This is nice, right?

If you like that, check this out: Russell will be teaching a pre-Photoshop World workshop in Las Vegas on Sept. 3:

If you’ve always wanted to learn how to fly the remote quad-copter and take aerial photography then this is the class for you. With advances in helicopter technology combined with small lightweight cameras, the age of aerial photography is easy to learn, and at reasonable prices. With the help of some expert flight instructors you will learn the basics of flight and some of the techniques for capturing images with the DJI Phantom. Representatives from DJI Innovations and GoPro will also be available for questions, answers and advanced tips and techniques.

After landing the unit safely back on the ground, Russell Brown and his team of experts will discuss some of the best ways to work with your still, and video images from the GoPro cameras.

The early bird price is $89 (regular price $99), and participation is limited to 65 students.

Russell Brown’s life does not, from all I can tell, suck in the least. He was recently flying a GoPro camera around the Golden Gate Bridge & the ghost town of Bodie, CA, and here he shows how the new lens profiles built into Camera Raw 8.2 can work on both stills & video. (Jump ahead to 2:40 or so if you want to see the video portion.)

A preview (release candidate) version of ACR is now available on Adobe Labs for Photoshop CS6 and Photoshop CC.

In addition to supporting 10 new cameras (including the new Canon 70D) and adding several lens profiles (including for the GoPro Hero 3), Camera Raw 8.2 makes a bunch of welcome nips & tucks: The Spot Healing tool gets feathering control; the histogram is now interactive; the Detail panel gets a color smoothness slider; workflow presets are now available; and the Local Adjustment brush has been refined. Check out the Lightroom Journal’s post for full details.

As a reminder, compatibility updates come to both CS and CC, but new features show up only in CC. (That’s the promise of Creative Cloud: New features roll out all the time.)

“Encourage [your kids] to play somewhere well-lit,” they say. Riiight… and the rest of the time, a big aperture (with corresponding shallow depth of field) is your friend. This has meant, unfortunately, that on the relatively few occasions I’ve tried it, I’ve gotten pretty miserable results shooting video with a DSLR: kids run in & out of focus with abandon, and without any sort of autofocus, I’m lost.

Now, however, the Canon 70D promises great things in that regard:

At present I’m shooting with an original 5D (passed on to me by Bryan O’Neil Hughes when he upgraded to the 5D Mark II, and still one of the nicest gifts I’ve ever gotten), but I’m starting to feel sorely tempted to upgrade, even sight-unseen. Any reason I shouldn’t? Yeah yeah, there’s the whole not-full-frame thing, but I think people get a little irrationally fetishistic about that one, and I doubt I’ll die as my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens ends up effectively zooming in a bit. (By the way, it’s the investment in that thing that’s keeping me in the Canon camp, but I’m open to hearing ideas from Nikon & other shooters.)

In any case, I’m excited that the technology is evolving to this point, and at a fairly attainable price point to boot. Viva competition.

Not having dozens of high-speed cameras, Jeremiah Warren got crafty with a GoPro & some inexpensive materials. Results*:

The making-of:

[YouTube]
*All edited in Premiere/After Effects, Jeremiah notes

Hey, mind if I duct-tape your mom to my back and go surfing? Crazy, inspiring, beautiful stuff. Via Kottke:

Pascale Honore enjoyed watching her sons surf but couldn’t participate because she’s been a paraplegic for the past 18 years. But then Tyron Swan, a friend of her sons, duct taped her to his back and took her out on his board.

[Vimeo]

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]

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:

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]

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]

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]

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]

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!

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]