Adobe Camera Raw & the DNG Converter have been updated to version 3.4 and can now be downloaded for Mac and Windows. New camera support (bringing ACR’s total to 113 or so 121!) includes the following:

• Canon EOS 30D
• Epson R-D1s
• Leaf Aptus 65
• Leaf Aptus 75
• Olympus EVOLT E-330
• Olympus SP-320
• Pentax *ist DL2
• Samsung GX-1S

As always, please take a second to ensure that you install the plug-in into the correct spot:
Mac: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Plug-ins/CS2/File Formats/…
Win: \Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Plug-ins\CS2\File Formats\…
[Update: Geoff Stearns asks, “Should I bother updating even if I don’t have any of the new cameras? Are there any bug fixes or other tweaks to the existing cameras?” To which Thomas Knoll replies, “There are nearly always at least minor bug fixes with any camera raw update.” Cue NBC’s “The More You Know” riff.]

…yearning to blend free. We’d like to ask your help in improving HDR (high dynamic range) imaging in Photoshop. The halos produced by many current HDR conversion techniques (see the Flickr HDR pool for some examples) are kind of cool and wonky, but to make HDR more than a fad, we need to produce more reasonable results. With this in mind we’d like to get sample images–particularly ones with which you’ve gotten better results converting 32->16/8 bits using another package than you have using Photoshop. Photoshop engineer John Peterson writes,

I’m looking for cases where the “other leading brand” is doing a better job than Photoshop. I’d like to get three or four really good cases of this from customers that are (potential) heavy users of Merge to HDR. I’d be interested in JPEG or raw source files, plus the HDR result file from the other application. JPEGs should be generated by the camera, not via Camera Raw. f-stop should be held constant, exposure should differ by two stops or so, and resolutions in the 2-6 MP range would be sufficient.

If you’d like to work with us on this, please shoot me a mail & I’ll get you in touch with the right folks on our end. Thanks!

Humble packing tape gives rise to ghostly forms in the work of photographer and sculptor Mark Jenkins. The Morning News presents a gallery of his pieces, along with an interview that’s well worth a read (not the usual art house banality). As we think of higher & higher tech ways to preserve creations for the ages, it’s refreshing to hear from someone at peace with impermanence. You can see lots more from Mark on his site and here. [Via]
[Update: YouTube features Jenkins casting his head by wrapping it in tape–and, amazingly, not asphyxiating himself or Van Gogh-ing an ear. [Via]

Heh–a little trend seems to have grown up around giving aerial photos the appearance of miniature models, first by using tilt-shift lenses & now via Photoshop.
Photographer Olivo Barbieri’s work drew some attention a few months back, inspiring folks without tilt-shift lenses (or helicopters, for that matter) to find other ways to produce similar effects. Writer Christopher Phin whipped up a simple Photoshop tutorial, and now there’s a Flickr photo group devoted to tilt-shift fakery (here’s a good set) [Via]. A similar technique has been applied to a movie, and Boing Boing provides more good examples here.

Hardworking author/scripter Ben Long has returned with version 2.0 of his popular Photoshop Automator Actions. In addition to introducing 22 new actions, Ben writes, “The biggest improvement is a new architecture that makes it much speedier, and that eliminates the problem of Photoshop having to open all of the documents in a batch at one time.” I’ve heard plenty of good feedback from folks using the scripts in production, and they’re a great example of nice Photoshop/Mac OS integration.
By the way, if you’re interested in automating Photoshop and plan to attend next week’s Photoshop World in Miami, check out Matt Kloskowski’s Photoshop for Geeks session. I was amazed that the previous installment of Matt’s talk drew more than 100 people to an 8:30pm session (!). It was a great vote of confidence in our efforts to make Photoshop more extensible, and as before my pal Jeff Tranberry from PS development will be on hand to answer questions & gather feedback.

Novelist, self-taught pianist, semi-pro basketball player, composer, director of Shaft–and somehow he still found time to be a groundbreaking photojournalist at Life for more than 20 years. I didn’t know the name Gordon Parks before he passed away yesterday at age 93, but since then I’ve learned a bit about his amazing and far-reaching life. The NYT offers an overview and slideshow; NPR features an audio report from Parks’ 90th birthday; and PDN hosts a gallery of his work with accompanying text. His life spoke to the transformative power of photography, and to the idea of “Not allowing anyone to set boundaries, cutting loose the imagination and then making the new horizons.”

I couldn’t attend PMA with the rest of the crew this year, but amidst the big camera announcements, they spied some funky accessories:

• The MonsterPod doesn’t suck–literally or figuratively. Rather, its “Viscoelastic Morphing Polymer Super Grip Base” (three times fast, please) sticks onto just about any surface. I wonder if you can stick it to The Man…
• The Joby Gorrilapod takes a different approach, wrapping its prehensile legs around all kinds of things (including the human head). [Via]

I recently went a slightly simpler route myself, opting for a tiny, lightweight Manfrotto, the better to irritate dinner companions when going for those natural light shots.

Though by now I’m sure it’s so six days ago, it’s been exciting to see all the discussions this week around the growing mainstream use of high dynamic range photography. Photoshop CS2 marks the app’s first steps into 32-bit imaging, enabling the creation of HDR files by merging multiple exposures (typically 10-12 bit for most raw files) into single images. While HDR editing has been immediately embraced by film and special effects pros, it’s only recently that a good number of photographers are taking notice. Flickr now features an HDR pool containing some striking stuff. [Via]
Chris Cox, the engineer who’s been implementing much of Photoshop’s HDR support, groans when seeing some of this early experimentation, concluding (rightly) that we need to improve the algorithms and interface to avoid weird halos when mapping from HDR to lower bit depths. I reply, however, that a good chunk of the appeal of HDR now is attached to the slightly bizarre results the techniques produce. I mean, look at the popularity of everything from Lomos to Lens Babies. Part of me thinks that when HDR is really mainstream (captured directly in a single frame, and easily manipulable), we’ll have lost some of the happy accidents occurring today.
For more on HDR, see this intro from Jon Meyer and this tutorial from Michael Reichmann. The best is yet to come.

A lazy Sunday morning means a chance to catch up with photography around the Web:

• French pastry chef/photographer team Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle play with food, creating miniature sculptures and tiny narratives. If you’re put off by their site’s dicey navigation, samples of their work can be found elsewhere. [Via]
• Michael Wolf’s Honk Kong portfolio goes exactly the opposite direction, throwing any sense of scale out the window (many thousands of them). [Via] The sense of unreality reminds me of these airborne shots from Mexico City. [Via]
• The NYT features Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin’s portraits of great performers of 2006.
• The Times also offers some great shots from the Olympic opening ceremonies.
• Retouchers at Fluid Effect present before & after samples of famous people. [Via] I’m always amazed that these folks permit their unretouched selves into the wild… See also the work of Glenn Feron, as well as Madonna before & after.
• Fine art photographer David Maisel explores geometry & color from the air. [Via]
  

Adobe’s own Julieanne Kost, globetrotting evangelist for Photoshop and Illustrator, has released her new book, Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking. PhotoshopNews features a nice overview; the O’Reilly site shows some before and after images; and in this sample chapter you can get a taste of how Julieanne uses her work to illustrate both the process of deciding what to do & the techniques for getting it done. Congrats, Julieanne!

Fans of jazz, photography, or both should check out Jazzlife, a lavish coffee table book that collects the 1959-60 work of William Claxton in nearly 700 large-format pages. The Taschen site lists this 17lb. bad boy for $200, but Amazon’s got it for $126. WNYC’s site features a brief slideshow from the book, though the scale of the book brings out the real power of the images.

Today’s NYT features photos and narration covering “The Snow Show,” a collaboration between artists and architects to build an all-snow installation in Sestriere, Italy, ahead of the Olympic Games. The accompanying article details some of the difficulties involved in the work (making me glad to stick with pixels). The project’s official site features some cool (d’oh) photos of the current work & previous installations, including a snow penal colony (who knew?).

Duct tape + a cardboard box + a cheap flatbed scanner = the surreal images of The Scanner Photography Project. Artist Michael Golembewski has combined a scanner with a large-format camera to produce a device that can mix still and moving elements into a single frame, producing some occasionally bizarre results. (Put that in your Lens Baby and smoke it.)
I especially like the molten vehicle shots, and the animation gallery shows how the camera makes a nice British bus ride resemble some kind of German Expressionist nightmare.
[Thanks to Adobe Edinburgh’s David Metzger for the link.]

Seeing work this lovely, I’m tempted to punt on photography & try converting my lenses into something more useful, like a Pringles can… [Via]

Well, you don’t see this every day: satuGO (“See Aim Throw captUre & GO”) aims to create a bouncable digital camera for “combining your love for bouncing balls and your obsession for taking pictures.” (Hmm… “It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!“) Sadly, the site doesn’t feature shots taken with the device, but I can’t help but be intrigued. As a kid I used to fool with my parents’ old 35mm, holding the shutter open while spinning a flashlight on a lazy susan. And with a fair number of people tossing cameras to produce interesting shots, maybe there’s a market for this after all. [Via]

• File Magazine bills itself as “A Collection of Unexpected Photography.” I like the high-speed photography gallery in particular, plus galleries from Holga & Lomo and Diana cameras.
• BLIR is “dedicated to promoting the work of emerging artists in the fields of painting, drawing, graphic design, illustration and photography.” The main page navigation design errs on the subtle side; the controls live under the little color bars by the logo.

I’ve often heard photographers discuss the ethics of altering a photo–debating, say, whether it’s acceptable to use Photoshop to remove a Coke can from a landscape shot. Had they noticed the can before taking the shot, of course, they’d have kicked it out of the frame. These heated discussions of the “purity” of the captured image strike me as a little sterile, especially when great pre-digital masters altered images freely.
So here’s a potentially meatier topic: Would you set up a great shot at the expense of personal injury to others? And to what end?
Photographer Liu Tao has been accused of lying in wait to capture shots of a man wiping out when his bike hit a submerged pothole. He defends himself by noting that his images embarrassed the government into fixing the pothole, and that without the change people would still be getting hurt. Photography can effect social change, but where’s the line between documentarian and participant, and how does one know when to cross it? [Via]

…or rather, a warm Compact Flash card. Score it Illinois winter 1, JNack 0. Short story: take care when shooting digitally in cold weather.
Longer story: On Friday my wife and I hiked around my snowy little hometown, filling a 1GB CF card via my Canon Rebel XT. The weather was brisk (maybe 35 degrees F) but sunny and not uncomfortable, and we captured plenty of images I’d love to have back. I kept the camera inside my jacket much of the time, and reviewing the shots in the field, everything seemed fine. Sadly, when I popped the card into my Mac, the photos were nowhere to be found. Bridge could display a few image fragments, but nothing usable transferred. The next day I reformatted the card in the camera and happily shot indoors for another couple hours; then things hit the wall. I got errors in the camera, and neither it nor the Mac could reformat the card. The card now resides in a trash can, and much of two days’ worth of shooting exists only in my memory.
I should note that I have no special expertise in this area, and I haven’t yet gotten to consult teammates who likely know a good deal more. The card itself claimed to be “unfazed by… arctic cold” (hmmm…); memory is generally supposed to work well in the cold; and it appears that Canon rates their cameras for shooting at freezing and above, so I thought I was in the clear. I might chalk this up to a fluke, but last Christmas I lost another batch of images taken in the same area (different card, different camera), so I suspect the technology is more fragile than we’d like to think.
In any event, it’s not a complete bust: I was able to salvage a few interesting shots of trains, real and imagined.

A number of media outlets have collected the best photojournalism of 2005 into Flash galleries:

• Reuters Pictures of the Year [Via]
• Time’s Best Photos of the Year
• MSNBC’s Year in Pictures [Via]

I wasn’t able to find a similar gallery from the New York Times [Update: The Times has posted its Year in Pictures], but a Google search turned up the NPPA giving the Times the nod for best use of the Web. Scroll to the bottom of the press release for links to numerous galleries, including those for the Newspaper Photographer of the Year.

The NY Times features an article on photographer Angelo Rizzuto and a slideshow of his images. From 1952 to 1966, Rizzuto left his apartment each day at 2pm to document the people and streets of New York, concluding every roll with a grim self-portrait. His work and troubled life are chronicled in the new book Angel’s World by Michael Lesy.

The Adobe Photographers Directory is now available in French, German and Spanish, in addition to the English version launched earlier this year. Visitors can search by location (20 countries and growing) and more than 40 photographic specialties. The directory is accessible directly from Bridge in the supported languages, and from Adobe.com.

An uncredited photographer for Getty Images captured an amazing shot following this morning’s explosion at a fuel depot in southeast England. See also a satellite image of the event. (I happened to be landing at Heathrow via a redeye flight & saw the enormous column of smoke off the right wingtip, luckily at a much greater distance.)

Today I was flipping through prints of a couple hundred shots I’d uploaded to Kodak via the Adobe Photoshop Services built into Bridge. I didn’t realize, though, that Kodak has been in the custom-photo-thing-you-can-mail business for some 100 years. The Morning News features an article about the “real photo postcards” craze (c.1907) brought about by the introduction of a preprinted card back that allowed postcards to be made directly from negatives. The accompanying gallery features some beautiful, ethereal images, and I like this weirdo’s sense of humor. [More background here and here.]

Solid: Slate Magazine now offers a daily feature showcasing the photojournalism of Magnum Photos. You can check out this introductory overview on the project, or jump directly to the images.

• Photographer Jan von Holleben brings a lush take to the shot-from-overhead perspective (also used by Robin Rhode) in his Dreams of Flying series.
  [via]

• NPR featured a story about collector Jack Naylor, who at age 87 is selling his more than 30,000 cameras, images, and other photography ephemera–and asking a cool $20 million. I haven’t found a good online resource about Naylor, but the NPR site features a small gallery of spy cameras and more.
• Seeing this, I wonder who’s going to bring the pigeon-with-camera idea into the digital age. Pigeon’s-eye-view is one thing, but I want to see it go airborne. Hmm, maybe someone at Make will take the challenge. (And if it really takes off, you know someone will create StuffOnMyPigeon.com).

The New York Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography ’05 features some dynamite recent work. My wife and I checked it out last Sunday following PhotoPlus East.
Robin Rhode brings a new spin to stop motion animations–literally. He sometimes works on vertical surfaces but other times rotates the scene 90 degrees, as in He Got Game (here’s a closer view of one frame) and Brick Flag.
We also enjoyed the work of Carlos Garaicoa, who explores structure, progress, and the lack thereof in his native Cuba. He combines 2D photography with extremely delicate 3D pin-and-thread overlays that outline the architectural vision, contrasted with what remains of it. For example, the uncompleted half of an abruptly halted circular apartment block hangs in space, carefully laid out in silver thread. I can’t find examples online (not that they’d do it justice, actually), so it’s well worth seeing in person.
Obligatory computer dork remark: These ethereal overlays struck me as uncannily similar to the grids one can create in Vanishing Point. And the process of drawing by combining pins and threads seemed like a literal interpretation of what people said about early vector-editing software.
One other bit: The Morning News has posted New York Changing, a gallery and interview with photographer Douglas Levere, who rephotographed Berenice Abbott’s pictures of 1930s New York. If you’re interested in the city, the site is well worth a look.

Wow. Leaf has announced new digital camera backs, the larger of which generates images of 6726 by 5040 pixels (that’s 33,899,040 total pixels for those playing at home). Each frame from this beast tips the scales at around 200MB.
Having come from the world of Web design, I was amazed at the size of files that get tossed around in Photoshop. Web designers are still debating whether requiring a 1024×768 monitor is okay, and in the mobile space that resolution must sound incredibly luxurious. Meanwhile, Photoshop CS raised max document dimensions to 300,000 x 300,000 pixels and the max document size to somewhere between 4 and 8 exabytes (!).
It’s a pleasure and a challenge to develop an application that can work smoothly across a huge range of image sizes. This diversity makes it hard to choose defaults that address all uses, so you may want to tune Photoshop (Mac/Win) to your needs.

Speaking of National Geographic, if you happen to be in the Bay Area next week, the Aurora Forum is presenting what looks to be an interesting panel discussion on documentary photography and democratic ideals. The panel includes photojournalist Chris Rainier, whom I was privileged to have assisted (a very small bit) in the launch of Cultures on the Edge.
And if you happen to be in LA this week or DC next, check out the film festival for All Roads, “a National Geographic initiative supporting films by and about indigenous groups and under-represented minority culture filmmakers.”

Just a little patting of our own backs: the Adobe Photographers Directory has won a WebAward. Congrats to the folks at Euro RSCG 4D and Adobe who’ve made it happen. Now that the directory is linked from Adobe Bridge, we hope that more photographers and designers, ad agencies, and other clients will find each other through it.

Editors Guild Magazine features an interesting article about the new movie “Corpse Bride” being shot with a digital SLR, the Canon EOS-1D Mark II. “[P]erhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.” [link via Rob Galbraith DPI]
This reminds me of the much lower budget but also clever “Between You and Me”, shot entirely with a Canon 20D. Dig the creative misuse of shiny technology.
[Update: On a related note, check out the stop motion used in the video for Sia’s haunting “Breathe.” A similar technique was used for Sam Bisbee’s “You Are Here.” [links via Kottke.org.]]

Editors Guild Magazine features an interesting article about the new movie “Corpse Bride” being shot with a digital SLR, the Canon EOS-1D Mark II. “[P]erhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.” [link via Rob Galbraith DPI]
This reminds me of the much lower budget but also clever “Between You and Me”, shot entirely with a Canon 20D. Dig the creative misuse of shiny technology.
[Update: On a related note, check out the stop motion used in the video for Sia’s haunting “Breathe.” A similar technique was used for Sam Bisbee’s “You Are Here.” [links via Kottke.org.]]