May 23, 2012

Photosmith 2 enhances Lightroom-iPad integration

I’m delighted to see that Photosmith has released version 2, enabling multi-image tagging, bidirectional sync with Lightroom, native Eye-Fi support, and more.

According to their site, new features of the $20 app include:

• Wirelessly sync your unsorted backlog from Lightroom with our free plugin
• Sort and filter your photos
• Organize them into collections
• Apply star ratings and color labels
• Apply keywords and IPTC metadata individually, in groups, or with presets
• Share highlights and rough selections to Facebook, Flickr or by e-mail
• Support for RAW, JPG, or RAW+JPG
• Support for 100% zoom for many cameras
• Native support for Export and Publish Services in Adobe Lightroom
• Directly receive from Eye-Fi cards
• Very powerful sync options, allowing workflow customization

I can’t wait to try it out when I get home. If you’re using the app, what do you think of it?

May 22, 2012

View to an eclipse

Photographer Cory Poole captured 700 images from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” then used them to create this video:

Or, as my Photoshop-centric brain saw it, “He’s moving two overlapping paths with a Boolean operation & red stroke/inner shadow layer style applied.” Because, yes, I need to get out a lot more.

Elsewhere, the Atlantic features a gorgeous gallery of images that capture the event from points all around the world.

[Via]

May 20, 2012

“The 112-Megapixel Camera You’ll Never Get to Shoot With”

Check out this $100,000 bad boy. PopPhoto writes,

They are looking to create a one-off version of the 1110 series, a black and white only camera with a 95x95mm sensor (medium format sensors are typically 48x36mm). That massive sensor is cooled down to -100 degrees Celsius, which means it can take exposures that last for hours without overheating, which can lead to noise. The 112-megapixel CCD has no Bayer mask or AA fliter so the images will come out super sharp.

Yeah, but does it work with Instagram?

May 14, 2012

Demo: Selectively Blurring Images in Photoshop CS6

Julieanne Kost demonstrates how to soften select areas using the Tilt-Shift blur, uniformly blur your entire image and then sharpen a single focal point with Iris blur, or select multiple focal points and then let Field blur vary the blurriness between them.

[Via]

May 08, 2012

Ikea makes a cardboard camera (?)

Cue up the “How Bizarre” :

 [Via]

May 03, 2012

Triggertrap: Control your SLR from an iPhone

“Triggertrap Mobile,” write its creators, “is the best way to trigger your camera based on sounds, magnetism, movement, or the number of faces in your image – all from your iPhone! How bloody awesome is that…”

[Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]

May 02, 2012

ACR 6.7 for CS5 supports D4, 5D Mk III, more

Camera Raw 6.7 [Win|Mac] and DNG Convertor 6.7 [Win|Mac] are now available as a final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS5.  This release includes bug fixes, new lens profiles, and new camera support:

• Canon EOS 1D X
• Canon EOS 5D Mk III
• Canon PowerShot G1 X
• Canon PowerShot S100V
• Fuji FinePix F505EXR
• Fuji FinePix F605EXR
• Fuji FinePix F770EXR
• Fuji FinePix F775EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS30EXR
• Fuji FinePix HS33EXR
• Fuji FinePix X-S1
• Nikon D4
• Nikon D800
• Nikon D800E
• Olympus OM-D E-M5
• Pentax K-01
• Samsung NX20
• Samsung NX210
• Samsung NX1000
• Sony Alpha NEX-VG20
• Sony SLT-A57

For more details about lens profiles supported & bugs fixed, please see the Lightroom Journal. [Via Dave Howe]

May 01, 2012

Photography: Forget pixels, gimme glyphs

• Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera captures images, uses real people to describe them, and then prints out only the descriptions they create. “The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete.” [Via]
• Adobe researcher Dan Goldman notes, “This is not just a nutty art project: the same general idea is actually being used to help blind people.” He points out VizWiz, ”an iPhone app that allows blind users to receive quick answers to questions about their surroundings. VizWiz combines automatic image processing, anonymous web workers, and members of the user’s social network in order to collect fast and accurate answers to their questions.”
• Text-Only Instagram is spot on. Hip hip cliché! [Via Mark Kawano]

April 28, 2012

Gorgeous photos from New York’s history

Alan Taylor has selected some terrific images from NYC’s history & shared them at high res on In Focus.  The images are drawn from more than 870,000 pictures recently put online by the city’s Department of Records. [Via]

April 27, 2012

Interesting recent collages

• John Stezaker “appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades,’” producing some disconcerting juxtapositions. (Hit the “Next” button at the top to see more.) [Via Guido Reule]
• Matthew Cusick creates portraits & collages from shredded bits of maps.

April 26, 2012

Lightroom 4.1 adds HDR toning, improved defringing

Check it out:

• Lightroom 4.1 RC2 now includes the ability to process HDR TIFF files.  (16, 24 or 32-bit TIFF files)  This can be quite useful if you have merged multiple exposures into a single 32-bit image using Photoshop’s HDR Pro.  Using the new basic panel controls can be a very effective and straightforward method of achieving an overall balance across the tonal range.
• Additional Color Fringing corrections have been added to Lightroom 4.1 RC2.  Please see this blog post for additional details.

Photoshop CS6: What’s in it for photographers?

A. TONS.

I’m sure you already know about Camera Raw 7, and you’ve probably seen bits about selective blurring & adaptive wide-angle lens correction–but what about Skin-Aware Masking, smarter Auto Curves, 64-bit Bridge, an improved Print dialog, and more?  Check out this comprehensive overview from photographer & Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes.

On a related note, photographer & author Martin Evening has posted a great in-depth piece on DP Review covering extreme contrast edits in Lightroom 4 and ACR 7.  I love being able to get more of the benefits of HDR from a single frame, and without introducing garish haloes.

April 23, 2012

MBA’s: Come join the Revel team

The Adobe Revel team is hiring a summer intern with a passion for photography to work on this exciting, transformative product. Job responsibilities include:

• Defining the next version of Revel
• Understanding the market and customers
• Structuring experiments and research to forge ahead in uncharted territory
• Driving the definition of features, working with the experience design and engineering teams
• Defining metrics for success to guide further feature development across multiple releases per year

Check out the job listing page for more info: MBA Product Manager Intern for Adobe Revel (14949). [Via Sumner Paine]

April 22, 2012

“The World’s Most Downloaded Man”

Frustrated by a growing lack of respect in the ad world for original work, Brazilian photographer Fernando Martins of the Câmera Clara Photography Studio travels to Copenhagen to meet with the World’s Most Downloaded Man: A handsome, 6’3″ Danish stock photography model named Jesper Bruun who has been seen “in more places than the Olympic torch.” [Via]

It’s more interesting in concept than in execution, maybe, but I love that it actually happened.

[Via Zorana Gee]

April 21, 2012

Adobe Revel 1.2 adds Retina support & more

The latest rev of Adobe’s mobile photo editing & sharing platform makes a number of improvements, including:

• Support for the Retina display on the new iPad
• Ability to tag photos with an event name, and filter your library by events
• Grid View which displays photos from a single day or event
• Ability to share, export and delete multiple photos at once
• Flexible adjustment to photo date and time stamps
• Faster editing on iPad and iPhone

In addition, the team writes,

If you already tried Revel in the past and want try these new features, we have great news for you! Anyone with an expired trial as of April 12 has ANOTHER 30-days to try Revel. To restart your trial, simply get the latest version from the app store, sign-in, and start another complimentary 30 day subscription.

Happy shooting,
J.

April 19, 2012

Slow-mo mayhem at 2,500fps

I cannot wait to show this to our tiny sons–which probably puts me on a path to being this guy.

[Via]

April 18, 2012

Amazing footage from a tiny RC plane

About five seconds into this clip, I have to repeat: There’s no other time in history when I’d rather live.

[Via]

April 16, 2012

Demo: Faster retouching via Content-Aware Move in CS6

Retoucher Glyn Dewis calls Photoshop CS6 a “game changer.” Here he compares lengthening a neck in CS5 to a new & much faster method enabled by CS6:

April 12, 2012

The visual style of The Wire

Erlend Lavik explores the show’s subtle, nuanced photography, making me miss it all the more. Even if you don’t have the full 30 minutes to spend, I think you’ll enjoy the piece:

[Via]

April 11, 2012

Demo: Correcting GoPro video in Photoshop CS6

I’ve always loved seeing the clever & unexpected ways people combine Photoshop features. Using the CS6 public beta, Stéphane Baril corrects fisheye distortion in video from a GoPro camera using Photoshop’s new Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction feature. Check it out:

April 08, 2012

A ride on the Space Shuttle’s booster

Boom:

From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle, a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.

April 06, 2012

Demo: Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction in CS6

As I’ve said before:

Artificial intelligence: Good.
Your intelligence: Better.
The two together: Best.

Building on the automated lens correction features we introduced in CS5, Photoshop’s Adaptive Wide-Angle Correction makes it easy to specify constraint lines based on your real-world knowledge:

April 05, 2012

Animation: Luminaris

Crazy-lovely French Argentine (?) stop-motion:

The Vimeo page claims “Only available for 2 days,” so you might not want to wait to watch. [Via Matthew Connell]

April 03, 2012

A trippy “Shining”

Topi Kauppinen creates a really uncanny effect, turning 2D stills from The Shining into 3D:

He explains the process on Vimeo:

“The overlapping parts must be photoshopped [*Cough* -- Adobe brand cops] so that in the end everything comes together without any seams or texture repetition. The Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop CS5 is a godsend for this type of work.”

[Via]

April 01, 2012

Advanced Book Features in Lightroom 4

Julieanne Kost drills into the details of this long-awaited & much-requested feature:

March 29, 2012

Video: Ballet at 1,000fps

Lovely: Marina Kanno & Giacomo Bevilaqua from Staatsballett Berlin fly in ultra slow-mo, captured at 1000 frames per second.

[Via]

March 24, 2012

Experience human flight

[Filed under "The Farthest Possible Thing From What I'm Doing While Watching Saturday Morning Vids with Kids"]

[Via ]

March 20, 2012

Video: Base jumping in Singapore

“What could make the view from the infinity pool atop the Marina Bay Sands casino, soaring some 55 stories above Singapore, even more surreal?,” asks Core77. “Human bodies jumping off of the roof behind you.”

March 18, 2012

Jumping rope, from the rope’s point of view

Oddly fascinating (and non-sickness-inducing):

[Via]

March 11, 2012

Japan’s tsunami zone, now & then

The Big Picture features a striking set of images comparing the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear zone exactly one year after the disaster. Click on each image to see the scene today compared with the moments of chaos. [Via John Dowdell]

March 06, 2012

Aching for better iOS app integration

[Disclosures: If I had any inside info, I obviously couldn't share it here, and I've been hopeful/disappointed on this subject before.]

Poor integration leads to bloated apps: if jumping among apps/modules is slow, customers gravitate towards all-in-one tools that offer more overall efficiency, even if the individual pieces are lacking.

Today I saw Neven Mrgan writing, of iPad photo apps,

[I]t’s just so much more convenient to stay in the canonical photo store; importing and exporting photos to and from another app is clumsier.

I experienced the pain, over and over, on my trip to Guatemala.  Having taken just my iPad & Camera Connection Kit, I was eager to put a variety of photo tools to the test.  Moving among apps was far & away the crappiest part of the experience.  For example:

• I’d review images in Photos, where I can see them nice and large. But I can’t say “Open in App X,” so…
• I’d leave Photos, launch Snapseed, bring up the tiny, default image browser component, navigate to the same point in my photo library, and then try to pick the same image I’d just been looking at in Photos.
• After editing, I’d hit Save, and images would go into the Camera Roll (not Imports, where I’d been browsing them).  Thus I couldn’t see the edited images alongside the originals.
• After repeating the process many times, I’d go to Flickr Studio, then carefully & laboriously add photos from various albums.  (The app doesn’t let you re-order images, so I had to dive into the albums again & again just to get the sequence right.)
• At last I’d upload.

This really, really sucked.  Far more desirable:

• Browse the images in the browser of my choice (Photos or something else–one that could, say, flag/sort/whittle down images, local or remote).
• Tap one or more images and say “Send to App X” (to build a panorama, composite in PS Touch, apply a tilt shift blur, whatever)–no manual navigating to the other apps, no navigating back to the photos.
• Be able to save, return to my browser, and see the edited image alongside the original.
• Hand off one or more images to the sharing tool of my choice.

Let’s not bloat PS Touch with every damn filter we can think of; rather, let’s have a great way to pass data back and forth, so that apps can function as plug-ins to one another. (PhotoAppLink is a nice start, but we need something universal.)  And let’s not all bloat our apps reinventing the image browser, integrating the same sharing services over & over, etc.  There’s a far more elegant way to proceed.

Tangential: Neven also writes,

The iPad is too big to shoot with; the iPhone is too small to edit on. Bridging the two is fine in theory, but in practice there’s the hairy matter of extremely large file sizes.

But why is it that my phone or tablet can send HD video streams instantly to my TV, yet they can’t send photos or video to each other (or to my Mac)?  To put a phone video onto my Mac, I have to upload the whole thing to something like Dropbox, then download it again; isn’t that kind of bizarre?  I really thought that AirDrop would sort things out; hope springs eternal.

March 04, 2012

Design: Truthful posters, Saul meets Spider-Man, & more

• Mike del Mundo has created a Spider-Man-themed homage to Saul Bass.
• Speed lines! Kang Duck-bong uses PVC pipes to create sculptures that appear to be moving. [Via]
• Posted:
  • Mubi collects some of the best movie posters of 2011. [Via]
  • “Extremely Lame & Incredibly Cloying”: Truthful posters for this year’s Oscar nominees.
• Photography
  • Lightboys worked for two years to create the large-format “Polaboy, an LED-backlit photographic frame that is a direct 10:1 scaling up of a Polaroid snapshot.”
  • Retronaut shows off Shackleton’s 1915 Antartica excursion–in color.

March 02, 2012

Import photos from Android into Adobe Revel

Check it:

Take photos with an Android phone? To easily add them to your Adobe Revel photo library, put the Adobe Revel Importer app on your Android phone (OS2.2 or later) and then choose photos to import or set the app to auto-import all your shots. The app is free with your Adobe Revel subscription—get it today in the Android Marketplace.

March 01, 2012

The City of Samba

“Just when you think tilt shift may be overdone,” Todd Dominey writes, “this comes along. Glorious.” If nothing else make sure to see the Carnival section that starts around 2:20.

Stop-motion Lego pizza delivery

I really can’t overstate the pleasure our lads have taken in watching these clips. Props & thanks to Michael Hickox.

(It probably shouldn’t have been a “teachable moment” for learning the term coldcock–but c’est la guerre.)

February 26, 2012

Photo juxtapositions

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the most fun:

• In The Flying Series Rachel Hulin makes kids levitate. [Via]
• Maddie the Coonhound is “a super serious project about dogs and physics.” [Via Jeff Tranberry]

February 25, 2012

(rt) Photography: Space, Battles, & Terrible Stock

• I… I really lack words for these. “60 Completely Unusable Stock Photos.” /via Andrew Kavanagh
• Carnage:
  • The Atlantic features some brilliant photos of the “Tough Guy 2012″ competition. (Well, that plus muddy British guys in thongs.)
  • Nicolai Howalt captured portraits of fighters before and after boxing matches.  (Applies also to PMs after meetings with German dev teams.)
  • *Man*, underwater dogs can look ferocious. (Keep your Nirvana babies away).
  • Behold, Sumptuous Meatscapes (not the name of a band, as far as I know).

• Stellar times:
  • Enjoy “A rare, last look inside Space Shuttle Atlantis“.
  • John Glenn relaxes in “The Coolest Astronaut Photograph Ever” (not sure about that, but I do like it).
  • Aww: Stormtrooper happiness. [Via]

February 21, 2012

Scalado Remove promises handheld tourist-zapping

About five years ago we gave Photoshop the ability to stack multiple images together, then eliminate moving or unwanted details. Similar techniques have appeared in other tools, and now it appears you’ll be able to do all the capture & processing with just your phone. Here’s a quick preview:

The Verge has a bit more detail on the user experience. [Via John Dowdell]

February 20, 2012

Timelapse: Yosemite HD

Well, that’s just not hard on the eyes (or ears), then. More info on the project is here.

[Via]

February 15, 2012

A camera so fast, it can see photons moving

Oh my:

MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects.

[Via]

February 14, 2012

Brief impressions of the Nikon V1

I’ve recently returned from my Guatemala trip, on which I carried a Nikon V1 borrowed from the Photoshop team.  If you want a long & crazy-detailed overview, check out Rob Galbraith’s review. What follows is explicitly not that. Rather, it’s off-the-cuff impressions from a guy who normally carries a 5D and who didn’t have the new cam’s manual to consult.

On the whole it’s a camera I quite like.  With a few improvements it could be one I love.

Highlights: Quality, silence, size.

• I found image quality to be excellent. (Here’s a totally untouched shot taken from a very bumpy van.) Granted, I was looking at reduced-res images on my iPad (making it harder to judge noise & sharpness), and I was relying on Apple’s built-in raw conversion (making it harder to judge flexibility of dynamic range), but still I was quite pleased. Even photos taken in a dark museums & caves came out well when using Auto ISO (a feature my 5D lacks) and the 10mm f/2.8 lens.
• I loved the cam’s total silence.  People couldn’t tell that it was on or firing, making it great for candid shots. At one point a colleague asked me, “Are you actually going to take any photos?,” as she didn’t realize I’d been snapping away.
• The presence of a dedicated video start/stop button alongside the shutter release is a cool idea, making it easy to unambiguously capture video (i.e. no need to check or switch shooting mode first).  Overall video quality is great.

Lowlights: Battery, lags.

• I found battery life on the whole to be somewhere between mediocre and awful.  Even with the rear display turned off, I’d knock a fully charged battery down to 1 bar in maybe 150 shots.  Unlike an SLR, you can’t just leave the cam on & ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. There’s no way to just leave it on (max setting is 10 min), meaning you can’t just raise the cam to your eye & know it’ll be ready to go. Weirdly, I found that when left on, the body grew quite warm to the touch. Even with access to my recharger every night, I stressed about battery life; without it (e.g. if backpacking), I’d have had to carry at least one or two spares.
• When you raise the cam to your eye, there’s a very slight delay before the digital viewfinder comes to life–nothing outrageous, but annoying for street photography.  One can hack this by taping over the proximity sensor, but presumably that would just exacerbate the battery life issue.
• As noted in the Galbraith review, the camera insists on briefly showing the last-taken photo in the viewfinder. Again, it’s not horrible, but I often want to keep concentrating on what I’m shooting, not chimp at the shot I just took.
• Minor: I found it a bit too easy to turn the shooting mode wheel by accident.  Suddenly I’d find myself in some odd burst mode, having nudged the wheel with my right hand.

For pop-up street photography, I found the Nikon 1 a good camera–just not quite a great one. Cutting out the lags, letting me leave it on, and adding a flip-out screen (so that I could compose & fire from waist height) would make it nearly ideal for the kind of work I was doing.  As it was, I learned to work around the camera’s limitations, and I’m very happy with what it let me capture.

A few galleries, in case you’re interested:

• A trip to waterfalls & caves (many taken on the move or in the dark)
• Street life parts one and two
• Cemetery & vultures

Of all these, I think this is my favorite.

February 11, 2012

Time & Tide

Canada’s Bay of Fundy features a high tide that can be 50+ feet higher than low tide. Check out this time lapse:

In an old, obscure corner of my career, I was a Navy Midshipman who spent a month on the USS Zephyr. (Would you have guessed?) I sat on a dock in Alaska, sketching the aft 25mm cannon (below), which I’d just unsuccessfully shot at some seagulls (thankfully I missed). I tend to draw each part methodically, and I kept kicking myself as I failed to get the perspective right among the various pieces. Finally I realized that the tide was lowering the ship so fast that the lines were rapidly changing. Not a great place to draw in pen!

[Via]

February 07, 2012

Feedback wanted for Adobe Revel (formerly Carousel)

From PM Sumner Paine:

Calling all active and enthusiastic Revel users!

The team at Adobe is looking for people to join our prerelease program. We’re working on new features and we need your feedback and help with testing.

If you are a Revel subscriber and you have it on all three device types (iPad, iPhone, Mac) just send an email to sumner@adobe.com with a brief explanation covering 4 things:

1. Your favorite thing about Revel
2. The most important thing that’s missing from Revel today
3. List of devices where you have Revel installed (e.g., MacBook Air, iPhone 4, etc.)
4. Names of other photo apps you use on your desktop computer, if any

There’s limited space in the prerelease program so we can’t accept everyone who applies, but we look forward to your submissions.

Sumner Paine, product manager

January 31, 2012

Julieanne Kost’s “Passing Time”

Our globetrotting photo evangelist has created a slideshow of images taken during her travels.

I would not expect the images to hold the same significance to you, the viewer, as they did for me. But that is not the point.

I am sharing this slideshow to encourage every image-maker to begin a visual journal for themselves – as a personal project. I am a firm believer that you have to exercise your creativity and you have to practice in order to improve.  So when I found myself in a rut last year, I started capturing images that were meaningful to me –  purely because I wanted to, for my own reasons – not because I think someone else is going to “like” it. And I had a delightful time.

[Via]

January 26, 2012

Russell Brown on night photography

Russell speaks highly of Jim Goldstein’s work:

The next next thing is going to be Long Exposure Night Photography! I recently attended one of Jim Goldstein’s night photography workshops and I was influenced to take the path to the DARK SIDE. Night photography is really amazing and Jim’s latest book lays out all the details for the beginner, to the advanced geek, who hangs around large telescope arrays. I’m not a super techno nerd, and I love a book that show you how to do something without a lot of magic incantations that make your brain explode. I highly recommend Jim’s latest digital book.

January 20, 2012

Astrophotography: Comet Lovejoy

Here’s a “Night Time Lapse of Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3) rising above the Andes near Santiago de Chile, 23rd December 2011, just before sunrise. Set of 4 sequences taken with different lenses “zooming in” the scene.” The sequences grow more visually impressive over time, though having just watched “Melancholia,” I found the object’s steady growth a bit unnerving.

[Via]

January 19, 2012

A Muybridge homage done with stock photos

Clever:

The creator writes,

“After Muybridge” is a loop made from 12 stock photographs that are sequenced to re-create the locomotion of a galloping horse. The animation was modeled after one of Eadweard Muybridge’s most famous motion studies called “Daisy”. I sifted through over 5,000 digital images to find 12 that matched his original photos.

The Internet allows me to access the over-abundance of everyday photographs, taken of everyday things, in every possible position. By collecting enough images of any one thing, including a running horse, I can place them in an order to re-invent or re-animate life.

[Via Jim Heid]

Ostensible bonus, sort of conceptually similar:

[Via]

January 18, 2012

Alien Skin announces Exposure 4

Alien Skin’s plug-in for Photoshop & Lightroom can create all sorts of interesting film looks, and now they’ve announced v4. “This is the most significant update to Exposure since its creation. Across the board everything is faster and much easier to use,” they say. Check out their blog post for details & screenshots.

Photojournalism & the power of time

One of the great pleasures of my job is getting to meet kickass artists of all stripes. This past summer I got to visit SWAT-cop-turned-photojournalist Bruce Haley at his home at the bottom of Big Sur’s Bixby Canyon. When I asked his advice about photographing people during my upcoming trip, he pointed me to an interview in which he provides some solid perspective. I’ve bolded a line that distills some of my hopes.

BH:  We spoke earlier about doing projects on my own dime…  what this buys me, in addition to the aforementioned freedom and independence, is time  -  the time I need to make people comfortable with my presence…

I don’t sneak any of my images, I never use a telephoto, I don’t do the “spray and pray” thing…  I spend time with the people I photograph, I hang out with them, get drunk with them, they invite me to their weddings, to funerals, whatever…  in extreme cases, like working in very closed societies like the most marginalized of the Roma, it took even more of that luxury of time…

First of all, I had to locate the camps or settlements that I wanted to shoot…  then I had to approach the camp, as a most unwelcome outsider, and not only try to convince them to allow me to shoot there, but to be relaxed enough with my presence that I could be that proverbial fly-on-the-wall that I aspire to be when I’m working…  and with the Roma especially, all of this was difficult, and I had some failures, but in the end I found some places where it all clicked…

Once I had the initial permission, I would ease into the situation very slowly, hoping to raise the comfort bar as high as possible..  I would show up without a single camera and just hang out…  maybe come back the next day with my camera bag, but never take a camera out…  next time come back and wear a camera around my neck, but not shoot anything… and all the while learning about the people, as individuals, so that my images would hopefully depict them as individuals, and not just as symbols of some sort of marginalized group…  then, finally, after all of this, beginning to shoot…  this easing in, getting extremely wary people accustomed to my presence prior to my making a single image, is a luxury of time, certainly, but better to have this level of trust and comfort as opposed to just walking into a situation, motor drive blazing, then beating a hasty retreat and hoping you got something…

Here Andrei Codrescu & Bruce speak about Bruce’s Sunder project:

January 17, 2012

So, what camera would you take to Guatemala?

I usually shoot with a Canon 5D plus a 24-70mm lens. Given the size & weight of that setup, I’m looking for an alternative. I also have a Canon S95, but I don’t love its shutter lag, and I wish I could get closer to the quality offered by a large sensor. Considerations:

• I don’t want to look like an ostentatious jerk.
• I don’t want to hang a “rob me” sign around my neck.
• I’d like great low-light performance for shooting people indoors.
• Zoom is fairly unimportant.

The Photoshop QE team has quite a few cameras to choose from, including a new Nikon 1. A friend seems quite enamored of his Fuji X100, and the local camera store guys like the Lumix DMC-GX1. I’m open to suggestions, especially if there’s something really solid I should consider renting. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

January 13, 2012

VSCO Film for Lightroom & Camera Raw

VSCO Film promises to emulate classic film looks with minimal effort. The product “utilizes camera specific film profiles to alter the way Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw sees your RAW file.” Check it out:

Photographer Jeremy Cowart writes, “I consider myself to be a Photoshop purist. I hate all things actions/filters/presets, etc. But because I liked these guys so much, I decided to look into it more. Then I was blown away…” His post features numerous sample images produced with these tools.

January 11, 2012

Adobe Carousel renamed “Adobe Revel”

From the Carousel Revel team:

We originally chose the name Adobe Carousel because it was descriptive of core functionality in the product – access to all your photos on any device (i.e., viewing photographs in a circular manner, like a carousel).

Revel means to take great pleasure or delight…and that’s what we hope to do in the future as we continue to add more functionality and fun to the app. In the future, you can expect we will also be able to offer additional photography solutions on the newly named Adobe Revel platform.

The app has also been updated to v1.1, enabling automatic photo import, adding Flickr sharing, and polishing a few other details.

January 08, 2012

Around The World Time Lapse

“17 Countries. 343 Days. 6237 Photographs.” Financial analyst turned photographer Kien Lam has created a high-speed tour of the world:

Check out his site for tons of additional information on the project. [Via Martin Bunyi]

January 07, 2012

Sharpening up your Facebook Timeline

• The Photojojo folks point out Pic Scatter, a free tool for generating a Facebook Timeline-friendly image by collaging your existing FB-hosted photos.
• They also note the funny F Yeah Facebook Profiles Tumblr, full of clever hacks to profile pages.
• From there I found Neal Campbell’s Facebook Timeline Cover Template PSD, useful for making one’s own hacks.

January 06, 2012

Instagram improves Facebook integration

Ah, this sounds nice:

Starting today, when you choose to share Instagram photos to Facebook, your images will automatically be added to an “Instagram Photos” Facebook album visible to your Facebook friends!

The photos will appear full-sized in the News Feed along with the caption that you’ve added to the Instagram photo, and a link to the image’s public URL. This change will also display your Instagram photos beautifully in your timeline.

I’d been pestering my former Lightroom colleague Troy Gaul (whose Instagallery for iPad you should download) to try to hack together some mechanism for making this work. Instead he tipped me off to this enhancement.

Now, if only I could find a solution to keep my Instagram-originated tweets from appearing alongside Instagram-originated FB postings… (My tweets are replicated on FB, but that method doesn’t provide inline photos, so I choose to share via both and thus get duplicates.) It’s hardly a big deal, though.

Video: Nikon D4′s iPad integration

Nikon’s newly announced D4 camera offers what looks to be cool iPad integration:

[Via Mark Kawano]

January 05, 2012

Upside-down photography from beneath a frozen lake (!)

“J. Mettälä took a camera under a frozen lake in Finland,” writes PetaPixel, “and captured this beautiful (and mind-bending) footage of his friends fishing in an upside-down world.”

January 02, 2012

(rt) Photography: Powerful images, rebel fashion, & more

• What a year: The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011.
• Take a very worthy of a short pause in your day to appreciate this beautiful world: The National Geographic Photo Contest.
• Odd–and oddly compelling — “fashion” photography: Pickup Trucks of the Libyan Liberation.
• The North Korean regime has certainly nailed the mass human coordination thing. (Theoretically related: the DPRK Party Rock Anthem. “Ain’t no party like a Pyongyang party, ’cause a Pyongyang party is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY.”)
• Truth & Beauty:
  • An advertising watchdog has banned excessive Photoshop use in cosmetics ads.
  • Men Photographed in Stereotypical Pin-Up Poses. [Via]
  • Interactive: How models morph under makeup.
11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments [1]

December 16, 2011

The Germans must have a word for this

Here’s the blog post I was drafting Wednesday:

Dear 5D & 24-70: I don’t know what I did to make you disappear, but on the off chance you read this blog, please come back. I miss you very much.  – Love, J.

I was utterly bewildered by it, but I’d begun slowly coming to terms with the disappearance of my camera and big, stupid-expensive lens. The pair had been MIA since Halloween, and all the king’s horses, children, wife, babysitter, and cleaning lady could not find them again.

Thus on Wednesday evening I found myself at San Jose Camera, checking out 60D’s, 7D’s, and stupid-expensive lenses. I was all set to ask your advice on the matter (how’s the 17-55 2.8 lens? are live view and/or a swiveling screen worth a damn? should I maybe go Nikon overall?), and I’d secured a cam or two to borrow from the Photoshop QE locker (one of the best perks of this job). After mourning my loss, I’d started getting excited about having features like video capture.

And then, what do you know, as I was talking to my wife about it at home, my eyes wandered into the china cabinet (never lit except, oddly, at this moment), into a crystal serving bowl… and to the camera!!  Our elderly sitter later remembered that she’d stowed it there while the boys were roughhousing–then utterly forgot about it.

And thus we come to the Germans*: Doesn’t it seem they should have a term for “Relieved delight in one’s good fortune, tinged with vague disappointment, seasoned with guilt regarding the disappointment”?

In any case, I’m looking forward to getting the big rig back in action. It’s true I shoot much less with the SLR these days, and yet when you need to nail a shot (e.g. with family visiting for the holidays), “accept no substitutes.” I just can’t miss any more kid photos when the iPhone or even the S95 takes its sweet time to fire the shutter.

Welcome home, boys.
J.

*Interesting read: “A Joyful & Malicious History Of ‘Schadenfreude’“: “By leaving Germanisms untranslated, one always points to the sentiment expressed by the word as fundamentally and even organically German. My favorite, ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung,’ means roughly to overcome or to come to terms with the past… In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon notes ‘the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named.’ Naming is not only a form of identification or labeling, but also of creation. To the eye, mouth, and ear, capacious German words seem to embody and externalize the weight of difficult emotions.”

An HDR time lapse of Brno

From Jan Minol:

[Via]

December 14, 2011

Lightroom 3.6, Camera Raw 6.6 updates now final

Lightroom 3.6 (Mac|Win) and Camera Raw 6.6 (Mac|Win) are now available as final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3. These updates include bug fixes, new camera support and new lens profiles.

New camera support in these releases:

• Canon PowerShot S100
• Fuji FinePix X10
• Leica V-LUX 3
• Nikon 1 V1
• Nikon 1 J1
• Panasonic DMC-GX1
• Ricoh GR Digital IV
• Samsung NX5
• Samsung NX200
• Sony NEX-7

In addition, the releases add support for numerous lens profiles while squashing a number of bugs. Please see the Lightroom Journal for details. [Via]

Video: Ho Chi Minh City

Rob Whitworth makes frenzy look lovely:

[Via Kevin Connor]

December 13, 2011

Video: MWAC Attack

Kinda fun, though the YouTube comments really make it (“Did you know that just like how DSLR’s have a P for Professional mode, Minivans also have an R for Racecar mode? #coolfacts”; “DANG and to think I have been shooting in ‘M’ for ‘Moron’”).

“MWAC,” incidentally, is “Mother With A Camera.”

December 06, 2011

Demo: Making a time lapse in Photoshop

Russell Brown puts Photoshop Extended through its paces:

December 05, 2011

Film: “Address is Approximate”

Absolutely lovely work from Tom Jenk­ins (just trust me & take the two minutes):

Update: Here’s some great making-of info from Digital Arts.

Apropos of very little, I saw a Google Street View car sitting alongside Page Mill Road last week, its little optical turret spinning away. I hoped it was secretly one of their self-driving robots in disguise. [Via]

Love for Photoshop Touch

I’m delighted to see reviews like this continue to roll in. A few recent quotes:

• “Photoshop Touch is a triumph of mobile computing, allowing for deep image manipulation, with very usable touch screen controls.” – Nick Moore, Galaxy Tabs
• “Photoshop Touch, a nearly perfect paring-down of its desktop counterpart… packs in almost all of the things I need for on-the-go photo editing.” – Liam Spradlin, Android Police
• “All in all, Photoshop Touch provides a wide array of useful and easy-to-use tools for manipulating images on the go.” – Michelle Mastin, PCWorld

December 01, 2011

Vincent Laforet talks about switching to Premiere Pro

The noted photographer & filmmaker & his team talk about producing their latest film via Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Story, and Photoshop:

November 30, 2011

“Photoshopped or Not? A Tool to Tell”

My longtime boss Kevin Connor left Adobe earlier this year to launch a startup, Fourandsix, aimed at “revealing the truth behind every photograph.” Now his co-founder (and Adobe collaborator) Hany Farid has published some interesting research:

Dr. Farid and Eric Kee, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Dartmouth, are proposing a software tool for measuring how much fashion and beauty photos have been altered, a 1-to-5 scale that distinguishes the infinitesimal from the fantastic. Their research is being published this week in a scholarly journal, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Check out the interactive presentation of before & after images. Details are on the NY Times.

November 29, 2011

Cameras + Choppers

Small, ubiquitous video capture & aviation make a potent combo. The NY Times features a story about amateur video helping in air crash investigations. Elsewhere, clashes in the streets of Warsaw have been captured by small, remote helicopter:

I find the effect both exciting and unnerving. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” and capturing misbehavior begets exposure, outrage, and action. Or does it? I wonder whether the aerial footage introduces a “cinemification” element, a sense that real life is simply more TV, more entertainment. I don’t know; I’m not complaining, just wondering aloud a bit. [Via]

November 25, 2011

A year-long time lapse of the sky

Another time lapse, really?? But check it out–Ken Murphy has created a really novel piece:

A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.

Here’s more info on how it was done, the rig used, and more. [Via]

November 22, 2011

Midnight Sun

“For 17 days,” writes Joe Capra, “I travelled solo around the entire island shooting almost 24 hours, sleeping in the car, and eating whenever I had the time. During my days shooting this film I shot 38,000 images, travelled some 2900 miles, and saw some of the most amazing, beautiful, and indescribable landscapes on the planet.”

Joe used Lightroom (with an assist from LRTimelapse) and the new After Effects Warp Stabilizer to create this piece. For more info on the project, check out this interview with Michael Levy Studio.

[Via]

November 19, 2011

Video: Flying Rhinos

Filmmakers Green Renaissance created this beautiful, inspiring short piece. Our 2- and 3-year-old boys watch it obsessively and now know the “characters” by name (“There’s Cathy in the green hat! There’s old Jacques!”).

November 18, 2011

Adobe Carousel surpasses a million downloads

“On October 27th we launched Adobe Carousel,” writes PM Sumner Paine, “and within a few short weeks we’ve already surpassed 1,000,000 downloads! We’re happy to see such a tremendous response — and want to thank everyone who jumped on board and downloaded the app on their iPhones, iPads and Macs.”

Though the team isn’t yet ready to talk in detail about future plans, check out Sumner’s post to hear about some areas they’re considering.

November 16, 2011

Time lapse: Earth from above

Michael König edited together beautiful imagery captured by the crew aboard the International Space Station (see the Vimeo page for more details):

November 12, 2011

Video: Bullet-time surfing

Rip Curl and Time-Slice Films used GoPro HD cams to build a “’30 camera Array’–a line of cameras firing consistently as surfers ride towards and past it.”

The same team erected an in-water scaffolding in Malaysia’s Sunway Lagoon Hotel to mount 52 full-sized DSLR cameras:

Core77 features more details & photos of the rigs, along with behind-the-scenes videos.

[Via]

November 10, 2011

GroundBot, a self-propelled ball camera

Another from the “Ah, What Could Go Wrong?” Files:

It denies any family connection to Imperial interrogation droids, but I’m not sure I buy its story. [Via]

November 06, 2011

Video: A love letter to NYC

Andrew Clancy’s “A Year in New York” is just lovely. Go Irish.

The song ‘We Don’t Eat’ by James Vincent McMorrow is available as a free download from Amazon. [Via Laine Fast]

November 04, 2011

Video: Collision study

A lovely little somethin’ somethin’ for a rainy Friday morning:

October 29, 2011

Photoshop CS5 automates lens correction

Here’s a one-minute tour from PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes:

He provides a deeper overview with examples (including iPhone shots automatically improved via this technology) on the Photoshop.com blog.

October 24, 2011

Fotolia adds stock photo search to CS5 apps

Check it out:

14 million photos & vectors right inside InDesign, Illustrator & Photoshop!

Search stock images, save to lightboxes, create galleries, insert comps & automatically update to high res versions making stock image integration what it was always meant to be!

To build your own panels like this, grab the Creative Suite Extension Builder.

October 20, 2011

Video: Photoshop Touch & Blending Modes

Russell Brown shows how to avoid lots of tedious image extraction tasks, simply by making good use of various blending modes:

October 19, 2011

“World’s First Mobile Photography Conference,” this Saturday

Check out the 1197 Conference, happening this Saturday in San Francisco and streaming online:

The first camera phone photo was taken on June 11th, 1997. In honor of that date, 1197 is a one-day conference dedicated to mobile & iPhone photography, presented by Bolt | Peters and Blurb.

The site lists speakers, registration prices, and more.

Gorgeous Arizona time lapse

Dustin Farrell’s work is so beautiful, I almost can’t deal with it.

“Every frame of this video,” he notes, “is a raw still from a Canon 5D2 DSLR and processed with Adobe software.” Check out the Vimeo page for additional technical details. [Via John Dowdell]

October 18, 2011

Eye-popping tech for inserting 3D objects into photos

“With a single image and a small amount of annotation,” writes researcher Kevin Karsch, “our method creates a physical model of the scene that is suitable for realistically rendering synthetic objects.” Fascinating:

Check out the project site for much more detailed info. [Via Zorana Gee]

October 17, 2011

Adobe demos amazing deblurring tech (new video)

Last week over a million people (!) watched a handheld recording of this demo. Here’s a far clearer version*:

And here’s a before/after image (click for higher resolution):

Now, here’s the thing: This is just a technology demo, not a pre-announced feature. It’s very exciting, but much hard work remains to be done. Check out details right from the researchers via the Photsohop.com team blog. [Update: Yes, it's real. See the researchers' update at the bottom of the post.]

* Downside of this version: Bachman Turner Overdrive. Upside: Rainn Wilson.

October 16, 2011

The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Interesting concept:

The Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera captures a full spherical panorama when thrown into the air. At the peak of its flight, which is determined using an accelerometer, a full panoramic image is captured by 36 mobile phone camera modules.

[Via Jeff Tranberry]

October 15, 2011

Video: Waves in slow motion

Sixty seconds of beauty. (Full screen HD is a must, naturally.)

[Via]

October 05, 2011

Video: Image search in Photoshop Touch

“Grab two images, cut the background off one, and blend the results.” If I had to boil Photoshop Touch down to one capability or scenario, it’s that.

Acquiring images is therefore critical. That’s why we made it simple to drag & drop in images from Facebook, Creative Cloud, and even Google Images. Here Russell Brown composites some public-domain NASA imagery using different blending modes:

We want to help customers do the right thing (i.e. not rip off others’ work), so we paid particular attention to making it easy to search only for images that have been tagged for reuse. By default PS Touch limits search results to those creators have marked as okay to use.

[By the way, I'm still in LA, working the MAX show all day. I'll get busy answering PS Touch-related questions when I get home.]

October 03, 2011

Introducing Photoshop Touch

Combine, Edit, Share. I’m delighted to introduce Adobe Photoshop Touch, a new tablet app for creative imaging. With PS Touch we’re bringing Photoshop fun & power not only to new platforms, but to a whole new audience.

Here’s my brief overview:

To see the app in action, check out Russell Brown’s 10-minute feature tour:

So, when can you get it, and what does it cost?

We plan to release Photoshop Touch for Android shortly, after which we plan to bring it to iOS. When we talk about reaching new audiences, we’re not kidding: Photoshop Touch is priced at just $9.99.

So (to anticipate an inevitable question), why Android first? Many Adobe apps (Adobe Carousel, Ideas, Photoshop Express, Eazel, Color Lava, Nav) have already been released on iOS first, and it’s good to support customers across platforms. We’re busily coding for iOS as well, so I wouldn’t make too much of this particular detail. No matter what tablet(s) you use, we can’t wait to get Photoshop Touch into your hands.

One last thought for now: We’re still very, very early in the evolution of mobile devices for creative work, and Photoshop Touch–along with the many other Adobe touch apps announced today–is just a beginning. We’re eager to hear what you think, and I’m looking forward to hearing ideas & questions here and on Twitter (@PhotoshopTouch). (Today I’ll be largely offline, showing the app in person at Adobe MAX, so I apologize in advance if I’m slow to respond.)

September 26, 2011

A lovely L.A. time lapse

Colin Rich has done the nearly impossible: He’s made me find Los Angeles beautiful.

[Via]

September 24, 2011

Time lapse: Earth from above

James Drake downloaded 600 photos from the International Space Station, then stitched them together to create this fly-over. Check it out in fullscreen HD & watch for the lightning storms.

[Via]

September 21, 2011

(rt) Photography: Giant photos and… oh, dear God, *bees*

• Beautiful: Long Exposure Photos of High-Speed Rail Transit.
• How does one exhibit the world’s largest photo? Like so.
• Kim Pimmel “looks around, around/He sees angels in the architecture/Spinning in infinity.”
• I’ve been quite enjoying the quiet photos of Ben Duchac. [Via]
• So, China features a bee-wearing contest. Yes, really. (Makes me think of Richard Avedon’s famous beekeeper image.) [Via Rob Galbraith] Archival bonus: “Oh dear Lord, bees!”

September 19, 2011

(rt) Photography: Jokes, plus people falling

• Self-referential:
  • “Stocking [imitating stock photo cliches] Is the New Planking.” [Via]
  • Had to be done: Artist Mocks the Absurd Poses in Fashion Photos by Showing Them in Real Life.
  • “You can hold your liquor, and now your lens can, too.” The Shot Glass Lens Set.
• People in flight:
  • The Big Picture features an urban cliff diving competition in Boston (yes, really). [Via]
  • Behold, the wonderful (as in, ridiculously contorted) world of the diving face. [Via]

September 18, 2011

PhotoAppLink improves iOS app communication

To avoid bloated software, I wrote months ago, we need better ways to connect small apps (so that each can focus on just what it does best). Android “intents” enables this (e.g. in Photoshop Express), and it sounds like Windows Metro “contacts” are similar. On iOS this has been more problematic. From iPhoneography:

[G]etting an image from one app to the next is tedious. When switching apps the user must save the edited image to the camera roll, quit the current app, launch the next and then load up the intermediate image before continuing to edit it.

So a group of app developers got together and found a way to solve this problem with PhotoAppLink:

I can’t make any commitments on behalf of Adobe apps, but I certainly find this development interesting & encouraging. [Via Dave Howe]

September 17, 2011

Video: I’m Crushing Your Head (kinda)

I find Junebum Park’s little videos totally charming.  Sadly it seems the longer, better-quality ones have been pulled from YouTube, but here’s a little taste:

Via Core77, ArtNews says,

In his short films… June Bum Park plays around with… shifts in scale: everyday scenes such as parking a car, constructing a building, or crossing a road are animated by gigantic hands (the artist’s own), and people and objects turn into playthings of a higher power. The manipulations appear tiny, their movements seem pre-determined, and all the figures do not let themselves be distracted from their goal. Cleverly they evade the intruder’s hands and continue on their way with the determination a column of ants.

September 16, 2011

The Adobe Carousel team answers reader questions

How does it work with Lightroom? Who exactly can see my photos? (And where are they, exactly?)

Check out this post from the Adobe Carousel team for good answers to top questions.  You can post comments here, but you’re more likely to get questions addressed via that post’s comments.

Meanwhile, here’s a cute little video they did to capture the zen of the product:

September 15, 2011

Video: Experience Zero Gravity

More amazing aerial filmmaking from the folks who brought us Experience Human Flight:

Or, if you prefer your extreme sports photography to feature spraying blood and wildly overdriven guitars, try this on for size:

[Via]

September 12, 2011

Watch Adobe Carousel demoed in the PS World keynote

Check out the multi-user/multi-device functionality demoed by Sumner Paine & Julieanne Kost. They show one-step import, direct capture into Carousel, the Develop engine, sharing ratings, and more. Unfortunately the video doesn’t allow embedding, but the link jumps you right to the start of the demo.

September 11, 2011

Photographers remember 9/11

• Photojournalist James Nachtwey grabbed his camera and ran towards Ground Zero. He captured incredible images, nearly paying for them with his life. You should read his story.
• Tom Junod’s article The Falling Man, about Richard Drew’s famous 9/11 photograph, is long, very difficult, and rewarding.
• “The Thousand-Yard Stare” : Peter Turnley talks about meeting Sal Isabella, the fireman whose image he captured the morning after the attacks.

September 10, 2011

CineSkates: “Roller skates for Your DSLR”

Clever Kickstarter project CineSkates offers “a set of three wheels that quickly attach to a tripod and enable fluid, rolling video in an ultra-portable package.”

Uses:

• Arcing shots that rotate around objects
• Sliding shots that push or pull the subject into focus
• Rolling shots that glide over the subject
• Time-lapse shots that move the camera slowly and smoothly
• Panning shots that scan a wide area
• “Worm’s eye view” shots that slide just above the floor

[Via]

September 09, 2011

Adobe Carousel demo/Q&A recording

For a more in-depth demo of Adobe Carousel, check out this recording of yesterday’s presentation/Q&A session. (Just skip past the first 90 seconds or so of dead air.)

September 08, 2011

My fondest hope for iOS5?

Frictionless camera-to-Carousel hand-off.

I really, really want to think that AirDrop will enable truly seamless integration with Eye-Fi and similar wireless networking/storage cards. Pairing a Wi-Fi-enabled camera with a phone or tablet needs to become as trivial as pairing two Bluetooth devices. Once it’s done once, the camera needs to be able to transfer images the nearby devices anytime, regardless of whether they’re in use, running a special app, etc.

Then–and only then–can we lay to rest the current dilemma: good dedicated camera with laborious transfer/editing/sharing experience, or lousy(-ish) phone camera with immediate editing/transfer? And with the proliferation of 4G phones & tablets, camera->-device->-cloud->desktop will become slick as hell.

Reminder: Photosmith for iPad

I’ve heard a few comments to the effect of “Adobe Carousel looks great, but I really want to pull my raw photos into my iPad, apply flags, ratings, and keywords, and they sync everything with Lightroom on my desktop.” Happily, that’s just what Photosmith ($17.99) already offers:

September 07, 2011

Introducing Adobe Carousel

“Lightroom for iPad” has been the clearest customer mandate I’ve heard in 10+ years at Adobe. Photographers are clamoring to transfer photos wirelessly to their tablets, review & tweak them there, and then sync the results with their desktops.

Adobe Carousel (press release) embraces that vision–and takes it further.  This new app–announced today for iOS and Mac OS X (with Android & Windows versions in development)–brings a highly tuned version of the Lightroom/Camera Raw engine to mobile devices, combining it with excellent multi-device syncing. Key coolness:

• You get access to all your images on all your devices.
• All edits are non-destructive: tweak a setting on one device & you’ll see the edit ripple through your other devices.
• It’s easy to collaborate with friends & family: people you invite to share a photo catalog can view photos, add new ones, apply adjustments and preset “looks,” and flag favorites.
• You can easily publish to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

What does it cost, and when can you get it?  The iOS and Mac versions should be available shortly. The iPad, iPhone, and Mac apps are free, and the syncing/storage service costs $9.99 a month (or $99/year), with a special introductory price of $5.99 a month (or $59.99 a year). Storage & number of photos are unlimited.

When you pay for an Adobe Carousel subscription, you’e investing in one complete solution, enabling you to import as many photos as you want, adjust and improve those photos, and then share those photos with family & friends.

This first version of the app is ruthlessly focused on simplicity & on meeting the needs of a very large group of photographers. As it evolves there’s plenty of room to grow, including adding support for raw file formats and integrating with Lightroom & other desktop apps.

When we introduced Lightroom, we likewise started small, listened hard to photographers, and rapidly iterated based on their feedback. I’m extremely excited to see what develops.

PS–You may know that I’ve been working on mobile imaging apps at Adobe, so can I take credit for Carousel? I’m afraid not: I was the PM early on, helping get things rolling, after which I moved to another effort. More on that soon enough.

September 06, 2011

Video: Soap bubbles & ferrofluid

When he’s not designing interfaces at Adobe, Kim Pimmel makes short films:

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

See more of his projects on Vimeo. [Via]

August 31, 2011

(rt) Photography: Canine Love

August 30, 2011

(rt) Scientific photography: Escher in water, eggs exploding, & more

• Moments in time:
  • Love it: an Escher painting refracted in a drop of falling water.
  • Check out some rather amazing food photography (PDF)–e.g. high-speed egg detonation. [Via Margot]
• Space:
  • Ever wonder what a “shooting star” looks like from space? This image was taken during the Perseids meteor shower. [Via]
  • “Look at That, You Son of a Bitch“: Frank perspective on the fragility of Earth, from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. [Via]
• Images like this make me suspect that God has a soft spot for airbrushed “Noble Wolf” shirts.

August 28, 2011

(rt) Odd camera materials (Lego, paper, & wood)

• Behold the Legotron, Mark I, a 4×5 Camera made of LEGO bricks. [Via]
• Going for a softer feel, one can get a working Leica M3 paper pinhole camera.
• You’re welcome, hipsters: the Wood Camera iPhone Case.

August 27, 2011

Video: Skating, rendered beautifully

So, you liked the Danny MacAskill thing, then? Now peep this:

[Via]

August 23, 2011

Video: A Day in California

Perfectly lovely:

Bobby Solomon writes,

Photographer Ryan Killackey and his wife decided to document California, mostly the Los Angeles area, through photos, taking over 10,000 in total, and then compiling them into this beautiful video.

August 22, 2011

Hints about Adobe’s future mobile photography tools

Managing your photos across a range of devices (phones, tablets, computers, cameras) really starts to suck. We’re exploring some interesting solutions that go beyond what others have announced:

No matter which device is in your hand, you see your entire photo library. So those hundreds of photos you took while touring through Italy with your smartphone would also appear in the library on your tablet device and at home on your laptop…just like that.

At Adobe, we’re exploring solutions to get you there. And it should come as no surprise that we will also leverage the power of Photoshop editing technology for quick fixes along the way.

A tad vague, maybe, but stay tuned. Good things are on the way.

August 17, 2011

Video: Danny MacAskill

Beautiful filmmaking showcases incredible athleticism:

August 12, 2011

Slow-Mo Owl Show

Oddly intense! (especially full screen)

One of these winged victors tried to make off with my parents’ elderly wiener dog during a midnight outing. Advantage: Older Irish lady using her bathrobe to look bigger! [Via]

August 11, 2011

Video: A Skateboard’s-Eye View of Manhattan

Filmmaker & skater Josh Maredy killed a pair of GoPro cameras en route to capturing this madness:

[Via]

August 07, 2011

Video: World’s largest stop-motion animation

Not content with having made “the world’s smallest stop-motion animation,” the folks at Aardman set out to crush it with the world’s largest–and once again, they shot it with a telephone:

As usual I find the making-of video even more interesting than the final piece:

[Via]

August 05, 2011

“Metropolis”: Enormous Matchbox kinetic sculpture

If you played with Hot Wheels as a kid, this is what you saw when drifting off to sleep:

Hypnotic & terrific. Here’s more about artist Chris Burden.

July 28, 2011

Exhibit: Photo Tampering Throughout History

You can build a business manipulating photos; how about building one by detecting those manipulations?

My longtime boss Kevin Connor was instrumental in building Photoshop, Lightroom, and PS Elements into the successes they are today, and he taught me the ropes of product management. After 15 years he was ready to try starting his own company, so this spring he teamed up with Dr. Hany Farid (“the father of digital image forensics,” said NOVA). Together they’ve started forensics company Fourandsix (get the pun?), aimed at “revealing the truth behind every photograph.”

Now they’ve put up Photo Tampering Throughout History, an interesting collection of famous (and infamous) forgeries & manipulations from Abraham Lincoln’s day to the present. Numerous examples include before & after images plus brief histories of what happened.

I wish Kevin & Hany great success in this new endeavor, and I can’t wait to see the tools & services they introduce.

Related/previous:

• 5 Ways to Spot a Fake Photo – Hany Farid
• Dr. Farid’s numerous papers at Dartmouth
• Image authenticity & Photoshop

July 27, 2011

Free Lightroom webinar on bookmaking, tomorrow

Photographer Jerry Courvoisier is presenting online tomorrow at 10am Pacific time:

How to Use Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 3.0 to Develop, Sort and Sequence Your Images for Blurb Bookmaking: In this free webinar, world-class Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom specialist Jerry Courvoisier will take you through great Lightroom tips and tricks including how to prep your photos for your book. He’ll also show you how to use the new Blurb Bookify™ plug-in for Lightroom. Plus, stay for an exclusive Lightroom discount at the conclusion of the webinar.

July 26, 2011

Come join me for a photo walk on Friday!

First we talk (mobile imaging), then we walk.

Photographers & mobile-imaging experts Dan Marcolina (author of iPhone Obsessed) & Knox Bronson (founder of P1xels, “the site of record for the emergent and global iphoneographic artist community”) will be speaking at the Photoshop store in San Francisco this Friday at 1:30pm. Afterwards (3:30-5pm) we’ll be taking pictures outside:

Join Dan, Knox, and members of the Photoshop team for a photo walk through Union Square. The only caveat is: NO CAMERAS ALLOWED. That’s right, you’ll only take photos with your mobile phone.

For me it’s a chance to see how you work & to hear more about what you want Adobe to do in mobile imaging.

Afterwards Blurb is throwing a little party in the store, showing off books while supplying drinks & appetizers. Not a bad little Friday afternoon/evening, eh?

The store is at 550 Sutter.  See the schedule for details on these events & everything else happening there. Hope to see you there!

Cool DIY aerial filmmaking

I’ll say it again: I’m oddly thankful that incredible technology like this didn’t exist when I was a kid, as otherwise I’d have lost my entire adolescence to it. First, here’s what happened when filmmaker Joe Simon mounted a Canon 7D to an RC helicopter:

[Via]

If you prefer more the rock-n-roll grunge tip, check out the work of 19-year-old Jeremiah Warren and his rocket-mounted spy cam:

[Via]

Previously: DSLR video + RC helicopter = awesome

July 21, 2011

More Photoshop-as-Instagram

Abduzeedo shares tips on replicating Instagram’s Nashville color effect via Photoshop. (Seems like it’s kind of begging to be turned into an action.) Previously: Instagram filters as PS actions.

Tangentially related: A band called The Vaccines is planning to use Instagram to create a crowd-sourced music video. [Via]

July 17, 2011

Great NASA resources commemorating the Shuttle & Shepard

• As the Shuttle flies its last few orbits above us, you might enjoy this excellent collection of photos from the program’s history.
• I also really enjoyed this short history on Alan Shepard & the first US manned spaceflight, the 50th anniversary of which passed a few weeks ago.

July 16, 2011

iPhone rolling shutter + guitar strings = interesting effect

Fascinating (though, the creator notes, apparently not representative of how strings actually vibrate):

[Via]

July 14, 2011

dbox: Instagram Filters as Photoshop Actions

If you’re a fan of Instagram-style photo effects & would like to apply them easily in Photoshop, check out Daniel Box’s Instagram Filters as Photoshop Actions.  I stumbled upon these randomly, not as the results of a search, so if you’ve seen other cool ways to apply these or similar effects via PS, please feel free to point them out via comments.

New Lightroom Website builder plug-in released

Matthew Campagna has released TTG Pages CE for Lightroom:

TTG Pages CE is not an image gallery. It is a website construction tool used to create a home in which your image galleries may thrive. It creates pages — Home, Services, Info, About and a Contact page with email contact form — and a self-populating Gallery Index for your image galleries.

Whether you’re building your first photo website or your hundredth, TTG Pages CE is the tool you’ve been waiting for to streamline your Lightroom-to-website workflow, and to create a website you can take pride in.

The tool is $25 from Matthew’s site.

July 13, 2011

360-degree cockpits, new & old

• 360vr features a 360-degree pano of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s flight deck, captured during the orbiter’s decommissioning process. [Via]
• Photographer Patrick McGee has shared a pair of Waco biplane cockpits. [Via]

Tangentially related: Don’t miss Shlomi Yoav’s eye-popping, wide-angle Shuttle launch photo.

July 12, 2011

Video: The Incredible Rube Goldberg Portrait Photography Machine

I kind of can’t even talk about this:

Hats off to David Dvir and the team at 2D Photography. Here’s more info about the project, plus a making-of video:

[Via Harrison Liu]

July 11, 2011

Feature request: Instagram->Facebook

I often say that if I could code, I’d never leave the basement*: I know what I want, but I have to rely on others to make it real.

At the moment I’m wishing for a way to suck up some or all of my Instagram-hosted images, then repost them on Facebook.  I already share each individual image via Twitter (and thus Facebook), but these don’t end up residing on FB, where family members would be much more likely to see them.  This can’t be a hard thing to implement, but I’ve yet to see it done.

Update: Thanks to Noah Mittman for pointing out Instaport, a free site that lets you download some/all of your images as a ZIP archive. It’s a great start, though just to get greedy, let me also request a way to retain image captions. For me those are often as critical as the images themselves.

* Thus it’s probably like my not being more muscular (which would lead to my getting into lots of fights): probably a blessing in disguise.

July 06, 2011

Disappearing acts: Content-Aware Fill in motion & more

• “Waldo was a chump at hiding compared to Liu Bolin.” Check out the artist’s amazing camouflage as he melts into various backgrounds.
• Christiane Feser and Mara Monetti hide their love away… with candy sprinkles! [Via]
• After Effects PM Steve Forde demos a quasi-Content-Aware Fill effect using CS 5.5′s new Warp Stabilizer.

July 02, 2011

Video: Striking a cymbal at 1,000fps

Bah-dum, tssch!

Spoiler: Not much changes after the initial strike. [Via]

June 30, 2011

Carousel (Instagram on Mac) gets new features

The beautiful Carousel for browsing/commenting on Instagram feeds ($5 on the Mac App Store) has been updated with a number of new capabilities, including searching, support for gestures, and the ability to see all the images you’ve liked. I highly recommend it.

Also very nice (and free): the Screenstagram screensaver.

June 29, 2011

Video: “Bullet time lightning”

A Tesla coil plus a 10-camera array of custom-programmed Canon cameras = Rob Flickenger’s 70 megapixel bullet time lightning.

More info is here. [Via Iván Cavero Belaunde]

June 25, 2011

(rt) Photography: Blackbirds & cursing & migrants, oh my

• Cute: the USB Film Roll packs 4GB of photos into a recycled film canister.
• History:
  • Interesting stories: 10 People’s Lives in Famous Photographs (“Migrant Mother,” the flowers-in-gun-barrels guy, and more).
  • Here’s a beautiful SR-71 Blackbird family portrait, plus a piece on why the SR-71 matters. [Via]
• Fun with profanity:
  • “‘[Screw] it. They’re all the same to me.’ remarked stock photo Steve, as he saved the company another 50%…” [Via]
  • It was almost worth buying the mug for its “shit-language.”

June 21, 2011

Instagallery enhanced

Our friend Troy Gaul has revised his excellent Instagallery iPad app with a host of improvements. For v1.2:

In short: Grid. AirPlay. AirPrint. Liked photos. Twitter. Facebook. Open in Safari. Open in Instagram. Email, save, and copy yours. Video out. Favorite sets. Recent sets. Better comments. Easy tagging. Entire caption. Filter display. Unnamed locations. Tap to advance. TextExpander. Faster. Bugs fixed.

Check out the App Store page for more details.

A tour of Earth from space

Dr. Justin Wilkinson from NASA provides a beautifully unhurried tour of Earth from above, as shot by astronauts in orbit.

[Via]

June 19, 2011

Stitching moments together

Photographer Peter Langenhahn combines hundreds of photos into huge, hundred-gigabyte monsters that show numerous moments at once–for example, depicting all the fouls in a soccer match. Here’s a brief piece (light on technical details, I’m afraid) on how he does it:

Kottke also points out the Peter Funch’s New York composites (mentioned previously).

June 18, 2011

Amazing first-person skiing/parachuting/avalanche video

Completely tremendous. Give it the two minutes, and in full screen. [Via]

Offbeat bonus first-person vid: Eli Stonberg’s “Extremities” straps multiple cameras to skater Aryeh Kraus, then shows the results simultaneously. [Via]

June 16, 2011

Props for the After Effects Warp Stabilizer

Well-known cinematographer Vincent Laforet has some kind words for the new tool in AE CS5.5:

What truly inspired me was the ability to shoot handheld footage at a high resolution, knowing full well that I could later stabilize it with technology such as Adobe CS 5.5′s Warp Stabilizer… Warp Stabilizer is truly AMAZING – and I’m not exaggerating here. This technology has the potential to change the way many of us shoot – allowing us to rely less on complex stabilization devices – and more on smaller less complex camera support platforms. This will allow filmmakers to shoot with a bit more freedom – which is exciting.

Vincent promises to share more details soon. In the meantime, enjoy the work he’s been capturing with the RED Epic 5K camera, bits of which were stabilized in AE:

June 15, 2011

Video: A DIY Space Balloon

Luke Geissbühler & his kids sent their homemade weather balloon & camera rig (packed inside a foam take-out container!) up 100,000 feet, right to the edge of space. It makes for some surprisingly captivating filmmaking.

[Via]

June 12, 2011

Adventures with mini cams

Planting a GoPro camera inside a hula hoop produces oddly watchable results:

[Via]

On a much less stable front, the $60 Hot Wheels Video Racer shoots at up to 60 frames per second, creating what Autoblog calls “nausea-inducing fun”:

June 08, 2011

Time lapse: Manhattan in Motion

Lovely work from Josh Owens:

[Via]

June 04, 2011

Breakfast, interrupted, at 1,000fps

Bruton Stroube captured high-speed mayhem using a Phantom HD Gold shooting at 1000fps:

The making-of video makes the shoot look like some messy fun. [Via]

June 02, 2011

A nifty twist on time lapse videos

You spin me right ’round, baby, right ’round like the earth, baby…

[Via]

May 30, 2011

(rt) Photographic history: Abbey Road to Mt. Rushmore

• Ever seen the original design of Mount Rushmore; who knew?
• Iain MacMillan remembers the Abbey Road album cover sessions.
• 40 years of industrial design history: Design house ItalDesign commemorates its work via iPad.
• The NYT remembers Willard S. Boyle, father of the CCD. On behalf of all digital shooters, thanks, Dr. B!

May 29, 2011

Video: Skaters on fire

Is it pyrotechnics, or is it Memorex? Hard to say, maybe, but I like the effect:

The filmmakers have posted a behind-the-scenes feature for the subsequent video in the series. I highly applaud their use of “FM.” [Via]

May 27, 2011

iObsessed for iPad

Photographer Dan Marcolina used InDesign CS5 to create iObsessed, an interactive compendium of over 30 apps. The book complements his iPhone Obsessed photo book, and he writes:

This interactive format allows you to see video tutorials right in-line with the featured images, along with the ability to pinch and zoom any image to see its full detail. Additional surprise links are found on each chapter page.

Here’s the quick demo:

May 25, 2011

Adobe TV: Lightroom coloring techniques & shortcuts

Recent vids of possible interest:

The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost: Selective Coloring Techniques in Lightroom

In this Episode of the Complete Picture Julieanne Kost explains two different methods for selectively colorizing an image to differentiate the subject from the background using Adobe Camera Raw.

Creative Suite Podcast: Photographers – 5 Lightroom Keyboard Shortcuts that will Speed up your Workflow

In this episode I’ll show you 5+ Lightroom Keyboard shortcuts that will definitely speed up your day-to-day Lightroom workflow!

May 24, 2011

(rt) iPhone bits & content-aware fails

• iPhone:
  • Hmm: A Leica-iPhone hybrid? (Would this still be relevant if wireless camera-to-phone transfer got good & pervasive?)
  • Though I don’t use the app, I can dig this hip Hipstamatic iPhone case. [Via]
  • Terry White gets detailed on “How the iPad fits into a Photography Workflow.”
• ‘Shop You, ‘Shop Me:
  • An Orthodox Jewish newspaper Photosh–er, digitally removed–Hillary Clinton from a photo.
  • Right back atcha: “Citing modesty, hipster website removes ‘sexually suggestive’ male images from Situation Room photo.” [Via]

May 23, 2011

(rt) Photography: Finding art in nukes, tulips, & more

• Natural art:
  • Wow–this is really a photo, not a composite? [Via]
  • Julian Faulhaber treats tulips in Netherlands as abstract art.
• Conflict:
  • Odd: The Unabomber’s famous hood & sweatshirt. Even odder: The US Marshals are auctioning it all (and evidently use Flickr). [Via]
  • The Atlantic rounds up striking, sometimes ghoulish photos of nuclear weapons tests. The mannequins creep me out. [Via]

May 21, 2011

Origami sculptures transform in water

Etienne Cliquet’s fascinating “Flottille” micro-origami sculptures are 2-3 centimeters long and open based on capillary action.

[Via]

May 20, 2011

(rt) Useful online photo tools

• Neat idea: SLR Camera Simulator teaches the effects of camera parameters. [Via]
• StolenCamera Finder “uses the serial number stored in your photo to search the web for photos taken w/the same camera.”
• Bigger camera sensors generally offer better performance. Sensor-Size.com lets you “Compare & Convert Digital Cameras.”

May 19, 2011

Lee Varis lecture recording now available

By popular demand, we recorded photographer Lee Varis‘s talk in San Jose Tuesday night (see previous overview). There was a break during the session, so here are Part One (an overview of Lee’s career) & Part Two (the “’10 Channel Workflow,’ a radical new image enhancement routine”).

May 18, 2011

Screenstagram: A screensaver of Instagram images

Check out this groovy (and free) Mac screensaver from the Barbarian Group. And props to them for one of the world’s most succinct demo videos:

Weirdly, I got a blank screen when testing the screensaver yesterday, but today it works fine. [Via]

May 17, 2011

iPhone photo seminar at 5pm Pacific today

Photographer & designer Dan Marcolina is “iPhone Obsessed,” having used his phone + apps to produce a coffee table book (with up-resing courtesy of Photoshop). Now I see that he’s presenting a seminar just over an hour from now (sorry, just saw the invite):

His new book, iPhone Obsessed, covers over 47 apps and the post-processing steps you need to know to achieve works of art right in your iPhone. Dan will cover many of these apps during this live Peachpit Photo Club event.

Having met Dan & discussed the book last summer, I can vouch for him being a really interesting, creative guy; should be a good session.

May 12, 2011

After Effects stabilization in the real world

Photographer Uwe Steinmueller has posted a set of samples made using AE CS 5.5. They’re not crazy-dramatic, but that may well be the point: the new feature improves even what was already decent footage.

In the accompanying article Uwe write, “This may be a situation where a new tool is really up to its hype and exceeded our expectations. Hard to describe how excited we are.”

May 08, 2011

64-bit DNG Codec & other updates

If you’re a Windows 7 user, you can now grab a preview version of the DNG Codec, in both 32- and 64-bit versions.  The codec lets you browse DNG files in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery.

In other news, techie photographers can grab beta 3 of the Adobe Lens Profile Creator and beta 3 of the DNG Profile Editor. [Via]

May 06, 2011

High-speed gelatinous action

Modernist Cuisine has fun at 6200 frames per second:

[Via] See also “Exploding Christmas Ornaments Filled with Various Things.” [Via]

May 03, 2011

(rt) Photography: Surreal composites, underwater history, & more

• National Geographic shows the first underwater color photo, plus an exploding flash raft & more.
• The “Surrealistic Pillow” is a set of trippy photos composites from Ronen Goldman. [Via]
• If that’s up your alley, see also this atmospheric photography from Swinspeed. [Via]
• Neat: Cartagram lays out popular Instagram photos according to geotags.
• “Switzerland: Come Take a Dump in the Alps!” (Or is that just how I read it?)

April 29, 2011

Parisian time lapse

Student Luke Shepard used 2,000 still images to create a time lapse of Paris.

[Via]

April 28, 2011

Video: Experience Human Flight

To create this captivating short film, the filmmakers note, “All footage was shot on a GoPro and slowed down with Twixtor.”

[Via]

April 26, 2011

Photography: Chernobyl, 25 years later

It’s a season of sometimes grim anniversaries (e.g. 150 years since the start of the American Civil War, 100 since the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, one since the Gulf oil spill), and today marks 25 years since the beginning of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.  The Big Picture hosts a haunting image collection, and the NYT’s Lens blog goes into more detail on the few who’ve stayed behind.

April 25, 2011

A giant wooden xylophone plays Bach

Amazing & rather excellent:

[Via]

April 23, 2011

Video: High-speed mountain climbing

I share this not just because of the inordinate badassery of speed climber Ueli Steck, but to showcase the filmmakers’ amazing visual storytelling (full-screen HD recommended, naturally).

If you’re short on time, make sure to jump ahead around 2 minutes & at least see him running up that mountain (Kate Bush-style). [Via]

April 22, 2011

Photosynth panorama maker for iPhone

I haven’t played with a lot of mobile panorama-creation apps, but I find Microsoft’s free Photosynth app for iPhone pretty amazing. It captures still images as you pan around, automatically stitching (and optionally uploading) the results.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=286219d4-1988-4479-816f-12e36d18b514&#038;src=SLPl:embed:&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011">Video: Microsoft Photosynth App – April 2011</a>

The example of an aviation museum is especially well chosen: I distinctly remember my deep, painful frustration trying to photograph rockets at the Air & Space Museum as a kid. I’d have found something like this unspeakably wonderful.

Aside: How do companies like Microsoft & Adobe profit by developing advanced technology & then simply giving it away? It’s like First CityWide Change Bank: Volume.

April 19, 2011

Time Lapse: “The Mountain”

Terje Sorgjerd (see previous) has produced another lovely time lapse, this time taken atop Spain’s highest mountain:

He writes,

A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes. Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds.

[Via Mark Kawano]

April 18, 2011

(rt) Scientific Photography: Sunspots, satellite images, & more

• “Melty roads”: Clement Valla collects unintentionally bizarre results from Google Earth. [Via]
• NASA shows “The extraordinary image of a large sunspot emitting cascades of glowing gas.” (That caption sounds like a Pink Floyd song title.)
• Sonar imaging reveals a submerged WWII German bomber.
• “Luminant Point Arrays” show tube televisions at the moment they are switched off. [Via]
• In case you were wondering what it looks like when lightning strikes the tallest building in the world, well, wonder no more.

April 13, 2011

Eye-Fi enables direct-to-tablet transfer

As I noted last year, photographers have been incredibly clear in wanting wireless tethering between their cameras & tablets. Forget about using tablets for storage: the big win is using a tablet’s big screen for “chimping” (reviewing & flagging one’s shots).

Thus I’m happy to see that a new 8GB Eye-Fi card enables a direct connection between cameras & tablets.  I’d love to put my iPad in my backpack & transfer to it while hiking around.  Two snags, though:

• The card is SD format, and my SLR uses Compact Flash. Something tells me a solution isn’t imminent.
• Wireless transfer requires one’s tablet to be switched on. Long battery life or no, I’m not going to leave the iPad on constantly while hiking, driving, etc. Solving this problem very likely requires support from Apple, Google, and hardware makers.

Still, the development is very encouraging.

Photography: Shallow depth of field on iPhone

Stanford professor & occasional Photoshop team collaborator Marc Levoy has created SynthCam, an interesting tool for simulating large-aperture photo effects using a tiny-aperture cell phone camera:

For more examples, tutorials, etc., see Marc’s site. [Via]

April 12, 2011

Video: Meet digital camera inventor Steven Sasson

I enjoyed David’s Friedman‘s brief but engaging chat with digital photography pioneer Steven Sasson, including his remarks about fitting a pitch into the culture of an organization:

[Via]

April 04, 2011

(rt) Photography: War, science, & enormous panoramas

• The NYT features an amazing jet crash image & other photos from Libya.
• Eric Guth makes some beautiful, otherworldly glacier cave photography. (I feel like the Alien queen might be lurking around a corner.) [Via]
• Bubble boy: Dig these subtly offbeat photos from Alex Kisilevich.
• A “pancake with a nose” makes for a nifty scientific image: Stingray X-ray.
• This 40 gigapixel 360º panorama taken inside the Strahov Philosophical Library, Prague, claims to be the world’s largest indoor photo. [Via Don Z.]

March 29, 2011

Video: Ten Things I Have Learned About The Sea

Even if you watch just for a minute, I think you’ll find Lorenzo Fonda’s ode oddly captivating:

Seeing these giant containers, it’s funny to think: all this stuff around you–the screen on which you’re reading this, maybe the car you drive, the shirt on your back–it’s all been there, creeping over untold expanses of water.

At one point I planned to join the US Navy. I spent three years in NROTC and generally loved it. Seeing dolphins race ahead of the bow quickens my pulse & takes me down a deep memory hole. The endlessness of the water, the blankness of the horizon, the ceaseless beating paired with beauty (think bioluminescent algae twinkling down the bridge windows after every 13-foot wall of green water)–strange to think of it all again. And strange where life takes us. [Via]

March 28, 2011

(rt) Photography: Strange history, beautiful Antarctica, & more

• Ghostly & strange: Corinne Vionnet overlays hundreds of tourist photos taken from the same spots. [Via]
• History:
  • I had no that Frederick Ives captured color photos of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. (105 years later, other San Franciscans are writing apps like Instagram to mimic the same looks.)
  • Bernard Kalb captured beautiful B&W photos of Antarctica during midcentury expeditions.
  • What could possibly be worse than being married to Hitler? Being married to Hitler in blackface.
• Vehicular:
  • Erwin Wurm makes chubby Ferraris & other absurd vehicles.
  • Terrific plane nerdery: Check out fourteen 360-degree cockpit panoramas. [Via]

March 25, 2011

A beautiful Aurora Borealis time lapse

“Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd,” writes David Pescovitz, “spent one week around Kirkenes and the Norway-Russia border, in -25 Celsius temperature, to make this magnificent time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis.”

On a related note, “Terje Sorgjerd” is one pretty solid name. He needs to join the Photoshop team & take up residence next to Seetharaman Narayanan, Iouri Tchernoousko, & other greats. [Via]

March 23, 2011

Video: Growing Is Forever

Three minutes of delightful woodland photography from Jesse Rosten:

[Via]

March 22, 2011

Artsiest. Melting ice cube. Ever.

Right? (Vid’s just a minute long; fullscreen recommended.)

[Via]

March 19, 2011

Video: A Blood-Red Eclipse

Happy supermoon. In the lunar spirit, here’s a lovely time lapse from last December:

Check out the Vimeo page for brief making-of info on the piece (stabilized in After Effects CS5) from photographer William Castleman. [Via]

March 18, 2011

Interactive photos: Japan Before and After Tsunami

The NYT’s satellite photo feature, Japan Before and After Tsunami, is amazing & deeply sobering. [Via]

March 17, 2011

A photographic (non-CGI) fly-by of Saturn

The IMAX film “Outside In” is produced from “hundreds of thousands of still photos” taken by the Cassini orbiter. I have a hard time believing that the footage is real, but I’m hardly an expert. Check it out:

The filmmaking is a non-profit effort being supported by individuals & a few companies. [Via]

Update: See comments for some technical details from the filmmaker & others.

March 16, 2011

Photoshop Express 2.0: Powerful noise reduction on iOS

After more than 20 million downloads, the free Photoshop Express app has added its first paid features. As PM Jordan Davis explains, Adobe Camera Pack in Photoshop Express 2.0 for iOS* adds three new features:

• Reduce Noise: Even the best phone cameras can introduce small amounts of grain and speckling—called noise—into images. The Reduce Noise feature quickly smooths out those flaws to improve your photos. (See screenshot with aggressive settings applied.)
• Self Timer: Set a camera timer to 3- or 10-second intervals before the photo is snapped. Now you can be in the picture too!
• Auto Review: Use the Auto Review mode to make sure you get a good shot and delete it if you don’t. Auto Review gives you a quick look at your picture before the action passes you by.

The app remains free, and the Camera Pack is a $3.99 in-app purchase.

The noise reduction code is based on the outstanding technology introduced in Lightroom 3/Photoshop CS5.  Squeezing very computationally intensive algorithms to run well on handheld processors was no easy feat, and I think you’ll be pleased with the speed & quality of the results.  We look forward to hearing your feedback.

* Photoshop Express for Android has not yet been updated

March 13, 2011

(rt) Photography: Outstanding Star Wars, True Grit, & more

• You really should see Avanaut’s beautifully executed Star Wars toy photography (seriously!). [Via]
• Photographer (!) Jeff Bridges has produced an interesting, wide-angle True Grit Book.
• Todd McLellan beautifully detonates all manner of devices.
• Atmospheric:
  • Check out some beautiful mammatus clouds over Olympic Valley. (Didn’t Steve Miller sing of the mammatus?)
  • “This plane photo-bombed a photo of the sun!,” writes Photojojo. “Props to the plane.”

Instagallery for iPad now available

Our friend Troy Gaul (formerly of Lightroom & ImageReady) has created Instagallery, a sleek Instagram client for iPad, offering slideshow support & more. I’ve found it great for following & commenting on friends’ photos from my tablet.

March 04, 2011

Old-school Daily Show clip on digital cameras

This Ed Helms bit features a special guest appearance by Photoshop 7 on OS 9:

[Via]

March 03, 2011

Photoshop Express: 20 Million Downloads & Counting

Wow–quite a milestone. PM Jordan Davis reports:

Photoshop Express for iOS and Android devices hit 20 million customer installations today. We want to thank all our customers who have downloaded and used the app to shoot, edit, apply fun effects, and share photos from their smartphones and tablets. If you haven’t yet tried it, Photoshop Express is available for free on the Apple iTunes Store and Android Marketplace.

Thanks for your support, and your feedback is always welcome.

March 01, 2011

Video: Space Shuttle launch as seen from an airplane

A lovely bit of low-fi aerospace footage:

[Via]

Photograph Iceland with Julieanne Kost

If you take this trip in August, you’re going to make me seriously jealous.  Adobe photography evangelist Julieanne Kost writes:

I’m hoping that YOU will be able to join me this summer (August 21 – August 27) on an incredible journey through the Icelandic landscape. This really is a unique opportunity to experience Iceland and all that it has to offer – glacier lagoons, Icelandic horses, waterfalls, and mud flats  are just a few of the things we may see on our excursions.  We will follow the weather and the light, photographing Iceland’s ever changing landscape with long hours of exquisite sunrise and sunset while the Focus on Nature team takes care of every little logistical detail  so that we can photograph in a relaxed, low pressure, unhurried, environment. We will come home not only with improved technique, but reenergized and inspired.

February 25, 2011

Interesting 3D Photo app

I can’t readily pronounce it “endlessly useful,” but 3D Photo‘s ability to map a live camera feed onto 3D shapes is rather cool:

[Via]

It can be hard to take tablet hardware, which is largely designed for low-power media consumption & gaming, and make it perform well for general-purpose imaging operations. Lately I’ve taken to joking that, “Well, my year-old iPad can run a beautiful 3D pinball game fullscreen at 30+ FPS, so maybe we should let people draw with friggin’ 3D pinballs, because apparently those can be made to go fast.” Look for Adobe Avian AngerPaint™, coming soon to an app store near you!

February 23, 2011

NYC session next week: Hidden Gems in PS CS5

If you’ll be in New York next Wednesday, you might want to drop by Foto Care 10am-12pm for a free class covering Hidden Gems in Photoshop CS5 featuring PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes.

Photography: The sacred & profane in Eastern Europe

I’ve spoken admiringly in the past of Bruce Haley‘s photojournalism. Now he’s produced a new monograph called Sunder:

Produced between 1994 and 2002, the images in SUNDER sweep the viewer along on a far-reaching journey through numerous former USSR and Iron Curtain countries, stopping at landscapes of ruin and moments of grace in equal measure. Haley’s explorations were intuitive, responding to a deep curiosity to taste the last drops of the would-be Utopian ideology that dominated global politics during the first thirty years of his life.

Bryan Hughes & I have been trying for ages to get down to the bottom of Bixby Canyon to visit Bruce & his beer fridge*. Hopefully we can do that soon & maybe share a trip report.

* But not, presumably, “goddamn barbecued monkey leg”

February 20, 2011

(rt) Photography: Ali’s greatness, retro re-creations, & more

• “This is the greatest photo you will see today,” notes Mike Monteiro. Sounds right to me.
• In her “Back to the Future” project, Irina Werning reenacts old photos, posing the same people in the same spots decades later. [Via]
• Plenoptic camera lenses, which use arrays of micro lenses & which can refocus images after the fact, come to cell phones.
• Edi Go has made surprisingly beautiful images of a plastic bag.
• Photo essays like this make me thankful for my immoderate blessings.

February 18, 2011

(rt) Photography: Photographing one’s own murder & more

• Grim & bracing:
  • Katrin Eismann notes, “Tyler Hicks is doing amazing work in Afghanistan.”
  • Bizarre & horrible: photographing one’s own murder. (I really wish this were fake.)
• Might want to have this looked at: Disturbing, if beautifully executed, image o’ the day. [Via]
• “On the Grid” is Gerco de Ruijter’s interesting set of aerial photos of trees.
• Racy back-of-mag ad promises “Larger Size Permanent.” Wow–people still get perms?

February 13, 2011

Aerial NYC for iPad

Photographer Cameron Davidson is offering Aerial New York City, a 60-image iPad portfolio depicting the city from above, for free for a limited time.  Lovely. [Via Ellis Vener]

[Irrelevant personal side note: I used to look out a window just below the "Y" in "York" on the opening screen. 20 Exchange FTW.]

February 12, 2011

Video: The Wilhelm Scream

James Blake picks a bizarre (and apparently unrelated) name for beautifully atmospheric visuals & vocals:

[Via]

February 10, 2011

Crazy 360-degree dodgeball video

Photographer Ryan Jackson strapped together four cheap GoPro video cameras into an interesting Frankenstein, shooting a cool 360-degree panoramic video. “The short version of this story is that I shot with four GoPros, extracted still images from video, stitched the stills together into panoramas then recombined them back into video. For the much more detailed and nerdy answer, read on.” [Via Manu S. Anand]

February 07, 2011

(rt) Photography: Vertigo, bisected bunkers, & more

• Military history:
  • Jonathan Andrew has taken a perversely beautiful series of photos of WWII bunkers. [Via]
  • This is your bunker. This is your bunker sawn in half & made into art. [Via]
  • These fighters are stuck onto the bomber, and not via Photoshop.
• Instagram:
  • Check out the World’s Smallest Instagram Gallery. [Via]
  • I belatedly realized that the point of Instagram isn’t photography. The point is looking cool. (And I’m okay with that.)
• Great heights:
  • The vertigo-inducing photo o’ the day comes from the transparent floor at Shanghai TV Tower [Via]
  • Here’s a terrific image of an enormous supercell cloud.
• How cool: This keychain-size DSLR sports interchangeable lens.

January 25, 2011

Photoshop Express 1.5 arrives for iOS

I’m delighted to report that Photoshop Express, Adobe’s free photo capture & editing tool that’s been downloaded over 15 million times (!), is now available in enhanced version 1.5 form via Apple’s App Store.

This release reworks the photo capture experience, adding support for batch capture of photos plus a highly useful review mode, and it includes full Retina display support. iOS 4.2 compatibility brings benefits like an improved ability to upload images in the background.

After going a bit quiet (publicly, at least) following the previous release, the Express team is now cooking with gas, and we have other cool enhancements queued up for the near future. In the near term, please let us know what you think of the new release, and what you’d like to see us do going forward. Thanks for your interest & support.

January 24, 2011

A few interesting iOS apps (video & utility)

• Video-recording app Precorder takes a cue from the world of reality TV production: rather than recording everything to disk in hopes of getting some good nuggets, it buffers a video stream (a la DVRs).  It’s constantly saving the few seconds of video before you hit record, so if something interesting happens, hit record & capture it.  If not, no worries: there’s nothing to delete.  I tried it with the kids yesterday & it worked nicely.
• 8mm Vintage Camera brings the trendy retro aesthetic to handheld video, “capturing the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies. By mixing and matching films and lenses, you can recreate the atmosphere of those bygone eras with 25 timeless retro looks.” [Via]
• Written by Lightroom team vets Troy Gaul and Dustin & Dylan Bruzenak, Handoff “simplifies sending things from your computer’s web browser to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch” via a combo of app + desktop browser extensions.  Looks clever and useful.

January 18, 2011

New Adobe TV videos for photographers

As always, good tutorials are making their way onto Adobe TV. Some recent examples:

• Photoshop Basics Series: Creating an image reflection

Presenter Dennis Radeke says, “Many times, I’ve seen great work that was somewhat spoiled by the fact that it employed a reflection as part of the design. Creating a reflection on any image is a fairly easy thing to do and in this episode we’ll look at some techniques to make a convincing and realistic reflection within Adobe Photoshop.”

• Sync Your Photos from Lightroom 3 to Your iDevices

In this episode I’ll show you how to set up the Hard Drive Publish Service to allow you to continue to manage your photos in Lightroom, but also sync them to your iDevices via iTunes without using iPhoto.

• Photographers – Mini Bridge

Every now and then it’s much easier to show someone than to try to explain it to them. After a few emails from Beau about how to use Mini Bridge? I just decided to make it the topic of this week’s Creative Suite Podcast.

• Adobe Lightroom 3: Needle in a Haystack

When you need to find a specific image among a huge number of images, filtering can provide an excellent solution. This jump-start will provide you with a sense of the power of filtering to find an image within Lightroom.

• Photoshop User TV – Episode 206

The countdown to the new set is winding down. In the meantime, check out this interview with Adobe’s Julieanne Kost.

January 14, 2011

New Lightroom presets from Julieanne Kost

Our friend/Adobe evangelist Julieanne has whipped up some great new Lightroom presets.  You can view the whole list of presets on her blog, or use these links to jump right to those you find most interesting.  Each entry includes an explanation & download links:

• Effects – Grain and Post-Crop Vignetting Presets
• Lens Correction Presets
• Single Color Split Toning Presets
• Lightroom 3 – Selective Color Removal Presets

January 13, 2011

Videos: Russell Brown on HDR, iPad portfolios

By very popular demand, Russell Brown has recorded & posted his tutorials on creating tablet-ready portfolios & great-looking (non-cheesy) HDR images. Enjoy.

Mobile portfolios:

• Exporting Adobe Bridge Images to an Apple iPad Portfolio
• Exporting Adobe Lightroom 3 Images to an Apple iPad Portfolio
• Exporting Adobe Bridge PDF Portfolios to an Apple iPad
• Exporting Adobe Lightroom 3 PDF Portfolios to an Apple iPad
• Advanced PDF Portfolio Techniques in Adobe Acrobat Pro X
• Exporting Video from Adobe Lightroom 3 to an iPad

HDR

• Natural HDR Toning Technique
• Detailing Action that goes with the HDR technique

(rt) Photos: Bokeh & Polaroids on iPhone, more

• Bokeh from an iPhone? So promises SynthCam from Stanford prof Mark Levoy. [Via Jeff Chien]
• Nifty: the Polaroid iPhone Decal.
• I saw a square, brownish 70′s family photo at Tom Hogarty’s house the other day and thought, “Oh, they used Instagram.” Man, I’m losing it.
• Evil Pregnant Natalie Portman (artist’s conception).
• Happy Family Slim-Slim #5; don’t trust it @ 99 cent store.

January 12, 2011

App Idea: Photo Defiler

The other day while using Instagram, it occurred to me: To really do proper retro photos, I need a way to obscure half the image with my dad’s finger.  In that vein, how about an app that would fill your images with cliched errors?  A few ideas:

• Head Clipper: Use face detection to identify people in an image, then partly lop off their domes.
• Shadow Caster: Hey, where’s the photographer? Ah, there’s his handy shadow!
• Back Lighter: Fill light/Shadow-Highlight is passé; we need a way to silhouette subjects into oblivion.
• Grass Expander: Auto zoom out, then use Content-Aware Fill to surround one’s subject with even more grass & extraneous details.
• Blink Synthesizer: If society has figured out how to put human eyes onto Muppets, surely we can shut the eyes of at least some people in a group photo.
• Face Blurrer: A bit o’ witness protection.
• Digital Intruder: My dad’s finger on millions of handsets around the world. You’re welcome.

Not quitting my day job,
J.

January 11, 2011

Time Lapse: The Pale Blue Dot

Carl Sagan reads a short excerpt from his book, “The Pale Blue Dot” in this lovely time lapse from filmmaker Michael Marantz:

[Via]

January 06, 2011

(rt) Photography: Images of the year, “Crouching Child, Hidden Mother,” & more

• The New York Times rounds up 2010: The Year in Pictures–often heartbreaking, occasionally beautiful.
• “Crouching child, Hidden mother:” Who’s up for restoring this weird photographic convention? (The comments are morbid.)
• Your photos + cheap Swedish furniture = Mykea. Neat. [Via]
• I dig this tranquil, snowy photo from Jason Santa Maria.

January 04, 2011

Eye-Fi enables direct camera-to-iPad transfer

Ah, I’ve been waiting for this one for some time: Eye-Fi is enabling direct photo transfer from cameras to iPads–something I’ve heard photographers request over and over again.  Now, if only I could get a WiFi-enabled card that would work in my 5D. (Eye-Fi strongly discourages the use of an SD-to-CF adapter.) [Via Sean Parent]

January 03, 2011

UNDERCITY: A guerrilla exploration of NYC

This is one of the most captivating, weirdly suspenseful short films I’ve seen in ages, and it’s essentially just one dude walking (or rather, sneaking) around New York City:

You can read more about these unsanctioned underground adventures in the NY Times and on NPR. [Via]

January 02, 2011

Time Warp: Liquid Sculptures

I dig the work of “liquid sculptor” Martin Waugh (see previous). Check out this behind-the-scenes segment from Time Warp:

December 30, 2010

What if you mounted a video camera on a sword tip?

“Super dizzying,” our man Finn might say–though oddly less so than you’d expect:

[Via]

December 29, 2010

(rt) Photos of the year, lost wookies, & more

• Amazing, sometimes brutal, often beautiful: The Big Picture’s 2010 In Photos, Part 1.
• A photographer recently found the AE-1 stolen from him 30 years ago. (As mine was stolen from the Washington Navy Yard in the mid-80′s, I guess I’ve gotta wait a few more years.) [Via]
• Stop! Hammer time. Defaced is “a photo blog all about people ruining other people’s stuff cuz it’s funny.”
• Photo-illustration: “The shroud of Vogue” was made from the last 12 editions of the magazine, overlaid.
• From my neighborhood: Have you seen my wookie?

December 27, 2010

Video: Blizzard timelapse

This one goes out to all the East Coast peeps:

[Via]

December 23, 2010

Photography: Flying liquids, stuck in time

Shinchi Maruyama creates amazing “sculptures” (see photo gallery) by tossing water & capturing the results with a high-speed camera:

[Via]

December 19, 2010

Magic Shutter enables light painting with an iPhone

What’s an “epoch-making creative iPhone camera”? One that lets you do long exposure & paint with light, apparently. Magic Shutter looks pretty cool:

[Via Nic Couillard]

December 18, 2010

Clever “Elf Cam” photography app

Of the new app Elf Cam, Mark Frauenfelder writes, “It allows you to set up your camera on Christmas Eve to record Santa coming out of your fireplace (or walking into room if you don’t have a fireplace), so you can show it to your child in order to prove that Santa Claus is real.”

December 08, 2010

Video: Lovely Aurora Borealis timelapse

Tor Even Mathisen rocks it:

[Via]

December 06, 2010

Lightroom 3.3, Camera Raw 6.3 now available

Lightroom 3.3 (Mac|Win) and Camera Raw 6.3 (Mac|Win) for CS5 are now available as final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3.  These updates include bug fixes, new camera support and new lens profiles. Cameras added:

• Canon         PowerShot G12
• Canon         PowerShot S95
• Nikon          D7000
• Nikon          Coolpix P7000
• Nikon          D3100
• Olympus     E-5
• Panasonic  DMC-GF2
• Panasonic  DMC-GH2
• Pentax        K-5
• Pentax        K-r
• Ricoh          GXR, GR LENS A12 28mm F2.5
• Samsung    NX100
• Samsung    TL350 (WB2000)
• Sony           A560
• Sony           A580

For a complete list of lens profiles added & bugs fixed, please see Tom Hogarty’s post on the Lightroom Journal.

Remember that if you’re using an older version (Lightroom 2.x, Photoshop CS4, etc.), you can use the free DNG Converter (Mac|Win) to save disk space (losslessly compressing your proprietary camera files) while making images compatible with your app.

(rt) Photography: Ansel does iPad, Mon Calamari, & more

• The work of Ansel Adams has come to iPad. [Via Zalman Stern]
• Heaven & earth:
  • “Skyward“: Patience rewards with a beautiful photo.
  • A neat satellite photo captures the UK & Ireland covered in snow. [Via]
• Photographer John Warner dubbed his father-son photo trip to Ireland “Dad, Lad, & iPad.” I love it.
• Fun with miniatures:
  • “It’s a Frap!!” So nerdy, but right up my alley.
  • Call it “Shirts vs. Tiny Plastic Blouses.”

December 03, 2010

A “Pointless, action-free and totally mesmerising” video

Graeme Taylor pointed his inexpensive, high-speed Casio Exilim FH20 out a train window, then slowed down the results:

He writes,

The ‘trick’ is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second – but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera’s field of view, but isn’t enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I’m doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping!

[Via]

November 26, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving

“Are you going to stuff me into the bird, Dad-O??”
“Absolutely, my boy!!”

Whether or not you celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday, I hope you had a great day today. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I’m giving myself a little break from daily blogging. Thanks for reading & for giving me the chance to do this job.

All the best to you & yours,
El Tryptophan

November 24, 2010

Photography: Buildings in motion

• I love the stark geometries & palettes in this architectural imagery by Philipp Schaerer.
• The Big Picture looks down (literally) on human landscapes in Florida. [Via]
• French street artist JR puts giant photos onto favelas, other slums, security walls, and more. [Via]

November 20, 2010

Wi-Fi Direct promises wireless tethering

Not really newsworthy, but encouraging: A few months ago I wrote about the need for wireless tethering, whereby your camera could discover transfer photos right into a tablet or laptop. (Today’s setups–e.g. setting up a portable hotspot while on the go–are too neckbeard-a-riffic to get mass adoption.)  The customer demand is so strong that I’ve assumed that a bunch of hardware manufacturers have been working on solutions. Now I see that the Wi-Fi Direct spec is apparently inching its way towards shipping products.  I’m eager to see what results. [Via Sean Parent]

November 15, 2010

Video: TimeScapes Rapture

Speaking of beautiful time lapses, here’s another worth seeing:

Come on, who doesn’t love a Zeppelin? Other installments are at TimeScapes.org. [Via]

Video: NYC timelapse

Alexandre Favre, Pierre Dumont, and David Mignot fire up the Beethoven in this bombastic tour of the city:

New York City – Timelapse from stimul on Vimeo.

[Via Rob Cantor]

November 13, 2010

Alien Skin starts an interesting blog

“In the end, we shall all be dead!” Anyone who pairs a statement like that with cheerful astronauts on their marketing materials is my kind of weirdo. :-)

With that in mind, I’m happy to see that Jeff Butterworth & the Alien Skin Software crew have started their own blog.  Like mine it mixes product info with interesting bits about photography, design, and more (e.g. one involving iPhones, suction cups, and plane windows).  I look forward to bogarting their finds like it’s my job.

November 11, 2010

(rt) Photography: Frozen explosions, toxic sludge, & more

• Euclidian eats: Ikea’s made a coffee table book of ingredients laid out as patterns.
• This smart poster reacts against domestic violence–literally.
• I dig these colors & compositions from photographer Jim Green.
• Fluid dynamics:
  • You know what’s been great today? Not getting buried in a flood of toxic sludge.
  • NPR shows photos of water balloons caught mid-pop. The water retains its shape for impossible-seeming images. [Via]
• The “Muybridgizer” app creates Victorian-style freeze frames.

November 07, 2010

(rt) Photography: Strange Cargo from the skies

• The infinitely patient Chris Thomas has captured a rather amazing airplane/moon photo. (Why use Photoshop when you can really suffer for your art?) [Via]
• “Not the Great Pumpkin”: a great shot of the Sun, captured in the wavelength of hydrogen alpha light. See also this close-up from the image. [Via]
• Shockwave & awe: The Beauty of Vapor Cones. [Via]
• Cow-dung toothpaste–for real? In Strange Cargo, Taryn Simon photographs contraband seized at JFK. (Presumably no one was shipping Photoshop 5.0 in there.)

November 01, 2010

Photography: X-ray pinups, pinhole experiments, & more

• Science:
  • X-Ray pinup girls seem like the ideal Misfits groupies.
  • So much for the idea of tasteful, pure white sculpture: Ultraviolet light reveals how ancient Greek statues really looked.
  • Behold some gorgeous electron microscope photos of grains of pollen.
• Pinholin’:
  • “What happens when you place a small pinhole camera on the top of a turntable and expose the film for the length of L America by The Doors?”
  • Check out Adam Magyar’s homebrew slit-cam photo Walking As One. The rest of his collection is worth a look, too. [Via]

October 30, 2010

Lightroom 3.3, Camera Raw 6.3 available on Adobe Labs

Lightroom 3.3 and Camera Raw 6.3 are now available as Release Candidates on Adobe Labs, fixing bugs while adding new lens profiles & new camera support:

• Nikon D7000
• Nikon Coolpix P7000
• Nikon D3100
• Canon PowerShot S95
• Canon PowerShot G12
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
• Samsung NX100
• Samsung TL350 (WB2000)

According to PM Tom Hogarty,

This release also introduces the Adobe Lens Profile Downloader.  The Lens Profile Downloader is a free companion application to Photoshop CS5, Photoshop Lightroom 3, and the Camera Raw 6 plug-in. It allows customers to search, download, rate and comment on the online lens correction profiles that are created and shared by the user community.

See Tom’s entry on the Lightroom Journal for complete details.

October 21, 2010

New Lightroom Develop tutorial series from George Jardine

Our friend & former Adobe Photo Evangelist George Jardine has published a new 15-video tutorial series on the Lightroom Develop module, giving special emphasis to features that are new to Lightroom 3, including the new sharpening and noise reduction controls, the all-new Lens Correction panel, and the new 2010 raw processing options.

[Previous: Asset management tutorials from George.]

October 20, 2010

Shoot NYC next week

If you’re a photographer who’ll be in NYC next week, you might want to check out Shoot NYC, an event running Thursday and Friday in parallel with PhotoPlus Expo.  On Friday PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes will be presenting an Adobe Lightroom Review, 12:30pm–2:00pm on Friday. Check out the full session listing here.

[Update: Author & PS expert Katrin Eismann also notes that SVA's Optic Nerve photography show will be running during the show, with a reception being held on Wednesday the 27th.]

October 16, 2010

Hardcore photography: Volcanos & sandstorms, oh my

Think you’ll go far for a shot? Not this far, I hope:

Elsewhere, NatGeo photographers get hammered by a wall of sand–and just keep shooting:

Staggering power and beauty.

October 13, 2010

What’s your favorite photo-capture app?

I’m pleased to say that I’ve just taken on product management responsibilities for Photoshop Express, Adobe’s photo capture, editing, and sharing app that’s been downloaded some 13 million times for iOS and Android devices. We’re excited about the interesting directions we can go with Express, and I look forward to sharing more details soon.

In the meantime, I thought I’d ask: What app(s) do you use for capturing images with your mobile devices? What’s missing, and what could be improved? (I’ll leave the question open-ended to avoid leading the witnesses.)

Thanks,
J.

October 07, 2010

DSLR video + RC helicopter = awesome

Man, is it a great time to be alive or what? I can’t tell you how badly I wanted a radio-controlled helicopter as a kid. I think I would have sold myself into slavery to get something like this rig:

Check out HeliVideo.com for more details. [Via]

October 02, 2010

7D + After Effects -> Ultra slow-mo

Oton Bačar used After Effects plug-in Twixtor and a Canon 7D to create 1,000-frame-per-second video:

[Via]

(rt) Photography: Vintage space suits, lenses, & more

• Check out this fun little SLR-shaped USB thumb drive.
• From the escuela vieja:
  • I love this juxtaposition of high & low tech: Space Suit of the Week
  • Rosemarie Fiore has created long-exposure captures of Atari games [Via]
  • Dreamy: pairing Canon 5DmkII plus a 102-year-old lens. (via @daringfireball)
• Astrophotography: “Crescent Moon With Earthshine” created using HDR in Photoshop.
• Canon’s developed one enormous motherscratchin’ camera sensor.

September 30, 2010

3D light painting with an iPad

What a fascinating technique & beautiful result:

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.

For more info, check out the makers’ blog post & the resulting book.

September 22, 2010

Video: Beautiful SF Timelapse

Lovely work from Simon Christen. The zipping planes & moon nail it for me.

[Total non-sequitur counterpoint, aviation-wise: American Airlines wants eight bucks for the use of a pillow and blanket. Eight bucks, AA? Two words: Die screaming.]

September 21, 2010

(rt) Photography: iPhones as Leicas, Photoshop disasters, & more

• Here’s a gorgeous Palestinian kid-with-sparkler image. The rest of gallery is good, too.
• How-to: Make your iPhone 4 look “like a beautiful old Leica.” You can also see Photojojo’s tips on How To Make Your Cell Phone Look Like Your Favorite Camera.
• Photoshop gone wrong:
  • Bloomingdale’s really approved this retouching job? Seriously? [Via John Lin]
  • Credit an Egyptian newspaper for coining “performing surgery” to explain away their manipulation of the news. [Via Harris Fogel]
• Check out this fun little SLR-shaped USB thumb drive.

September 20, 2010

(rt) Photography: Space, power, and iPhone funkiness

• Athleticism:
  • The Big Picture rounds up some amazing diving photos. 8 & 16 are my faves. [Via]
  • “The Beauty of the Power Game“: The NYT features slow-mo video of top female tennis players.
• Space & science:
  • NASA photos: Martian dunes plus a towering Shuttle launch trail.
  • There are great NASA images on the Flickr Commons, including this Apollo 11 launch gem.
  • The iPhone’s rolling shutter vs. a spinning propeller produces a cool effect. Here’s some background info on why this happens, plus more bizarre shots of propellers.

September 18, 2010

Video: Giants->Jets in a 53-hour timelapse

Neat, and rather hypnotic:

[Via Jeff Tranberry]

September 07, 2010

Waiting for wireless tethering

Could photographers be clearer in wanting their images sent wirelessly & immediately to iPads and similar tablets, turning these devices into extensions of the back of the camera?  I seriously doubt it.

At the moment you can kinda-sorta do some interesting things, as long as you have a traditional Mac/PC in the loop.  Here’s a 3-minute demo from Brent Pearson:

More details about the setup are on Brent’s site. [Via]

Relying a regular computer largely defeats the purpose of using the tablet, of course.  Photogs want to be shooting with a tablet-wielding assistant on the red carpet; checking lighting on set by reviewing raw image data; and just chimping on vacation.  The whole point is to avoid lugging a 5-8lb. laptop & to carry a ~1lb tablet instead.

Here’s hoping that device makers are working on a Bonjour-like solution that’ll let cameras, computers, phones, and other devices in close proximity locate one another, then exchange data (stills, live video streams, etc.).  If nothing else I’d stop wishing that my iPad included a camera for capturing raw materials for sketching, as I’d instead just use my phone as an extension of the tablet.

September 06, 2010

(rt) Photography: Giant imaging, great silhouettes, & more

• Huge:
  • British scientists are using a dried-out lake bed as a massive white balance card for satellites.
  • “The Big Unit” is to become 7-foot-tall rock concert photographer. (Presumably it’ll go better than his career in the Audubon Society.)
• The Big Picture features a great set of silhouette photos. [Via]
• Telling a photographer that his camera takes great pictures is like telling a chef that his oven makes great meals. [Via]

September 02, 2010

Introducing Photoshop’s new PhotoBomb tool (parody)

Heh heh. This is doubly funny as I watch this in a hotel room with the actual Bryan O’Neil Hughes. (Note: Contains some minor nudity & dirty hand gestures, in case that sort of thing offends you.)

In case the embedded video doesn’t work for you, here it is on its original page.

August 31, 2010

Lightroom 3.2, Camera Raw 6.2 arrive

The Lightroom 3.2 update (released in preview form a couple of weeks ago) is downloadable for Mac & Windows and adds direct publish functionality to Facebook. Along with the latest release of Camera Raw for CS5 (Mac|Win), it adds new camera support:

• Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG*)
• Leica S2 (DNG*)
• Panasonic DMC-FZ100
• Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45)
• Panasonic DMC-LX5
• Pentax 645D
• Samsung NX10
• Samsung TL500 (EX1)
• Sony A290
• Sony A390
• Sony Alpha NEX-3
• Sony Alpha NEX-5

*The DNG raw file format is supported in previous versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw. This update improves the color and noise profiles for these models.

Numerous lens profiles have been added & bugs squashed, so please see the Lightroom Journal site for more details.

August 28, 2010

Video: A Walk in Paris

A lovely evening chill-out courtesy of Rodrigo Bressane:

(Full-screen viewing with speakers on recommended.)

(rt) Photography: From Iceland to Insects

• Far & Away:
  • Brent Stirton has captured some amazing photos of indigenous peoples. [Via]
  • Check out a set of beautiful Iceland images from Julieanne Kost.
• Wildlife:
  • You, sir, are one fine-looking bug: Amazing macro photos from Thomas Shahan.
  • Outstanding bird photography blog: Hungover Owls.
  • “Be warned, YOU WILL NEVER UNSEE THIS.” [Via]

August 26, 2010

64-bit Alien Skin Bokeh filter now shipping

People sometimes ask for a faster, easier-to-control version of Photoshop’s venerable Lens Blur filter.  Alien Skin’s just-released Bokeh 2.0 is a great answer, providing fast on-image control, compatibility with both Photoshop and Lightroom, and interesting creative effects like spiral blurs.  I’ve just taken it for a spin and am impressed.

Bokeh costs $199. See their press release for more details.

August 25, 2010

Photoshop Express online editor gets upgraded

Sync your images with the cloud; organize your Flickr, Facebook, and other images in one spot; and edit them more easily through the new Photoshop.com.

According to a post from project PM Jordan Davis, highlights of the new release include:

Photoshop Express Editor: Redesigned to be faster and easier to use. As an added bonus, you can now edit files directly from your hard drive (no Photoshop.com account needed).

Photoshop Express Organizer: Now a standalone application that serves as an online hub for all of your media on Photoshop.com. It also gives you easy access to your images on Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa.

Photoshop Express Uploader: A lightweight, installable application that enables two-way syncing between files stored on your computer and those stored online on Photoshop.com.

Check out the site to get started (and to get 2GB of online storage free).

August 23, 2010

Video: Camera strapped to Space Shuttle boosters

Man is this cool:

Just before the 6-minute mark, you can see the parachutes deploy, followed by splash down some 30 seconds later. [Via]

By the way, on the off chance you’re wondering what this possibly has to do with Adobe or this blog, I’ll just note that I have a soft spot for the overlap of science & imaging (see related category).

August 22, 2010

Video: “The world’s fastest 3D film”

Filmed via two gullwing SLS AMGs doing a buck sixty around the Isle of Man. (I’m getting flashbacks to a classic Mac ad.)

The making-of video is genuinely fascinating, too:

[Via]

August 21, 2010

Photography: Intense storm images, video

Ever seen a house impaled by a child’s bicycle? That and more are in the Big Picture’s gorgeous, terrifying storm gallery. In a similar vein, would you really drive towards this thing?

[Via]

August 20, 2010

Photography: From Great Heights

• The scale is the impact: check out this great gallery of New York from above. [Via Gary Ferster]
• Looking down, Alex MacLean finds the abstract & the often beautiful. See more on his site.
• Christoph Gielen works in a similar vein & is worth a look.

August 10, 2010

Barbie vs. the 7D

Silly, but kind of fun. (Man, as a kid I’d have gone bananas for/with an affordable video camera.) [Via Stephen Shankland]

Creator Brandon Bloch notes, “This is also a spoof of another video that compared the Canon 7D and iPhone 4: ‘iPhone 4 as good as the 7D? No, but it’s amazing for what it is.’”

August 09, 2010

Scientific art: Macro eyes, colorful brains, & more

• Phil Hart has posted a lovely gallery of Bioluminescence and Weather Phenomena.  For me the two will always be associated with my one cruise in the US Navy, watching bioluminescent algae spatter the bridge windows of our ship all night during heavy seas–then puking my guts out (rinse & repeat). [Via]
• Your Beautiful Eyes: I kinda can’t deal with this macro photography by Suren Manvelyan. (I feel a T.J. Eckleburg reference coming on.) [Via]
• The Beautiful Brain: Artist, former lawyer, and MS patient Elizabeth Jameson colors images of her own & others’ brains, using her art to “make medical imaging and its representative humanity more accessible.” [Via]

August 07, 2010

Video: High on London

Matt Gosden and Rob Rackstraw give the old city the “New York in Miniature” treatment:

[Via Margot Nack]

August 06, 2010

(rt) Photography: Exploding aircraft, baby daydreams, & more

• Awesome: Photographer Luke Jerram chopped up camera to create a projector ring.
• What a great idea for a baby/photo series: Mila’s Daydreams. [Via]
• Airborne photographic mayhem: Crashing fighters and prancing transports.
• DeNiro, Brooklyn, India: The story of Steve McCurry’s shoot on the last roll of Kodachrome. (No photos yet, unfortunately.) [Via Bill Hughes]
• Techy:
  • Huey HD 3D Video Camera: Serious project or elaborate “Short Circuit” homage?
  • Science geeks + salad = Veggie MRIs. [Via]
• When it’s my time to go, I hope “drowning in oil” isn’t in the cards. [Via]

August 01, 2010

The Van Halen of cameras

Apparently people are digging Samsung’s two-screen compact camera, which features a now-larger front-facing screen for compositing self portraits (and hypnotizing babies).  Interestingly, in “Jump Mode,”

The front LCD will provide a visual cue to those in front of the camera to jump in unison, and immediately trigger the ST600 or ST100 to take three consecutive images to help users capture an image that essentially freezes their subjects in mid-air.

Also interesting:

The Smart Gesture UI allows for the quick access and use of key features with either a simple tilt or a hand gesture. Users can quickly scroll through photos by slightly tilting the device in either direction, swiping their finger across the screen, or by selecting the appropriate photos for a slide show.

July 31, 2010

Photography: The Longest & the Largest

• Ghostly passage of time: Stefan Klenke shows The Longest Photographic Exposures in History. [Via Ben Jones]
• 70 Billion Pixels Budapest claims to be “the largest photo on Earth.” [Via Barry Young]

July 30, 2010

The “Make My Photo Good” button draws closer (?)

Andrew Kupresanin’s Nadia project claims that ”The camera that thinks, so you don’t have to.”  Instead of showing an image on its viewfinder, the camera leverages ACQUINE, the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine,” in order to display an aesthetic rating

As I’ve said previously, developments like this makes think of the Robin Williams character in Dead Poets Society excoriating a textbook that rated poetry along two axes:

Excrement! That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard! We’re not laying pipe! We’re talking about poetry. How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand? “I like Byron, I give him a 42 but I can’t dance to it!”

Or, as The Online Photographer put it, “If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself.”

I start wondering whether the art project here is a bit more “meta” than it appears: The point is to make photographers flip out–a sea of (largely) angry old white guys as the medium, unknowingly engaged in mass performance art. If so, touché! [Via Tobias Hoellrich]

Previously: “A computational model of aesthetics”

July 28, 2010

“Computational Rephotography” helps marry new & old

Remember the Historypin project I mentioned recently? Creating that kind of historical overlay is about to get easier.

“Computational rephotography,” says Wired, “is a fancy name for photos taken from the exact same viewpoint as an old photograph. Actually, that’s just rephotography. The ‘computational’ part is when software helps out.”

Adobe researcher Aseem Agarwala, together with MIT’s Frédo Durand and Soonmin Bae, are developing some interesting tech here:

According to New Scientist,

The team’s software runs on a laptop linked to a digital camera. The software compares the camera’s view to a preloaded historical scene and provides instructions to adjust the camera’s position and zoom to best match the scene.

The laptop is a temporary measure, however: “We envision the tool running directly on the camera,” the team says.

For more info, check out the project site and papers (including a 135 MB PDF!).  [Via Thorsten Wulff]

Video: Lightning in ultra slow-mo

Neat: two seconds of lightning slowed down to a minute and a half.

[Via]

July 27, 2010

Video: Stop-motion excellence from Levi’s

I love the flavor of this cross-country roadtrip video from Levi’s:

It gets cooler when you check out the behind-the-scenes video (featuring things like a “MacGyver-style” protractor made in Photoshop):

[Via]

[Tangential, inside-baseball note: A big, wet, sloppy kiss to the folks at YouTube for now allowing one to specify the dimensions for embedded video. I can't tell you how many times I used a blank document in Photoshop to calculate how to scale object height to match a certain width. Adios to all that!]

July 26, 2010

Lightroom 3 “like switching to a new camera,” says DPReview

In giving Lightroom 3 a Gold award, Digital Photography Review says:

The difference between high ISO images converted using the new 2010 process compared to the older 2003 algorithm is remarkable, both in terms of detail and noise reduction. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that at high ISO settings, switching to the new RAW processing engine is like switching to a new camera.

Elsewhere, Bright Hub gives the software a perfect 5 out of 5 “Excellent” rating and concludes, “This product stands head and shoulders above the competition in an increasingly crowded sector.”

Excellent; thanks, guys.

In other news, the LR/Enfuse multi-exposure blending plug-in has been revved to version 4. The concept is similar to HDR imaging, but the plug-in authors say their approach produces more natural-looking images.

(rt) Photography: Summer storms, giant Russians, & awkward stock

• History:
  • The Very Last Roll of Kodachrome Film Ever Made Was Used to Capture NYC, at the hands of the renowned Steve McCurry. [Via] (“If I ever become CEO of Kodak,” says Mark Rosenberg, “I’ll manufacture one more roll of Kodachrome, just to drive Steve McCurry nuts.”)
  • We got your Woodpecker right here, da: Photography of giant Cold War Russian radio tech. [Via]
• Jeffrey Friedl’s cool rollover shows the visual effects of Lightroom’s JPEG export settings.
• Stock:
  • Just what’s promised: AwkwardStockPhotos.com [Via]
  • Similarly great: StockDBags.tumblr.com (Love the Kuato/abs reference!) [Via]
• Man, having grown up in Illinois, I love this photo–”Summer Storm, Chicago” by Ken Tanaka.

July 22, 2010

(rt) Photography: Great & terrible images, Holgas & spacemen

• Best of:
  • 2009 National Pictures of the Year Nominees [Via Rob Galbraith]
  • The Press Photographer’s Year 2010 [Via]
• Worst of:
  • Gripping, terrible photos: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon.
• Check out Saikat Biswas’s cool rethink of the Holga design.
• I’m getting a weird kick out of Hunter Freeman’s astronauts-in-banal-situations series. [Via]

July 20, 2010

Video: Canon Wonder Camera Concept

There’s some interesting food for thought here (the merging of video & still imaging, terabytes becoming the new megabytes, etc.). Skip forward 3 minutes or so if you’re short on time.

For more on research Adobe’s been doing around infinite-focus imaging, see previous. [Via Tom Hogarty]

July 17, 2010

IPTC-PLUS Toolkit extends Bridge, guides photographers

The IPTC and the PLUS Coalition have created a free Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS3-CS5 applications. Together with the downloadable user guide, these tools help photographers & agencies store detailed descriptions of their content and data relevant for managing image copyrights.

According to the press release,

The IPTC-PLUS Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS includes easy-to-use IPTC-PLUS Metadata panels for Adobe Bridge CS3 and CS4, plus comprehensive user guidelines for these panels and the File Info panels already built into all CS5 products. The panels for Bridge include the granular metadata fields of the IPTC Photo Metadata and also a set of fields for the communication of image rights metadata, based on industry standard developed by the PLUS Coalition. Creating these panels was a joint effort of both organizations.

I saw Jeff Sedlik from PLUS speak here in LA yesterday, and long story short, if you care even a little about preserving ownership of what you create, take two seconds and add your copyright info. These tools make it easy, and if you’re in doubt about what to do, the guide explains things.

[Update: To clarify, the downloadable panels are usable/needed only in CS3/CS4, as the functionality ships in the box with CS5. The guide is relevant to users of all three versions.]

July 14, 2010

Historypin: Old photos overlaid on the modern world

What a totally cool project:

Historypin uses Google Maps and Street View technology and hopes to become the largest user-generated archive of the world’s historical images and stories.

Historypin asks the public to dig out, upload and pin their own old photos, as well as the stories behind them, onto the Historypin map. Uniquely, Historypin lets you layer old images onto modern Street View scenes, giving a series of peeks into the past.

July 06, 2010

The Lightroom 3 Learning Center

On the off chance that you’ve got some free time this week (as I do), check out the Lightroom 3 Learning Center, created by Scott Kelby & the crew at NAPP. You’ll find interesting bits about uploading to Flickr, adding sharp watermarks, and more.

(rt) Photos & Illustration: Tetris everywhere, the Hand of God, & more

• Don’t hate the game:
  • “Tetris Tetris everywhere“: real-world objects that resemble the falling blocks.
  • What if popular gaming consoles were buildings, as imagined by Joseph Ford. [Via]
• Interesting media:
  • “A Matter of Taste”: Photographer Fulvio Bonavia recreates luxury goods from food. [Via Lynn Grillo]
  • Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal, rendered in Legos. [Via Steve Guilhamet]

July 04, 2010

(rt) Photography: Utterly non-Fourth-related miscellany

• Matt Kloskowski has created Lightroom iPad export settings for easy portfolio sharing. [Via]
• Photos + Photoshop – Wires = Anti-Gravity. [Via Jeff Chien]
• Moodiness:
  • Matt Mawson’s foggy beach photography makes me feel damp. [Via]
  • Dig these dark, atmospheric photos from Garmonique.
• “How on earth does one acquire that many dead birds, and why would one want to?” Macabre museum-keeping.

In any case, despite the thematic disconnect, Happy Fourth of July!

July 02, 2010

SlideShowPro does HTML5, Flash

Todd Dominey & co., the makers of the excellent Flash-based SlideShowPro, have created a visually rich alternative version that uses HTML5 instead of Flash.

This is a good thing.

Why?  Because it’s putting customers ahead of technologies, and it’s using both Flash & HTML to maximize viewers’ ability to see rich content, including on i-devices.  As the site explains:

SlideShowPro Mobile is an entirely new media player built using HTML5 that doesn’t require the Flash Player plugin and can serve as a fallback for users accessing your web sites using these devices. But it’s not just any fallback — it’s specially designed for touch interfaces and smaller screen sizes. So it looks nothing like the SlideShowPro player and more like a native application that’s intuitive, easy to use, and just feels right. [Demo]

I’d love to see this support added to the Lightroom version of SlideShowPro, as I rely on it for all our family shots.  I want to generate two presentation layers (one Flash, one HTML) that both provide a rich, beautiful presentation of the same image files, and I want the gallery to auto-select the correct presentation layer based on viewers’ devices.  Make the whole tedious Flash-vs.-HTML thing a non-issue for customers.

June 28, 2010

Huge multitouch wall at the World’s Fair

The Wall of Chile  at the 2010 Shanghai World’s Fair features a 4-by-1.2 meter (13-by-4 foot) display wall that enables visitors to access more than six hours of high-definition video and thousands of photographs.

Here are more info & more projects from the creators.

June 20, 2010

Photography: Augmented reality, vintage strobism, & more

• The StreetMuseum iPhone app overlays the 19th century on top of current London. [Via]
• Monochrome:
  • Strobe photography pioneer Harold Edgerton captured Stonehenge at night by using “a 50,000 watt-second flash in the bay of a night-flying airplane 1500 feet above the ancient monoliths.” I’d really like to see a larger version. [Via]
  • Dig the otherworldly black & whites of Zoltán Vancsó.
• Kirill Kuletski shows that salt mines are good for you (really!). [Via]
• The Big Picture commemorates the eruption of Mount St. Helens, 30 (!) years ago. (I vividly remember sifting through ash in a Chicago museum at age ~5.)

June 17, 2010

NYC photowalk with Adobe PMs next Saturday

On June 26th, Lightroom and Photoshop product managers Tom Hogarty and Bryan O’Neil Hughes will be leading a morning photo walk around New York’s Madison Square Park and Flatiron district. Meet up at Foto Care 41 West 22nd (between 5th & 6th Aves.) at 10am sharp. The walk is scheduled to last until 2pm and includes a free lunch and software tips/demos. Feel free to bring your disc camera & crampons whatever camera you’d like & comfortable shoes.

Space is limited to 50 participants, so please RSVP via the event page.

Other NY/next week-related reminders:

• On Friday the 25th from 4:30-7:30 pm, Scott Kelby & crew will be joining Adobe folks for a free Photoshop CS5 Summit.
• Tom and Bryan will be presenting LR3 and PS CS5 at Fotocare on the 28th and 29th; see details.

From great heights: Cool weather balloon + camera project

Colin Rich used a homemade weather balloon to carry cameras to an altitude of 125,000 feet:

According to PetaPixel,

After purchasing two Canon compact cameras on eBay, Rich programmed them to take 3 photos every 3 minutes, and shoot a minute of video every fourth minute. The cameras were then insulated in styrofoam, and sent up to 125,000 feet before the balloon burst. With the help of a parachute, the cameras descended for 35 minutes and landed about 15-20 miles away.

It’s a great time to be alive. [Via]

June 16, 2010

Adobe Lens Profile Creator updated

The Adobe Lens Profile Creator, a free utility for creating lens profiles that work in Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, and Camera Raw 6.1, has been updated to fix a couple of bugs and improve batch processing. You can download the update from Adobe Labs, and you can read more details on the product user forum. [Via]
Update: In case you haven’t seen the lens correction tools in action, or if you’d like more info on how to use them, check out this brief overview from Julieanne Kost:

June 12, 2010

Interesting device: AirStash wireless flash drive

Hmm–this seems kind of promising: the AirStash lets you plug-in SD memory cards, then broadcast their content to wireless devices (e.g. iPads, iPhones, etc.). Here’s a demo:

Photographers I meet really, really like the idea of shooting freely & having their images immediately, painlessly displayed on a tablet–effectively turning the tablet into an extension of the camera. I haven’t yet seen an example of this working, but I have an Eye-Fi card on order and am motivated to experiment. It’s apparently possible to use an iPhone as an iPad camera, but not having a 3GS, I can’t try that approach.
The AirStash doesn’t offer camera-to-tablet syncing, but it seems like the next best thing, and it might enable more flexible import than Apple’s Camera Connection Kit presently enables. With 16GB memory cards going for as little as a hilariously low $30, it’s easy to imagine taking a card or two on vacation, leaving all photos on it, backing them up to a tablet, and performing reviewing/culling/adjusting/sharing on the tablet.
Unfortunately the AirStash is sold out at the moment, so I haven’t gotten to try it. If anyone has kicked the tires on this or related devices, I’m curious to hear your feedback. [Via Simon Chen]

June 11, 2010

Of Lightroom, iPads, and muffins

When asking customers about possible Adobe tablet apps, I’m reminded of the experience of trying to get our toddler to count bites of dinner en route to a chocolate muffin:

Mom: “Okay, what number comes before six?”

Finn: “Muffin!”

Mom: “Five…then what’s next? Not three but…”

Finn: “Muffin!”

It’s like this:

Me: “So, we’re thinking of building app X…

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

Me: “Yes, cool, we hear you. But back to X…”

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

Me: “Right, I know, but…”

Everyone: “Lightroom!”

I find this kind of charming and encouraging. Building a great iPad app for mobile photo review, editing, and sharing is (presently) tougher than one might think, but customer desire is very clear. (Feedback about non-LR/photography workflow apps is welcome, too.)

June 06, 2010

Video: HDR from Lightroom 3 to Photoshop CS5

Terry White shows how to use LR3 together with CS5 to create high dynamic range images:

I had fun using this workflow to produce some very-poor-man’s Ansel Adams wannabe images in Yosemite.

May 31, 2010

Video: Handmade Content-Aware Scale

“Taking photos of multi-lane monstrosities all around Los Angeles,” says Photojojo, photographer David Yoon “wielded the power of Photoshop, and he narrowed LA.” Check out his novel technique, which includes drawing lines on his camera’s LCD:

Find more images & projects on his Narrow Streets: Los Angeles blog.

May 30, 2010

Video: Athens Timelapse

Beautifully smooth imagery from Alexandros Maragos:

[Via Katrin Eismann]

May 18, 2010

(rt) Photography: Lightroom layouts, photographic history, & more

• Halina Veratsennik has created a set of handy free collage templates for Lightroom 3.
• History:
  • Cool: Squeezing digital camera guts into a classic AE-1 film SLR. (The AE-1 was my first real camera.) [Via]
  • 19th-century “photochroms” look weirdly (retro-) contemporary.
• I dig the otherness of Spencer Murphy‘s photography. [Via]
• Olympics bits (that I somehow never got around to posting earlier):
  • As you’d imagine, there’s an excellent Olympics photo collection on The Big Picture.
  • Even more amazing are the photos from the 2010 Winter Paralympics. Hard core. [Via]

May 15, 2010

Video: Volcanic time lapse from Eyjafjallajökull

Great stuff from Sean Stiegemeier, particularly in the use of a motorized dolly. [Via Tom Moran]

May 11, 2010

(rt) Photography: The Sistine Chapel, Darth Vader, & more

• Check out the beautiful B&W photography of Chuck Kimmerle. [Via]
• Neat “Laptopograms”: Making photos with a laptop screen.
• Heh: “Stages of a photographer.” (Beware HDR.) [Via]
• Fun, cryptic photo: “Sad Vader.”
• Here’s a terrific panorama taken inside the Sistine Chapel. [Via]
• Apparently Content-Aware Fill will not blow ladies’ clothes off.
• Here’s some deep nerdery on DNG spec updates, for those who like such things.

May 09, 2010

Work travel + toddler + iPad paraphernalia…

I swear I didn’t pose this. Our little guy was a little sad that I finally got back in the work-travel saddle this week. His response on the other end of the trip made homecoming pretty sweet.

May 07, 2010

(rt) Photography: Historic NYC, war, & more

• Flickr hosts a set of gorgeous photos of New York from the 1940′s. [Via]
• Same city, different era: check out Allan Tannenbaum’s “Dirty, Dangerous, and Destitute: New York in the 70s.”
• “Iwo Jima without Marines… but filled with content awareness,” says Thorsten Wulff
• Neat project: Lining up past & present photos. [Via]
• A cry for Photoshop, if ever there was one: Eastern European album covers of the ’70s. [Via]

May 02, 2010

(rt) Nature Photography: Apocalyptic vulcanism & more

• “Real wrath-of-God-type stuff…” Insanely beautiful and terrifying volcano photos. See also this & this. [Via]
• “Hey, let’s go to Africa and bolt a DSLR + flashes to an RC car & drive it up to lions & elephants!” Meet the BeetleCam. [Via]
• Christies selects the Top 40 Nature Photographs. [Via Franz Lanting]
• Seems like polar bears would be effective against Imperial probe droids. Polar bear steals tripod.

May 01, 2010

Adobe Lens Profile Creator now available

I’m pleased to report that Adobe Labs is now hosting Adobe Lens Profile Creator, a free utility that enables the easy creation of lens profiles for use in Photoshop, Lightroom, and (very shortly) Camera Raw.

Lens Profile Creator characterizes three common types of lens aberrations, namely the geometric distortion, the lateral chromatic aberration and the vignette.
The general process of creating a custom lens profile for your lens involves capturing a set of checkerboard images using your specific camera and lens, converting the set of raw format images into DNG format, and importing the DNG files to generate the custom lens profile.
You can also submit the lens profiles to share with the rest of the user community.

Check out the Labs page for more info, and see the Lens Profile Creator user forum to discuss the tool & profiles.

April 26, 2010

Remaindered Links, pt.1: Photography, science, etc.

We’ve had so much CS5-related news to share lately that I haven’t gotten to spend much time posting unrelated interestingness. In case you dig that type of thing, I’m going quick n’ dirty (er, cheap n’ cheerful) and unloading some of my recent finds:

• Photography:
  • “Matthew Albanese‘s photos of dramatic landscapes are gorgeous, but they are not what they first seem to be. These are meticulously hand-made models.” [Via]
  • Tim Hetherington has captured raw, eye-opening photography of Liberian war graffiti.
• Science-y:
  • Grab my Kenobi: Holograms you can feel (?).
  • In early July, “a photographer took a picture of what appears to be three Suns rising over Gdansk Bay in Poland,” writes Kottke.
  • Nebulous: Celestial soap bubble. (The fact that the thing got dubbed “PN G75.5+1.7″ makes me feel a little better about some of Adobe’s naming choices.) [Via]
• Auto-Align, feelin’ fine: How Photoshop Helped Save My Dad from eBay Fraud. [Via]
• Shape Collage is a “Free Automatic Photo Collage Maker.”

April 17, 2010

Scott Kelby on what CS5 offers photogs, more

Scott Kelby has posted a couple of good Photoshop CS5 FAQs on his blog. Handy sample:

Q. As a photographer what is the most compelling reason to consider an upgrade from CS4 to CS5?

A. That’s a tough one, because it will be different for different photographers. I think a lot of folks will naturally want it to create HDR images, but I think the built-in masking features (using Refine Edge) is even more compelling for most photographers. Content-Aware Fill is big (and it works amazingly well), but then the Noise Reduction in Camera Raw is just insane, so it’s a tough call to make. Luckily, any one of those is worth the upgrade alone, so if you get all four, this is an easy decision for a lot of photographers.

He’s also got a funny (and useful) take on upgrade questions.

April 16, 2010

Sigma announces compatibility with Lens Correction in CS5

The Photoshop team has had a great relationship with lens maker Sigma, and they’ve issued a short press release:

The Sigma Corporation is pleased to announce that, through collaboration with Adobe Systems Incorporated, Sigma lenses will be compatible with the Lens Correction feature of the professional digital imaging standard, Adobe Photoshop CS5…

Photoshop CS5 has applied the aberration information of the current Sigma lens lineup. When the improved Lens Correction filter is selected, it will provide accurate correction of aberrations automatically in accordance with each lens parameter.

We look forward to sharing more details about how lens correction works in CS5, how you can create and share your own lens/camera profiles, and even how you can use some as-yet-unannounced goodness. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]

April 10, 2010

The iPad dirt pile

“That a big dirt pile back there!,” says our two-year-old in-house photo critic Finn eyeing the iPad’s default background image. “How did that dirt pile get back there??” ArtInfo has the story. (Apologies to photog Richard Misrach; it really is a nice image.) [Via]

Related/previous:

• One of the grosser–yet most universal–iPad wallpapers
• A nice selection of wallpapers from various artists

[Update regarding a couple of the comments: Guys, I was just passing along a (to me cute) thing my kid said about this new device, as I've been doing. I'm not trying to yank anybody's chain, and I find that we can all handle most thing better with a sense of humor. Let's not let the enjoyment of Apple products turn anybody into a scowling Defender of Faith and Morals, eh? :-)]

April 06, 2010

(rt) Photography: Gorgeous insects, Star Wars, & more

• Wildlife:
  • The Daily Mail features gorgeous pictures of sleeping insects covered in early morning dew [Via]
  • Zero-to-gore: Drag-racing cows in the mud (no kidding). [Via]
• Star Wars:
  • Photography skills + Star Wars imagery = The Dark Lens. (Click the “Work” link up top.)
  • In a related vein, I like this random historical mashup. [Via Barkin Aygun]

April 03, 2010

(rt) Photography: Shooting wars, giant waves, & more

• Conflict:
  • The Shooting War features a small but excellent set of intense images from conflict photographers.
  • The iPhone is combat photojournalist David Guttenfelder’s tool in Afghanistan. Note the final shot of his dust-covered traditional photo gear. [Via]
  • The NY Times features What the Still Photo Still Does Best–namely, freezing moments in our shared life, often rendering them iconic. The article features gripping civil rights photos from the late Charles Moore. [Via]
  • Crazy high-speed photo: Bullet vs. cigarette. See the rest of the gallery for more fast action.
• Wild blue:
  • I dig the screen-filling presentation of Jay Watson’s high-res gallery from the Mavericks surfing contest. (The booming action shots start on p7.) [Via]
  • Penguins parade in a gorgeous photo from near the South Pole. (But seriously, there’s a National Penguin Awareness Day?)

April 02, 2010

Sneak peek: Puppet Warp in Photoshop

Russell Brown has posted a demonstration of the Puppet Warp technology being developed for Photoshop:

Cool as everyone seems to agree the technology is, I know there’s a tendency to worry that it’s kind of frivolous–maybe useful only occasionally, and then for making some extreme change to an image. Fortunately that’s not the case. Stick with the demo to see Russell show (around the 5-minute mark) how the features can also be used to make subtle adjustments to photos. (Taken together with Content-Aware Fill, automatic lens correction, and the ability to address huge amounts of memory thanks to 64-bit, I think panorama creators will be very happy with what’s cooking.)

April 01, 2010

(rt) Photographic Extremes: Giant panos, putrid water, & more

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March 20, 2010

(rt) Photography: Darkness, distant underpants, & more

• Alberto Seveso has created some amazing images by dropping varnish into a fishbowl. The shots take me back to playing with Lego boats + food coloring in the bathtub years ago.
• Canon cannons:
  • “I See London, I See France, I See Your Underpants from 32 Miles Away With The Canon 5200mm Ultra Telephoto” [Via Zalman Stern]
  • Canon’s limited edition coffee mug swag resembles a lens that resembles a coffee mug. [Via]
• Panasonic brings touchscreens to SLRs: Via the live view, tap a person to focus on/shoot him or her. That strikes me as very cool, given that I’m always pressing halfway to meter/focus, then recomposing and firing. That’s pretty tedious/error-prone with kids.
• Tenebrae:
  • Check out the Space Shuttle in colorful bands of atmosphere.
  • The Big Picture features Jason Hawkes’s night photography of New York City & Las Vegas from above. It’s cool, though for some reason I don’t find it as compelling as his earlier work over London.

March 19, 2010

(rt) Photography: Stormtroopers, deer-skipping, and more

• Ever wonder what Stormtroopers do on their days off? [Via]
• Is this a painting or a photo? You might be surprised. [Via]
• Nice photographic pun: “How genetics works.”
• From National Geographic: I’ve heard of skipping stones, but skipping a deer? [Via]
• Nice, and news to me: To reset a crop in Lightroom, use Cmd+Opt+R/Ctrl+Alt+R. [Via]
• Wall of Sound: A record groove gets magnified 1000x. [Via]

March 14, 2010

(rt) Photography: Curves, Frankencameras, & more

• Nikki Graziano takes photographs of curves found in nature & the graphs and functions that go with them. [Via]
• Medical imaging pic o’ the day: “Buddy Sneaks Into Chest X-Ray.”
• Eric Curry makes cool, somewhat surreal photos.
• Peeps at Gizmodo have fun with photographic action sequences.
• Check out a DIY 3D camera rig at the Olympics: Two Nikons lashed together. Looks kludgy but sophisticated. [Via]
• The Boston Globe’s The Big Picture tackles Chile’s quake in photos. Stunning, heartbreaking. [Via]

March 12, 2010

Video: Time lapse from Mauna Kea

And now for a hypnotically chill counterpoint, where nothing blows up. Photography by Charles Leung.

[Via]

February 25, 2010

Ansel Adams works in San José through Sunday

Photoshop tech writer Eric Floch points out that the SJ Museum of Art is hosting an Ansel Adams exhibition that runs through this Sunday. He & some other team members checked it out, and he writes:

The photographs on display are quite stunning. It’s mostly small-scale prints Adams made from the 1920s through the 1950s. You can see the full evolution Adams made from the soft-focus “Parmelian Prints” of the 20s through the sharper works to come out of the f/64 school to the “classic” cooler, high-contrast prints we’ve all seen on so many posters.

Check out the museum site (link above) for a video & more info.

February 24, 2010

(rt) Photography: Plane crashes, laser-eyed babies, & more

• The wearable 360-degree yellowBird camera rig is sort of like Google Street View for your head. [Via]
• War & remembrance:
  • Painful new 9/11 aerial images show the World Trade Center collapse.
  • The Online Photographer linked to a striking WWII plane crash image from Iwo Jima. More are here.
• Cleared for Weird:
  • Filed under “Things You Wish You Could Un-See,” here’s some deeply weird Photoshop action: Celebrities Upside Down. [Via]
  • In a related vein, here’s a collection of upside down faces presented as if they were right side up. [Via]
  • Weirdest photoblog ever? Babies with laser eyes. [Via]

February 20, 2010

(rt) Photography: Volcanoes, Olympians, lasers, & more

• Scientific:
  • Martin Rietze captured some beautiful volcanic lightning. (“I’d be charged, too, if I were shot out of the center of the earth,” says my wife.)
  • No sci fi: Infrared photos of a 747 shooting down a missile with a laser. (Can ill-tempered sea bass be far behind?) Apparently it happened not far from where I’m typing this.
  • “If you are intrigued by physics and love photography,” says Katrin Eismann, check out the work of Caleb Charland.
• Olympics:
  • Ryan McGinley brings a fresh eye & fresh palettes to photographing Olympians. [Via]
  • The Big Picture features a high res gallery showing the Olympic opening ceremonies. [Via]
• Oddly compelling: “Vans and the places where they were.” (As long as “lingering outside my house” isn’t featured, we’re cool.) [Via]

February 11, 2010

Motion: Tokyo Sky Drive

Captivating:

[Via]

(rt) Photography: Everest 360 & more

• Check out this 360-degree panorama from the summit of Everest. [Via]
• Camera acronym o’ the day: EVIL (for small SLR alternatives). [Via]
• “Worst stock photos of the decade.” Not good, but there’s gotta be worse, right? [Via]
• Beautiful HD time lapses of Vancouver. (via Rob Galbraith)
• Chromoscope provides views of the Milky Way galaxy in x-ray, visible, microwave, & other wavelengths [Via]

February 09, 2010

“Digital Analogue”: Stop motion photography of photography gear

[Via]

January 24, 2010

Behind the scenes of the Bird book

I just picked up a copy of Andrew Zuckerman’s gorgeous Bird book, mentioned here a couple of months ago. It would be a great deal at the cover price of $60, but I found it locally for 50% off, and it seems Amazon & others are matching that price. I was reminded to mention the book when I spotted this short behind-the-scenes video shot during production. [Via] Next up: I’d like to check out his Creature book.

January 23, 2010

Haiti earthquake: 360° video

CNN is documenting the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake by offering 360° video clips. As the site says,

Use your mouse to click and drag around the video to change the view. You can also zoom in and out. Pause and explore at any time by pressing the play/pause button under the video to stop and look around.

Note the arrows at upper right that lead to additional videos. I find the second one most interesting in that it was shot via a person’s backpack, enabling a view that’s pedestrian in both senses. That feels to me like an interesting counterpoint to most photojournalism (e.g. the heartbreaking images on The Big Picture) which emphasizes some amount of technical excellence (composition, focus, lighting, etc.). The 360° videos are inherently more raw.

January 20, 2010

Rollin’ on the River

Having grown up by the Mississippi, I often make fun of the feeble Guadalupe River (aka “The Mighty Guat”) that trickles past Adobe HQ. Then there are the days (like today) when I see why the city lavished money on a huge flood-control channel:

The image comes courtesy of the Lightroom team’s Kelly Castro. See more of his great B&W’s on Flickr, and check out more info on his Lightroom-Photoshop technique.
– J. (who’s feeling marginally better about being forced to carry flood insurance)

(rt) Photography: JPEGging the hell out of things, grenade tennis, & more

• The American Pixels project uses excessive JPEG compression for artistic effect. [Via]
• “The Moon on Earth.” Vincent Fournier has created compelling artistic photos of astronaut training. Higher res versions are on his site. [Via]
• Tennis with a grenade, anyone? Intense, incredible imagery in The Big Picture’s 2009 in Photos (Part 2).
• Here’s a set of thrilling motorsports shots from the Dakar Rally. (I’m having flashbacks of getting a certain huge RV stuck in the sand in Death Valley, hours from cell phone service. But that’s another story.)

January 19, 2010

Fun iPhone photo/illustration apps

Just a couple of recent finds that manipulate your images in interesting ways:

• “Digital photography never looked so analog,” proclaim the makers of Hipstamatic. The interface is more than a little (deliberately?) wonky, but it produces some fun stuff. It even makes Photoshop PM meetings look interesting:

  

  [Via Geoff Badner]

• PhotoTropedelic “draw[s] upon the colors and symbols of 60′s Pop Art to produce boldly unique art.” Far out. [Via Matthew Richmond] [Update: Apparently the app was created by Adobe's own Larry Weinberg.]
• Le Petit Dummy “lets you position a mouth on any photo and play back audio files as the mouth moves in sync.”
• And, in case you missed it earlier, the LEGO iPhone app (App Store link) will render you in vibrant lo-fi.

January 18, 2010

(rt) Photography: Life & death from above, & more

• “We are experts in the application of violence…” Intense war photography, shot with a Canon 5D Mk II. [Via]
• Check out some winter gorgeousness (plus weirdness) from The Big Picture. I can’t wait to teach our boys to sled (though living in California, I certainly must).
• Aerial history:
  • From the Iconic Photos blog comes a a photo of the Pearl Harbor attack in progress, taken from a Japanese plane. [Via]
  • Lovely B&W of an American airship under construction. [Via]
• Nocturnal:
  • Night photography from atop the world’s tallest building.
  • I love the beams of light criscrossing Kevin Cooley’s photos. [Via]

January 05, 2010

Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2009

Awesome.

(Photo by Matthias Rempel, NCAR)

January 03, 2010

(rt) Photography: Best of ’09, Edge of the World, & more

• Photojojo has amassed The Best Roundups of the Best Photos of 2009. Chasing tots full time, I’ve yet to dig into these, but I look forward to exploring (you know, as soon as I’m back at work; always gotta see whether the bosses still read this…).
• I must find a Steadicam rig & bring it to Death Valley next time.
• Edge of the World: NatGeo features beautiful images from Scotland’s Hebrides. [Via]
• The Lego iPhone app makes fun images on the fly. (I don’t think they meant to make me envision my child’s smile made from hamster pieces, however.)
• Here’s NASA’s giant new Ares I-X rocket being assembled. (Am I the only one who keeps completely forgetting that the country is building this thing?)

January 01, 2010

Happy New Year

I wish you could see the moon as it appears overhead here at this moment. I’ve never seen anything like it. Pictures (mine, anyway) can’t begin to capture its vivid beauty, and I laid a long while on the driveway gazing up. And then, being the suburban dad I am, I rose & towed in the trash cans. I’m feeling very blessed.
I wish you great peace, happiness, and success in “oh-Ten” (as I’m sure to stumble and call it more than once). Thanks for reading.

December 31, 2009

Quick tip: Reviewing images as B&Ws in Bridge

I just saw a feature request for Adobe Bridge that covers something that’s already possible. A photographer requested a way to review all his images as black & whites. Here’s my simple suggestion:

• Open an image in Camera Raw and create a B&W treatment you like.
• Create a preset via the “Save Settings…” option in the little menu* on the right-hand side of the Camera Raw tabs.
• Once you’ve made a preset, you can batch-apply it to images in Bridge by selecting the images, then choosing Edit->Develop Settings->{Your Preset Name}.

* Side note: I can’t adequately describe how annoying I find it that we (Adobe collectively) make this menu & similar ones so hard to see. I don’t have control over all such decisions.

December 29, 2009

(rt) Photography: News photos of the decade & more

• Fascinating: The decade in news photographs on The Big Picture. [Via]

• Amazing photos: The Hubble Advent Calendar 2009. (There’s seriously a “Sombrero Galaxy”? Do they serve horchata there?)

• Lovely vintage car photography: The original Lamborghini Countach concept.
• Gear:
  • “16 Days in the Himalayas” is Craig Mod’s travelogue/review of the Lumix GF1. (Interesting point: “A camera without a viewfinder is less intimidating” to subjects.)
  • Canon DSLR Suffers 3,000-Foot Fall, Camera and Lens Still Work [Via]

December 20, 2009

Photography Quote o’ The Day

Regarding HDR & its discontents: “This style of tone mapping has become synonymous with HDRI in a way that isn’t good at all. It’s as if T-Pain’s Auto-Tune tracks were the blanket description for ‘music.’” — Author Jack Howard, who’s just started an HDR group on Facebook. Check out Jack’s tutorials (one, two) on “soft” tonemapping techniques.

[Update: Fixed typo in the Facebook link.]

December 19, 2009

PS Elements voted Photography Gadget of the Decade

Viewers of Channel 5′s Gadget Show have voted Photoshop Elements Photography Gadget of the Decade. On behalf of the Elements team, wow, and thanks, everyone! Evidently I can’t watch the video from within the US, but I’m told that Elements gets mentioned about 5 minutes into it. [Via Emma Wilkinson]

December 11, 2009

SimpleViewer 2.0 available, works with PS, Lightroom

Felix Turner has updated his excellent SimpleViewer Web gallery package with a number of enhancements (embeddable compact mode, Flickr integration, and more). You can use it to create galleries directly from Photoshop or Lightroom.

December 10, 2009

Photo nerdery for a good cause

Scott Kelby has created some geeky off-camera-flash t-shirts:

If you’re looking for a really unique holiday gift for the photographer on your list (or you just want a really cool t-shirt that nobody else will have), AND you totally love the idea that 100% of the profits go to feeding and caring for kids in a orphanage in Kenya that you guys helped to build (see below), then man have I got a holiday gift idea for you!

Very cool, Scott.

December 08, 2009

Expert tip on lighting a kid for holiday photos

1. Wrap that little sucka* in Christmas tree lights.
2. Start firing for effect.
3. There is no step 3.

*He sees you, sucka.

December 06, 2009

(rt) Photography: Gorgeous ice, giant rockets, & more

• National Geographic’s International Photo Contest features some spectacular images. (I find they get better as you scroll farther.)
• Google Image Swirl offers more dynamic search. (Try clicking any of the image results to pivot on that image.) Popular Science has more info on the project.
• I can hear the thunder behind Thomas Prior’s moody photos.
• Photo: Day at the beach with friends: good fun. Getting kicked in the back by said friends: less fun.
• Air & Space:
  • NASA is building one hell of a big rocket to take us back to the moon. (Related: Still no one knows, cares.)
  • Plane nerdery: Pics of Boeing’s cool, swollen “Dreamlifter” chimera.
• Nature:
  • David Hirmes shares some gorgeous ice photos. [Via]
  • Martin Scott-Jupp takes oddly beautiful close-ups of mold.

November 21, 2009

(rt) Photography: Amazing bird photography, Mars, & more

• Andrew Zuckerman just crushes it with his bird book. Outstanding. [Via]

• Droppin’ science:
  • The Big Picture features some totally fascinating Mars pictures. [Via]
  • Check out this year’s Olympus microscopy photo winners. (Many leave me nonplussed, but scroll down for the hero-flea.) [Via]

• History:
  • Have gas mask, will travel. Creepy stuff; recalls animations from The Wall.
  • On CreativePro, Gene Gable shows off the pioneering photo processing of Look Magazine (e.g. the Beatles shot by Richard Avedon). Lots of interesting pre-digital manipulations.
• This 12,000-photo time lapse is interesting even for Yankee-haters. [Via]
12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments [3]

November 18, 2009

Fascinating slow motion water drops

Trippy!

[Via]
Coincidentally, here’s a cool tutorial on milk-drop typography using Photoshop.

November 16, 2009

“dpBestflow” aims to drive best practices

There are a million ways you can process, manage, and archive your images–but how should you? What techniques best capture and preserve your creative output?

To address these questions, the Library of Congress, working with ASMP, has just announced “dpBestflow” (Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow). Two years’ worth of research have produced “real-world solutions for preserving the quality and integrity of digital images; proven best practices that have been shown to produce superior results; and guidelines for streamlined production workflows.”

The site is loaded with resources, ranging from a quick reference sheet* to a detailed glossary. I haven’t gotten to read the materials in detail, but the effort seems like a great response to persistent real-world issues. [Via project contributor Peter Krogh.]

* Nice to see this guidance: “Use DNG to archive raw file data… A DNG archive can be validated with a much higher level of certainty than any other image file format.”

November 13, 2009

(rt) Photography: Historical remixes, Lightroom tips, & more

• Here’s a set of strangely diggable aquatic photos from Asako Narahashi.
• History reconsidered:
  • Iconic Photo Of JFK Assassin Oswald Was Not Faked, Professor Finds. (Adobe has worked w/Hany Farid.) [Via]
  • Bizarre B&W photos: Batman + Fidel, Darth + FDR. [Via]
• Lightroom tips via Tom Hogarty:
  • PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) plug-in now available for Lightroom 2; would like your feedback.
  • How to create a time lapse video direct from Lightroom 3 beta: [Via]

November 11, 2009

(rt) Photography: Crushing overloads, HDR moon, & more

• This insanely overloaded truck seems like a metaphor on wheels, crying out for inclusion in a Demotivator. [Via]
• Here’s a pair of striking photos from India, courtesy of Emanuele Nardoni.
• Twins Triptych: Arbus, Kubrick, and (scariest) the Olsens.
• Superfly dragonflies & avian stylings come from Conrad Tan.
• Heavenly:
  • Need to know where/when the sun/moon will rise/set for photos? Use The Photographer’s Ephemeris. [Via]
  • Check out an HDR pic of the Halloween full moon. [Via Ben Hansen]

November 10, 2009

Panoramic view from a tongue

Tell me this isn’t one of the weirdest things you’ve seen all week:

Here’s some more info.

October 31, 2009

(rt) Photography: Biggest tree photo ever & more

• Interesting iPhone photography roundup (and images) from Phil Coffman. Includes use of Photoshop.com app
• Thinking of digitizing old photos? Macworld compares scanning services. [Via]
• National Geographic:
  • Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo Ever (Our wee man Finn loves the fold-out print version: “Leetle dudes!!”)
  • A chimp funeral (pic #2)? That’s honestly not something I expected to see today.
• A photo essay in TIME covers history’s Top 10 Doctored Photos (many predating Photoshop).

October 29, 2009

Bullet time

New Adventures in Slow-Mo:

Elsewhere:

• Check out Alan Salier’s stunning high-speed gallery on Flickr. [Via Tom Hogarty]
• See also the slow-mo detonations captured by Martin Klimas.

October 27, 2009

How goes the war?

• The Big Picture’s Afghanistan, September 2009 gallery is full of striking, often heartbreaking images.

• Matthew Cook filters the Iraq war through a hazy, watercolor prism. [Via]

October 26, 2009

(rt) Photography: Glaciers from space, famous Legos, & more

• The natural world:
  • Glaciers, as seen from space. [Via]
  • Amazing undersea image from Nat Geo. [Via]
  • Fascinating–MIT Students Build Space Camera for $150.
• Famous images:
  • Check out the interesting “Iconic Photos” blog. (via @kottke)
  • Mike Stimpson offers Famous photos recreated in LEGO [Via]

• Striking aircraft photography from Josef Hoflehner [Via Christina Wiley]
• “Two Weeks in Forever” is the NYT’s interesting 3-minute photo essay about a Marine unit in Afghanistan.
• Here’s a 360-degree pano of some Photoshop & Lightroom guys meeting w/customers last week in NYC.

October 19, 2009

Monday Photos: Dark n’ Lovely

• Take a look at the marvelous intricacy of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields. The photographer “uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.” [Via]
• I love the understatement of Carlos de Spinola‘s “Drive In” series. Somehow I’m taken back to driving across northern Indiana (where Gary could double as the backdrops for Blade Runner) at night. [Via]
• The NYT tells the story behind (and features a gallery of) Walker Evans postcards.
• To quote our little son Finn seeing whirling blades, “Makeitturn makeitturn makeitturnturn!”: Helicopter taking off–in 1949 [Via]
• Last Suppers is “A series of photographs documenting former Death Row prisoners’ requests for their last meal before execution.” Happy Monday! [Via]

October 12, 2009

(rt) Photography: Nobel Prizes, Lightroom plug-ins, & more

• “Masters of light”: 2009 Nobel Goes to Digital Photography Pioneers. [Via Todor Georgiev]
• Hot aerospace action:
  • “This photo destroyed a camera,” says Photojojo. “Worth it.”
  • Great plane-from-above photo (apparently from a blimp over LaGuardia). More shots are here.
• Here’s a fairly substantial introduction to available Lightroom plug-ins. [Via]
• Clever: A vase that mimics a Polaroid.
• The venerable German magazine Brigitte is stopping the use of professional models: all too skinny. They to use Photoshop to make them “thicker.” [Via Roey Horns]

October 05, 2009

(rt) Photography: Red skies, Robo-bama, & more

• Spooky: Dust storm in Australia on the Big Picture. (Cue up The Fixx…) Make sure to check out the interesting crossfades (e.g. image 4) that juxtapose dust-occluded & normal views of their subjects. [Via]
• Great plane-from-above photo (from a blimp over LaGuardia). More images are in the rest of the post.
• Lovely recycled camera lens wrist cuffs. [Via]
• New Strata tool lets you make 3D models using just a camera. Includes Photoshop plug-in for further tweaks.
• President Roboto: Remix of 130 State Department Flickr photos showing the unvarying Obama smile. [Via]
• Focalware, a cool iPhone app to assist in outdoor photography, has been updated to v2.0.

September 24, 2009

(rt) Photography: Astronomy, Architecture, & More

• Free* copy of Lightroom 2! (*with purchase of Leica M9) [Via]
• Awesomely bad engagement photos. [Via]
• Hot spatial action:
  • Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners. (The universe has a weird way of sometimes emulating the look of an airbrushed ’77 Econoline.) [Via]
  • A beautiful B&W from the shiny early days of the space race.
• Buildings in stasis:
  • Beautiful, ethereal architectural photography by Kim Høltermand.
  • Oddly lovely: Photos of abandoned houses in Detroit, now being reclaimed by nature. [Via]
• How do people get wildlife shots like this? Timing, timing, timing–and probably serious prep. (Oh yes–and mice as bait.)
7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments [4]

September 15, 2009

(rt) Photography: Bitchin’ laser portraits, Frankencamera, & more

• Laser backgrounds + Mullets = Bitchin’ 80′s portraits: Laserportraits.net/ [Via]
• PT’ing in one of Saddam’s palaces has to qualify as one of life’s stranger events. Photo essay by Richard Mosse.
• Gaston Batistini captured a nice HDR-ish balloon race photo. (via @kottkedotorg)
• Lightroom tip: You can show color selectively, desaturating all but a selected region. (Note Density=100) (via @LR_Tom)
• Behold the Stanford “Frankencamera.” We’ve been collaborating with Dr. Levoy & team for a while. I’ll try to share more details sometime soon.

September 13, 2009

A Post-Apocalyptic “Where’s Waldo?”

Bruce Haley, whose stirring war photography I’ve mentioned previously, has come up with a novel idea:

I decided to feed the industrial junkies and gamers and sci-fi nuts and add to the dialogue on dead machinery…  so I dumped a ton of photos onto my site that have never been seen before, in a section entitled “The Post-Apocalyptic World,” and also threw a contest into the mix…  It’s sort of a end-of-days “Where’s Waldo?” type of thing: Amidst all of the vast wastelands of rust and abandonment, one can find six people and a dog…  so the first 5 people who find these will get a free copy of my limited-edition portfolio.

Details about the project are in the “Contest 9-9-09” section.

September 12, 2009

(rt) Photography: Motorcycle supermen, Space Shuttles, & more

• Photog Mark Weaver offers up some solid iPhone wallpapers.
• This two-faced Samsung camera features built-in baby-hypnotizer.
• Mentalfloss collects some amazing airplane graveyard pics. [Via]
• NASA’s sharing a beautiful photo of the Space Shuttle blasting off at night.
• Tomatoes, baby. Two hundred & forty dollars worth of puddin–er, tomatoes.
• Percentage of motorcycles getting Supermanned: 100. I love this photo. [Via]

September 11, 2009

Friday Photography: Shots to the Chops & more

• Gonna leave a mark: Howard Schatz captures boxers before & after fights. [Via]
• Damion Berger creates spacey black & whites In The Deep End. [Via]
• Rube Goldberg contraptions, puking skulls, & more populate the photos of Jamie Chung. [Via]
• Light-Test.com provides fun, funky, de-glamorized looks at photographic subjects. [Via]
• Michael Wolf’s Life Behind Glass captures the human habitrails of downtown Chicago. [Via]

September 09, 2009

“Like asking headphones to clean your ears”

Loving a good rant, I thought I’d pass along this bit from my fellow PM/photographer Bryan O’Neil Hughes. Hughes uses a Canon 5D Mk II and loves good camera tech as much as just about anybody. He does not, however, have much patience for gear-for-gear’s-sake, or for money as a replacement for sweat.

You don’t need an accelerometer to hold your camera level…and if you do, you should find a new hobby. That’s like asking headphones to clean your ears.

The problem isn’t software. It isn’t hardware. It’s the shoot-a-million-images-and-hope-to-hell-it-works-out philosophy that people are taking.

Here’s a snippet (repeated a million times when I used to sell high-end photo gear):

• Customer: I want to buy a Hasselblad.
• Me: Sure, we have those… Let me ask you, though: what don’t you like about your current camera?
• Customer: It isn’t sharp enough.
• Me: What sort of things do you shoot?
• Customer: Landscape.
• Me: Do you shoot from a tripod?
• Customer: No.
• Me: Do you own a tripod?
• Customer: No.
• Me: Let’s start there.

…And invariably they’d buy the Hassy. People always want to solve their own laziness with gear (often the wrong gear). I see it with photography, cars… man, I even saw it with skateboarding.

My Mk II has a grid overlay… my F3 had that… but honestly, if you need to lean on that to hold the camera straight… you should probably have your inner ear checked.

– BH

[In a related vein: "If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself"]

September 08, 2009

From Russia with Pix

• Sergey Maximishin takes viewers on a slightly freaky tour of the big country. (I dig the composition of these flying fish.) [Via]
• Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii documented Russia in color a hundred years ago (!).
• You call that a nesting doll? This is a nesting doll. Note the man providing scale. (More images from Mongolia & the Russian border are on The Big Image.)
• I don’t miss winters in Illinois, Boston, or NY–and those are a walk in the park compared to snowfall like this. [Via]

August 27, 2009

(rt) Photography: Badass aircraft, Killer origami, & more

• In flight:
  • As Stu Maschwitz says, “Badass photos of badass aircraft are badass.” Word.
  • Captivating photos of helicopter halos (+ some moving stories). [Via]
• Horse + Hood = High-speed badness. (Many beautiful there pix, too.) [Via]
• Grégoire Alexandre: When Green Screens Attack (And Turn Into Origami)
• Lovely, and crafty, underwater photography. [Via]

• Mad Men season three promo images. Love the color and light balance. [Via]
• Harper’s Bazaar shows models sans makeup or Photoshop. (Seems like a microtrend.) [Via]

August 23, 2009

(rt) Photography: The End of (MPx) War & More

• Megapixel War Is Over (If You Want It): New Canon G11 features 4 MPx fewer than its predecessor. I think that’s great, but what a challenge it must be to market “Now with 35% less resolution!” to average consumers. (via Bryan O’Neil Hughes)
• “Always-on cameras” (of which the new iPhone may have one) = Way cool.
• A MacGyver-style camera ring light for $5? Photojojo tells How to Light With LEDs.
• Huelight.com offers free DNG profiles for Canon, Panasonic, Olympus. (Haven’t tried ‘em & can’t offer eval) (via Eric Chan)
• Photo quote o’ the day: “The best camera is the one you have with you and which has a f/1.4 normal prime.” — Neven Mrgan

August 13, 2009

(rt) Photography: Cranes, hills, & mountains

• Chicago crane operator + photography skills = quite a cool gallery. (via Bill Hughes)
• Beautiful, surreal cinematic compositions from Roy Andersson.
• Marcin Sacha makes absolutely beautiful rolling-hill landscapes. [Via Jason Fried]
• JK Keller crushes mountains with the help of Photoshop + JavaScript [Via]

[Update: Man, it had to happen: Managing the baby 2-4AM = retweeting stuff I'd posted not long ago. Gah... I wasn't kidding about running on fumes. Good catch by Timothy Mackey. --J.]

August 12, 2009

The Longest Way: Great visual storytelling

Christoph Rehage walked 4646km across China, taking daily photos & short videos of himself along the way. Here’s the result (full-screen viewing recommended):

His site seems to be down at the moment, but I’m adding the link in case it comes back to life. See the corresponding Vimeo page for a bit more background. [Via]

August 05, 2009

Wednesday Photography: Fires, OCD, coffee, and more

I have to admit, with a newborn in the house, a 17-month-old on the loose, and rotating sets of grandparents in town, I’m running on fumes when it comes to the blog. Somehow, though, I can’t quite cut myself enough slack to miss a few days, so let me briefly mention a few recent finds (including re-tweets) I’ve found compelling:

• From the Big Picture, Fires Around the Mediterranean
• Crane operator + photography skills = quite a cool gallery [Via Behues]
• Absolutely beautiful rolling-hill landscapes from photographer Marcin Sacha [Via]
• Even regular jellyfish freak me out. I really can’t deal with the giant Japanese suckers featured in National Geographic.
• The Mona Lisa made from cups of coffee [Via]

July 31, 2009

Friday Photography: Cleared for Weird

• I stumbled across this oddity via a simple Flickr search for the word “peanut.” (Gotta love the inexplicable tiny box of Manischewitz!) See photog snailbooty’s photo stream for other curiosities.
• Vincent Bousserez makes similarly tiny, offbeat compositions in his Plastic Life series.
• As for the Monkeyman photo illustrations, you’ll just have to see for yourself. [Via Keith Johnson]