Until such time when a certain bleeding-edge technology that allows you to refocus your shots after shooting them morphs into a compact solution providing shallow depth-of-field no longer dependent on the optics of large pieces of glass in a tube, you can immediately graft said glass tubiness onto your wee iPhone using Photojojo’s iPhone SLR Mount. Attach a telephoto, wide angle, macro or fifty prime — you name it — you’re on your way to that 35mm shallow DOF look. Mashable notes some caveats: your images will be upside down, due to the fact that SLR cameras have a mirror inside them which flips the image right-side up – something that iPhone obviously doesn’t have. Oh heck, that’s no biggy; the Brevis adapter did this in its initial iteration (the footage for this spot and this spot came out of the camera up-side-down). A simple Photoshop script should help you batch rotate stills, while doing so in FCP might be a bit of a manual task. This device is clearly useful as a supplement to you existing kit. For instance, you’re traveling with 5 or 6 lenses; you put a couple of your lenses on say a Canon 7D and 5D that you’re shooting video with simultaneously, you can throw on one of your remaining lenses onto your iPhone to get a third shot. This guy will set you back $249.

Photojojo iPhone SLR Mount

Time to blow your photographic mind: refocus a photo after the fact.

Hardcore technology out of Stanford becomes start-up Lytro, via Techcrunch:

Rather than just capturing one plane of light, it captures the entire light field around a picture, all in one shot taken on a single device. A light field includes every beam of light in every direction at every point in time. Experimentation in this field started in the mid-1990s at Stanford with 100 cameras in one room. Lytro’s innovation is making it small enough to fit in your pocket.

Check out the science inside this camera that makes “living pictures.” This seems to us to be the technology which will eventually allow for shallow depth-of-field after the fact, doing away with the need for physically large lenses full of sculpted pieces of glass. We can imagine how images captured using small lenses on smartphone devices will be manipulated automatically or manually into the focal lengths of various lenses. Not to mention making obsolete funky iPhone accessories (no matter how much we love them) such as the Olloclip and Photojojo’s iPhone SLR Mount. This innovation will either be a blessing, a curse or somewhere in between for focus-pullers everywhere.

In any event, bring on the music video concepts leveraging exclusively this focus gag, the fantastic “focus-pulling” in narrative films, and undoubtedly a Scientific and Technical Academy Award.

Launches to Transform Photography with $50M in Venture Funds (TCTV)

Newton interprets each 2D layer as a rigid body in a real environment. Once simulation is completed, animation is recreated in After Effects with standard keyframes.

Main Features:
. robust and fast
. simple and intuitive user interface with OpenGL preview
. gravity, collisions, friction, etc.
. support of masks and shapes
. handles different sorts of bodies: static, dynamic, kinematic, etc.

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motionboutique
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Czech artists Vladimir Turner and Ondřej Mladý made a video performance on the streets of Prague mounting a pico projector to the bike handlebars to display a DIY digital bike lane in front of the rider. Gizmodo notes that it might have been clever to rig another projector in the back so that cars would also see the bike lane as they approached the rider. Animal NY reports that this performance piece called Safety First (2011) is the way the artists are bringing attention to Prague’s dirth of bike paths. Watch the video above, the structure of which is clearly designed to be viewed looping in a gallery setting. Behind the scenes photos shot with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II and shots of the gallery installation are below.

Not to be confused with the world’s smallest stop-motion animation character which happened to have been shot with a Nokia N8 smartphone, Dot is an eyeball attachment for the iPhone 4 that allows you to shoot video in 360 degree panoramas. Like iPhone 4 photography accessory hits like The Glif and the Olloclip, Dot is a Kickstarter project. Brought to you by makers of full-sized panoramic video devices Kogeto:

Dot lets your iPhone capture immersive, fully navigable, panoramic video in real-time – and share with friends on your phone, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, or streamed online using our awesome panoramic video web platform and player.

The video is swipe-navigable.

Kickstarter

Flavorwire has desaturated and uploaded 10 films that they claim provide a better viewing experience in black and white.  From Roger Ebert’s 1989 essay Why I Love Black and White:

There are basic aesthetic issues here. Colors have emotional resonance for us… Black and white movies present the deliberate absence of color. This makes them less realistic than color films (for the real world is in color). They are more dreamlike, more pure, composed of shapes and forms and movements and light and shadow. Color films can simply be illuminated. Black and white films have to be lighted. With color, you can throw light in everywhere, and the colors will help the viewer determine one shape from another, and the foreground from the background. With black and white, everything would tend toward a shapeless blur if it were not for meticulous attention to light and shadow, which can actually create a world in which the lighting indicates a hierarchy of moral values.

Enjoy watching the opening scene from Indiana Jones above and here are links to the other nine:

A Christmas Story

The Fabulous Baker Boys

The Last Seduction

Fargo

The Departed

Out of Sight

Michael Clayton

The Silence of the Lambs

Halloween

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via Flavorwire

Like other grip and lens as well as panoramic solutions for the iPhone 4, Oona is being pioneered via Kickstarter. The Oona looks like a useful tool for rigging up your iPhone in tight shooting situations or as a car mount.

Kickstarter

Streamflow displays real-time stream heights and flow data read from U.S. Geological Survey river gaging sites. It displays current measurements and provides interactive charts plotting one, seven, 30 or 90 day views.

Tod Landis

via Susty

MoveOn dot org founder Eli Pariser takes on the practice of using algorithms to tell us what we’re interested in. From Daniel Mintz at MoveOn via email:

MoveOn wouldn’t be possible without the open Internet. But according to our own Eli Pariser, the Internet itself is changing. His book on the topic, The Filter Bubble, comes out this week (you can check it out here).

In March, the TED conference invited him to preview the argument. When I talked to Eli beforehand, he was really nervous—in the audience were top executives from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and a number of other companies he critiques. But his call for an open, ethical Internet—he actually called out the Google founders and Bill Gates in the audience by name—got a standing ovation. And it’s been burning up the TED website ever since. We’re sharing it today because we think it’s a really important point. Increasingly, the Internet is hiding things from us, and we don’t even know it.

TED

As tablet computers surge, will video be publishing’s next big hit? Publishers Weekly explores video companion pieces for books. The below Tribute To George Carlin is clean with interesting historical photos and the above video is simple and interesting. The other videos embedded in the article are a little too unpolished for our tastes.

What does the future hold for video in book publishing? Will video-enhanced books surge in demand, changing the nature of the publishing game? Or will video be used more for marketing and publicity, allowing thousands of authors who don’t have an HBO series or can’t be on Good Morning America to reach a wider audience through Web platforms like YouTube?