Gallery: These Moody Pics Visualize Where Other People Have Taken Snapshots

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    Philipp Schmitt
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    Philipp Schmitt's new series of photographs visualize what it would look like if every photographer at a tourist site took a photo at the same time.
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    Philipp Schmitt
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    He used geo-tagged data from Flickr and Panaramio to plot where each person stood in his town of Schwäbisch Gmünd, a suburb of Stuttgart.
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    Philipp Schmitt
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    Schmitt rigged up a system that allowed his phone camera to flash whenever he passed by a geo-tagged spot. "In order to trigger a flash from my smartphone, I soldered a circuit board with an ATtiny85 microprocessor as its core," he wrote. "The board is attached to the iPhone headphone jack and listens for audio impulses sent from the web application. When a signal is detected, the microprocessor triggers the camera flash via its synchron cable."
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    Philipp Schmitt
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    Some of his images visualize the data as ghostly apparitions.
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    Philipp Schmitt
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    Others use just the flash to create a moody, minimalist mood.
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    Philipp Schmitt
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    Each dot or person visualizes where the photo was taken.