- HD video of the Kuroshio Sea aquarium, shot with Canon 5D MkII 5DMKII (via @mikegee)
- Awesome (if you’re an old Beastie Boys fan): a photographic history of the Paul’s Boutique corner. (via @khoi)
- Yucks:
- What would happen If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma, via Photoshop? (My wife is an OK escapee.)
- The Onion: “17-Year-Old Thinks She’s Getting Into Photography“.
- Regarding Nikon ads: “I don’t get this whole ‘I’m Ashton Kutcher and you should care what my goofy ass is doing’ thing.” — my wife.
- Use Google Images without violating copyright. CreativePro.com features tips on using it to find royalty-free imagery.
- Ugh: NY Times was burned by digital photo manipulation. See also their comments.
- Chipmunks vs. Star Wars? (You were a good smuggler once; now you’re just ‘munk fodder…)
- Tips (including a video) on creating complex multi-photo layouts using only Lightroom.
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!
- The Daily Mail features what’s billed as a never-before-seen photo showing Neil Armstrong’s face as he first walks across the moon.
- Over on Kottke.org, you can watch Apollo 11 live coverage, “40 years to the second after it originally happened.”
- Check out Kottke’s giant Apollo 11 post for more perspective and links, including ones to Google’s LIFE Magazine Apollo archive & NYT readers’ moon memories.
Monday Photography: Cities in Dust
- Slate features a slideshow discussing Detroit’s Beautiful Ruins. “It’s like Berlin or Warsaw in 1945. Just as in post-World War II photos of those ruined cities, the most shocking thing is to see people carrying on their everyday lives in the midst of so much physical destruction.” [Via]
- More such photos appear in Time’s piece on Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.
- See also this panoramic photo of a ghost street in Detroit [Via]
- Finally getting away from Motor City, WebUrbanist features a collection of abandoned hotels, hospitals, and churches. [Via]
For those about to walk…
…WE SALUTE YOU!
To all the 30,000+ (!) photographers signed up to go photowalking today, good luck, have fun, and happy shooting. I look forward to seeing all sorts of great imagery & hearing fun stories.
[Er, rats–I set this one to auto-publish a day early, and the walk is tomorrow. But have fun just the same!]
(rt) Photography: Masses of humanity, Star Wars, and more
- Portrait of an eye made from human figures [Via Mark Coleran]
- NY Times gallery: Michael Wolf photos of impersonal Chicago skyscrapers & inhabitants. [Via Stephen Shankland]
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sucks at Photoshop. [Via @rufusd]
- Fashion mags try going makeup- and Photoshop-free. [Via Tom Hogarty]
- Star Wars-flavored:
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
- Gary Greenberg reveals some amazing structures with his microscopic photos of grains of sand [Via]
- Bubbles:
- Bogdan Chesaru captures amazing “natural iridescent colors you see when light catches a clear soap bubble,” creating images that make Yes album covers look tame in comparison. [Via]
- A friend tells me to check out a great gallery of bursting soap bubbles, but I’m having trouble getting it to load. I’m posting the link in hopes the problem gets fixed. [Via]
- Canon’s site features the amazing wildlife photography of Stephen Dalton. [Via]
- Webphemera rounds up marvelous pix of insect eggs, while Environmental Graffiti shows off the beauty of morning dew.
Thursday Photography: CBGB to crazy cheesy
- Fish hover in space in Michael Itkoff’s Perch on Ice.
- The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year set features some lovely images, all freely shared. [Via]
- NYC:
- Martin Sobey’s colorful on-street photographic installations punch up the street in front of my old office.
- A bit further down that street lie the ghosts of CBGB, living on through a panoramic virtual tour.
- If your camera doesn’t make city cops nervous enough, try a riflestock camera mount.
- Extreme cheese-rolling: Guaranteed to end in tears. (And cheese.)
Sunday Photography: Playing with Time
- I dig Andrew Curtis’s Cinco De Mayo Carnival timelapses (not to mention the infectious soundtrack). He’s uploaded this clip and many others as iTunes video podcasts. (Check out Dizzy Driving.) [Via]
- SignalTheorist created a long-exposure capture of a Roomba doing its thing. [Via]
- David Coiffier captured rugby, fire-breathing and more in extreme slow-mo.
- Gorgeousness ensuses in The Colors Of Light Art Performance Photography.
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
- The Lightroom team welcomed photographer/blogger Thomas Hawk to Adobe SJ earlier this month. Thomas has detailed his visit & has posted some great images. (Lightroom/Camera Raw engineer Zalman Stern jokes, “Cool article, but if things really looked that saturated, I’d bring a Geiger counter to work to make sure they weren’t radioactive.”)
- Lightroom tips:
- It’s too easy to view a single great photo in isolation, rather than as part of a process. Art Wolfe walks through his process & outtakes, narrating the starts & stops on the way to getting a great result. [Via]
- Joel Saget captured a terrific composition of a French aerobatic team. The image is part of a solid set from the Wall St. Journal.
- Photojojo rounds up an excellent set of The Best Free Photos on the Web.
Keepin' it real… hostile
- Flickr user 9000 just doesn’t like marketers. At all.
- What possible search terms would produce this stock photo? [Via Mark Coleran]
Tuesday Photography: Fantasies, histories, & more
- Mark Holthusen makes some fantastic (in every sense) photo-illustrations. [Via Scott Evans]
- I’m digging Christopher Lamarca‘s diptychs & custom palettes. [Via]
- Shinichi Maruyama captures the structure & texture of fluids bursting.
- Photos That Changed The World delivers a compendium of just what it says. [Via]
Saturday Photography: Iced wings, giant faces, & more
- I tried to blog Stephen Mallon’s fascinating images of the salvage of Flight 1549 (the one that landed in New York’s Hudson River), but they got yanked offline during the accident investigation. Now they’re back. [Via]
- Street artist Mentalgassi puts giant faces onto public objects in Berlin. Fellow artist JR does something similar in Rio.
- Spirit of ’76: Sveinn Birkir has been collecting images from 1976, his birth year. [Via]
- Larry Lars has recreated his photography room in Lego. [Via]
- To keep it safe, maybe you should make your camera ugly. (I saw this approach a lot with bikes in NY. Can’t say it ever saved mine there, though.) [Via]
- Cool idea for a photography business card: let the card work as a pinhole camera.
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
- Dig Alex MacLean’s Dinghies Clustered Around Dock.
- Real-Life Dead Pixel in Google Earth: Helmut Smits “somehow came upon the decision to burn an almost 3-foot by 3-foot square of ash into the grass somewhere out there in the world in the name of art in public places. When it’s viewed from 1 kilometer above the ground (3,280 feet), it looks just like a dead pixel on your monitor at home.” [Via]
- Hubert Blanz’s splintered airport collages make me think of Charles Demuth’s Figure 5 in Gold.
- Rod Wynne-Powell recently posted a large gallery showing London from above.
Weekend photography: Dimmed Earth, glowing frogs, & more
- The Big Picture features a terrific overview of Earth Hour 2009, offering the ability to click photos to fade between lit & unlit versions of the same subject.
- James Snyder spotted a Cuban tree frog that ate a Christmas tree light.
- Lesa Snyder King offers tips on creating a Smart Object-based photo template–i.e. a PSD with effects applied, into which you can insert other photos.
- Level & Tap “seeks to showcase photographers and their work in a way that will sell prints.” John Gruber points out Sara Flemming’s work. I’m partial to Trey Hill’s abstraction.
- Jason Hawkes captures human landscapes from above. [Via]
- “The best camera is the one that’s with you,” says Chase Jarvis. He’s got an entire portfolio of work captured using only his iPhone’s camera & processed on the device. [Via]
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
- Stephen Shankland captured some cool images of the Sony A900 without its skin. [Via]
- You will talk, slave! Check out this LED-based photo accessory/interrogation device. [Via]
- The ever-clever Photojojo features the novel Wrap-Around-the-Corner Frame.
- Think the iPod Shuffle is wee? It’s got nothing on these cams.
- Being kind of a gas bag, I appreciate these vintage Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.
Saturday Photography: Beautiful bugs, great actors, and more
- File under Tiny, Lovely: Smashing Magazine hosts 25 Beautiful Examples Of Macro Photography.
- National Geographic, unsurprisingly, has been offering up all kinds of great photography lately:
- The gallery of vanishing sea ice is a beautiful bummer. (Will I ever take a shot as cool as that first seal image from Paul Nicklen? Thermally, maybe.)
- The magazine’s photography contest winners show off solid work. For more good stuff see the 2008 International Photography Contest winners.
- Paolo Pellegrin got intimate access to photograph great performers (Penélope Cruz, Robert Downey Jr., and others) from the past year.
- I Found Your Camera hopes to reunite lost cameras & memory cards with their owners. [Via]
Thursday Photography: DIY cyborg eyeballs & more
- So, you say you’re into photography. Yeah, but did you ever shoot out your eye and then jam a tiny camera into the socket? Yeah, I didn’t *think* so.
- Looking down:
- Andreas Gefeller looks at the world from above. [Via]
- Ready for Google Earth fly-ofers, street artist JR brings huge faces to slums around the world. Here’s more background on the work.
- Branislav Kropilak finds austere, graphical beauty in parking garages.
- Finding new in the old:
- Relleno De Mono remixes old photos in a most custom way.
- Turn a Scrabble Board into a Picture Frame.
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:
- Earth, observed features photos of the Earth from NASA’s The Earth Observatory. [Via]
- Google Earth has apparently exposed a U.S. drone base in Pakistan.
Sunday Photography: Simplicity, squalor, and scares
- I love the beautiful simplicity–in concept and in execution–of this timelapse video of a cross country flight at night. It makes me think of our own Julieanne Kost’s Window Seat project.
- Slices of life:
- Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places We Live documents life in slums around the world. [Via]
- English Russia features intensely intricate carved windows in Siberia.
- Lingering Obamarama:
- Photographer Lisa Jack has shared her college photos of a 20-year-old Barack Obama. [Via]
- NY Times street fashion photog Bill Cunningham attended the inauguration & narrates his captures. The photography itself doesn’t stir me, yet I found the piece an engaging little compilation. [Via]
- Upsetting stylings:
- Wayne Martin Belger makes the scariest cameras ever. [Via]
- Don’t ever use your photos to make a ski mask, or pretty soon you’re going to be telling someone to “rub the lotion on its skin.”
- The Coraline Web site lets you make button-eyed portraits by uploading & manipulating photos. [Via]
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:
- Dig Kim Høltermand’s ghostly images of the Hyllie Water Tower. [Via]
- Patrick Boland’s Cockatoo Island Project, images of a shipyard in Sydney Harbour [Via]
- From the NY Times:
- One in 8 Million chronicles New York characters in photos and sound.
- The paper features a small slideshow of Mary Ellen Mark’s work photographing on the sets of more than 100 movies. See the accompanying article for more.
- I’m late in mentioning it, but their 2008: The Year in Photos is well worth a look.
- 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:
- Jim Frink captured an image of a gynandromorph cardinal (half male and half female). [Via]
- Rick Lieder’s “Aerial Acrobats” are a flapping flock of flying fury*. [Via]
*Alliteration credits go to the wonderful Calef Brown.
Sunday Photography: A free utility, giant photo, & more
- Inaugural bits:
- David Bergman shows how created a 1,474-megapixel photo during the inauguration.
- The Washington Post stitched together thousands of inaugural photos into one zoomable mosaic. [Via]
- Chuck Kennedy used a remote-controlled 5D Mk II to capture a unique low-angle shot of the swearing-in. [Via John Cornicello]
- I just used Jeffrey Friedl’s groovy (and free) little “Export to Facebook” Lightroom Plugin, and it worked without a hitch. Thanks, Jeffrey. [Via Eric Scouten]
- PhotoCliches.com is full of, well, just that. (Who knew the Lynndie England pose was so popular?)
- Viva Cheap:
- Photojojo shows how to Make Your Own 3D Camera for $15 or Less. (Somewhere Russell Brown is buying superglue.)
- Who says the iPhone’s camera sucks? Let’s see your D3X do this, tough guy! [Via]
- Photographers Roth & Ramberg show how they recreated Antarctica in April with the help of a leaf blower, among other things. [Via]
- People In Commercial Having More Fun With Camera Than Humanly Possible, says the Onion. (“They just high-fived, for Christ’s sake.”)
Mo'naugural
At pain of reaching complete burnout on this subject…
- As usual, The Big Picture hosts some excellent galleries:
- Inaugural Preparations features some great, little-seen details. I love these fragmented Obama eyes, plus this image of the Lego capitol. [Update: Reuters features more images of the Lego scene.]
- The inauguration gallery includes images of people watching the show from Sadr City to Mexico City.
- The Newseum hosts hundreds of front pages documenting the events. [Via Marc Pawliger]
- Pranksters in SF have changed Bush St. to Obama St. (I remember hearing after the 2000 election that people had changed “Bush” to “Puppet.”)
- Updates:
- CNN hosts a zoomable version of the satellite image I mentioned yesterday.
- The NYT has added overlay text identifying most of the people in the zoomable photo of the swearing-in. That strikes me as a much more useful application of the technology.
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.
- Looking back, another piece depicts the changing configuration of the White House.
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).
The Big Picture's Best of '08
Alan Taylor’s Big Picture has been an outstanding addition to the online world. The site now features The Year 2008 In Photographs. More gripping imagery is on display in parts two and three. (‘Tis the season of an endless succession of year-end collections, but I’m trying not to link to everything all at once. I’d rather see fewer images and take the time to consider each a little more deeply.)
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.
- School pictures, with attitude promise an alternative to “puppy mill” portraiture. [Via Keith Johnson]
- An uncredited photographer captured some amazing shots of a diving kingfisher. (Most thrilling chilled!)
Friday Photos: Infernos, skeletons, and incontinent cameras
- En fuego:
- “Holy Crap!!” Photographer Sandy Huffaker talks about what happened when a fighter jet crashed near his house this week. [Via]
- Peep Casper Hedberg’s fiery image from Kenya.
- Ends of the line:
- Amazing anthropology: Mike Hettwer helps document what remains of the Green Sahara.
- Listverse.com rounds up 10 Fascinating Last Pictures Taken.
- Photography crap, almost literally: I always think of the Japanese as such a polite bunch that this camera ad was more than a little surprising.
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]
- Fans of mid-century design/photography goodness should peep a visual remembrance of Lou Dorfsman.
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. 🙂
- Video:
- Keith Loutit used tilt-shift lenses to make beachgoers look like ants–trippy and cool.
- Christopher Prouse points out–and demonstrates–that it’s possible to fake the effect using Lens Blur in Photoshop Extended on video. (Here’s how to do it on stills.)
- It would be fun to try doing the same with Alien Skin’s forthcoming Bokeh plug-in, which promises more realistic physical blur simulations (see video). [Via Marc Pawliger]
- Check out Fenway Park as a scale model. [Via]
- No tilt-shift necessary: some of the structures in these images from Yemen already look miniature.
- If you still haven’t gotten your fill, check out Smashing Magazine’s roundup of 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography. [Via]
Science Friday: From Mexican caves to the Sun
- NatGeo features a photo gallery from inside Mexico’s breathtaking Cave of Crystals. In an accompanying video, writer Neil Shea and photographer Carsten Peter discuss the extreme heat & other challenges involved in working in the cave.
- Disturbances in the Force: The NYT features an interesting article and captivating photo gallery of “The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film”–using photography to capture gas dynamics.
- Micro:
- The paper also features a narrated gallery of the Nikon Small World competition winners. If I could paint something as beautiful as these marine diatoms, I’d be a happy guy.
- Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow has figured out how to create abstract backgrounds with a cheap children’s microscope.
- Heavenly:
- The Big Picture features revealing shots of the Sun. [Via Ivan Cavero Belaunde]
- Air & Space Magazine features a set of the 50 Greatest NASA Photos.
- Okay, I’m straying now, but if those are up your alley, I’ll bet the Rocket-Bye-Baby will be, too.
- What’s not to dig about a protein sculpture inspired by Vitruvian Man?
- Aquatic:
- The “Piglet squid” makes me suspect that scientists may be punking us, just to see whether we’re paying attention.
- 7 minutes in the Galapagos offers some gorgeous moving images, including the rather amazing whale shark at the end.
Monday Photography: Super cellphone cams & more
- We keep hearing that cellphone cameras are going to shake up the world, and Sony Ericsson aims to do just that with an 8.1-megapixel sensor in their latest phone (er, cam?). To drive home they point, they’re shooting the ad campaign with the phone.
- Look, ma: no hands (or legs). Or, I’m sorry to say, life, thanks to that stunt. More on Indian Larry is on his site. [Via Bill & Bryan Hughes]
- Marc Pawliger passed along a collection of Pictures Taken At Just The Right Angle.
- Check out Idee’s beautiful Multicolr search tool, able to return Flickr results based on the hues you select. [Via]
- David Hockney’s site features a small gallery of his photo collages.
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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