• The Selvedge Yard features a collection of Jacob Riis photographs of a turn-of-the-century slum in New York City called the Bandits’ Roost. The photos clearly show poor, hard lives, but the hats and coats and dresses cause some cognitive dissonance.
• Recording Magazine has a nice primer on the technical aspects of mastering to vinyl.
• The Old Town School of Folk, 55-years-old and going strong, has expanded with the opening of its new building on Monday on the east side of Lincoln Ave. It’s great to see more classes and concerts, but I don’t like the carpet. Greg Kot covers the opening in the Trib.

Art blog BOOOOOOOM asked readers to submit classic art remakes using only a camera. While the most literal ones are admirable, I like the oblique approach to some others, like the Mondrian above. Click through for many, many more.

I am really excited about this 360° image from the Bridge, er, flight deck of the shuttle Discovery. Click for the full, draggable effect. It really looks like the 30-year-old technology that it is, but we’re only two centuries away from galaxy class.

For contemporary comparison, the cockpit of SpaceShip One, the first private sub-orbital spaceplane (“This is my adopted daughter Margot Tenenbaum”), seems to have fewer controls than most airplanes.

Apollo 1 crew during water egress training, June 1966. Embiggen.

I love how perfectly this photo captures the transition from atomic age to space age. All that’s missing is some TV dinners. Tragically all three astronauts pictured died in the Apollo 1 test launch fire six months later.

• New camera technology is coming that allows photographers to change the focus of a photo after the snap. The data captured by the “micro-lens array” puts a simple two-lens 3D shot to shame.
• With some old documents and a little urban archaeology Forgotten Chicago maps out the evolution of Chicago’s El system, exploring its many abandoned and demolished lines.
• Hats. All of ‘em. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Will is a street photographer from New York with a nice eye for detail.
A Test of Will is his blog.

A photo of Chicago and the southern tip of Lake Michigan taken onboard the ISS (you can see it in the foreground). The photo comes from an In Focus photo collection covering the recent changing of the guard at the ISS. NASA loves documentation, and this video shows the hugs and handshakes when they opened the hatch in February on Discovery’s last trip.

For a few years Jeff Bridges has been publishing great on-set photographic diaries from his films: True Grit, Tron, Crazy Heart, and Iron Man. He really is good with a camera—able to capture intimate moments of the movie process and personalities of the people behind it. Plus, look at that ridiculous rig.

Frequency of the bass strings and high shutter speed of the camera lead to this suprising string-wobble footage.

There is no slow-mo applied to the take. Sound is original.
Video was filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II, Nikon 50mm lens on 1,8f.

There has been some discussion about what we are actually seeing here—whether it’s due to a strobe effect between the shutter speed and the string vibration, or it’s caused by the rolling shutter of the camera itself.

It’s both, to an extent. There are some other tests out there (1, 2), and notice at the end of the second clip, when the string is almost horizontal, the chaotic wobble is nearly gone. A cool effect of the rolling shutter.

You may have seen the rolling shutter effect in a video like this involving an airplane propeller. Here’s a handy simulation of exactly how that happens.

• I really enjoyed this video on how a quartz watch works.
• The Reader published its annual photo issue (with not one but two photos from Brian Bonenberger).
• A good story will involve George S. Kaufman or Groucho Marx. A great story will feature both.