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Leave A Legacy is Colorado’s own memory station. Bring your slides, old prints, Super 8 movies, VHS, audio cassettes, even your 4H ribbons to either our Denver or Fort Collins, Colorado locations. We’ll find the best way to preserve your precious moments, get them out of those dusty shoeboxes… and make them easy and fun to share.
Here are a couple things you need to know about us:
We're a local and family owned business
Our high-tech lab is located in Fort Collins, Colorado
We have been serving families since 2006
Our work quality is second to none all while being competitively priced.
We don't believe in a phone tree! We have humans answer the phone to handle your project.
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Leave A Legacy
Helping You Enjoy Your Memories Again
We'll take your memories and digitize them to the media of your choosing and organize them for you to enjoy for years to come.
Ok, So Why Leave A Legacy?
We're The Leading VHS To DVD Transfer Company
Leave A Legacy is Colorado’s own memory station. Bring your slides, old prints, Super 8 movies, VHS, audio cassettes, even your 4H ribbons to either our Denver or Fort Collins, Colorado locations. We’ll find the best way to preserve your precious moments, get them out of those dusty shoeboxes… and make them easy and fun to share.
Here are a couple things you need to know about us:
We're a local and family owned business
Our high-tech lab is located in Fort Collins, Colorado
We have been serving families since 2006
Our work quality is second to none all while being competitively priced.
We don't believe in a phone tree! We have humans answer the phone to handle your project. //
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Video editor Joaquim Campa has remastered, colorized and “deOldified” the iconic 1897 black and white silent film Louis Lumière entitled “Bataille de Nege” (“Snowball Fight”). With these enhancements, the humorous scene in which a man is knocked off his bicycle can be witnessed with greater clarity.
This hill is ubiquitous but surprisingly difficult to locate in reality.
The iconic Windows XP default desktop wallpaper of a sloped green hill beneath a bright blue sky is one of the most viewed photos in the world, but its generic pleasantness has long stumped internet denizens in regards to its real-world location — with some believing it’s not a real photograph.
The editor-in-chief of SFGate recently set out to find the earthly subject of the computer background and discovered it covered in wine grapes, across the street from an alpaca farm and Highway 12 in Sonoma, California.
The photo even has an incredible backstory: Charles O’Rear snapped the now-legendary shot of what is known as “Bliss” hill while driving to see his now-wife on a Friday afternoon in January 1996.
Microsoft Spotlight
When you first see Michael Wolf’s photography, it takes a second to realize what you’re looking at.
A different astronomy and space science
related image is featured each day, along with a brief explanation.
No matter if you enjoy taking or just watching images of space, NASA has a treat for you. They have made their entire collection of images, sounds, and video available and publicly searchable online. It’s 140,000 photos and other resources available for you to see, or even download and use it any way you like. …
Searchable
Trevor Mahlmann
is creating lighthouse, landscape, and rocket photography.
It looks like it ought to be the subject of a funny caption competition but this picture taken in China's Qilian Mountains is deadly serious.
The fox has surprised the marmot and a fight is about to begin that will result in the rodent being killed.
Not even the intervention of the marmot's mother can change the outcome.
"That's nature," says Yongqing Bao, whose striking image has earned him the top prize in the 2019 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.
The shot also meant Yongqing got to share the award for the best picture in the mammal behaviour category.
Persistence pays when you are a wildlife photographer, and Yongqing had to stake out an alpine meadow on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau for several hours to be in position to catch the action.
The fox had lain very still, hoping to trap a passing marmot unawares. It worked a treat. In one of the more gruesome frames on Yongqing's camera, the fox has the young rodent's head in its mouth.
#Q:
Many photos of Milky-way show it in nice colors instead of just the black of sky and white of the stars. Is the key to having those colors in the capturing of the image or in the post processing, or both? Or am I just doing it in a wrong time of year when the visible part of Milky-way is simply not showing color? //
#A:
The vast majority of night sky photos have been boosted in post to achieve their brightness. This is more true for cameras with smaller sensors than for cameras with larger sensors, but in general, even if you shoot the night sky at ISO 3200, you are going to need to boost exposure to get one of those nice, bright single-frame Milky Way shots.
There are a few things you can do to increase the brightness of your night sky shots.
My wife is Irish, and in 2015 we bought a small old stone cottage a couple of miles from Baltimore in South West Cork, about as SW as you can get in Ireland. Walking back from the pub one November night, I was SHOCKED by the sheer blackness of the night sky and the dazzling array of stars. Constellations were not even recognizable, drowned out in the sea of stars. My interest in astronomy suddenly resurfaced.
Round 1 – a Horrid Mess
Fast-forward to a summer night a while later, once the cottage had been made habitable. Looking up, I was aware of a streak of pale cloud slightly spoiling the dark sky. Of course, this was the Milky Way, which I hadn’t seen for donkey’s years! Disappointment turned to awe. Out there, the Milky Way is easily visible to the naked eye even straight after leaving a bright room. I thought “I wonder if I can photograph that?”. Being a keen photographer, I reckoned I ‘knew a bit’ about photography – it turned out “you know nothing, Jon Snow”.
Nonetheless I quickly retrieved my camera, attached my fastest wide zoom lens, plonked it onto a tripod and pointed it up. Only then did I think: “Er, what settings to use?”. Obviously the widest aperture and its widest angle (24mm f/2.8) and ISO 3200 (because it seemed "about right"). I chose 30 seconds exposure, but was aware that stars might streak, as the earth rotates noticeably over even as little as a half-minute.
The result, from early August 2016, is here, my first Milky Way image, looking up SSW at around 1am.
click for bigger image
It’s a horrid mess of a picture. Yes, you can see the Milky Way, but that’s about it: out of focus, no other context, no colour, heavily streaked stars, noisy, boosted to buggery in Photoshop. Funnily enough, for a while I was quite impressed, though I didn’t really solicit opinions. If you've never photographed a night sky before, you too may be impressed, but this is really not very good.
Round 2 – 8.5/10 for Composition, 3/10 for Execution
Five months later, Christmas 2016, I had another go. It's obviously a slightly different shot, but it was taken from the same patio as above. My intention was to get the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy visible in a recognizably local setting.
Left: Crop from a handheld Night Sight shot of the sky (full resolution image here). There was slight handshake, so Night Sight chose 333ms x 15 frames = 5.0 seconds of capture. Right: Tripod shot (full resolution image here). No handshake was detected, so Night Sight used 1.0 second x 6 frames = 6.0 seconds. The sky is cleaner (less noise), and you can see more stars. (Florian Kainz)
Stacking many images has the advantage of averaging out noise while increasing signal, but adds the problem of aligning images taken some time apart. The camera's software (which ought to be largely independent of the phone hardware) aims to handle this intelligently.
Nearly 50 years have passed since the Apollo programme first delivered astronauts to the surface of the Moon.
In that time, millions of words have been written about that mission, and the pictures the astronauts and cosmonauts captured on the race to our nearest neighbour have become iconic images.
But there’s been one problem for space enthusiasts poring over the images captured in orbit and on the lifeless lunar surface – they only reveal its beauty in two dimensions. As spectacular as they are, they can only do so much to make you feel like you’re there.
But amid the thousands of photos taken on Nasa's space missions, some of the images created were intended to make the viewer feel they were right there - stereo photographs that have only now come to light, thanks to a new book masterminded by Queen's Brian May.
“The Mission Moon book came about because we’re all kind of nuts about the Moon shot, and it all seems like yesterday to us old people. It’s 50 years ago – incredible,” he says.
“No one had ever done a 3D book on the whole Apollo history and we thought ‘Can we do it, is there enough material?’. So my good friend Claudia Manzoni, who spends her whole life trawling through Nasa archives, gradually sifted through and found images which looked promising.”
The astronauts didn’t take stereo cameras up with them, but they were trained in a rudimentary stereo photography method which meant their normal photographs could easily be turned into 3D images.“Very often they were too busy to remember it and practice it,” May says. “But they were taught to do the ‘cha-cha’ thing – take a picture here and a picture there and eventually it became a 3D picture. Occasionally you’re lucky enough to find one of those.
“I’m not the first person to make 3D pictures in this way but I think we are the most persistent… we’ve got something like 200 stereo pictures in the book, and they all work.”
May can add inventor to his long list of achievements, as well. At the back of each copy of the book is his patented Owl stereoscopic viewer, a pair of plastic lenses that help create the 3D effect. The Owl is the result of May collecting viewers since the early days of Queen, and combining the best bits of various designs.
“For me, it’s a nice coming together,” says May. “It is stereoscopic work, and it’s also astrophysics and it’s astronautics, and to bring them together is great. It wasn’t on my own, we have a great team. David Eicher wrote the text, he’s a wonderful writer and editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine, and as a team we put this together.“
The guy who wrote our afterword – Jim Lovell [Apollo 13 crew member] – said this is the closest you can to feeling like you’re there.”Mission Moon 3D by David J Eicher and Brian May is published by the London Stereoscopic Company on 23 October. You can also visit the book's site, www.missionmoon3-d.com
One of the most widely known photographs of Earth, this image was taken by the crew of the final Apollo mission as the crew made its way to the Moon. Dubbed the “Blue Marble,” Earth is revealed as both a vast planet home to billions of creatures and a beautiful orb capable of fitting into the pocket of the universe.
Some astronauts didn’t want to bring TV cameras on board – but the footage captured has gone down as some of the most memorable in human history.
Christmas Eve 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 – Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders – were about to get their first glimpse of the far side of the Moon.
“We fired the spacecraft engine something like four minutes to slow down enough to get into lunar orbit,” says Borman. “We’re about halfway through when we looked down and there was the Moon.”
“The lunar surface was terribly distressed with meteorites, holes, craters, volcanic residue,” he says. “But one of the things that struck me was there's absolutely no colour, it was either grey or black or white.”
“It was a very interesting first view
But the most captivating view came as they swung back around on the fourth orbit and Anders spotted the Earth in the command module window.
“Oh my God, look at that picture over there! There's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” he exclaimed. “You got a colour film, Jim? Hand me a roll of colour, quick, would you?”
These cartridges containing reels of 70mm film could be easily swapped on the crew’s Hasselblad cameras.
“Take several, take several of them,” said Lovell. “Here, give it to me!”
Once the film was developed back on Earth several weeks later, Nasa image 2383 (and the frames either side) would become one of the most famous pictures of all time.
The picture, showing the Earth in the context of the barren Moon, was one of the unexpected achievements of the Apollo programme.
“I think it's probably one of the more significant pictures that humans have ever taken,” agrees Borman. “The Earth was the only thing in the entire universe that had any colour – a beautiful sight, we're very fortunate to live on this planet.”
In the run-up to the Apollo missions, there was tremendous resistance among many Nasa engineers and astronauts to the idea of carrying TV cameras for live broadcasts from space. It was frivolous and would interfere with the mission, they argued.
The formidable head of mission control, Chris Kraft, thought otherwise and insisted that TV was a way of showing American taxpayers how their money was being spent.
The first astronauts to carry a TV camera into orbit were the crew of Apollo 7 – Wally Schirra, Don Eisele and Walt Cunningham. After a shaky start, they soon got the hang of adding a little showbiz to the space programme.
Despite their shortcomings, these first TV broadcasts from space – a total of seven – nonetheless won an enthusiastic global following. They gave the missions an immediacy that wasn’t possible with film or photography.
When the Apollo 7 crew returned to Earth, they were rewarded with an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for their efforts.
Later missions would push the boundaries of TV technology, with improved cameras, transmitters and content. Apollo 8 broadcast live from lunar orbit for the first time and, during Apollo 10, the crew produced the first colour TV shows from the Moon.
Broadcasting from the relatively bright and controlled conditions of the Apollo spacecraft was very different from transmitting the first images from the surface of another world. But Nasa realised it was essential to broadcast mankind’s first footsteps on the Moon.
Nasa wasn’t taking any risks with ensuring the live video reached the Earth and arranged for the transmissions to be received by 64-metre wide dishes in Goldstone, California and at Parkes in New South Wales, Australia.
Engineers at Parkes spent months working with Nasa to prepare the giant radio telescope to receive the first TV pictures from the lunar surface. On the 21 July 1969, everything was ready for the big event but then the weather suddenly changed.
“Just minutes before the Moonwalk was due to begin, a violent squall hit the telescope with winds that were over the safe operating speeds,” says Parkes operations scientist John Sarkissian. “The astronauts may have been on the Sea of Tranquility on the Moon,” says Sarkissian, “but it was the ocean of storms here.”
During the later Apollo missions, a TV camera was fixed to the lunar rover to give viewers a drivers-eye view of the Moon. The camera was remote-controlled from Earth, which also enabled operators to capture one of the coolest shots in TV history. As Apollo 17 blasts-off from the Moon, the camera tilts to follow its trajectory
Around 600 million people watched as Neil Armstrong took his first tentative small step on the lunar surface. At that time, it was the world’s largest-ever TV audience.
But by the time of Apollo 13, just nine months later, the world had already lost interest. As Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise travelled to the Moon, none of the national US TV networks carried their broadcast.
28,000: Distance the Blue Marble image taken from, in miles
As the Apollo 17 crew headed to the Moon for the final time in 1972, they were instructed to take a picture looking back at the Earth. The image – known as the Blue Marble – gives a unique perspective of the whole Earth hanging in the blackness of space. Not only does it show the South Pole but it puts Africa – not the USA – at the centre.
Even when we return to the Moon, these first images – particularly those of Earth – will have a special place in the history of humankind.
In the words of Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman: “I don't think any of us paid any attention to the fact that we would be going all the way to the Moon and be more interested in looking at the Earth.”
By Johnny O'Shea BBC News
7 June 2019
There are more than 250 lighthouses still in use across the UK, whose shining beams of light play a vital role in protecting shipping. With the days of the lighthouse keeper long gone, who looks after them?
When Scott Tacchi spotted an advertisement for a job as a lighthouse technician, he was intrigued enough to apply and then delighted to land the post.
The 30-year-old from Truro in Cornwall has spent the past 18 months helping to maintain the nation's lighthouses, and documenting a job that often provides spectacular views.
Scott is employed by Trinity House - set up by Royal Charter in 1514 - which is the General Lighthouse Authority for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar
"It is incredible, but it's also scary sometimes. It does make you think... how much longer will these structures withstand that kind of force?
"We have regular surveys carried out, and apparently they are exactly as they were built and are performing exactly the way they were designed.
"The engineering that went into these, considering the technology they had, is just incredible."
Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Computational Photography Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates high-resolution panoramas that seamlessly combine original images. ICE can also create panoramas from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom.