His ‘Nudes in Landscape’ series is also worth a look.

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Seal:

I think the more you take photographs, the more you kind of develop a feel for it. You get better at reading light or anticipating certain situations. It’s just a question of taking a lot of photographs and also experimenting with a lot of cameras and realizing what you don’t like.

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But here’s the point: Somewhere around Day One of Week Two, the clouds part. You’ll see a logic behind iPhoto that wasn’t immediately apparent and you’ll have forgiven those weird choices. From that day forward, until some company produces an even better photo editor or until the heat death of the universe, you’ll be working with an desktop-grade app with few limitations. Isn’t that better than an app that you completely figure out in five minutes and then completely outgrow in five weeks?

Andy took my words out of my mouth and wrote a better piece than I truly could about this pro-grade app from Cupertino.

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Now you can resume your true identity with The iPhone Shutter Grip! It’s an ergonomic grip that makes your iPhone feel just like an SLR (only smaller). It adds a photo and video button right where you’re used to having a shutter button.

The grip connects to the charging slot and hugs the sides of your iPhone for a secure hold. (It’ll even adjust to fit over your case!) Just like that, your iPhone is transformed into a hand-held camera.

And if you read carefully, you’ll also find this, somewhere on their page:

The iPhone Shutter Grip only works with the “Belkin LiveAction” Camera App.

I didn’t buy it when POPA was introduced. I’m not buying this one either.

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It was getting late in the day and I made a decision to push my portable dark room around the corner to see if I could shoot some homeless people that live in skid row. It was going to be a pretty big mission and I was not sure how the people that live on this street would react to me. All of a sudden this man in the photo walked up. I started talking with him and after 10 minutes I asked hi if he would shoot a photo with me.

Wisdom says shooting in the street requires discretion and mobility. Sometimes though, the opposite would surprise you.

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So, does it work? Yeah, sure, I guess. It has a tiny little sensor, so like any small sensor camera, pretty much everything is in focus pretty much all of the time anyway. If you actually want to see the power of refocusing at work, you essentially need to compose your shot with that in mind. You need to put a humming bird feeder a few inches from the lens, with San Francisco Bay at infinity in the background. Lytro talks about how this camera eliminates the need to worry about focus. But of course you want to take advantage of the cool thing that your camera can do, so you end up thinking more about focus when shooting with this camera, rather than less. It would be a different matter if shooting with the Lytro were like shooting with a 50mm f/1.2 on your Canon 5D Mark III, where your shot of that beautiful woman can be ruined because you focused on the tip of her nose, rather than her eye. Besides the fact that the Lytro can’t achieve a depth of field that shallow, it doesn’t have sufficient resolution to reveal missed focus that subtle. That’s not soft focus you’re seeing, that’s the maximum resolving power of the 1 megapixel image.

I had an inkling about this but it’s wrong to write anything about it without a test camera and images to proof the theory on my Lytro piece. I have never read anything from ‘Ben’ before, but this Lytro review piece is just great.

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Run it, and it’ll download all the photos from yuor instagram feed into the current directory, named with the upload date and title. It won’t re-download files that already exist, so you can safely run it nightly and just download new photos if you want to do that.

It does one thing: download your entire Instagram photo collection to your Mac.

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“… I found myself questioning the validity of my work and the purpose of the images I was seeking and making. What good would they do? How could I photograph this community in a different way to express another viewpoint and communicate a valuable new story?”

This same question should be asked, again and again, by every member of an editorial team, including, but not limited to the editors.

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645 PRO is the first and only iPhone camera app to give you RAW image data, a workflow essential for many professionals. Its JPEGs, too, are of a quality typically associated with high-end digital cameras, with the option to save truly “lossless” JPEGs.

And on his blog, Mike Hardaker, Jag.gr’s founder, wrote:

And that’s the kind of RAW data that 645 PRO supplies. Its nothing like as “uncooked” as the image data in a top-end RAW file. But it has never been through a JPEG compression stage, and goes through no in-app processing at all. It consists of the straight pixel data and that’s all. It’s then wrapped up as a TIFF image (with non-lossy compression) and saved. We did look at the option of using DNG files (Adobe’s open standard for RAW image files) but realised there was no practical benefit to doing so and a serious downside of bigger files that saved more slowly – not to mention far less application support.

No, it’s not a RAW file – to be honest, it’s unlikely that the small, relatively simple, image-sensing modules found in iPhones will ever be able to provide us that (although we’ll keep trying to push the limits of what an iPhone’s camera can do, so who knows?).

So which is it?

Making an app is hard, marketing them is even harder. It’s easy to claim something bold in order to get people’s attention, but saying something which is not true is just wrong.

The reason why Apple ships the iPhone without the complexity of a full-blown camera is because there’s no need for it. Anyone who needs a full-quality image will settle on a camera. The camera on the iPhone is designed to capture the best possible image at the easiest, fastest and most efficient way with their mobile image sensor, anything that defies that objective is just redundant.

On a side note, an app that requires a user manual — especially a 32-page PDF one — is never suppose to make it to the app store.

Introducing the EOS 1D C:

The camera, which Canon is aiming at the motion picture, television and high-resolution production industries, supports in-camera 4K (4096 x 2160) video recording with 4:2:2 colour sampling, “offering greater creative freedom for video professionals… [and] delivering outstanding video quality, advanced low light performance and film-like dynamic range” in a DSLR-sized body, it claims.

If it is what Canon says it is, and if the technology shall ever be passed down to Canon’s non-cinema EOS System; groundbreaking will be an understatement.

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Fascinating work of passion by a Memphis-born toy photographer Brian McCarty.

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Charles Bronson, before he was the Charles Bronson.

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Exquisite collection of vintage F1 photographs. And some more here.

(Uncredited photo, source: ivegotmytowel)

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What we do know is that we live in a world where a camera, far from being the shield for the press that it once was, is now often seen as a target in conflict situations. Rather than be safeguarded, we become the target. That creates a new world of unease and mystery for those working in places where just being a photographer puts you at risk. It requires an extra sense of self, and smarts, to be able to not only make the pictures, but safely get them, and oneself, out.

I have linked to David’s work a number of times here, but I rarely read his words. This one, a 2-part score by John Camp is not to be missed.

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Ten One Blog discovered the source of the noise (no, it’s not the sudden motion sensor) and found a permanent fix:

One of the connectors in this system touches the bottom plate right in the center where it flexes a lot. When the computer heats up, the metal pins in the connector scrape noisily against the cover and chassis. It makes you want to eat your hands.

By removing the connector (two easy screws!), you remove one of the grounding connections between the unibody enclosure and the bottom cover.

I chose not to remove the connector but to stick an electrical tape on the back of the bottom case where the connector touches, which seems to have fixed the problem.

Jump to the linked post for some pictures and more details.

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From usability perspective, progressive is usually good, because the user gets feedback that something is going on. Also if you’re on a slow connection, progressive JPEG is preferable because you don’t need to wait for the whole image to arrive in order to get an idea if it is what you wanted. If not, you can click away from the page or hit the back button, without waiting for the (potentially large) high quality image.

Bottomline: Progressive JPEG is the ticket to flawlessly serve retina-quality photos for the new iPad today.

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Today is that day. Have a glorious Nyepi, my dear Balinese friends.

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The problem began when the web goes mobile.

And as mobile screen resolution goes higher web workers have tried to find a good solution to handle designs on different screen resolutions in a smart way.

For the lack of a better term, someone coined the term ‘Responsive Web Design’.

Then there’s another problem: How to properly scale images for different resolution? The puzzle continues and the term stuck. ‘Responsive images’ became the topic in coffee shops and breakfast meets.

As Jason Grigsby explains nicely there’s actually no good solution but several pragmatic techniques to patch this world-wide gap.

But then the new iPad came out.

iPad’s gorgeous retina display is one giant beast. At 264ppi, its 2048 * 1536 screen resolution is hungry for pixels. Wait, isn’t that the density of full-size images? No, not exactly, but close.

While photographer Duncan Davidson was attempting to future-proof his websites, he came across an interesting problem:

Relatively small high-resolution images—such as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball logo—work great. But 2000-pixel wide photographs failed miserably and ended up looking worse than the 1000-pixel wide images they were replacing in my test pages. Much worse, in fact.

[…]

Bottom line, however, is that there’s a limit to serving up web images in JPG format with WebKit the new iPad and the limit kicks in when you approach screen-filling resolutions.

His post is a good home base for your research in this topic, which includes the two links above on responsive imgs. Interestingly, there’s another article by Jason Grigsby detailing how Apple solves their problem. I also found an active discussion on Apple Support Communities that discusses image size and how it relates to the web on retina displays.

Now that I’ve done some reading, I got some homework to do.

Fascinating two-part film on the early days of Shanghai, when they were still encouraged to have ‘no more than two children.”

Three billion population and forty years later, it’s economically impractical two have a second child. (via China Stories)

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The download size is massive: 984 MB for Mac, and 1.7 GB for Windows. I’m curious as per why the Mac version is only half the size of the Windows download.

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While we’re in this topic, iPhoto is now in the hands of one million unique users.

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I have been silently wishing that this day will come.

While I love Instagram as an app/service, I don’t use the camera function much. Hipstamatic is my go-to app when it comes to capturing photos; for its speed, stability, but mostly its spontaneous nature.

What I’d do — much later — is to post my pick to instagram (user: @w1ll) and (optionally) fed to either Tumblr, Twitter or Facebook. I’m still using the 3GS, so it isn’t the most effective use of my time waiting, it’s slow but it beats posting the photo individually to each network.

The good news is Hipstamatic had meticulously redesigned its sharing interface and baked Instagram’s API right in, so not only you can post photos directly from it, but you’ll properly get Hipstamatic-specific tagging in a nicely designed interface in its own Hipstamatic-style.

It’s just great that when two potentially competing parties can shake hands and make the world a better place for their users.

On an interview about the partnership, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom reveals that there will be more apps to have such support built-in. I’d be thrilled to see such integration with iPhoto, or better yet, iOS, the same treatment as Vimeo had.

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Four years since Martin Scorsese left the project, this poignant documentary on the life and the legacy of Bob Marley is seeing the light of day. If you have seen The Last King of Scotland and the gripping 2010 documentary, Senna, you’d probably have an idea what kind of cinematic experience he’s showing us this time.

Also see: David Burnett’s Soul Rebel

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Steve House shows the world what he can do while photographer Tyler Stableford shows the world how the new EOS 1DX & the Speedlite 600EX-RT see differently. BTS video here.

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The Speedlite 600EX-RT represents the next generation in wireless flash systems. In addition to traditional optical wireless transmission, the Speedlite 600EX-RT facilitates radio controlled, two-way wireless transmission up to 98.4 feet, among up to 5 groups with a total of 15 individual Speedlites. Communicating on 2.4 GHz frequencies, the Speedlite 600EX-RT does not have the same directional limitations of traditional wireless optical transmitters. Where other wireless signals can be interrupted by physical obstacles, radio controlled systems excel. 15 transmission channels are available, selectable manually or automatically, and radio transmission IDs can be set to prevent misfiring in the event of signal interference on the same channel.

Canon’s Speedlite line was in dire need of a revamp. The IR-based wireless solution doesn’t work well outdoor and controlling them requires a rocket science degree. This looks like a viable answer to the users’ cry for help.

Syl Arena, the author of Speedliter’s Handbook, wrote a wish list and have it revisited after trying out the new toy.

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It is very likely that Apple has recycled the 5 Mp back illuminated CMOS image sensor from the iPhone 4. [sic] That unit was the Omnivision OV5650. The OV5650 is the second generation back illumination (BSI) technology from OmniVision. This 5 Mp camera features 1.75 µm pixels, and is designed to deliver DSC quality in a mobile phone application.

Follow the link for close-up photos and die image for the object(s) in question. (via iFixit)

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The iPhone has changed the rule of the game, uplift the whole thing alto­gether and turn the game into some mature play, they move the indus­try with real inven­tions, they put some smiles in a lot of people’s faces. The bro­ken voice­mail? Fixed. The unnec­es­sary but­tons & clumsy inter­face? Changed for­ever. Technology that we can touch? Done. Copy & Paste? Piece of cake! And not to men­tion how mil­lions of devel­op­ers joined up the ride and develop 3-rd party Apps, help­ing the wheel of inno­va­tion move faster.

[…]

The truth is, the race is not going away. New prod­ucts intro­duced by Nikon will soon get a respond from Canon, while oth­ers will fol­low, this will hap­pen again next year, and the year after that. The cycle that moves the indus­try are being dri­ven by mar­ket demand & com­pe­ti­tion, no longer by pure sci­ence. Hopefully, some­one will make the effort to bring inno­va­tion back to that cycle; fresh ideas on the world wide web and how the images came to life will cer­tainly bring new par­a­digms in the com­ing year, some new play­ers will emerge and are already doing cre­ative things on the mar­ket­ing side for their upcom­ing sur­prises, one could only hope that they do some­thing right this time.

So yeah. I agree with Jean-Louis Gassée, and I like his closing line.

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The proper place for ethics and codes is in ensuring that a reasonable number of people go to the source instead of just reading your rehash.

Codifying “via” links with confusing symbols is solving the wrong problem.

He’s debating against Maria Popova’s creation of the Curator’s code, where she suggests the following:

The Curator’s Code will use a symbol resembling a sideways S to express that a piece of content came directly from another source, and a different figure — a curved arrowlike symbol — to signal what is commonly known as a “hat tip,” or nod to a source that inspired a further thought. The Curator’s Code supplies the appropriate symbol and then the blogger or writer simply puts in a hyperlink behind it as they normally would.

Beside hybrid articles-and-links posts, I do a third kind of post here at the Journal: a portfolio/image gallery link — like this one, in which three (or more) layers of attributions are enforced:

1. Present the image at the highest possible quality with the least amount of distraction, and avoid wording the post at all cost. For some gallery/portfolio which has some unique or less obvious appeal, I word them as little as possible.

2. The ‘alt’ HTML tag must be filled with the caption of the original image (when available), or a brief description of the content. (For the observant ones, I also name the files with the name of the shooter and I host them on my own server to handle the bandwidth cost.)

3. Always display the © copyright information immediately at the bottom of the image to ensure proper recognition. Include a link to the photographer’s main portfolio homepage when available.

Behind this page is an RSS publishing engine where I codify my posts accordingly (you see different post styling here). Since I post more links than original articles, only the full-length article posts are codified (¶) in the RSS, rendering links as regular posts with the link to the external page embedded directly at the title field. Hat tip to DF and Tumblr.

Wonderful things must be shared, and sharing such greatness is wonderful. But selflessly sharing with proper recognition and attribution to its creator is simply divine.

It’s not just sharp; the display also shows great bright colors without any saturation-gimmickry like you get with OLED displays. Photographs look amazingly good, but also amazingly true-to-life. It’s no coincidence that iPhoto was chosen as the app to demo on stage and debut alongside the device. Photos don’t just look sharp when zoomed out — they look sharp when zoomed in. The iPhone 4/4S can show print-quality photos at small sizes, but the new iPad can show print quality photos at hang-it-on-the-wall sizes.

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Any product, not just camera, must be usable the first time a not-so-curious soul picked it up. Most of us today struggle even just to turn on many of today’s digital camera.

The linked video depicts a first time user uses a Mac OS X desktop computer, but I would love to see one where somebody who never used a camera before attempts to capture their first ever photograph with the most popular point-and-shoot, or even a digital SLR camera.

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It’s hard to be minimalistic and a Jack of all trade all at once. iPhoto for iOS has some never-before-seen editing features & UI conventions packed into a palm-to-tablet sized real estate. Clever the design is, not every function can be translated into visible UI metaphors, new elements must be introduced, and iPhoto has plenty of them.

The most impressive but less obvious feature is the double-tap-to-compare-similar-images. There’s the swipe-across to view the thumbnail grid, and the undocumented two-finger tap-and-hold loupe mode.

Then there’s the advanced white balance adjustment.

This marks the first time that I actually need to read the documentation to use an iOS app.

You can resort to the help pages, but you don’t wanna miss reading his post to learn some hidden tricks.

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… what improvements has Canon made to the CMOS image sensor itself relative to the 5D Mark II?

Three main areas of image quality-related improvement on the EOS 5D Mark III image sensor compared to the EOS 5D Mark II are:

· Gapless Microlenses: This feature increases the amount of light received by each photodiode compared to the gapped microlenses used on the 5D Mark II’s image sensor.

· New Photodiode Structure: The photoelectric conversion rate of each photodiode has been improved.

· On-Chip Noise Reduction: Canon’s proprietary technology in this area, which was first shown on the EOS D30 Digital SLR in the year 2000, has steadily improved over the years.

(via CR)

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1. Pick the original .ipa app file on finder to tag the app(s) for installation.
2. After plugging in the device, go to the Applications tab and look for iPhoto, click install.
3. Wait for it and behold.

I wonder if Apple specifically limits the iPhoto only to run on newer devices just to encourage users to upgrade. The app — though a little sluggish on larger files — works just fine.

Windows version.

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Apple is proud to announce the promotion of Randy Ubillos to the level of Distinguished Engineer, Scientist or Technologist (DEST). DEST is a job classification equal to that of director-level manager. This fosters a career path for our exemplary engineering employees that concentrates on technology rather than management.

Fast forward to today:

© Apple

Those who follow Apple events in the last couple of years will recall that Randy was the showman for the iMovie ’11 and Final Cut Pro X that he and his team put together. He was always the video guy. Any photo-related demo was either done by Steve Jobs or Scott Forstall, then Apple’s Mac Software Chief. At the new iPad announcement held earlier this week, he took the spotlight for a groundbreaking new photo app for iOS with a little addition to his job title.

Since Tim Cook took over as CEO, there has been a few changes both in the positions and the official titles of Apple’s Senior Management team. Eddy Cue became SVP of Internet Software & Services, Forstall became SVP of iOS Software, and Ubillos is now known as the Chief Architect of Photo & Video Applications.

What does this mean?

No official announcement was given by Apple and unlikely there will be any. But if Ubillos’s new title suggests is that the Aperture team is now under his wings.

As the father of Final Cut Pro, Randy was bold enough to reboot a very successful app that he pioneered, and even it did not win him many new friends, Apple is still at his back patiently working with the community in rebuilding the next generation of video editing powerhouse.

And if the iPhoto demo can reveal, is that there is a lot that can be done on the photography space too. The iPad is bringing a whole new possibilities of immersive editing environment previously only possible in the darkroom. With our eyes and hearts opened up by this new revelation, desktop photo editing can also adapt these new tricks to enrich the experience without making the software more complex.

I don’t know what Apple is cooking for the next version(s) of Aperture, nor I want to guess. But if Adobe’s Photoshop Touch can make Photoshop for the desktop looks like an old fat beast, I can only imagine what Aperture on the iPad would be like, if it ever sees the light of the day.

This is how every photo app should work: without getting in our way.

Bonus points for Journal and Photo Beaming.

Update: Federico Viticci has posted a review.

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Never gamble in someone else’s game, as in Las Vegas. The house always wins long-term. Gamble in your own game.

Borrowing from business 101, the piece is substantial with good advices about being bold to take risks, but the sentence above seems to worth a different article of its own.

He uses the gambling analogy to argue his points on taking risks but he also uses them to exemplify how to take a winning photograph, which often is less about gambling, but rather smart choices.

My best photos were captured when I am being smart, when my impulses were at the lowest and my intuitions were high. His both examples seem to have represent this argument; he felt that something was up for grabs, and he went for it.

Anything I capture with high risks — that which usually involves sticking my upper body part out, unharnessed from a high point, or angry security dudes — produces impressive images, but never my best work. (via @pschiller.)

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The Lytro has some drawbacks — and not inconsiderable ones. For starters, you can’t share photos while on the go. If you were to tear a Lytro apart, you’d see a dormant Wi-Fi chip inside, so clearly there’s going to be an evolution with some wireless capability. But for now, what happens on a Lytro stays on a Lytro, until you plug it into your computer.

And while refocusing is its own interesting tool, that’s the only tool you have at this point — adding a filter or importing the image into Photoshop remains impossible.

Lytro is a breakthrough in photographic achievement, but it doesn’t serve an actual need in consumer photography. By allowing us to focus or refocus after the fact, it creates a problem. Requiring a computer running its proprietary software for casual photography is a giant roadblock in photographic simplicity.

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Available now for $80 upgrade or $150 full license.

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Yours Truly, back in October 2009 after the announcement of Nikon D3S:

Some rumor has been going on for weeks in Cameraland. A little bird has been singing the Canon-is-working-on-something-big: a pro-level camera, (I say some new flash toys too — hint: it’s not infrared) and as the 7D has spelled, its design iteration shall find its way in the future EOS camera models. That was when the rumors of the new 5D began to make its rounds. The 5D Mark II was no EOS 3, but looks like we have got ourself a winner this time.

Andy Westlake & Richard Butler:

We’ve not really had our hands on a 5D Mark III long enough to do much more than scratch the surface of what it can do, but first impressions are extremely positive. It addresses the Mark II’s most glaring weakness — its distinctly unimpressive autofocus system — in what on paper is the most comprehensive fashion possible, while adding an array of interface tweaks and improvements as well. It’s at least as much of an improvement over its predecessor as the EOS 7D was over the 50D. Of course the elephant in the room is the question of resolution; will the 5D Mark III’s 22MP offer enough in comparison to the Nikon D800’s 36MP to prevent users switching brands? Canon appears to be confident that its users don’t really need extra pixels anymore, and indeed don’t want to put up with the processing and storage demands that come with them. It will be interesting to see whether that confidence is justified once the two cameras hit the shops — and we can’t wait to get them into our studio to put them head-to-head in testing.

Vincent Laforet, internet-appointed HDSLR filmmaking ambassador:

For still photographers — the higher motor drive FPS are welcome — as well as a much needed and far superior AF system. This AF system is LIGHTYEARS ahead of the 5D MKII when you consider that the MKII had the SAME AF sensor as the original 5D (meaning it’s almost 8 years old!) And one notable key still feature which could be HUGE (finally they added this feature!!!) The EOS 5D Mark III camera features a built-in HDR mode, merging three images at various exposure levels into a single image, in-camera, This would be my camera of choice to travel the world as a still photographer.

I skipped both the 5Ds for two reasons that beat their selling point: half-baked auto-focusing system and less than 100% viewfinder coverage regardless of their gorgeous full-frame sensors. The Mark III seems to have taken care of these two main issues.

A more subtle observation by Jeff Ascough, Canon’s ambassador for no-flash photography:

The viewfinder is a world away from the 5D Mark II. Now we have 100% coverage which does make a huge difference. It is glorious to use, with a lovely bright image and even with spectacles I found it easy to see all the edges of the frame. The eye relief is just about right. The AF points are projected onto the focusing screen like the 7D and 1DX but it does mean that you can’t change focusing screens like the earlier models. The eyepiece is slightly deeper and very comfortable but the dioptre correction wheel still protrudes from behind the eyepiece and will have to be taped up especially as I carry my cameras with the lenses hanging down, which causes the top of the camera to rub against my clothes. I would have loved to have seen the dioptre correction wheel put behind the eyepiece like the 1DX.

The Verge shares these bits from a tech writer’s point of view:

The 5D Mark III, on the other hand, feels like Canon pulled as many features as it possibly could from the new 1D X (including its autofocus system, video codecs, and processor) and fit them into a camera that is significantly less expensive. Compromises were made, particularly in the ISO range, shooting speed, and weatherproofing, but the new autofocus system and 6FPS shooting mode means that this camera’s target audience just expanded significantly. It’s no longer a camera best suited to studio work.

Planet5d has a couple of interesting details:

The new sensor is completely re-designed with gapless microlenses — brings in more light as compared to previous sensors with gaps between the diodes. The new photo diode structure which provides better quantum efficiency. Plus there’s better on chip noise reduction. These 3 things mean there will be a cleaner signal coming off the sensor before it even goes to the processor.

… (as suspected, new design first seen on the 7D have found their way on the Mark III):

• The power switch is below the mode dial like the 7D.
• The mode dial has a locking button * The multi-function button has been added by the shutter trigger
• The live view switch is to the right of the viewfinder (thank goodness it isn’t on the mode dial!)
• The Q button has been added to control the LCD screen. * Touch pad like the Canon EOS-1D X — touch the dial to change ISO, audio level, shutter speed, aperture etc. While recording video.
• Creative photo button — centralizes creative menus for picture style, HDR, and multi-exposure mode.
• The rating button — can rate images while reviewing and give 1–5 stars. Note the data flows thru to Adobe and Apple software (1 to 5 stars)

Here’s the official press release from Canon and sample images & movies, and to top it off, T.O.P has some insightful commentaries. Whatever the future may hold, right now Canon has some winners down its sleeve. The megapixel race is over and with the 1DX and 5D Mark III, Canon signals a path that would make our photographical journey for the next decade brighter.

If not for the new camera, perhaps their new lighting toys would be a delight.

We, imag­ing professionals/shutterbugs, are in dire need of a magic bul­let that can sim­plify our imag­ing work­flow, and that you-know-what by the you-know-who device has been proven to be the magic pis­tol by its grow­ing num­bers of accep­tance, as well as its lim­ited num­ber of sup­plies, and yet, the magic bul­let app — you know the one that does: photo review, approval/rejection, rat­ing, anno­ta­tion, gen­er­ates con­tact sheet, send PDF to recip­i­ents (sim­ple review web­site export don’t hurt), sync catalog/selection to the (we des­per­ately hope) soon-to-be-announced app & its desk­top client… most impor­tantly one that is sim­ple and doesn’t suck and doesn’t crash in front of jaw-dropped-by-our-magic-bullet-app clients — is nowhere to be found.

Apple is expected to launch a retina display-equipped iPad 3 this week, and John Gruber toyed with the idea that Apple would be demoing said photography app at the launch event. The question is what kind of app would they launch.

Neven Mrgan made an intriguing analysis on the heart of the matter and argued that the larger consumer/prosumer would be a more profitable endeavor for this purpose, thus suggesting that an iPhoto would be a better product to serve such purpose.

As hard as it is to argue, it’s even more difficult to accept the fact that professional photography is a high-resources, low-margin endeavor, one that is difficult to do and requires a high degree of patience and persistence that only exists on the minority side of our market. Companies like Apple knows this fact. That’s why iPhoto gets the spotlight but not Aperture, the same way iMovie overshadowed Final Cut Pro (or X).

But such simplification could also signal a new paradigm in the professional photo-editing space: why do we need Aperture if an iPhoto can do the job? Why not make things simpler? A tablet device has its own constrain that could make or break a process, and bringing desktop-driven workflow to touch would be madness without simplifying them. But such simplification does not mean limiting what an app can do. I found using GarageBand for iPad to be more intuitive and fluid than using GarageBand on my mac, and this experience can easily be replicated for iPhoto on the iPad too.

What iPhoto lacks that Aperture has is its advanced adjustment tools. Think Snapseed and its touch-pinch-slide editing metaphor, coupled with the simplicity of iOS’ built-in photo browser. GarageBand-like instrument choices for adjustment presets, and of course, easy adjustment tools from iPhoto, combined with some of Aperture’s pro-level imaging engine & photo book authoring tools.

Simply, it would be great to have something fun and intuitive like what Apple did to music with GarageBand on iPad. Aperture-like adjustments on an iPhoto-like functionality on the iPad would be a dream come true for most of us.

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A great food photographer makes the viewer want to reach into the magazine—or computer screen, or tablet—and take a bite of whatever the chef is making.

It helps to overexpose a little to make food looks tasty, and shooting it with a perspective that people are familiar with. If you’re camera has a macro function, shooting details often gives the viewer a better idea about the texture of the food hence making it more desirable. Shoot wisely.

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[…] They create markets for their work through persistence, rather than letting the market dictate what they do. They seek out advice, take criticism on-board, and learn all they can from teachers, mentors and peers, with whom they collaborate openly. They value their relationships with their clients, and they are a delight to work with.

Yupe.

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This is a strange app.

The basic gist is that it wants to help you deal with photographs, one that has multiple frames of a single shot, so it caters to a very specific need of a user: a photographer who often shoots with burst mode, i.e. sports, runway; paparazzi’s, simply those who loves pressing the shutter button.

My quick run suggests that the detection engine is solid, it did not crash and it runs pretty fast on my MacBook Pro. The workflow, heavily relying on your clicks, does not seem to represent well what the app is capable of, e.g. clicking an image opens it in preview, putting a photo into a box doesn’t proceed to the next pair of photos, and pressing tab or the arrow keys does not do anything too — not so great if you’re dealing with hundreds of photos.

But it’s got potential. $10 on the Mac App Store, and there’s a demo avaiable. so go try it out and see if it’s for your.

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