I love seeing how Anthony Schmidt, a 13yo photographer with autism, treats his neuroatypicality & resulting hyperfocus as a blessing. It’s a point I try to gently impress upon my own obsessive son about our unusual brains. Check out Anthony’s story & his pretty damn impressive model-car photography!

Cristóbal Valenzuela from Runway ML shared a fun example of what’s possible via video segmentation & overlaying multiple takes of a trick:

As a commenter noted, the process (shown in this project file) goes like this:

1. Separate yourself from the background in each clip
2. Throw away all backgrounds but one, and stack up all the clips of just you (with the success on top).

Coincidentally, I just saw Russell Brown posting a fun bonus-limbed image:

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A post shared by Russell Preston Brown (@dr_brown)

Well, they do call themselves a camera company… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This little contraption looks incredibly lightweight (pocketable, even) and easy to use. Visual quality (particularly stabilization) seems a little borderline, but I dig its person-centric nature, including tracking & AR effects (segmentation, cloning, etc.). Check out a great review—including a man-machine “romantic montage” (!):

Great to see Adobe AI getting some love:

Adobe Super Resolution technology is the best solution I’ve yet found for increasing the resolution of digital images. It doubles the linear resolution of your file, quadrupling the total pixel count while preserving fine detail. Super Resolution is available in both Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) and Lightroom and is accessed via the Enhance command. And because it’s built-in, it’s free for subscribers to the Creative Cloud Photography Plan.

Check out the whole article for details.

Good lord!

PetaPixel writes,

Finnish photographer Juha Tanhua has been shooting an unusual series of “space photos.” While the work may look like astrophotography images of stars, galaxies, and nebulae, they were actually captured with a camera pointed down, not up. Tanhua created the images by capturing gasoline puddles found on the asphalt of parking lots.

Check out the post for more images & making-of info.

Waaaay back in the way back, we had fun enabling “Safe, humane tourist-zapping in Photoshop Extended,” using special multi-frame processing techniques to remove transient elements in images. Those techniques have remained obscure yet powerful. In this short tutorial, Julieanne Kost puts ’em to good use:

In this video (Combining Video Frames to Create Still Images), we’re going to learn how to use Smart Objects in combination with Stack Modes to combine multiple frames from a video (exported as an image sequence) into a single still image that appears to be a long exposure, yet still freezes motion.

Roughly forever ago, when I was pushing the idea of extending the Photoshop compositing pipeline to include plug-in modules (which we did kinda succeed with in the form of 3D layers—now sadly ripped out), I loved the idea of layers that could emit & control light. We didn’t get there, of course, but I’m happy to see folks like Boris FX offering some cool new controls:

In Death Valley a couple of weeks ago, my 12yo Mini Me Henry & I had fun creating little narratives in the sand. I have to say, it’s pretty cool how far a kid can get these days with a telephone & handful of plastic bricks! Here’s a little gallery we made together.

Elsewhere, I’m perpetually amazed at what folks can do with enough time, talent, and willpower:

My son Henry & I were super hyped to join Russell Brown & his merry band last Monday at Nevada’s deeply weird International Car Forest of the Last Church for some fire photography featuring pyrotechnic artist Joseph Kerr. As luck would have it, I had to send Henry on ahead with little notice, pressing my DSLR on him before he left. Happily, I think he did a great job capturing the action!

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A post shared by John Nack (@jnack)

Russell of course caught some amazing moments (see his recent posts), and you might enjoy this behind-the-scenes footage from Rocky Montez-Carr (aka Henry’s kindly chauffeur 😌🙏):

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A post shared by Russell Preston Brown (@dr_brown)

Lately I’ve been drawn to bold lighting of the face & body, both for black & white and stunning color:

Therefore I really dig this music video from Lusine, which leans into the myriad possibilities inherent in moving lights around a face:

[Via Cameron Smith]

Some 20+ years ago (cripes…), 405: The Movie became a viral smash, in part thanks to the DIY filmmakers’ trick of compositing multiple images of the busy LA freeway in order to make it look deserted.

Now (er, 8 years ago; double cripes…) Russell Houghten has used what I imagine to be similar but more modern techniques to remove car traffic from the streets, freeing up the concrete rivers for some lovely skateboarding reveries:

I’m headed out to Death Valley on Friday for some quick photographic adventures with Russell Brown & friends, and I’m really excited to try photographing with burning steel wool for the first time. I’m inspired by this tutorial from Insta360 to try shooting with my little 360º cam:

“Just don’t be horrendously disappointed if it doesn’t turn out quite like this,” advises Henry, my 12yo aspiring assistant. Fair enough, dude—but let’s take it for a spin!

If you’ve ever shot this way & have any suggestions for us, please add ’em in the comments. TIA!

Wait for it…

A year ago, I was shivering out amidst the Trona Pinnacles with Russell Brown, working to capture some beautiful celestial images at oh-dark-early. I’m wholly unsurprised to learn that he knows photographer Michael Shainblum, who went to even more extraordinary lengths to capture this image of the Milky Way together with the Golden Gate Bridge:

PetaPixel writes,

“I think this was the perfect balance of a few different things,” he explains. “The fog was thick and low enough to really block out most of the light pollution from the city, but the fog had also traveled so far inland that it covered most of the eastern bay as well. The clouds above just the eastern side around the cities may have also helped. The last thing is the time of evening and time of the season. I was photographing the Milky Way late at night as it started to glide across the western sky, away from the city.”

File under, “OMG, Duh, Why Didn’t We Think Of/Get This Sooner?” The Verge writes,

With Skydio’s self-flying drone, you don’t need to sketch or photograph those still frames, of course. You simply fly there. You fly the drone to a point in 3D space, press a button when the drone’s camera is lined up with what you want to see in the video, then fly to the next, virtually storyboarding your shot with every press.

Here’s some example output:

Check out the aforementioned Verge article for details on how the mode works (and sometimes doesn’t). Now I just need to get Russell Brown or someone (but let’s be honest, it’s Russell 😉) to expense one of these things so I can try it out.

Nearly 16 (!) years ago I noted the passing of “novelist, self-taught pianist, semi-pro basketball player, composer, director of Shaft–who somehow he still found time to be a groundbreaking photojournalist at Life for more than 20 years” Gordon Parks. Now HBO is streaming “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks,” covering his work & that of those he’s inspired to bear witness:

Liam Neeson narrates

“Ireland invites giant screen audiences on a joyful adventure into the Emerald Isle’s immense natural beauty, rich history, language, music and arts. Amid such awe-inspiring locations as Giant’s Causeway, Skellig Michael and the Cliffs of Moher, the film follows Irish writer Manchán Magan on his quest to reconnect Irish people from around the world with their land, language, and heritage.

Of course, my wry Irishness compels me to share Conan O’Brien’s classic counterpoint from the blustery Cliffs of Moher…

…and Neeson’s Irish home-makeover show on SNL. 😛

I like this concise 6-minute list from Shutterstock, though I wish they touched on how to avoid the dreaded scourge of propeller shadows. (Somehow I’ve yet to look this up & get my head conclusively around it.)

I think you might dig this insightful thread from Vancouver-based DOP/director/colorist Devan Scott, just as I did:

Levon Bliss offers some incredible peeks into the tiny marvels that surround us, from insects to seeds & more. Check out this gallery of seed photos.

Enjoy!

[Via]

Talk about an amazing gig that comes around once in ~forever:

Lightroom is the world’s top photography ecosystem with everything needed to edit, manage, store and share your images across a connected system on any device and the web! The Digital Imaging group at Adobe includes the Photoshop and Lightroom ecosystems.

We are looking for the next leader of the Lightroom ecosystem to build and execute the vision and strategy to accelerate the growth of Lightroom’s mobile, desktop, web and cloud products into the future. This person should have a proven track record as a great product management leader, have deep empathy for customers and a passion for photography. This is a high visibility role on one of Adobe’s most important projects.

Jump in or tell a promising friend!

Per Daring Fireball:

Devan Scott put together a wonderful, richly illustrated thread on Twitter contrasting the use of color grading in Skyfall and Spectre. Both of those films were directed by Sam Mendes, but they had different cinematographers — Roger Deakins for Skyfall, and Hoyte van Hoytema for Spectre. Scott graciously and politely makes the case that Skyfall is more interesting and fully-realized because each new location gets a color palette of its own, whereas the entirety of Spectre is in a consistent color space.

Click or tap on through to the thread; I think you’ll enjoy it.

Congrats to Eric Chan & the whole crew for making Time’s list:

Most of the photos we take these days look great on the small screen of a phone. But blow them up, and the flaws are unmistakable. So how do you clean up your snaps to make them poster-worthy? Adobe’s new Super Resolution feature, part of its Lightroom and Photoshop software, uses machine learning to boost an image’s resolution up to four times its original pixel count. It works by looking at its database of photos similar to the one it’s upscaling, analyzing millions of pairs of high- and low-resolution photos (including their raw image data) to fill in the missing data. The result? Massive printed smartphone photos worthy of a primo spot on your living-room wall. —Jesse Will

[Via Barry Young}

“Folded optics” & computational zoom FTW! The ability to apply segmentation and selective blur (e.g. to the background behind a moving cyclist) strikes me as especially smart.

On a random personal note, it’s funny to see demo files for features like Magic Eraser and think, “Hey, I know that guy!” much like I did with Content-Aware Fill eleven (!) years ago. And it’s fun that some of the big brains I got to work with at Google have independently come over to collaborate at Adobe. It’s a small, weird world.

I know I posted about it just the other day, but the design of this system is legit interesting. I thought it was especially cool that one can remove the side grips, attach them to the monitor, and control the whole rig from literally miles away (!).

Built-in gimbal, 8K rez, LIDAR rangefinder for low-light focusing—let’s go!

It commands a pro price tag, too. Per The Verge:

The 6K version costs $7,199, the 8K version is $11,499, and both come with a decent kit: the gimbal, camera, LIDAR range finder, a monitor and hand grips / top handle, a carrying case, and a battery (the 8K camera also comes with a 1TB SSD). In the realm of production cameras and stabilization systems, that’s actually on the lower end (DJI’s cinema-focused Ronin 2 stabilizer costs over $8,000 without any camera attached, and Sony’s FX9 6K camera costs $11,000 for just the body), but if you were hoping to use the LIDAR focus system to absolutely nail focus in your vlogs, you may want to rethink that.

Take a moment, won’t you, to enjoy some ethereal undersea beauty with me?