Thursday, February 25, 2010
The future of digital camera?
Very interesting article in Wired about the new mirrorless, large sensor cameras that are hitting the market. The Sigma camera illustrated in the article is especially interesting because you can use an adapter to mount pretty much any brand of lens on it, including lenses for 35 mm. film cameras (which can be found cheap in any used camera store). I would love to have the F2 28 mm. Vivitar lens or the 50 mm. F1.4 that I used back when I was seriously into photography. That 50 mm. lens with a camera that can get usable pictures at 3200 ISO would be really fun to use.
Labels: photography
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Nothing is real
Watching special effects production reels is always interesting, and especially now with the really advanced digital technology available to TV and film directors. The phrase "nothing is real" crops up in more than one Beatles song, but I doubt that they were thinking of the type of visual fakery shown in this Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot reel. It is truly mind blowing.
Labels: movies and television, photography, SF, video
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
All about ISO and why it matters
Gizmodo has published an article explaining the concept of ISO (what used to be known as film speed, back in the analog days). Recently, digital cameras have started to work at higher and higher ISO levels, up to above 100,000 in some cases - a number that boggles the mind of anyone who grew up pushing Tri-X to 1600 ISO for low-light shooting. In practical terms, what this means is that you'll be able to shoot pictures in light so low that you probably won't be able to see colours, and yet you'll still get a decent shot.
The article also explains, simply and clearly, the different types of cameras and camera sensors now in use. If you're into photography, this is worth reading.
The article also explains, simply and clearly, the different types of cameras and camera sensors now in use. If you're into photography, this is worth reading.
Labels: photography
Monday, January 18, 2010
Advice on upgrading your digital camera
In a previous life, I worked in a camera store and got quite seriously into photography as a hobby. I wish that I had access then to some of the equipment and techniques that we now take for granted - I remember spending $40 and an entire evening making four Cibachrome colour prints with a friend who had a darkroom. Now a colour print might cost a dollar, allowing for ink consumption and the cost of high-quality paper. And it takes minutes instead an hour messing with noxious chemicals.
My own digital camera is a three-year-old Fuji, 5 MP with a 3x zoom. It was a decent enough camera when I bought it, but digital camera technology has zoomed ahead and $300 now will buy a far more sophisticated and better quality camera. I've been thinking of upgrading to a better camera and have been trying to make up my mind between a compact camera similar to the Fuji I have now, a super-zoom like the Canon SX20, or a low-end SLR like the Nikon D-40 or D-60. At this point, I'm inclined to the superzoom type of camera, because as much as I'd like an SLR, I'd have to spend well over $1,000 to get the quality and features I'd really like.
Freedom to Tinker has a good article that summarizes some of the things you might consider if you're thinking about getting a new digital camera. It does a reasonably good job of outlining the benefits of the different types of cameras and the compromises you might have to make. About the only issue that I would take with it, is that the superzoom category is given short shrift. But allowing for that, the advice he gives is pretty solid.
My own digital camera is a three-year-old Fuji, 5 MP with a 3x zoom. It was a decent enough camera when I bought it, but digital camera technology has zoomed ahead and $300 now will buy a far more sophisticated and better quality camera. I've been thinking of upgrading to a better camera and have been trying to make up my mind between a compact camera similar to the Fuji I have now, a super-zoom like the Canon SX20, or a low-end SLR like the Nikon D-40 or D-60. At this point, I'm inclined to the superzoom type of camera, because as much as I'd like an SLR, I'd have to spend well over $1,000 to get the quality and features I'd really like.
Freedom to Tinker has a good article that summarizes some of the things you might consider if you're thinking about getting a new digital camera. It does a reasonably good job of outlining the benefits of the different types of cameras and the compromises you might have to make. About the only issue that I would take with it, is that the superzoom category is given short shrift. But allowing for that, the advice he gives is pretty solid.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A Prague winter's night
Here's a drop-dead gorgeous video of a winter's night in Prague, shot with a pre-production Canon 1D SLR. It's shot in black and white, and it's hard to believe that it wasn't shot with a full-scale professional movie camera. It's also a very nice piece of film making and will definitely put you in the mood for Christmas.
Labels: photography, places, video
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
60 stunning satellite photos of the Earth
Here'a collection of 60 beautiful satellite images of the Earth. Each comes with a brief caption explaining the picture. These would make great wallpaper, if I didn't have a widescreen monitor.
Labels: photography, space
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Hubble's greatest hits
The excellent digital site, CoolVibe has put together a collection of 100 of the best images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Looking at these really inspires a feeling of awe at the beauty and variety of the universe.
Labels: photography, space
Saturday, December 19, 2009
2009 and the decade in pictures
The Big Picture blog has put together another excellent photo compilition - this a three part set of 2009 in pictures. 1 2 3
They also have a compilation of the decade in news photos. It was a tumultuous ten years and the pictures reflect that.
They also have a compilation of the decade in news photos. It was a tumultuous ten years and the pictures reflect that.
Labels: history, news, photography
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Hubble Advent calendar
It's that season again, and the fine folks at the Big Picture blog have a neat treat for us - a Hubble Space Telescope Advent calendar. Each day between now and Christmas, they'll add a new Hubble image to the page. And since it's the Big Picture blog, you'll get a big picture - not one of those dinky thumbnails that you have to squint to see. If the first picture is any indication, it should be glorious.
Labels: photography, science, space
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Large Hadron Collider up close
The Big Picture blog has a very impressive photo essay on the Large Hadron Collider, which resumed testing this week after a series of major problems. This is the world's largest machine, and probably the most complex -- if you doubt that just look at the pictures.
Labels: photography, science, technology
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Earth
This is one of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. I just wish I could see it with my own eyes.
This unique perspective of Earth was taken by the OSIRIS narrow-angle camera on board Rosetta, from 393,327 miles (633,000 kilometers) on 12 November 2009 at 13:28 CET. The image—which form by three exposures under orange, green, and blue filters—shows the South Pole at a resolution of 12 kilometer per pixel.
Rosetta is coming back home for the last time, to take the impulse necessary to reach the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. When it reaches it in 2014, Rosetta will first study the comment flying alongside, then it will attempt to set its mechanic feet on it. For that it will use the Philae lander that it carries along its decade-long trip around the Solar System.
Labels: photography, space
Saturday, October 24, 2009
PIctures of pollution in China
Chinese photographer won this year's ugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography for his documentary project “Pollution in China.” The pictures are stunning, both for their photographic and artistic quality, which is very high, but also for the subject matter, which shows just how far Chinese industry (and presumably the government, in collusion) will go in raping the environment in the name of the economy. Think of these, and the poor affected people many of them show, the next time you shop at Wal-Mart or your local big-box retailer, and by something with a "Made in China" label because it's cheap.
Labels: economics and finance, environment, photography, places
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Canon DSLR does incredible low-light video
The big trend in digital cameras now seems to be shooting video and low light photography. Canon's new ID Mark IV SLR does both and incredibly well, as the embedded video in this Gizmodo post shows. Now, admittedly, it was shot with pro rigs - tracking dollys, Steadicams, and the like. But the camera was the Canon shooting 1080p video entirely by available light. Amazing. I guess at $5K, it should be.
Labels: If I had a million dollars, photography, video
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Some more amazing Saturn pictures
The Cassini space probe continues to send back amazing pictures of Saturn, its ring system, and moons. The Big Picture Blog has some of the latest. The ones of the small moons causing perturbations in the rings are truly incredible.
Labels: photography, space
Friday, October 16, 2009
World Press Photo 2009 contest
Every year, the World Press Photo Foundation has an exhibition of the best news and scientific photography of the year. The exhibition is current on display at the Galleria in Brookfield Place (formerly BCE place) in downtown Toronto and it's well worth a visit. You can view the photos online, but it won't have the impact of seeing the full-size (some are 20" x 30" or more) prints. As always, the photos of war and disaster have the most impact, but there are many quieter scenes and strikingly beautiful portraits.
Labels: news, photography
Sunday, September 27, 2009
LIFE and Google do it right
Time Warner Inc. has partnered with Google Books to make the entire print run of LIFE magazine from 1936 to 1972 available online. And they've done it right.
Younger readers (say those of you born after 1970), probably don't realize why this is a big deal. LIFE was an important magazine - a large format weekly that was known for its in-depth photojournalism. It had the budget to cover big stories in a big way, and the large format let them produce some stunning layouts. And it wasn't just all pretty pictures - look at some of their coverage of the Viet Nam war, for example, or their coverage of the space program.
All issues from 1936 tp 1972 have been scanned. You select a five year period, say 1965, which then displays a time line of covers for that period. Select an issue and you'll get a linked table of contents, a Google Map with icons pointing to the locations of stories in the magazine, and a linked list of keywords from the articles.
You can read the magazine in a single page scrolling layout or a two-page view. I'd recommend the latter, especially if you have a big wide-screen monitor, because it'll give you the full impact of the page layout. To see just how good LIFE could be, take a look at the August 1969 special issue on Woodstock.
Even better, the whole archive is searchable.
Kudos to Time Warner and Google for making this incredible resource available, and for doing it so well.
Younger readers (say those of you born after 1970), probably don't realize why this is a big deal. LIFE was an important magazine - a large format weekly that was known for its in-depth photojournalism. It had the budget to cover big stories in a big way, and the large format let them produce some stunning layouts. And it wasn't just all pretty pictures - look at some of their coverage of the Viet Nam war, for example, or their coverage of the space program.
All issues from 1936 tp 1972 have been scanned. You select a five year period, say 1965, which then displays a time line of covers for that period. Select an issue and you'll get a linked table of contents, a Google Map with icons pointing to the locations of stories in the magazine, and a linked list of keywords from the articles.
You can read the magazine in a single page scrolling layout or a two-page view. I'd recommend the latter, especially if you have a big wide-screen monitor, because it'll give you the full impact of the page layout. To see just how good LIFE could be, take a look at the August 1969 special issue on Woodstock.
Even better, the whole archive is searchable.
Kudos to Time Warner and Google for making this incredible resource available, and for doing it so well.
Labels: history, photography
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Fantasic photos of our solar system
The Smithsonian has put together a very striking gallery of photographs of our solar system taken by various spacecraft over the last decade. Among the most impressives are Cassini's pictures of Saturn and its glorious rings and various photos of the Sun.
"The past decade has been spectacular in terms of achievements," says Sean Solomon, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a leader of recent missions to Mercury and Mars.
Seven missions are currently keeping a wary eye on the Sun; they were launched by the United States, Japan and Europe, partly for pure science and partly for self-preservation. Solar flares, which can come from sunspots, are magnetic eruptions that sometimes hit Earth. A superflare like the one in 1859 that surged through telegraph lines and ignited fires would black out today's electrical grids, fry communication satellites and jam navigation signals. Missions to track solar flares may alert us to outsize magnetic storms in time to brace ourselves.
Last year, NASA's Messenger mission gave us the first up-close view of parts of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. The spacecraft has found extensive ridges along the planet's surface, made as it cooled and shrank over its four billion years. Messenger should nestle into orbit around Mercury in 2011 and continue to study the planet's geology and magnetic fields.
Labels: photography, science, space
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Travel through the Milky Way
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have put together a giant, high-resolution zoomable panorama of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. This is one of the most goose-bump raising things I've seen in quite a while - it'll definitely stimulate your sense of wonder. And you won't believe what they used to produce it:
Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.
While many of the most stunning space images come from huge telescopes or Hubble, Brunier wanted to create photographs of space that were closer to the commonplace human experience of just going outside and looking at the sky.
“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to — with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood, its myths shared by all civilizations since Homo became Sapiens,” Brunier said in a release. “The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera under the dark skies in the Atacama Desert and on La Palma.”
Labels: photography, science
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
One year after Hurricane Ike
The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog has another excellent photo essay, this one showing areas damaged by Hurricane Ike just after the storm and a year later. In some cases, you can click on a photo to get the after picture fading in over the original image. After seeing these pictures, there's no way I'd ever live on the Texas coast!
Labels: environment, photography
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
A camera I'd like
Back in a previous life, I worked in a camera store, and I got seriously into photography. One of the perks was getting to play with the new cameras and even better, occasionally borrowing the boss's. Paul was a professional photographer and used real cameras, a Nikon F, a Hasselblad, and a Leica. Of them all, the Leica was the sweetest - small, quiet, machined like a jewel, and with the sharpest optics of any camera I've ever used. It was also way out of my price range, but hey, a man can dream.
So now it's 25 years later and Leica has come out with a new camera, the M9, and I still can't afford it. But if I won the 6/49 tonight, it would be the first camera I'd buy.
So now it's 25 years later and Leica has come out with a new camera, the M9, and I still can't afford it. But if I won the 6/49 tonight, it would be the first camera I'd buy.
Labels: photography
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Photos from Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica
Alek O. Komarnitsky was fortunate to be able to take an Antarctic cruise that included Terra del Fuego, South Georgia, and the Falkland Islands. He took 2 Canon digital SLRs and shot about 10,000 pictures, many of which he's posted to the web.
I've spent about half an hour browsing through these, and I'm seriously impressed. There are some gorgeous pictures here of a part of the world few of us will ever see. Highly recommended.
I've spent about half an hour browsing through these, and I'm seriously impressed. There are some gorgeous pictures here of a part of the world few of us will ever see. Highly recommended.
Labels: photography, places
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Getting a camera 30 km. high
This is cool. A guy from Vulcan Alberta used a weather balloon to get a camera up to an altitude of more than 100,000 feet (more than 30 km), got some gorgeous pictures, and recovered the camera after it fell back to earth. He was only about half-way to space, but still, it's neat.
Labels: photography, space, technology
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Yes, it's real
MSNBC has an interview with the couple who took the hilarious picture of the the camera-happy squirrel in Banff National Park. Yes, the picture is real - they show the others in the sequence leading up to the one with the squirrel. It is funny.
Labels: funny, photography
Thursday, August 06, 2009
August 6, 1945 in pictures
Today is the anniversary of the first time an atomic bomb was used in war. The Big Picture blog has a portfolio of pictures of Hiroshima. Look, and remember. As the saying goes, those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
Labels: history, photography
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Seven contempory Detroit photographers
I posted the other day about the photographs of Detroit by James D. Griffioen. Here's another collection of photographs of Detroit by seven photographers. The third world is just around the corner, maybe a few years away.
Detroit is one of the most visually interesting cities in the world however it is also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cities. This group of photographs illustrates what contemporary Detroit artists have been doing in regards to developing an understanding and appreciation for this complex and diverse city from street portraits of the “survivors” to the landscapes of wild new growth to the industrial leftovers.
These seven artists have been working in the city as explorers, adventurers and pioneers for years to capture the city as it changes, evolves, devolves and transforms into something unbelievable, profound and heartbreaking. In the end they hope as a group to show Detroit as it is, not what it should be or what it was, but how it is. This in itself a provocative gesture as there are not many who feel content with the Detroit of today.
Labels: photography, places, society
Friday, July 31, 2009
The disappearing city
I went to university and Windsor, and Detroit was something of a magic wonderland to a kid who'd grown up in small-town northern Ontario. It looked quite beautiful at night, the lights of downtown glittering on the water of the Detroit river, and it wasn't too hard to ignore the sound of sirens and the occasional gunshot. The reality of the city, once you got up close and personal, was something quite different, and I was never really comfortable visiting there, especially at night. There was always a sense of menace just around the corner, but to go with that there was a lot of life and vibrancy, at least in the late 1960s and early 70s. Detroit was still a city that mattered.
Things have changed, and not for the better. Parts of the city are now a vast urban wasteland and other parts aren't urban at all, as Nature is reclaiming the land. James D. Griffioen has been documenting the disappearance of Detroit in an incredible series of photographs. These are remarkable both for their subject and their artistic and technical merit. The pictures of vacant schools are particularly poignant.
Things have changed, and not for the better. Parts of the city are now a vast urban wasteland and other parts aren't urban at all, as Nature is reclaiming the land. James D. Griffioen has been documenting the disappearance of Detroit in an incredible series of photographs. These are remarkable both for their subject and their artistic and technical merit. The pictures of vacant schools are particularly poignant.
Labels: photography, places, society
Monday, July 27, 2009
Science Photo Library
The Science Photo Library is a new web site devoted to providing high-quality photographs of scientific topics across a wide variety of subjects. Images are available both royalty free and under commercial license. The Pic of the Pics category has some especially impressive images.
Labels: photography, science
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Recent scenes from the ISS
The Big Picture blog has a photo essay of recent pictures of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. Especially impressive are the pictures of Russia's Sarychev Peak Volcano erupting, and final image, a stunning animation of the ISS flying towards the Northern Lights.
Labels: photography, space
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Open source Canon camera firmware
Most of us are quite familiar with open source hardware, but probably less so with open source firmware for our electronic devices. I am a happy user of RockBox on my Sansa MP3 player, and I've seen open source firmware for Linksys routers. But this is the first time I've seen it for a digital camera - in this case, Canon. If I had a Canon digital camera, I'd definitely try this out.
Labels: photography, technology
Friday, June 19, 2009
Figure/Ground photography blog
Figure/Ground is the portfolio web site of Liao Yusheng, an architecture photographer based in New York.
He's really, really good. I thought I'd taken some good pictures in Vancouver last year, until I looked at his ...
Yusheng's photographs have appeared in books published by teNeues and Taschen, as well as periodicals and newspapers like Time Asia, The Guardian, International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.
He's really, really good. I thought I'd taken some good pictures in Vancouver last year, until I looked at his ...
Labels: photography, places
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Iranian election and after in photos
The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog has a three-part series on the election and subsequent turmoil in Iran. Like most Big Picture posts, these are outstanding collections of photographs, and offer by far the best pictures I've seen anywhere on what's going on in Iran. Definitely not to be missed.
Labels: photography, politics
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Hubble's final servicing mission
The Big Picture Blog does it's usual fine job with this photo essay on the final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope. Especially impressive is the picture an amateur astronomer took of the Shuttle and Hubble transiting the sun.
Labels: photography, space
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Surfing a monster in slo mo
I've always been fascinated by big waves and surfing, though I've never tried it. But I've never seen anything like this video of a surfer surfing a monster wave, shot in super slow motion. Very cool indeed.
The remarkable video, which will be shown as part of the BBC Natural History Unit's new series South Pacific, was filmed in super slow motion using a high-definition camera.
It reveals the hidden power of a four-metre-tall monster barrel wave.
It also shows the first images of underwater spiralling vortices created by the wave's action.
The wave was filmed off the coast of Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands, part of the Federated State of Micronesia.
Labels: photography, science
Sunday, April 19, 2009
10 composition rules for better photos
Despite being very nearsighted, I've always been a better than average photographer. I have a knack for composition - perhaps, because I don't see the fine details in a scene, I see the higher level graphical elements that make up the scene. But even if you don't have a particularly good eye for composition, don't fret, because it's a skill that you can easily learn.
There are several rules for composing photographs that artists and photographers have developed over the years. Amateur Snapper has an overview of 10 of them, and it's a good reference. Pick any three, grab your camera, and go for a walk, and practice.
There are several rules for composing photographs that artists and photographers have developed over the years. Amateur Snapper has an overview of 10 of them, and it's a good reference. Pick any three, grab your camera, and go for a walk, and practice.
Labels: photography
The infinite Earth
National Geographic have assembled a photomosaic of pictures that is essentially infinite in depth - you can keep drilling down and drilling down for more and more pictures. It's quite cool. Note that it will take some time to load the first time you use it.
What makes up our world? Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you. It's made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot. (Submit a photo) Move the yellow square over an area you would like to explore, click, and go. Double-click on an image to see more information about it. Keep clicking—and diving deeper into the Infinite Photograph—to get a truly boundless picture of Earth.
Labels: environment, photography
Monday, March 16, 2009
Fotoflexer - another web-based photo editor
I blogged recently about the Pixlr online photo editor. I just came across yet another web-based photo editor - Fotoflexer, which if it doesn't have more features than Pixlr, might be a bit easier to use for the average user. About the only thing that I'd use that I didn't see in it is a straighten tool.
With all of these tools becoming available online and mostly for free, you have to wonder who's buying photo editing suites these days.
With all of these tools becoming available online and mostly for free, you have to wonder who's buying photo editing suites these days.
Labels: photography, software
Saturday, March 14, 2009
How to create high dynamic range images
High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging is a technique for combining multiple exposures to get the maximum dynamic range (basically the difference between light and dark areas) in an image. If you're familiar with old-style darkroom techniques, it's similar to Ansel Adam's Zone technique, which he used to get an amazing range between black and white into his prints.
Gizmodo has a tutorial on how create HDR images. You'll need a camera with autobracketing or manual exposure controls, a tripod, and the right software (a recent version of PhotoShop with plug-ins, or specialized HDR software).
If you want to see some examples of HDR images, there's an HDR group on Flickr. I particularly like this mountain scenic. It's also worth noting that some of the new compact cameras introduced at this year's PMA show have built-in multiple exposure modes that do the equivalent of HDR imaging directly in the camera.
Gizmodo has a tutorial on how create HDR images. You'll need a camera with autobracketing or manual exposure controls, a tripod, and the right software (a recent version of PhotoShop with plug-ins, or specialized HDR software).
If you want to see some examples of HDR images, there's an HDR group on Flickr. I particularly like this mountain scenic. It's also worth noting that some of the new compact cameras introduced at this year's PMA show have built-in multiple exposure modes that do the equivalent of HDR imaging directly in the camera.
Labels: photography
Friday, March 13, 2009
More 3-D panoramas
I love looking at the 3-D panoramas you can find on the Web, and 360cities.net has lots of them. The one of Monument Valley is really impressive.
If yoiu click on a region on the home page, you'll get a Google Map, with icons indicating the location of panoramas. Mousing over an icon gives you a list, if there's more than one at that location. Neat, I could spend hours browsing here.
If yoiu click on a region on the home page, you'll get a Google Map, with icons indicating the location of panoramas. Mousing over an icon gives you a list, if there's more than one at that location. Neat, I could spend hours browsing here.
Labels: photography, places
Friday, February 13, 2009
Photography 101
Here's a good, basic online course in photography, If you have a new digital camera with manual control settings that you don't know how to use, this is for you.
Welcome to the fifth lesson in Photography 101 - A Basic Course on the Camera. In this series, we cover all the basics of camera design and use. We talk about the ‘exposure triangle’: shutter speed, aperture and ISO. We talk about focus, depth of field and sharpness, as well as how lenses work, what focal lengths mean and how they put light on the sensor. We also look at the camera itself, how it works, what all the options mean and how they affect your photos.
Labels: photography
Monday, February 02, 2009
Rare photos of Buddy Holly
Here are some rare photos of Buddy Holly mostly from his British tour in 1958. It's hard to believe, looking at how clean-cut and innocent everyone looks, that anyone could have gotten upset about the rock and roll of those days.
Labels: history, music, photography
How to take a gigapixel image
If you saw the incredible gigapixel panorama of the Obama inauguration recently, you may be wondering how that picture was taken. Here's how. The amazing thing is that the hardware only costs $380 (not counting the camera, which can be any consumer grade digital camera).
Labels: photography
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Pixlr - another good online photo editor
It seems that web applications just keep getting better and more powerful. A good example is Pixlr, an online photo editor that has a good chunk of Photoshop's capabilities in a simple and fast interface. It even does layers. The Globe and and Mail says:
Pixlr in particular is rather eerie in just how closely it recreates Photoshop's feature set—it even incorporates Photoshop's concept of layers. What once was a revolutionary new feature can now be achieved inside your web browser for free.
Of course, not all of Photoshop's features are recreated here, and there are a few rough edges—you can't create anti-aliased text, for example, and many features are simplified, so that you can't apply blending effects to layers or set different parameters on the blur filter. But the simplification works both ways—Pixlr's also a lot easier to use, and for people who just want to edit a few photos on the go, especially in places like internet cafes where installing software is impossible, Pixlr's perfect.
Labels: photography, software
Thursday, January 22, 2009
The inauguration of President Obama
As usual, the Big Picture blog comes through with an outstanding spread of photos of the inauguration of President Obama. The satellite image of the Washington Mall is particularly impressive.
Labels: history, photography
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Rudy Rucker visits New York city
SF writer visited New York city recently and wrote about it on his blog. The post includes many photographs. I enjoyed seeing his perspective on the city, which I regret to say I've never visited.
Labels: photography, places, SF
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Incredible Earth pictures
Here's a series of striking pictures of the Earth from NASA's Earth Observatory site, courtesy of the Big Picture blog. There's some great wallpaper here, folks.
Labels: environment, photography, places, space
Monday, January 12, 2009
Things every digital camera owner should know
Unless you've had a background in 35 mm photography, preferably with a good quality single lens reflex (SLR) camera, you'll probably find the plethora of settings and options on today's digital camera's quite confusing. But knowing the basics about how to set up your camera and use its options can make a big difference in the quality of your photographs. This series of articles will go a long way to explaining some of the things you should know.
Labels: photography
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Zoom, baby, zoom!
I've posted before about QuickTime VR panorama, which are quite cool. But how about a panning around a gigapixel panorama that's almost infinitely zoomable. The images are produced by a British photographer and mathematician who identifies himself as kilgore661.
My photographs are a special kind of image made with leading-edge technology called a gigapan. The term derives from the prefix giga- (meaning "billions" or, less formally, "huge") and panorama; hence giga-panorama or gigapan for short. As photographs, gigapans are special for two reasons. First their size: a typical gigapan is roughly 100 times the size (in area) of an ordinary photograph, and the biggest gigapans are 10 times larger again. Second, due their size, the only practical way of viewing gigapans is on a computer. By using simple software people can "fly into" a gigapan image, creating an immersive, interactive experience.
Flying into a gigapan evokes a sense of wonder in people. I wish to harness this visceral experience to build communities, to heal old wounds between neighbours and create respect for the World. My tactic is to give people a sense of wonder and then introduce them to others who have had the same experience. My hope is that people will identify with each other and the shared experience will create a bond between them.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Free textures
If you need photographic textures, you can download some very nice ones from TextureWell. They're free, under a Creative Commons Attribution License and organized into packs of similar themes. Kudos to the photographer, Maria Popova, for making them available and for the excellent quality of her work.
Labels: photography
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The beauty of the core
Astronomers have combined images taken by infrared cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space telescope to produce the sharpest picture yet of our galaxy's core. It looks like a turbulent violent place of stunning beauty.
Labels: photography, space
Friday, January 02, 2009
2008 in photos
I'm a big fan of the Boston Globe's Big Picture blog, which consistently posts some of the best news photographs I've seen on the Web. They've assembled an excellent three-part photographic review of the best pictures of 2008:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
And to go along with that, here's a nice collection of the best astronomy pictures from 2008, assembled by India's ItvNews.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
And to go along with that, here's a nice collection of the best astronomy pictures from 2008, assembled by India's ItvNews.
Labels: history, photography, space
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Round trip with Endeavour
Here's another excellent photo essay from the Big Picture blog featuring the Endeavour Space Shuttle from beginning to end of its recent mission. Once again, they manage to come up with striking photos that no-one else seems to have.
Labels: photography, space
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
A good camera review site
While digital SLRs (single lens reflex) seem to be getting the most attention in the photography world these days, there are some very nice compact cameras out there. Serious Compacts is a blog devoted to compact cameras, and it's a good one.
These days it seems that many people associate serious photography with the use of large, heavy gear. Our site features testing and discussion of the remarkable compact tools available to photographers. We also highlight some of the outstanding work being done with this gear.
From an equipment standpoint, we are of course interested in advanced compact cameras, i.e. cameras which offer full manual controls, RAW, and other special capabilities. However, our interest extends to include quality photography achieved with any compact cameras, advanced or otherwise.
Labels: photography
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Macbeth colour checker page
Professional photographers have long used the Macbeth colour checker to calibrate their cameras and printers. Here's a web page (with RGB values) that reproduces the standard Macbeth colour checker.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Google to host 10M LIFE images
Google is now hosting the image archives of LIFE magazine, amounting to some 10 million photographs, sketches, etchings, and other images dating back to 1750. Only about 20 percent are online right now, but what's there is seriously cool. And they've done it right - the collection is searchable, they've set up sub-collections of interesting subjects (The Yangtze river, Marilyn Monroe), you can select pictures by decade. Best of all, you're not limited to just thumbnails - you can view high-resolution, full-screen images. Read more on the Google blog.
Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn't get much easier than that.
So please take a look for yourself and experience these great photos. Your exploration will be limited only by your imagination and your desire to keep on clicking. Be sure to check back often as more photos from the LIFE archive will be added regularly to Google Image Search. We hope that you enjoy them as much as we do!
Labels: history, photography
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Scenes from Anarctica
The Big Picture blog features scenes from Antarctica - some truly awesome photos of a place few of us will ever see in person.
Labels: photography, places
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Spectacular nature photos
Here are some spectacular nature photos, divided into two categories: angry and soft.
Labels: photography
Thursday, October 16, 2008
World Press Photo Contest 2008
The winners of the World Press Photo Contest for 2008 are currently on display at the Galleria at Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place) in downtown Toronto. I went down to have a look at it last week and was thoroughly impressed. You can view the photos online here, but get to see the exhibition in person if you can, because the photos have far more impact when you see the large prints.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A million pictures of Britain
The Geograph British Isles project aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland, and they've just hit a million pictures. If you're a Britphile, you are positively going to love this site. Just click on a map of the British Isles, drill down and see a grid of thumbnail pictures of that area. Click on a thumbnail to view a larger picture. You can search and browse the site in various ways and quite a bit of information is provided for each photo. Images are freely available under a Creative Commons license.
I would love to see something like this for Canada.
I would love to see something like this for Canada.
Labels: photography, places
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Scenes from North Korea
You don't see a lot of pictures from North Korea, so this series from the Big Picture blog is definitely worth a look. As always from this site, the quality of the photography is outstanding and the subject matter makes it especially remarkable. The degree of regimentation in people's lives must be mind numbing.
Labels: photography, places
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Wired photo contest winner
Wired has posted the winners to its recent photo contest. There are eleven categories and you can view the top ten in each category.
Labels: photography
Monday, September 01, 2008
Preparing to rescue Hubble
The Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to launch in October on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. This will be the last mission to the Hubble and should extend its useful life to well past 201o. The Big Picture blog has an excellent photo essay on the work that is being done to get Atlantis ready for the mission.
Labels: photography, space
Saturday, August 30, 2008
The Photographer's Guide to the Eye
Having been extremely near sighted all my life, I've probably paid more attention to my eyes than the average person. Despite my vision problems, I'm a better than average photographer, partly because I don't take what I'm seeing for granted, and also because I've learned some of the technical aspects of vision and photography (things like colour balance, the difference between contrast ranges in the eye and film or digital sensors, and how eye tracking affects perception of details).
PopPhoto.com has a good article on how understanding some of the details behind visual perception can improve your photography. After an overview of human vision research, they get into some nitty gritty tips. If you're interested in improving your photopgraphy, this is a good article to bookmark.
PopPhoto.com has a good article on how understanding some of the details behind visual perception can improve your photography. After an overview of human vision research, they get into some nitty gritty tips. If you're interested in improving your photopgraphy, this is a good article to bookmark.
SENSITIVITY
In principle: The eye's nighttime ISO has been estimated at about 800. Since day vision is about 600 times less sensitive to light, on a sunny day your eyes have an ISO of close to 1. In practice: The slowest film you can buy is ISO 25, and ISO 50 is low on a digital camera. But with DSLRs now topping ISO 6400, your camera sees in the dark better than you do. So enjoy your camera's nighttime advantage and shoot when the lights are low.
LINES
In principle: Eye-movement tracking shows that the eye is drawn to lines, is even more taken with angles, and returns repeatedly to corners. The Mach Effect describes how the eye searches out luminance differences by neurologically exaggerating contrast along edges. In practice: We love lines, especially horizons. So use them to your advantage: Keep lines straight, include points of intersection, and put your subject close to corners.
Labels: photography
Friday, August 29, 2008
History in HD
Shorpy - The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog presents high-resolution historical photographs from 100 years ago. It's always interesting seeing the difference, and similarities, in life between then and now as presented in photographs like these.
Labels: history, photography
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
NASA's best photos
To help celebrate NASA's 50th anniversary, Wired has assembled a collection of some of the best space-related photographs from the last 50 years. The page also includes links to several online space photo sites.
Labels: photography, space
Thursday, August 07, 2008
2008 solar eclipse photos
The Big Picture blog has some truly spectacular photos of the recent total solar eclipse.
Labels: photography, science
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Beijing 2008 preparations
The Big Picture photo blog has some amazing pictures of preparations for the Beijing Olympics which start next month. I'm sure you'll see lots of press about this in the next month, but I doubt you'll see better photographs than these.
Labels: photography
George Eastman House photos on Flickr
George Eastman House, the photography museum located at the home of Kodak founder George Eastman in Rochester, NY now has a photostream up on Flickr. I particularly like the autochromes (early colour photographs).
Labels: photography
Saturday, June 21, 2008
A Midest Katrina
The Big Picture blog, a photography blog published by the Boston Globe, has a series of pictures showing the flooding in the US Midwest, mostly around Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The scope of the flooding rivals that of Hurricane Katrina a few years ago. The story leads off with what is probably the scariest tornado photograph I've ever seen.
Labels: environment, photography
Smithsonian on Flickr
The Smithsonian is now putting photographs up on Flickr. If you're into historical photographs, you'll want to have a look at this.
Labels: history, photography
Friday, June 06, 2008
Time-lapse impressionist videos
Photographer Brad Emerson uses some custom Python code to stitch his time lapse photographs into animated, impressionist videos. I've played around with the "art" filters available in programs like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop, but this goes way beyond that.
Labels: art, photography
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Beautiful photos of bankrupt offices
Photographer Phillip Toledano has a gallery of photographs of bankrupt, abandoned offices. As well as being striking photos, they're quite poignant. I've been there three times myself, but it never occurred to me to take pictures.
Labels: photography
Monday, March 31, 2008
Photos of American West drying up
National Geographic has published some striking photos of the drought in the US West. Contrast the pictures of the golf course in the middle of the desert with the drop in the water level of Lake Meade. There's also an accompanying article.
Labels: environment, photography
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Remixing anti-photography posters
Recently the London Metropolitan Police put up some anti-photography posters, which basically implied that anyone taking a picture might be a terrorist. Of course, they've been Photoshopped to show the essential absurdity of the campaign. My favourite: "Millions of people take photographs every day. Some of them are brown. Please do not shoot them."
Labels: photography, security
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Adobe's free online Photoshop
Adobe has launched Photoshop Express, a free online photo editor very loosely based on Photoshop. It's pretty slick. It gives you many basic editing controls (crop, change exposure, red eye removal, adjust colour) in a very easy to use Flash-based interface (which means it's cross-platform). You don't get more advanced features like layers or drawing or text elements, but for quick adjustments of photos, it'll do just fine and the price is right - free.
You will have to set up an account, which also gives you 2 GB of free storage. If you have albums on Picassa, MySpace, or Facebook, it'll sync with those and pull in your photos. I actually like this more than Photoshop Elements.
You will have to set up an account, which also gives you 2 GB of free storage. If you have albums on Picassa, MySpace, or Facebook, it'll sync with those and pull in your photos. I actually like this more than Photoshop Elements.
Labels: photography, software
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sports Illustrated archive now online
Sports Illustrated has put a huge archive of its back issues online. And when I say huge, I mean it: 150,000 stories, 2,800 covers, and 500,000 photographs. This will be a treasure trove for sports fans. It continues the trend for magazines and newspapers to put their back issues online.
Labels: Internet, photography
Monday, January 14, 2008
Pictures from the end of the world
Here are some truly amazing, otherworldly pictures from Antarctica, taken by Uruguayan photographer Amado Becquer Casaball.
During his voyage, Becquer Casaballe lived eternal days, trespassed ice seas, was at 14º below 0 temperature and 35º below 0 thermal sensation (inside the icebreaker, of course), passed through a scary 'whale factory' that functioned between 1911 and 1934 at the Deception Island (talk about a proper name), saw white crosses cemeteries that remembered the fallen in the area, and managed to manipulate his camera with huge gloves.
Labels: photography, places
The Earth Observatory
The Earth Observatory is a gallery of images of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. As you might expect, the astronauts spend a lot of time looking at and photographing the Earth. Some of the pictures are quite stunning.
Labels: photography, space
Monday, January 07, 2008
The World at Night
The World at Night is a site that displays eerie, beautiful pictures of the world at night - usually long exposures that show landscapes and starscapes together. The picture of Monument Valley is particularly striking - if Van Vogt had been a photographer, he might have taken it.
Labels: photography
Saturday, December 15, 2007
HD Photo for better photos
John Udell has a post about the new Microsoft-developed HD Photo standard, which will likely become the next version of JPEG. What's most interesting about this is that it offers far more control over the colour and exposure in your photographs. You get 64K levels of detail (16 bits) for each colour instead of the 255 (8 bits) that JPEG offers. Since cameras can record more than 8 bits of detail, you're losing information when you use the JPEG format (and unfortunately, I have a camera that uses JPEG as its native format and I can't change it). The linked video in Udell's post shows the difference this will make to photographers who want to adjust their photographs, and it's really something to look forward to. It's like the difference between a 128 Kbps MP3 and a CD of the same track.
Labels: photography
Saturday, November 17, 2007
A history of photoshopping
Although Photoshop and similar applications have made it easy to alter photographs in ways that may not be obvious to the casual viewer, tampering with photographs has been going on almost since the invention of the medium. Digital Tampering in the Media, Politics and Law is a fascinating look at photographic alterations since the 1860s. In most cases, clicking on a picture will open a page that shows before and after examples that clearly show the tampering.
circa 1930: Stalin routinely air-brushed his enemies out of photographs. In this photograph a commissar was removed from the original photograph after falling out of favor with Stalin.
Labels: photography
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The war on photography
A Japanese tourist was detained after taking pictures through the window of an Amtrack train. This is only the latest in a series of similar incidents in which people have been hassled, or even arrested, after taking pictures of buildings, bridges, or just general scenes. The War on Photography blog is a good resource for photographers who want to assert their rights.
Labels: photography, security
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Interpol unswirls face to identify pedophile
Interpol released pictures of a man they believe to be a pedophile, in the hopes that someone could identify him. What makes this interesting is that in the original pictures, the man had obscured his face using a Photoshop swirl tool and yet the police were able to restore the image.
Interpol said the reconstructed images were produced by Germany's Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, police force. Contacted separately by The Associated Press, a BKA spokesman said the agency did not want to give details of the process used by its image processing expert "because we do not want to give criminals the opportunity to adjust to the techniques we are using."
The techniques do not appear very complicated: the AP produced an almost recognizable image of the man from the blurred photo that Interpol also distributed, in just a few minutes using commercially available computer software for editing photographs. The AP image was not as clear as Interpol's but still showed the outlines of a face rather than a mere blur.
"Techniques are always developing. What is impossible today is possible tomorrow," Persson said. "There were several attempts to clear the face. ... We are sure that you can't get better pictures, and the people in his neighborhood - family friends, colleagues, whatever - they will recognize him."
Labels: photography
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Digital photographic forensics
And by complete coincidence (really!), here's a nice tie-in with the previous post. The New York Times has an interview with Harry Farid, a scientist who specializes in digital forensics - analyzing photographs to see if they've been altered.
Q. What’s been the most interesting use of your software?
A. I sold a copy of it to a Canadian company that runs a bounty fishing contest. People send in photographs of fish they’ve caught. My program can check if the fish in the picture has been enlarged. We can prove whether or not the fish was really “THIS big!”
Labels: photography
Bill Gates throughout history
This is hilarious - Bill Gates photoshopped into historical photographs. I particularly like the Beatles album cover.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Abandoned industries
Here's a collection of photography by Haiko Hebig featuring abandoned and decrepit industrial sites. The pictures are quite striking. I'm quite impressed by the photo of the control room that was featured in BoingBoing Gadgets - it's a perfect example of an interface designed by engineers without any concession to human factors.
Labels: photography, technology
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Sending a balloon 22 miles up
A team of researchers in Alberta has sent a balloon 22 miles up and recorded the event with a digital camera. The pictures are pretty spectacular. Note that the site may take a while to load, but it's worth it.
Labels: photography, science
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Using Flickr to fix photos
Researchers have created an algorithm that uses online photographic repositories, such as Flickr, to automatically retouch photos. The algorithm can be used to perform tasks such as removing a truck from a landscape.
To find suitable matching elements, the research duo's algorithm looks through a database of 2.3 million images culled from Flickr.
"We search for other scenes that share as closely as possible the same semantic scene data," said Mr Hays, who has been showing off the project at the computer graphics conference Siggraph, in San Diego.
In this sense "semantic" means composition. So a snap of a lake in the foreground, hills in a band in the middle and sunset above has, as far as the algorithm is concerned, very different "semantics" to one of a city with a river running through it.
Labels: photography
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Cyberheritage
Cyberheritage is a site that links to scads and scads of historical photographs. It's not very organized - in fact it's one of the ugliest, most disorganized sites I've come across in a long time, but don't let that discourage you from browsing it. There's a treasure trove of material here. A lot of it is about British subjects, especially Plymouth where the author of the site lives, but there's quite a mix of other stuff, if you can find it.
Labels: history, photography
Thursday, June 28, 2007
ISS and Atlantis from the ground
Here's a remarkable picture of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis taken from the ground with a .6 metre telescope. I've seen similar pictures (though not nearly as detailed) taken with backyard telescopes and even video cameras, but this one is definitely the best.
Labels: photography, space
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Good photography blog
The tagline for the photography blog, Dark Roasted Blend, is "Something Old, Somthing New, Something Cool". It's a pretty apt description. You'll find posts like "The Glamour of Flight" - stewardess cheesecake from the 60s, "Oops!!" - accidents you wouldn't want to be in, and "Mount Saint-Michel", the famous monastery in France. I spent about half an hour browsing through the site this morning, before I realized how much time I was spending.
Labels: photography
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
World Press Photo winners for 2007
The World Press Photo winners for 2007 have been announced.
I saw the exhibition of the 2006 winners when it appeared in Toronto last fall and was blown away by some of the photography. This year's winners look to be equally as striking.
First and foremost, World Press Photo is known for organizing the world's largest and most prestigious annual press photography contest. Prizewinning photographs are assembled into a traveling exhibition that is visited by over two million people in some 45 countries worldwide. A yearbook presenting all prizewinning entries is published annually in six languages.
I saw the exhibition of the 2006 winners when it appeared in Toronto last fall and was blown away by some of the photography. This year's winners look to be equally as striking.
Labels: photography
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Spectacular night shot of Tokyo skyline
This has got to be one of the most spectacular city skyline photos I've ever seen - it's a "high dynamic range" night shot of the Tokyo skyline. Truly amazing - it looks like something out of Bladerunner. It's going into my wallpaper folder.
I'm going to have to find out more abut the high density colour process. There's a Flickr group for HDR images if you want to see more.
I'm going to have to find out more abut the high density colour process. There's a Flickr group for HDR images if you want to see more.
Labels: photography, places
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Ansel Adams at the AGO
I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario last night to see an exhibition of photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Ansel Adams. I enjoyed Eisenstaedt's photos, but I found them more interesting from an historical point of view than as examples of photographic art. (Mostly -- one photograph of a num was one of the finest photographic portraits I've ever seen).
Ansel Adams' photographs were another matter -- they were simply stunning. Adams was both a great photographer, in his ability to visualize and capture and image, and a printmaker; he was perhaps the greatest printmaker in the history of photography. If you think you've seen his pictures, because you've seen them reproduced in books, magazines, or on the web -- well you haven't. His prints are remarkable in their tonal range, detail, and dimensonality. They're like windows into another world; you have the feeling that you could stick your head into the frame and into Yosemite or Death Valley - which is all the more remarkable considering that they're black and white. As a former, somewhat serious photographer, who spent quite bit of time in a darkroom, I am in awe at his talent.
This is definitely a must see exhibition - even if you're not into photography, I can't imagine how you'd fail to be moved by Adams' photography.
Ansel Adams' photographs were another matter -- they were simply stunning. Adams was both a great photographer, in his ability to visualize and capture and image, and a printmaker; he was perhaps the greatest printmaker in the history of photography. If you think you've seen his pictures, because you've seen them reproduced in books, magazines, or on the web -- well you haven't. His prints are remarkable in their tonal range, detail, and dimensonality. They're like windows into another world; you have the feeling that you could stick your head into the frame and into Yosemite or Death Valley - which is all the more remarkable considering that they're black and white. As a former, somewhat serious photographer, who spent quite bit of time in a darkroom, I am in awe at his talent.
This is definitely a must see exhibition - even if you're not into photography, I can't imagine how you'd fail to be moved by Adams' photography.
Labels: photography
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Colour photos of rural US 1939-45
Here's a large collection of colour photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration of the rural US taken between 1939 and 1945 or thereabouts. You don't see a lot of colour photos from this period, so these are particularly interesting.
Labels: history, photography
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Toronto photos from the CN Tower
BoingBoing posted a link to a couple of excellent photos of Toronto taken from the CN Tower. One is an eerie cityscape nothing but the tops of skyscrapers sticking up out of the fog. The other is an excellent 360-degree panorama. Photos of Toronto from the CN Tower (or of the CN Tower) are something of a cliché by now, but these are unusual.
Labels: photography
