I can’t just talk CS4, now can I? Taking a little break from current software events, here’s a collection of cool recent photographic finds:

• Our friend Mike Hill features a great image from Brazil on his site’s landing page.
• I’m digging the ghostly, muted tones of Michael Kenna’s work.  Much more is on his site.
• The lovely Moontime gallery of David Stubbs whets my appetite to learn about low-light imaging. [Via]
• Last flight of the bumblebee: Jozsef L. Szentpeteri has captured some amazing images of bee-eating birds. [Via]
• Ever wanted to build a Canon out of balsa wood?  Me neither, but it’s still kinda cool to see. [Via]
• Nothing if not dedicated, Dan Hanna’s posted 17 years of daily self-portraits as a video.  (The spinning motion is a little sick-making.) [Via]
• Big photo printing + raingear = the most aggro umbrella ever (well, short of those umbrella-sword/gun combos, anyway).

• From the WTF Dept: Li Wei makes some eyepopping images. [Via]
• Roasting here in Vegas makes chillaxin’ with Nele Azevedo’s ice people sculptures look pretty cool.
• I’m not sure whether to file this under photography or illustration, but Josh Poehlein combines the two by scratching into the surface of his prints.  Inspired by this, Photojojo shows how to "vandalize your photos in the name of art."
• The poles of photo tech:
  • Extreme X-Rays Photography: Nick Veasey is "currently building a $200,000 studio with 35-inch-thick, lead-lined concrete walls which will let him see through almost anything." [Via]
  • Miroslav Tichy makes painterly images with his cardboard cameras.
• Images of daily life in Afghanistan make me feel very privileged–and very soft.

• As you’d expect, The Big Picture offers up a sampling of terrific Olympics photos.
• TotallyCrap offers their own collection, juxtaposing some excellent bits with bizarre loss of dignity.  Feeling overwhelmed, I haven’t even gotten to check out parts 2 and 3. [Via]
• Vincent Laforet talks about shooting world records from above.

I’m always intrigued by what people can produce by mining & transforming a big image set:

• Symmetry Explorer gathers Flickr search results, then displays them as mirrored pairs.  The results are surprisingly cool.
• Long-time Flickr hacker Krazydad lets you make your own kaleidoscopes from images. [Via]
• Wolfenflickr is Castle Wolfenstein in Flash, with your photos projected onto the walls. [Via]

On non-Flickr but somewhat similar fronts:

• Yearbook Yourself places your face in high school photos from decades past.  I’ve gotten poor results so far, though Jason Kottke fared better.
• Put a Porsche in your driveway [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]

• PopPhoto’s Debbie Grossman paid a visit to the Adobe Mothership a couple of weeks ago, getting a grand tour from Bryan Hughes & chatting with modest brainiacs like Jeff Chien.  Showing tons of daring, she underwent Kelly Castro’s black & white process–the first woman to do so.  (“That’s because it makes men look tough and women look like hell," she writes.)  [Related/previous: Jeff Schewe’s Visit to Adobe.]
• At Siggraph last week, Zorana Gee encountered the guys from OnLatte ("You got it right: we make industrial robot machines that do nothing but pretty up tasty beverages") and had them put the Photoshop icon on foam (image two).
• Photoshop: Helping The Ugly Since 1988. [Spied by Tom Hogarty on the Caltrain yesterday]
• Slate presents Politishop.  (Is it finally time for us to introduce Brushy the Talking Airbrush ("Hey, pardner, it looks like you’re tryin’ to retouch a photo")?  [Via Adam Jerugim]
• This isn’t Photoshop-specific, but I noticed that Adobe.com has added a slick new search widget to the site.  Groovy, as previously I’d resorted to using Google (typing "site:http://www.adobe.com" plus a search term into the search field).

Normally I don’t go for single-serving link posts, but this sequence of Michael Phelps’ amazing photo finish is too good not to share. [Via]

And, what the heck, here’s some spectacular imagery from the Olympics opening ceremony. (It’s as if Julie Taymor got ahold of the Clone Stamp…) Also, what’s with creepy Olympic M&M’s?

• The Big Picture features some terrific images of this month’s total solar eclipse.
• Edward Burtynsky, known for chronicling humans’ impact on the planet, is experimenting with carbon transfer printing in hopes of making photographic prints that last 10,000 years.
• GM Progress on Parade comes from a time when Detroit design set the pace for the world.
• Alexander Hassenstein captured a cool long-exposure image of women’s fencing, part of a larger set.
• More from the big bits/pixels front: peep Peter Carr’s 42-foot-wide HDR panorama,
• PhotoCalc is "a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure." [Via Fergus Hammond]
• Martin Evening provides a helpful write-up on how auto-masking works in Lightroom’s local correction brushes.

• The Big Picture features some terrific images of this month’s total solar eclipse.
• Edward Burtynsky, known for chronicling humans’ impact on the planet, is experimenting with carbon transfer printing in hopes of making photographic prints that last 10,000 years.
• GM Progress on Parade comes from a time when Detroit design set the pace for the world.
• Alexander Hassenstein captured a cool long-exposure image of women’s fencing, part of a larger set.
• More from the big bits/pixels front: peep Peter Carr’s 42-foot-wide HDR panorama,
• PhotoCalc is "a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure." [Via Fergus Hammond]
• Martin Evening provides a helpful write-up on how auto-masking works in Lightroom’s local correction brushes.

• National Geographic has posted a beautiful gallery of translucent sea creatures, thoughtfully offering desktop wallpaper-sized images. [Via]
• Tipping the scale at more than 8 gigabytes, Brian Lawler’s ginormous HDR photo mural came together in Photoshop, yielding a 19-foot-long printout and a 9-foot-high neon sign.
• Public policy:
  • The NYT headline encapsulates a controversy about Iraq war coverage: 4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images.
  • The creepy Cameraheads project in Seattle protests the ubiquitous surveillance of public spaces.
• Photojojo has some neat ideas on DIY aerial photography–largely involving one of those telescoping sticks used for paint rolling.
• Now this is some memorable use of motion blur.

• National Geographic has posted a beautiful gallery of translucent sea creatures, thoughtfully offering desktop wallpaper-sized images. [Via]
• Tipping the scale at more than 8 gigabytes, Brian Lawler’s ginormous HDR photo mural came together in Photoshop, yielding a 19-foot-long printout and a 9-foot-high neon sign.
• Public policy:
  • The NYT headline encapsulates a controversy about Iraq war coverage: 4,000 U.S. Deaths, and Just a Handful of Public Images.
  • The creepy Cameraheads project in Seattle protests the ubiquitous surveillance of public spaces.
• Photojojo has some neat ideas on DIY aerial photography–largely involving one of those telescoping sticks used for paint rolling.
• Now this is some memorable use of motion blur.

• Alex Prager mixes mid-century looks with some weird modern twists in her work. On Kitsune Noir Bobby Solomon points out similarities with Philippe Halsman’s wild Dali Atomicus.
• Make mine a White Russian: I love this shot of a Belarusian commando shrouded in smoke.
• Hello, moon: Laurent Laveder uses forced perspective to capture some beautiful Moon Adventures. [Via]
• Take a good look at my crazy, genocidal face: the Faces of Evil collection invites viewers to stare down some of the most infamous figures of the 20th century.  "The pictures are 1,80m x 2,30m, high-resolution digital images that expose every tiny detail of their faces." [Via]
• Ten years after I remember sticking her into a comp, the "Everywhere Girl" (stock photo superstar) has a blog.
• Tangential: I think this is way better than any iPhone.

• Alex Prager mixes mid-century looks with some weird modern twists in her work. On Kitsune Noir Bobby Solomon points out similarities with Philippe Halsman’s wild Dali Atomicus.
• Make mine a White Russian: I love this shot of a Belarusian commando shrouded in smoke.
• Hello, moon: Laurent Laveder uses forced perspective to capture some beautiful Moon Adventures. [Via]
• Take a good look at my crazy, genocidal face: the Faces of Evil collection invites viewers to stare down some of the most infamous figures of the 20th century.  "The pictures are 1,80m x 2,30m, high-resolution digital images that expose every tiny detail of their faces." [Via]
• Ten years after I remember sticking her into a comp, the "Everywhere Girl" (stock photo superstar) has a blog.
• Tangential: I think this is way better than any iPhone.

GPS-related photo bits:

• Bridge geotagger is a free script that "allows you to inspect, set and/or edit GPS data embedded in photos using a Google Maps interface. It uses the embedded Opera HTML engine in Bridge to display Google Maps."  Very cool, though developer Aldo Hoeben describes it as more technology demo than a full-fledged tool.
• Firing up the Exposure Flickr-browsing app on my iPhone the other day, I discovered the nearest geotagged image is of "¡Chavelas!," described as "A delicious blend of Modelo, lime juice and a shot of tequila in a
  frozen pimp chalice!"  Thank you, intercontinental technology network, for making my neighborhood seem cool for a minute.
• Previously: Did you know that Lightroom can call up a Google map to show the coordinates in your images?  So, for that matter, can Photoshop Elements.
• What about images that lack coordinates?  Can a computer accurately guess where something was shot?  That’s the goal of Carnegie Mellon’s IM2GPS project.  Check out this CNET story for a good summary. [Via Doug Nelson]

Off to look for neighborhood pimp chalices on a Friday eve,

J.

Mid-week photography:

• Death & destruction:
  • Photojournalist Warren Zinn reflects on the photo that made Army medic Joseph Dwyer famous, and wonders whether it contributed to the troubled vet’s death last month.
  • Kottke features the disarmingly placid image Robert Wiles captured immediately after Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the observation deck of the Empire State Building in 1947.  (Warhol later made it into a print.)
  • The Big Picture features some spectacular wildfire imagery from recent California blazes.
• Find giclée paseé? Try printing on grass instead.  (Just don’t ask us to soft-proof it.)  [Via Doug Nelson]
• Beware sketchy, sketchy photogs.
• I never saw them while living in snowy Illinois, Boston, or NY, but CA roads are full of stick-on "Botts dots."  They’re now available as part of a complete breakfast.
• Make mine intermediated: Photo nation.

• Jumping the shark: predictable and sad.  Jumping several hundred pounds of very PO’d livestock: much more spectacular.  (Interestingly, the man-gores-bull shot hides behind a "this may be offensive" curtain, whereas the bull-gores-man shots don’t.)
• In Curse of the Black Gold, Ed Kashi captures the pain, degredation, and occasional beauty wrought by oil extraction in Nigeria. (The tiny bottom nav bar offers more info about each image.)
• I used to carry around a GI Joe head that I’d photograph in all kinds of situations (say, the middle of Death Valley). I named him Sgt. Goldbug, after the little Richard Scarry creation who’d hide somewhere on every page.  Witold Riedel is up to similar tricks with The Bear In Repose.
• Getty editors are getting set to start approaching Flickr users, offering to license their images.  PDN offers some perspective on what it all means. [Via Geoff Scott]
• The new Radiohead video was shot without using cameras–instead employing LIDAR (laser radar).  I see only stills so far, but I look forward to the finished product.
• Lightroom:
  • Fashion photographer Martin Evening takes readers inside the photo shoot for his forthcoming Lightroom 2 book.
  • Michael Clark offers a great tip for quick Rank n’ Advance in Lightroom (via the Caps Lock key).
• Josh Derr captured a shot of some great clouds over NYC. [Via]

I’m having fun slacking er, conducting important digital imaging research, starting to explore photography-oriented iPhone apps:

• The free PangeaVR offers amazingly smooth panorama display and navigation.
• Exposure (paid or ad-supported) promises to let you put "2 billion photos in your pocket," letting you browse Flickr from your handheld.  Groovy bonus point: it’ll show you images geotagged to locations near you.
• Clowdy promises easy & free photoblogging.

Unfortunately for the capture-and-upload scenario, the camera in the iPhone is pretty rudimentary.  Doesn’t it seem like someone should build a wireless hookup between the phone & dedicated cameras?  That way you could, for example, put an Eye-Fi memory card into your camera of choice, then upload shots via the phone in your pocket?  Maybe that’s a solution in search of a problem, though, or maybe it would just kill your battery.

If you come across any particularly good or noteworthy apps, feel free to post your experiences here.

Per yesterday’s news…

(Found here) [Via Jacqueline Floyd]

Gonna grab my missiles/Gonna hold them tight…

Iran’s state media is under fire for apparently digitally adding another missile to a photo of an artillery test.  I like the first comment on the NYT story:  “Clearly someone thought 4 missiles would be 33% more scary than three… or they thought it really tied the composition together, which, I have to say, it actually does.” [Via everyone ever]

Now, excuse me while we get back to work making it even easier for various Great Satans to fake you out.  (Actually, a number of Adobe folks have been collaborating with news agencies on ways to offer greater image authentication, and PBS hosts a 13-minute Nova segment focusing on Dr. Hany Farid & discussing his work with Adobe.)

Updates:

• Wonkette refers to "the Iranian Revolutionary WoW Photoshoppers Guild." Nice. [Via Russell Brady]
• I think the Iranian peeps were inspired by the Chinese news agency.
• Gizmodo challenges readers “to use Photoshop to create some sweet Iranian propaganda, showing their technological advancements that are heretofore unseen.” [Via Fergus Hammond]

PS–To everyone who now has that awful song in their heads, you’re welcome.

• Wired hosts an interesting Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras.
• Rapid decents:
  • The Big Picture offers a collection of diving photos (taken at a recent US Olympic qualifying event) unlike any I’ve seen before.
  • In Kabul in Transition, photojournalist Tyler Hicks shows diving platforms used for a far darker purpose.
• Mitchell Feinberg makes unique art using food.  Many more examples are on his site.
• 22-year-old photographer Kevin Connolly was born legless and chronicles the world from his unique perspective.  CNET has his story.
• In Land of the Free, Steve Schofield portrays sci-fi costumers, exploring how people establish a fictional existence to escape the everyday. [Via]
• Slices in time:
  • "Barbara Probst’s diptych and triptych photos," says the Morning News, "taken at the same time from different cameras and points of view, offer multiple versions of a split second."  It’s a cool project, well worth a look. [Via]
  • The Immodesty multicam system aims to "create an affordable platform which enable all kinds of temporal-spatial experimentation."  In some ways it’s a poor-man’s tool for getting the Matrix "bullet time" effect, as videos on their site show, but the output can be deployed in more interactive ways, too.
• Reuters hosts some striking images of a Chilean volcanic eruption.

This is your PM…

This is your PM after being busted following an all-night meth bender…

Lightroom team member Kelly Castro has been continuing his "Exteriors" project (see the whole collection), photographing people at Adobe & elsewhere.  On Monday he got me into the team’s on-site photo studio for a shoot*.  If you’re into this style, check out the info that Kelly & Bryan O’Neil Hughes put together on generating killer B&W using Photoshop + Lightroom.  (Kelly also created a color version of my portrait, in which I have the healthy glow of a Barbecue Pringle.)

In other photo news:

• Peep Eddie Murphy’s giant head on the interstate.  (I’d like to see versions for Barry Bonds & Ted Kennedy, but I guess it would be redundant.) [Via]
• Don’t I know you from the cinematographer’s party?  No Country for Raising Arizona juxtaposes scenes from two very different Coen Bros. films. [Via]
• Not just a weird Photoshop job: Chinese cops on Segways (with very tiny guns). [Via] [Update: Engadget is having a caption contest for the photo. (“Don’t make me lean forward and come over there…”)]

*These little photo projects tend to turn funky, ranging from foolish to beatific to vainglorious. (Take that, Eddie Murphy.)

Here’s a bit of brilliance for your Monday: "The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards."  In other words, it watches for the flash of someone else’s camera & projects an image onto what they’re photographing.  Check it out in action. [Via]

On a related note, Wired surveys cameras shaped like guns, cameras on guns, and more. [Via Ellis Vener] For other projected guerilla fun, see previous about Applied Autonomy’s “Streetwriter.”

• People as smoke: the simple tricks of long exposure produce a ghostly presence.  [Via Marc Pawliger]
• The Big Picture showcases the wrath of nature:
  • I used to play soccer against the guys from Cedar Rapids, IA, and I hate seeing the city submerged.  Scroll down as the photography gets more and more striking.
  • Smoke from the northern California fires cast a bizarre light over the Bay Area last week.  Apparently the T1000 got caught in the flames.
• Vintage photo manipulation:
  • Wired New York features a wealth of early photos of the city. Among them you can find at least one example of rudimentary (yet surprisingly decent) photo manipulation.
  • Sam Haskins talks a bit about how composite photos were made in the time before Photoshop and shows an example. "At the time there was zero retouching after the event. Now of course I have the luxury of scanning the transparency to clean and refine the image in Photoshop – God bless its digital socks." [Via]
• Doing their own thing:
  • Phillip Toledano has created a photo essay of phone sex operators–a surprisingly articulate, diverse, and self-aware crew.  (Fair warning: The photos are tame, but some of the blurbs beneath them are fairly frank.) [Via]
  • Return of the ’70s Weirdos features 1978 & 2008 photos of a group of early Microsoft employees.  [Via]  Referring to aging dudes working for MSFT these days, a friend of mine calls the shuttle bus from Seattle to Redmond "The Ponytail Express."
  • You never know what you’ll find via the American Gothic tag on Flickr. [Via]

• People as smoke: the simple tricks of long exposure produce a ghostly presence.  [Via Marc Pawliger]
• The Big Picture showcases the wrath of nature:
  • I used to play soccer against the guys from Cedar Rapids, IA, and I hate seeing the city submerged.  Scroll down as the photography gets more and more striking.
  • Smoke from the northern California fires cast a bizarre light over the Bay Area last week.  Apparently the T1000 got caught in the flames.
• Vintage photo manipulation:
  • Wired New York features a wealth of early photos of the city. Among them you can find at least one example of rudimentary (yet surprisingly decent) photo manipulation.
  • Sam Haskins talks a bit about how composite photos were made in the time before Photoshop and shows an example. "At the time there was zero retouching after the event. Now of course I have the luxury of scanning the transparency to clean and refine the image in Photoshop – God bless its digital socks." [Via]
• Doing their own thing:
  • Phillip Toledano has created a photo essay of phone sex operators–a surprisingly articulate, diverse, and self-aware crew.  (Fair warning: The photos are tame, but some of the blurbs beneath them are fairly frank.) [Via]
  • Return of the ’70s Weirdos features 1978 & 2008 photos of a group of early Microsoft employees.  [Via]  Referring to aging dudes working for MSFT these days, a friend of mine calls the shuttle bus from Seattle to Redmond "The Ponytail Express."
  • You never know what you’ll find via the American Gothic tag on Flickr. [Via]

• Slate features an excellent photo essay from Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, Wars: Chechnya and Iraq.  The subject is heavy, but his sardonic narration is well worth a listen.
• Happening to have a camera on hand during a terrible interruption yielded this rather amazing earthquake wedding photo gallery. [Via]
• The NYT profiles photographer Nikola Tamindzic.  “He uses long exposures, then shakes the camera while the shutter is still open, causing colors to blur and lights to streak. ‘I’m not recording what is really happening, but it’s something like what the brain is seeing late at night, especially if maybe you’re drunk or very excited,’ he said.” [Via]   On his own site he offers one of the more punishing self portaits I’ve ever seen.
• Ernesto Scott teaches photography near my old home town & offers lots of lovely bird shots.
• Raw in the raw: camera tech nerds (or just the curious) may enjoy Looking at a Real NEF Bayer Pattern. [Via Dave Polaschek]
• Photographer Jay Maisel is offering more intensive NYC-based photography workshops (July 14-18, Sept. 15-19, and Nov. 17-21).  Details are on his site.

• Slate features an excellent photo essay from Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak, Wars: Chechnya and Iraq.  The subject is heavy, but his sardonic narration is well worth a listen.
• Happening to have a camera on hand during a terrible interruption yielded this rather amazing earthquake wedding photo gallery. [Via]
• The NYT profiles photographer Nikola Tamindzic.  “He uses long exposures, then shakes the camera while the shutter is still open, causing colors to blur and lights to streak. ‘I’m not recording what is really happening, but it’s something like what the brain is seeing late at night, especially if maybe you’re drunk or very excited,’ he said.” [Via]   On his own site he offers one of the more punishing self portaits I’ve ever seen.
• Ernesto Scott teaches photography near my old home town & offers lots of lovely bird shots.
• Raw in the raw: camera tech nerds (or just the curious) may enjoy Looking at a Real NEF Bayer Pattern. [Via Dave Polaschek]
• Photographer Jay Maisel is offering more intensive NYC-based photography workshops (July 14-18, Sept. 15-19, and Nov. 17-21).  Details are on his site.

As you may have heard, for the last few days large fires have been burning in the Santa Cruz mountains overlooking Adobe HQ.  Quite a few of our colleagues live in or over the hills, but fortunately no one on the Photoshop team has (as far as I know) had to evacuate.  Bryan Hughes didn’t sleep well on Thursday night, I know, with the fire half a mile from his house (shoes on, cats in hand).

I mention it because on my way to an air show yesterday, I snaked through the mountains via some back roads and was surprised to see a very large and imposing Chinook helicopter barreling towards our car, on its way to reload water from the pond right behind me.  I pulled over and popped off a few frames that may be of interest to other aviation nerds.  Included in the set is the swift, violent, helicopter-borne death of a white Jeep Cherokee.  (Yeah, it blowed up real goood!)  Plumes of smoke from the mountains are visible in a few of the shots.

As for other fire-related photography, I honestly can’t compete with things like this.

• The NYT showcases Tintype Buckaroos.  Robb Kendrick uses archaic gear to capture the enduring lifestyle of cowboys.  “When I’m doing tintypes, everything has to be driving, not flying — all the stuff for the developing is fairly flammable,” he explains.  An interactive feature shows the work while providing narration from the photographer & the article’s author.
• Pioneering photojournalist (and ICP founder) Cornell Capa passed away on Friday at age 90.  The NYT features a selection of his photos.  I particularly like this one of 7,000 white-shirted Ford engineers.
• Rob Galbraith points out some great photos in MSNBC’s weekly photo gallery.  I love the frog-hopping image, though it took me a moment to notice the frog. [Via]
• Matteo Ferrari is doing an interesting little project showing before & after shots of people who drive the same car for a long time. [Via]
• How does one actually measure the temperature of light?  James Duncan Davidson explains.

• Timelapses:
  • The New Yorker features a hard-to-watch timelapse video of a man stuck in an elevator for 41 hours. [Via]
  • A new Canon TV spot is composed mostly of stills shot by EOS-1D Mark III cameras.  (Ironically, the ad is for the lower-end Canon Rebel.)
  • CHDK (the Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) is a set of firmware enhancements for a wide range of Canon cameras.  Scripts “provide functionality like motion-sensing photography (which reportedly works for lightning strikes) and unlimited interval time-lapse photography.” [Via Ashish Mukharji]

Woot, there it is!  The subject line pretty much says it all: you can now browse and edit your photos stored on Flickr right from within Photoshop Express.  I’ve just given the integration a whirl and, yep, it works like a charm.  Similar hooks are available for photos stored on Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa.  (I’ve been uploading just to my own site since becoming, uh, photographically obsessed with one little subject, but maybe this will draw me back to using a service as well.)

As long as we’re on the subject, what’s your take on the importance of integrating services like Flickr into Photoshop?  There’s an obvious appeal in being able to upload right from Lightroom, but should we make it possible to browse & open images on Photoshop.com & co. right from within Photoshop?  (Let’s imagine we could drop in an optional little Flash widget as a browser palette/panel, or maybe enable browsing via Adobe Bridge.)  What about being able to save edits back to the service?  Just curious.

A number of interesting Ansel Adams-related bits have popped up recently:

• The NYT features an interactive gallery in which Adams’s former assistant Andrea Stillman discusses the back story on nine of his images.  The story of the naming of "Mt. Ansel Adams" is particularly cool.
• In what he calls "The most amazing 24 hours of my photo career," photographer Marc Silber trekked around Yosemite with Robert Scoble & Adams’s son Michael.  Afterward they visited the photographer’s darkroom.
• Frederick Johnson from the Lightroom team joined these guys on the visit.  "Michael is amazing," he writes.  "Turns out we were both in the Air Force! Though he was a General, and I was an enlisted man. It was hard to fight the impulse to call him ‘sir…’"  Frederick posted some photos and short video clips in his Flickr stream.  And oh yeah: if you’ve ever wondered why Photoshop has a lollypop-shaped Dodge Tool (you know, this thing), here’s why.

Photographer Michael Poliza* has produced a stunning collection of aerial photos, Eyes Over Africa.  He says, "The images came mostly from an
8-week helicopter expedition from Hamburg to Cape Town.  Lots of
zickzacking over this amazing continent.  The Lightroom beta & LR 1.0 was the tool to work my way thru the 30,000 images."  You can browse more than 200 of the images on his site via Flash (also available in smaller HTML form, both uploaded from LR).  Beautiful
zickzacking indeed.

A few months ago Michael dropped by Adobe to visit with Tom Hogarty and me.  He brought with him his "newest baby," Eyes Over Africa XXL.  He’s not kidding about that suffix:  "It will be the largest coffee table book ever that was purely shot digitally. Almost 50 (!) lbs and definitely huge."  Just for fun, he used his iPhone to call up a satellite image of the same coordinates displayed on one of the pages, then laid the phone on the book.  For further weirdness points, I then snapped a couple of shots of the layout using my iPhone.  (At this point there was a great disturbance in the Force.)

For more Earth from above:

• National Geographic rounds up some great stuff in Through the Eyes of the Condor.
• In honor of Earth Day, NASA offered their Top 10 Views of Earth.

* Coincidentally the elder brother of GoLive founder Andreas Poliza

• Dewbacks in the car park; I think it’s serious…  Cedric Delsaux makes extremely nice images of Star Wars characters in the real world.  (Click the “Series” link in the top navigation bar.) [Via]
• Slate features an interesting history on Stanley Forman’s The Soiling of Old Glory, a wrenching and iconic image from the civil rights struggle in Boston. (Why they use a blurry low-res JPEG, I don’t know, but here’s a somewhat crisper version.)
• “It should never, ever be possible to pour meat…”  This sage wisdom came to me from a fellow high schooler who’d gone to work at the Dubuque meat packing plant for the summer.  I thought of it upon seeing this photo series of food that takes the shape of its container. [Via]
• Andri Pol makes contrails erupt from a man’s head.  (Can’t buy into it being more fun than Photoshop, though.)
• Peep Wayne Levin’s underwater B&W. [Via]

• Dewbacks in the car park; I think it’s serious…  Cedric Delsaux makes extremely nice images of Star Wars characters in the real world.  (Click the “Series” link in the top navigation bar.) [Via]
• Slate features an interesting history on Stanley Forman’s The Soiling of Old Glory, a wrenching and iconic image from the civil rights struggle in Boston. (Why they use a blurry low-res JPEG, I don’t know, but here’s a somewhat crisper version.)
• “It should never, ever be possible to pour meat…”  This sage wisdom came to me from a fellow high schooler who’d gone to work at the Dubuque meat packing plant for the summer.  I thought of it upon seeing this photo series of food that takes the shape of its container. [Via]
• Andri Pol makes contrails erupt from a man’s head.  (Can’t buy into it being more fun than Photoshop, though.)
• Peep Wayne Levin’s underwater B&W. [Via]