I’ve previously linked to the incredible aerial photography of George Steinmetz, much of it captured while dangling from an ultralight wing over Africa. I think you’ll enjoy this 20-minute talk about his life of adventure, replete with fantastic images, as much as I did:
[Via]
“Foliobook Is My New Preferred iPad Portfolio App,” writes Adobe evangelist Terry White:
I use Lightroom to publish to folders in Dropbox via the built-in Hard Drive Publish feature. This is also one of the ways I go from Lightroom to my iOS devices.
In this latest update to FolioBook, FolioBook Now “Syncs” with Dropbox. That’s right! Real syncing. Simply choose the folder on your Dropbox.com account that you wish to sync with as a gallery in FolioBook and it will “sync” the new photos to FolioBook and remove the old ones. Hooray!
Disturbing, but beautifully shot & executed:
Okay, I’ll admit it: my first reaction was basically “Man, the world needs to wax Jay Maisel’s proverbial car even further about as much I need a hole in my head.” But dang if this 7-minute piece by The Big Picture isn’t totally charming. (If only it were higher res! But still, the images & personality come right through.)
[Via Kelly McCathran]
This subject came up at lunch as we chatted about whether tools can & should aspire to help people be better illustrators, storytellers, etc.
My initial reaction was that no, Instagram doesn’t make you better, but it makes a great many people feel better (giving photos some flair, paving over flaws like crappy lighting). Making people feel cooler than they are is nothing to sneeze at, but one could argue that a shortcut to “interestingness” detracts from doing harder work around composition, lighting, etc.
On second thought, though, I think Instagram does make me a better photographer—or at least it makes me work harder to make interesting images. People love to put on fancy conferences about gamification & incentives, but the game here’s simple: When my photos draw likes (especially from, say, photographers I respect or some cute girl I knew 20 years ago), I feel good; when they don’t, I feel bad. (Hey, I’m human.) Thus I’m highly motivated to share only my most interesting work.
What do you think?
Photojojo—the effortlessly, inimitably charming little photo newsletter/store—has just introduced Photojojo University. Site creator Amit Gupta explains, “It’s photography fundamentals, taught for people discovering photography for the first time with a phone.”
Each lesson is lovingly crafted for the small screen and sent straight to your email for anytime reading. Each week, you’ll get two bite-size lessons complete with photo challenge to practice your skills.
Looks fun; I’ve just signed up.
Sustainable-food company The Perennial Plate has captured a visually sumptuous look at India:
It’s hard to put your camera down in India. With so much beauty and filth, food and poverty, happiness and stress: its an overwhelming (and wonderful) place to film. We came back exhausted, full and still overwhelmed (this time with the task of editing all the footage into a short video). Because India is a big place, and each area varies dramatically, we attempted to construct a day across India: from north to south, from dawn till dusk.
PetaPixel on the Paul Harvey Super Bowl “Farmer” ad:
One of standout commercials during the Super Bowl yesterday was the above ad by Chrysler promoting its Dodge Ram line of trucks. The 2-minute ad pays tribute to farmers across the nation, and is composed entirely of photographs showing various facets of the farming industry.
Note that the images aren’t entirely static. Watch for bits of parallax, clouds that stream by, particles that float, and more. I love that kind of subtle enlivening, creating something in the cinemagram vein (not quite a photo, not exactly video).
What happens when you strap a couple of GoPros onto the bottom of the B-24 you’ve talked your way aboard? There’s only one way to find out!
Last Memorial Day my friend Bruce Bullis (Adobe video engineering) and I managed to ride a vintage bomber out of Moffett Field. Bruce charmed the GoPro folks into lending us a couple of cameras that we could mount on the outside of the plane, and we carried a Canon 5D Mk II and our iPhones aboard the plane.
Lessons learned, in brief:
Generating 600 GB of data per second (eat your heart out, RED cam), the 1.8-gigapixel ARGUS camera will hitch a ride on drones, spotting targets as small as six inches from an altitude of 20,000 feet. TechCrunch reports,
The camera uses 368 five-megapixel camera sensors aimed through a telescopic array to pick out birds in flight and humans on the move on the Earth’s surface. ARGUS stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System.
Elsewhere, acronym-lovin’ DARPA wants you to design an amphibious Fast, Adaptable, Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). Somehow I’m kinda weirded out by their appropriating a breezy whiteboard aesthetic more often seen in TED talks:
Yes, really. Check out this Kickstarter project from Lomography:
The Smartphone Film Scanner was conceived as a way to offer photographers and enthusiasts a quick, easy and portable way to scan 35mm films. It offers unrivaled speed and convenience when compared to other film scanners. In addition, the scanner will work with a free integrated Lomoscanner App, which allows you to easily edit and share your scans.
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Chilling.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecz8nRkgVX8&w=425&h=239]
Now I have to debate whether to show this to our lads (who just built their first snowman) or whether it’s too… how do you say… cold-blooded. [Via]
That’s what I found myself wondering as I watched Supralude‘s That Night In Williamsburg. He won’t spill many beans, but what do you think? Were those lights added in post, and how can you tell one way or the other?
Russell’s a master of combining often obscure parts of Photoshop in new & useful ways. Here he shows how to combine multiple exposures via one of his scripts:
Every day, Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost shares a set of beautiful captures via Instagram. As she did last year, she’s compiled her favorites into a short video:
I’m sure that the images will mean more to me than they do to you, but I would encourage you to create a collection of your own images and look at them as a complete body of work for the year to see what you can discover about yourself.
Giacomo Sardelli used Photoshop & Premiere Pro to edit eye-popping visuals taken aboard the International Space Station, then combine them with clips of the crew addressing all of us down here:
Some making-of nerdery courtesy of PetaPixel:
Pictures were downloaded from the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center and edited with Photoshop CS6. Even if they were Hi-res images shot with Nikon D3S cameras, a lot of noise removal and color correction was needed, especially for those shots at ISO 3200, which was the highest ISO speed limit I’ve allowed myself to use, exception made for the last sequence of the spinning world, which comes from a sequenze of shots taken at ISO 12800. […]
Editing was made with Adobe Premiere CS6, with a 2K workflow, which allowed me to scale, rotate and pan image sequences whose native resolution is 4K.
Tangentially related bonus: NASA’s Captain Sunita Williams gives a 25-minute tour of the International Space Station—what Kottke calls “the nerdiest episode of MTV Cribs.”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doN4t5NKW-k&w=425&h=239]
Photoshop engineer John Peterson (who’s been behind Photomerge, various vector improvements, and more) highly recommends the new documentary Chasing Ice:
It follows photographer James Balog as he travels the Arctic documenting the massive meltdown of the glaciers. Among other things, he and his crew set up over two dozen time-lapse cameras to capture the melting ice over a period of years. The footage they capture of the glaciers – in some cases melting completely out of frame – is amazing. Another team, camped out on a freezing ledge for over two weeks, were rewarded with footage of an ice shelf the size of lower Manhattan collapsing into the sea.
It’s some of the most stunning, dramatic landscape photography I’ve seen on a movie screen.
Filmmaker Andrew Telling followed street artist Conor Harrington around Vardo, “a half-abandoned fishing village” off the coast of Norway, “one of the most Northerly and isolated parts of Europe.” I dig the minimal, meditative results.
[Via]
“There’s no replacement for displacement,” especially in this short film:
THE REAL THING is a short documentary about custom hot rod builder Bodie Stroud and his re-imagining of a classic Mustang by way of an extremely rare and powerful motor built specifically for legendary racer Mario Andretti’s 1969 Can Am series race car.
Well, there’s still an hour and a half on the ol’ doomsday date, at least where I sit, so you never know… Maybe file these tips from Jim Goldstein away for horrible future reference:
Adobe Revel lets you organize your photo library, sync your photos among devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad), apply non-destructive edits, and share Web galleries. Whereas you previously had to pay a $5.99 monthly subscription, you can now use the app for free—or pay a subscription for premium service.
Everyone can now download the app & import their entire photo libraries for free. You pay only if you use the app enough to import more than 50 photos per month. Details from the team:
Here is a summary of the changes we are making to Revel:
- We are eliminating the 30-day trial and replacing it with a free version of Revel that you can use for as long as you like.
- You can still upgrade to Revel Premium as an in-app purchase in the Revel App.
With the free version of Revel you get:
- The ability to import as many photos as you want in the first 30 days
- After that you can import up to 50 photos every month
With Revel Premium you get:
- Unlimited photo import for US$5.99 per month – import as many photos as you want, anytime you want
- The ability to automatically import new photos added to the Camera Roll on your iPhone and iPad
For more details see the product FAQ. You can download the new version of Revel from iTunes and from the Mac App Store.
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If you have an interest in photography, the Adobe research team would like to talk to you. Here’s a quick screening survey. Thanks in advance!
Ready for your brain to hurt? PetaPixel writes,
YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik’s cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.
“At first I though it was going to be about a 14 yr. old kid escaping the country by riding inside of a tumbleweed,” my friend quips. It’s even better than that. Upworthy writes,
Massoud Hassani was smuggled out of Afghanistan when he was 14-years-old. Watch his story about returning to Kabul and putting his product design skills to work to build a tool for cheaply surveying and raising awareness about the hundreds of thousands of land mines still hidden in Afghanistan.
[Update: Here’s the recording. Also, check out this post for lots of details from the Bandito Brothers team.]
Oh, this should be interesting: On Thursday, December 13 at 10:00am Pacific, filmmaker Jacob Rosenberg will be talking about creating Waiting for Lightning, the new documentary about skater Danny Way. You can register here.
See how the video pros behind Waiting for Lightning used high-performance Adobe post-production tools to document the life of Danny Way, one of the world’s most visionary skateboarders. This presentation will cover Bandito Brothers’ digital workflows which relied on After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and other Adobe Creative Cloud tools to tell the story about how much abuse the body can sustain, how deep you have to dig to survive family troubles, and how high and far dreams can fly.
Join director, filmmaker, author, and digital media expert Jacob Rosenberg of the studio Bandito Brothers for a webinar where he walks you through the making of this remarkable new, feature-length documentary and some of the breakthrough cinematography used in its creation.
National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo teamed up to create some captivating footage:
Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.
Stick around ’til 5:40 or so to see the contraption used to drive the camera. Watching the cat pursue the stuffed target, my wife sat next to me & quietly whispered “Get it, get it, get it!” [Via Danny Smythe]
Oh good Lord. Petapixel says, “Director Arturo Perez Jr…. snapped a total of 1905 iPhone photos around San Francisco to capture the story.”
The band writes, “This is the very first music video done entirely on Instagram without any third party alterations. Every single frame of this music video is an actual picture that we ran through Instagram. We never shot any video. We only shot still photography.”
I’m getting a repetitive-stress disorder just thinking about the creation process.
A great city finally gets its tilt-shift due. I can’t wait to take our lads there for Christmas.
[Via Terri Stone]
Bonus miniaturized water traffic: The “Toy Boats” of Sydney harbor, which Nathan Kaso created by applying a tilt-shift effect in Photoshop, then compiling in LRTimelapse & After Effects, and finally editing in Premiere Pro CS6.
[Via]
Remember that Wayne’s World “Camera one, camera two!” scene where he opens & closes one eye at a time? (No, you probably weren’t born when that came out; but I digress.) Lytro’s “perspective shift” feature works a bit like that, letting you switch among two subtly different points of view on the same scene:
It’s cool, though my big hope here remains that such technology offers a better way to select elements in a photo by detecting their varying depths. [Via]
In September I mentioned some great photos of the Shuttle Endeavor flying over San Francisco, captured by Lightroom team member Ben Warde. Now Ben shows some of his techniques for turning a flat image into something much more impactful.
[Via Andrew Kavanagh]
Tom Ryaboi has made a lovely homage to a beautiful city:
[Via Pete Green]
This is so great. 24-year-old A. J. Brockman can move only his facial muscles and three fingers of his left hand, yet he just got to give his portrait of the First Family to President Obama:
“He ducked out of the security area and came over to us. He said, ‘Did you do that magnificent painting?’” recalled Brockman, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens.
The president lingered a few minutes, asking about Brockman’s computer painting technique. The president posed for photos and signed Brockman’s copy of the painting: “Thanks for the wonderful portrait…you make us proud! Barack Obama.”
“He told me he hoped it would one day hang in his personal library. He was such a dude,” said Brockman.
Five days later, the “New York Times” ran a half-page photo of a presidential aide carrying Brockman’s painting off Air Force One.
“Waldo was a chump at hiding compared to Liu Bolin.” The artist sort of Content-Aware Fills himself out of photographs, disappearing into background via elaborate make-up. Now Ford has cleverly commissioned him to highlight its competitors’ blandness, making them melt into their backgrounds. Check it out:
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Dutch photographer Iwan Baan hopped aboard a helicopter with his 1DX to capture this striking photo of a half-darkened Manhattan:
“[It was] the kind of shot which was impossible to take before this camera was there,” Baan said.
It was more difficult to rent a car than a helicopter in New York the day after Sandy, Baan said. And because there was such limited air traffic so soon after the storm, air traffic control allowed Baan and the helicopter to hover very high above the city, a powerful advantage for the photo.
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You know what you see every day? Not this.
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Can this possibly be real? In any case, Happy Halloween!
In this episode of The Complete Picture Julieanne explains the best way to add a color tone to an image using the Split Tone and Tone Curve panels and shows how to save presets to increase your productivity. You can download the presets discussed in the video via Julieanne’s blog. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.
Check it out:
“A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool?…” Um, this? Core77 writes,
Danish shooter Ebsen Nielsen has made the latest advancement: After cobbling together an octo-copter from several different manufacturers’ kits, he rigged up a way to send a live feed from the camera to a pair of goggles he wears, enabling him to fly it from a first-person POV.
In a related vein, how about a climb up Pakistan’s 20,000ft Trango Towers? Stick around (or skip) to about 1:30. #HNL
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Pilot Jakub Vlk captured & accelerated footage out the front of his aircraft:
[Via]
Better still, a seagull kept pace by taking off with a running GoPro!
Photo Plus Expo is drawing a range of Adobe folks & expert artists (Julieanne Kost, John Paul Caponigro, Dan Marcolina, Bryan O’Neil Hughes, and many others) to New York. Check out some of the interesting talks going on all week.
“The simplest way to describe Richard [Koci Hernandez],” says my friend Michael Ninness, “is that he is the ultimate evangelist for new storytelling tools.” Richard spent many years working as a photojournalist for the SJ Mercury News before becoming a professor at Berkeley.
Now he’s put together a full-throated defense ostensibly of using Instagram, but really more about democratized image-making, the value of filtering/manipulation, and more. I think you’ll find it interesting:
It’s said to be “30% smaller, 25% lighter & 2X more powerful than previous models. New resolutions and frame rates include 4K @ 15fps, 1080 @ 60fps, and 720 @ 120fps. It also offers 12MP burst photo capture at 30 fps.” Oh, and it has built-in WiFi, for $399 (or down to $199 minus some resolutions/rates). Wild.
fxphd writes,
While much of the popular press may focus on the jump to 4K, we wanted to flag the incredible shift from being a ‘straight to YouTube’ camera to a camera that now also offers a very real alternative for those wanting to intercut GoPro footage – a pipeline that assumes there will be grading, that there will be post, and outputs from the camera in a format that lets you maximize both.
[Via Colin Stefani]
Shahab Gabriel Behzumi shot for six days, then produced this rather eye-popping piece.
He writes,
I had to import and customize the NEF files before I equalized them with the great LR-Timelapse from Gunther Wegner. (Adobe Lightroom is necessary) The observed JPEG had then to be droped into virtual dub and were rendered as AVI. When this was done, I had to stabilize the sequences manually frame by frame (AE motion tracker) and rendered each of them in 3 different sizes: (4928×3264 pixels, 1920×1080 pixels, 1024×768 pixels) Last but not least the snippets were edited fitting to the beautiful title “Diving Through The Blue” by the respectable composer and musician Valentin Boomes.
“Ross Ching, the director,” writes Gizmodo, “used Adobe Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere to delete every human and moving car from all the timelapse sequences. His short, the first of a series called Empty America, shows every landmark from the Golden Gate Bridge to Fisherman’s Wharf to Lombard Street to Ghirardelli Square to the Bay Bridge, ‘wiped empty of tourists and traffic.'”
Here’s a peek behind the scenes:
Pro tip: You can shoot videos like this any day of the week here in San Jose (population 1 million) and never need to do any post-processing. “It’s more necropolis than metropolis,” says my wife. [Via Dave Helmly]
Getting the weekend off to a rather fast start:
[Via]
Julieanne Kost writes,
In this episode of The Complete Picture (The Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush), discover the power of making selective adjustments like dodging and burning, color corrections and noise removal using the Graduated Filter and Adjustment Brush. Note: although this video was recorded in Lightroom, the same techniques are available in Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6.
[Via Jeff Tranberry]
The Digital Negative format lets you convert your proprietary-format raw files (NEF, CR2, etc.) into a format that’s fully publicly documented (more future-proof). Now the standard has been extended to support 32-bit floating point data (capable of representing hundreds of f-stops of dynamic range), plus optional lossy compression (JPEG-like sizes with the flexibility of raw), and more. Check out the DNG 1.4 specification notes on the Lightroom Journal for more info.