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]

…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!]

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?

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.

• 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.

• 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.)

• 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.

• 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]

• 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]

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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]

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]]

• 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.

• 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]

• 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.

“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.

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.)

• 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.

• 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]

• 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.

• 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]

• 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.

• 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.”)

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.

“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]

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!)