Gorgeous work from Japanese photographer “DarwinFish105“:
According to dvice, the video was shot “using a [Panasonic DMC-GH3] in continuous-shot mode at 1-second shutter speed. The artist then took the footage into Adobe Premiere and applied mirroring and other effects that resulted in visuals that are rooted in reality, yet appear incredibly psychedelic.”
[Vimeo] [Via Stuart DeSpain]
Simon Christen calls his new film Adrift “a love letter to the fog of the San Francisco Bay Area,” writing,
I chased it for over two years to capture the magical interaction between the soft mist, the ridges of the California coast and the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. This is where “Adrift” was born.
If you like this short film, please consider using the tipping jar, proceeds will go towards the next project.
[Vimeo] [Via Mischa McLachlan]
On the NY Times, Nick Bilton talks about photographs becoming a ubiquitous, disposable form of communication:
Photos, once slices of a moment in the past — sunsets, meetings with friends, the family vacation — are fast becoming an entirely new type of dialogue. The cutting-edge crowd is learning that communicating with a simple image, be it a picture of what’s for dinner or a street sign that slyly indicates to a friend, “Hey, I’m waiting for you,” is easier than bothering with words, even in a world of hyper-abbreviated Twitter posts and texts.
Apparently text messaging is in (slight) decline, while SnapChat (y’know, self-destructing junk shots for the kids) is reputedly worth $800+ million. This is the part where Old Man Nack officially feels he has no idea what’s going on.
There’s got to be some great Orwell quote about losing the language to make sense of experiences, but, eh, who wants to read all that?
Elsewhere Dave Pell muses about how imaging can separate us from experiences:
We’ve ceded many of our remembering duties (birthdays, schedules, phone numbers, directions) to a hard drive in the cloud. And to a large extent, we’ve now handed over our memories of experiences to digital cameras. […]
We no longer take any time to create an internal memory of an event or an experience before seeing, filtering, and sharing a digital version of it. We remember the photo, not the moment.
In a world of social media, we can all exist in a droll, above-it-all sugary crust (like Seinfeld talking about how in a cab, everything on the other side of the plexiglass, no matter how dangerous, is amusing & unreal). It’s a good time to remember that Facebook likes, like design, won’t save the world…
Products sell people a better version of themselves, and Instagram is a highlight reel. It’s not about photography; it’s about getting liked. Photos are just the vessel by which people exchange affirmation.
In the NYT Jenna Wortham thoughtfully considers how video punctures the fantasy-bubbles that Instagram photos create:
But while that shaky video that I took on the roof was definitely steeped in reality and definitely true to the moment, it wasn’t the version of the night that I wanted to remember or share with my Instagram friends.
That’s because Instagram isn’t about reality – it’s about a well-crafted fantasy, a highlights reel of your life that shows off versions of yourself that you want to remember and put on display in a glass case for other people to admire and browse through. It’s why most of the photographs uploaded to Instagram are beautiful and entertaining slices of life and not the tedious time in-between of those moments, when bills get paid, cranky children are put to bed, little spats with friends.
If you want facts & figures to back this up, here are a bunch.
Can technology make people feel more comfortable sharing their videos? Maybe. In many cases it’s by moving the goal posts—simply reducing what’s possible (and thus what can be expected) to the point that people say “Well I could do that.” (Cue the old “Lowered Expectations” jingle.)
I wonder whether (or when) Instagram & Vine will let people upload video from their camera rolls. Omitting that feature certainly made it easier to get to market (as they could eliminate features for trimming, sizing, etc.), but there’s another key difference: Insisting that video be captured via the apps limits the content to things you yourself captured. Thus your feeds can’t (yet) become dumping grounds for whatever animated GIF people have found.
We shall see.
[Via]
Here’s a neat use of Google’s backpack-mounted, spherical-photo-capturing rigs. The Next Web writes,
Without venturing anywhere near the United Arab Emirates, you can explore the world’s tallest observation deck on the 124th floor, dangle from the building’s maintenance units on the 80th floor (which are reserved for cleaning windows, apparently), and also visit the highest occupied floor in the world, on floor number 163.
It’s funny: I’m reminded of the QuickTime VR (hey, remember that?) projects we did circa 1996. I thought that spherical panos were brilliant, but they fell into disuse for years. I never anticipated that they’d reemerge & prove so common, even mundane, all these years later.
[YouTube]
Working on a shoestring budget, Johnny Han has created a captivating video for Irish musician Bressie’s “Silence is Your Saviour”. He used an intensive, all-Adobe workflow, but I’ll save that write-up for another time.
Coincidentally, my Father’s Day looked a ton like this–except that every swarming, pint-size thrower was targeting me alone. My shoes are still drying out…
This piece from Apple is the best kind of advertising, and damn if it isn’t beautiful, informative, and moving. (Tell me the kid becoming verbal doesn’t grab your heart & I’ll check you for a pulse.)
[Via]
Korean photographer & metalworker Kwanghun Hyun built a pair of brass pinhole cameras, powering their timing mechanisms with watch parts:
Lovely, though I wish my initial misreading (that it was somehow powered by one’s heartbeat) proved accurate. [YouTube]
Check out this work from Mike Olbinski:
He writes,
It took four years but I finally got it.
A rotating supercell. And not just a rotating supercell, but one with insane structure and amazing movement.
I’ve been visiting the Central Plains since 2010. Usually it’s just for a day, or three, or two…but it took until the fourth attempt to actually find what I’d been looking for. And boy did we find it. […]
We chased this storm from the wrong side (north) and it took us going through hail and torrential rains to burst through on the south side. And when we did…this monster cloud was hanging over Texas and rotating like something out of Close Encounters.
The timelapse was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II with a Rokinon 14mm 2.8 lens. It’s broken up into four parts.
Check out the Vimeo page for more details. [Via Richard Morey]
Photohop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes has posted a new 42-minute course that’s free until June 21:
Shoot in color, but think in black and white. In this course, Adobe Photoshop Senior Product Manager Bryan O’Neil Hughes shares his favorite techniques for transforming color photographs into black and white, a technique that provides more creative options than using your camera’s black-and-white mode. Learn how to prepare and fine-tune your photographs in Lightroom, and then move them into Photoshop to take advantage of its nondestructive adjustment layers. The course also introduces techniques for using Photoshop to adjust the color of video clips.
Lovely work from Daniel Silva:
Brilliant, and well worth the two minutes:
[Via Dave Helmly]
PetaPixel writes about 14-year-old photographer/Photoshopper “Zev” (aka Fiddle Oak).
Elsewhere Miguel Campos has his 5-year-old (!) posting Photoshop tutorials:
I of course now feel inadequate because I’ve yet to interest Finn in using & teaching Photoshop. He does seem intrigued by the idea of making laser beams shoot out of his brother’s eyes. To be continued!
Irish photographer Richard Mosse uses 16mm Aerochrome film to make us see the invisible—literally & figuratively—in the Congo’s ongoing war. He says,
How much more constructed is a pink photograph than a black-and-white photograph? … [Viewers are] confused, and angry, and disoriented. And this is great! Because you got them to actually think about the act of perception and how this imagery is produced and consumed.
In a marginally related vein, on Popular Photography Debbie Grossman writes about creating Fake Infrared Photography Using Adobe Camera Raw. [Via John Dowdell]
Via PetaPixel, this one’s too charming not to share. Photographer Brady Dyer writes,
After having the most amazing day ever, we were on the deck of our penthouse apartment drinking Veuve at which point Emma said “this moment couldn’t get any more perfect”… She was wrong! I told her to do a big 360 degree video of the sunset finishing on me and I would wave and say hello.
[Via]
The freely downloadable beta of Lightroom 5 introduces the ability to work with files that reside on disconnected drives—even modifying their Develop module settings:
[Via Andrew Kavanagh]
The resourceful kids at Candy Glass Productions show how to use Google Street View + Photoshop to create an animation that spins around a reference building (in this case the CN Tower):
[Via Ben Hansen]
“I’ve been on an icebreaker for almost two months now,” writes marine scientist Cassandra Brooks, “traveling through the Ross Sea, Antarctica… To share the incredible experience of an almost infinite variety of scenes, I’ve compiled a time-lapse montage shot over the last two months, condensed into less than five minutes, with a surprise at the end. Enjoy!”
Check out more from Cassandra’s travels on the NatGeo site.
[Via]
If I may echo Rainn Wilson, “Oh my God, that’s ridiculous.”
Note: This is a technology demo, not a feature that’s quite ready to go in Photoshop CC. With the move to subscriptions, however, Photoshop and other teams are moving away from “big bang” releases & towards more continuous deployment of improvements.
[Update: I know that a number of people aren’t digging Wilson’s schtick. Hats off to Sarah for being such a pro under pressure.]
In this quick demo, Julieanne Kost shows three different ways to display an image with in a shape in Photoshop including vector masks, clipping masks and layer groups.
I was all set for a standard Kickstarter pitch. That’s when the F bomb & dubstep dropped…
Project creator Peter Basma-Lord writes,
Take your photographs out of the dark and put them in Eternal Light [EL1] – An OSX app that lets you playback, filter, affect & record an infinite number (100,000+) of images & videos at any speed. All synced to sound and controlled (optionally) via iPhone or iPad.
For more info see the project site.
This clip from BBC Earth Productions was way, way up my owl-loving 3-year-old’s alley, though now I’m dreading the possible resulting nightmares:
[Via]
Adobe’s Inspire magazine features Photoshop hoss Erik Johansson, his process & his work:
Johansson: I wanted to do something with paper — something more physical, not just a retouch project. Although I obviously use Photoshop quite a bit, I try to do as much as possible in-camera, which makes the illusion look more realistic and makes things easier during post-production.
I once had a Japanese girlfriend who was scandalized that my high-school burnout buddies had always misunderstood the battle cry “Hadouken!!” as a horribly clumsy attempt to say “(hh)I’ll use it.” That has nothing to do with anything, except that I think of it while watching these kids give a fun illustration of how to create “Makankosappo (“Magic Penetrating Killing Ray”!) photos:
[Via]
“We now snap more photos in two minutes than were captured in the entire 19th century,” and people have already spent more than 900 years working in Photoshop Touch (!).
Check out the talk for more interesting info & demos. Skip to around the 23-minute mark to see camera shake reduction. Around 31 minutes they show that tech being run in the cloud.
[Via Andrew Kavanagh]
The new $2 app lets you refocus images after capturing them:
PetaPixel writes,
Unlike Lytro’s light field camera, which uses innovative new technology that actually captures entire scenes sharply in one shot, FocusTwist “fakes it.” The app doesn’t require any additional hardware because it’s simply based around the idea of stacking multiple photographs.
The app snaps multiple photographs of a scene with different focal planes and then merges them together into a single interactive image that can be refocused. One of the “secret sauces” behind the app is the image stabilization algorithm that it uses to cancel any hand shake that might be present when it shoots the multiple exposures.
What do you think—is the effect legitimately useful, or just a gimmick?
Colossal reports,
The folks over at Red Bull are currently holding a photography competition called Red Bull Illume which is billed as “the world’s premier international photography competition dedicated to the world of action and adventure sports.” One of the latest entries to the competition is this awesome set of photos captured by photographer and light painter Patrick Rochon.
Check it:
[Via Kim Pimmel]
Oh, this looks cool:
Filmmaker* Vincent Laforet writes, “The completely silent device weighs under 3.5 pounds bare and can be operated solo, or with the help of a second ‘gimbal’ operator with a joystick to pull off some incredible moves.” Check out his blog for more details. [Via Patrick Palmer]
* and Premiere Pro convert, I might add
Check out this great collaboration between Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes & Lynda.com. Bryan writes,
When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast last fall, I remember reading stories about the survivors, and one theme kept popping up – people facing great danger to retrieve their family photos…
I needed a way to help. It was unbearable to see these victims fight to recover their most prized photographs, only to find them damaged by the storm. Knowing Photoshop’s tremendous power for retouching and restoration, I looked everywhere for tutorial content to share, but nothing seemed right…
Luckily, the team at lynda.com came to the rescue. They offered me one of their studios to record a video series about using the tools in Photoshop to recover photos.
The video series (25 clips, 70 minutes) is now available to everyone through the “Like to Learn” tab on the Lynda.com Facebook page. Here’s a sample:
“2 Weeks
3,000 Miles
5,000 Photos
in 3 Minutes.”
The irritatingly* talented Mike Matas & his girlfriend produced the beautiful & charming Roadtrip USA:
[Via Tim Marshall]
*not really, of course!
Hmm—interesting to hear via the NYT that social media are cutting out the middleman, and thus reducing the price paparazzi can command:
“The old school way was that you would get an e-mail that said, ‘I was on vacation and saw so-and-so and I’d like to sell it to you,’” she said. “Fans are far less likely to do that now. They’d rather share it themselves first on Twitter and Instagram than sell it immediately. People are dedicated to gaining their own followings and that’s the best way to do that.”
Photos can go for a fraction of their historically high cost, she said. “It’s certainly devalued by the fact that it’s already out there,” she said.
Update: Design Taxi has a story about the NY Times running an Instagram photo on their front page. I found this comment from photographer Peter Krogh interesting:
What’s crazy to me is that the Times is granting a perpetual, sublicensable, royalty free, fully-indemnified license to its images to Mark Zuckerberg. Who cares which camera and software was used.
Quite a bit more than you’d think, it turns out. Terry White explains.
Dark, heavy, bizarre—but visually arresting.
[Via Durin Gleaves]
PetaPixel writes,
Messe Kopp sent us this awesome and mind-bending video he shot on the streets of Downtown Jerusalem. It it’s a backward-is-forward video that shows a man getting up from bed and taking a stroll down a city street, interacting with various people and objects along the way. The entire 2.5-minute video was shot in a single take.
Wondering how the original capture looked (i.e. running frontwards), some thoughtful soul downloaded, reversed, and uploaded the piece:
Normally I’d insert an ironic “U-S-A!” chant, but this mayhem comes from the Danish show “Dumt & Farligt” (i.e. “Stupid & Dangerous”).
[Via]
Magician Rahat Hussein and prankster Jack Vale performed a little switcheroo and fooled Hollywood pedestrians–no digital editing necessary:
[Via]
Russell Brown is the master of creatively misusing (or at least bending) Photoshop features. Here he manually aligns a series of photos, then blends them to create an elongated structure not found in nature.
Seriously? I must politely say that if you’re not willing to take a few seconds to think about improving your image & possibly giving it a caption, I likely don’t need to see it.
I don’t accept that simply maximizing active use, consumption, etc. is an unquestionable good. (That’s how cancers operate.) You want quality, and if Instagram further reduced friction (e.g. by enabling batch upload from desktop apps), it would turn into an unwashed Facebook stream.
Instagram makes me a better photographer in that it induces me to slow down just a tiny bit & try to craft an image/caption pair that my audience will like (literally). It’s an incredibly simple form of gamification, and dang if it doesn’t work.
Russell Brown has been killing it lately with long-exposure photography.
Here he shows how he lit charcoal kilns in Death Valley, then stacked the results in Photoshop:
Check out the Photoshop.com blog:
In only two years, Taylor McCormick has transformed herself from a budding photographer into a one-of-a-kind artist. Through an involved and self-driven process McCormick matured from a high-school student with a camera and an imagination into a gallery-sponsored artist, traveling to Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York and Los Angeles for her work. Her journey can be described by the same word used to describe most of her published images: dreamlike.
Great cinematography + aircraft boneyard nerdery? Sign me up–and that’s even without the brilliant motocross stunts:
[Via Colin Stefani]
Tristan Stoch of Cineastas created this beautifully shot profile of athlete-turned-creator Mike Friton:
Mike Friton is a freelance shoemaker, weaver, paper sculptor and innovator with over 30 years of experience at Nike. His innovations are responsible for many elements of athletic footwear that people wear today. Each of his crafts informs one another and he is constantly exploring the fringes of his field. Mike’s work is a great example of how non-traditional methods of exploring one’s craft can lead to unique end results.
[Via]
PetaPixel features Jess Dunlap’s “Gorgeous Landscape Time-lapse Created Over 1 Year and with 17,000 Photos.” [Update: Dammit, somewhere in the time since I queued up this post, the video went password-protected. Hopefully it’ll come back.]
Elsewhere, look to the skies: Gavin Heffernan writes,
“The skies cleared and showed us an incredible galactic palette! Star Trails shot at 25 sec exposures. No special effects used, just the rotation of the earth’s axis. Photography Merging: STARSTAX. Used Canon 5D & 7D, with a 24mm/1.4 lens and a 28mm/1.8. The Geminids get crazy as the sun comes up (2:20-2:35) but you can spot a bunch more throughout, if you look closely — or here’s a nice shot (bit.ly/SkZGdw). There’s also some passing planets (1:15-1:30 and 2:15-2:25). I believe the first big one is Jupiter.”
[Via]
I’m delighted to see that following up on the very popular tablet version, Photoshop Touch for phone is available on the Apple App Store and Google Play for $4.99. PM Stephen Nielson writes,
Much like the tablet version, Photoshop Touch on the phone has core Photoshop features like layers, advanced selections tools, adjustments and filters. We also packed in features exclusive to Photoshop Touch, like Scribble Selection for high-precision selections using only your finger, and Camera fill for real-time creative blending of your camera feed with layers. This app features the same creative filters as the tablet version, like Color Drops and Acrylic Paint, and also a new Ripple filter.
With Photoshop Touch and the Adobe Creative Cloud, I can start a project on my phone, continue it on my tablet, and polish it off at my desk in Photoshop CS6. Photoshop Touch will automatically keep my projects in sync on each device, at the full resolution and with all the layers intact. This capability is available to every customer with a free Creative Cloud account. There is no paid subscription requirement for syncing.
Give it a whirl & please let us know what you think.
It’s refreshing to see an artist trade slickness for candor, and that’s just what Julieanne does in showing off the trial, error, and production techniques that went into creating her still life piece “Cyclical”:
I really enjoyed hearing master storyteller Ken Burns discuss how his personal history helped give rise to his life’s work, and more:
You can read much more detail in this interview on The Atlantic.
Just as interesting to me, from a geeky perspective, is the way the famous & simple Ken Burns effect has morphed into something richer & more ambitious, imparting parallax movement to the various pans & zooms. In fact, the clip above prominently credits After Effects artist Elliot Cowan. Let’s hear it for Content-Aware Fill, “postcards in space,” and more.
[Via Troy Church]
Interesting developments in mobile photography:
“We invented a way of dual-path encoding where we would shoot still and video simultaneously with no data loss,” Whitehorn says. “We wouldn’t drop data yield down at all. We would bring in full-resolution video and full-resolution stills at the same time… What that means is you have this living asset, that moment will be alive — you can always scrub that moment and get that perfect smile.”
The camera trades away megapixels (coming at 4, vs. a more typical 8+) for quality: “What we realized is that megapixels is just a metric for blue shirts in Best Buy.”
Another neat feature: Zoe mode starts recording video before you even press the record button so you don’t miss a moment. “Think of it as TiVoing your life.”
Video also can be shot in an “always on” HDR mode at full 1080p resolution or in slow motion.
[Via]
Looks interesting (literally):
Whether inspired by the clean, commercial look of films like Fuji FP 100c or the sun-drenched vibe of Polaroid 690, VSCO Film 03 for Lightroom 4 and Adobe Camera Raw 7 represent the most diverse VSCO Film pack yet. With over 115 presets, VSCO Film 03 is overflowing with both present day film stock, as well as expired vintage films. The pack also includes a custom Toolkit specifically created to help you emulate the varying looks of instant films. This is not an update or an upgrade. It is a completely new VSCO Film pack with completely new film emulations and tools.
Check out the site for examples, pricing, and discounts.
…and Lightroom turns 6, and Photoshop 23!
What was born during Thomas Knoll’s vacation to Italy (wherein he was so frustrated by his camera’s raw conversion software that he downloaded their SDK & wrote his own) has come a long, long way. PM Tom Hogarty says, “I count 42 official releases over those 10 years or 1 update every 2.8 months. However, when you include all of the public RC builds you could easily double that!”
Click through to the Photoshop team blog to see an infographic that marks this milestone. Thanks to all the engineers & QE who’ve made this engine so invaluable, and to all the passionate photographers who help the team keep doing what they do. Here’s to the next 6, 10, & 23 years!
