John Nack on Adobe

July 2, 2009

Thursday Photography: CBGB to crazy cheesy

• Fish hover in space in Michael Itkoff's Perch on Ice.
• The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year set features some lovely images, all freely shared. [Via]
• NYC:
  • Martin Sobey's colorful on-street photographic installations punch up the street in front of my old office.
  • A bit further down that street lie the ghosts of CBGB, living on through a panoramic virtual tour.
  • If your camera doesn't make city cops nervous enough, try a riflestock camera mount.
• Extreme cheese-rolling: Guaranteed to end in tears. (And cheese.)

June 28, 2009

Sunday Photography: Playing with Time

• I dig Andrew Curtis's Cinco De Mayo Carnival timelapses (not to mention the infectious soundtrack). He's uploaded this clip and many others as iTunes video podcasts. (Check out Dizzy Driving.) [Via]
• SignalTheorist created a long-exposure capture of a Roomba doing its thing. [Via]
• David Coiffier captured rugby, fire-breathing and more in extreme slow-mo.
• Gorgeousness ensuses in The Colors Of Light Art Performance Photography.

June 10, 2009

Wednesday Photography: Memescenery & more

• The world without us:
  • Danish decor of the 70s as seen through, um... cinema. (It's all well cropped, safe for work.)
  • Memescenery: Andy Baio says, "I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video."
  • Richard Perry's Made in NYC project deliberately omits people, finding "little bits of elegance and beauty in the objects themselves." [Via]
• Bespoke objects:
  • One can now order custom sonogram cufflinks. You know, I'd kind of like to buy things like this off the rack. Walking through a mall once, I was tempted to buy a t-shirt featuring a little girl (who clearly couldn't be mine) with the caption "Daddy's Favorite." I knew people would fail to know I was kidding, though. [Via]
  • You can similarly order Photo Shower Curtains. Noting the price ($149-199), Bryan Hughes remarked, "Someone’s cleaning up...and it isn’t the person in the shower ;-)." [Via]

May 31, 2009

Sunday Photography: Thomas Hawk, LR tips, & more

• The Lightroom team welcomed photographer/blogger Thomas Hawk to Adobe SJ earlier this month. Thomas has detailed his visit & has posted some great images. (Lightroom/Camera Raw engineer Zalman Stern jokes, "Cool article, but if things really looked that saturated, I'd bring a Geiger counter to work to make sure they weren't radioactive.")
• Lightroom tips:
  • Shooting tethered with the Canon EOS 1Ds MkIII [Via Tom Hogarty]
  • Watermarking with Lightroom and LR2/Mogrify
• It's too easy to view a single great photo in isolation, rather than as part of a process. Art Wolfe walks through his process & outtakes, narrating the starts & stops on the way to getting a great result. [Via]
• Joel Saget captured a terrific composition of a French aerobatic team. The image is part of a solid set from the Wall St. Journal.
• Photojojo rounds up an excellent set of The Best Free Photos on the Web.

May 28, 2009

Keepin' it real... hostile

• Flickr user 9000 just doesn't like marketers. At all.
• What possible search terms would produce this stock photo? [Via Mark Coleran]

May 26, 2009

Tuesday Photography: Fantasies, histories, & more

• Mark Holthusen makes some fantastic (in every sense) photo-illustrations. [Via Scott Evans]
• I'm digging Christopher Lamarca's diptychs & custom palettes. [Via]
• Shinichi Maruyama captures the structure & texture of fluids bursting.
• Photos That Changed The World delivers a compendium of just what it says. [Via]

May 23, 2009

Saturday Photography: Iced wings, giant faces, & more

• I tried to blog Stephen Mallon's fascinating images of the salvage of Flight 1549 (the one that landed in New York's Hudson River), but they got yanked offline during the accident investigation. Now they're back. [Via]
• Street artist Mentalgassi puts giant faces onto public objects in Berlin. Fellow artist JR does something similar in Rio.
• Spirit of '76: Sveinn Birkir has been collecting images from 1976, his birth year. [Via]
• Larry Lars has recreated his photography room in Lego. [Via]
• To keep it safe, maybe you should make your camera ugly. (I saw this approach a lot with bikes in NY. Can't say it ever saved mine there, though.) [Via]
• Cool idea for a photography business card: let the card work as a pinhole camera.

May 20, 2009

Brief HDR bits

• In talking to photographers recently, we've heard that clients are requesting "that HDR look"--i.e. the somewhat wonky, overprocessed look often seen in places like the Flickr HDR pool. With that look in mind, Russell Brown shows how to create "faux HDR" from one image using Camera Raw/Lightroom.


• FDR (Full Dynamic Range) Tools have released an updated version of FDRCompressor, their tonemapping plugin for CS2, CS3 and CS4. The tool works on both HDR (32-bit) and individual JPEG and raw files. [Via Manfred Schömann]


• Planet Photoshop posts a reminder about Bridge CS4's ability to auto-stack components of an HDR image, then have Photoshop batch-merge the files.

May 15, 2009

Tilt-shifting in AIR; Slick, simple 3D

• Developer Art & Mobile has created TiltShift Generator, a simple little Flash app that lets you selectively blur parts of an image, simulating very shallow depth of field. You can download the app for use outside your browser, too. [Via Rich Townsend]
• Box Shot 3D is a very simple, very easy-to-use little app for mapping images onto common 3D objects (boxes, bottles, business cards, etc.), then rendering a nicely lit result; see screenshots. I downloaded a copy and got good results in a minute or two.

Photos from Above: Punking satellites & more

• Dig Alex MacLean's Dinghies Clustered Around Dock.
• Real-Life Dead Pixel in Google Earth: Helmut Smits "somehow came upon the decision to burn an almost 3-foot by 3-foot square of ash into the grass somewhere out there in the world in the name of art in public places. When it's viewed from 1 kilometer above the ground (3,280 feet), it looks just like a dead pixel on your monitor at home." [Via]
• Hubert Blanz's splintered airport collages make me think of Charles Demuth's Figure 5 in Gold.
• Rod Wynne-Powell recently posted a large gallery showing London from above.

May 2, 2009

Weekend photography: Dimmed Earth, glowing frogs, & more

• The Big Picture features a terrific overview of Earth Hour 2009, offering the ability to click photos to fade between lit & unlit versions of the same subject.
• James Snyder spotted a Cuban tree frog that ate a Christmas tree light.
• Lesa Snyder King offers tips on creating a Smart Object-based photo template--i.e. a PSD with effects applied, into which you can insert other photos.
• Level & Tap "seeks to showcase photographers and their work in a way that will sell prints." John Gruber points out Sara Flemming's work. I'm partial to Trey Hill's abstraction.
• Jason Hawkes captures human landscapes from above. [Via]
• "The best camera is the one that's with you," says Chase Jarvis. He's got an entire portfolio of work captured using only his iPhone's camera & processed on the device. [Via]

April 29, 2009

Photoshop gets stuffed, goes Presidential

• MySuiteStuff.com offers a whole set of Creative Suite-style icons as pillows. "These 12"x12" stuffed icons are 100% hand-made with love from the softest, fluffiest fleece there is," they say. Presumably you're only a Sharpie away from upgrading the CS3 look to CS4. [Via]
• Tom Hogarty points out that the images posted on Flickr by White House photographer Pete Souza are tagged as having been edited with Photoshop CS4 for Mac. Earlier this year, Pete was using CS3, so we're happy to see that he's moved up to CS4. (Back in January we looked into sending him a complementary upgrade, but due to some touchiness about giving gifts to government employees, we had to punt on that idea.)

April 2, 2009

Hipster cam idea o' the day

Bryan O'Neil Hughes and I were looking at the very raw guts of a prototype camera today--a bunch of naked circuit boards, wires, etc. Someone mentioned the mass of the whole contraption, and Bryan said, "Looks like it's the size of a VHS tape."

This got me thinking: How about making a hipster camera that's actually housed inside the shell of a VHS cassette? Turning the big wheels could flip through photos or adjust camera settings. C'mon, you know some goateed weasel would just love taking off-axis shots using a ginormous plastic case. For bonus points, kit it out with a greasy little lens & call the results "artsy."

[See also: Retro brick cell phone]

[Update: Close enough! [Via Hughes]]

March 18, 2009

Wednesday Photography: Skinless cams, LED interrotrons, & more

• Stephen Shankland captured some cool images of the Sony A900 without its skin. [Via]
• You will talk, slave! Check out this LED-based photo accessory/interrogation device. [Via]
• The ever-clever Photojojo features the novel Wrap-Around-the-Corner Frame.
• Think the iPod Shuffle is wee? It's got nothing on these cams.
• Being kind of a gas bag, I appreciate these vintage Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.

March 14, 2009

Saturday Photography: Beautiful bugs, great actors, and more

• File under Tiny, Lovely: Smashing Magazine hosts 25 Beautiful Examples Of Macro Photography.
• National Geographic, unsurprisingly, has been offering up all kinds of great photography lately:
  • The gallery of vanishing sea ice is a beautiful bummer. (Will I ever take a shot as cool as that first seal image from Paul Nicklen? Thermally, maybe.)
  • The magazine's photography contest winners show off solid work. For more good stuff see the 2008 International Photography Contest winners.
• Paolo Pellegrin got intimate access to photograph great performers (Penélope Cruz, Robert Downey Jr., and others) from the past year.
• I Found Your Camera hopes to reunite lost cameras & memory cards with their owners. [Via]

March 12, 2009

Thursday Photography: DIY cyborg eyeballs & more

• So, you say you're into photography. Yeah, but did you ever shoot out your eye and then jam a tiny camera into the socket? Yeah, I didn't *think* so.
• Looking down:
  • Andreas Gefeller looks at the world from above. [Via]
  • Ready for Google Earth fly-ofers, street artist JR brings huge faces to slums around the world. Here's more background on the work.
• Branislav Kropilak finds austere, graphical beauty in parking garages.
• Finding new in the old:
  • Relleno De Mono remixes old photos in a most custom way.
  • Turn a Scrabble Board into a Picture Frame.

March 11, 2009

HDR panoramas demoed Thursday at SF PUG

"In just over 2 months," reports Photoshop PM Zorana Gee, the San Francisco Photoshop User Group has "already gotten 380 members!" Tomorrow they'll host a talk by photographer Lisa Yimm:

A photographer and VFX artist with a BFA in Photography, Lisa is the co-founder of HDR-VFX, based in Nyack, NY. Last year, she spent over 7 months on the road shooting HDR panorama-based virtual tours of Lexus Dealships across the US.

Things get underway at the Adobe SF office around 7pm. Here are the full details.

March 6, 2009

Sweep the leg, Johnny

This week Sony introduced the $499 HX1 camera, notable as it offers a very cool "Sweep Panorama Mode." This new mode lets you "click and drag" with the camera, pressing and holding the shutter button while pivoting up to 224 degrees horizontally and 154 degrees vertically. The camera itself stitches the images together on the fly, producing images with a max resolution of 7152×1080. Check out this demo video (low res but effective). A number of journalists I met on Tuesday at PMA were clearly impressed.

Coincidentally, I was just about to talk about using Photoshop to do something similar. Our little champ turned one on Monday, so we threw a birthday party on the weekend. My 24-70mm lens wasn't nearly wide enough to let me capture the folks gathered around the table, so I fired off a quick series of frames, then tossed them from Lightroom to Photoshop for automatic stitching. (Here's before & after.)

Photoshop's Auto-Blend algorithm handled the moving people well overall, and in the one area that needed touching up, I was able to simply paint on the auto-generated layer masks to modify the blending. I was really pleased with the results.

So, it's great to see cameras doing more automatically, but don't forget that you've already got some interesting power at your disposal. (Bridge offers the same single-step hand-off to Photoshop for processing: choose Tools->Photoshop->Photomerge.)

March 4, 2009

Crashing surf, iPhone photo tools, & more

• Clark Little is a man willing to suffer for his craft, taking a tremendous pounding from the surf in order to capture some spectacular images. [Via Winston Hendrickson]
• iPhone photo tools:
  • QuadCamera, according to Macworld, "allows you to take four quick shots in succession with the iPhone camera, producing a single image divided into four quadrants." [Via]
  • Our friend John Warner has released Focalware, a tool that calculates sun and moon position for a given location and date. "An example of Focalware's practical use: a photographer is assigned to shoot in New York City on March 15, 2009 and the subject building faces 195 degrees but the photographer prefers raking light at an angle of 130 degrees. Focalware instantly computes a time of 10:28 a.m. with a sun elevation of 35 degrees as the time for the desired conditions."
• Is Congress really thinking of mandating that cellphone cameras emit a sound? Yes, really, it appears.
• Ab Alto:
  • Earth, observed features photos of the Earth from NASA's The Earth Observatory. [Via]
  • Google Earth has apparently exposed a U.S. drone base in Pakistan.

February 22, 2009

Sunday Photography: Simplicity, squalor, and scares

• I love the beautiful simplicity--in concept and in execution--of this timelapse video of a cross country flight at night. It makes me think of our own Julieanne Kost's Window Seat project.
• Slices of life:
  • Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen's The Places We Live documents life in slums around the world. [Via]
  • English Russia features intensely intricate carved windows in Siberia.
• Lingering Obamarama:
  • Photographer Lisa Jack has shared her college photos of a 20-year-old Barack Obama. [Via]
  • NY Times street fashion photog Bill Cunningham attended the inauguration & narrates his captures. The photography itself doesn't stir me, yet I found the piece an engaging little compilation. [Via]

• Upsetting stylings:
  • Wayne Martin Belger makes the scariest cameras ever. [Via]
  • Don't ever use your photos to make a ski mask, or pretty soon you're going to be telling someone to "rub the lotion on its skin."
  • The Coraline Web site lets you make button-eyed portraits by uploading & manipulating photos. [Via]

February 21, 2009

New HDR camera, Lightroom tips

• Ricoh's new, compact CX1 camera offers "a dynamic range double shot mode." This mode "takes two images in succession with different exposures and then combines them automatically to present the best of both images." DPReview offers additional details. Very cool. It's rare that I need much more than the 8MP offered by my slightly aged SLR, but I'd always like less noise and greater dynamic range. I'd love a future cam that could shoot high resolution when desired, but if necessary shoot with lower res/broader dynamic range. [Via Jerry Harris]
• HDRsoft, makers of the popular Photomatix Pro, offer a Lightroom export plug-in. They've just posted a step-by-step tutorial showing how to send multiple images from LR to Photomatix for processing, then automatically pull the results back into your LR library. (Note the little "Next" arrow up top for navigating to subsequent pages.) [Via Tom Hogarty]
• If you're looking for a detailed primer on the whole topic of dynamic range, check out The Online Photographer's thorough write-up.

February 11, 2009

Bryan Hughes shares ideas, tips

My fellow Photoshop PM/Best Man/unindicted co-conspirator* Bryan O'Neil Hughes has posted a guest entry on Scott Kelby's blog.  In it Bryan talks about some of his favorite photographic enhancements in Photoshop CS4, and he shows off some new ideas for using the new Auto-Blend Layers options to combine flash/no-flash images.

*And, any minute now, father.  Something is in the water, with Photoshop PM babies a go-go (four due in the next five months, Miles H. being first in the queue).  You know we're doing it just for the cute test files...

February 8, 2009

Gut-busting photos & more

• Puking up mud isn't half as scary as some of the attire seen in the Tough Guy Challenge.
• Interesting structures:
  • Dig Kim Høltermand's ghostly images of the Hyllie Water Tower. [Via]
  • Patrick Boland's Cockatoo Island Project, images of a shipyard in Sydney Harbour [Via]
• From the NY Times:
  • One in 8 Million chronicles New York characters in photos and sound.
  • The paper features a small slideshow of Mary Ellen Mark's work photographing on the sets of more than 100 movies. See the accompanying article for more.
  • I'm late in mentioning it, but their 2008: The Year in Photos is well worth a look.
• Funky angles:
  • Flipbac promises to let you "shoot from the hip," adding a little extension to your camera's LCD. [Via]
  • The Super-Secret Spy Lens is "basically a periscope that attaches your SLR's zoom lens... you can shoot left, right, up, or down, all while appearing to shoot straight ahead." [Via]

January 28, 2009

Photos from 100 meters to 1mm

• Oh man: Jason Lee makes me feel bad as a photographer, a Photoshopper, and a dad. He's posted some terrific images of his girls, many turned into photo illustrations. [Via Tobias Hoellrich]
• Dimensions:
  • The 100-meter photo: To create We're All Gonna Die, Simon Hoegsberg set up shop in a single spot on Berlin's Warschauer Strasse, capturing 178 people in all. [Via Tony Patricelli]
  • In 1mm a day, Chris Hornbecker set himself a challenge: "Take a brand new photo each day. Beginning with 14mm, each day I zoom the lens by 1 millimeter and force myself to use that focal length to shoot and post a photo before going to sleep that night." [Via]
• Shimon Attie projects images from the past (e.g. from Berlin's pre-WWII Jewish quarter) onto the current versions of those scenes, then photographs the results.
• Hot avian action:
  • Jim Frink captured an image of a gynandromorph cardinal (half male and half female). [Via]
  • Rick Lieder's "Aerial Acrobats" are a flapping flock of flying fury*. [Via]

*Alliteration credits go to the wonderful Calef Brown.

January 25, 2009

Sunday Photography: A free utility, giant photo, & more

• Inaugural bits:
  • David Bergman shows how created a 1,474-megapixel photo during the inauguration.
  • The Washington Post stitched together thousands of inaugural photos into one zoomable mosaic. [Via]
  • Chuck Kennedy used a remote-controlled 5D Mk II to capture a unique low-angle shot of the swearing-in. [Via John Cornicello]
• I just used Jeffrey Friedl's groovy (and free) little “Export to Facebook” Lightroom Plugin, and it worked without a hitch. Thanks, Jeffrey. [Via Eric Scouten]
• PhotoCliches.com is full of, well, just that. (Who knew the Lynndie England pose was so popular?)
• Viva Cheap:
  • Photojojo shows how to Make Your Own 3D Camera for $15 or Less.  (Somewhere Russell Brown is buying superglue.)
  • Who says the iPhone's camera sucks? Let's see your D3X do this, tough guy! [Via]
• Photographers Roth & Ramberg show how they recreated Antarctica in April with the help of a leaf blower, among other things. [Via]

• People In Commercial Having More Fun With Camera Than Humanly Possible, says the Onion. (“They just high-fived, for Christ's sake.")

January 21, 2009

Mo'naugural

At pain of reaching complete burnout on this subject...

• As usual, The Big Picture hosts some excellent galleries:
  • Inaugural Preparations features some great, little-seen details.  I love these fragmented Obama eyes, plus this image of the Lego capitol. [Update: Reuters features more images of the Lego scene.]
  • The inauguration gallery includes images of people watching the show from Sadr City to Mexico City.
• The Newseum hosts hundreds of front pages documenting the events. [Via Marc Pawliger]
• Pranksters in SF have changed Bush St. to Obama St.  (I remember hearing after the 2000 election that people had changed "Bush" to "Puppet.")
• Updates:
  • CNN hosts a zoomable version of the satellite image I mentioned yesterday.
  • The NYT has added overlay text identifying most of the people in the zoomable photo of the swearing-in.  That strikes me as a much more useful application of the technology.
    

January 20, 2009

Hail to the Chief, from space

"For those about to Barack... We salute you!"

• The GeoEye-1 satellite took a high-res photo of the inaugural proceedings from 423 miles overhead, whipping by at 17,000 mph. Here's a version of the whole thing (but not full-res).
• The NYT hosts a zoomable photo (via Flash) showing the new president addressing the crowd.  (You know you can create things just like this straight out of Photoshop, right? File->Export->Zoomify.) [Via Ken Lawson]
• CNN features a 360-degree panorama showing the stand before the ceremony. [Via Adam Pratt]

January 18, 2009

Interesting Inaugural bits from the NYT

• The New York Times features an interactive photography portfolio called Obama's People, offering portraits of key staffers. The audio commentary (via the link below the photos) is worth a listen, describing the subjects' choices in what to bring to the shoot (e.g. a chocolate chip cookie for David Axelrod).  The separate making-of piece features Kathy Ryan talking about how shooting digitally has enhanced the collaborative aspects--and maybe the time pressures--of portraiture.  [Update: Ellis Vener points out a hilarious "Real Behind-the-Scenes" take on the shoot, followed by some good discussion in the comments.  "Blue Steel..."]

• The paper (that term seems more than a little outmoded, doesn't it?) also features an excellent overview of the Inauguration Day goings-on via a 3D-rendered map and timeline.

• Looking back, another piece depicts the changing configuration of the White House.

I'd love to be in DC in person, but that map triggers a memory of having gotten stuck on the Metro under the Potomac on a sweltering July 4 years ago.  With Tuesday temperatures due to hover around freezing, maybe I'm okay with TV after all.

January 15, 2009

Obama via Photoshop

Photographer Pete Souza has captured what's billed as the first digital presidential portrait.  Folks have nerded out and parsed the EXIF metadata, learning that the image came from a Canon 5D Mark II and was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS3.  NPR features a piece on Souza's history photographing presidents. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Adam Pratt, and Klaasjan Tukker]

Quick-thinking Photoshop team member Adam Jerugim has shot Pete a note and is working on setting him up with a copy of CS4 (hey, we can't have the White House lagging in technology).  We just have to make sure we're not breaking any rules that would get him in trouble as a government employee.  (It's not Jan. 20 yet!)

January 8, 2009

Browser in a camera: I think it's serious

Years ago, my bizarre friend Higgins told me and another buddy that his girlfriend had mysteriously dumped him.  He was visibly shaken and seemed truly down in the dumps.  He said, "I... I just don't get it.  The whole thing inspired me to write a song.  Do you guys want to hear it?"  Well sure, of course we did.  "Okay, here goes," he said.  Closing his eyes, clearing his throat, he leaned back and paused.  And then, bursting into a Pete Townshend air-guitar windmill, and doing his best Axl Rose devil-woman wail, he screeched,

"EhWHAAAAAaaaaaaAAAattt??"

That was is, end of song. :-)

Ever since then we've "busted out the 'Whatstrument*'" for bizarre news.  The arrival of the Sony Cybershot G3, World's First Camera You Can Surf the Web On, seems worthy.

Okay, maybe it's not that weird.  As Gizmodo puts it, "Sony's seeing this more as a flexible, fast way to dump and check your photos and videos online, direct from your camera, not so much as a way to compulsively watch YouTube videos or read Gizmodo, even though that's exactly what we want, and will try to do, practicalities aside."

I dig the instant sharing possibilities, though I'd explicitly keep them out of my wife's hands: she's all for uploading before I've had time to crop, retouch, and otherwise noodle around.  [Via Jerry Harris]

*Other suggested air-instrumental possibilities for the song:  Trombone, sax, harmonica, sextant, astrolabe, and finger snap (Beatnik edition).

December 28, 2008

The Big Picture's Best of '08

December 22, 2008

Photographic Miscellaney

• Photographer Filip Dujardin challenges the viewer with some bizarre buildings, "combin[ing] photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures." [Via]
• Photojojo offers up the very cool bottle cap tripod for $10. (On a somewhat related note, David Pogue points out "It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp--the place where the lampshade screws on--are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod.") They also offer a rather nifty doodle frame.

• School pictures, with attitude promise an alternative to "puppy mill" portraiture. [Via Keith Johnson]
• An uncredited photographer captured some amazing shots of a diving kingfisher. (Most thrilling chilled!)

December 12, 2008

Friday Photos: Infernos, skeletons, and incontinent cameras

• En fuego:
  • "Holy Crap!!" Photographer Sandy Huffaker talks about what happened when a fighter jet crashed near his house this week. [Via]
  • Peep Casper Hedberg's fiery image from Kenya.
• Ends of the line:
  • Amazing anthropology: Mike Hettwer helps document what remains of the Green Sahara.
  • Listverse.com rounds up 10 Fascinating Last Pictures Taken.
• Photography crap, almost literally: I always think of the Japanese as such a polite bunch that this camera ad was more than a little surprising.

December 5, 2008

Friday Photos: Sketchy Swedes, bodybuilders, and more

• Things one presumably doesn't see every day:
  • Martin Schoeller has captured a series of portraits of women bodybuilders. (From Kottke: "If you cover up the faces with your hands, they look like men in bikini tops and if you cover up the bodies, meth addicts.") [Via]
  • Fancy a round-up of Swedish 1970s dance band photos? [Via Jeff Tranberry, who says, "The real challenge is how to fit it into a relevant post! It’d be a good one for rickrolling some readers."]

• Moments in time:
  • Barbara Probst's Split Second project captures the same moment from multiple perspectives.
  • Game face: Robbie Cooper's Immersion project aims to photograph facial expressions of people as they play video games, surf the web, and watch TV. The corresponding video isn't super flattering. [Via]

• Fans of mid-century design/photography goodness should peep a visual remembrance of Lou Dorfsman.

November 30, 2008

Details on Camera Raw 5.2 enhancements

Photographer & author Shangara Singh points out some helpful links to Adobe documentation on the new features in Camera Raw 5.2:

• Targeted Adjustment Tool
• Camera Profiles
• Snapshots
• Output sharpening
• New keyboard shortcuts

Side note: I love that it’s now possible to add one’s own notes to help entries. The Targeted Adjustment Tool entry refers repeatedly to the “TAT Tool,” which is as annoying as saying “SAT test” or “PIN number.” I’ve added a comment correcting the terminology. Pedants rejoice. ;-)

November 29, 2008

Saturday Photos

• Mugs:
  • Martin Schoeller's Close Up is “A magnetic succession of stripped-down faces, straightforward portraits of the very famous and absolutely unknown.”
  • Helen Marshall’s Big Picture (talk about truth in advertising) is comprised of 112, 896 photos of people's faces. [Via]

• Isolation:
  • Kim Høltermand creates spare, bleak, often dreamlike compositions from sometimes banal subject matter. [Via]
  • In a somewhat similar vein, Andy Taylor Smith captures the sculptural quality of overpasses and other large structures. (The Veer gallery seems to be acting up, but you can also see images on Andy’s own site.) [Via]
• Vanity Fair has posted a collection of the 25 Best News Photos. (Fair warning: Some are tough to see.) [Via]

November 28, 2008

Tilt-shift flava

"I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick," writes Jason Kottke.  No, but it's worth a try. :-)

• Video:
  • Keith Loutit used tilt-shift lenses to make beachgoers look like ants--trippy and cool.
  • Christopher Prouse points out--and demonstrates--that it's possible to fake the effect using Lens Blur in Photoshop Extended on video. (Here's how to do it on stills.)
• It would be fun to try doing the same with Alien Skin's forthcoming Bokeh plug-in, which promises more realistic physical blur simulations (see video). [Via Marc Pawliger]
• Check out Fenway Park as a scale model. [Via]
• No tilt-shift necessary: some of the structures in these images from Yemen already look miniature.
• If you still haven't gotten your fill, check out Smashing Magazine's roundup of 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography. [Via]
  

November 12, 2008

Science Friday: From Mexican caves to the Sun

• NatGeo features a photo gallery from inside Mexico's breathtaking Cave of Crystals. In an accompanying video, writer Neil Shea and photographer Carsten Peter discuss the extreme heat & other challenges involved in working in the cave.
• Disturbances in the Force: The NYT features an interesting article and captivating photo gallery of "The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film"--using photography to capture gas dynamics.
• Micro:
  • The paper also features a narrated gallery of the Nikon Small World competition winners.  If I could paint something as beautiful as these marine diatoms, I'd be a happy guy.
  • Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow has figured out how to create abstract backgrounds with a cheap children's microscope.
• Heavenly:
  • The Big Picture features revealing shots of the Sun. [Via Ivan Cavero Belaunde]
  • Air & Space Magazine features a set of the 50 Greatest NASA Photos.
  • Okay, I'm straying now, but if those are up your alley, I'll bet the Rocket-Bye-Baby will be, too.
• What's not to dig about a protein sculpture inspired by Vitruvian Man?
• Aquatic:
  • The "Piglet squid" makes me suspect that scientists may be punking us, just to see whether we're paying attention.
  • 7 minutes in the Galapagos offers some gorgeous moving images, including the rather amazing whale shark at the end.

November 10, 2008

Monday Photography: Super cellphone cams & more

• We keep hearing that cellphone cameras are going to shake up the world, and Sony Ericsson aims to do just that with an 8.1-megapixel sensor in their latest phone (er, cam?). To drive home they point, they’re shooting the ad campaign with the phone.
• Look, ma: no hands (or legs). Or, I'm sorry to say, life, thanks to that stunt. More on Indian Larry is on his site. [Via Bill & Bryan Hughes]
• Marc Pawliger passed along a collection of Pictures Taken At Just The Right Angle.
• Check out Idee's beautiful Multicolr search tool, able to return Flickr results based on the hues you select. [Via]
• David Hockney's site features a small gallery of his photo collages.

November 6, 2008

Photo safari in SF on Saturday

Photojojo is a great photo blog, full of interesting bits (e.g. today's bit on taking ghostly pictures with your scanner).  As it happens, they're hosting a photo safari this Saturday in San Francisco:

(1) You bring a camera (it doesn't matter what kind) and some friends (2) There's a cool place or event or a tour for you to take pictures (3) We go to a bar and you can put your photos in a slideshow to win prizes from us or sponsors. (4) You are happy and fulfilled.  Cost: Free.

 

Adobe is sponsoring the event, and the photo whose work the group votes best will win some groovy software.  Sounds like a fun way to spend a Saturday.

November 2, 2008

CS4: What's in it for Photographers?

More…

October 4, 2008

Saturday Photography: Bumblebees to balsa wood

• Our friend Mike Hill features a great image from Brazil on his site's landing page.
• I'm digging the ghostly, muted tones of Michael Kenna's work.  Much more is on his site.
• The lovely Moontime gallery of David Stubbs whets my appetite to learn about low-light imaging. [Via]
• Last flight of the bumblebee: Jozsef L. Szentpeteri has captured some amazing images of bee-eating birds. [Via]
• Ever wanted to build a Canon out of balsa wood?  Me neither, but it's still kinda cool to see. [Via]
• Nothing if not dedicated, Dan Hanna's posted 17 years of daily self-portraits as a video.  (The spinning motion is a little sick-making.) [Via]
• Big photo printing + raingear = the most aggro umbrella ever (well, short of those umbrella-sword/gun combos, anyway).

September 22, 2008

Monday Photography: Bright lights, big pixels

• From the Big Picture:
  • I've never thought of London as a great-looking city, but dang if Jason Hawkes' London from Above doesn't offer a fresh take.
  • TBP has posted a beautiful set on Observing Ramadan.  These two images are my favorites.
• The NYT features a nice interactive panorama from yesterday's final game at Yankee Stadium.
• [Emit low whistle] Boy, cameras are good these days.  The Online Photographer makes that point in a really concise way.
• "Strobist Jet Pack" or "Dignity-B-Gone" machine?  You decide.
• A group in Israel is teaching photography to the blind. [Via Adam Pratt]
• In "The Process-Enacted Mutoscope," 987 Polaroids make up a (short) original film.
• Blowed-up pretty: Beautiful toner explosion. [Via]

September 17, 2008

Photos in motion; DNG sprouts wheels

• As you probably don't need me to tell you, Canon has just announced the 5D Mark II, complete with the ability to record HD-resolution (1080p) video.  This follows on the heels of Nikon's D90, itself capable of 720p video capture.  My initial thought was that DSLRs capturing video is kind of like dogs walking on their hind legs--not done well (e.g. no autofocus), though interesting to see done at all.  Nikon's sample videos, however, have gotten me thinking about the possibilities, and film effects pro Stu Maschwitz sees lots of promise.  (He calls Canon's decision to shoot at 30fps instead of at 24 "almost unbearable," however.)


• On the other end of the tech spectrum, I'm a big fan of the little Flip video camera.  Now a guy named Reid Gershbein has given a tilt-shift appearance (how, he doesn't say) to footage from the wee cam.  Hmm--this may motivate me to try applying Lens Blur as a Smart Filter on video using Photoshop Extended.


• Ikonoskop's rather potent-looking, weirdly named A-cam dII is, it would appear, first to support DNG for motion capture. "The buzz at IBC is DNG," they write, "so people seem to understand and start to follow our lead in DNG together with Adobe." [Via Scott Sheppard]


• Interesting video of an SLR: Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion. [Via Zalman Stern]


• Photojojo's got some ideas on making flipbooks from your video content.
  

Political illustrations

• Photographer Jill Greenberg is under fire for doing a cover shoot with John McCain for The Atlantic Monthly, then using the outtakes to create harshly anti-McCain photo illustrations.  The magazine has disavowed her actions, and Mark Tucker asks a number of questions (while linking to more commentary).  Greenberg has posted her images at manipulator.com.
• On a much lighter note, I'd vote Tauntaun any time.  (Not so much actual Hope, though.) [Update: Also, McCain gets the Frank Miller treatment. (Via Steven Johnson)]
  

September 9, 2008

Colliding hadrons, sinking subways, & more

• Casas de sciencia:
  • The Big Picture features some gorgeous images of the Large Hadron Collider, nearly ready to create a black hole and swallow the world as we know it.  (The dorkiness of their little fire-fighting vehicle could rupture spacetime, too.)
  • Seed shows eerily deserted labs at night.
• Image manipulation isn't just for political candidates anymore: even the weather isn't safe.
• No fakery needed: Environmental Graffiti hosts the 30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth.
• The British Library's Bodies of Knowledge online exhibition is loaded with great imagery, exploring how the body has been viewed through history. [Via]
• The NYT reports on a deep-sea home for subway cars.  I wonder whether global warming will someday make the idea of deliberately flooding subways seem quaint.

September 3, 2008

Wednesday Photography: X-rays, fire, and ice

• From the WTF Dept: Li Wei makes some eyepopping images. [Via]
• Roasting here in Vegas makes chillaxin' with Nele Azevedo's ice people sculptures look pretty cool.
• I'm not sure whether to file this under photography or illustration, but Josh Poehlein combines the two by scratching into the surface of his prints.  Inspired by this, Photojojo shows how to "vandalize your photos in the name of art."
• The poles of photo tech:
  • Extreme X-Rays Photography: Nick Veasey is "currently building a $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls which will let him see through almost anything." [Via]
  • Miroslav Tichy makes painterly images with his cardboard cameras.
• Images of daily life in Afghanistan make me feel very privileged--and very soft.

September 1, 2008

Olympic photography

• As you'd expect, The Big Picture offers up a sampling of terrific Olympics photos.
• TotallyCrap offers their own collection, juxtaposing some excellent bits with bizarre loss of dignity.  Feeling overwhelmed, I haven't even gotten to check out parts 2 and 3. [Via]
• Vincent Laforet talks about shooting world records from above.

August 31, 2008

Flickr-flavored craftiness

I'm always intrigued by what people can produce by mining & transforming a big image set:

• Symmetry Explorer gathers Flickr search results, then displays them as mirrored pairs.  The results are surprisingly cool.
• Long-time Flickr hacker Krazydad lets you make your own kaleidoscopes from images. [Via]
• Wolfenflickr is Castle Wolfenstein in Flash, with your photos projected onto the walls. [Via]

On non-Flickr but somewhat similar fronts:

• Yearbook Yourself places your face in high school photos from decades past.  I've gotten poor results so far, though Jason Kottke fared better.
• Put a Porsche in your driveway [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
  

August 29, 2008

A pair of panos: Obama & Olympics

The NY Times has been making more use of interactive panoramas these days, offering a new take on storytelling & dropping the viewer into context in a way that's hard to match with still images alone:

• Gabriel Dance and Raymond McCrea Jones captured the electrified atmosphere preceding Barack Obama's speech last night in Denver.
• A pano taken from the 10-meter platform in Beijing's Water Cube features narration from American diver Thomas Finchum.  (Now you know: the Cube is, technically speaking, "ginormous.")  Photo credits go to Bedel Saget, Mike Schmidt, and Gabriel Dance.
  

August 21, 2008

Photoshop ephemera

• PopPhoto's Debbie Grossman paid a visit to the Adobe Mothership a couple of weeks ago, getting a grand tour from Bryan Hughes & chatting with modest brainiacs like Jeff Chien.  Showing tons of daring, she underwent Kelly Castro's black & white process--the first woman to do so.  ("That’s because it makes men look tough and women look like hell," she writes.)  [Related/previous: Jeff Schewe's Visit to Adobe.]
• At Siggraph last week, Zorana Gee encountered the guys from OnLatte ("You got it right: we make industrial robot machines that do nothing but pretty up tasty beverages") and had them put the Photoshop icon on foam (image two).
• Photoshop: Helping The Ugly Since 1988. [Spied by Tom Hogarty on the Caltrain yesterday]
• Slate presents Politishop.  (Is it finally time for us to introduce Brushy the Talking Airbrush ("Hey, pardner, it looks like you're tryin' to retouch a photo")?  [Via Adam Jerugim]
• This isn't Photoshop-specific, but I noticed that Adobe.com has added a slick new search widget to the site.  Groovy, as previously I'd resorted to using Google (typing "site:http://www.adobe.com" plus a search term into the search field).
  

August 18, 2008

PS in NYT, crafty imaging tech, & more

• In "I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop," Alex Williams of the NY Times writes about the pervasiveness of image manipulation in our culture.  Regarding the manipulation of family photos, I found this bit interesting:

  In India, she said, it is a tradition to cut-and-paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs as a gesture of respect and inclusion. "Everyone understands that it’s not a trick," she said. "That’s the nature of the photograph. It's a Western sense of reality that what is in front of the lens has to be true."

• Seemingly everyone ever is forwarding me this cool demo showing ideas for enhancing video using still images.  I mentioned the work in June, but it's worth noting that the developers have been collaborating with Adobe folks.
• The You Suck At Photoshop crew has been posting new bits, involving the Baldwin brothers, among many other things.
  

August 17, 2008

Photo finish

Normally I don't go for single-serving link posts, but this sequence of Michael Phelps' amazing photo finish is too good not to share. [Via]

And, what the heck, here's some spectacular imagery from the Olympics opening ceremony. (It's as if Julie Taymor got ahold of the Clone Stamp...) Also, what's with creepy Olympic M&M's?

August 16, 2008

10,000-year prints, vintage rides, & more

• The Big Picture features some terrific images of this month's total solar eclipse.
• Edward Burtynsky, known for chronicling humans' impact on the planet, is experimenting with carbon transfer printing in hopes of making photographic prints that last 10,000 years.
• GM Progress on Parade comes from a time when Detroit design set the pace for the world.
• Alexander Hassenstein captured a cool long-exposure image of women's fencing, part of a larger set.
• More from the big bits/pixels front: peep Peter Carr's 42-foot-wide HDR panorama,
• PhotoCalc is "a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure." [Via Fergus Hammond]
• Martin Evening provides a helpful write-up on how auto-masking works in Lightroom's local correction brushes.

August 14, 2008

Wednesday Photography: Giant HDR, sea creatures, & more

• National Geographic has posted a beautiful gallery of translucent sea creatures, thoughtfully offering desktop wallpaper-sized images. [Via]
• Tipping the scale at more than 8 gigabytes, Brian Lawler's ginormous HDR photo mural came together in Photoshop, yielding a 19-foot-long printout and a 9-foot-high neon sign.
• Public policy:
  • The NYT headline encapsulates a controversy about Iraq war coverage: 4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images.
  • The creepy Cameraheads project in Seattle protests the ubiquitous surveillance of public spaces.
• Photojojo has some neat ideas on DIY aerial photography--largely involving one of those telescoping sticks used for paint rolling.
• Now this is some memorable use of motion blur.

August 4, 2008

The DNG Profile Editor: What's it all about?

When we look back at how things changed with the arrival of Lightroom 2, I think the new DNG Profile Editor (presently kind of a sleeper technology) will stand out as transformative.  The technology was largely developed by Eric Chan, a bright young guy on the Camera Raw team (and aspiring photographer).  I've always found his explanations lucid and highly readable, so I'm delighted that he's written a guest blog post on the subject.  Enjoy.  --J.

Hi everyone. My name is Eric Chan and I've been a Computer Scientist at Adobe since February, which doesn't exactly explain how I ended up on John Nack's blog. [People often wonder how they ended up here...  --J.] Well, John kindly invited me to share some thoughts on the new color profiles for Lightroom 2 and Camera Raw 4.5... "Whoa, hold on there!" you say, "New profiles? What new profiles? I didn't see any new profiles!" Ahh, that's because the new profiles are currently undergoing a public beta and aren't shipping directly with LR 2 and CR 4.5. Instead, they're available as a separate download from the Adobe Labs web site. Why a public beta? Simply because there have been many changes under the hood, and we want to give folks a chance to try the new profiles and provide feedback before we bake them for final release.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let me backtrack and give you the big picture first. As it turns out, there's quite a bit more going on here than just a new set of color profiles.

More…

August 3, 2008

Sunday Photos: White Russians, the Moon, & more

• Alex Prager mixes mid-century looks with some weird modern twists in her work. On Kitsune Noir Bobby Solomon points out similarities with Philippe Halsman's wild Dali Atomicus.
• Make mine a White Russian: I love this shot of a Belarusian commando shrouded in smoke.
• Hello, moon: Laurent Laveder uses forced perspective to capture some beautiful Moon Adventures. [Via]
• Take a good look at my crazy, genocidal face: the Faces of Evil collection invites viewers to stare down some of the most infamous figures of the 20th century.  "The pictures are 1,80m x 2,30m, high-resolution digital images that expose every tiny detail of their faces." [Via]
• Ten years after I remember sticking her into a comp, the "Everywhere Girl" (stock photo superstar) has a blog.
• Tangential: I think this is way better than any iPhone.

July 25, 2008

Where It's At (turntables, microphone optional)

GPS-related photo bits:

• Bridge geotagger is a free script that "allows you to inspect, set and/or edit GPS data embedded in photos using a Google Maps interface. It uses the embedded Opera HTML engine in Bridge to display Google Maps."  Very cool, though developer Aldo Hoeben describes it as more technology demo than a full-fledged tool.
• Firing up the Exposure Flickr-browsing app on my iPhone the other day, I discovered the nearest geotagged image is of "¡Chavelas!," described as "A delicious blend of Modelo, lime juice and a shot of tequila in a frozen pimp chalice!"  Thank you, intercontinental technology network, for making my neighborhood seem cool for a minute.
• Previously: Did you know that Lightroom can call up a Google map to show the coordinates in your images?  So, for that matter, can Photoshop Elements.
• What about images that lack coordinates?  Can a computer accurately guess where something was shot?  That's the goal of Carnegie Mellon's IM2GPS project.  Check out this CNET story for a good summary. [Via Doug Nelson]

Off to look for neighborhood pimp chalices on a Friday eve,

J.

July 23, 2008

War, suicide, fire... and t-shirts

Mid-week photography:

• Death & destruction:
  • Photojournalist Warren Zinn reflects on the photo that made Army medic Joseph Dwyer famous, and wonders whether it contributed to the troubled vet's death last month.
  • Kottke features the disarmingly placid image Robert Wiles captured immediately after Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building in 1947.  (Warhol later made it into a print.)
  • The Big Picture features some spectacular wildfire imagery from recent California blazes.
• Find giclée paseé? Try printing on grass instead.  (Just don't ask us to soft-proof it.)  [Via Doug Nelson]
• Beware sketchy, sketchy photogs.
• I never saw them while living in snowy Illinois, Boston, or NY, but CA roads are full of stick-on "Botts dots."  They're now available as part of a complete breakfast.
• Make mine intermediated: Photo nation.

July 12, 2008

Charging bulls, lasered Radiohead, and more

• Jumping the shark: predictable and sad.  Jumping several hundred pounds of very PO'd livestock: much more spectacular.  (Interestingly, the man-gores-bull shot hides behind a "this may be offensive" curtain, whereas the bull-gores-man shots don't.)
• In Curse of the Black Gold, Ed Kashi captures the pain, degredation, and occasional beauty wrought by oil extraction in Nigeria. (The tiny bottom nav bar offers more info about each image.)
• I used to carry around a GI Joe head that I'd photograph in all kinds of situations (say, the middle of Death Valley). I named him Sgt. Goldbug, after the little Richard Scarry creation who'd hide somewhere on every page.  Witold Riedel is up to similar tricks with The Bear In Repose.
• Getty editors are getting set to start approaching Flickr users, offering to license their images.  PDN offers some perspective on what it all means. [Via Geoff Scott]
• The new Radiohead video was shot without using cameras--instead employing LIDAR (laser radar).  I see only stills so far, but I look forward to the finished product.
• Lightroom:
  • Fashion photographer Martin Evening takes readers inside the photo shoot for his forthcoming Lightroom 2 book.
  • Michael Clark offers a great tip for quick Rank n' Advance in Lightroom (via the Caps Lock key).
• Josh Derr captured a shot of some great clouds over NYC. [Via]

iPhone photo apps: Floodgates open

I'm having fun slacking er, conducting important digital imaging research, starting to explore photography-oriented iPhone apps:

• The free PangeaVR offers amazingly smooth panorama display and navigation.
• Exposure (paid or ad-supported) promises to let you put "2 billion photos in your pocket," letting you browse Flickr from your handheld.  Groovy bonus point: it'll show you images geotagged to locations near you.
• Clowdy promises easy & free photoblogging.

Unfortunately for the capture-and-upload scenario, the camera in the iPhone is pretty rudimentary.  Doesn't it seem like someone should build a wireless hookup between the phone & dedicated cameras?  That way you could, for example, put an Eye-Fi memory card into your camera of choice, then upload shots via the phone in your pocket?  Maybe that's a solution in search of a problem, though, or maybe it would just kill your battery.

If you come across any particularly good or noteworthy apps, feel free to post your experiences here.

July 11, 2008

*Now* we can panic

Per yesterday's news...

(Found here) [Via Jacqueline Floyd]

July 10, 2008

Skyrockets in flight, Photoshop delight

Gonna grab my missiles/Gonna hold them tight...

Iran's state media is under fire for apparently digitally adding another missile to a photo of an artillery test.  I like the first comment on the NYT story:  "Clearly someone thought 4 missiles would be 33% more scary than three… or they thought it really tied the composition together, which, I have to say, it actually does." [Via everyone ever]

Now, excuse me while we get back to work making it even easier for various Great Satans to fake you out.  (Actually, a number of Adobe folks have been collaborating with news agencies on ways to offer greater image authentication, and PBS hosts a 13-minute Nova segment focusing on Dr. Hany Farid & discussing his work with Adobe.)

Updates:

• Wonkette refers to "the Iranian Revolutionary WoW Photoshoppers Guild." Nice. [Via Russell Brady]
• I think the Iranian peeps were inspired by the Chinese news agency.
• Gizmodo challenges readers "to use Photoshop to create some sweet Iranian propaganda, showing their technological advancements that are heretofore unseen." [Via Fergus Hammond]

PS--To everyone who now has that awful song in their heads, you're welcome.

July 7, 2008

Sawed cameras, free falls, and more

• Wired hosts an interesting Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras.
• Rapid decents:
  • The Big Picture offers a collection of diving photos (taken at a recent US Olympic qualifying event) unlike any I've seen before.
  • In Kabul in Transition, photojournalist Tyler Hicks shows diving platforms used for a far darker purpose.
• Mitchell Feinberg makes unique art using food.  Many more examples are on his site.
• 22-year-old photographer Kevin Connolly was born legless and chronicles the world from his unique perspective.  CNET has his story.
• In Land of the Free, Steve Schofield portrays sci-fi costumers, exploring how people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday. [Via]
• Slices in time:
  • "Barbara Probst’s diptych and triptych photos," says the Morning News, "taken at the same time from different cameras and points of view, offer multiple versions of a split second."  It's a cool project, well worth a look. [Via]
  • The Immodesty multicam system aims to "create an affordable platform which enable all kinds of temporal-spatial experimentation."  In some ways it's a poor-man's tool for getting the Matrix "bullet time" effect, as videos on their site show, but the output can be deployed in more interactive ways, too.
• Reuters hosts some striking images of a Chilean volcanic eruption.

July 5, 2008

Weekend Photography: HDR to RFK

• Is Full-Frame the Coming Thing, or is it just a way for uninformed gearheads to show off?  Longtime photography observer Mike Johnston posts some interesting thoughts on the subject.
• High dynamic range:
  • Our friend Ben Willmore has been traveling the country in his bus, and he's collected the best of his work at The Best of Ben.
  • Reaktor 1 is a cool, interactive, HDR panorama from Jann Lipka.
  • Norwegian photog Klaus Nordby captured a beautiful fjord sunrise, then posted the high-res image via Photoshop CS3's Zoomify export feature.
• History:
  • On June 8, 1968, Look photographer Paul Fusco rode inside the funeral train that carried Robert Kennedy's body from New York to Washington to be buried beside his brother at Arlington.  On the NY Times site he narrates a slideshow of the work, capturing the Americans who lined the route.  The NYT carries remembrances from that time, and more shots (albeit smaller) are here.  [Via]
  • The Commons, Flickr's project to host public-domain images, is getting beefed up with the help of The Smithsonian.  The institution added 800 photographs from its collection of 13 million images, and 1,200 more will be added in coming months, according to CNET.  Images shared on the Commons can be tagged by anyone.
  • The Smithsonian posts a small set of turn-of-the-20th-century color autochromes.  Kottke has more info & links to more early color photography.
• Moving in Stereo:
  • Yosemite in 3D:The Smithsonian hosts a story & slideshow of 19th-century stereoscopic images from Carleton Watkins. [Via]
  • Cursive Buildings hosts a collection of vintage stereoscopic photos made into weirdly undulating GIFs.
• DIY:
  • Grab these downloadable PDF plans to create a stylish paper pinhole camera.
  • MAKE shows how to turn a video camera into a lensless microscope. [Via]
  • Build your own LEGO color scanner. [Via Trevor Morris]  This seems far more benign than LEGO fruit snacks.  ("I would love to know what sick bastard at Kellogg's came up with this genius idea..." [Via]

July 3, 2008

JNack: Public Enemy

This is your PM...

This is your PM after being busted following an all-night meth bender...

Lightroom team member Kelly Castro has been continuing his "Exteriors" project (see the whole collection), photographing people at Adobe & elsewhere.  On Monday he got me into the team's on-site photo studio for a shoot*.  If you're into this style, check out the info that Kelly & Bryan O'Neil Hughes put together on generating killer B&W using Photoshop + Lightroom.  (Kelly also created a color version of my portrait, in which I have the healthy glow of a Barbecue Pringle.)

In other photo news:

• Peep Eddie Murphy's giant head on the interstate.  (I'd like to see versions for Barry Bonds & Ted Kennedy, but I guess it would be redundant.) [Via]
• Don't I know you from the cinematographer's party?  No Country for Raising Arizona juxtaposes scenes from two very different Coen Bros. films. [Via]
• Not just a weird Photoshop job: Chinese cops on Segways (with very tiny guns). [Via] [Update: Engadget is having a caption contest for the photo. ("Don't make me lean forward and come over there...")]

*These little photo projects tend to turn funky, ranging from foolish to beatific to vainglorious. (Take that, Eddie Murphy.)

June 30, 2008

Punking tourist pix

Here's a bit of brilliance for your Monday: "The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards."  In other words, it watches for the flash of someone else's camera & projects an image onto what they're photographing.  Check it out in action. [Via]

On a related note, Wired surveys cameras shaped like guns, cameras on guns, and more. [Via Ellis Vener] For other projected guerilla fun, see previous about Applied Autonomy's "Streetwriter."

June 24, 2008

Photos: Smoke, fire, floods, & weirdoes

• People as smoke: the simple tricks of long exposure produce a ghostly presence.  [Via Marc Pawliger]
• The Big Picture showcases the wrath of nature:
  • I used to play soccer against the guys from Cedar Rapids, IA, and I hate seeing the city submerged.  Scroll down as the photography gets more and more striking.
  • Smoke from the northern California fires cast a bizarre light over the Bay Area last week.  Apparently the T1000 got caught in the flames.
• Vintage photo manipulation:
  • Wired New York features a wealth of early photos of the city. Among them you can find at least one example of rudimentary (yet surprisingly decent) photo manipulation.
  • Sam Haskins talks a bit about how composite photos were made in the time before Photoshop and shows an example. "At the time there was zero retouching after the event. Now of course I have the luxury of scanning the transparency to clean and refine the image in Photoshop - God bless its digital socks." [Via]
• Doing their own thing:
  • Phillip Toledano has created a photo essay of phone sex operators--a surprisingly articulate, diverse, and self-aware crew.  (Fair warning: The photos are tame, but some of the blurbs beneath them are fairly frank.) [Via]
  • Return of the ’70s Weirdos features 1978 & 2008 photos of a group of early Microsoft employees.  [Via]  Referring to aging dudes working for MSFT these days, a friend of mine calls the shuttle bus from Seattle to Redmond "The Ponytail Express."
  • You never know what you'll find via the American Gothic tag on Flickr. [Via]

June 21, 2008

Saturday Science: Great photos of Earth, Mars, & beyond

Boston.com's new feature The Big Picture dispenses with traditional peanut-sized Web photos and showcases great images in the news.  Site designer/developer/writer/photo editor Alan Taylor talks about his brainchild and how it came to be. [Via]  Lately they've been harvesting the best photos that billions of tax dollars can buy:

• The Sky, From Above features gorgeous shots of the Space Shuttle at liftoff, as well as of thunderstorms over the American Midwest and more.  [Via]
• In Martian Skies, you can view panoramas from Mars and watch dust devils skittering across the Martian landscape.
• The site also features a retrospective of some of the great images sent back home by the Cassini space probe over the past four years. [Via]

On related notes, apparently the Mars Phoenix rover is broadcasting via Twitter.  Also, NASA's new space suit design looks rather trim & buff.  I kind of miss the human Jiffy Pop bag look, though.

June 11, 2008

DestroyFlickr! (in a nice way)

The curiously named DestroyFlickr has nothing to do with destruction & everything to do with browsing your images via a desktop application.  Specifically, it's an Adobe AIR app (essentially a Flash SWF running on the desktop, outside the browser) that lets you navigate your photostream through an attractive, minimalist gray interface.  According to the developer,

With the support of both drag and drop uploading and downloading, posting and saving photos is done in one easy motion. Now you can download the highest resolution version of a photo without having to see it first—just drag a thumbnail to the download menu and the download begins. [Via]

Smoove.

May 30, 2008

Friday photos: Earthquakes, birds, war, & more

• Slate features an excellent photo essay from Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, Wars: Chechnya and Iraq.  The subject is heavy, but his sardonic narration is well worth a listen.
• Happening to have a camera on hand during a terrible interruption yielded this rather amazing earthquake wedding photo gallery. [Via]
• The NYT profiles photographer Nikola Tamindzic.  "He uses long exposures, then shakes the camera while the shutter is still open, causing colors to blur and lights to streak. 'I'm not recording what is really happening, but it's something like what the brain is seeing late at night, especially if maybe you're drunk or very excited,' he said." [Via]   On his own site he offers one of the more punishing self portaits I've ever seen.
• Ernesto Scott teaches photography near my old home town & offers lots of lovely bird shots.
• Raw in the raw: camera tech nerds (or just the curious) may enjoy Looking at a Real NEF Bayer Pattern. [Via Dave Polaschek]
• Photographer Jay Maisel is offering more intensive NYC-based photography workshops (July 14-18, Sept. 15-19, and Nov. 17-21).  Details are on his site.

May 26, 2008

Fire on the Mountain

As you may have heard, for the last few days large fires have been burning in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Adobe HQ.  Quite a few of our colleagues live in or over the hills, but fortunately no one on the Photoshop team has (as far as I know) had to evacuate.  Bryan Hughes didn't sleep well on Thursday night, I know, with the fire half a mile from his house (shoes on, cats in hand).

I mention it because on my way to an air show yesterday, I snaked through the mountains via some back roads and was surprised to see a very large and imposing Chinook helicopter barreling towards our car, on its way to reload water from the pond right behind me.  I pulled over and popped off a few frames that may be of interest to other aviation nerds.  Included in the set is the swift, violent, helicopter-borne death of a white Jeep Cherokee.  (Yeah, it blowed up real goood!)  Plumes of smoke from the mountains are visible in a few of the shots.

As for other fire-related photography, I honestly can't compete with things like this.

May 25, 2008

Sunday photos: Tintypes, timelapses, and more

• The NYT showcases Tintype Buckaroos.  Robb Kendrick uses archaic gear to capture the enduring lifestyle of cowboys.  "When I’m doing tintypes, everything has to be driving, not flying — all the stuff for the developing is fairly flammable," he explains.  An interactive feature shows the work while providing narration from the photographer & the article's author.
• Pioneering photojournalist (and ICP founder) Cornell Capa passed away on Friday at age 90.  The NYT features a selection of his photos.  I particularly like this one of 7,000 white-shirted Ford engineers.
• Rob Galbraith points out some great photos in MSNBC's weekly photo gallery.  I love the frog-hopping image, though it took me a moment to notice the frog. [Via]
• Matteo Ferrari is doing an interesting little project showing before & after shots of people who drive the same car for a long time. [Via]
• How does one actually measure the temperature of light?  James Duncan Davidson explains.

• Timelapses:
  • The New Yorker features a hard-to-watch timelapse video of a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours. [Via]
  • A new Canon TV spot is composed mostly of stills shot by EOS-1D Mark III cameras.  (Ironically, the ad is for the lower-end Canon Rebel.)
  • CHDK (the Canon Hacker's Development Kit) is a set of firmware enhancements for a wide range of Canon cameras.  Scripts "provide functionality like motion-sensing photography (which reportedly works for lightning strikes) and unlimited interval time-lapse photography." [Via Ashish Mukharji]

May 24, 2008

Miscellaneous interestingness

New fatherhood -> sleep deprivation (yeah, still) -> abandoning any pretense of categorization.  That said, here are a few interesting bits I've seen lately:

• The New Yorker reports on the world of high-end retouching in "Pixel Perfect -- Pascal Dangin’s virtual reality." (Hey, someone uses the Smudge tool!) [Via Ivan Cavero Belaunde, Clare McLean, Gary Cosimini, Claiborne Brown, and seemingly everyone else I know ;-)]
• The Times Online features "Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera" [Via Jeffrey Warnock]
• As I've said before, Logo design = Bullet magnetism.  Now "OGC unveils new logo to red faces," says the Telegraph.  Er, um, yes.  (But hey, it's no worse than the "Lisa Simpson" London Olympics logo.)   [Via Lori Grunin]
• "Oh man... two words: Photoshop Filter," says Adobe's Chris Arkenberg.  Behold Man Babies.

May 18, 2008

Take your camera to Tasmania--for free

Photographer Mikkel Aaland, organizer of the recent Lightroom Adventure down under, passed along some attractive info:

Follow in the footsteps of the Adobe Lightroom Adventure Photographers or create your own adventure on the beautiful island of Tasmania!  Here is your chance to win a trip for two to experience the natural beauty of Tasmania first hand.

 

Roundtrip economy airfare for two on Qantas Airways from one of their North American gateways - Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York City (JFK) - to the island of Tasmania. Two nights’ accommodation in Tasmania.

What do you have to do?  Just fill out a simple form & you're good to go.  Good luck & happy inverted shooting.

I've been meaning to blog about the Adventure for quite a while, but my draft full-o'-links was lost to my hard drive crash.  Therefore I'll keep it simple for now and just recommend checking out the beautiful galleries of images captured by the participants.  At the moment I'm grooving on some work from NatGeo photographer Bruce Dale.  (What is this thing?)

May 10, 2008

Photoshop Express now does Flickr

Woot, there it is!  The subject line pretty much says it all: you can now browse and edit your photos stored on Flickr right from within Photoshop Express.  I've just given the integration a whirl and, yep, it works like a charm.  Similar hooks are available for photos stored on Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa.  (I've been uploading just to my own site since becoming, uh, photographically obsessed with one little subject, but maybe this will draw me back to using a service as well.)

As long as we're on the subject, what's your take on the importance of integrating services like Flickr into Photoshop?  There's an obvious appeal in being able to upload right from Lightroom, but should we make it possible to browse & open images on Photoshop.com & co. right from within Photoshop?  (Let's imagine we could drop in an optional little Flash widget as a browser palette/panel, or maybe enable browsing via Adobe Bridge.)  What about being able to save edits back to the service?  Just curious.

May 7, 2008

All Ansel, all the time

A number of interesting Ansel Adams-related bits have popped up recently:

• The NYT features an interactive gallery in which Adams's former assistant Andrea Stillman discusses the back story on nine of his images.  The story of the naming of "Mt. Ansel Adams" is particularly cool.
• In what he calls "The most amazing 24 hours of my photo career," photographer Marc Silber trekked around Yosemite with Robert Scoble & Adams's son Michael.  Afterward they visited the photographer's darkroom.
• Frederick Johnson from the Lightroom team joined these guys on the visit.  "Michael is amazing," he writes.  "Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him 'sir...'"  Frederick posted some photos and short video clips in his Flickr stream.  And oh yeah: if you've ever wondered why Photoshop has a lollypop-shaped Dodge Tool (you know, this thing), here's why.
  

May 3, 2008

DNG submitted to the ISO

"The DNG format was supposed to be the future, an open standard for RAW files that every manufacturer could use," writes Digital Photo Pro's Dave Willis.  "Here’s a look at how the revolution has panned out."  Dave talks with my boss Kevin Connor about the problem that gave rise to DNG:

"Our philosophy on this from the beginning, sort of my personal belief," continues Connor, "is that eventually the proprietary system is just going to break. When we came out with the first camera RAW plug-in, we were supporting around 25 cameras. We’re now supporting more than 175 cameras—in other words, more than 175 different file formats. And when you’re talking about images, people don’t want to keep those images for just five or 10 years. Professional photographers want to know those images will be fine for 50 years—100 years—from now. If you think about the rate of new-camera introductions, how many new file formats will there be? A hundred thousand? It just seems that it’s going to reach a point when it becomes unmanageable."

It's true that we haven't yet seen big camera vendors like Canon and Nikon adopt DNG, though maybe we'll see more progress now that DNG has been submitted to the ISO as a vendor-independent standard.  In any case, the format is providing real-world benefits today:

• Converting to DNG saves disk space and eliminates the need to use separate sidecar files for raw settings.  (I knocked 1.5GB off the 7GB of photos from our wedding photographer.)
• Because of these benefits, customer feedback indicates that 40% of Lightroom users are converting to DNG on import.  (It's a one-click set-and-forget option that's also available in Adobe Bridge CS3.)
• DNG lets Adobe support new cameras in older versions of Camera Raw without having to constantly revise and test those versions.  Photographers and use the free DNG Converter (Win | Mac) to process their proprietary raw images to DNG.  The upshot is that we can spend our time building good new functionality instead of updating old software.

[Via]

April 30, 2008

Earth from on high

Photographer Michael Poliza* has produced a stunning collection of aerial photos, Eyes Over Africa.  He says, "The images came mostly from an 8-week helicopter expedition from Hamburg to Cape Town.  Lots of zickzacking over this amazing continent.  The Lightroom beta & LR 1.0 was the tool to work my way thru the 30,000 images."  You can browse more than 200 of the images on his site via Flash (also available in smaller HTML form, both uploaded from LR).  Beautiful zickzacking indeed.

A few months ago Michael dropped by Adobe to visit with Tom Hogarty and me.  He brought with him his "newest baby," Eyes Over Africa XXL.  He's not kidding about that suffix:  "It will be the largest coffee table book ever that was purely shot digitally. Almost 50 (!) lbs and definitely huge."  Just for fun, he used his iPhone to call up a satellite image of the same coordinates displayed on one of the pages, then laid the phone on the book.  For further weirdness points, I then snapped a couple of shots of the layout using my iPhone.  (At this point there was a great disturbance in the Force.)

For more Earth from above:

• National Geographic rounds up some great stuff in Through the Eyes of the Condor.
• In honor of Earth Day, NASA offered their Top 10 Views of Earth.

* Coincidentally the elder brother of GoLive founder Andreas Poliza

April 25, 2008

Old Glory, pourable meat, & more

• Dewbacks in the car park; I think it's serious...  Cedric Delsaux makes extremely nice images of Star Wars characters in the real world.  (Click the "Series" link in the top navigation bar.) [Via]
• Slate features an interesting history on Stanley Forman's The Soiling of Old Glory, a wrenching and iconic image from the civil rights struggle in Boston. (Why they use a blurry low-res JPEG, I don't know, but here's a somewhat crisper version.)
• "It should never, ever be possible to pour meat..."  This sage wisdom came to me from a fellow high schooler who'd gone to work at the Dubuque meat packing plant for the summer.  I thought of it upon seeing this photo series of food that takes the shape of its container. [Via]
• Andri Pol makes contrails erupt from a man's head.  (Can't buy into it being more fun than Photoshop, though.)
• Peep Wayne Levin's underwater B&W. [Via]
  

April 24, 2008

Tips on using the Lightroom 2 beta

• Image sharpness is a good thing... except when it isn't.  Martin Evening shows how to achieve a "'pseudo' diffusion printing technique" using the Lightroom 2.0 beta's ability to go negative on the Clarity slider.
• To even out exposures across multiple images, Lightroom features a "Match Total Exposures" command. Sean McCormack explains it in this brief video. (I'd listen just for the soothing brogue. ;-))
• Lightroom lets you create virtual copies of a single image, applying different settings to each.  New in the LR2 beta is the ability to stack virtual copies as layers of a PSD file, letting you composite and blend them in Photoshop. Mucho groovio!
• Lightroom marketing manager Frederick V. Johnson toted his camera to the Golden Gate Bridge in order to demonstrate handing off a panorama from Lightroom to Photoshop.
• Ken Milburn touches on the improved Auto adjustment algorithms in LR2.
  

April 19, 2008

Shocking photography (literally) & more

• Adobe TV went live last week.  It features a profile of Adobe's Angela Drury, an accomplished photographer who moonlights as a product manager.  Look for the Photographer channel on Adobe TV for tons more.
• I'm shocked, shocked to report on The Stunning Camera.  Bryan O'Neil Hughes, Photoshop PM and camera store veteran, reports "experimenting" with this kind of thing in his past life: "We even rigged one up to the door knob of the men’s room.  Then someone had the bright idea of running the capacitors in parallel and well, it worked but it 'snake-bit' him....essentially the current arced right through his thumb leaving two seared holes.  Seriously." [Via Joe Ault]
• That chintzy look: “When I looked at the wallpaper and the wallpaper looked at me, we instantly fell in love."
• On an occasionally related note, Thierry Bouët chronicles people in their beds (click "au lit" in the top nav bar). [Via]
• Jan Sochor is a Czech-born freelance photographer who splits his time between Europe and South America.[Via]
• You might not guess it from the title, but this NYT photo essay on how manhole covers are made in India is really interesting.

April 7, 2008

Remembering photographer Dith Pran

Photojournalist and humanitarian Dith Pran, survivor of and witness to Cambodia's "Killing Fields" period, passed away last week.  The NY Times, for which Mr. Dith reported with his friend and colleague Sid Schanberg, features a remembrance of his life, along with a selection of his photos.  Perhaps most interesting, though, is the "Last Word" video feature in which Dith speaks about his life and the need to remain vigilant lest the horrors he witnessed be repeated.  I found the feature to be six minutes very well spent.

[Update: On a related note, see the NPPA's story Four Photojournalists Killed During Vietnam War Come Home For Burial.  [Via]]

March 30, 2008

A great digital imaging project honors the fallen

Photographer Peter Krogh (author of the excellent The DAM Book, the Rapid Fixer extension for Bridge, and more) recently completed an ambitious & enormous digital imaging project: photographing all 58,256 names listed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, enabling the creation of an interactive online version of the wall.  By stitching together some 1,494 digital images into a 400,000 pixel by 12,500 pixel monster, Peter & colleague Darren Higgins were able to help create a Flash-based presentation that enables you to search for names, read servicemen's details, and add notes and photos to the wall.

The presentation site features some behind-the-scenes production info, but figuring there was more to the story, I asked Peter for details.  He kindly provided them in this article's extended entry.  Read on for more.

More…

March 20, 2008

Photoshop + Lightroom = Killer B&W

One of my favorite things about working on the Photoshop team is that we get to build a product people actually want to use when they leave work.  That means that lots of the engineers, QE folks, marketroids, and others are avid photographers, and the halls of the floor are lined with their work.

Recently, every time I've walked by the office of Kelly Castro from the Lightroom team, I've noticed really striking black & white portraits on his monitors.  Knowing that my friend & fellow Photoshop PM Bryan O'Neil Hughes had recently co-authored a great book covering B&W in Photoshop and Lightroom, I suggested he touch base with Kelly to learn more about the way he combines the two products.  Here's his report. --J.

More…

March 17, 2008

Photographic coolness: Miniature worlds & more

• New camera technology can detect the amount of blood and water in a vehicle, enabling the fuzz to bust carpool lane violators. [Via]
• Scott Kelby shows how to get a cool, gritty look in Camera Raw/Lightroom + Photoshop.
• The world of the small:
  • Lori Nix builds incredibly detailed tabletop worlds and photographs them.  Love this little Zeppelin.  She gives a behind-the-scenes tour on Cool Hunting. [Via]
  • Martin Amm's captured an amazing shot of a dew-covered bug. [Via]
  • Kodak says they've shrunk CMOS sensors, squeezing 5 megapixels onto a 1.4 micron device.  Meanwhile Sony's new DSC-W300 brings 13.6 megapixels to point-and-shoots.
• Digital SLRs seem to have an inferiority complex, adding features found on compact cameras.  First they got going with live preview (e.g. Sony's autofocus-friendly version), and now they're considering movie mode.
• "My pencil is very big and hard."  Ahem.  Photojojo has a cool idea for making your own photo pencils.
• Robert Rezabek's Blackr JavaScript bookmarklet hides everything on a Flickr photo page except for the pictures. [Via]
• Leica has launched a rich, immersive Flash experience on their site.
• Can the iPhone be a pro photo accessory?  Yep; Ben Long shows how, using iLevel software.
  

March 9, 2008

Tips for HDR in Photoshop & Lightroom

• Colin Smith of PhotoshopCafe.com has posted a tutorial on creating high dynamic range images using Photoshop, then tone mapping them using Photoshop's built-in tools as well as HDRSoft's Photomatix plug-in for Photoshop.  Scroll all the way down for a cool theater shot Colin created using these techniques.
• Over on LightroomNews, Sean McCormack covers LR/Enfuse, Timothy Armes' project to integrate the open-source Enfuse blending program right into Lightroom.  LR/Enfuse is available from Timothy's site & is supported by user donations.

On a slightly related note, if the topic of digital dynamic range is up your alley, you might want to check out Stu Maschwitz's detailed experiments with video gear.

March 7, 2008

Friday Photos: Slam dunks to Zeppelin

• Slate features a Magnum collection of photos from Afghanistan. I find this one especially weirdly compelling.
• Photography via Flash:
  • Phi Slamma Jamma: USA Today uses Flash + burst photography to give a better look at the latest NBA slam dunk contest. [Via]
  • Randy Bacon showcases his work using some interesting Flash transitions.
• The MacGyver chronicles:
  • Found Photography shows how to build your own tilt-shift lens using, among other things, an old bike innertube. [Via]
  • In a similar vein, you can build a homemade bellows kit for $25.
  • You can build your own Nikon geotagger for under $100.  Side effects may include lower back pain and loss of dignity. (Hopefully cams with built-in geotagging are truly right around the corner).
• Photographers who script:
  • I'm super late in mentioning it, but Ben Long has posted v3.6 of his handy--and free--set of Photoshop Automator Actions.
  • Joe Lencioni has posted Smart Image Resizer, "a ridiculously easy-to-use PHP script for resizing images the smart way."
• Vintage:
  • Blast from the past: Giant ear trumpets, no Photoshop required.
  • Photographer Ted Harvey shot Led Zeppelin in '72, but his photos never saw the light of day.  Now, some 35 years later, he's taking them on tour to raise money at Rock Photo Aid.  [Via Max Ferguson]

February 23, 2008

Of Eyeballs & iHoles

Apparently Canon is developing an Iris Registration Mode that will enable photographers to use their eyeballs to form a kind of digital fingerprint for their images.  Hmm... the tech sounds cool (well, provided it works better than the fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad), but I'm not sure how it helps secure photographers' rights.

What people want--and can't have, as I've noted previously--is the ability to embed copyright data in images that are both easily readable and secure.  Iris scanning doesn't address the fact that if you can edit the pixels of an image, you can get around copyright data in the image (through copy and paste to a new file, if nothing else).  And for all the talk of wanting secure metadata, I don't see much use of the Digimarc technology that's been bundled in Photoshop for ~10 years (allowing copyright to be subtly encoded into the pixels themselves), nor do I hear of many photographers passing around their images as secure PDFs (which offer 128-bit encryption, among other things).  So, unless I'm missing something (and please shout out some enlightenment if so), iris scanning doesn't seem to change the game too much, at least as regards downstream image protection.  [Via Steve Weiss]

On a lighter eye-related note, check out Scot Hampton's iHole--the camera made from an iPhone box.

February 21, 2008

Mama don't take my Polaroids away

News about the demise of Polaroid film production has pulled a number of interesting items out of the woodwork:

• Eames + Cramps + Cams: Check out this demo film of the Polaroid SX-70 made by famous furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames, but inexplicably set the music of The Cramps.  Weirder still, it all kind of works. [Via]
• "The late cinematographer Jamie Livingston, who died at age 41 in 1997," writes Mike Johnston, "left an archive of almost 6,000 Polaroid SX-70 shots, taken one per day (with only minor lapses) for 18 years."  You can browse the archive here.
• David Friedman would like to see a Polaroid-style digital picture frame, complete with dry-erase area for jotting notes.  [Via]
• "Polaroid made me the photographer I am today": Photographer Ctein reminisces about the format's importance in his artistic development.
• We recently met with some photogs doing a great project using large-format Polaroids.  Once they post images publicly I'll pass along the news.

One more photo-nostagia tip--this time for Kodak--this clip from Mad Men shows a pitch for the original slide carousel.

February 17, 2008

Digital imaging in, and of, space

• Is there a sculpture of a Man on Mars?  Not really, but the illusion is cool.  Of course, anthropomorphic stone formations are also found closer to home.
• Virgin Galactic has unveiled the brilliant Burt Rutan's elegant SpaceShipTwo.  Here's more info on the efforts. [Via]
• Bring on the nuclear tricycles! Air&Space Mag features alternative lunar vehicles that didn't quite make the cut. [Via]
• CNET talks about lightning strikes on Venus, as well as how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has helped explain bizarre Mars textures using stereoscopic imaging.  The also point out the dusty Mars rover finding evidence of water.
• The Hubble recently captured a double Einstein ring.  An Einstein ring occurs when light from one body is deflected into a ring by another body, such as a black hole.  In this case, the effect required three galaxies to be perfectly aligned. [Via]
• Scientists have now turned up a smaller version of our solar system using "a trick of Einsteinian gravity called microlensing."
• On a level I can understand more directly, dig this Solar System typography from Christopher David Ryan. [Via]
• The NYT reports on amateur "satellite spotters" who track the motion of satellites & share their findings on the Net. [Via]
• MSNBC's has posted their top space photos of the year, while National Geographic has shared their top science images of the year.
  

February 13, 2008

Helmut Newton, the death of Polaroid, and more

• Mike Johnston shares a number of interesting thoughts on recent photographic news.  Talking about those huge zoom lenses, he says, "[W]hat people are really interested in is who can buy the biggest, baddest, most expensive status symbol in the form of massive glass. Plus, the narrowed field of view of the smaller sensor has now come into direct conflict with the preferred status symbol in sensors, so-called "full-frame" (i.e., 35mm size). We're back to the best of both worlds in terms of one-upsmanship: the people with the biggest sensors also need the biggest lenses. Perfect."
• James Danziger has posted a short, funny, and salty interview with the late Helmut Newton:
  • Q: Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?
  • A: Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class. [Via]
• You've probably heard that Polaroid film production is reaching its end.  One can, however, convert a Polaroid cam to digital [Via], and while the film stocks last they lend themselves to painterly manipulation. [Via Ashish Mukharji]
• I'm sure my folks in Illinois can relate to this beautiful ice.  Certain things I'm happy to observe from afar. [Via]
• Storm chaser Jim Reed risks life, limb, and gear to get some amazing shots, cataloged in his book. [Via]
• Image database Covering Photography is billed as "a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design." [Via]
• I'm late in posting it, but I enjoyed this unusual photo of Sen. John Edwards on the campaign trail. [Via]
• Dan Heller's blog covers the business of photography.

February 11, 2008

Moments in time: Frozen Grand Central & more

Playing with our sense of time:

• Improv Everywhere recently staged some captivating performance art in NYC's Grand Central Station, in which 207 people froze in place for five minutes.  I'd love to see a time lapse view of the happening.  [Via]
• IKEA makes superb use of slow-mo video in this new interactive catalog.  The Flash UI lets you drag the image to change angles or change rooms.  Motionographer offers some comments.
  
• oobject features time lapses of people playing with Wiis. [Via]
• Flickr use Apres makes intimate use of long exposure (more).

February 8, 2008

Friday photography: Old Hollywood & New Cams

• Norman Jean Roy, Mark Seliger, and other photographers reinterpret famous Hitchcock scenes using current actors in this month's Vanity Fair. (Here, at least, Renée Zellweger is on her way to looking like Henry Gibson.) [Via]
• Speaking of Hollywood, Alison Jackson creates fake paparazzi shots (not 100% work-safe, FYI). [Via]
• CNET's Stephen Shankland hosts an interesting interview with Canon's Chuck Westfall, talking about various camera tech developments--sensor dimensions, OLED displays, geotagging, and more.
• YouTube hosts a video demonstrating how camera lenses are made.  Not shown: my wallet imploding. [Via]
• On the big-glass front, Sigma has trotted out this $25,000 badboy, and yet that's got nothing on this Canon 1200mm cannon--selling for a cool $99,000, used.  Not satisfied yet?  How about a 5200mm Canon, good for photographing stuff 32 miles away? Even more examples are here.
• At the other end of the spectrum, 20 bucks gets you a 6x iPhone camera zoom. [Via]
• Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk illustrates the issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images.  The Thoreau quotation is chilling and well chosen. [Via]
• If M.C. Escher had a camera, you might see something like this cool effect.
  

February 4, 2008

Adobe Stock Photos to be discontinued

Adobe has announced Adobe Stock Photos, the service integrated into Adobe Bridge, will be discontinued as of April 1, 2008.  An FAQ is posted to address common questions (especially if you're an ASP user), and there are uninstallers for Mac and Windows that let you remove ASP from Bridge if you'd like.

The FAQ is very light on the rationale for the decision, but in an interview with StockAsylum's Ron Rovtar (subscription required for part of it), Adobe director James Alexander says, "We thought we went to market with a set of features and functionality that were going to improve workflow.  It was just not as compelling as we thought it was going to be."

I don't have a lot of additional context to offer, other than to say that we're working hard to make Photoshop, Bridge, and the other Creative Suite apps much more easily extensible so that they can support whatever services customers find useful--whether from Adobe or from third parties.

January 31, 2008

Made-up Japanese photography word o' the day

As I sit in the airport waiting for a flight to PMA in Las Vegas, I'm reminded of a word coined by Adobe market research (I believe) to describe enthusiast photographers in Japan: "Fotomaniaku."  Sure, it just means "photo maniacs," but doesn't it have kind of a fun mouth-feel?  Now I'm picturing a camera-wielding guy with Mr. Sparkle eyes ("I am disrespectful to shutter lag!!").  T-shirts to follow. :-)

January 27, 2008

Sunday Photography: From Mullets to MacGyver

• "We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me."  In that spirit, enjoy this retro-horrific Olan Mills photo collection.  ¡Viva los mullets siempre!  [Via Reen Bodo (and of course Jack Handey)]
• Long before he masterminded the Lightroom iceland adventure, photog Mikkel Aaland (podcast) appeared on Letterman, discussing his County Fair Portraits project.  (Mucho más mullets.) [Via Frederick Johnson]
• Let there be more light:
  • Robert Benson shares his striking strobe photography on Flickr. [Via]
  • On the other end of the exposure spectrum, here's some really precise light painting. [Via]
• Retouching:
  • RetouchShoppe will retouch your images for a flat fee of $100/image. [Via]
  • Charging just slightly higher rates, "Photo Retoucher to Kidman and Stefani Turns Eye on $5.8 M. Village Townhouse" [Via Gary Cosimini]
• HWMS: How Would MacGyver Shoot?  Quite possibly with the aid of a ghetto--but cool and effective--string-based image stabilizer.
• Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk illustrates the issue of global warming in a video created entirely by using still images.  The Thoreau quotation is chilling and well chosen. [Via]
• The NYT talks about the rediscovery of a collection of Robert Capa's negatives, presumed lost in World War II. The article is accompanied by a slideshow and a Zoomify-powered high-res view. [Via Katrin Eismann]
• Popular Photography mourns the passing of Herbert Keppler (who apparently got his own action figure). [Via]
  

January 24, 2008

One *miiiillion* images per second

Dang--and I thought 1,200fps was pretty impressive, but that's so last week.

The camera fiends at Vision Research have trotted out the Phantom V12, a crowd pleaser said to be capable of grabbing 1MM images per second (if you can live with 256x8 resolution; resolution goes up as frame rate goes down).  Their gear is "targeted at industrial applications ranging from biometric research to automotive crash testing," they say. "Essentially," opines Engadget, "this little bundle of joy is meant to be strapped into daredevil-type situations in order to grab as many photos as possible within a split second."  Check out the company Web site for videos of a popcorn kernel popping and more. [Via Jerry Harris]

The proliferation of these high-speed capture devices makes me remember a talk given last year at Adobe by Microsoft researcher Michael Cohen.  He described the idea of "thick photos"--essentially taking little movies instead of single frames, making it possible to select the perfect moment in a series.  This development will probably further irritate photo purists, but I'd like to see a camera maker take a run at the idea.

[Update: Michael points out that his ideas are covered in some detail in this paper.  His own page offers more technical bits.]

January 21, 2008

"Enter The Ghetto Matrix," Flash Panos, & HDR

• "How to Enter The Ghetto Matrix": Graffiti Research Labs built their own bullet-time camera rig, then used it to make a music video. [Via]
• Flash-based panoramas:
  • The NYT features a pair of interactive panoramas shot at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan.  The audio helps add to the sense of being there, though I'd recommend skipping the built-in animation & instead clicking and dragging to navigate for yourself.
  • Rob Corell passed along these 360° video panoramas, created with the help of Papervision 3D. Go Irish.
• More high dynamic range action:
  • HDR Japan is chock full of, well, Japanese HDR.
  • Masato Ohta has posted a great machinery shot. [Via]
  • Macworld reports on Hydra, an inexpensive new application for merging exposures to create HDR data.
  
  

January 17, 2008

Casio spitfire cranks out 1,200fps, does DNG

Speaking of DNG, author/photographer Ben Long has released his Convert Raw to DNG Automator Action, enabling easy conversion to DNG via AppleScript.  Solid.

For more memory-crushing camera goodness, see previous.

January 11, 2008

Flickr phlows, Photo Friday

• National Geographic hosts a great set of photo contest winners & runners up. [Via]
• FILE Magazine is running the interesting 36 Exposures challenge, bringing back the discipline and scarcity of film. [Via]
• Flickr bits:
  • Photophlow (currently running a private beta) aims to add a social dimension to Flickr, wrapping the photo-sharing site in (I think) Flash-based tools for chat, collaboration, and more.
  • Mash-up "museumr" aims to show your work hanging in a museum. [Via]
• Say what you will about the health impacts, but smoking still looks cool.   Cape Town-based photog Grant caught another great B&W shot, plus many others.
• Photojojo talks about creating one's own Photo-opoly.  Modifying your Monopoly board is good and all, but when can we print ourselves as 3D objects?  (No more fighting over who gets to be the little car.)  Maybe the folks at JuJups.com, "a new generation 3-D design creation gateway that allows consumers to create their own 3D content" (info), can help.  Meanwhile, I'm already covered.
• History:
  • The National Gallery of Art is showing The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978 and has posted an interesting slideshow.  [Via reader Petra]
  • German site Focus.de hosts "A brief visual tour of the history of the digital camera, 1975–2002."  Good to see the ol' Apple QuickTake 100 again.  My school owned one of those and a (Canon?) XapShot.  Man, they were the bomb...  [Via]
  • This spy camera watch prototype from 1969 apparently sold for nearly $60,000 on eBay. [Via]
    

January 7, 2008

War and rebirth, in photos & illustration

• When not driving between continents & documenting the experience, German-born, Brooklyn-dwelling photographer Christoph Bangert produces gripping photojournalism in Iraq, Darfur, and elsewhere.  You can find his Iraq effort reviewed here, and on the NYT site Christoph narrates over a selection of his photos.
• Offering a different take on Iraq, Shooting War is a graphic novel written by Anthony Lappe & illustrated by Dan Goldman.  You can find background & a review on MotherJones.com.  According to that site, "To layer drawings and shading on top of photos, Goldman drew everything directly onto a 21-inch touch screen using an electronic, wireless pen, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop. Everything combined, this is a slick-looking book."
• On a rather brighter note, the NYT features a slideshow on kite flying in Kabul--a colorful pastime banned under the Taliban.  See related article, with video.
  

January 6, 2008

'007 in review: Photography, design, and more

Photography:

• 2007 was the year the digital SLR boomed, reports CNET's Stephen Shankland, offering links to top stories throughout the year.  He notes that "Adobe released Photoshop Lightroom in March, and in just a few months it surpassed in popularity the earlier Apple rival, Aperture."
• Serious photogs keep seeking a nice compromise between SLR quality & compact portability.  A number of folks around Adobe's West 10th floor have been intrigued by the Canon G9; see Ben Long's review.
• Meanwhile a megapixel backlash seems to be building steam. "The more pixels, the worse the image!" says a German camera-testing lab, arguing that splitting a compact sensor into smaller & smaller bits is bad juju.
• In terms of the craft itself (which keeps proving itself death-proof), Rob Galbraith rounds up a large group of pictures of the year collections.  The sheer number of galleries is a little daunting (paradox of choice, anyone?), but I can at least vouch for MSNBC & Canada Post galleries.  I find the little NatGeo gallery underwhelming.

Adobe:

• The company was so busy (Creative Suite 3, Lightroom, new CEO...), it's hard to believe that it was just in '07 that so much went down.  Fortunately Scott Kelby provides a thorough overview.
• Zeroing in just on Photoshop Lightroom, Scott's colleague Matt Kloskowski offers A look back at Lightroom in 2007, recalling the year's interviews, cool add-ons, and more.

Design:

• The architectural smartasses at Curbed have gathered up the Top 10 Craziest Architectural Renderings of the Year.  Each one links to funny, wry commentary ("Rise, massive shadow-inducing cantilever, rise!").  Aside: Who knew a W Hotel was going into Harlem?
• One of my favorite blogs (frequently pilfered here), Core77, looks back at What Happened in '07. Herewith I'm gonna need all my pizza laser-cut, stat.
  

January 2, 2008

Non-destructive imaging: Easy as PIE

"Over the last couple of decades," writes photographer and author Peter Krogh, "the term non-destructive has been applied to many different kinds of imaging technologies. While the term is useful as a broad classification, it covers so much ground that it can often add more confusion than clarity..."

With an eye towards helping identify which type of non-destructive imaging offers the best tools for given tasks, Peter has written an interesting and thorough overview (PDF) of what, exactly, entails "non-destructive imaging."  In it he proposes some terminology--e.g. Parametric Image Editing, or "PIE"--to help distinguish one kind of approach from another.  Thanks to Peter for all the hard work in parsing the issues & proposing clearer ways to talk about them.

The paper joins others in Adobe's collection of Adobe digital photography white papers and primers.  The paper have been very well received, and you might find them worth browsing.

December 26, 2007

Sharks eating cameras, Infrared shooting, & more

Holiday break = catching up on photography online:

• The Nikon D80: Great camera/delicious shark meal (i.e. lousy shark-be-good stick). [Via]
• The NYT features a great perspective on a slide, showing ballplayer Luis Aparicio coming into third in 1962.
• Photojojo has a solid round up of resources on shooting holiday lights (with a camera, thankfully).
• Gear:
  • PopPhoto talks up The New Infrared Revolution, made possible by digital cameras.  Too bad that for most cameras the process of removing the IR filter is somewhat expensive & renders the cams unable to shoot regular photos.  The accompanying gallery of IR shots includes some good (and some sorta marginal) stuff.
  • The Zigview S2 Digital Viewfinder "clips onto the optical viewfinder of your DSLR, adding a swiveling live 2.5-inch LCD display that can not only be extended on a cable as a remote, but can also automatically trigger the camera when it detects motion." [Via]
  • "Your popup flash doesn’t have to suck," reports Adobe's Terry White in reviewing the $30 Lightscoop.  My wife tried to score one of these for me for Christmas, but thanks to publicity from David Pogue & others, they've been sold out.
• Artistry:
  • Patrick Winfield achieves a kind of fragmented impressionism in his Polaroid composites (not entirely safe for work). [Via]
  • The Nocturna installation uses stereoscopic imagery to unusual effect (ditto on the warning).
  • For whatever reason, gigantic "people pictures" were all the rage in the early 20th century.  [Via]
  • Speaking of large images, Nils Nova's Opposition of Memory uses very large inkjet prints to create an interesting optical illusion. [Via]
• Matt Kloskowski shares an omnibus list of 28 Lightroom Resources. [Via]  On a related note, Carlo from South Africa writes in to note that he's uploaded a set of B&W presets.
• I get a kick out of Sony's new ad campaign, illustrating the importance of timing by showing famous photos ruined by some intruding object.  Unfortunately I can link to just this one example, though others appear in banners, etc.
  

December 20, 2007

Borrow from Flickr -> Live to regret it

Through Google Image Search & the like, it's almost ridiculously easy to find pictures of nearly anything you can imagine--and just as easy to drag them into editing tools for your own use.  Do it to a motivated photographer, however, and the practice can end in tears.

Last week, an image taken by photographer Lane Hartwell was used without permission in a parody video posted on YouTube.  She wasn't pleased, contacted the band, and filed a takedown notice with YouTube.  CNET's Stephen Shankland recaps the events to date, then interviews Hartwell.  She notes that she's had to deal with similar incidents frequently (five in just the last two weeks).

Over in the NYT, David Pogue talks about "the generational divide in copyright morality."He lists a number of the scenarios he mentions to gauge audience reactions to what kind of media copying is acceptable.  Short story: older people see shades of gray, whereas younger people think that anything goes.

I wonder what these folks would say about appropriating a piece of photography, artwork, or software.  If a college kid did a painting that got used in a GM ad campaign, I'm betting he or she would feel entitled to some compensation.  Now, if that painting got used in an amateur video on YouTube, would that be okay?  What if the video promoted a hate group?  Do these guys think that the creators of intellectual property deserve to have any say over how their work is used & whether they're compensated?  Without any of their skin in the game, the general answer seems to be no.

[See also: Lawrence Lessig's talk on "How creativity is being strangled by the law."  Also, Derek Powazek has posted some sensible thoughts about collaborative media.  Rule 1: Ask First.]

December 15, 2007

Urban decay, pigs on mopeds, & other good photos

• Art collective Henry VIII's Wives uses elderly Glaswegians to re-enact iconic photos of the 20th century.  Triiippy...  My wife says she'd really like to hear the conversations between the photographer & the pensioners.  ("Yeah, so there was this little girl who got burned by napalm, and we want you to play her!") [Via]
• Also in the vein of photo reinactment, check out these classic photos done via Lego.  (Presumably the conversation with the Legos is shorter.)  [Via]
• I'm loving the portfolio of Diane Varner; I especially like this leaf bagel.  Her site talks about some of her Camera Raw & Photoshop post-processing techniques, and on PhotoshopSupport.com she discusses her work & ideas.
• I can't tell you much about it, but I like this neat panoramic timelapse image. [Via]
• Henrik Kam captures urban decay in images from Hunter's Point .  His work appears in Photolucida's list of Top 50 list of photographers for 2006.
• "Sleepycity is photographically deconstructing your city."  I like this nifty bit of light painting in what looks like some sci-fi set.
• If that's up your alley, see also these '70s light paintings. [Via]
• My friend Khoi just returned from Vietnam, where he captured this pig riding a moped (so to speak).

December 13, 2007

Would photography please "die" already??

Ah, the indestructable "Is Photography Dead" meme...

• Leica enthusiast Erwin Puts claims that in an age of digital capture and manipulation, photography does not exist anymore.
• The Online Photographer hosts reactions from photogs.
• Now Newsweek is jumping on the case.  And now here comes the NYT, taking on one angle.
• And...

Oh, who gives a crap?  Sorry, let me explain.  I thought about noting this not-so-little trend some time ago, but I've never been able to invest much passion in it.  People have been manipulating photography in every which way--through their choice of what to capture & what to omit; through changes to the scene/subject (adding lights, building sets, moving bodies on a battlefield); and through tweaks to the captured results--since the dawn of the technology.  So what?  I think Bridge engineering manager Arno Gourdol hit the nail on the head:

Being aware of composition, balance, symmetry and "owning the frame" is the creative act. The creative act matters, and the moment at which it occurs seems secondary--whether it is when pressing the shutter release on your camera, when making a print in the darkroom or when sitting in front of a computer.  This echoes the early days when photography was viewed as an unfair and unworthy competitor to painting...

I dunno; much of this "is photography dead" discussion strikes me as sterile and pointless--and maybe a strawman that's not worth beating up.  Yet I wonder whether it's driven by veteran photogs feeling threatened--comercially and aesthetically--by so many affordable tools that make competent image-making so much more attainable. 

Sure, yeah, we can debate this camera or lens vs. that one all day long--but all this stuff absolutely rocks compared to what pros were using just a few years back (to say nothing of what Arbus, Capa, Cartier-Bresson, and co. had).  You can say that digital makes us lazy, and there's some truth there; and yet it also fosters free experimentation & instant review of the results.  That quicker learning cycle, plus autofocus, good software, etc. helps get people "good enough" (technically, anyway) without years of slow and costly apprenticeship.  And when anyone can take a technically decent shot, then "good" becomes "trite," and people seek to define themselves by bucking the trend--making portfolios blurry or murky.

Therefore--and maybe I'll live to regret writing this--we end up with a bunch of freaked-out oldsters (or just curmudgeons at heart) twisting up a Dick Cheney grimace and saying, "Bah, I don't like this digital tomfoolery--not one bit!  In my day we had to huff developer until we saw Ernest Borgnine floating in the liquid--and we liked it fine!!  You kids are ruining everything."

Um, yeah.  Life, art, and expression move on.  If "photography" is something so brittle & exclusionary that it can't bear evolution, then goodbye and good riddance.  (Don't let the film door hit your ass on the way out...) It isn't, of course, so maybe we can just bury the is-photography-dead schtick.  But I'm not holding my breath.

December 2, 2007

Stoners, puzzles, & photos that aren't there

• "In college, take a year off and drive across the country, and camp along the way," "Old Geezer" advises young photographers. "Do it with good friends that are smart; not dumbasses that just want to get high. Bring some books. Bring some audio books if you can't read."  Also: "Always order good catering. That’s all the client really cares about." [Via]
• "This is a picture I did not take..."  On Unphotographable, Michael David Murphy describes the ones that got away. [Via]
• Befuddlr creates interactive puzzles from the contents of Flickr.  To get one of your images into the game, you can--according to the folks at Photojojo--"Upload your photo to the Photojojo Flickr group, go to Befuddlr and click “photojojo”, select your photo, and scramble it into an online puzzle game! The site will even time your unscrambling attempts, making for a perfect mid-day office-wide showdown." [Via]
• Speaking of Flickr, Jason Kottke test-drives the Eye-Fi wireless memory card, which enables direct upload from your camera to Flickr--no cables required.  (This strikes me as cool tech, but I'd much rather have the perhaps impossible GPS-on-a-card.)  Elsewhere, Photopreneur.com offers up 36 Reasons Flickr is a Photographer’s Ultimate Tool.
• DIYPhotography shows a cool way to make heart-shaped bokeh (lens blur). [Via]  Hmm--maybe we should add hearts as a shape option for Photoshop's bokeh-making Lens Blur filter (see related tutorial).  If doing stuff like this is up your alley, check out their other tutorials--e.g. "Cheapest ring light ever" [Via] and high-speed photography at home (champagne glasses, BB gun, and subsequent eye patches sold separately).
• Speaking of high speed photos, check out this beautiful collection of liquid art & droplet photography. [Via Dave Story]
• Ecocentric offers a foxy camera bag made from old belts. [Via]

November 20, 2007

African skinheads, found photos, and other slices of life

• MangoFalls is a rather fascinating collection of photos from film found in thrift store cameras (kind of a photo-specific version of Found Magazine).  [Via]
• Clayton James Cubitt's Lagos Calling is "an anthropological study of African skinhead fashion from the early seventies." [Via]
• The Morning News features Aaron Hobson's Cinemascapes plus a short interview with the photographer. [Via Thorsten Wulff]
• Magnum Magnum celebrates the 60th anniversary of the famed photo agency.  I love the first two shots in this gallery.  [Via Marc Pawliger]
• People & their breakfasts surveys--well, just that. [Via]  I think this kind of navel-(orange) gazing may be part of Why They Hate Us.
  

November 18, 2007

Plastic Man drives the lane, + other moments in time

• SI photographer John Zimmerman captured a crazy image of Dr. J shot using a slit camera to follow the movement of his hand.  Hard to believe it's from 1972!
• Liquid sculpture: Photographer Martin Waugh (see previous) talks about how he combined high-speed photography with a bit of Photoshop to create the new Smirnoff ad campaign.
• William Hundley makes some eye-popping jumping sheet photographs.  See more of his work on Flickr. [Via]
• Sports Shooter hosts a cool gallery of indoor rodeo shots from Darryl Dyck. [Via]
• Telling a very different story occasioned by cowboy imagery, LA Times photog Luis Sinco talks about how his shot of the "Marlboro Marine" James Blake Miller in Iraq changed both of their lives. [Via]  The story is behind an irritating, albeit free, registration barrier.
  

November 14, 2007

Feedback, please: Photomerge in Photoshop

The Photoshop team could use your guidance in setting priorities around our panorama-creation tools.

The automatic alignment & blending features introduced in CS3 have been really well received by photographers creating panoramas.  Panorama creation in CS2 and earlier relied on use of an interactive dialog (screenshot) that enabled the user to adjust the position and rotation of images before blending them together.  The improved algorithms in CS3, however, can usually produce good results without any user interaction, which is why Photomerge now defaults to "Auto" (screenshot) and bypasses the interactive dialog unless you request it.

So, here's the question: Do we even need the interactive dialog anymore?  It's built on an aging framework, so keeping it around would require some investment.  If you create panoramas using Photoshop CS3 and rely on the dialog, please let us know the details (via the comments) of how & why.

Thanks,
J.

PS--General feedback on panorama creation in Photoshop is always welcome, too, though the fate of the dialog is the most urgent issue.

Spies, irony, and evil

Interesting recent photo finds:

• Wee cams:
  • Justin Quinnell uses a pinhole camera to take some slightly nasty photos from inside his mouth. [Via]
  • Is the government spying on you via an airborne ultralight camera platform? Wired's got some interesting speculation & a video.
• Try and stop us:
  • Strictly No Photography sticks it to the Man with an entire site composed of photos taken exactly where they're forbidden. [Via]
  • "Photo-bans at pop art shows -- irony impairment, or Dadaism?" asks Cory Doctorow.  "I wasn't even allowed to photograph the 'No Photographs' sign. A member of staff explained that the typography and layout of the signs was itself copyrighted."
• Darkness:
  • The NY Times has been covering some grim episodes in the history of humanity, as seen through photography:
    • The personal photos of Nazi death camp guards are a study in chilling banality.  See the accompanying slideshow.
    • Photographer Nhem En was made to photograph prisoners who had arrived to be tortured by the Khmer Rouge. “I had to clean, develop and dry the pictures on my own and take them to Duch by my own hand," he says.  "I couldn’t make a mistake. If one of the pictures was lost I would be killed."  On a related note, Khmer leader Pol Pot's 1973 Mercedes limo is for sale on eBay.
    • The paper also features a multi-part essay from documentarian Errol Morris, charting his efforts to find the exact location of a famous photo from the Crimean war (the so-called Valley of the Shadow of Death).
  • Flickr hosts a small gallery of images from French nuclear tests. [Via]  In college one of these images adorned the basement wall of our hovel in South Bend, IN.

November 12, 2007

Jay Maisel NYC photo workshop announced

Renowned photographer Jay Maisel is offering a unique workshop in New York next month.  As a fair bit of this blog's content concerns photography, I thought the details might be of interest.  From Jay:

This is an opportunity to take a workshop with Jay in his own environment, a historic landmark bank building in Lower Manhattan.

This is a workshop about seeing and expanding your capability.  It is not about performing or getting your ego stroked.  It is definitely not about technical things and absolutely not about Photoshop.  You will shoot, get critiques, look at Jay’s work and talk about photography all day long.

It will take place Mon. Dec. 17 to Fri. Dec. 21, from 9am to 10pm each day.  All meals are included.  The cost is $5000.  It will be filled on a first come, first served basis and will be limited to 9 participants.  Payment in full, in advance must be made in order to secure a spot.

The workshop is sponsored by SanDisk. Please call 212.431.5013 or email jay@jaymaisel.com for more information.

November 4, 2007

Fire on the mountain

Despite having flown through the deeply punishing winds, doing a touch-and-go landing at Burbank and seeing the flames from the air, somehow until now I failed to grasp the scale of the Southern California fires.  The excellent LA Times photo gallery*, however, brings home the reality.  I'm reminded of the word "terriblisma"--or as we might say it now, "shock and awe." [Via]

*Opening in a new window to avoid irritating auto-resize of one's browser.

October 25, 2007

Gigapixel panos through Flash

GigaPan.org is "sort of a Flickr for zoomable panoramas," notes Photoshop engineer (and Photomerge creator) John Peterson. The site makes it possible to upload & browse gigapixel-sized images, then navigate through them via a Flash interface.  Here's a shot of Adobe HQ, taken from nearby Caesar Chavez park* in downtown San José.  (Bustling, isn't it? ;-))  The site is labeled "beta," and the viewer currently leaves much to be desired (quit squirming around, dammit!), but it's a very cool project nonetheless. [Via]

For more in this vein, see previous: Colossal images through Photoshop & Flash; 13 gigapixels or bust; 3.8 Gigapixels of Half Dome.

* I'm sure I walk by it all the time, but until seeing this image I never noticed the deeply gross sign in the park.  Click the second of the two snapshots below the Adobe pano to read it.  I'll never think of the fountain in quite the same way.

October 16, 2007

Aperture vs. Lightroom: What do the pros use?

• 66.5% using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in
• 23.6% using Lightroom
• 5.5% using Aperture

To be fair to Aperture, it might be helpful to remove Windows users from the equation for a moment.  Even after doing so, Lightroom's usage among Mac-based pros is still nearly double that of Aperture (26.6% vs. 14.3%).

It's also worth pointing out that photographers haven't started to abandon Photoshop as a result of using tools such as Lightroom.  (Photoshop usage overall remains in the 90% range.)  The vast majority of photographers seem to understand pretty clearly the different nature & roles of the apps, and they continue to view Photoshop as a must-have part of any serious arsenal.

Lightroom is clearly off to a tremendous start, and everyone here is really pleased & grateful to the photography community for such a warm welcome.

October 13, 2007

Adobe puts 3D insect eyes on your camera

"Why," I wondered for a long time, "is a wild-haired Eastern European guy walking around our floor carrying a medium-format camera & a hot glue gun?"  The answer, I discovered, is that Adobe research scientist Todor Georgiev* has been working on algorithms for use with a plenoptic camera & was motivated to build his own lenticular lens array.

So, what does any of that mean?  The goal is to let cameras capture a moment in time from multiple slightly different perspectives.  The resulting image (a series of smaller images, actually) might then enable the photographer to change the focal distance of the photo after the fact, or to use depth information to aid in selecting & editing objects.

News.com has more info & images, and I think the potential comes through best in Audioblog.fr's video of Adobe VP Dave Story showing off the lens.  Gizmodo writes, “It’s a way-cool demo, but it might be a while before you see such a fancy lens on everyday cameras. But a focus brush in Photoshop? Whoa. Sign us up.” [Via Cari Gushiken]

*Okay, his hair seems to be less wild these days, but Todor still kicks out "light reading" like this (PDF). I think I left my copy at the beach.

October 8, 2007

TiltViewer: 3D Flash interface to Flickr

October 7, 2007

viewAt.org: Flash-based panorama sharing

The folks at viewAt.org have carved out an interesting mission for themselves: letting photographers around the world share their panoramas as interactive Flash creations. Citing the ubiquity of Flash over QuickTime, the site creators have devised a system whereby photogs can upload their panoramas, make them interactive (see instructions), and plot them on the Earth via Google Maps.  Site co-creator Bernard Custard Gascó writes:

This project is totally free for anyone who wishes to upload their panoramas and has the advantage of offering your uploads in Flash, thanks to a system developed by Denis Chumakov. Besides this, you can promote your own website integrated on Google Earth.

Needless to say, you have complete control over your own work, and obviously all rights are yours. By means of a simple code number, you can insert the panoramas on your web page and authorize those which you allow others to download.

Click around the map on the main page to view panos from all around the world.  Very cool work, guys.

September 29, 2007

Cool Recent Photography, Part 2

• "Memorize This!" Popular Photography lists 12 essential photographic facts, formulas, and rules of thumb. [Via]
• Design Meltdown has aggregated a slick selection of photo blogs.  Though Design Meltdown's focus tends to be on cool Web design and technique--plenty of which is in evidence--the photography's plenty good, too.  There's almost too much to choose from, but I'll call out Alberto Oviedo's funky palettes & foxy Flash skin in particular.  In any event, remind me not to compare pets with this lady.
• Red Bull adorned its F1 race car with more than 30,000 images submitted by folks who helped raise over $1million for charity.  Brilliant.
• Jonathan Mannion specializes in the world of hip hop & celebrity.  His work spans Busta Rhymes cutting his dreads to the little man from Twin Peaks. [Via Dean Stelfox]
• In the realm of doing it yourself:
  • Make your own pinhole panoramic camera.
  • Make your own light snoot. [Via]
  • Make your own smoke photography. [Via]
• Terry White talks about GPS + Lightroom using a Sony device.

September 25, 2007

Cool Recent Photography, Part 1

Of jazz, Jawas, carnage, & more:

• Kent Phelan shares a great shot of octagenarian jazz man Roy Haynes. [Via]
• TrueGrain is "a pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black and white film with digital photography."  It'll set you back $300.
• The NYT features a slideshow from Turkey's barren & striking Cappadocia; Jawas sold separately.  According to the gallery, the caves have been carved from soft rock.  I'd like to see caves carved into some really soft rock, like Nerf.  ("Or Air Supply," interjects Margot.)
• Speaking of the NYT, they've been offering excellent prints for sale from their archives.  Dig Ruth Fremson's photo of trams in the fog (info).  See also the ghostly Twin Towers in the fog; Lower Manhattan in the 60's (hello, old office); Feeding the hippo at the Bronx Zoo.
• The paper remembers the life and work of pioneering female photojournalist Gerda Taro (partner of Robert Capa), offering a slideshow of her work.
• "Don't look at me like a piece of meat!" But look at my hair that way.  If Julia Kissina's carnage trips your trigger, see Pinar Yolacan's work. [Via]

September 10, 2007

Free new presets for Camera Raw

I'm delighted to see that author Jack Davis & the folks at onOne Software have teamed up to release more than 100 presets designed to work in Adobe Camera Raw. Available previously for Lightroom, the set of presets has been expanded and refined for Camera Raw.  According to the site,

PhotoPresets with One-Click WOW! tackle only one development parameter at a time allowing you to optimize your image at each step to create the look you really want without sacrificing any one quality. You start with adjusting your images color and tone and then add effects like black and white conversions, tinting, split-toning and vignetting.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for video training, or just download the presets' installer and start going to town. [Via]

September 8, 2007

13 gigapixels or bust; sketchy photogs; more

• In Spectacle, photographers David Rockwell & Bruce Mau "celebrate the phenomenon and history of communal, awe-inspiring public performance worldwide--from the stadium to the streets, from religious festivals to political marches."  Dig the really well-chosen type treatments as well. [Via]
• For a different kind of spectacle, see Harlem in 13 Gigapixels. Photographer Gerard Maynard & software developer Alexandre Jenny have teamed up to create a massive image of the famous New York neighborhood.  With results spanning 279,689 x 46,901 pixels, the project's raw numbers are pretty eye-popping:
  • 2,045 individual photos from a Nikon D2X
  • 21.49 GB of compressed raw data
  • 1 day for image placement and color correction
  • 46 hours of rendering on an 8-core Xeon system with 8GB of RAM
  • Results: A single 48.8 GB image stored in the Photoshop Large Document format (.PSB), converted via Zoomify & displayed through the Flash Player.
    [Via Maria Brenny]  (If this is up your alley, see previous.)
• Ah, the 1950's, when you had to be the lookout for "corn-fed belles" hanging out of trees along the road, ready to disrobe in your U-Haul trailer.  At least that's the world conjured up by the (more than a little creepy) Glamour Photography magazine--one "designed to give the camera man a better understanding of the technical and philosophical aspects of photographing pretty girls."  Philosophy--yes, that's it. [Via]
• Elsewhere in history, here are 50 years of a woman's life, as told by photos bought at a garage sale.  Note to self: Keep trying not to get old.
• Clayton James Cubitt shares portraits of Hurricane Katrina survivors.  (I'm a big fan of Flash galleries in general, but in this case I think the jerky transitions distract from the subject matter.) [Via]

September 5, 2007

Fighter jets, galaxies, & infrared squirrels

From the world of scientific & technical imaging:

• "You come across the body of a tramp, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal…. ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!"  Er, sorry, I digress.  Joe Lencioni has captured some great macro shots of yellow ants (acanthomyops to their friends).
• Seed Magazine features a fascinating video tour of scientific visualizations--from Benoît Mandelbrot's early fractals to an atomic simulation that required six months of supercomputer rendering to depict 20 nanoseconds' worth of motion.  (Oh, and the closing soundtrack is from Dub Side of the Moon.) [Via]
• News.com reports on a cool technique for astrophotography--taking up to 20 images per second, then using computer image processing to sift & combine the sharpest results, compensating for degradation caused by Earth's atmosphere.  Details & before/after images are on the Lucky Imaging site.
• NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) telescope has captures pix of a star with a comet's tail. [Via]
• Who knew that squirrels have infrared-emitting tails, useful for confusing rattlesnakes?  This is kind of thing you learn when grad students get to wander around with expensive camera gear. [Via]
• A Russian air show produced a terrific image of an Su-27 dropping flares.  (Who needs safety regulations?)
• Inspire Underground hosts a photo essay on prepping the Space Shuttle for launch. [Via]  Post lift-off, the Shuttle crew captured some lovely shots. [Via]

August 31, 2007

"Most of your pictures suck"

I tend to get in my own head about photography.  Maybe because it can be praticed with fairly little physical skill (compared, say, to sketching, which came rather naturally to me), photography seems to put more emphasis on one's "eye," one's taste.  That can be nerve-wracking, making it seem like a failure to take a good shot* is a comment not only on your technical chops, but on your worth as an aesthetic being.  See, I told you I get in my head about it.

Maybe that's why I found this comment from experienced photographer Mike Johnston refreshing:

To be honest, most of my pictures suck. The saving grace of that admission is that most of your pictures suck, too. How could I possibly know such a thing? Because most of everybody's pictures suck, that's how. I've seen Cartier-Bresson's contact sheets, and most of his pictures sucked. One of my teachers said that it was an epiphany for him when he took a class from Garry Winogrand and learned that most of Winogrand's exposures sucked. It's the way it is.

Whew.  It's nice to know that bad photos happen to all guys sometimes, so to speak.  And as Mike reminds his sometimes gear-obsessed readers, "Cameras don't take good pictures, photographers do."  Just not all the time.

*There's also the whole angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question of what good is.  In Ireland I'd joke, "Look, honey, I set the camera to 'Trite'..."

August 29, 2007

Taliban as Boy George; Frozen photos; more

Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak has posted a fascinating 7-minute look at the Taliban & photography.  Their religious beliefs led them to deface any human or animal representation (from ancient statues to bottles of shampoo), yet numerous young men posed for images that make them look "like gay icons."  Western reactions say something about our times, too.

Elsewhere in photography:

• Dave Hirmes has created captivating macro ice photography.  [Via]  (Ah, but how about taking those image while using a lens made out of ice?)
• Adobe Bridge engineering manager Arno Gourdol has been doing some cool wide-angle HDR imaging.
• The blind camera contains no optical parts. Instead, "The camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment."  That is, it takes other people's photos.
• Roadside bloomery is calling for great images of America's "unplanted gardens." [Via Craig Schamp & Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
• ShootSmarter.com features a guide to monitors for professional photography usage.
• Watchismo features a Victorian spy camera disguised as a pocket watch. [Via]
  

August 27, 2007

New monochrome photography

• Douglas Gayeton mixes photos and hand lettering into a unique kind of storytelling. [Via]
• Martin Evening has created an 11-minute video tutorial on creating great black & white images using Lightroom.  (Although the interfaces are a bit different, much of the info carries over to Camera Raw in Photoshop CS3 as well.)
• Coming to the defense of digital SLRs, veteran photographer Rob Reiter talks digital B&W.  He combines multiple exposures into an HDR file, then converts it to B&W using Photoshop.
• In Popular Photography Debbie Grossman discusses ways to use Photoshop together with traditional photographic filters.  The accompanying gallery contains a beautiful image created by combining multiple exposures in Photoshop.
• Annie Leibovitz has created the Gap's latest campaign. (John Mayer is now a muse?  Yeesh.)
• Helga Steppan creates interesting monochromatic compositions entirely in situ--no manipulation after the fact.  [Via]
  

August 26, 2007

Photography: Moments in time

Like tears in the rain:

• Ah, if only this were a Photoshop job... The Online Photographer features an image of a boat plunging to its destruction.  Note the unlucky dude in the upper-right corner of the photo (back of the boat).  Mad Mariner has the backstory.
• Novak's Blog has an interesting collection of moments frozen in time. [Via Bob Regan, who muttered "It's a little 'Hang In There'..."  Touché.]
• Slate's Magnum series features images in motion .  I really dig the fourth one, taken in Osaka.  And #7 reminds me of time spent in Death Valley... (no further comment).
• "Oh, the Beemanity!!"  Speaking of dudes being... dudes, remember this formula: Flying insects + flying gasoline + an SLR: great photographic storytelling.  (Note: The copywriting is a carnival of profanity, but pretty damn funny.  Just thought you should be forewarned.) [Via Tom Moran]

August 23, 2007

Gigapixel Adobe HQ now in Google Earth

Few people push Photoshop harder than the crew at the Gigapxl Project, creators of ultra-high resolution digital images and prints.  Now their work, including a shot of the Adobe HQ in San Jose, appears inside Google Earth.  You can zoom in from space onto individual images, then zoom way into each one.  Here's a screenshot.

To check it out, download the latest version of the software.  Under "Layers" on left side, open the "featured content" folder, check the box for "Gigapxl Photos," and then look for the icons of a picture with a camera.  More details are in the Google Earth documentation.

August 20, 2007

Photographic pondering

• Documentarian Errol Morris uses an image of the Lusitania to muse on truth, falsehood, and more in photography. [Via Paul Ferguson]
• The NFL is requiring photo journalists to wear red vests that feature Canon and Reebok logos, and the journalists aren't too pleased.  The Online Photographer has some fun taking the idea to extremes.
• The Guardian considers the commodification of photography, saying "We all helped to speed the demise of professional photographers."  In a similar vein, the Washington Times remarks on the ubiquity of retouching: "The kind of photo touch-up that once required a lab with chemical baths and pricey equipment can be done in a few minutes by a bright adolescent. Entry costs are low: a computer, an Internet connection and pirated software." (Gah!) [Via]

August 15, 2007

Visions in Green

and wonderfully i fell through the green groove
of twilight striking into many a piece.  --ee cummings

I think the country of Ireland deserves its own color space: the famous "Forty Shades of Green" are a malachite manhandling of your optic nerves that can't be done justice using the puny ProPhoto or anything else.  We need iRGB*--Irish RGB--with the capacity to describe hilariously green tones found nowhere else in nature.

In the meantime, here are my photos from Ireland.  Once you've clicked the gallery for the first time, you can move through the images using left and right arrow keys.  A few notes/thoughts:

• Upside of asking a pro photographer friend for shooting/gear advice before a trip like this: He'll offer good suggestions, such as bringing a graduated ND filter (which I wish I'd done).  Downside: He'll show you images he took in the same spots, making you slap your forehead in dismay.  (Thanks a lot, Steve, ;-))
• I continue to wish that Flash respected color profiles.  Because it doesn't, the colors in the gallery are totally washed out**, at least on a Mac.  (Right-click/Cmd-click any one of them to see the difference, at least in Safari.)  We'll keep working towards a solution.
• I hate disrupting a scene using a flash, so I'm itching to replace my 17-85mm f4 lens with something comparable but faster.  The surprising thing (to me, anyway) is that Canon's higher-end glass (e.g. the 24-70mm f2.8) doesn't offer image stabilization.  I'm not sure why that is, or whether losing it would hurt images relative to my current lens.
• Speaking of green grooves, we referred to various roadways as "green bobsled" tracks--emerald walls whipping by in disturbingly close proximity to one's head.  Coming around a bend to find a Ford Focus leaning at a 45-degree angle, two wheels firmly up on a stone fence, was a useful cautionary moment.  In describing the trip to her folks, I overheard my wife say, "They drive like the English." "No," I interjected, "they drive like Evel Knievel."  Sadly I couldn't get any of this on film (er, sensor?).
• Someday I'd love to try shooting "The Clash of the Ash," hurling--"the world's fastest field team sport."  Unlike soccer/football, this is a game Americans could dig--not the kind of thing about which Stephen Colbert could quip, "I'll help you tell the boring scoreless matches from the riveting scoreless matches.)

July 31, 2007

Great black & white, New York at night, & more

• Chuck Kimmerle makes masterful black and white imagery.  His Deadwoods series is particularly striking. [Via]
• Speaking of striking (oh tortured segues, you're the best!), here's some brilliant ad placement: a rugby jersey promoting facial reconstructive surgery .  On another rugby-related note, check out this 1928 image from Martin Munkácsi.
• Joergen Geerds lights up the Big Apple in Luminous New York.
• A Chris Walken in a blimp is nowhere to be seen, but I still enjoy these views from the top of the Bay Bridge.  Dizzlying heights are one thing, but I dig the control room (not to mention the frank graffiti). [Via]
• Christopher Scholl has made a list of the 10 best Firefox extensions for photographers, enabling everything from slideshows to uploading to geotagging.
• The Photoshop Blog features some very cool (d'oh) images of deep blue ice.  For more iced goodness, see Jeff Schewe's Antarctica gallery.
• Catch Superman challenges you to play photojournalist & capture the little guy in action. [Via]
  

July 30, 2007

Beware your metadata trail

...at least if you're planning to commit crimes.  The British Times Online reports that the EXIF metadata embedded in digital camera images could be used to track down whoever photographed each page of the final Harry Potter novel & uploaded it prior to the book's release:

The information, known as Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) data, has already revealed that the camera used was a Canon Rebel 350. Because the model is three years old, the device would likely have been serviced at least once since it was purchased, in which case the owner's name would be known. [Via]

The reality in this case, I think, is that identifying and prosecuting the shooter would be difficult.  The camera owner would have had to have registered the camera and have had it serviced, and even with a name authorities would have to demonstrate that the person then used the camera to photograph the pages and upload the results.

Still, it's another interesting example of digital devices recording more fingerprints than most people expect.  As devices get smarter, they'll leave a longer trail of breadcrumbs--for better and for worse.  (How much info must be contained in an image from a GPS-enabled cellphone camera, for example?)

Adobe often ends up in a tug of war: some people really want to make metadata secure, while others want easy ways to strip it away.  Photographers seem most sensitive in this regard, wanting to ensure that their copyright info is preserved, while optionally stripping out revealing details of how, when, and where an image was captured.  On other occasions I've heard law enforcement folks wish aloud that Photoshop automatically inserted some trackable info into each file based on serial number.  (Don't worry: that's been met with an immediate, "Um yeeeah, noooo...")

In any case, I think there's some low-hanging fruit here.  We should offer a simple script that would let Bridge remove metadata from images, trusting that most people would use it for good & not for evil.  If you have other suggestions, please let us know.

July 20, 2007

Airplane bones in HDR; more

Super fly:

• Flickr user "Dimsumranch" has created a set of HDR (?) shots from an airplane graveyard. [Via Adam Pratt]
• Superuse is an online community "where recycling meets design." Check out this beautiful recycled plane-wing desk. [Via] If that's up your alley, see also Giancarlo de Astis's Il Primo Wing Desk (made with the help of a former Flying Boxcar), as well as this "Apple wing" setup. [Via]  Superuse also points out a DC9-turned-truck.
• "The skin of the earth can wrinkle like a horse throwing off flies."  NPR features a profile of doctor/aerial photographer Michael Collier, and on their site you can find 3 minutes of his images with narration.  Plenty of high-res versions of his work live in the Earth Science World Image Bank.
• NYC's Financial District features a rooftop biplane [Via] "Its sole purpose is to amuse the inhabitants of surrounding buildings and scyscrapers."
• The NYT features a number of killer aviation prints for sale.  I dig this guy in particular, and this shot of the christening of the airship USS Akron.
• For more aviation-related goodness, see previous entry.

July 19, 2007

Photography from the Four Corners

• First, some Southern-fried action:
  • MSNBC hosts David Turnley's Gallery of the South. Note that in a few cases, additional images are hidden behind the "Play" buttons. [Via]
  • "Loud, colorful, and proud": Chris Ramirez captures people who love endless left turns in his NASCAR slideshow.
  • Deadman busking: James Heil documents a hobo band, the Deadman Street Orchestra. [Via]
• Going way out west, Ben Willmore has been doing some creative HDR work: I particularly like this Kingman, AZ motel; Needles to Calico; Grill; and Regulator.
• Going east, PingMag gives an overview of emerging photography in China.
• Headed way south, German-born Michael Poliza does incredible work around Africa. [Via Adobe South Africa's Mohammed Jogie]
• And finally, closer to my home, Photobooth.net lists the (disappearing) locations of photo booths around the USA. [Via]

July 12, 2007

Time & space in photography

• In honor of George Eastman's 153rd birthday (today), Slate features an interesting Magnum photo essay on the history of consumer picture-taking.
• If Eastman were still with us, he'd make a great model for Mark Story's Living in Three Centuries: The Face of Age. [Via]
• Spanning 35 years to the day, Nick Ut brought the world a girl burned by napalm & a girl burned by herself.
• Peter Kaplan shoots from great heights, including some eye-watering shots from atop World Trade Center. [Via]
• Elsewhere in the air, in Me and My Human Vincent Laforet has captured a striking image from above the ice rink in Central Park.
• Wired hosts selections from Edward Burtynsky's documentary about China's superhuman rise & the human consequences thereof.  [Via David Harradine]
  

July 8, 2007

Sunday Photography: Keep your chimp-hand strong

I've recently come across some round-ups of great photos:

• The Smithsonian is hosting a gallery of terrific nature photography--the kind of thing that makes me want to pretty much cash in my chips behind the lens.  My wife remarked (a la Say Anything), "Finches, man--finches." [Via]
• The PDN Photo Annual 2007  is chock full of arresting images.  The Photo Books section alone has sent me on a dozen fruitful tangents across the Web.
• The Press Photographer's Year highlights some of the most impactful images captured over the last 12 months. [Via]
• American Photo's Images of the Year contest has issued a call for entries.  While those are filtering in, you can browse the 2006 gallery. [Via]
  

July 4, 2007

Blowin' up real good

While getting frozen yogurt the other night, I observed a posse* of little boys--maybe 5 or 6 years old--swarming around a small pink "Little Mermaid"-themed chair.  They were goading one of their little buddies to body slam himself into the chair, chanting "Dooo it, dooo it... Destroy IT, destroy IT!!"  Ah, the complete purity of that human impulse to see some stuff smashed all to hell.

In honor of today's American holiday devoted, in some part, to that impulse:

• Gene Gable features some cool vintage Fourth of July artwork on CreativePro.com.
• Similar goodness comes from American U.  Go heavy or go home, right?
• The NYT hosts a slideshow from explosives summer camp in Missouri. Adios, watermelon. (Here's the accompanying article).
• In the spirit of fire-breathing, wheel-popping patriotism, check out these shots from a Wisconsin tractor pull (recalling a little slice of my youth).  Not pictured: Sierra Club reps.
• Not tied to the Fourth, but in the vein of vintage artwork, check out these fruit crate designs. [Via]  (See also previous.)
• Update: For more bombs bursting in air, see Firework-Art.com. Man, all this really makes me miss summer car trips as a kid, where we could buy legally questionable goodies from web-footed Southerners by the roadside. [Via]

Happy (and grudgingly safe) Fourth,
J.

*What would the correct term (a la "pride of lions") be? Gaggle of boys? Hootenany? Fisticuff?

June 12, 2007

Tilt-shift photography, DIY tripods, and more

• Juan Pons' Aphlog (short for "A Photography Log) offers a one-stop way to track numerous photography-related Web feeds (DPReview, PhotoshopNews, etc.), including this one.  Groovy.
• The NYT features an interesting little slideshow in which photog Vincent Laforet talks about using a tilt-shift lens to put a new spin on sports photography.
• If that's up your alley, CreativePro features info on how to build your own tilt-shift lens on the cheap.   You can also simulate the effect inside Photoshop using the Lens Blur filter.
• In the vein of rolling your own solutions, I came across a tutorial on creating a do-it-yourself string tripod.  "HWMS?" ("How Would MacGyver Shoot?") [Via]
• When it comes to black & white photography, Ted Masumura & others argue that high ISO is your friend.  Why?  They find that it brings back the grainy feel of high-speed film.
  

June 9, 2007

Weekend photography

• I find most photogs' Web sites pretty underwhelming (hey, you can't be good at everything), but Philip Toledano scores: beautiful HTML complements a hell of a portfolio. Mr. Toledano Will See You Now.  And I can see those fighter planes... [Via]
• Crestock is hosting a gallery of terrific speed shots (with just a couple of duds). [Via]
• In "LIFE: A Journey Through Time," photographer Frans Lanting depicts the evolution of Earth & its life forms.  [Via]
• CNET is hosting concept art that depicts a spinning tower in Dubai.  Interesting that the concept artist snuck that famous Joan Martin Munkacsi photo into the design.
• Mark Brautigam finds beauty in the everyday in his On Wisconsin project. [Via]   The portfolio makes me think of the Sufjan Stevens record Illinoise I've been spinning lately, and of this photo of him from Joe Lencioni.  Represent for the Mid'Wess...
• UCLA has digitized more than 5,000 images from LA newspapers archives, 1920-1990. Boing Boing links to a number of interesting finds.  Viva shag carpeted vans.
  

June 2, 2007

A momentary lapse in time

• Photoshop CS3 Extended includes the ability to turn a sequence of images into a video.  For more info, check out Russell Brown's timelapse tutorial.
• For tips on capturing your own sequences, check out CreativePro.com's feature on do-it-yourself time-lapse photography.
• Their Circular Life presents an interesting method for navigating time lapses via Flash. [Via Jon Williams]
• Noah Kalina's Everyday project records his own image each day; he's assembled 6 years' worth into a time-lapse video.  Jonathan Keller is up to something similar--a real study in facial hair.  [Via]

May 30, 2007

Guns, kids, and salt

• Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths knows war.  He reflects on violence & its tools in this Guns and Kids photo essay presented by Slate.  The piece brings to mind these ladies--and these.
• The subjects of It's All Good couldn't be less so--junkies, crackheads, gangsters and their families in NYC, "where escape is one rock, one shot, one Glock away."  Gallery. [Via]
• PingMag interviews Edward Burtynsky, whose Manufactured Landscapes images chronicle humanity's impact on the earth.  (Not long ago I kind of harshed on one of Burtynsky's photos.  It certainly has more impact in the context of his larger efforts.)
• Chris Jordan (mentioned recently) is using the synthetic world of Second Life to present his "Running the Numbers"--depicting the scale of human consumption.
• The miniature City of Salt comes from Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick--the photographers behind the similarly amazing Apollo Prophecies.
• In Salt Dreams, Jimmy and Dena Katz chronicle the racers, rocketeers, and pink flamingos of the great Salt Flats.  More info is here. [Via]
  

May 29, 2007

Camera Raw 4.1 announced, due shortly

As you may have seen already, Adobe has announced Camera Raw 4.1, due to be available shortly via Adobe.com.  (The communication got out a little ahead of the actual plug-in, which should be posted in the next 24 hours or so.)

Camera Raw 4.1 adds support for 13 new digital cameras and backs, including the Canon EOS-1D Mark III, Fujifilm FinePix S5 Pro, Nikon D40x, Olympus E-410, Olympus SP-550 UZ, Sigma SD14, Phase One H 20, Phase One H 25, Phase One P 20, Phase One P 21, Phase One P 25, Phase One P 30 and Phase One P 45.

In addition, Camera Raw includes some very cool enhancements to sharpening & noise reduction.  I'll share more details on these shortly; in the meantime, here's a teaser screenshot.  (By the way, all the same controls will be coming to Lightroom soon, too.)

May 24, 2007

Scientific bits: Seadevils, severed arms, & Stephen Hawking

• Air & Space has the story of the first images from space (starting in 1946), taken from captured German V-2 rockets.  Here's a large panoramic shot from 1948. [Via]
• Having moved on just a bit since then, NASA & the USGS have created a series called Earth as Art (this shot featuring the Anti-Atlast Mountains; think we could get Google Earth to provide sponsorship & have them renamed the Anti-Alias Mountains?).
• Before The Deluge provides vintage renderings (c.1872) of Earth's past.  (And what is this guy chewing on? Hopefully it's not an arm turned into crocodile snack, then reattached. [Via])
• The NYT features a slideshow of amazing underwater creatures ("Dumbo octopi," seadevils, and more)--many who live just down the road from here in the Monterey Bay. (And is it me, or did a seadevil used to be in Motörhead?
• CNET has posted a gallery of hot solar action.   NASA provides info on how to use Photoshop to make the images 3D.
• And finally, for a look of sheer joy, can you beat Stephen Hawking going for a spin?
  

May 15, 2007

Apocalypse, memory, and redemption

• In Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove, Canadian Kristan Horton recreates shots from the film using everyday objects: "Silverware become an airplane, plastic and coffee grounds become the sky." Fantastic. [Via]
• In a slightly related vein, Edward Zwakman produces large-scale photographs by painstakingly reconstructing objects and landscapes from memory. A bit more info is in his Tales from the Grid, but I'd like to know more.
• Chris Jordan attempts to make staggering numbers comprehensible in his Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait.  By assembling thousands of photographs into large, intricately detailed prints, he depicts "a slow-motion apocalypse in progress."  See also the fascinating images of his earlier Intolerable Beauty. [Via]
• Artist Amanda Vandermeer and photographer Paul O’Grady have collaborated to create Sustainable Jewellery, using flora & fauna to decorate the human form.  (Weirdly, there's no permalink on the blog where the images appear, so you'll need to scroll down to the relevant section.)  It might be interesting to see this work juxtaposed with Chrisopher Conte's sculptures, such as this biomech arm or this stainless steel spider.
  

May 13, 2007

Sunday in black & white

It's been far too long since I've gotten to share some photographic finds.  So, without further ado, here's great stuff in black & white:

• The Apollo Prophecies sounds fascinating: "This installation features a continuous ten inch by thirty-six foot long black and white panoramic photograph depicting astronauts from the 1960’s traveling to the moon and back. While on the lunar surface they discover a lost Edwardian expedition that may or may not be real. It was shot and assembled on sets or on location with miniature models and live actors."  Here's a video about its creation, followed by larger detail images.  The long-snouted astronauts have a Hieronymus Bosch quality.
• Through photog Tim Mantoani (who's doing a really interesting project I'll mention soon), I learned of rock n' sports vet Michael Zagaris. Sports Shooter is hosting a gallery of his work (love the Bill Walsh/Joe Montana shot), and more is available to see and purchase on Michael's site.
• Jonathan Greenwald sets his portfolios to music.  Dig the "Ordinary Life" set, well paired with Coldplay.
• Herman Krieger's Mall-aise captures suburban anomie with visual & verbal puns. [Via]  On a somewhat related note, Stephen Crowley captures isolation at a rural motel.
• SUNY Buffalo hosts a rather haunting gallery of early 20th century images from the Arkansas State Prison. [Via]
• On Flickr folks are re-creating vintage photos of London.  See also the site's Then & Now photo pool. [Via]
• Apparently, in child portraiture, it was once common for mothers to disguise themselves as chairs. [Via]
  

May 1, 2007

High Plains Drifting

I'm just back from the desert, and boy are my arms sandy... We gave our friend/my fellow Photoshop PM Bryan O'Neil Hughes a solid send-off to his single days, I think. Word to the wise : RV+sand = elephant+tar pit; oi vey. Sadly, I didn't manage to see a real live Adobe Photo Shop [Via].  I did, however, find a great deal on California real estate in Trona.  (Hope you like sulfur... and breaking your windows just to cut your wrists.)  Ballarat Bob was MIA, but we caught up with our friend, the Mayor of Ballarat, along with his even more grizzled (!) dad--keepers of Charlie Manson's truck & black helicopters; here's a small gallery. 

Their one-room building (famous for $2 cans of Milwaukee's Best--which will taste good to you when it gets hot enough) also features a photo I really love.  I don't know a thing about its subject or its history, and I always choose not to ask.  Sometimes it's good to savor a little mystery.

In a photographic vein, and starting with Death Valley:

• Author & photog Ben Long is just back from the park as well, and he's posted a gallery of terrific shots.
• If the boys of Ballarat were ever to go digital, they might like the Kodak 1881: a digital camera as vintage locket. [Via]
• "You just had to run": TOP relays an anecdote from Steven Spielberg on catching the dawn for Empire of the Sun.
• Author Will Self has documented his writing room, festooned with Post-It notes.  (I feel like he's got a physical version of my copy of Contribute, from which I write this blog.  It's a warren of ideas and links, jotted in blurbs, competing for too little time.) [Via]
  

April 26, 2007

Check out the thorax on that guy

I'm a real lightweight when it comes to insects (for example, I could never name my Flash rival after one ;-)), but they do inspire creative photography & more:

• Buzz illustrates "The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects" via some amazing microscopic photography. See inside. [Via]
• Student photographer Lawraa shares a shot of a praying mantis apparently listening to Snoop ("Throw your prehensile appendages in the ai-ir...") [Via]
• Der Spiegel had a great gallery of shattered bugs, but now I've waited too long and it's returning a 404 error.  Dang--maybe it'll turn up elsewhere, as the images were worth seeing. The best the site will now give me is a pregnant cow scaring chubby cyclists.
• Make any treat more mouthwatering with the help of sugar that looks like ants. [Via]
• In a similar vein, an ad campaign uses ants--"the most credible ambassadors for sweetness*"-- to show off sugar-free eats.
• [For more bug life, see previous.]

April 7, 2007

Swords, plowshares, photos & art

• Armed America photographs some of those who own the nation's ~200 million firearms, sharing bits of their perspectives.
• Armed Appalachians appear in Shelby Lee Adams's Napier Family series.
• Slate features Gitmo in Black and White, a Magnum photographers' slideshow documenting the prisoner detention center at Guantanamo Bay.  (If there's a more surreal location for a Starbucks, I've yet to hear it.)
• Juxtaposing wealth & war, this image from Lebanon was named "Photo of the Year 2006" by World Press Photo.  There's more info in this NPR story (which for whatever reason won't play on my Mac). [Via]
• Unflinching war photographer James Nachtwey has been honored at the TED Conference.  They've created a video discussing his & others' work, and Nachtwey is covered in the documentary War Photographer (3-minute excerpt). [Via]
• Hoping for a more peaceful world, Retired Weapons depicts another future for military hardware.  (I hoped for a bit more from this one, but maybe it's deeper than I'm seeing.) [Via]
• Lastly, a reason to go bigger than Shuffle: this iPod saved a soldier's life.
  

April 1, 2007

Your eyeballs' resolution, historic photos, & more

• As traditional photo printing heads into obscurity, photo conservationist Dusan Stulik & his crew at the Getty Conservation Institute want to capture what's being lost. They're "working on what might be described as the genome project of predigital photography: a precise chemical fingerprint of all the 150 or so ways pictures have been developed" over the last 170 years.  19-century leather printing sounds cool, but as for the uranium prints, he can keep 'em.
• Taking a different angle on photo preservation, Shorpy is "The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog." (It's named after this little dude, apparently.) [Via]
• I haven't gotten to poke at it much, but Focus, The Photographic Search Engine, sounds interesting. [Via]
• Your point-and-shoot has a little way to go before reaching the 576-megapixel resolution of the human eye [Via]
• And lastly, speaking of resolution, who knew that Google satellite aerial photography could go so insanely close?  If I start balding, they'll probably know before I do... [Via]

March 30, 2007

Infrared, bobbleheads, & bone-crunching hits

• Get down, do you?  Sport Shooter talks about the details of Peter Read Miller's low-angle shooting, which makes for some extra-dramatic images. [Via]  (Turns out this even works for former Photoshop PMs/Adobe execs. ;-))  
• Elsewhere on the site, Peter Lockley uses infrared & a tilt-shift lens to offer a fresh take on baseball.
• Sports Illustrated is hosting a gallery of photographer Bill Frakes' best shots. Gotta love those bobbleheads.
  

March 28, 2007

Safe, humane tourist-zapping in Photoshop Extended

Yesterday I mentioned that Photoshop CS3 Extended features "image stack analytical filters."  Er, yes, so that's useful and relevant... how, exactly?  In a nutshell, you can now treat multiple images as a single entity, running an algorithm across them non-destructively.  So, for example, you could take a range of frames, then have Photoshop show you the average value of each pixel.  Other algorithms include Entropy, Skewness, Summation, and Kurtosis*.

If this doesn't yet sound scintillating, it's probably because (I'm guessing) you're not doing technical image processing work.  It was to enable technical applications that image stack processing was added, and it's the reason that one finds the feature in Photoshop Extended.

Having said that, photographer and author Martin Evening has come up with a great example of how combining multiple images into a stack, then aligning them and running the Median filter, can make moving objects (tourists, pigeons, bits of noise) disappear.  Check out his story on Photoshop News for details and images.  To demonstrate the process, I've whipped up this 75-second video demo using Martin's images (hoping he won't mind).  And you can watch Russell Brown "reduce global warming" by removing the cars from the Golden Gate Bridge**.

Now, I'll admit that seeing image stacks this way makes our marketing story a little more challenging.  Didn't we say that "Photoshop Extended" is meant to offer specific capabilities to people who need them, and that we haven't withheld core photographic functionality in order to get every customer wanting/using Extended?  We did say that, and it's true.  Image stacks are powerful and (I think) pretty cool, but I'd feel uneasy about overselling them a core photographic tool.  There's both power and potential here, but it's a little more science-fair-ish than we'd like to sell for mainstream photography work.

Does that make sense? We are sincere in trying to group capabilities logically in Photoshop vs. Photoshop Extended.  We did not want to be shady.  (That's why, for example, you'll find "Video Frames to Layers" in both editions of PS: It was previously in ImageReady, and even though we'd have had an easier time saying "all the video stuff is in Extended," we didn't want anyone's arm to feel twisted.)

* Which, Chris Cox assures me, does not mean "bad breath."
** This also demonstrates how stacks are related to video, which is core component of Photoshop Extended.

March 16, 2007

Friday photography

• I love this horse goatee from Tim Flach.  Explore his site for other great details, including these bats. [Via]
• Tim's dog shots reminded me of these (somewhat inexplicably) flying dogs from filmmakers Pleix.
• Kazuhiko Kawahara reveals "Twisted symmetry" in his digitally enhanced photo compositions.   Many of the most eye-catching shots are featured in his interview in PingMag. [Via]
• I enjoyed Jeremy Cowart's portfolio on Virb, digging this silhouette especially.
• David Ichioka's overhead camera casts an unblinking eye on peeps sleeping.

March 10, 2007

Beautiful patterns in nature & beyond

• Robert Hodgin is a creative force.  It seems his Flight404 has been an inspiration as long as I can remember, and now he shares the lovely Magnetosphere.  This--this--is what I want using Photoshop to be like--totally alive, reactive, surprising (cf. that Hands video I mentioned earlier).  Robert discusses its creation here.
• The piece reminds me of the Eskimo Nebula, seen in NASA's Image of the Day archive. [Via]
• Jeff Schewe captured some captivating patterns in icebergs in Antarctica last month. My favorite bits start roughly halfway through the gallery.
• Peep the gardens to be found in Petri dishes. [Via]
• Marc Pawliger points out a gallery of cool flame fractals.

March 8, 2007

New lens comes with free hernia

Damn--this new Sigma lens (200-500mm, F2.8) is a beast; see details (which omit the key question of weight).  No word on whether this thing ships with its own crew of sherpas.  Of course, it's still no match for that 500+ lb custom Zeiss monster, but it's impressive nonetheless. [Via Russell Williams]

March 6, 2007

Hurricanes, Turkish panos, & more

• The New Yorker talks to photographer Clifford Ross, creator of the ultra-high-res R1 film camera (see it on his site), as well as the R2, a 360-degree video camera (images) that captures 9 gigs of data each minute.  The R2, they write, is "like a super-high-tech Advent calendar," revealing "thousands of little inadvertent dramas."  I've found Clifford's site engrossing, offering a high-res sample image, as well as his terrific Hurricane series (apparently a very wet shooting endeavor). [Via]
• As Turkish photog & filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan traveled the country to scout locations, he created a series of striking panoramas called Turkey Cinemascope.  His muted palettes & lighting are out of sight.  The Online Photographer offers a brief profile.
• Macduff Everton travels the world making beautiful images, many of them panoramic.  I found his site a touch difficult to navigate (and the images sadly tiny), but the gallery is lovely nonetheless. [Via Dave Sailer]

March 4, 2007

Under a Blood Red Moon

• Jonas Thomén has posted a great sequence of Saturday night's blood-red lunar eclipse.  Other takes are here, here, and here. [Via]
• Mathias Verhasselt makes some solid sci-fi concept art.
• For some more sci, potentially less fi concepts, check out what NASA is considering building on the moon.  On a related note, BusinessWeek talks about the interior designs produced by British firm Seymourpowell for Virgin Galactic. [Via]
• NASA is also offering some new images of Jupiter, including one showing a 180-mile-high volcanic plume.
• Pointing back the other way, NASA's Earth Observatory furnishes a wealth of beautiful imagery--much of it available in high res (like this). [Via]

February 27, 2007

The 66" negative

AutoWeek has the interesting story of how photographer Rick Graves uses a modified, motorized camera back which feeds a continuous roll of film past the shutter while it's open, creating a very wide negative (like this one; scroll it to the right):

"Each image Graves makes is from one exposure on an entire roll of film, not a composite of several different images.

"'A number of people have tried to build this type of camera,' Graves said, likening it to the finish-line cameras used at horse races. 'But the difference with my camera is that I have 66 inches of movement [of the film] in one second. The film is moving relative to the moving subject. I developed this camera as a better way to capture motion.'

"The secret to the system is not the camera itself—a standard 500 Series Hasselblad—but in the film back, which contains a small motor and various electronics adapted from the robotics industry. This setup gives Graves control of how fast the film moves when he opens the shutter. If he gets it right, the film is moving at the same speed as the cars, allowing for a photo with dozens of speeding cars, all razor sharp."

NASCAR sells prints that are 4 inches tall by 8 feet long.  Check out many more examples (not all automotive) in the DistaVision portfolio. One slight bummer is that because of the ubiquity of Photoshop-edited composites in the world, a lot of viewers may think these works are simply digital collages. [Via Joe Ault]

On a related note, I happened across an article on slit-scan photography that features a rather trippy photo produced using related methods. [Via]

February 25, 2007

Urban grit, bright buildings, and more

BYOTR (Bring Your Own Thematic Relationship) to these photos; I can't offer one this time. :-)

• I love the punchy palettes & urban grit Keith Kin Yan captures on Overshadowed.  Dig this composition in particular.  [Via]
• Mixing bright colors and brutalism, check out these beautifully painted Russian tower blocks. [Via]
• Offering their own mix of bright & muted, see Evern Sahlin's India photos. (Namaste, Kilroy.) [Via]
  
• National Geographic's Your Shot gives readers a chance to submit photography for inclusion in the magazine.  I enjoy this perspective on bicycles in the snow. On a vaguely related note, Welcome to the Story invites readers to submit pictures of themselves to be incorporated into the narrative (not that I have any idea what's supposed to be going on). [Via]
• Careful with that cam, Eugene: Hasselblad has a proud tradition of putting cameras in space; unfortunately one of them is part of a growing halo of space junk circling the earth.  On another Hasselblad note, they feature some beautiful photos of a Bugatti from Peter Dudek. [Via Bryan O'Neil Hughes]
• Google turned up this panorama of the Millau viaduct bridge (which, at 984ft, is the world's tallest).  More cool photos of its construction are here.
• Burning bulbs redux: Rich Legg has captured a nice image of burnout. [Via]
• This wee thing is creepy & fantastic, all at once.

February 17, 2007

Panopalooza: From Barcelona to the Moon

It's rough--rough!--when a humble photog like me finds himself pursued from city to city by someone much more capable behind the lens.  But that's the situation in which I found myself last week, when Dzone Magazine editor Hans Frederiks* (brother of Adobe's own Ton Frederiks) joined us in Amsterdam, then in Barcelona.  I found time to squeeze in a few panoramic shots, but every time I'd turn around, Hans was shooting & had already uploaded images to his blog.  It's all good, though, and I wanted to pass along a few of his images (stitched together with Photoshop CS3):

• Barcelona at sunrise from the Adobe office.  By the time I arrived, the light had changed, so I settled for shooting the interior.
• Barcelona shot from a similar vantage point later in the day.
• The Amsterdam harbor just outside the building where we held a press briefing.  (Here's my take, as well as the interior.)

Since folks seemed to enjoy my Paris panorama, here are a few more from the journey**:

• Barcelona skyline from Montjuïc.  I shot the harbor, including the cable car that took us to Montjuïc, from a similar vantage point.
• Barcelona skyline from Parc Güell.  (Bummer that it was so hazy.)  The Adobe office is in the beachfront high-rise that appears just to the right of the Sagrada Familia cathedral.  How people concentrate while working there, I have no idea...
• This version shows a couple of the famous Gaudí-designed ceramic works in the park, and this shot points the other direction, back into the park.  (Check out the little lizard king below the columns.)
• Interior of the city train station.
• Interior of one of the columns of the Sagrada Familia (also in Zoomify flavor, though there's more noise than detail to explore).
• Sagrada facade--not a pano per se, but a shot that was required stiching these four images.
• Back to Amsterdam: a pair of images of the city's famous canals.
• The history museum at Tarragona--just down the coast from Barcelona, and home of the Romans' HQ in Iberia.
• Tarragona at sunset.

Figuring that if you've read this far, you must like panoramic flavor, so I'll pass along a few more:

• Hans Nyberg has scanned & stitched photographs taken on the surface of the moon, assembling them into this excellent QuickTime VR panorama (complete with sound!).  More details on the project are here. [Via]
• Photographer Alexandre Duret-Lutz has turned his panos into a series of super cool Mini-planets. [Via]
• Jim Heid from Macworld passed along this lovely panorama he took from the top of L'Arc d'Triomphe.
• Photographer Scott Howard creates giant images, and through Zoomify you can see that they remain tack-sharp all the way in.  He writes, "For some examples of gigapano's done with a standard (manual!) tripod, but with a nice Canon 100-400L lens have a look at these:
  
  • Sydney By Night - 740 Megapixels
    
  • Mega Machu Picchu - 1500 Megapixels
    
  • Chicago By Night - 1000 Megapixels"

*I also can't offer up phrases like "Eindelijk sneeuw! De lichtmeester 'at it again'!"  But I can enjoy the sound. ;-)

**Note: We're still fine tuning the Zoomify implementation in Photoshop.  The output here is generally nicer than what you can produce with the CS3 public beta, but we still have some work to do (e.g. the panos are a bit soft when they first load).  Also, I'm trying not to Zoomify things just for the sake of doing so, and instead I want to use the feature only when it adds value (and when it doesn't let you see just how noisy some of my captures are!).

Oh, and one more thing: This is post #500 on the ol' blog-blog-revolution.  I hope you enjoy the reading as much as I enjoy the writing.

February 14, 2007

Frosty photography

From chilly Kansas City (via my friend Maria at Hallmark, specifically) comes a link to amazing photos from Lake Geneva in Switzerland, showing cars, boats, and more buried in beautiful, brutal ice.  Background info on the pix is at Snopes.com.

Man, this stuff makes me not miss living in Boston.  I returned to Logan airport once to find my old Volvo with six inches of snow coating its side, needing to be clawed off with a speaker cover that had conveniently fallen off the door.  San José, CA, may have all the culture of a beer nut, but the weather sure doesn't suck.

[Tangentially related Boston/cold thing: On this Europe trip, InDesign PM Chad Siegel entertained us to no end with his rendition of a beer vendor from Fenway Park: "ICE cold beeah heeah! FREEZE ya teeth, take ya TONGUE on a sleigh ride! You'll wish ya throat was a miiiiiiile loong!"  Of course I had to morph this into a topical cry: "RED hot apps heeah! WORK ya flow, take ya MOUSE on a joy ride!  You'll wish ya screen was a miiiiiile wide!"]

February 8, 2007

GigaPans & big zooms

A couple of interesting optical bits of note:

• Roland Piquepaille talks about a new device called GigaPan, a $200 automated device which promises to facilitate the creation of very large panoramas. More info is here. [Via]
  
• David Pogue waxes rhapsodic about the hard-to-find Nikon 18-200mm stabilized lens. Newly minted Flash PM (formerly long-time Flash evangelist) Richard Galvan has been shooting up a storm with what I believe is this same lens & loves it. He took some beautiful sunrise shots of Barcelona today, to which I'll link as soon as he posts 'em.
  
• New Canon developments are rumored, including the possibility of some new "long glass." I've been wondering when we might see a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens featuring the new image stabilization technology. Having just shelled out for a house, however, my enthusiasm for a purchase like that has appropriately waned... [Via Keith Cooper]
  

February 7, 2007

Paris from the top

I'm having a ball shooting panoramic images in Europe, so I thought I'd share one sample (more to come). I created this 27MP Parisian pano by taking a series of shots from atop the Tour Montparnasse, home to the local Adobe office. I stitched the images together by loading them via the files-to-layers script, then choosing Edit->Auto-Align Layers, followed by Edit->Auto Blend Layers, and finally Export->Zoomify.

Adobe must have a thing for towers, and I write this from the Barcelona office, which tops a 20-story building overlooking the beach. The city is as beautiful as I'd been told, so I look forward to shooting more tourist bits--er, valuable test files--in a bit.

[Update: Fixed link.]

February 3, 2007

Next-gen "Origami Lens"

John Dowdell tipped me to an interesting development in the world of tiny optics:

"Your next camera phone might get a new kind of lens if researchers at the University of California at San Diego convince the cell phones makers. They have designed an 'origami lens' which will slim high resolution cameras. Today, their 5-millimeter thick, 8-fold imager delivers images comparable in quality with photos taken with a compact camera lens with a 38 millimeter focal length. In a few years, these bendable lenses could be used in high resolution miniature cameras for unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision applications."

I, meanwhile, prepare to head out the door with a comparatively luggable 17-85mm lens in hand.  Having seen a colleague shooting this week with an approximately 35-200mm lens that appeared to offer a much wider aperture than mine & no appreciable increase in bulk, I keep wondering about my photo friends' advice.  "Oh, those things are blurry crap," they say--but boy, the flexibility & speed they appear to offer sure is appealing.  It makes me think of audiophiles who drop thousands of dollars on equipment that (to me, anyway) just reveals the flaws in the source audio or other components.  I don't want to use garbage, but I'm starting to stroke my chin about the info I've been getting...

January 31, 2007

Of Birds & Bees

• Rick Lieder, whose BeeDreams macrophotography was mentioned earlier, has turned to birds with the lovely CloudBoxer.com
• Graham Jeffery (of smoke fame) has posted some insanely cool photos of hoverflies.  He's also gotten into the bird world; nice landing gear on this guy. :-)
  

January 26, 2007

Blowing Smoke

January 24, 2007

Night photography: Comets & more

• SpaceWeather.com has posted a gallery of beautiful shots of Comet McNaught in action, including this otherworldly pic from the Haleakala High Altitude Observatory. [Via]
• Joe Lencioni has posted a nice shot of the Leonids meteor shower (now joined by a second shot).
• Joe Reifer has posted in-depth info on shooting with a Canon 5D & a wide angle lens, used to produce this image.  [For more from him, see previous.]
• I really enjoy the painterly quality of New York Blue, from photographer Bill Travis. [Sidenote: It's amazing how different the same image looks in Safari vs. Firefox on my system, due to FF not (as far as I know) honoring color profiles.  Would it kill the browser makers to implement color management?  Of course, Adobe needs to do the same in the Flash Player.]

January 23, 2007

Organized Randomness

(Other than this blog, I mean.)

• In More Turns, photographer Bill Sullivan has captured New Yorkers as they pass through subway turnstiles.  "I developed a situation," he writes, "so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus... At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet."  Besides the images themselves, I really enjoy the quasi-panoramic presentation.  Bill rotates the same approach 90 degrees in his elevator-based Stop Down series, where closing doors do the cropping. [Via]
• In The Thought Project, Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg approached 150 strangers on the streets of Copenhagen and NYC, asking them what they were thinking the moment before he stopped them. He recorded their replies and then took their portraits. Thoughts range from truffles to Sheena is a Punk Rocker to IRBMs. [Via]
• In Le Grand Content, Clemens Kogler pretty much captures how my mind works, depicting connections between hamsters, religious doubt, artificial sweeteners, heavy drinking, and more. [Via]
  

January 22, 2007

Burning bulbs

Yesterday I happened across a rather cool photo gallery from Lightroom engineer Kevin Tieskoetter, in which he captures the moments just after shattering lightbulbs.  Kevin writes,

I was inspired by a similar image I saw on photo.net and thought it would be fun to give it a try. I went through probably 50-100 bulbs, and discovered I had the most luck with the candle-flame-shaped frosted bulbs, mostly because they have a more interesting design to their elements, they're dirt cheap, and I can break the bulb with a pair of pliers. If I break just the tip off, I can then use a needle-nose pliers to break off additional chunks until I have just the amount of glass remaining that I want (although I found it was usually more interesting without any glass showing). Traditional lightbulbs turn out to actually be very hard to break, especially without destroying the filament in the process. Also, the filament is so simple that the flame pattern isn't as interesting.

I borrowed a Nikon D2hs and a Canon 1D Mk II to do the shots: high pixel count wasn't particularly important, but a high frames per second was critical. Once I lit the bulb, it would burn for 1-2 seconds, but the only interesting shots were generally at the very start of the process as the mushroom cloud was rising. An 8fps camera makes a big difference here.

The images were backlit using a standard flash on an extension cord. I set it to manual mode at 1/64 power (I think; I did a lot of experimenting here to find the right settings). Lenses used were a 50mm macro (at 1.5x magnification) and 150mm macro (at no magnification).

January 21, 2007

Single-pixel camera

The megapixel wars are so overrated--at least according to a team of researchers at Rice University. By focusing light on a single-pixel sensor, they promise reduced power consumption & consequently greater battery life in digital cameras.  The digital micromirror device, says the BBC, "consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium."  As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. 

Photoshop engineer Zalman Stern points out the researchers' info on compressive imaging & writes,

The design uses a micromirror array and a lens to perform a pseudorandom weighting of the image. The result is sampled using a single photo detector. The image presented to the micromirror array is from a standard lens system of some sort.

The interesting part is the math underlying the reconstruction from the samples. There is recent theory work that determines how good a reconstruction you can get for a given amount of sampling reduction. That is, one takes significantly fewer samples than the number of pixels in the output image and gets a moderately acceptable rendition of the original scene. One way they have of looking at this is that image compression is done during sampling, rather than digitally afterwards.

The device is currently the size of a suitcase, so getting it into practical applications is likely to take some time. [Via Kevin Tieskoetter]

* For those interested in these things: Zalman was on the Photoshop team way back in the day (doing the port to PowerPC, as well as the ye olde GIF 89a Export plug-in).  After that he left, joined Macromedia, then left and started a company, then found his way back to Macromedia, and thus to Adobe. (Kind of a nice pallindrome...) Now he's contributing code to Camera Raw that's "rockin' like Dokken." He was a creator of Contribute, which I'm using to type this now. It's a small world, after all.

January 19, 2007

Friday photography

• Nature Photographers has posted its Editor's Pick Awards for 2006, featuring assorted natural gorgeousness. [Via]
• Speaking of wild creatures, I got a kick out of this photo of one of Scotland's hairy coos doing that Michael Jordan tongue-thing.
• And speaking of the natural world, you might call this rather amazing shot clearing the forest, seeing the tree.  The Daily Mail has the story. [Via]
• A totally different kind of Auto-Align: Michael Hughes travels the earth, overlaying postcards & other tourist swag on top of the real scene.  Check out his gallery on Flickr to see what I mean. (Tilting at windmills is especially nice.) [Via]
• Maggie Hallahan took part in the Lightroom/Photoshop Iceland Adventure & has posted a gallery from the trip. (You might also check out her accompanying podcast.)
• Revealing Chicago, by Terry Evans, offers an aerial portrait of the Windy City. [Via]  Photoshop team member & Chi-town native Heather Dolan reports seeing the exhibition at Millennium Park & loving it.
• Trona, CA, is one of the most surreally depressing places on earth, but it might have some soulmates in these decaying Soviet roadside bus stops. [Via]
• Today's NYT features a story & nice gallery discussing the International Center of Photography's new shows covering Martin Munkacsi & Henri Cartier-Bresson.  The ICP site has online galleries showing additional images from both Munkacsi & Cartier-Bresson.

January 17, 2007

Take photos, not a beating

Will snapping a photo get you popped in the nose, legally or literally? The latter's a good bet in a biker bar, but what guidance exists for other situations--especially in a climate of heightened security? "Since I've heard various people ask (or debate) these questions from time to time," writes Photoshop engineer Russell Williams, "here are some references you might find useful:"

• A short guide to "When/where is it OK to take pictures? [in the US]":
• A short guide to "When do I need a model release? [in the US]"
• A 5-page article from Popular Photography about various legalities of taking, publishing, and selling pictures
  
• Possibly more than you want to know about model and property releases, with example situations and practical suggestions. (The Section 10 summary is reasonable to read on its own.)

[Update: See additional good links in the comments below.]

Little Fluffy Clouds

• Paul Octavious has posted some of the most interesting photos I've seen in a while. I love the way his silhouettes play with our sense of scale. [Via]
• From Paul's gallery I found my way to other cool cloud shots on Flickr.
• Philip Straub, head of concept art at Electronic Arts, creates some clouds that are anything but little n' fluffy. [Via] He talks about his history, work in Photoshop & Painter, and more in this interview.
• In case you missed an earlier link posted in the comments, check out these rather amazing lenticular clouds. [Via BW Jones]

January 10, 2007

Local Boy Does Good: Geoff's image in PopPhoto

One of the nice things about working on Photoshop is that many people on the team enjoy using the software outside of work, especially for digital photography.  The hallways & office doors of West Tower 10 are filled with beautiful prints from folks in engineering, QE, localization, etc., and using the app as a customer provides great perspective while building it. 

Anyway, an image from Photoshop engineer Geoff Scott now appears in this month's Popular Photography.  He explains, "Last May I went on a trip that’s put together by American Photo and Popular Photography magazines. The trips are called Mentor Series, because pro photographer come along to offer tips, critiques, and general goofiness." The organizers liked one so much that they're using it for the ads for the trip this year, and you can check it out here (cars streaking through Times Square).  Congrats, Geoff.

January 9, 2007

Dare to Daguerre

Today is the 168th anniversary of the daguerrotype's introduction to the world.  Interestingly enough, this archaic form of photography remains a powerful, if seldom used, artistic medium: since 1999 painter Chuck Close has been using the process to create some interesting portraits, including an unvarnished Kate Moss.  If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out Neatorama's World of Early Photography.

January 8, 2007

Fluid Photography: Foam, Ice, Air, Flood

• From Russia with Foam: John Peterson passed along this gallery showing the hiterto unknown art of drawing on top of coffee. (I think Jerry Uelsmann might dig this one. ;-)) And later I found a video of the techniques in action.
• Only slightly more permanent, the sparkling sculptures in the Harbin international ice and snow festival are built to chill. [Via] China Daily features photos from the opening ceremonies.
• Elsewhere in cold China, check out this frozen waterfall. [Via]
• The Musée d'Orsay features the work of Etienne-Jules Marey, who did pioneering work photographing air at the start of the 20th century, using imaging plus one of the first wind tunnels to reveal previously unseen details of air's fluid dynamics. [Via]
• Whereas those vintage photos are presented in frustatingly small form, the Paris School of Mines features large images of the city during the 1910 flood [Via]

January 1, 2007

Photography to welcome a new year

• Milk'shroom: From Germany comes a terrific image of milk dropping into coffee. [Via]
• Like perhaps millions of others, I've seen some of Steve McCurry's famous and arresting images, but like many I didn't know his name.  I know it now, as the always-excellent blog The Online Photographer highlighted the arrival of Looking East, a book of Steve's portraiture. Do be careful, though: his site contains a rich portfolio and could well suck you in for ages (and it did me). [Via]
• Through T.O.P. I was reminded of the work of Jill Greenberg, whom they've named Photographer of the Year.  Her crying tots aren't my cup of tea, but for whatever reason I really groove on her monkey portraits. See more of them here.
• My own amateurish bits suffer by proximity, but the windy CA weather dropped a few groovy branches in our yard last night, and with a macro lens borrowed from the 'Dobe, I had fun creating a few shots.  I've posted them (1, 2) via Zoomify, exported from CS3, as well so you can see the details. [Note: We'll fix that "zoomed way out by default" bug soon, I promise.]
• Someday, I'm afraid, you'll read that I crashed and burned on Hwy 101 while transfixed by the comings & goings at Moffett Field, former home of the Navy's lighter-than-air fleet.  In the meantime, the NYT is selling a beautiful print of a Zeppelin over Manhattan. On a related note, "Personal Blimp" refers not just to a product mgr. stuffed with HoneyBaked Ham (it was delicious) , but also to a small new airship being designed in Massachusetts. [Via]
  

December 30, 2006

Atmospheric photography

• Marc Pawliger passed along this gallery from PhotoAstronomique.net, containing some interesting time lapse stuff.  Shots like this one make me remember how much I have yet to learn about my camera.  As the text is in French, I can't read much of it, but I think "Arc de brume" sounds great. [Update: Here's the site in English.]
• Seeking atmosphere of a different kind, Nicole Bengiveno has captured some beautiful impressions around NYC.  (The music may or may not be your cup of tea; I preferred to nuke it and focus just on the visuals.) [Via]
  

32-bit/HDR improvements in Photoshop CS3

Photoshop CS2 introduced the application's first support for 32-bit high dynamic range (HDR) imaging.  The support was pretty limited, consisting of the Merge to HDR command (for combining bracketed shots into a single image) and some basic imaging functions (cropping, cloning, conversing from 32 to 8 or 16 bits per channel).  Even so, about a year ago examples started popping up of HDR experiments (not solely connected to Photoshop, of course, but helped along by CS2).  In the time since then more good resources on the subject have emerged.

The Photoshop CS3 beta includes some improvements in the HDR realm.  Some more functions (e.g. Levels) are enabled for 32-bit images, and the Merge to HDR command, although superficially similar to the one in CS2, contains a variety of improvements.  It benefits from the new image alignment code; preserves a more complete set of source data; and uses improved algorithms for merging the data.

Trevor Morris has kindly supplied an HDR photo created with the CS3 beta, as well as the source frames.  He says, "I could never get it to work in CS2, but it worked flawlessly in CS3, and I was quite pleased with the results."  He writes,

This photo was shot inside the Christ Church Cathedral, located in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. For this particular shot, I used a tripod and remote to capture 12 exposures, from 1/125s to 20s, with a Nikon D70 @ f/16, ISO 200, FL 18mm. I combined the exposures using Merge to HDR, increased the local contrast, and gave the image a slight saturation boost.

Give it a whirl with your bracketed shots, and please let us know whether it works well for you.

December 27, 2006

Mechanical insects & more

• Graham Owen creates insanely realistic flies for fishing.   (I've spent a good part of the Christmas break cat-fishing; wonder what Graham could do in the way of a felt mouse.)  He even offers a step-by-step tutorial on creating flies.  [Via]
• And if that's not realistic (or weird) enough for you, there's Mike Libby's Insect Lab,"an artist-operated studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components." [Via]
• Speaking of animals+electronics, the Woofer's name works on two levels.  I wonder if he's related to this pup.
• Artist Cai Guo-Qiang gets crazy with animals real (dead wolves a go-go; an unfortunate tiger going out like St. Sebasian) and imagined (explosive dragon skeleton) [Via]
• The NYT features some beautiful shots of northern Japan's disappearing world of draft horse racing.

[See also previous bits]

December 26, 2006

Photos of the Year 2006

• The NYT has posted its Year in Pictures, featuring images of war, politics, sports, and more.  It's amazing how quickly events can fade from our (or at least my) consciousness, often just months after they occur.
• MSNBC has some terrific galleries from this past year.  (Bet you've never seen a bull doing a headstand before.) See also Time's collection.
• The Photography Blog features an interview with German photographer Gerd Ludwig, named Photographer of the Year at the Lucie Awards.  His journeys through the former USSR produce images both grim & transcendent.   (On going digital, "I turned my film fridge into a wine cooler," he says.) [Via]
• Chernobyl is the subject of an intense and difficult portfolio from Paul Fusco. I found it among Slate's excellent collection of interactive essays from Magnum photographers.  See also Martin Parr's take on the "flotsam and jetsam of the Western world."
• Mexican crime photographer Enrique Metinides captures a rough world--supermarket shootouts, wounded actresses, and more.  Additonal work is featured in the Anton Kern Gallery [Via]
• Slight non sequitur: I don't know why I find the idea of a wooden digital camera so charming, but I do. [Via]
  

December 21, 2006

Ten thousand bucks a gallon... for ink

"Give away the razor, make money on the razor blades..." I say, the razor guys need to convince you to ink your face/legs, 'cause the real money is in inkjet refills.

Popular Photography's Michael McNamara has posted some interesting observations on the state of inkjet prices in the world market.  Note: I don't mention this to suggest that these products are overpriced.  The rate of innovation in desktop printing has been terrific, and as Michael notes, these inks enable creation of prints that "technically blow away minilab and online quality, plus last five to ten times longer on display."  It's simply interesting to do the math on commodities that are, drop for drop, among the most expensive any of us will likely encounter. [Via Russell Williams]

December 14, 2006

Photos of Adobe at night

Photoshop engineer Chris Bailey says he was killing time recently, installing Linux on a bunch of Adobe servers, and snapped some cool shots of the Adobe San Jose courtyard/basketball court/bocce ball enclave. (And as with all things Flickr, if you're visiting through Safari, you owe it to yourself to download the free, cinematic PicLens viewer.) Chris also captured some time-lapse shots of the ever-present, always slightly unnerving low-flying planes overhead.

For more shots of the friendly confines, see Jeff Schewe's story, A Visit to Adobe.  And here's the same courtyard from space.

December 10, 2006

3.8 Gigapixels of Half Dome; Great Flash panoramas

The folks at FlashPanoramas.com sell a utility for displaying spherical panoramas via the Flash Player.  They've now updated their technology to take advantage of the new full-screen mode enabled in the latest rev of Player 9.  Check out some very cool examples, or get the tool for €39.95 from their site. [Via]

Elsewhere, Greg Downing & co. at xRez.com are working on Extreme Resolution panoramic image creation.  Check out this 3.8 gigapixel* spherical panorama of Half Dome, displayed via the Google Maps API.  Although the subject is nearly a mile from the camera position, you can zoom in and see a climber on the face of Half Dome, as well as someone standing on the visor & and hikers along the Merced river in the valley below. Wicked!  "By the way," Greg writes, "Photoshop large document format [PSB] was a lifesaver on this project!"

The xRez site shows off more examples and goes into plenty of technical geekery for those so inclined.  Greg's own site offers other interesting bits on HDR panoramas, and this QuickTime slideshow nicely demonstrates how various elements of a scene can be displayed at different exposures.   (Aside: Is that thing a naval mine or an interrogation droid or...?)  A test render of 3D objects lit with an HDR lighting map shows the power of sampling this data from a scene, then feeding it into a 3D rendering package.

*According to Wikipedia, a single gigapixel contains 250 times the data captured by a 4MP sensor. (Of course, at any given moment Wikipedia might claim that I personally have invented over 350 uses for the peanut--but I think it can be trusted in this case.)

December 8, 2006

New digital photography guides from Adobe

More…

Tethered shooting in Lightroom; ACR versioning

• At photography shows I'm frequently asked by pro photographers for support of tethered shooting in Lightroom--that is, the ability to have a high-end camera tethered to one's workstation, and to have the images flow in as they're shot.  The good news is that what's requested is largely possible already.  London-based fashion photographer/author Martin Evening has posted a great intro to shooting tethered in Lightroom.  [See also Martin's overviews of the Lightroom Library and Develop modules.]
• Photographer and author Ben Long has posted a Windows version of his Adobe Camera Raw Version Control package. By duplicating and managing XMP settings files, this free set of applications makes it simple to create and manage multiple versions of the same raw document. This means you can easily create multiple XMP files for the same image, and easily switch from one to the other.  Also check out the free (though donation-supported) Mac version.
  

November 26, 2006

The Colour & the Shape

Adobe kuler (which seems to be getting much love) has put color on my brain.  With that in mind:

• Colour By Numbers is a 72m-high light installation in Sweden. You can program the colors using a phone (just call +46 (70) 57 57 807), then watch the results in a live video feed on the site. [Via]
• Photographer Constantine Manos captures the nation's rich palettes in American Color.
• COLOURlovers is "a resource that monitors and influences color trends," providing news and interviews as well as tools for browsing and rating palettes.  They recently interviewed Dr. Woohoo (aka Drew Trujillo), creator of the In The Mod color analytics tool, among other grooviness.
• Moto Colors makes it possible to browse Motorola phones by color, and to create, ah, abstract designs in the corresponding colors.  (Click and drag once you've picked a color in order to paint.)  [Via]
• It's possible to trick your eye into seeing color on a B&W photo, as in this Spanish castle illusion.  To create your own version of the illusion, follow the steps of this tutorial, complete with a Photoshop action. [Via]
  

November 24, 2006

Animals photographed in the womb, & more

• Using a combination of three-dimensional ultrasound scans, computer graphics and tiny cameras, a team of filmmakers has been able to show the entire process of animal gestation from conception to birth.  Here's the article and amazing photo gallery.  [Via]
• Created in After Effects & Lightwave by XVIVO for Harvard biology students, The Inner Life of a Cell depicts mighty mitochondria and the like doing their thing; check it out in high- or low-res Flash video. [Via]
• Among the more unusual images I've seen, here's the sun shot through the Earth, displaying neutrinos that pass through the planet's mass.
• Speaking of celestial imagery, this month's National Geographic features stupendously gorgeous images of Saturn--just a hint of which can be found on their site.  [See also previous]
• Rick Lieder must have the patience of Job, and it pays off in his insect macrophotography at BeeDreams.com [Via]
• BibliOdyssey has posted The Concept of Mammals, a collection of antique critter renderings. "As was the fashion of the time," they write, "the animals were placed in contrived settings and often given human facial qualities, which only serves to heighten the sense of bizarre. And thankful we are too." [Via]  The site is jammed with other good bits, including claws, shells, whales, and more. (And if stuff trips your trigger, check out Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.)
  

November 23, 2006

Pleasures of the Flesh... with Toast

Clearly the smell of slow-cooking turkey meat wafting down the hall is getting to me, and soon enough I'll give this laptop a much-deserved break.  But before that, here's a wee cornucopia of hopefully interesting bits:

• Sure, it's not "Kentucky Fried Turkey," but this insanely huge logo project seemed topical.  A video depitcs the assembly of 65,000, one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces into one big, smiling Southern mug.  More info here.
• Pleasures of the Flesh is an offbeat photo illustration project from David Field. See his portfolio for more creepiness.  [Via Kevin Connor]
• Setting a new standard for truth in advertising, Your Name On Toast offers--wait for it--"your name, except on toast."  The idea is that by selling photos of bespoke bread, they can raise money for a good cause.  Tasty!
• While Americans are busy hacking their birds, Japan is the Land of the Rising Pimp-Ride: Dekotora are insanely modified trucks, as you can see in this gallery of wild creations. [Via]
• If watching football today on a glossy screen is just too poncey, maybe you'll soon be able to select a grittier experience, courtesy of rear-projection concrete.

And with that, I wish you good eating, good health, & a day free from turkey frying disasters. [Via] Happy Thanksgiving!

--El Tryptophan

November 14, 2006

Tipping cows, Bending Light, & more

• Postcard Polaroid features, well, just that--a blog-ful of Polaroid snaps sent in by readers, often with little magic marker witticisms.
• In a related vein, Photojojo has a cool idea (and tutorial) for turning a single photo into a large mailable mosaic.  And in their Awesomeness section (heh), they sell The Mailable Photo Frame, a self-contained 4"x6" sleeve with its own stand.
• If that's up your alley, you might like MOO's Flickr MiniCards--an easy way to print tiny, sharable copies of your images.
• Through Joe Lencioni's excellent Shifting Pixel, I found Bending Light Magazine, home to numerous lovely Flash galleries like this one. I especially liked these discoveries. ("I've got a fever... and the only prescription... is more cowball.")
• I escaped rural Illinois without ever having tipped a cow, though I was chased by a few. Too bad I didn't think to shoot them (with a camera, of course).  Rachel Sudlow did; Cowscapes is the result.
• Borut Peterlin does some cool portraiture.
  

November 11, 2006

Photographic sculptures, giant graffiti, & more

• Gwon O-Sang creates intriguing three-dimensional sculptures (full-size people, vehicles, pets) from flat photos (c-prints).  An essay on the site shares more details. [Via]
• The NYT features an audio slideshow, with accompanying article, "In the Holy Caves of India." [Via Mary Huber]
• Julia Fullerton-Batten has skills.  'Nuff said. [Via]
• PicLens is a brilliant little Mac utility for delivering "an immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos on the Web."  It's ridiculously easy to use with image collections on Flickr, Google, etc.: clicking a little image overlay invokes a full-screen slideshow.  I used it today to enjoy Vincent Benoit's photostreams on Flickr. [Via]
• High-speed photography: Nike blows stuff up real good with their new Juice ball. [Via]
• To flash or not to flash: that is the night photography question.  Consider the results. ;-)
• Not photography, but what the hey: Street artist MOMO writes his (?) name the width of Manhattan. [Via]
  

Panoramas: Cubism, Holgas, and DIY planets

• "Holga Cubism": Susan Bowen is a fine art photographer who creates panoramic collages using a cheap plastic Holga camera.  She writes, "The long overlapping images are created by only partially advancing the film between exposures – the overlapping occurs in the film itself. It delights me how well these mostly unplanned juxtapositions capture my experience of a particular time and place and at the same time have an identity all their own."   Check it out. [Via]
• Danish photographer Hans Nyberg took a series of panoramas at Photokina , including a pair showing the Adobe booth.  He reports, "For fast action panoramas we shoot 3 or 4 images with a fisheye. Many of us use the Canon 5D today with a Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye (with an adapter). They are stitched with software like PTGui." Here are some more.
• Photojojo (no relation, we presume) has a fun tutorial on How to Create Your Own Planets Using Your Panoramas. [Via]

November 1, 2006

Creating professional HDR images

Ryan McGinnis of Backing Winds has posted a solid intro to creating high dynamic range images in Photoshop.  "Photoshop CS2 has a little-known (it seems) built-in HDR assembler," he writes, "that, while lacking the 'make my photo look like an acid-trip' tone-mapping features of Photomatix, is capable of creating extremely realistic or extremely surreal HDR images." He ends up with a beautifully exposed image of the interior of a cathedral, although it would be nice to get a bit more info on how he (very capably) tone-mapped the 32-bit file down to 16bpc. [Via]

I mentioned the article to Photoshop engineer John Peterson, who worked on the Merge to HDR feature.  He points out a few things:

• Instead of opening images via Camera Raw, setting their parameters, and then choosing Merge to HDR, you can simply select them in Bridge and choose Tools->Photoshop->Merge to HDR (or from within Photoshop, choose File->Automate->Merge to HDR).
• Merge to HDR and Camera RAW have a secret handshake where M2HDR tells Camera Raw to always zero out the exposure-related parameters (Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast) and guarantee linear output.
• "The alignment feature doesn't usually work so great" -- Fair enough, and we have some good ideas on how to improve it.
• "You don't need to adjust the histogram...it has no effect on the final image" -- This is true, although it does set the exposure value for the finished document.

Speaking of HDR, here's an otherworldly photo of an Italian cathedral.  And John P. speaks highly of the Merge to HDR chapter in Mikkel Aaland's Photoshop CS2 Raw.

October 31, 2006

I want your skulls...

In honor of Halloween, I thought I'd pass along a couple of snaps from Photoshop engineer Joe Ault, who captured a ghoulish hot rod mod during a recent car show: see the pistoncarb heads and whole car.  Note to self: must get more flavaful ride.

Elsewhere, on Sunday night my wife Margot & I carved pumpkins with our newest Photoshop PM, Bryan O'Neil Hughes & his freshly minted fianceé Alex (double congrats, guys!).  I opted to go with my favorite luchador, while Margot went more Día de los Muertos & Bryan did "Pumpkin Pi."  Here's the gallery.

In a related vein:

• Mao Ze Tongue: The SF Chronicle has hired 12 artists to make downloadable last-minute masks.
• Here's a great little skull I found on Logopond.
• If you like the history of the graphic arts, or if you just enjoy slightly weird old imagery, check out Gene Gable's collection Of Evil Witches and Dancing Pickles.
• Along those lines , the Today's Inspiration blog features a whole mess of vintage Halloween-related art.

Happy Halloween,
J.

[ ^* Speaking of that chaos, thanks for all the feedback. I greatly appreciate the level-headed comments, and I've gained some good perspective from them. --J.]

October 30, 2006

American Tough Guys

• Held aboard NYC's USS Intrepid, pro arm wrestling contest The Big Apple Grapple is captured by photographer Clayton James Cubitt. Sadly, no one makes the insane Stallone-face from Over the Top.
• Scott Pommier features bikers, skaters, and the occasional man-rodent showdown in his portfolio.
• Backyard wrestling?  Yeah, that's probably gonna end in tears. [Via]
• Okay, he's not American, but this iguana isn't kidding around.
• Neither American nor particularly tough, Walking the Cabbage (which is not a euphemism, apparently) challenges ideas of acceptable behavior by, well, walking a cabbage around China.  More info here. [Via]
  

October 21, 2006

Colossal images through Photoshop & Flash

• Jean-François Rauzier has developed techniques for creating "Hyperphotos"--panoramas that can be printed some 30' x 10'. "When looking at a Hyperphoto," says his press release, "at first you think you’re looking at an enlargement of a panoramic photograph. Not quite. Look more closely and you absorb a strange atmosphere that distances the viewer from the real world and sucks you into a universe of dizzying amplitude. Each Hyperphoto is a gigantic hyper-realist puzzle, created by assembling hundreds of close-up shots taken with a telephoto lens." 
  
  Jean-François reports that although he tried other software, Photoshop was the only tool capable of handling his 30-40GB images.  He displays them on his site using Flash, though for sheer scale I'd love to see one in person.   More info (in French) on his process is here and here.


• Rob Galbraith has the story of HAL9000, an Italian team that has created a whopping 8.6 gigapixel stitched photograph of an Italian fresco.  They won't go into the details of how they stitched 1,145 Nikon D2X frames into a 96,679 x 89,000 behemoth, but it looks like they use the excellent Zoomify technology to make the results visible (a la Google Maps) via Flash.  Check out the results on their site.
  

Hmm--using Photoshop and Flash together to make sharing high-res imagery a snap; seems like something the Grand Unified Adobe might want to consider... [pulling chin thoughtfully]

October 19, 2006

Liquid Sculpture, Touchdown Jesus, & more

• Martin Waugh produces gorgeous images of fluids in motion--something he calls Liquid Sculpture.  As you'd expect, creating the images depends on high-speed photography.  Related: Marc Pawliger points out the 10-nanosecond exposures needed to capture nuclear fireballs.
• ¿Donde esta la biblioteca? Right here, in a series of beautiful photos.[Via]  Some of the shots could have benefitted from HDR, and it's too bad they don't include pix of the rad new Seattle Public Library (or maybe ND's Touchdown Jesus). Still, it's a great collection.
• "This seems more like a John Nack item..." writes John Dowdell, and so it is, but I've been delayed in posting it (dang actual job slowing me down): Little People is "a tiny street art project" that leaves tiny figures around London. [Via]  It makes me think of the miniature food sculptures of French pastry chef/photographer team Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle.  For my part, I used to carry around a GI Joe head that I'd photograph in all kinds of situations (say, the middle of Death Valley).  I named him Sgt. Goldbug, after the little Richard Scarry creation who'd hide somewhere on every page.
• Speaking of food, Worth1000 features some deeply unappetizing Photoshop food mash-ups.  (Of course, these are not quite as nauseating as that McDLT ad with Jason Alexander.)
  

October 6, 2006

Lightning photographer narrowly escapes crisping

Non-carbonized British photographer Kane Quinnell is lucky to be alive after snapping this rather spectacular photo of lightning near his home. He tells the Daily Mail about being launched several feet into the air as lightning connected with the house next door. [Via] For his trouble he'll be featured in an Australian weather calendar.

Elsewhere in the Daily Mail you can find an extremely cool shot of the International Space Station and shuttle Atlantis silhouetted against the sun. Be sure to click the image to see the shapes in more detail.

[For more lightning photography, see previous.]

Camera Raw 3.6 beta now available

As promised, the next rev to Adobe Camera Raw & the DNG Converter has been on an accelerated development schedule, and now beta releases of both have been posted for Mac (Universal) and Windows. New (preliminary) support in this release includes the following cameras:

• Canon EOS 400D / Rebel XTi
• Leica D-LUX3
• Leica Digilux 3
• Nikon D80
• Panasonic DMC-LX2
• Pentax K100D

  
  These join the cameras just added in ACR 3.5:
  

• Kodak EasyShare P712
  
• Nikon D2Xs
  
• Panasonic DMC-FZ50
  
• Panasonic DMC-L1
  
• Sony A100

As always, please take a second to ensure that you install the plug-in into the correct spot:
Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-ins/CS2/File Formats/…
Win: \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-ins\CS2\File Formats\…

The full list of 140 or so supported cameras is on the Camera Raw product page.

October 4, 2006

Lucha Loco; Bomber Boneyards

• What blanco niño doesn't like to to don a rasslin' mask and live the life of a luchador? (Call me El Tryptophan, master of the sleeper hold.) Er, maybe it's a Jack Black/Jack Nack thing. In any case, Lucha Loco is a set of more than 120 portraits of masked Mexican wrestlers, complete with biographical bits. ("I teach Tae Kwan-Do. I'm black-belt. And I'm also in sales," says Dr. Muerte. See also Super Porky and others in the gallery.) [Via]

  
  For more lucha goodness, check out these pix from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (viva El Santo!).

• Night photographer Troy Paiva (aka Lost America) has posted a beautiful gallery of shots taken at an airplane boneyard at El Mirage Dry Lake. Joe Reifer has another good set from the same spot.

  Meanwhile TerraServer hosts a satellite photo of the place the AMARC boneyard. [Via] And Flickr features a photoset of a derelict communication outpost, remnants of the Cold War DEW Line. [Via]

• Okay, this has nothing to do with anything besides pointy metal things flying through the air, but FYI in case you're planning to judge any javelin competitions: you may want to wear some sturdy insteps.

September 29, 2006

Crazy umbrella-cam/Flickr browser

I've mentioned some unusual cameras before, but this one takes a Special Jury Prize for Weirdness: The Pileus System is a functioning umbrella that can also capture still images and video, upload them to Flickr, and project other users' creations onto the umbrella's skin. Uploads are automatic, and twisting the grip browses Flickr and YouTube for related tags.

Marginally related: UMBRELLA.net is an art project that links umbrellas via Bluetooth, making them light up in one another's presence. And the iBrella consists of "a Pic Microcontroller, a 2-Axis Accelerometer, Hall-Effect Sensors and a Gyroscope"--all so that you can gesture wildly and thereby control your iPod.

September 23, 2006

Flying with your cam? Better bring a pistol.

Having borrowed some nice photo gear from the Photoshop QE locker this weekend, I'm getting acquainted with the travel pains it brings. New TSA rules mean anything from hassle (at best) to smashed glass, lost lenses, etc. This state of affairs drives quite a bit of commentary from photogs, culminating with a rather brilliant suggestion: why not ensure the safety of checked gear by packing a starter pistol in each camera case? Check out the post for full details, and happy shooting (ba-dum, tssch!). (Hmm, I wonder if a Jerky Cannon would suffice?) [Via Andrew Shebanow & William Gregory]

September 20, 2006

HP camera puckers up

As in-camera processors get faster, what can they be used for besides grabbing more and more pixels? HP has one answer: apply slimming right in the camera. Heh--I wonder what else they could do with this (maybe reverse the effect to make me look yoked on the beach?). [Via Tom Attix]

Of course, doing too much in camera can alienate some photographers. Earier this summer, Fuji's in-camera facial recognition feature earned the comment "If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself" from The Online Photographer. Then again, some purists still swear that no significant work has ever been done with a zoom lens, so what can you do?

September 19, 2006

160 megapixels or bust

Got 28,900 Euro burning a hole in your pocket (or 45,500 CHF for all you Confoederatio Helvetica types)? If so, you can be the top kid in the canton with this 160MP crowd-pleaser from Seitz. The new device offers Gigabit Ethernet output & is said to capture 300MB of data per second, producing images of 21,250 x 7,500 pixels. And the megapixel arms race goes on... [Via Chris Quartetti]

Camera Raw 3.5 now available

Adobe Camera Raw 3.5 has been released for Mac and Windows. Newly supported cameras:

• Kodak EasyShare P712
• Nikon D2Xs
• Panasonic DMC-FZ50
• Panasonic DMC-L1
• Sony A100

A couple of notes:

1. The DNG Converter is now available as a universal binary for Intel-based Macintosh hardware.
   
2. The new camera support added to Adobe Camera Raw 3.5 is not officially available in Adobe Lightroom beta 3.
   
3. The Nikon D80, Canon 400D/Rebel XTi., and other new cameras were introduced too recently to make the cut for this release, but we're speeding up the development of ACR 3.6 to accommodate these new models.

As always, please take a second to ensure that you install the plug-in into the correct spot:
Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-ins/CS2/File Formats/…
Win: \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-ins\CS2\File Formats\…

The full list of 130 or so supported cameras is on the Camera Raw product page.

September 18, 2006

9/11 and photo manipulation: No Photoshop needed

Last month the world debated the integrity of photography in an era of easy digital manipulation. This month, attention turns to the interpretations we (photographers, viewers, writers) attach to images.

Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker recently published a photo of young New Yorkers appearing to chat and relax while Ground Zero burned across the river behind them. Columnist Frank Rich saw in the image a symbol of American denial, disbelief, and demand to move on. Hoepker replied, adding context and asking some searching questions ("How would I have looked on that day to a distanced observer? Probably like a coldhearted reporter, geared to shoot the pictures of his life"). And the couple on the wall responded, hotly denying any lack of seriousness. [Via]

So many kinds of truth here...

What if the people in the photo had been caught sharing a smile while New York smoldered in the background? Well? In the city that Friday, my friends and I went out for beers near a lifeless Times Square; on the weekend we shopped for a new PC. Was that all wrong? You could give money, blood--but what the hell else could you do? If the folks in the photo were cracking the tension, I don't think I can condemn them.

And what about the claim that the subjects represent something fundamental about America--a shortness of attention, a need to escape from tragedy? In the summer before 9/11, the country obsessed over shark attacks, pop stars, and missing white women on cable news. Now it's stingray attacks, pop stars, and missing white women on cable news. Do the particulars of the conversation in that photo, whether serious or trivial, determine whether the photo is emblematic of something deep and troubling about our culture? You tell me.

For me the conversation throws the debate over digital manipulation into greater perspective: the battle for truth is fought on many fronts, and compared to the questions over what meaning can and should be assigned to images, the technical side starts to look straightforward. The bits matter, but we see in them what we want and need to see.

Related: Slate hosts a gripping and well produced Magnum Photos essay on 9/11. Susan Meiselas talks about seeing teams of doctors rushing around, slowly realizing how little they could do.

[Update: See also this daguerreotype of 9/11. [Via]