Category Archives: Photography

Google {hearts} you

Photography

Heh—check out Google’s latest Auto Awesome feature, introduced for Valentine’s Day. Team member Vincent Mo writes,

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we launched Auto Awesome Hearts! Just upload a photo of kissing or hugging, and Google Photos will add hearts automatically.

It even works on bear hugs. 😉

The fascinating thing for me isn’t so much this fun if slightly silly example, but rather the idea of using computer vision to understand the contents of photography, then do interesting things as a result. I might have an idea or two in that regard—and I’d like to hear yours.

Bearhug

Learn to tell stories through photography

Photography

Kickass pro photographer Mike Hill is one of the funniest, nicest guys you’ll meet, and he’s now released a promising online course, Narrative Photography: Storytelling with Photo Essays (click through for video):

Go behind the scenes on two Las Vegas photo shoots with professional photographer Mike Hill, and learn how to create captivating photo essays from start to finish. Navigate on-location demands, and collaborate with subjects for candid, authentic photos. Effectively frame compelling shots using compositional principles, and learn when and how to adjust available light with on and off-camera flash and affordable modifiers. Then, enjoy step-by-step guidance through Adobe Lightroom to quickly narrow down hundreds of photos to a small collection of shots that reveal your subject’s story.

Mike Hill shoots commercial, editorial and fine art photography. He has produced award-winning photo essays, and has a background as a Photo Editor and Art Director. His photographs have been honored by Paris Prix de la Photographie, PDN, National Geographic and American Photo. Mike teaches workshops on Adobe Lightroom, and is now bringing his expertise to Craftsy!

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[Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]

Zoom Zoom: Google+ editor adds HDR, zooming

Photography

Snapseed has been a critical part of my mobile imaging workflow since its release, and after joining Google, the Nik team brought it to the Web. (Yes, you can use Snapseed-style editing right in your browser.) Just this weekend the team rolled out new features. André Meyer writes,

1. HDR Scape

With HDR Scape you can apply high dynamic range (HDR) effects to a single image, with a single click. HDR Scape is currently available in the Snapseed apps for Android and iOS, and today’s update brings the filter to Google+ on the web. You can see some examples here.

2. Zoom

Seeing your images up close is an important part of the editing process — from checking the focus point, to seeing how the “Drama” filter has changed your pixels. With today’s update, you can now use the magnifying glass to zoom in or out.

To give either feature a try, just open one of your photos on Google+ (using the Chrome browser), and click “Edit.” And if you say, “I don’t have images on Google+,” I’ll point out that Google will automatically back up all your images from iOS or Android. You can enjoy the free backup (and automatic enhancements, etc.) without needing to share those images publicly.

Photography: Gregory Heisler shares his craft

Photography

A few years back I had the pleasure of dropping in on renowned photographer Gregory Heisler at his New York studio, and I found myself captivated by the stories behind his portraits of Rudolph Giuliani, Muhammad Ali, George Bush, and many others. Here he whiteboards the tricky lighting for the Giuliani shoot:

 

If you dig that, here’s a 2-hour talk where he goes into more depth:

Join Gregory Heisler as he lovingly details the lore behind selected images from his professional career and the newly-published book, “Gregory Heisler: 50 Portraits: Stories and Techniques from a Photographer’s Photographer.“

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via]

Photoshop turns moving people into ghosts

Photography

Interesting work from Aaron Grimes. Sploid writes,

Aaron Grimes used Photoshop to blend regular footage at a 1/50th shutter speed into a new 24 frames per second with a 1-second shutter speed film. The result is, as he says, eerie.

According to Aaron,

What is done here is taking frames from video captured at 24fps with a 1/50th shutter speed and blending them together using Adobe Photoshop. The final product is a video that’s still played at 24fps but with a 1 second shutter speed.

The effect is eerie, causing things that do not move to remain sharp, but anything with motion to blur. The faster something moves to more faint it becomes. Where this is best shown is when something changes speed such as the shot of the man stopping in the street to check his phone, he almost appears out of nowhere, but when he walks off you can see his shape fade away.

[Vimeo]

Short film: "Mountains in Motion"

Photography

Gorgeous time lapses (just don’t be put off by the opening minute or two of narration from the lost Mumford son):

Mountains in Motion: The Canadian Rockies is an award-winning short film documenting the life of the alpine landscape through time-lapse photography. In an effort to highlight the wildness of these mountain places and how they have inspired explorers of the past, present and future, time-lapse sequences were patiently gathered from exposed summits, by glacial lakes, and under aurora-filled skies.
Hours and even months of change lapses in a matter of seconds, providing the viewer with a rare insight into the ever-changing nature of the landscape. Weaving throughout the film are reflections of an early mountaineer, who is deeply moved by his own encounter with the mountains and the revelations of explorers who have come before him. “What is this power that lures me upwards, into the unknown,” he wonders, “that pulls me deeper, despite snow, wind and exhaustion?”
Made on a shoestring budget and with entirely volunteer hours, the film brought together artists from two vastly different parts of North America – Banff, Alberta, and Atlanta, Georgia. Strangers at the start, the film team developed strong friendships over the course of production and were united by their common goal of capturing the beauty and essence of a place that inspires them every day.
This 100% human-powered film combines advanced time-lapse photography with an original story and musical score to bring the landscape center-stage and offers a thrilling new perspective that re-establishes the Canadian Rockies among the finest mountains in the world.

[Vimeo]

Funky camera ideas: "Frontback" + Heat vision

Mobile, Photography

Frontback is an offbeat app meant to capture images from both of your smartphone’s cameras simultaneously (showing “You, and what you see”). Evidently Canon is now building two sensors into point-and-shoot cameras to enable this sort of “Dual Capture mode.”

Elsewhere the FLIR One camera case promises to give your iPhone Predator-style heat vision:

The company anticipates that homeowners and contractors will use its thermal imaging system to identify energy efficiency problems, like poorly insulated doors or windows, and to find wall studs or ceiling joists.
It also foresees its technology used by hunters, bird watchers, and campers to observe wildlife, to navigate in darkness, to assess whether campfires have really been extinguished, and to determine whether food has been adequately cooked.
And the company claims FLIR One can “detect intruders in total darkness.”

"The Sound of Taste"

Photography

BOOM!

Several tons of black peppercorns, cardamom, turmeric, paprika, cumin seeds, ginger, chilli and coriander were rigged to explode in perfect sync with a bespoke musical composition. Each explosion represents an individual piano note or chord, which when filmed at high speed, creates a surreal three dimensional sound scape.


[Vimeo] [Via]

Nokia introduces DNG color profiles for Lightroom, Camera Raw

DNG, Lightroom, Mobile, Photography

I’m excited to see the passionate photographers at Nokia helping people not only capture full-fidelity raw files & support open standards, but also use those images efficiently in their photo workflows. Nokia’s Tiina Jaatinen writes,

The DNG format gives you access to pure and untouched visual information, allowing you to do more with your images using the professional workflow you can use with SLRs. […]
A raw DNG image file contains a lot of information about the image such as camera details, exposure settings, date, and so forth. A color profile tells even more information about the image – specifically how Adobe Lightroom should convert the colors of the raw image file.

Check out her chat with Juha Alakarhu, the head of imaging technologies at Nokia, for more details plus download links.

Short film: "The Ox"

Photography

“What’s the film about… and then, what’s the film really about?”

I find myself touched by Ben Proudfoot’s “THE OX… a portrait of master woodworker Eric Hollenbeck.” It’s about much more, though—about the kids & veterans whose lives he touches, about how he got “bent,” about the virtual island he built.

[Vimeo]

[Via]

Cubism

Photography

 The SwatchMate Cube helps you sample color inspiration from the world. Mashable writes,

Utilizing an inner sphere with a light source and a color sensor, the Cube functions as a swatch grabber, recording the color of virtually any object placed underneath it. The Cube then sends the swatch via Bluetooth Low Energy directly to any smartphone into Photoshop; or if the Cube cannot connect to any device, it will store up to a maximum of 20 swatches locally.

[Via Jeff Tranberry]

Meanwhile Polaroid (which is evidently still a thing) has unveiled the rather adorable, GoPro-y C³ camera. CreativePro writes,

For a suggested retail price of $99, the C³ offers a 5MP CMOS Sensor and 120° wide angle lens. It can capture video in 1280 x720 and 640×480, and still images up to 5.0 MP. It’s even waterproof up to 2M. No wireless, though. Images are stored on a micro SD card. Still, don’t you just want to hold one? Or maybe a handful?

Instagram vs. The Paradox of Choice

Instagram, Photography

“80% of life is showing up,” Woody Allen said. If you never post your photo or video, you can pretty well guess the number of likes it’ll garner.

Instagram knows that the #1 predictor of whether a photo or video will get engagement (i.e. likes, comments) is how quickly it gets posted. (There’s a reason it’s not called “Latergram.”) The limitations of Instagram are what help people get across the finish line.

I used the nicely executed YouTube Capture app a bit over the holiday break. To my surprise, although it works just as advertised, I never shared anything I made with it, whereas I shared half a dozen videos I made with Instagram.

Instagram battles against “the paradox of choice.” Studies show that for every additional 401(k) plan a company offers, employee participation goes down. Why? Because when people have the option to dig in & do more research (work) to achieve the ideal outcome, they get paralyzed and don’t actually complete the mission.

That’s how I’m finding YouTube Capture: It’s easy to capture a bunch (i.e. more than 15 seconds) of footage, then optionally go back and trim, edit, re I’m on the hook to go back and review/trim it, meaning that I… oh sure, I will, soon… I swear… {life intervenes}.

“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week,” said George Patton. Same goes for pics & vids, General.

Zipline madness

Photography

Devin Supertramp’s NFL stadium shoot features flying cheerleaders, mascots, and all things ‘murica:

Adobe’s Dave Helmly made the shoot a family affair:

I had Dave Jr. on site working with Devin as a shooter as the shoot was near his college in Florida. He was using a new wearable camera from Panasonic. They also mounted these small cameras all over the stadium for a multicam edit in Premiere Pro – saved them a ton of shooting – camera triggers via WiFi.

Take a look behind the scenes:

Time lapse: "City Lights"

Photography

Two years ago filmmaker Colin Rich did the impossible, making me find LA beautiful. Now he’s back with a vengeance. Behold City Lights, created for (and featuring the music of) M83:

Colin writes,

‘City Lights’ is the final chapter from my “Trilogy of Light” series that began a couple years ago with ‘LA Light’ and then followed up with ‘Nightfall’. It was a nightly adventure that took me to almost every angle of Los Angeles.
It was an exercise in patience. A lesson in light. An understanding of what it is to live amongst each other and to understand the system and order of a city, the seemingly complex organics that make it up and the life form that the city truly is. A visualization of sonder. It was a daily jaunt to watch the arterial freeway systems pump car cells through its body and channel them to the capillaric avenues that are our neighborhoods and homes. It was a chance to break away from the 70mph freeway perspective and to observe the sun slip from view and watch the electric dance of nightfall begin. It was challenging. It was frustrating. Definitely dangerous at times. Sometimes it hurt. I was chased. Yelled at. Warned. But the overall context of things learned, people met, things seen, and places discovered over the past three years shaped who I am today.
I didn’t always love Los Angeles but I learned to and discovered that this city is much more than temperate weather, palm trees, pretty girls, and beaches; to me the true beauty behind the city lies hidden on the other end of a rusted fire escape to a view no one else has seen.

Check out more info in an interview on LA Canvas. Colin will be running a limited series of high quality Kodak Endura VC metallic prints. Contact him if interested in purchasing them.
[Vimeo] [Via Rick Miller]

Awesome photographic history from NASA

Photography

You think *you’ve* had high-pressure photo situations? Spend a couple of minutes watching this great recreation of how the first earthrise photo was captured. (Hurry up with that damn color film!)

From NASA:

Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates the 45th anniversary of Apollo 8’s historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of A Man on the Moon, sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.

See more info on the NASA site. [YouTube] [Via Sebastiaan de With]

25 new video tutorials on Camera Raw

Photography

Former Adobe photography evangelist George Jardine has released an in-depth new series: 

This set of 25 all-new video tutorials contains over 4.5 hours of the most comprehensive training available on the Camera Raw 8 Photoshop Plug-In. In this series we cover the raw processing controls from top to bottom. Starting from the ground up, we guide any professional artist, designer or photographer through a complete understanding of each and every control. Then we dive deeper, digging into important details no other videos touch, such as the intricate relationships between the local and global adjustments, how Smart Objects work, as well as a deep dive on working with RGB files.

Check out George’s site for a complete listing of topics plus a sample movie. Access to the series costs $29.95.

Tastemade: The proverbial 1-inch hole

Mobile, Photography, User Interface

“People don’t come to us because they want 1-inch drills,” the CEO of Black & Decker is said to have remarked, “They come to us because they want 1-inch holes.”

The beautifully executed app Tastemade (App Store) represents an interesting evolution in creative software. Instead of offering an open-ended toolset for doing any number of projects, it aims to do just one thing well—namely, produce short, highly watchable person-on-the-street reviews of restaurants. The entire interface is built to walk you through making & sharing exactly one kind of content. Through constraint + automation, it tends to quickly produce a very nice “hole” (example).

The app is full of nice design touches. For example:

  • Based on its knowledge of your location & Foursquare data, the app can guess which restaurant you’re visiting, auto-populate the title field, then choose an appropriate font/music combo (which you can then change).
  • You’re prompted to capture a number of shots, and a colored progress indicator helps ensure you shoot enough but not too much.
  • When you go to choose a color look, your existing clips are played back at 2x speed, making it easier to see the impact of the filter on more footage.
  • One of the clips you shoot of the venue is placed behind the title & blurred.

Tastemade

Now, is this particular problem worth solving (i.e. do a lot of people want to record, share, and watch restaurant reviews)? I have no idea. (I’m not allowed out of the house; thanks, kids.) I think, however, that the radically reduced barriers to building & distributing software will keep reshaping the creative-tool landscape, producing more highly focused apps that nicely address one specific need.

"An Instagram Short Film"

Instagram, Photography

Thomas Jullien writes,

Instagram is an incredible resource for all kinds of images. I wanted to create structure out of this chaos. The result is a crowd source short-film that shows the endless possibilities of social media.

The video consists of 852 different pictures, from 852 different instagram users. If you are one of them, shout and I will add you to the credits.

Noting the eerie similarity of the photos, PetaPixel writes, “That’s great when you’re trying to create a seamless, crowdsourced hyperlapse journey around famous landmarks, but it stings a bit when you realize that your photos of *insert famous monument here* probably look the exact same as everybody else’s.”

[Vimeo]

A giant space telescope made from plastic

Enormousness, Photography

Normally I’d call a 600mm lens big—but this bad boy dwarfs even the Hubble: 

DARPA says the MOIRE program is currently in its “second and final phase,” and has already been prototyped. When completed, such optical systems could result in more powerful telescopes that fit in smaller rockets and shuttles, with eventual use in tracking weather systems or for reconnaissance. Here’s a clip explaining more about how it works:

 

[YouTube]

Photoshop Photography Program extended to Dec. 31

Lightroom, Photography

Great news:

We are delighted to announce that we are extending the period that the Photoshop Photography Program is available without restrictions to December 31, 2013. The offer is available to everyone, regardless of whether you have purchased a previous Adobe product. […]

Your response to the initial program has been incredible, well above our expectations, and I am thrilled we are able to extend this program so more of you can take advantage of it.

It’s possible that not all pages on Adobe.com have been updated to reflect this change; that should be resolved shortly.

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Last day for everyone to get in on the $9.99/mo. Photoshop-Lightroom deal

Photography

The Photoshop Photography Program remains open to everyone (regardless of whether you’ve owned a previous version) through the end of the day. After today & through the rest of the month, you’ll still be able to sign up, but you’ll need to own Photoshop CS3 or higher.
As a reminder, the availability of these deals is what’s limited in time. The $9.99/month price is the ongoing price (i.e. it’s not limited to 12 months).

Demo: Use Camera Raw as a Smart Filter in Photoshop CC

CC, Photography

Julieanne Kost puts one of the most popular features in PS CC through its paces: 

In this episode of The Complete Picture, Julieanne demonstrates how to take multiple exposures and combine them into a single 32-bit HDR file that can then be edited nondestructively using Adobe Camera Raw as a Smart Filter in Photoshop. In addition, you’ll discover how powerful using Camera Raw as a Smart Filter can be when working with layered files.

Nokia enables Lytro-like refocusing

Mobile, Photography

Nokia Refocus creates interactive, refocus-able images. ZDNet writes,

The Nokia Refocus app performs similarly to the Lytro camera. The application allows you to shoot between two and eight photos, dependent on available focal planes in view of your shot.

You can share your captured image to SkyDrive with a unique page at refocus.nokia.com being created. This site hosts the image where people can interact and change focus themselves, right from their web browser. Try it out on the Nokia website, it’s pretty slick.

Adobe showed off homegrown plenoptic imaging tech 6+ years ago (“Why is a wild-haired Eastern European guy walking around our floor carrying a medium-format camera & a hot glue gun?”); Apple has apparently been working in this area; and of course Lytro came and… went? This stuff is undoubtedly cool; whether it addresses problems that people really care about solving remains a more open question. [Via Allen Jeng]

Wait, what part of Adobe's new photography deal is "limited time"?

CC, Lightroom, Photography

The sign-up window is limited; the price is not.

  • Everyone (regardless of whether you own previous Adobe apps) can sign up by next Monday (Dec. 2) to get Photoshop CC & Lightroom 5 the $9.99/month price.
  • Anyone who owns Photoshop CS3 or higher can sign up by Dec. 31.
  • The price itself isn’t limited. That is, it won’t be going up in a year. (Adobe has no plans to raise the price at all, but we can’t say that it’ll never go up—e.g. for inflation—or down.)

A new deal for all photographers: Photoshop CC + Lightroom 5 for $9.99/mo.

CC, Photography

I’m delighted to say that for a limited time, Adobe’s Photoshop Photography Program is available to everyone. The team writes,

By “everyone” we mean EVERYONE! Sign up before Dec. 2 to get Photoshop, Lightroom, 20GB of storage, and Behance ProSite for $9.99/month

As before, the intention is not to get you in at $9.99/mo., then crank up the price after a year. $9.99 is the expected ongoing price. The difference is that you now don’t need to own a copy of Photoshop or Creative Suite CS3 or higher. Please do note that this is a limited-time deal, so you’ll want to jump in before December 2.
999

Russell's aerial tour continues

Panoramas, Photography

Building on yesterday’s video:

In the second video, Russell Brown will guide you though the process of taking an aerial panorama. This video is taken on location along the California coast and will demonstrate Mr. Brown’s technique for aerial tripod rotation.

Lean how to stitch aerial photographs together with the help of Adobe Camera Raw profiles combined with the Auto Alignment, and Blending features, in Adobe Photoshop CC.

[Adobe TV 1, 2]

Phones adding raw image support

DNG, Mobile, Photography

Exciting news for all of us who love wringing maximum dynamic range & quality out of our images:

  • “For the better image quality and flexibility of raw photos,” writes CNET’s Stephen Shankland,
    “Nokia’s Lumia 1520 will shoot with Adobe’s DNG format. Similar raw support will come to the Lumia 1020 in early 2014.” Check out the Nokia blog for more details. Nokia’s head of imaging Juha Alakarhu notes, “If you shoot with RAW, you can take benefit of the continuously developing algorithms in the future. Who knows what these tools will offer in 10 years!”
  • Meanwhile Google is working on a new Android camera API that features raw support. (And sorry, I’m not going to call it “RAW,” as it’s neither a proper name nor an acronym. I can’t read it without hearing “RAW is WAR!!” ;-))

At what point will it seem silly & archaic to call these things “phones,” instead of highly programmable cameras that just happen to make phone calls?