Category Archives: Photography

CS4 eSeminar Series for Pro Photographers

If you’re a pro photographer, check out the CS4: Shortcut to Brilliant eSeminar Series for Professional Photographers, starting this Thursday. Titles & times at a glance:

  • Discover the Timesaving Benefits of Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
    • Thursday, July 23, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
  • Accelerate your Workflow with the Combined Power of Adobe®Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 and Adobe® Photoshop® CS4
    • Thursday, July 30, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
  • Expand Your Creative Possibilities with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
    • Thursday, August 13, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT
  • Spend More Time Shooting and Less Time Computing with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
    • Thursday, August 20, 2009 10:00 A.M. PDT

See the events page for more details.

Moon reunion

Happy 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing!

Monday Photography: Cities in Dust

Oh Boy, Oh Henry!

I couldn’t be happier to announce that (not-so-)little Henry Seamus Nack–marvel of creation, California King, Little Brother to the Stars, & general delight to behold–sprang into the world at 2:47pm yesterday afternoon.

Mom & baby are doing great after a crazy-fast labor (end-to-end 20 minutes in the hospital!*), and big brother Finn is suitably intrigued** with baby “Goonie” (short for “El Segundo”). The big-little man bested his whopping bro’s marks, coming in at 9lb 12oz (what’s that, about 4 hectacres in Metric***?) and 21″. He and mom are chilling at the hospital while dad squires Finny around and runs sandwich-fetching missions.

Here’s a little gallery of the goings-on, and of course we’ll be updating the soon-to-be-renamed Finnegan Wakes as we bring our buddy home and learn to niño-juggle. Wish us luck!

I expect to be taking a little break from work-blogging, though I have a bunch of links set to publish on an automated schedule.

* “No epidural for you!”
** “Pop! Egg!” he says, a la Very Hungry Caterpillar
*** Can you tell I’m American?

Unique photography workshop in September

Reader Erin English let me know about a cool photography workshop being held this fall in Crested Butte, Colorado, for individuals with cognitive disabilities. She writes,

Individuals with cognitive disabilities are invited to take part in this nature photography workshop held during prime “leaf-peeping” time in the Elk Mountains. The camp will cover all of the basic skills needed to take great photos: lighting, composition and subject. Photographers will find plenty of adventure along the way as they search for their perfect shot. A slide show presentation wraps things up on the final day, and will be sure to please. Families are encouraged to participate; all ages welcome.

Check out the Adaptive Sports Center site for more info.

On a tangentially related note, I see that the InDesign team has just posted a document on how to create accessible PDFs using ID–documents that are screen-reader-friendly, for example.

The beautiful world

Thursday Photography: CBGB to crazy cheesy

Sunday Photography: Playing with Time

Wednesday Photography: Memescenery & more

  • The world without us:
    • Danish decor of the 70s as seen through, um… cinema. (It’s all well cropped, safe for work.)
    • Memescenery: Andy Baio says, “I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video.”
    • Richard Perry’s Made in NYC project deliberately omits people, finding “little bits of elegance and beauty in the objects themselves.” [Via]
  • Bespoke objects:
    • One can now order custom sonogram cufflinks. You know, I’d kind of like to buy things like this off the rack. Walking through a mall once, I was tempted to buy a t-shirt featuring a little girl (who clearly couldn’t be mine) with the caption “Daddy’s Favorite.” I knew people would fail to know I was kidding, though. [Via]
    • You can similarly order Photo Shower Curtains. Noting the price ($149-199), Bryan Hughes remarked, “Someone’s cleaning up…and it isn’t the person in the shower ;-).” [Via]

Sunday Photography: Thomas Hawk, LR tips, & more

Saturday Photography: Iced wings, giant faces, & more

Brief HDR bits

  • In talking to photographers recently, we’ve heard that clients are requesting “that HDR look”–i.e. the somewhat wonky, overprocessed look often seen in places like the Flickr HDR pool. With that look in mind, Russell Brown shows how to create “faux HDR” from one image using Camera Raw/Lightroom.
  • FDR (Full Dynamic Range) Tools have released an updated version of FDRCompressor, their tonemapping plugin for CS2, CS3 and CS4. The tool works on both HDR (32-bit) and individual JPEG and raw files. [Via Manfred Schömann]
  • Planet Photoshop posts a reminder about Bridge CS4’s ability to auto-stack components of an HDR image, then have Photoshop batch-merge the files.

Tilt-shifting in AIR; Slick, simple 3D

  • Developer Art & Mobile has created TiltShift Generator, a simple little Flash app that lets you selectively blur parts of an image, simulating very shallow depth of field. You can download the app for use outside your browser, too. [Via Rich Townsend]
  • Box Shot 3D is a very simple, very easy-to-use little app for mapping images onto common 3D objects (boxes, bottles, business cards, etc.), then rendering a nicely lit result; see screenshots. I downloaded a copy and got good results in a minute or two.

Photos from Above: Punking satellites & more

Weekend photography: Dimmed Earth, glowing frogs, & more

Photoshop gets stuffed, goes Presidential

  • MySuiteStuff.com offers a whole set of Creative Suite-style icons as pillows. “These 12″x12″ stuffed icons are 100% hand-made with love from the softest, fluffiest fleece there is,” they say. Presumably you’re only a Sharpie away from upgrading the CS3 look to CS4. [Via]
  • Tom Hogarty points out that the images posted on Flickr by White House photographer Pete Souza are tagged as having been edited with Photoshop CS4 for Mac. Earlier this year, Pete was using CS3, so we’re happy to see that he’s moved up to CS4. (Back in January we looked into sending him a complementary upgrade, but due to some touchiness about giving gifts to government employees, we had to punt on that idea.)

Hipster cam idea o' the day

Bryan O’Neil Hughes and I were looking at the very raw guts of a prototype camera today–a bunch of naked circuit boards, wires, etc. Someone mentioned the mass of the whole contraption, and Bryan said, “Looks like it’s the size of a VHS tape.”

This got me thinking: How about making a hipster camera that’s actually housed inside the shell of a VHS cassette? Turning the big wheels could flip through photos or adjust camera settings. C’mon, you know some goateed weasel would just love taking off-axis shots using a ginormous plastic case. For bonus points, kit it out with a greasy little lens & call the results “artsy.”

[See also: Retro brick cell phone]

[Update: Close enough! [Via Hughes]]

Wednesday Photography: Skinless cams, LED interrotrons, & more

Saturday Photography: Beautiful bugs, great actors, and more

Thursday Photography: DIY cyborg eyeballs & more

HDR panoramas demoed Thursday at SF PUG

“In just over 2 months,” reports Photoshop PM Zorana Gee, the San Francisco Photoshop User Group has “already gotten 380 members!” Tomorrow they’ll host a talk by photographer Lisa Yimm:

A photographer and VFX artist with a BFA in Photography, Lisa is the co-founder of HDR-VFX, based in Nyack, NY. Last year, she spent over 7 months on the road shooting HDR panorama-based virtual tours of Lexus Dealships across the US.

Things get underway at the Adobe SF office around 7pm. Here are the full details.

Sweep the leg, Johnny

This week Sony introduced the $499 HX1 camera, notable as it offers a very cool “Sweep Panorama Mode.” This new mode lets you “click and drag” with the camera, pressing and holding the shutter button while pivoting up to 224 degrees horizontally and 154 degrees vertically. The camera itself stitches the images together on the fly, producing images with a max resolution of 7152×1080. Check out this demo video (low res but effective). A number of journalists I met on Tuesday at PMA were clearly impressed.

Coincidentally, I was just about to talk about using Photoshop to do something similar. Our little champ turned one on Monday, so we threw a birthday party on the weekend. My 24-70mm lens wasn’t nearly wide enough to let me capture the folks gathered around the table, so I fired off a quick series of frames, then tossed them from Lightroom to Photoshop for automatic stitching. (Here’s before & after.)

Photoshop’s Auto-Blend algorithm handled the moving people well overall, and in the one area that needed touching up, I was able to simply paint on the auto-generated layer masks to modify the blending. I was really pleased with the results.

So, it’s great to see cameras doing more automatically, but don’t forget that you’ve already got some interesting power at your disposal. (Bridge offers the same single-step hand-off to Photoshop for processing: choose Tools->Photoshop->Photomerge.)

Crashing surf, iPhone photo tools, & more

  • Clark Little is a man willing to suffer for his craft, taking a tremendous pounding from the surf in order to capture some spectacular images. [Via Winston Hendrickson]
  • iPhone photo tools:
    • QuadCamera, according to Macworld, “allows you to take four quick shots in succession with the iPhone camera, producing a single image divided into four quadrants.” [Via]
    • Our friend John Warner has released Focalware, a tool that calculates sun and moon position for a given location and date. “An example of Focalware’s practical use: a photographer is assigned to shoot in New York City on March 15, 2009 and the subject building faces 195 degrees but the photographer prefers raking light at an angle of 130 degrees. Focalware instantly computes a time of 10:28 a.m. with a sun elevation of 35 degrees as the time for the desired conditions.”
  • Is Congress really thinking of mandating that cellphone cameras emit a sound? Yes, really, it appears.
  • Ab Alto:

Sunday Photography: Simplicity, squalor, and scares

New HDR camera, Lightroom tips

  • Ricoh’s new, compact CX1 camera offers “a dynamic range double shot mode.” This mode “takes two images in succession with different exposures and then combines them automatically to present the best of both images.” DPReview offers additional details. Very cool. It’s rare that I need much more than the 8MP offered by my slightly aged SLR, but I’d always like less noise and greater dynamic range. I’d love a future cam that could shoot high resolution when desired, but if necessary shoot with lower res/broader dynamic range. [Via Jerry Harris]
  • HDRsoft, makers of the popular Photomatix Pro, offer a Lightroom export plug-in. They’ve just posted a step-by-step tutorial showing how to send multiple images from LR to Photomatix for processing, then automatically pull the results back into your LR library. (Note the little “Next” arrow up top for navigating to subsequent pages.) [Via Tom Hogarty]
  • If you’re looking for a detailed primer on the whole topic of dynamic range, check out The Online Photographer’s thorough write-up.

Bryan Hughes shares ideas, tips

My fellow Photoshop PM/Best Man/unindicted co-conspirator* Bryan O’Neil Hughes has posted a guest entry on Scott Kelby’s blog.  In it Bryan talks about some of his favorite photographic enhancements in Photoshop CS4, and he shows off some new ideas for using the new Auto-Blend Layers options to combine flash/no-flash images.

 

*And, any minute now, father.  Something is in the water, with Photoshop PM babies a go-go (four due in the next five months, Miles H. being first in the queue).  You know we’re doing it just for the cute test files...

Gut-busting photos & more

  • Puking up mud isn’t half as scary as some of the attire seen in the Tough Guy Challenge.
  • Interesting structures:
  • From the NY Times:
  • Funky angles:
    • Flipbac promises to let you “shoot from the hip,” adding a little extension to your camera’s LCD. [Via]
    • The Super-Secret Spy Lens is “basically a periscope that attaches your SLR’s zoom lens… you can shoot left, right, up, or down, all while appearing to shoot straight ahead.” [Via]

Photos from 100 meters to 1mm

  • Oh man: Jason Lee makes me feel bad as a photographer, a Photoshopper, and a dad. He’s posted some terrific images of his girls, many turned into photo illustrations. [Via Tobias Hoellrich]
  • Dimensions:
    • The 100-meter photo: To create We’re All Gonna Die, Simon Hoegsberg set up shop in a single spot on Berlin’s Warschauer Strasse, capturing 178 people in all. [Via Tony Patricelli]
    • In 1mm a day, Chris Hornbecker set himself a challenge: “Take a brand new photo each day. Beginning with 14mm, each day I zoom the lens by 1 millimeter and force myself to use that focal length to shoot and post a photo before going to sleep that night.” [Via]
  • Shimon Attie projects images from the past (e.g. from Berlin’s pre-WWII Jewish quarter) onto the current versions of those scenes, then photographs the results.
  • Hot avian action:

*Alliteration credits go to the wonderful Calef Brown.

Sunday Photography: A free utility, giant photo, & more

Mo'naugural

At pain of reaching complete burnout on this subject…

 

Hail to the Chief, from space

 

“For those about to Barack… We salute you!”

 

  • The GeoEye-1 satellite took a high-res photo of the inaugural proceedings from 423 miles overhead, whipping by at 17,000 mph. Here’s a version of the whole thing (but not full-res).
  • The NYT hosts a zoomable photo (via Flash) showing the new president addressing the crowd.  (You know you can create things just like this straight out of Photoshop, right? File->Export->Zoomify.) [Via Ken Lawson]
  • CNN features a 360-degree panorama showing the stand before the ceremony. [Via Adam Pratt]

Interesting Inaugural bits from the NYT

  • The New York Times features an interactive photography portfolio called Obama’s People, offering portraits of key staffers. The audio commentary (via the link below the photos) is worth a listen, describing the subjects’ choices in what to bring to the shoot (e.g. a chocolate chip cookie for David Axelrod).  The separate making-of piece features Kathy Ryan talking about how shooting digitally has enhanced the collaborative aspects–and maybe the time pressures–of portraiture.  [Update: Ellis Vener points out a hilarious “Real Behind-the-Scenes” take on the shoot, followed by some good discussion in the comments.  “Blue Steel…”]

 

  • The paper (that term seems more than a little outmoded, doesn’t it?) also features an excellent overview of the Inauguration Day goings-on via a 3D-rendered map and timeline.

 

 

I’d love to be in DC in person, but that map triggers a memory of having gotten stuck on the Metro under the Potomac on a sweltering July 4 years ago.  With Tuesday temperatures due to hover around freezing, maybe I’m okay with TV after all.

Obama via Photoshop

Photographer Pete Souza has captured what’s billed as the first digital presidential portrait.  Folks have nerded out and parsed the EXIF metadata, learning that the image came from a Canon 5D Mark II and was edited in Adobe Photoshop CS3.  NPR features a piece on Souza’s history photographing presidents. [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Adam Pratt, and Klaasjan Tukker]

 

Quick-thinking Photoshop team member Adam Jerugim has shot Pete a note and is working on setting him up with a copy of CS4 (hey, we can’t have the White House lagging in technology).  We just have to make sure we’re not breaking any rules that would get him in trouble as a government employee.  (It’s not Jan. 20 yet!)

Browser in a camera: I think it's serious

Years ago, my bizarre friend Higgins told me and another buddy that his girlfriend had mysteriously dumped him.  He was visibly shaken and seemed truly down in the dumps.  He said, “I… I just don’t get it.  The whole thing inspired me to write a song.  Do you guys want to hear it?”  Well sure, of course we did.  “Okay, here goes,” he said.  Closing his eyes, clearing his throat, he leaned back and paused.  And then, bursting into a Pete Townshend air-guitar windmill, and doing his best Axl Rose devil-woman wail, he screeched,

 

“EhWHAAAAAaaaaaaAAAattt??”

 

That was is, end of song. 🙂

 

Ever since then we’ve “busted out the ‘Whatstrument*'” for bizarre news.  The arrival of the Sony Cybershot G3, World’s First Camera You Can Surf the Web On, seems worthy.

 

Okay, maybe it’s not that weird.  As Gizmodo puts it, “Sony’s seeing this more as a flexible, fast way to dump and check your photos and videos online, direct from your camera, not so much as a way to compulsively watch YouTube videos or read Gizmodo, even though that’s exactly what we want, and will try to do, practicalities aside.”

 

I dig the instant sharing possibilities, though I’d explicitly keep them out of my wife’s hands: she’s all for uploading before I’ve had time to crop, retouch, and otherwise noodle around.  [Via Jerry Harris]

 

*Other suggested air-instrumental possibilities for the song:  Trombone, sax, harmonica, sextant, astrolabe, and finger snap (Beatnik edition).

Photographic Miscellaney

  • Photographer Filip Dujardin challenges the viewer with some bizarre buildings, “combin[ing] photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures.” [Via]
  • Photojojo offers up the very cool bottle cap tripod for $10. (On a somewhat related note, David Pogue points out “It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp–the place where the lampshade screws on–are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You’ve got a rock-steady indoor tripod.”) They also offer a rather nifty doodle frame.

Friday Photos: Infernos, skeletons, and incontinent cameras

Friday Photos: Sketchy Swedes, bodybuilders, and more

  • Things one presumably doesn’t see every day:
    • Martin Schoeller has captured a series of portraits of women bodybuilders. (From Kottke: “If you cover up the faces with your hands, they look like men in bikini tops and if you cover up the bodies, meth addicts.”) [Via]
    • Fancy a round-up of Swedish 1970s dance band photos? [Via Jeff Tranberry, who says, “The real challenge is how to fit it into a relevant post! It’d be a good one for rickrolling some readers.”]
  • Moments in time:
    • Barbara Probst’s Split Second project captures the same moment from multiple perspectives.
    • Game face: Robbie Cooper’s Immersion project aims to photograph facial expressions of people as they play video games, surf the web, and watch TV. The corresponding video isn’t super flattering. [Via]

Details on Camera Raw 5.2 enhancements

Photographer & author Shangara Singh points out some helpful links to Adobe documentation on the new features in Camera Raw 5.2:

 

 

Side note: I love that it’s now possible to add one’s own notes to help entries. The Targeted Adjustment Tool entry refers repeatedly to the “TAT Tool,” which is as annoying as saying “SAT test” or “PIN number.” I’ve added a comment correcting the terminology. Pedants rejoice. 😉

Saturday Photos

  • Mugs:
    • Martin Schoeller’s Close Up is “A magnetic succession of stripped-down faces, straightforward portraits of the very famous and absolutely unknown.”
    • Helen Marshall’s Big Picture (talk about truth in advertising) is comprised of 112, 896 photos of people’s faces. [Via]
  • Isolation:
    • Kim Høltermand creates spare, bleak, often dreamlike compositions from sometimes banal subject matter. [Via]
    • In a somewhat similar vein, Andy Taylor Smith captures the sculptural quality of overpasses and other large structures. (The Veer gallery seems to be acting up, but you can also see images on Andy’s own site.) [Via]
  • Vanity Fair has posted a collection of the 25 Best News Photos. (Fair warning: Some are tough to see.) [Via]

Tilt-shift flava

"I seemingly will never tire of this gimmick," writes Jason Kottke.  No, but it’s worth a try. 🙂

 

Science Friday: From Mexican caves to the Sun

Monday Photography: Super cellphone cams & more

Photo safari in SF on Saturday

Photojojo is a great photo blog, full of interesting bits (e.g. today’s bit on taking ghostly pictures with your scanner).  As it happens, they’re hosting a photo safari this Saturday in San Francisco:

 

(1) You bring a camera (it doesn’t matter what kind) and some friends (2) There’s a cool place or event or a tour for you to take pictures (3) We go to a bar and you can put your photos in a slideshow to win prizes from us or sponsors. (4) You are happy and fulfilled.  Cost: Free.

 

Adobe is sponsoring the event, and the photo whose work the group votes best will win some groovy software.  Sounds like a fun way to spend a Saturday.

CS4: What's in it for Photographers?

I thought photographers might like to have a single, consolidated list of all the enhancements in Photoshop CS4 & Bridge CS4 that can help improve their productivity.  Photographer/author/fellow Photoshop PM Bryan O’Neil Hughes kindly stepped up with a guest blog entry, below.  It’s a long list, so I’ve put it into this post’s extended entry.  Read on for the good 411…  –J.
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