Photoded

Scarab Darkroom from Scarab Labs is a new, fast, free and easy-to-use raw converter for Windows. Read more and comment

Shaun Pendergast was working away at his Portland apartment when he heard a strange noise. He walked to the window and saw two raccoons expressing their love for each other on his roof. Armed with an iPhone, he shot a little video and let them get back to their business, which he says took at least an hour. “I didn’t want to cock block,” he says. Later, he posted the video to YouTube and sent it around on Facebook. At the urging of one of his friends he also posted it on Reddit, and soon enough it started to go wild. Today the video has received more than 2.3 million hits and has been featured on TV shows, including Good Morning America . “I see all these people putting a ton of production value into YouTube videos, but sometimes it just takes finding something completely random and funny to get people’s attention,” he says. And that’s kind of what makes us sad. Sure, it’s all a bit of internet fun – viral videos are a tradition almost as old as the internet itself – but maybe it’s time to raise the bar a bit? How many times do we have to hit that crack button in our reptilian brains? Are we doomed/blessed to be saturated with these videos forever? The internet is like a big lottery, where everyone shares their videos hoping they’ll be the one the web gods choose. This time it was Pendergast, 29, a app designer and illustrator . Unlike many of his winning peers, he’s just let the video run its course instead of trying to jump on his 15 minutes of fame. “I don’t feel famous in any right and I don’t put too much stock into it,” he says. “Remember the video isn’t about me, it’s about two raccoons doing it.” The video has driven some traffic to his personal website and he did monetize the video through YouTube, but says he suspects the return is going to be pretty small. Ultimately, he says he’s most pleased by the way the video has helped him break the ice with a couple of his apartment neighbors who found out he shot it. He’s says he’s relatively new to the building and it’s been nice to get to know the people around him. “That’s been beneficial and fun,” he says.

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Raccoon Sex Tape Is Sad Barometer of Good Taste

Hands-on gallery of photos of the new Leica M9-P Edition Hermès limited edition rangefinder camera. Read more and comment

Hands-on gallery of photos of the new Leica V-Lux 40 digital compact camera. Read more and comment

Hands-on gallery of photos of the new Leica M Monochrom rangefinder camera. Read more and comment

The Sony A37 isa new entry-level SLT camera. Read more and comment

Photo illustration: Brita d’Agostino Wired magazine’s Found page represents our best guess at what lies over the horizon, from touchscreen windshields to organ farming. Now, we’re inviting readers to help create Found pages: What do you think our world will look like in 10, 20, or 100 years? Found Found: The Future of Toiletries More Artifacts From the Future Each month, we’ll propose a scenario and present some ideas and concepts. Then it’s up you: Sketch out your vision and upload your ideas (below). We’ll use the best suggestions as inspiration for a future Found page, giving kudos to contributors, and we’ll add our favorite submission to this story. Imagine the future of school science fairs. Will they be presented via hologram? Will entrants build particle accelerators out of K’NEX? Sequence their own genomes? Will their miniature volcanoes actually spew molten rock? One thing’s certain— there’ll still be a lot of grunling about how the winner clearly cheated and got help from their parents. You can send us your ideas in text form, but we’re keen on getting visual entries. Check out these links to some CC-licensed photos on Flickr of awesome (and not so awesome) process servers to fire up your imagination: Volcano Science fair posters Potato battery K’NEX Use the widget below to submit your best idea and vote for your favorite. The image must be your own— submitting it gives us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit relatively large images (ideal size is 800 to 1,200 pixels, or larger on the longest side). Include a description of your idea and how you made it. We don’t host the images, so upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you’re using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, provide a link to the image, not to the photo page where it’s displayed. If your photo doesn’t show up, it’s because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Make sure it ends with the image file name (xxxxxxx.jpg). Check back over the next few weeks to vote on new submissions, and look for an update announcing our favorite. Voting App For information regarding use of information about you that you may supply or communicate to the Website, please see our Privacy Policy . Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy or in this Agreement, you agree that by posting messages, uploading text, graphics, photographs, images, video or audio files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication (including your identity and information about you) in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so. In addition, please be aware that information you disclose in publicly accessible portions of the Website will be available to all users of the Website, so you should be mindful of personal information and other content you may wish to post.

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Found Contest: Imagine the Future of School Science Fairs

Harald Johnson has announced the relaunch of his photo education and entertainment site PhoozL. Read more and comment

Nik Software announced today that all of its plug-in products and trial versions have been tested and found to be compatible with the newly released Photoshop CS6, Read more and comment

The winner of this year’s Webby for best use of photography, “God’s Lake Narrows,” is a multimedia project that takes viewers inside a Canadian Indian reservation and tells director Kevin Lee Burton’s personal story of growing up there. Burton left Gods Lake when he was 15 because the reservation’s school only goes through the 9th grade. But Burton says he was secretly happy to get away because people on the reservation often bullied him for being queer and half white. “It was complicated and it was shitty,” he says about life in Gods Lake. “I had to walk away and reassess my judgment, my self hate, my perspective.” Moving beyond any bitterness, Burton demonstrates an affection for the town and allows outsiders to understand the community in a deep and nuanced way. “People can argue until they are blue in the face about stereotypes, but I generally find that very tired,” he says. “I like to make my political points very subtly and to allow the viewer to come to their own conclusions.” Much like in the United States, he says, native peoples in Canada have long been viewed as either the logos we see on baseball hats or drunks on the local news. “People don’t see us as very complicated,” says Burton, 32, who is now based in Winnipeg. “Instead they see us as clichés.” Many photo projects about impoverished communities can fall flat because they are told from a distance. Burton’s personal approach does away with journalistic neutrality, and instead gains an intimacy necessary for doing the story justice. In an attempt to make the experience personal for audiences as well, the piece opens by tracking the viewer’s geographic location and calculating the distance from Gods Lake Narrows — which for most people is hundreds, if not thousands of miles away. “All things considered I’m going to bet you’ve never visited,” Burton writes in the opening text piece. In picture after picture, rundown homes generate assumptions in the viewer about the people who live there. Those assumptions are bent as the photos move inside the homes, face-to-face with the residents — many of whom are members of Burton’s family. Feeding off what Burton acknowledges is probably a voyeuristic curiosity, the photos confirm some prejudices and refute others. There are holes in walls and mismatched wallpapers, but also flatscreens and laptops. No matter what impression the viewer comes away with, it’s more nuanced than the one he or she started with . “I’m not trying to badger people who are non-native,” he says. “It’s more like ‘come in for tea and get to know us.’ To me it feels a little bit grandmotherly in terms of its tone.” Burton hired photographer Scott Benesiinaabanda to shoot the photos back in 2010. Burton didn’t want to take the photos himself because he felt like hiding his face behind the camera would have created a barrier between him and the family and community members he would’ve been photographing. The photos were originally displayed that year as a part of a gallery exhibit in Winnipeg. At the show, the photos were hung in a circle, and from the outside viewers could only see the exteriors of the houses. To see the interior photos, viewers had to enter the circle. Alicia Smith, a producer with the National Film Board of Canada — a nationally funded organization that helps artists and filmmakers with their projects — saw that exhibit and says she was immediately taken by the experience of passing from outside in. “It’s hard for me to admit, but it challenged my own assumptions about reserve life,” she says. “And to experience those interiors was really moving.” Afterwards, Smith spoke with Burton about turning the project into a multimedia piece. They spoke about their own differences in understanding and ended up using the conversation as a kind of guide for how to shuttle an audience through a similar experience online. “It wasn’t an easy dialogue,” Smith says. “You feel like you’re walking on eggshells when you deal with that subject in general. But Kevin is really inclusive and our conversation just worked.” Burton says he feels like the dialogue was key to the piece’s success. “I feel very close to her now because we were able to come from two different worlds and ask each other questions and create something out of it,” he says. Supported by the Film Board, Burton, Smith and a team of people including Benesiinaabanda and a sound person spent months recording and producing the piece, which was originally released in 2011. For Burton, the project was a homecoming of sorts. After more than 15 years, he says, it was time to come back. His family knew that he had become a film director, but didn’t know exactly what he did. By choosing Gods Lake Narrows for this project, Burton says he was able to bring his new life back home and share it in a way that made sense. His family and community were able to see how he works, creating a much needed bridge. “I wanted to reverse the flow and also show them my world,” he says. “And I wanted my family back and my community back.”

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Director’s Homecoming Spawns Award-Winning Photo Project