anna • creative technologist

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I created @PXLCAM: Climate Clock Camera as a passion project bringing together my love for photography + tech 💚 PXLCAM: Climate Clock Camera is an app that takes intentionally retro-style, lo-fi photos, each one marked with the Climate Clock: a live countdown of how much time scientists estimate we have left to meaningfully act on climate change ⏰🌲 We tend to think of photos and digital media as weightless, living in “the cloud,” but they rely on physical servers and infrastructure drawing real power; the bigger the file, the greater the environmental cost. Most cameras keep pushing for more: more detail, more pixels, more data, more storage. PXLCAM goes the opposite way and leans into the beauty and charm of the digicam look, saving actually smaller files… measured in kb! (no, it’s not just a filter) You also don’t need another camera or device to get this look… you can get it with the phone already in your pocket. Manufacturing and shipping actually account for a large portion of a device’s carbon cost, a significant share of the emissions in its entire lifecycle, spent before it’s even powered on 📱 Yes, I know a few smaller files won’t change the trajectory of climate change. Think of PXLCAM as an experiment against the default assumption that bigger and newer is always better. PXLCAM is out now, free on iOS and Android! Search “PXLCAM: Climate Clock Camera” on your app store. Links in bio, or comment CAMERA and I’ll send it over. • App Store (iOS): tinyurl.com/iOS-pxlcam • Google Play (Android): tinyurl.com/android-pxlcam • More about the project: 🔗 pxlcam.anna-zhang.com If you try it, I’d love to see what you capture and hear what you think ☺️ #retrophotography #climatechange #digicamphotography #cameraapp #filmlook [retro style, digicam, aesthetic photography, photo editing, photo filter, low resolution, image processing, lofi, vintage aesthetic, film filter]

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Did you know the famous images from Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope don’t come out of the telescope looking like that? And it’s definitely not what you’d see if you went to space 🚀🔭 I’ve been really interested in different forms of image-making… and in how we come to understand our world through images and the technologies that produce them. So I wanted to dig into how those famous space images actually came to be. Here’s what I learned! Our eyes pick up only a thin sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum — what’s known as visible light — and only when it’s fairly bright. Telescopes see far past us, catching infrared, ultraviolet, and other light we can’t detect at all. What they capture is monochromatic, black and white. Devoting the whole sensor to one narrow band captures far more detail, and astronomers usually want one specific range of wavelengths at a time. The color is added later, on the ground, by imaging specialists through deliberate choices, e.g., rules like chromatic order (shorter wavelengths become blue, longer become red) and shaped by what they’re trying to understand. So an astronomical image isn’t really a photograph. It’s more a data visualization. Telescopes let us gather different kinds of information about the universe. Turning that data into color, and into a final image, is ultimately an act of translation: a way to reveal and make sense of our universe. References in comments!! 📝 #didyouknow #spacescience #sciencecommunication #datavisualization #learningnewthings

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The Climate Clock went under three years for the first time today ⏳ It’s a countdown of how much time remains before the world exhausts its carbon budget, the total amount of CO₂ we can still emit while keeping global warming below 1.5°C (the threshold scientists have identified as critical for avoiding the most severe consequences of climate change). I built @PXLCAM: Climate Clock Camera to bring this climate timeline closer than a report or a headline, both of which are easy to skim past and feel removed from... with PXLCAM, it’s embedded into every photo you take. Each shot becomes a snapshot of the world as it is right now, and a reminder of what’s at stake 💚 The camera is deliberately low-res, with image files in the kilobytes, because storing, moving and sharing media carries its own carbon cost, and the larger the file, the bigger that cost. Plus there’s a lot of beauty in grain and this retro aesthetic anyway. Every photo ends up holding two kinds of time: when you took it, and how long we have left to act 📷 PXLCAM is out now, free on iOS + Android. Search “PXLCAM: Climate Clock Camera,” or comment CAMERA and I’ll send it over. • App Store (iOS): tinyurl.com/iOS-pxlcam • Google Play (Android): tinyurl.com/android-pxlcam • More about the project: pxlcam.anna-zhang.com The intro video countdown is from climateclock.world. PXLCAM is not affiliated with the Climate Clock project. Their work inspired PXLCAM, and if the countdown resonates with you, I’d encourage you to explore the Climate Clock directly and support their work! 💙 #climatechange #digicam #creativetechnology #retrophotography #filmaesthetic