• Armed America photographs some of those who own the nation’s ~200 million firearms, sharing bits of their perspectives.
• Armed Appalachians appear in Shelby Lee Adams’s Napier Family series.
• Slate features Gitmo in Black and White, a Magnum photographers’ slideshow documenting the prisoner detention center at Guantanamo Bay.  (If there’s a more surreal location for a Starbucks, I’ve yet to hear it.)
• Juxtaposing wealth & war, this image from Lebanon was named "Photo of the Year 2006" by World Press Photo.  There’s more info in this NPR story (which for whatever reason won’t play on my Mac). [Via]
• Unflinching war photographer James Nachtwey has been honored at the TED Conference.  They’ve created a video discussing his & others’ work, and Nachtwey is covered in the documentary War Photographer (3-minute excerpt). [Via]
• Hoping for a more peaceful world, Retired Weapons depicts another future for military hardware.  (I hoped for a bit more from this one, but maybe it’s deeper than I’m seeing.) [Via]
• Lastly, a reason to go bigger than Shuffle: this iPod saved a soldier’s life.

• As traditional photo printing heads into obscurity, photo conservationist Dusan Stulik & his crew at the Getty Conservation Institute want to capture what’s being lost. They’re "working on what might be described as the genome project of predigital photography: a precise chemical fingerprint of all the 150 or so ways pictures have been developed" over the last 170 years.  19-century leather printing sounds cool, but as for the uranium prints, he can keep ’em.
• Taking a different angle on photo preservation, Shorpy is "The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog." (It’s named after this little dude, apparently.) [Via]
• I haven’t gotten to poke at it much, but Focus, The Photographic Search Engine, sounds interesting. [Via]
• Your point-and-shoot has a little way to go before reaching the 576-megapixel resolution of the human eye [Via]
• And lastly, speaking of resolution, who knew that Google satellite aerial photography could go so insanely close?  If I start balding, they’ll probably know before I do… [Via]

• As traditional photo printing heads into obscurity, photo conservationist Dusan Stulik & his crew at the Getty Conservation Institute want to capture what’s being lost. They’re "working on what might be described as the genome project of predigital photography: a precise chemical fingerprint of all the 150 or so ways pictures have been developed" over the last 170 years.  19-century leather printing sounds cool, but as for the uranium prints, he can keep ’em.
• Taking a different angle on photo preservation, Shorpy is "The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog." (It’s named after this little dude, apparently.) [Via]
• I haven’t gotten to poke at it much, but Focus, The Photographic Search Engine, sounds interesting. [Via]
• Your point-and-shoot has a little way to go before reaching the 576-megapixel resolution of the human eye [Via]
• And lastly, speaking of resolution, who knew that Google satellite aerial photography could go so insanely close?  If I start balding, they’ll probably know before I do… [Via]

• Get down, do you?  Sport Shooter talks about the details of Peter Read Miller’s low-angle shooting, which makes for some extra-dramatic images. [Via]  (Turns out this even works for former Photoshop PMs/Adobe execs. ;-))  
• Elsewhere on the site, Peter Lockley uses infrared & a tilt-shift lens to offer a fresh take on baseball.
• Sports Illustrated is hosting a gallery of photographer Bill Frakes’ best shots. Gotta love those bobbleheads.

• Get down, do you?  Sport Shooter talks about the details of Peter Read Miller’s low-angle shooting, which makes for some extra-dramatic images. [Via]  (Turns out this even works for former Photoshop PMs/Adobe execs. ;-))  
• Elsewhere on the site, Peter Lockley uses infrared & a tilt-shift lens to offer a fresh take on baseball.
• Sports Illustrated is hosting a gallery of photographer Bill Frakes’ best shots. Gotta love those bobbleheads.

Yesterday I mentioned that Photoshop CS3 Extended features "image stack analytical filters."  Er, yes, so that’s useful and relevant… how, exactly?  In a nutshell, you can now treat multiple images as a single entity, running an algorithm across them non-destructively.  So, for example, you could take a range of frames, then have Photoshop show you the average value of each pixel.  Other algorithms include Entropy, Skewness, Summation, and Kurtosis*.

If this doesn’t yet sound scintillating, it’s probably because (I’m guessing) you’re not doing technical image processing work.  It was to enable technical applications that image stack processing was added, and it’s the reason that one finds the feature in Photoshop Extended.

Having said that, photographer and author Martin Evening has come up with a great example of how combining multiple images into a stack, then aligning them and running the Median filter, can make moving objects (tourists, pigeons, bits of noise) disappear.  Check out his story on Photoshop News for details and images.  To demonstrate the process, I’ve whipped up this 75-second video demo using Martin’s images (hoping he won’t mind).  And you can watch Russell Brown "reduce global warming" by removing the cars from the Golden Gate Bridge**.

Now, I’ll admit that seeing image stacks this way makes our marketing story a little more challenging.  Didn’t we say that "Photoshop Extended" is meant to offer specific capabilities to people who need them, and that we haven’t withheld core photographic functionality in order to get every customer wanting/using Extended?  We did say that, and it’s true.  Image stacks are powerful and (I think) pretty cool, but I’d feel uneasy about overselling them a core photographic tool.  There’s both power and potential here, but it’s a little more science-fair-ish than we’d like to sell for mainstream photography work.

Does that make sense? We are sincere in trying to group capabilities logically in Photoshop vs. Photoshop Extended.  We did not want to be shady.  (That’s why, for example, you’ll find "Video Frames to Layers" in both editions of PS: It was previously in ImageReady, and even though we’d have had an easier time saying "all the video stuff is in Extended," we didn’t want anyone’s arm to feel twisted.)

* Which, Chris Cox assures me, does not mean “bad breath.”
** This also demonstrates how stacks are related to video, which is core component of Photoshop Extended.

• I love this horse goatee from Tim Flach.  Explore his site for other great details, including these bats. [Via]
• Tim’s dog shots reminded me of these (somewhat inexplicably) flying dogs from filmmakers Pleix.
• Kazuhiko Kawahara reveals "Twisted symmetry" in his digitally enhanced photo compositions.   Many of the most eye-catching shots are featured in his interview in PingMag. [Via]
• I enjoyed Jeremy Cowart’s portfolio on Virb, digging this silhouette especially.
• David Ichioka’s overhead camera casts an unblinking eye on peeps sleeping.

• Robert Hodgin is a creative force.  It seems his Flight404 has been an inspiration as long as I can remember, and now he shares the lovely Magnetosphere.  This–this–is what I want using Photoshop to be like–totally alive, reactive, surprising (cf. that Hands video I mentioned earlier).  Robert discusses its creation here.
• The piece reminds me of the Eskimo Nebula, seen in NASA’s Image of the Day archive. [Via]
• Jeff Schewe captured some captivating patterns in icebergs in Antarctica last month. My favorite bits start roughly halfway through the gallery.
• Peep the gardens to be found in Petri dishes. [Via]
• Marc Pawliger points out a gallery of cool flame fractals.

• Robert Hodgin is a creative force.  It seems his Flight404 has been an inspiration as long as I can remember, and now he shares the lovely Magnetosphere.  This–this–is what I want using Photoshop to be like–totally alive, reactive, surprising (cf. that Hands video I mentioned earlier).  Robert discusses its creation here.
• The piece reminds me of the Eskimo Nebula, seen in NASA’s Image of the Day archive. [Via]
• Jeff Schewe captured some captivating patterns in icebergs in Antarctica last month. My favorite bits start roughly halfway through the gallery.
• Peep the gardens to be found in Petri dishes. [Via]
• Marc Pawliger points out a gallery of cool flame fractals.

Damn–this new Sigma lens (200-500mm, F2.8) is a beast; see details (which omit the key question of weight).  No word on whether this thing ships with its own crew of sherpas.  Of course, it’s still no match for that 500+ lb custom Zeiss monster, but it’s impressive nonetheless. [Via Russell Williams]

BYOTR (Bring Your Own Thematic Relationship) to these photos; I can’t offer one this time. 🙂

• I love the punchy palettes & urban grit Keith Kin Yan captures on Overshadowed.  Dig this composition in particular.  [Via]
• Mixing bright colors and brutalism, check out these beautifully painted Russian tower blocks. [Via]
• Offering their own mix of bright & muted, see Evern Sahlin’s India photos. (Namaste, Kilroy.) [Via]
• National Geographic’s Your Shot gives readers a chance to submit photography for inclusion in the magazine.  I enjoy this perspective on bicycles in the snow. On a vaguely related note, Welcome to the Story invites readers to submit pictures of themselves to be incorporated into the narrative (not that I have any idea what’s supposed to be going on). [Via]
• Careful with that cam, Eugene: Hasselblad has a proud tradition of putting cameras in space; unfortunately one of them is part of a growing halo of space junk circling the earth.  On another Hasselblad note, they feature some beautiful photos of a Bugatti from Peter Dudek. [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]
• Google turned up this panorama of the Millau viaduct bridge (which, at 984ft, is the world’s tallest).  More cool photos of its construction are here.
• Burning bulbs redux: Rich Legg has captured a nice image of burnout. [Via]
• This wee thing is creepy & fantastic, all at once.

From chilly Kansas City (via my friend Maria at Hallmark, specifically) comes a link to amazing photos from Lake Geneva in Switzerland, showing cars, boats, and more buried in beautiful, brutal ice.  Background info on the pix is at Snopes.com.

Man, this stuff makes me not miss living in Boston.  I returned to Logan airport once to find my old Volvo with six inches of snow coating its side, needing to be clawed off with a speaker cover that had conveniently fallen off the door.  San José, CA, may have all the culture of a beer nut, but the weather sure doesn’t suck.

[Tangentially related Boston/cold thing: On this Europe trip, InDesign PM Chad Siegel entertained us to no end with his rendition of a beer vendor from Fenway Park: "ICE cold beeah heeah! FREEZE ya teeth, take ya TONGUE on a sleigh ride! You’ll wish ya throat was a miiiiiiile loong!"  Of course I had to morph this into a topical cry: "RED hot apps heeah! WORK ya flow, take ya MOUSE on a joy ride!  You’ll wish ya screen was a miiiiiile wide!"]

A couple of interesting optical bits of note:

• Roland Piquepaille talks about a new device called GigaPan, a $200 automated device which promises to facilitate the creation of very large panoramas. More info is here. [Via]
• David Pogue waxes rhapsodic about the hard-to-find Nikon 18-200mm stabilized lens. Newly minted Flash PM (formerly long-time Flash evangelist) Richard Galvan has been shooting up a storm with what I believe is this same lens & loves it. He took some beautiful sunrise shots of Barcelona today, to which I’ll link as soon as he posts ’em.
• New Canon developments are rumored, including the possibility of some new “long glass.” I’ve been wondering when we might see a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens featuring the new image stabilization technology. Having just shelled out for a house, however, my enthusiasm for a purchase like that has appropriately waned… [Via Keith Cooper]

A couple of interesting optical bits of note:

• Roland Piquepaille talks about a new device called GigaPan, a $200 automated device which promises to facilitate the creation of very large panoramas. More info is here. [Via]
• David Pogue waxes rhapsodic about the hard-to-find Nikon 18-200mm stabilized lens. Newly minted Flash PM (formerly long-time Flash evangelist) Richard Galvan has been shooting up a storm with what I believe is this same lens & loves it. He took some beautiful sunrise shots of Barcelona today, to which I’ll link as soon as he posts ’em.
• New Canon developments are rumored, including the possibility of some new “long glass.” I’ve been wondering when we might see a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens featuring the new image stabilization technology. Having just shelled out for a house, however, my enthusiasm for a purchase like that has appropriately waned… [Via Keith Cooper]

John Dowdell tipped me to an interesting development in the world of tiny optics:

"Your next camera phone might get a new kind of lens if researchers at
the University of California at San Diego convince the cell phones
makers. They have designed an ‘origami lens’ which will slim high
resolution cameras. Today, their 5-millimeter thick, 8-fold imager
delivers images comparable in quality with photos taken with a compact
camera lens with a 38 millimeter focal length. In a few years, these
bendable lenses could be used in high resolution miniature cameras for
unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision
applications."

I, meanwhile, prepare to head out the door with a comparatively luggable 17-85mm lens in hand.  Having seen a colleague shooting this week with an approximately 35-200mm lens that appeared to offer a much wider aperture than mine & no appreciable increase in bulk, I keep wondering about my photo friends’ advice.  "Oh, those things are blurry crap," they say–but boy, the flexibility & speed they appear to offer sure is appealing.  It makes me think of audiophiles who drop thousands of dollars on equipment that (to me, anyway) just reveals the flaws in the source audio or other components.  I don’t want to use garbage, but I’m starting to stroke my chin about the info I’ve been getting…

John Dowdell tipped me to an interesting development in the world of tiny optics:

"Your next camera phone might get a new kind of lens if researchers at
the University of California at San Diego convince the cell phones
makers. They have designed an ‘origami lens’ which will slim high
resolution cameras. Today, their 5-millimeter thick, 8-fold imager
delivers images comparable in quality with photos taken with a compact
camera lens with a 38 millimeter focal length. In a few years, these
bendable lenses could be used in high resolution miniature cameras for
unmanned surveillance aircraft, cell phones and infrared night vision
applications."

I, meanwhile, prepare to head out the door with a comparatively luggable 17-85mm lens in hand.  Having seen a colleague shooting this week with an approximately 35-200mm lens that appeared to offer a much wider aperture than mine & no appreciable increase in bulk, I keep wondering about my photo friends’ advice.  "Oh, those things are blurry crap," they say–but boy, the flexibility & speed they appear to offer sure is appealing.  It makes me think of audiophiles who drop thousands of dollars on equipment that (to me, anyway) just reveals the flaws in the source audio or other components.  I don’t want to use garbage, but I’m starting to stroke my chin about the info I’ve been getting…

• Rick Lieder, whose BeeDreams macrophotography was mentioned earlier, has turned to birds with the lovely CloudBoxer.com
• Graham Jeffery (of smoke fame) has posted some insanely cool photos of hoverflies.  He’s also gotten into the bird world; nice landing gear on this guy. 🙂

• Rick Lieder, whose BeeDreams macrophotography was mentioned earlier, has turned to birds with the lovely CloudBoxer.com
• Graham Jeffery (of smoke fame) has posted some insanely cool photos of hoverflies.  He’s also gotten into the bird world; nice landing gear on this guy. 🙂

Put this in your burning bulb & smoke it: Graham Jefferey has created a gallery of gorgeous smoke images. (In case you’re wondering, as my wife was, whether it’s possible to buy prints, the answer is yes.)  Graham’s work inspired Myla Kent to create her own lovely experiments with incense.  There’s a whole pool of art smoke images on the Flickr, and now Photocritic features tips & tricks from Graham for creating your own smoke images. [Via]

• SpaceWeather.com has posted a gallery of beautiful shots of Comet McNaught in action, including this otherworldly pic from the Haleakala High Altitude Observatory. [Via]
• Joe Lencioni has posted a nice shot of the Leonids meteor shower (now joined by a second shot).
• Joe Reifer has posted in-depth info on shooting with a Canon 5D & a wide angle lens, used to produce this image.  [For more from him, see previous.]
• I really enjoy the painterly quality of New York Blue, from photographer Bill Travis. [Sidenote: It’s amazing how different the same image looks in Safari vs. Firefox on my system, due to FF not (as far as I know) honoring color profiles.  Would it kill the browser makers to implement color management?  Of course, Adobe needs to do the same in the Flash Player.]

• SpaceWeather.com has posted a gallery of beautiful shots of Comet McNaught in action, including this otherworldly pic from the Haleakala High Altitude Observatory. [Via]
• Joe Lencioni has posted a nice shot of the Leonids meteor shower (now joined by a second shot).
• Joe Reifer has posted in-depth info on shooting with a Canon 5D & a wide angle lens, used to produce this image.  [For more from him, see previous.]
• I really enjoy the painterly quality of New York Blue, from photographer Bill Travis. [Sidenote: It’s amazing how different the same image looks in Safari vs. Firefox on my system, due to FF not (as far as I know) honoring color profiles.  Would it kill the browser makers to implement color management?  Of course, Adobe needs to do the same in the Flash Player.]

(Other than this blog, I mean.)

• In More Turns, photographer Bill Sullivan has captured New Yorkers as they pass through subway turnstiles.  "I developed a situation," he writes, "so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus… At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet."  Besides the images themselves, I really enjoy the quasi-panoramic presentation.  Bill rotates the same approach 90 degrees in his elevator-based Stop Down series, where closing doors do the cropping. [Via]
• In The Thought Project, Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg approached 150 strangers on the streets of Copenhagen and NYC, asking them what they were thinking the moment before he stopped them. He recorded their replies and then took their portraits. Thoughts range from truffles to Sheena is a Punk Rocker to IRBMs. [Via]
• In Le Grand Content, Clemens Kogler pretty much captures how my mind works, depicting connections between hamsters, religious doubt, artificial sweeteners, heavy drinking, and more. [Via]

Yesterday I happened across a rather cool photo gallery from Lightroom engineer Kevin Tieskoetter, in which he captures the moments just after shattering lightbulbs.  Kevin writes,

I was inspired by a similar image I saw on photo.net and thought it would be fun to give it a try. I went through probably 50-100 bulbs, and discovered I had the most luck with the candle-flame-shaped frosted bulbs, mostly because they have a more interesting design to their elements, they’re dirt cheap, and I can break the bulb with a pair of pliers. If I break just the tip off, I can then use a needle-nose pliers to break off additional chunks until I have just the amount of glass remaining that I want (although I found it was usually more interesting without any glass showing). Traditional lightbulbs turn out to actually be very hard to break, especially without destroying the filament in the process. Also, the filament is so simple that the flame pattern isn’t as interesting.

I borrowed a Nikon D2hs and a Canon 1D Mk II to do the shots: high pixel count wasn’t particularly important, but a high frames per second was critical. Once I lit the bulb, it would burn for 1-2 seconds, but the only interesting shots were generally at the very start of the process as the mushroom cloud was rising. An 8fps camera makes a big difference here.

The images were backlit using a standard flash on an extension cord. I set it to manual mode at 1/64 power (I think; I did a lot of experimenting here to find the right settings). Lenses used were a 50mm macro (at 1.5x magnification) and 150mm macro (at no magnification).

Kevin took additional photos of the process & hopes to do a how-to page at some point.  First, though, there’s the small matter of shipping Lightroom. 🙂

The megapixel wars are so overrated–at least according to a team of researchers at Rice University. By focusing light on a single-pixel sensor, they promise reduced power consumption & consequently greater battery life in digital cameras.  The digital micromirror device, says the BBC, "consists of a million or more tiny mirrors each the size of a bacterium."  As the light passes through the device, the millions of tiny mirrors are turned on and off at random in rapid succession. 

Photoshop engineer Zalman Stern points out the researchers’ info on compressive imaging & writes,

The design uses a micromirror array and a lens to perform a pseudorandom
weighting of the image. The result is
sampled using a single photo detector. The image presented to the
micromirror array is from a standard lens system of some sort.

The interesting part is the math underlying the reconstruction from the
samples. There is recent theory work that determines how good a
reconstruction you can get for a given amount of sampling reduction.
That is, one takes significantly fewer samples than the number of pixels
in the output image and gets a moderately acceptable rendition of the
original scene. One way they have of looking at this is that image
compression is done during sampling, rather than digitally afterwards.

The device is currently the size of a suitcase, so getting it into practical applications is likely to take some time. [Via Kevin Tieskoetter]

* For those interested in these things: Zalman was on the Photoshop team way back in the day (doing the port to PowerPC, as well as the ye olde GIF
89a Export plug-in).  After that he left, joined Macromedia, then left and started a company, then found his way back to Macromedia, and thus to Adobe. (Kind of a nice pallindrome…) Now he’s contributing code to Camera Raw that’s "rockin’ like Dokken." He was a creator of Contribute, which I’m using to type this now. It’s a small world, after all.

• Nature Photographers has posted its Editor’s Pick Awards for 2006, featuring assorted natural gorgeousness. [Via]
• Speaking of wild creatures, I got a kick out of this photo of one of Scotland’s hairy coos doing that Michael Jordan tongue-thing.
• And speaking of the natural world, you might call this rather amazing shot clearing the forest, seeing the tree.  The Daily Mail has the story. [Via]
• A totally different kind of Auto-Align: Michael Hughes travels the earth, overlaying postcards & other tourist swag on top of the real scene.  Check out his gallery on Flickr to see what I mean. (Tilting at windmills is especially nice.) [Via]
• Maggie Hallahan took part in the Lightroom/Photoshop Iceland Adventure & has posted a gallery from the trip. (You might also check out her accompanying podcast.)
• Revealing Chicago, by Terry Evans, offers an aerial portrait of the Windy City. [Via]  Photoshop team member & Chi-town native Heather Dolan reports seeing the exhibition at Millennium Park & loving it.
• Trona, CA, is one of the most surreally depressing places on earth, but it might have some soulmates in these decaying Soviet roadside bus stops. [Via]
• Today’s NYT features a story & nice gallery discussing the International Center of Photography’s new shows covering Martin Munkacsi & Henri Cartier-Bresson.  The ICP site has online galleries showing additional images from both Munkacsi & Cartier-Bresson.

Will snapping a photo get you popped in the nose, legally or literally? The latter’s a good bet in a biker bar, but what guidance exists for other situations–especially in a climate of heightened security? "Since I’ve heard various people ask (or debate) these questions from time to time," writes Photoshop engineer Russell Williams, "here are some references you might find useful:"

• A short guide to "When/where is it OK to take pictures? [in the US]":
• A short guide to "When do I need a model release? [in the US]"
• A 5-page article from Popular Photography about various legalities of
  taking, publishing, and selling pictures
• Possibly more than you want to know about model and property releases, with example
  situations and practical suggestions.
  (The Section 10 summary is reasonable to read on its own.)

And engineer Dave Polaschek adds, "There’s also The Photographer’s Right,
which is a single sheet that you can toss into your camera bag for reference
should you happen to get harassed by private security or cops when legally
taking pictures."

[Update: See additional good links in the comments below.]

• Paul Octavious has posted some of the most interesting photos I’ve seen in a while. I love the way his silhouettes play with our sense of scale. [Via]
• From Paul’s gallery I found my way to other cool cloud shots on Flickr.
• Philip Straub, head of concept art at Electronic Arts, creates some clouds that are anything but little n’ fluffy. [Via] He talks about his history, work in Photoshop & Painter, and more in this interview.
• In case you missed an earlier link posted in the comments, check out these rather amazing lenticular clouds. [Via BW Jones]

One of the nice things about working on Photoshop is that many people on the team enjoy using the software outside of work, especially for digital photography.  The hallways & office doors of West Tower 10 are filled with beautiful prints from folks in engineering, QE, localization, etc., and using the app as a customer provides great perspective while building it. 

Anyway, an image from Photoshop engineer Geoff Scott now appears in this month’s Popular Photography.  He explains, "Last May I went on a trip that’s put together by American Photo and Popular Photography magazines. The trips are called Mentor Series, because pro photographer come along to offer tips, critiques, and general goofiness." The organizers liked
one so much that they’re using it for the ads for the trip this year, and you can check it out here (cars streaking through Times Square).  Congrats, Geoff.

Today is the 168th anniversary of the daguerrotype‘s introduction to the world.  Interestingly enough, this archaic form of photography remains a powerful, if seldom used, artistic medium: since 1999 painter Chuck Close has been using the process to create some interesting portraits, including an unvarnished Kate Moss.  If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out Neatorama’s World of Early Photography.

• From Russia with Foam: John Peterson passed along this gallery showing the hiterto unknown art of drawing on top of coffee. (I think Jerry Uelsmann might dig this one. ;-)) And later I found a video of the techniques in action.
• Only slightly more permanent, the sparkling sculptures in the Harbin international ice and snow festival are built to chill. [Via] China Daily features photos from the opening ceremonies.
• Elsewhere in cold China, check out this frozen waterfall. [Via]
• The Musée d’Orsay features the work of Etienne-Jules Marey, who did pioneering work photographing air at the start of the 20th century, using imaging plus one of the first wind tunnels to reveal previously unseen details of air’s fluid dynamics. [Via]
• Whereas those vintage photos are presented in frustatingly small form, the Paris School of Mines features large images of the city during the 1910 flood [Via]

[For more snowy goodness, see previous.]

• Milk’shroom: From Germany comes a terrific image of milk dropping into coffee. [Via]
• Like perhaps millions of others, I’ve seen some of Steve McCurry‘s famous and arresting images, but like many I didn’t know his name.  I know it now, as the always-excellent blog The Online Photographer highlighted the arrival of Looking East, a book of Steve’s portraiture. Do be careful, though: his site contains a rich portfolio and could well suck you in for ages (and it did me). [Via]
• Through T.O.P. I was reminded of the work of Jill Greenberg, whom they’ve named Photographer of the Year.  Her crying tots aren’t my cup of tea, but for whatever reason I really groove on her monkey portraits. See more of them here.
• My own amateurish bits suffer by proximity, but the windy CA weather dropped a few groovy branches in our yard last night, and with a macro lens borrowed from the ‘Dobe, I had fun creating a few shots.  I’ve posted them (1, 2) via Zoomify, exported from CS3, as well so you can see the details. [Note: We’ll fix that "zoomed way out by default" bug soon, I promise.]
• Someday, I’m afraid, you’ll read that I crashed and burned on Hwy 101 while transfixed by the comings & goings at Moffett Field, former home of the Navy’s lighter-than-air fleet.  In the meantime, the NYT is selling a beautiful print of a Zeppelin over Manhattan. On a related note, "Personal Blimp" refers not just to a product mgr. stuffed with HoneyBaked Ham (it was delicious) , but also to a small new airship being designed in Massachusetts. [Via]

Oh, and by the way, Happy New Year! 🙂

Interesting design/photography bits:

• Graham Owen creates insanely realistic flies for fishing.   (I’ve spent a good part of the Christmas break cat-fishing; wonder what Graham could do in the way of a felt mouse.)  He even offers a step-by-step tutorial on creating flies.  [Via]
• And if that’s not realistic (or weird) enough for you, there’s Mike Libby’s Insect Lab,"an artist-operated studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components." [Via]
• Speaking of animals+electronics, the Woofer‘s name works on two levels.  I wonder if he’s related to this pup.
• Artist Cai Guo-Qiang gets crazy with animals real (dead wolves a go-go; an unfortunate tiger going out like St. Sebasian) and imagined (explosive dragon skeleton) [Via]
• The NYT features some beautiful shots of northern Japan’s disappearing world of draft horse racing.

[See also previous bits]

Interesting design/photography bits:

• Graham Owen creates insanely realistic flies for fishing.   (I’ve spent a good part of the Christmas break cat-fishing; wonder what Graham could do in the way of a felt mouse.)  He even offers a step-by-step tutorial on creating flies.  [Via]
• And if that’s not realistic (or weird) enough for you, there’s Mike Libby’s Insect Lab,"an artist-operated studio that customizes real insects with antique watch parts and electronic components." [Via]
• Speaking of animals+electronics, the Woofer‘s name works on two levels.  I wonder if he’s related to this pup.
• Artist Cai Guo-Qiang gets crazy with animals real (dead wolves a go-go; an unfortunate tiger going out like St. Sebasian) and imagined (explosive dragon skeleton) [Via]
• The NYT features some beautiful shots of northern Japan’s disappearing world of draft horse racing.

[See also previous bits]

• The NYT has posted its Year in Pictures, featuring images of war, politics, sports, and more.  It’s amazing how quickly events can fade from our (or at least my) consciousness, often just months after they occur.
• MSNBC has some terrific galleries from this past year.  (Bet you’ve never seen a bull doing a headstand before.) See also Time’s collection.
• The Photography Blog features an interview with German photographer Gerd Ludwig, named Photographer of the Year at the Lucie Awards.  His journeys through the former USSR produce images both grim & transcendent.   (On going digital, "I turned my film fridge into a wine cooler," he says.) [Via]
• Chernobyl is the subject of an intense and difficult portfolio from Paul Fusco. I found it among Slate’s excellent collection of interactive essays from Magnum photographers.  See also Martin Parr’s take on the "flotsam and jetsam of the Western world."
• Mexican crime photographer Enrique Metinides captures a rough world–supermarket shootouts, wounded actresses, and more.  Additonal work is featured in the Anton Kern Gallery [Via]
• Slight non sequitur: I don’t know why I find the idea of a wooden digital camera so charming, but I do. [Via]

"Give away the razor, make money on the razor blades…" I say, the razor guys need to convince you to ink your face/legs, ’cause the real money is in inkjet refills.

Popular Photography’s Michael McNamara has posted some interesting observations on the state of inkjet prices in the world market.  Note: I don’t mention this to suggest that these products are overpriced.  The rate of innovation in desktop printing has been terrific, and as Michael notes, these inks enable creation of prints that "technically blow away minilab and online quality, plus last five to ten times longer on display."  It’s simply interesting to do the math on commodities that are, drop for drop, among the most expensive any of us will likely encounter. [Via Russell Williams]

Photoshop engineer Chris Bailey says he was killing time recently, installing Linux on a bunch of Adobe servers, and snapped some cool shots of the Adobe San Jose courtyard/basketball court/bocce ball enclave. (And as with all things Flickr, if you’re visiting through Safari, you owe it to yourself to download the free, cinematic PicLens viewer.) Chris also captured some time-lapse shots of the ever-present, always slightly unnerving low-flying planes overhead.

For more shots of the friendly confines, see Jeff Schewe’s story, A Visit to Adobe.  And here’s the same courtyard from space.

Adobe has commissioned a number of digital photography guides from industry heavy hitters, covering everything from metadata to color management, digital workflow to black & white conversion. The complete list with links is in this post’s extended entry, so check ’em out when you have a sec.

Continue reading →

• At photography shows I’m frequently asked by pro photographers for support of tethered shooting in Lightroom–that is, the ability to have a high-end camera tethered to one’s workstation, and to have the images flow in as they’re shot.  The good news is that what’s requested is largely possible already.  London-based fashion photographer/author Martin Evening has posted a great intro to shooting tethered in Lightroom.  [See also Martin’s overviews of the Lightroom Library and Develop modules.]
• Photographer and author Ben Long has posted a Windows
  version of his Adobe Camera Raw Version Control package. By duplicating and managing XMP settings files, this free set of
  applications makes it simple to create and manage multiple versions
  of the same raw document. This means you can
  easily create multiple XMP files for the same image, and easily
  switch from one to the other.  Also check out the free (though donation-supported) Mac version.