Category Archives: Photography

Video: Multi-GoPro skateboarding mayhem

“What would you do with 50 GoPros at the touch of a button?” Hopefully (though not likely) something this cool. Check out Ryan Sheckler in action, and if nothing else, check out the neat burst effects that show up about 1:33 in:

A couple of weeks ago my friend Bruce & I did strap a couple of GoPros to the belly of a B-24 bomber that took us for a spin. I’ll try to share the footage soon. [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]
[Previously: A Skateboard’s-Eye View of Manhattan]

Whatever happened to all my design links? (Hint: Pinterest.)

You might remember that I often used to featured bulleted lists of links about photography, illustration, typography, etc.  I still share links when possible via Twitter, but I just haven’t had time in recent months to amass collections as I once did. (Could I now be working for a living? Perish the thought!) I still pine for an automated solution that apparently doesn’t exist.

A silver lining, though: Now I find that my Pinterest boards absorb what would otherwise have been tweets. I can’t add quite the same context/commentary there, but the site offers a beautifully visual presentation, and you might want to follow me there.

Photosmith 2 enhances Lightroom-iPad integration

I’m delighted to see that Photosmith has released version 2, enabling multi-image tagging, bidirectional sync with Lightroom, native Eye-Fi support, and more.

According to their site, new features of the $20 app include:

  • Wirelessly sync your unsorted backlog from Lightroom with our free plugin
  • Sort and filter your photos
  • Organize them into collections
  • Apply star ratings and color labels
  • Apply keywords and IPTC metadata individually, in groups, or with presets
  • Share highlights and rough selections to Facebook, Flickr or by e-mail
  • Support for RAW, JPG, or RAW+JPG
  • Support for 100% zoom for many cameras
  • Native support for Export and Publish Services in Adobe Lightroom
  • Directly receive from Eye-Fi cards
  • Very powerful sync options, allowing workflow customization

I can’t wait to try it out when I get home. If you’re using the app, what do you think of it?

View to an eclipse

Photographer Cory Poole captured 700 images from a telescope with “a very narrow bandpass allowing you to see the chromosphere and not the much brighter photosphere below it,” then used them to create this video:

Or, as my Photoshop-centric brain saw it, “He’s moving two overlapping paths with a Boolean operation & red stroke/inner shadow layer style applied.” Because, yes, I need to get out a lot more.
Elsewhere, the Atlantic features a gorgeous gallery of images that capture the event from points all around the world.
[Via]

"The 112-Megapixel Camera You'll Never Get to Shoot With"

Check out this $100,000 bad boy. PopPhoto writes,

They are looking to create a one-off version of the 1110 series, a black and white only camera with a 95x95mm sensor (medium format sensors are typically 48x36mm). That massive sensor is cooled down to -100 degrees Celsius, which means it can take exposures that last for hours without overheating, which can lead to noise. The 112-megapixel CCD has no Bayer mask or AA fliter so the images will come out super sharp.

Yeah, but does it work with Instagram?

ACR 6.7 for CS5 supports D4, 5D Mk III, more

Camera Raw 6.7 [Win|Mac] and DNG Convertor 6.7 [Win|Mac] are now available as a final releases on Adobe.com and through the update mechanisms available in Photoshop CS5.  This release includes bug fixes, new lens profiles, and new camera support:

  • Canon EOS 1D X
  • Canon EOS 5D Mk III
  • Canon PowerShot G1 X
  • Canon PowerShot S100V
  • Fuji FinePix F505EXR
  • Fuji FinePix F605EXR
  • Fuji FinePix F770EXR
  • Fuji FinePix F775EXR
  • Fuji FinePix HS30EXR
  • Fuji FinePix HS33EXR
  • Fuji FinePix X-S1
  • Nikon D4
  • Nikon D800
  • Nikon D800E
  • Olympus OM-D E-M5
  • Pentax K-01
  • Samsung NX20
  • Samsung NX210
  • Samsung NX1000
  • Sony Alpha NEX-VG20
  • Sony SLT-A57

 

For more details about lens profiles supported & bugs fixed, please see the Lightroom Journal. [Via Dave Howe]

Photography: Forget pixels, gimme glyphs

  • Matt Richardson’s Descriptive Camera captures images, uses real people to describe them, and then prints out only the descriptions they create. “The technology at the core of the Descriptive Camera is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk API. It allows a developer to submit Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) for workers on the internet to complete.” [Via]
  • Adobe researcher Dan Goldman notes, “This is not just a nutty art project: the same general idea is actually being used to help blind people.” He points out VizWiz, “an iPhone app that allows blind users to receive quick answers to questions about their surroundings. VizWiz combines automatic image processing, anonymous web workers, and members of the user’s social network in order to collect fast and accurate answers to their questions.”
  • Text-Only Instagram is spot on. Hip hip cliché! [Via Mark Kawano]

Lightroom 4.1 adds HDR toning, improved defringing

Check it out:

  • Lightroom 4.1 RC2 now includes the ability to process HDR TIFF files.  (16, 24 or 32-bit TIFF files)  This can be quite useful if you have merged multiple exposures into a single 32-bit image using Photoshop’s HDR Pro.  Using the new basic panel controls can be a very effective and straightforward method of achieving an overall balance across the tonal range.
  • Additional Color Fringing corrections have been added to Lightroom 4.1 RC2.  Please see this blog post for additional details.

Photoshop CS6: What's in it for photographers?

A. TONS.

I’m sure you already know about Camera Raw 7, and you’ve probably seen bits about selective blurring & adaptive wide-angle lens correction–but what about Skin-Aware Masking, smarter Auto Curves, 64-bit Bridge, an improved Print dialog, and more?  Check out this comprehensive overview from photographer & Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes.

On a related note, photographer & author Martin Evening has posted a great in-depth piece on DP Review covering extreme contrast edits in Lightroom 4 and ACR 7.  I love being able to get more of the benefits of HDR from a single frame, and without introducing garish haloes.

 

MBA's: Come join the Revel team

The Adobe Revel team is hiring a summer intern with a passion for photography to work on this exciting, transformative product. Job responsibilities include:

  • Defining the next version of Revel
  • Understanding the market and customers
  • Structuring experiments and research to forge ahead in uncharted territory
  • Driving the definition of features, working with the experience design and engineering teams
  • Defining metrics for success to guide further feature development across multiple releases per year

Check out the job listing page for more info: MBA Product Manager Intern for Adobe Revel (14949). [Via Sumner Paine]

"The World's Most Downloaded Man"

Frustrated by a growing lack of respect in the ad world for original work, Brazilian photographer Fernando Martins of the Câmera Clara Photography Studio travels to Copenhagen to meet with the World’s Most Downloaded Man: A handsome, 6’3″ Danish stock photography model named Jesper Bruun who has been seen “in more places than the Olympic torch.” [Via]

It’s more interesting in concept than in execution, maybe, but I love that it actually happened.

[Via Zorana Gee]

Adobe Revel 1.2 adds Retina support & more

The latest rev of Adobe’s mobile photo editing & sharing platform makes a number of improvements, including:

 

 

In addition, the team writes,

If you already tried Revel in the past and want try these new features, we have great news for you! Anyone with an expired trial as of April 12 has ANOTHER 30-days to try Revel. To restart your trial, simply get the latest version from the app store, sign-in, and start another complimentary 30 day subscription.

Happy shooting,
J.

A ride on the Space Shuttle's booster

Boom:

From the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle, a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.

Aching for better iOS app integration

[Disclosures: If I had any inside info, I obviously couldn’t share it here, and I’ve been hopeful/disappointed on this subject before.]

Poor integration leads to bloated apps: if jumping among apps/modules is slow, customers gravitate towards all-in-one tools that offer more overall efficiency, even if the individual pieces are lacking.

Today I saw Neven Mrgan writing, of iPad photo apps,

[I]t’s just so much more convenient to stay in the canonical photo store; importing and exporting photos to and from another app is clumsier.

 

I experienced the pain, over and over, on my trip to Guatemala.  Having taken just my iPad & Camera Connection Kit, I was eager to put a variety of photo tools to the test.  Moving among apps was far & away the crappiest part of the experience.  For example:

  • I’d review images in Photos, where I can see them nice and large. But I can’t say “Open in App X,” so…
  • I’d leave Photos, launch Snapseed, bring up the tiny, default image browser component, navigate to the same point in my photo library, and then try to pick the same image I’d just been looking at in Photos.
  • After editing, I’d hit Save, and images would go into the Camera Roll (not Imports, where I’d been browsing them).  Thus I couldn’t see the edited images alongside the originals.
  • After repeating the process many times, I’d go to Flickr Studio, then carefully & laboriously add photos from various albums.  (The app doesn’t let you re-order images, so I had to dive into the albums again & again just to get the sequence right.)
  • At last I’d upload.

 

This really, really sucked.  Far more desirable:

  • Browse the images in the browser of my choice (Photos or something else–one that could, say, flag/sort/whittle down images, local or remote).
  • Tap one or more images and say “Send to App X” (to build a panorama, composite in PS Touch, apply a tilt shift blur, whatever)–no manual navigating to the other apps, no navigating back to the photos.
  • Be able to save, return to my browser, and see the edited image alongside the original.
  • Hand off one or more images to the sharing tool of my choice.

 

Let’s not bloat PS Touch with every damn filter we can think of; rather, let’s have a great way to pass data back and forth, so that apps can function as plug-ins to one another. (PhotoAppLink is a nice start, but we need something universal.)  And let’s not all bloat our apps reinventing the image browser, integrating the same sharing services over & over, etc.  There’s a far more elegant way to proceed.

Tangential: Neven also writes,

The iPad is too big to shoot with; the iPhone is too small to edit on. Bridging the two is fine in theory, but in practice there’s the hairy matter of extremely large file sizes.

But why is it that my phone or tablet can send HD video streams instantly to my TV, yet they can’t send photos or video to each other (or to my Mac)?  To put a phone video onto my Mac, I have to upload the whole thing to something like Dropbox, then download it again; isn’t that kind of bizarre?  I really thought that AirDrop would sort things out; hope springs eternal.

Design: Truthful posters, Saul meets Spider-Man, & more

Scalado Remove promises handheld tourist-zapping

About five years ago we gave Photoshop the ability to stack multiple images together, then eliminate moving or unwanted details. Similar techniques have appeared in other tools, and now it appears you’ll be able to do all the capture & processing with just your phone. Here’s a quick preview:

The Verge has a bit more detail on the user experience. [Via John Dowdell]