position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

High Dynamic Range Imaging, or simply “HDRI“, is currently gaining a lot of momentum among photographers. These images offer a much larger range of tones than traditional exposure. The outcome is terrific. Ryan McGinnis has written up a very easy to follow tutorial on creating HDR photos with Photoshop CS2.

This video represents a week in the life of “Rinpa,” a Japanese art crew based in Tokyo.

You can find more of their videos here. These guys are amazing.

(The YouTubers among you have probably already seen it as it’s right on the YouTube front page, but it’s just too cool I couldn’t pass up on posting it.)

Design theft is something every designer comes across at some point in his career. Some people just can’t keep their fingers off other peoples’ work and claim it theirs. Once discovered, these individuals fire off a certain set of arguments that may seem hard to counter at first. Not all hope is lost, however, as James Bennett of The B-List has managed to classify the characteristics of design thief arguments into three species: Turpem tuus, Auferet omnes and Situs in publica, along with their respective antidotes. My work has been ripped numerous times before, so I find this particulary funny. Read it all here.

“Street art is a form of urban art and communication which should not be seperated from its roots – the street.” Following this motto, NO GALLERY has organized Sticker Safari, a free, 24/7 outdoor gallery featuring urban art stickers on Marktstraße in Hamburg, Germany. This year saw over 5000 entries to the International Sticker Awards and the best will be on display here. It started three days ago and is running until November 7th, so be sure to have a look if you’re in the area. See last year’s stickers here.

Here’s a video I found, with drawing and music created by Pete Moraites.

New tune, and a journey through my sketchbooks, adding line and color, evoking the joyful magician and traveling across time…

I have a new addiction: TheDailyDrawing.com. It delivers exactly what it promises, a new drawing once a day, in video, sometimes sped up, sometimes in realtime, and never too long for a quick daily fix. The videos are also all posted on YouTube, if you want to subscribe. It’s a nice way to get some insight into how other people go about drawing and how they use certain media. As they say, watch and learn.

Danish artist Peter Callesen does some interesting things with paper, such as his series Paper Cuts. Also, have a look at his other paper works.

Who’d have thought you could find value in those icky vacuum-cleaner dust bags (aside from the occasional rediscovered ring)? Well, for one, there’s Maria Adelaida Lopez, a Columbian artist, who takes that dust and covers doll houses with it in a fascinating tribute to her past work as a house cleaner. Very eerie, very cool. (via)

Designer Aaron Koblin has taken US flight traffic data and turned it into beautiful animations. The work is entitled Flight Patterns. This reminds me of the visualization plugins that come with media players, such as Winamp’s AVS, where stunning patterns are generated via complex mathematical formulas, controlled by the wavepatterns of the music played.

Aaron provides some more info on his site:

Flight pattern visualizations were the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne. FAA data was parsed and plotted using the Processing programming environment. The frames were composited with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya and the final piece was highlighted at SIGGRAPH 2005 in the NVIDIA Immersive Dome Experience.

(via)

Get ready to throw your cameras up in the air, folks, and… well.. do your best to catch them. If not, well, that sucks. But hey! It’s all for the sake of art, so… :)

From the Cameratoss page at Flickr:

This is a “technique” group, and the technique here is regarded by some as insanity. For we are the reckless folks on flickr that enjoy the abstract, chance, generative, physical photography that results from throwing our cameras into the air (most often at night in front of varied light sources).

It is about trading risk for reward in the pursuit of art. It is not about being a photographer, it is about enabling the photography that happens naturally when you let go of the process, give up control, and add a hell of alot more variables. It is about physics, gravity, angular momentum, acceleration, direction, chaos, and timing… most of which you have tenuous control of at best!

Very interesting stuff in the gallery. Dare to take the risk?