© Hans Gedda

© Regis Bolieau

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

A $200 beast by Schneider Optics, or a clev­erly designed $70 Olloclip for your iPhone 4/4S?

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)

© Pablo Corral Vega for National Geographic

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.

Panoramic stitch­ing apps are com­plex, not so user friendly and it often fails to meet our expec­ta­tion. Keith Cooper of Northlight Images takes a look at the lat­est iter­a­tion of Kolor’s Autopano and touted it as one of the few apps that ‘just works’:

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.

gfx­Card­Sta­tus is a lit­tle menu bar applet for dual-GPU MacBook Pros that indi­cates which graphic mode is in use. But mainly, it allows you to instantly tog­gle between the two modes on the fly, or auto­mat­i­cally, based on app depen­den­cies, or power source.

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

Priceless, and free. (via TidBits)

Rob Galbraith:

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.

© Park in Style

An exquis­itely detailed lens mod/paintwork done by Park — look at how he intri­cately mimic Canon’s sig­na­ture tex­ture for its higher-end metal-based lens bar­rel on a cus­tom piece of plas­tic. The orig­i­nal post is writ­ten in Korean, but his pho­tographs should speak louder than words. Here’s the link if you want to read it in English. (via Petapixel, Daniel)