Google Street View Hyperlapse

Google Street View Hyperlapse from Teehan+Lax Labs.

 Teehan+Lax is a digital studio based in Toronto whose Labs staff works on experimental ideas. From their site: "Hyper-lapse photography — a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest — has been a growing trend on video sites. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material."

You can do this yourself by going to the hyperlapse site and picking your starting point by dropping the 'A' pin onto Google Maps, and repeating that with your 'B' pin. Now all you have to do is press 'Create' and the Google Street View images are stitched together to create your film! Check it out here.

We Ain't Monkeying Around

"Orang hutan" means "forest man" in one of the many native language of Indonesia, and the remarkable intelligence of our long-armed cousin in the mimicry of human behavior further justifies this title. Gerd Schuster took several stunning photos visually capturing the intelligence of the orangutans for his new book, Thinkers of the Jungle.

My favorite of the photos features a male orangutan, grasping an overhanging branch in his left hand, using a wooden pole in an attempt to spear fish in the local river. The photo was taken in Borneo on the island of Kaja, and the intrepid ape had witnessed local fishermen use the spears on the nearby Gohong River. According to the photographer, the orangutan was unsuccessful in his endeavor but later succeeded by using the same pole to catch fish already trapped in locals' fishing lines.

Monkey Business: An orangutan tries to spear a fish for dinner

Tool use in orangutans was observed by primatologist Birute Galdikas in ex-captive populations as far back as in 1982. In 1994, Carel van Schaik documented the great apes developing tools to pry open and eat fruits covered in needle-like barbs that were normally painful to handle. Schaik continued to observed sophisticated tool manufacture and use in the wild by the orangutans who also adjusted their tools according to the nature of the task at hand. Interestingly, this use of tools also indicates cultural behavior as the tool technique is socially transmitted.

Unfortunately, orangutans—while being the two exclusively Asian species of extant great apes—are endangered and currently only found in the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. The island of Kaja, where this photo was captured, is unique as it's where apes are re-released after being rescued and rehabilitated.

If you're interested in reading more about the plight of the orangutans, please see this blog post or watch Sir Terry Pratchett's newly released and excellent documentary, Facing Extinction.

Prolific Photography

10 percent of all photos taken ever, were taken last year.

TIME, Top 10 Photos of 2012

We currently take as many photographs in a single year as photographers did throughout the entirety of the 19th century. This tidbit and the above statistic aren't as unbelievable when you realize how slow photography was in the 1800s. I have been the subject of wet-plate collodion/tintype photographs (the dominant process in the 1800s, invented around the 1850s), and it takes about ten minutes from start to finish to make a single image with the process. Even 20th Century photography was much slower than digital photography is now; one hour photo shops gave you thirty-six prints per roll of film, tops. And that doesn't take into account the time spent out photographing.

Digital cameras and smartphones allow us to make images without any comparable constraint to volume. In an hour, a professional digital photographer can realistically make upwards of a thousand photographs in the field. With wet-plate collodion, including set-up and tear-down time for the portable darkroom, the photographer is lucky to make four.

But the very nature of digital photographs leads to interesting questions about their survivability and persistence in a historical sense. Old-school darkroom photographers often bemoan the lack of accessibility with digital files over time (anybody tried accessing information from a 5.25" floppy recently?), and by virtue of the volume of photographs being made right now, images in general seem less "special" or "worthy." Not to mention that many photographs don't exist in a physical, holdable, experiential, corporeal sense anymore. The internet is slowly changing that as it slowly abstracts the content away from the storage medium: When consumers look at a picture on Instagram, it doesn't really matter to them what Instagram stores it on, as long as they can send it to them. So now the problem becomes, when the electricity goes out, so too vanishes our photography.