Via coudal.com, two photos from a gorgeous slideshow of Iceland images by San Francisco-based photographer Tim Gasperak. I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland, and I’m hoping to take a vacation there soon.

For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere’s missions.

But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper’s southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes.

The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there’s some assorted mayhem at the end.

You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom’s site.

A guy in Boston took 3,000 photos over the course of three days and then stitched them together into this excellent stop-motion video:

The music is “Dry Lips,” by Lightspeed Champion.

[via The Big Noob, again.]

Brad Smith of The Big Noob went to Hawaii for a vacation in January, and his Flickr set has a bunch of excellent photos from the set of Lost. He was there during the writers’ strike, so production was shut down, and he was able to wander into or near locations that have played a major role in the show, including Jacob’s shack, the main beachfront camp, and the pier where Kate, Jack, and Sawyer were captured at the end of season 2. Here is Mr. Eko’s church:

I hadn’t seen a single episode of Lost until last November, and then I watched the first three seasons in three weeks. It was fun, and now I’m all caught up. Here’s my little Lost obsession, and I haven’t seen any major analysis of this anywhere: What’s with the whole doppelgänger thing involving Juliet, Penny, and Jack’s ex-wife? They all look very similar, and it’s clearly not an accident. The resemblance has been noted in a few places, even on the show itself, in passing, but the larger issue of what this means has not been deeply explored, as far as I know. What does it mean?

A Brooklyn-based photographer named Izaz Rony is offering a new kind of portrait service: You tell him where you’re going to be on a particular day, and what you’ll be wearing, and he shows up in the general vicinity and snaps your picture, without you knowing exactly where he is or when he’ll be there. “Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject,” he writes on his site, MethodIzaz. “The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.”

[via Khoi Vinh.]

Check out this astonishing TED presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, a Microsoft researcher who is leading the development of an amazing visual technology called Photosynth. As Arcas’s bio on the TED site explains:

Photosynth itself is a vastly powerful piece of software capable of taking a wide variety of images, analyzing them for similarities, and grafting them together into an interactive three-dimensional space. This seamless patchwork of images can be viewed via multiple angles and magnifications, allowing us to look around corners or “fly” in for a (much) closer look. Simply put, it could utterly transform the way we experience digital images.

This is a revolution.

[via NewsDesigner.com.]

Starting on April 1, the city of São Paulo, Brazil, began strictly enforcing its ban on many kinds of outdoor advertising, particularly billboards. A photographer named Tony de Marco has been chronicling the rollback, and his Flickr set is beautiful and amazing.

The Flickr set is here.

[via The FontFeed.]

Check out this awesome Quicktime VR image that was taken during a recent Pixies show at a medium-size club in Prague. You can spin around and see the whole club; you can zoom in and zoom out; you can look at the ceiling. Follow this link or click on the image below to check it out. (Heads up: The site will resize your browser window, but not too much.)

How cool will it be when someone finally develops a system that can handle full-motion video with these kinds of controls? It’ll be years before that’s possible, I’m guessing, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually.

The photographer, Jeffrey Martin, has lots of other great panoptic images on his website.

La Jetée, the experimental New Wave short by the French director Chris Marker, is probably best known today for having served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But Marker’s 26-minute masterpiece is by far the more important and original work, and not just because 12 Monkeys was almost ruined by Brad Pitt’s awful—but Oscar-nominated!—performance as a deranged animal-rights activist.

Except for one brief clip of a blinking eye, La Jetée (1962) is comprised entirely of black-and-white still images, voiceover narration, and unobtrusive minor-key music. The action, such as it is, takes place in the aftermath of World War III. Paris has been destroyed, along with much of the rest of the civilized world, and all survivors were long ago forced underground. A group of scientists is attempting to find food and energy by subjecting prisoners to rudimentary time-travel experiments. The film’s time-traveling protagonist, identified simply as “the man whose story we are telling,” is haunted by a childhood memory of an incident he witnessed on a pier (a jetée) at Orly Airport. He is sent again and again to prewar Paris, where he spends time with a beautiful young woman whose significance to him he can’t quite grasp.

La Jetée is about time, memory, and longing, among other things, and it’s incredibly complex and powerful. This seven-and-a-half-minute clip is from the first half of the film. (I taped it off of the Sundance Channel a few months ago.) The voiceover has been rerecorded in (French-accented) English.

The film seems to be hard to find on DVD, but Amazon can hook you up with used copies of a DVD compilation that includes it. And ooh, I just discovered that someone has uploaded the entire original French version to Google Video.