Astronomers have directly imaged the faintest exoplanet ever seen from Earth, a gas giant called Beta Pictoris d — and it turns out the planet had been sitting in telescope archives for more than 11 years before anyone managed to pull it out of the noise.
A small crew of storm chasers is doing something that sounds impossible: flying camera drones straight into active tornadoes. The OTUS Project — short for Observations of Tornadoes by UAV Systems — has now pulled off more than a dozen successful intercepts, and this June it live-streamed a drone punching into an EF3 for the first time.
Patreon just started actively blocking the AI bots that scrape creators' work to train models, and it's good to see a platform plant a flag on the creators' side. I just wouldn't mistake it for protection.
Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens today, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm for a reported $250 million. Three days before it reached theaters, an AI studio announced an Odyssey of its own: 135 minutes long, made largely by one person over three months, for a budget in the mid five figures.
Netflix just spent real engineering time making its biggest show look worse, on purpose. It's not the only surprising analog bet this summer — Christopher Nolan shot a $250 million blockbuster entirely on physical film — and neither is nostalgia. It's a signal about what audiences want that every photographer and videographer should notice.
A photographer was hired to shoot a musician for a magazine. Months later, she started selling prints from that session. The musician says she never agreed to any of that — and now a court is going to settle a question photographers normally settle with a piece of paper: who owns an editorial photograph once the shoot is over?
One of cinema's most influential creators just planted his flag firmly on the pro-AI side. In a wide-ranging interview tied to the opening of his Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, George Lucas said artificial intelligence is "the future" of moviemaking and that fighting it is pointless: "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress, it's the future."
The FAA has proposed a rule that would let power plants, dams, refineries, and other "critical infrastructure" sites ask to have the airspace above them closed to drones. By the agency's own estimate, roughly 125,000 facilities could qualify to ask. Almost no one has said anything about it — 578 public comments as of July 13 — and the window closes August 5.
Camera gear discounts move fast, and this week has a strong spread of them: a do-everything Tamron superzoom, three phone gimbals and two wireless mic kits from DJI, a pocketable Panasonic full frame body, a compact Canon vlogging camera, and a two-pack of GaN chargers to keep it all running. Here's what's worth your attention right now.
