Captivating:

[Via]

[Via]

I just picked up a copy of Andrew Zuckerman’s gorgeous Bird book, mentioned here a couple of months ago. It would be a great deal at the cover price of $60, but I found it locally for 50% off, and it seems Amazon & others are matching that price. I was reminded to mention the book when I spotted this short behind-the-scenes video shot during production. [Via] Next up: I’d like to check out his Creature book.

Having grown up by the Mississippi, I often make fun of the feeble Guadalupe River (aka “The Mighty Guat”) that trickles past Adobe HQ. Then there are the days (like today) when I see why the city lavished money on a huge flood-control channel:

The image comes courtesy of the Lightroom team’s Kelly Castro. See more of his great B&W’s on Flickr, and check out more info on his Lightroom-Photoshop technique.
— J. (who’s feeling marginally better about being forced to carry flood insurance)

Just a couple of recent finds that manipulate your images in interesting ways:

• “Digital photography never looked so analog,” proclaim the makers of Hipstamatic. The interface is more than a little (deliberately?) wonky, but it produces some fun stuff. It even makes Photoshop PM meetings look interesting:

  

  [Via Geoff Badner]

• PhotoTropedelic “draw[s] upon the colors and symbols of 60’s Pop Art to produce boldly unique art.” Far out. [Via Matthew Richmond] [Update: Apparently the app was created by Adobe’s own Larry Weinberg.]
• Le Petit Dummy “lets you position a mouth on any photo and play back audio files as the mouth moves in sync.”
• And, in case you missed it earlier, the LEGO iPhone app (App Store link) will render you in vibrant lo-fi.

I wish you could see the moon as it appears overhead here at this moment. I’ve never seen anything like it. Pictures (mine, anyway) can’t begin to capture its vivid beauty, and I laid a long while on the driveway gazing up. And then, being the suburban dad I am, I rose & towed in the trash cans. I’m feeling very blessed.
I wish you great peace, happiness, and success in “oh-Ten” (as I’m sure to stumble and call it more than once). Thanks for reading.

I just saw a feature request for Adobe Bridge that covers something that’s already possible. A photographer requested a way to review all his images as black & whites. Here’s my simple suggestion:

• Open an image in Camera Raw and create a B&W treatment you like.
• Create a preset via the “Save Settings…” option in the little menu* on the right-hand side of the Camera Raw tabs.
• Once you’ve made a preset, you can batch-apply it to images in Bridge by selecting the images, then choosing Edit->Develop Settings->{Your Preset Name}.

* Side note: I can’t adequately describe how annoying I find it that we (Adobe collectively) make this menu & similar ones so hard to see. I don’t have control over all such decisions.

Regarding HDR & its discontents: “This style of tone mapping has become synonymous with HDRI in a way that isn’t good at all. It’s as if T-Pain’s Auto-Tune tracks were the blanket description for ‘music.'” — Author Jack Howard, who’s just started an HDR group on Facebook. Check out Jack’s tutorials (one, two) on “soft” tonemapping techniques.

[Update: Fixed typo in the Facebook link.]

Viewers of Channel 5’s Gadget Show have voted Photoshop Elements Photography Gadget of the Decade. On behalf of the Elements team, wow, and thanks, everyone! Evidently I can’t watch the video from within the US, but I’m told that Elements gets mentioned about 5 minutes into it. [Via Emma Wilkinson]

Scott Kelby has created some geeky off-camera-flash t-shirts:

If you’re looking for a really unique holiday gift for the photographer on your list (or you just want a really cool t-shirt that nobody else will have), AND you totally love the idea that 100% of the profits go to feeding and caring for kids in a orphanage in Kenya that you guys helped to build (see below), then man have I got a holiday gift idea for you!

Very cool, Scott.

1. Wrap that little sucka* in Christmas tree lights.
2. Start firing for effect.
3. There is no step 3.

*He sees you, sucka.

New Adventures in Slow-Mo:

Elsewhere:

• Check out Alan Salier’s stunning high-speed gallery on Flickr. [Via Tom Hogarty]
• See also the slow-mo detonations captured by Martin Klimas.

• Take a look at the marvelous intricacy of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Lightning Fields. The photographer “uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.” [Via]
• I love the understatement of Carlos de Spinola‘s “Drive In” series. Somehow I’m taken back to driving across northern Indiana (where Gary could double as the backdrops for Blade Runner) at night. [Via]
• The NYT tells the story behind (and features a gallery of) Walker Evans postcards.
• To quote our little son Finn seeing whirling blades, “Makeitturn makeitturn makeitturnturn!”: Helicopter taking off–in 1949 [Via]
• Last Suppers is “A series of photographs documenting former Death Row prisoners’ requests for their last meal before execution.” Happy Monday! [Via]

Bruce Haley, whose stirring war photography I’ve mentioned previously, has come up with a novel idea:

I decided to feed the industrial junkies and gamers and sci-fi nuts and add to the dialogue on dead machinery…  so I dumped a ton of photos onto my site that have never been seen before, in a section entitled “The Post-Apocalyptic World,” and also threw a contest into the mix…  It’s sort of a end-of-days “Where’s Waldo?” type of thing: Amidst all of the vast wastelands of rust and abandonment, one can find six people and a dog…  so the first 5 people who find these will get a free copy of my limited-edition portfolio.

Details about the project are in the “Contest 9-9-09” section.

• Gonna leave a mark: Howard Schatz captures boxers before & after fights. [Via]
• Damion Berger creates spacey black & whites In The Deep End. [Via]
• Rube Goldberg contraptions, puking skulls, & more populate the photos of Jamie Chung. [Via]
• Light-Test.com provides fun, funky, de-glamorized looks at photographic subjects. [Via]
• Michael Wolf’s Life Behind Glass captures the human habitrails of downtown Chicago. [Via]

Loving a good rant, I thought I’d pass along this bit from my fellow PM/photographer Bryan O’Neil Hughes. Hughes uses a Canon 5D Mk II and loves good camera tech as much as just about anybody. He does not, however, have much patience for gear-for-gear’s-sake, or for money as a replacement for sweat.

You don’t need an accelerometer to hold your camera level…and if you do, you should find a new hobby. That’s like asking headphones to clean your ears.

The problem isn’t software. It isn’t hardware. It’s the shoot-a-million-images-and-hope-to-hell-it-works-out philosophy that people are taking.

Here’s a snippet (repeated a million times when I used to sell high-end photo gear):

• Customer: I want to buy a Hasselblad.
• Me: Sure, we have those… Let me ask you, though: what don’t you like about your current camera?
• Customer: It isn’t sharp enough.
• Me: What sort of things do you shoot?
• Customer: Landscape.
• Me: Do you shoot from a tripod?
• Customer: No.
• Me: Do you own a tripod?
• Customer: No.
• Me: Let’s start there.

…And invariably they’d buy the Hassy. People always want to solve their own laziness with gear (often the wrong gear). I see it with photography, cars… man, I even saw it with skateboarding.

My Mk II has a grid overlay… my F3 had that… but honestly, if you need to lean on that to hold the camera straight… you should probably have your inner ear checked.

— BH

[In a related vein: “If You Think You Need This, Kill Yourself“]

• Sergey Maximishin takes viewers on a slightly freaky tour of the big country. (I dig the composition of these flying fish.) [Via]
• Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii documented Russia in color a hundred years ago (!).
• You call that a nesting doll? This is a nesting doll. Note the man providing scale. (More images from Mongolia & the Russian border are on The Big Image.)
• I don’t miss winters in Illinois, Boston, or NY–and those are a walk in the park compared to snowfall like this. [Via]

Christoph Rehage walked 4646km across China, taking daily photos & short videos of himself along the way. Here’s the result (full-screen viewing recommended):

His site seems to be down at the moment, but I’m adding the link in case it comes back to life. See the corresponding Vimeo page for a bit more background. [Via]

• I stumbled across this oddity via a simple Flickr search for the word “peanut.” (Gotta love the inexplicable tiny box of Manischewitz!) See photog snailbooty’s photo stream for other curiosities.
• Vincent Bousserez makes similarly tiny, offbeat compositions in his Plastic Life series.
• As for the Monkeyman photo illustrations, you’ll just have to see for yourself. [Via Keith Johnson]

• Tom Junod’s article The Falling Man, about Richard Drew’s famous 9/11 photograph, is long, very difficult, and rewarding.
• Battlespace brings together photographs from Iraq and Afghanistan, 2003-2008. If nothing else see the 5-minute slideshow.
• “As a general rule, people really don’t catapult ten feet into the air whenever an artillery round explodes near them, despite what Hollywood war movies show you.” Bruce Haley shares amazing war photography and insights on his site. (“After weeks of living on the run in the jungle, eating nothing but rice, that goddamn barbecued monkey leg tasted like filet mignon.”)
• Photography Served features beautiful (in one sense) B&W’s of 20th-Century War Machines.
• Design Observer surveys Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs. [Via]