Facebook buys Instagram for about $1bn

As I’m sure everyone has heard by now, Facebook recently bought the image editing/sharing app Instagram for $1bn.

For those of you that haven’t heard of it, Instagram is very popular amongst iPhone users – I’d say most of the people I know with iPhones at least have it installed, even if they don’t use it frequently.  I’d show you my profile, but unless you have Instagram installed on your phone, you wouldn’t be able to see it (my username is ‘danfoy’, if you’re interested) – all that can be shared outside of the app is a link to the current photo, without linking to a profile or even other images in your stream.  Check out this photo of Kat at the Natural History Museum if you haven’t seen what a Instagram looks like outside of the app before.

The pros and cons of Facebook’s acquisition are already being debated to death on the internet, so I won’t go into them here.  What interests me is the amount Facebook is prepared to pay.  To put it into perspective, Siri – the most technologically-significant feature of the iPhone 4S – only cost apple $0.2bn or so to acquire.  Google only paid $0.75bn or so for AdMob, which had an existing userbase and was making money as a business.  Instagram doesn’t make any money.  It doesn’t even have adverts.

It’s not like Facebook needs to expand its userbase, so the only thing I can think of that Facebook would want Instagram for is what it can learn from both it and the development team, and how they can use what they learn to influence future developments in the way images are shared on Facebook.  I think it’s great that they’ve put such a high value on forward-looking ways of sharing images.

Jyoti and DIY Lighting

I went to see my friend Jyoti the other day.  He is one the most interesting people I suspect I will ever have the privilege to meet, but unfortunately I don’t get to see him as much as I’d like due to me moving away for university.

Aside from being a musician, which is probably what he’s best known for (he’s the guy from White Town), he’s also a prolific photographer and skilled portraitist.  We met through the Derby Flickr group back in 2005 or so, and tend to get sucked into geeky photo-tech conversations whenever we meet.  He’s recently started playing around with new ways of lighting for portraits, but rather than going down the currently-popular ‘strobist‘ route, he’s decided to try out different ways to use constant light sources.

Jyoti has a Canon macro ringflash but, unhappy with the results that it produces for portraits, he decided to make his own ‘full-size’ version using a bent metal clothes hanger and some LED fairy lights.  He’s got some amazing results with it – check out this set of portraits of Toppy, and this set of Nat – and was kind enough to let me have a play with it whilst I was round.

(Click the images above to enlarge)

It produces a really interesting quality of light, especially for something so cheap to make.  I’ve used the ringflash at uni a couple of times, and the light from this isn’t really comparable.  I suspect that this is for the most part due to the distance I was using it at – the ringflash at uni is powered by a 3000 watt quad-pack, which at this sort of close range probably wouldn’t be practical (I try to avoid, you know, melting peoples’ faces off).  50mm wasn’t the most flattering perspective to use at this sort of range (still fancy getting an 85/1.8), and ƒ1.6 was probably a bit excessive as well (notice how parts of Jyoti’s face, even on very close planes, swim in and out of focus) but, hey, I was just playing around.  I love the weirdness of the reflections in Jyoti’s glasses in the last image… wasn’t expecting that.

On a slightly unrelated note, we also went on a walk around the fields near to where Jyoti lives, where I took some more photos:

For those of you who are interested, I’ve upgraded Adobe Lightroom to the recently-released Version 4, and the above two photographs were taken at ISO 25,600, with luminance noise reduction in Lightroom set to just 20/100.  How incredible is that?

Cinemagram

The App of the Week on the iOS App Store this week is Cinemagram, which is an app that allows you to animate portions of otherwise static photographs.  Apologies for the mess my example image makes of the post – the app outputs animated GIFs, which unfortunately are difficult to resize whilst preserving the animation.

The app works by capturing a couple of seconds of video and then allowing you to mask over the details that you’d like animated.  It’s surprisingly satisfying.  It might be a bit gimmicky, but that sort of adds to its appeal- it’s a one-trick pony a-lá other ‘fatbooth’-type  manipulation apps, but at least with Cinemagram you get to be a bit more creative with your choice of subject.

Cinemagraphs aren’t new (there are some nice examples on Jamie Beck’s tumblr photoblog), but I wasn’t aware of such a simple way of making them before now (although in fairness, it’s not like it’s something I’ve been looking for).  It’s a pretty straightforward process, with a couple of catches.  Firstly, everything needs to be pretty still, and the details that move should move in place rather than moving around the frame.  The second thing to be aware of is that in order to create a seamless animation, the movement is played forwards and then backwards on a loop.  This is quite evident on the example (of Kat in KFC earlier) above – notice how she sometimes blinks ‘backwards’.

At time of writing, it is free in the UK iOS App Store.

Pianosequenza series by Mario Zanaria

Francesca - Pianosequenza by Mario Zanaria

I recently came across the excellent Pianosequenza series by Mario Zanaria.  In this series, Zanaria uses a whole 36-exposure rolls of black and white 35mm film to create contact sheets, which become the final output.  There are a mixture of square-ish ones in rows of 6×6 frames (as above), and others that are laid out as 5×7 frame portraits (such as this excellent piece).  Be aware, though, that some contain nudity and therefore may be NSFW.

They’re absolutely fantastic, as is the rest of his work.  We’re all familiar with the maxim ‘there is nothing new in photography’, but having said that, I don’t recall any well-known examples of contact sheets being used in this way.  The nearest thing that I can think of is the Facebook profile banner manipulations that were fashionable for a while, before Facebook Timeline came out.  To compare Zanaria’s work to Facebook hacks would be insulting, though – to end up with results this perfect, with 36 perfect frames, on an analogue medium, is very impressive and visually arresting.

Zanaria also sells a set of photobooks on Blurb.

Via PetaPixel.