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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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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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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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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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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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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Bold images from the top of the world by a French-born photographer Regis Bolieau. (Flash needed, via abbarentbeauty)

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Photojojo has some too — simply called ‘cell phone lenses’, and here’s a thread on Flickr forum discussing this very topic.

Personally, I like the Olloclip, simple & small. But I mind the extra possession.

Pushing image quality with the iPhone is like putting a Ferrari engine in a Honda Civic: expensive & unnecessary. (via TBR)

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It takes two to tango, but one shot is what it takes to capture the essence of it.

The photo is part of a feature for the March 2012 issue of National Geographic, and here’s Pablo’s note from the field where he interviewed a man who makes tango shoes:

One of my best interviews was with Alberto Corona, a man who makes tango shoes. I wasn’t expecting the depth of passion he brought to this. It was his life. He told me, “If you let a shoe drop to the floor, it has to fall on its feet, as it were. If it tips over, it’s not properly balanced. And then it’s very important to check it on a flat surface; you should be able to fit a pencil just below the tip, so that you can shift the weight to the metatarsal arch as you step.“

Exquisite.

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Whilst, from my previous engineering and scientific background, I have a knowledge of much of the maths and processing behind what’s going on, I was really pleased that I didn’t need to know any of this stuff to actually use the software. At no time was I presented with a form or dialog box full of meaningless numbers and asked to set some parameter that meant nothing to me. The details are there in the background if I want to delve and experiment, but the whole point is that I didn’t have to know this stuff to start with.

I have tried Autopano since the earlier versions but still doesn’t find it intuitive enough, however, the latest 64-bit-friendly version of the app sees some major interface & engineering improvements, so much that I began to consider putting my money on it, even though it is far from, well, simple.

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And here’s a tip to change the icon for MacBook Pros with AMD GPUs.

Priceless, and free. (via TidBits)

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I’ve been using early iterations of the software for months, and recently have switched to using only it for RAW conversion duties, so crisp and natural are the pictures it produces.

He’s talking about a new app that is currently in-development by PictureCode, developer of Noise Ninja. Unprecedented, is his one-word-description of the app, and Jim Christian, the founder of PictureCode, broke the silence via a post in Pro Digital Talk Forum, in response to PictureCode’s years-long hiatus and its lack of updates:

For some time now, we have been quietly developing a powerful, differentiated raw converter that emphasizes image quality. We have been beta testing it for several months, and early users have told us that the image quality is indeed unprecedented. Not only is the noise reduction a significant improvement over Noise Ninja, but there are a half-dozen other algorithms that are arguably best in class, and everything is seamlessly integrated into a streamlined, coherent workflow. It will interoperate with other platforms like Photo Mechanic, Lightroom, and Photoshop. (And yes, it is 64-bit/multi-core.) We are trying to lock down the feature set in the next couple of weeks and then start the process of final testing and preparation for release. Assuming things go smoothly (and they don’t always, but I am cautiously optimistic based on how things have been going lately) I am hoping to give the go-ahead for a major reviewer to start publishing details within the next 30 days or so, with release to follow shortly afterward. It took much longer to develop than I expected. Not only were there significant technical hurdles to overcome to achieve the level of quality and performance that we wanted, but there were some nontrivial random events and distractions that slowed down the development effort. And, frankly, it’s just a hugely complex and difficult task — easily an order of magnitude more involved than a product like Noise Ninja.

I suspected early on that they are working on something, and I’m glad to hear Rob’s nod of approval on it, but I got to give it a run before I say something about it.

RAW development means business, and the market’s full of them. From the manufacturer’s door, the big boys like Adobe or Apple, even newer apps like Snapseed or Flare who are not really RAW development apps, but seem to have been able to earn some trust in a photographer’s workflow.

Competition is good, and I’d like to keep a closer look on how this one turns out.

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