Scott Kelby has put his New Lightroom Book Online for Free, so head on over and read it now!

Camera Instructor Offers Free and Interactive Online Photo Courses

Camera Instructor offers courses on different photography subjects. The only one available at launch is Photography 101, but classes on Portraits, landscapes, and Weddings are on the way.

Pretty awesome resource to have available.

So yea, in case you were wondering 365-Gigapixels is a lot of gigas…. :)

Finally the GPP2015 ShootOut featuring Sara Lando, Ryan Brenizer & Joel Grimes is online.

As always, fantastic.

The End of Paris Daily Photo, after 10 years of posting an image a day. Pretty fantastic, I’m only sad that I just discovered the site a few months ago.

Camera51 App Automatically Helps You Compose Better Photos with Your Smartphone

And that’s it, super simple. By applying things like the rule of thirds and the golden triangle to your images, it hopes to take standard smartphone shots to new compositional heights… automatically.

Looks interesting. Not sure I like the ‘pass on years of experience automatically’, but it’s definitely a cool idea.

The last sitting is a great bit about photographer Bert Stern and a photo session with Marilyn Monroe. Absolutely fascinating read.

He then looked at his subject and was surprised. Monroe had a scar. She’d had a gall bladder operation six weeks before. He remembered Liz Taylor had been marked as well  a long tracheotomy scar along her throat. He recalled Diana Vreeland telling him, “I think there’s nothing duller than a smooth, perfect-skinned woman. A woman is beautiful by her scars.” He didn’t buy it when Vreeland said those words, but here he was with a half-naked Marilyn Monroe. How could argue with that opinion now?

After lots of rumors, the Pentax Q-S1 has finally been officially announced. Looks like a sexy little camera.

The Q-S1 features an impressive 40 stylish colour combinations. A 12.4 megapixel, back-illuminated CMOS sensor promises to deliver high-quality images for the photographer in you. Creativity is certainly not compromised in the PENTAX Q series latest installment. Users will be able to use Bokeh Control to produce SLR-like bokeh effects with ease, as well as Smart Effects Modes to add the desired filter effects with the simple turn of a dial. The combination of a well-conceived design and great operability makes the PENTAX Q-S1 an ideal everyday camera for photographers of all levels.

I’m pretty sure that this guy has the world’s greatest job.

A couple of links for my friends in the US who might be setting up to do some fireworks photography this upcoming Fourth of July. * Joe McNally has a great writeup on how to take some great shots of fireworks. Joe’s the man, so you know he knows what he’s talking about. * There’s also another great fireworks tutorial over at PhotographyBB.

Lots of news from Adobe today. Updates to their mobile apps, release of their Creative Cloud 2014 software (for those afraid that the rolling update releases will not force them to add in new features, of which Photoshop just got a few), and more. Best news of all is about the Photographer deal from CC:

Last year, Adobe announced a $9.99/month photography plan for the Creative Cloud in response to photographers that didn’t want to use all of the CC apps. When they announced it, it was a temporary thing. So if you got it, you were in. If not, you weren’t. Well, then they brought it back, but again it was still meant to be temporary. I think that made a lot of people uneasy because they thought maybe next year it would go away, and they’d have to revert back to old versions or spend more money to get the full Creative Cloud. So today, they officially announced that the Creative Cloud Photography plan is permanent. It’s not going away so if you want to sign up this week, great. If not, and maybe you decide to next month it’ll still be there.

Great news all around.

Slide and Clutch is the latest Kickstarter endeavor from Peak Design, who produced some very cool camera clips previously, and make a compelling argument why their camera straps are different and better than the competition.

While I own a Black Rapid camera sling strap and a eBay $3.50 special hand strap, I contributed right away, and are really looking forward to seeing these guys succeed (again). Please have a look at their Kickstarter page and become a backer so I can have these new products.

Add GPS to your dumb camera photos using your iOS device. A great writeup of my favorite iOS app for geotagging for my photography.

Saw this on Petapixel this morning: Photog Stopped at Six Flags for Wearing ‘I Shoot RAW’ Shirt. This makes my blood boil. The issue is obviously they think “I shoot RAW” has some connotation with guns, but for some reason they refuse to admit that (which is weird), and the park employees are completely hypocritical. Seriously, screw those guys. I’m so glad I’ve never had any issues with harassment as a photographer from douchebags like this.

Grrrr…..

Noticed today that Nik introduced Analog Efex Pro v2!. Lots of nice updates there if you’re into photography.

onOne Software’s Perfect Effects 8 available for free. Always been a big fan of onOne, so this is pretty cool.

onOne Software is offering its Perfect Effects 8 Premium Edition plugin for free for a limited time. It gives you hundreds of creative presets, fully customizable filters and ability to combine effects. Perfect Effects 8 works as a standalone application (Windows or Mac) or integrates with Adobe Lightroom, Aperture and Photoshop. Go to the onOne Software site to get this fully licensed version - worth $99.95 - for free (a the time of writing).  

Humans of New York has a great talk on approaching people on the street. He’s done it in the area of 10,000 times, so he knows really well what to say (and not say) and how to present yourself. Great for street photographers.

From the Leica T first impressions review:

Assessing a camera like the Leica T comes with its own set of problems. The first is suspension of disbelief at the pricing - Leica has become a premium, essentially ‘designer’ brand, but even so the idea of spending £2700 for a mirrorless camera with no built-in EVF and a slow zoom lens is difficult to accept rationally. But exclusivity has become part of Leica’s continued existence, and manufacturing this kind of product in Germany (complete with 45 minutes of hand-finishing each body shell) both contributes to, and helps justify, the high price. The design is - quite deliberately - all about desire over reason.

It is a damn sexy camera, but I couldn’t justify the cost.

Via Engadget: Lytro’s new light-field camera looks like an actual camera, costs $1,599.

“It’s thinner, lighter, and it has a bigger zoom range and a bigger aperture than you could’ve ever gotten conventionally,” said Ng. “We’re doing in software what physical pieces of glass had historically had to do.” Ng added, “To design something like this with a conventional camera would essentially be impossible.”

Looks pretty sexy, and not “OMG WTF is that”. I’m really interested to hear what it does in real life.

Lightroom mobile was released last night. It’s an iPad app and a webapp, which is run through your Adobe CC account (required). It syncs fairly transparently through the cloud and images appear on the web for display or sharing, or on your iPad for an almost full blown editing experience.

Several aspects are missing from the app. No keywording, colors, or metadata editing, but a basically complete editing experience. Very cool. If you need the other side of the coin, PhotoSmith handles image ingesting, selecting, keywording, adding metadata, and sorting really well, but (as of now) has no editing capabilities. A match made in heaven.

Lightroom Mobile was super easy to setup and install, and as long as you have an Adobe CC account (even the $9.99 photographer bundle thankfully!), it’s free and as far as I can tell un-restricted. A great way to have a portfolio setup on the go and doing some quick and dirty editing.

Dedicated is a behind the scenes view of the making of a video for the Nikon D4s. Regardless of your camera manufacturer affiliation, it’s still a great look at cameras, gear, photographers.

TEN MORE from Craft & Vision is now free. If you’re into photography then this is a great book to have and add to your collection. Even at it’s full price of a whopping $5 it was well worth it.

The full list of free Craft & Vision eBooks is:

• Craft & Vision I - 11 Ways to Improve Your Photography
• Craft & Vision II - More Great Ways to Make Stronger Photographs
• TEN - Ten Ways to Improve Your Craft Without Buying Gear
• TEN MORE - Ten More Ways to Improve Your Craft Without Buying Gear

I had no idea that Visual Supply Co (VSCO) had a Journal with fantastic interviews (and pictures) from interesting photographers.

Today 500px (my favorite photography site online) announced an evolution of it’s marketplace, called 500pxArt.com:

500px Art offers 28 options for base materials, styles, frames and multiple sizing options to choose from. Payment processing is available in over 20 currencies and shipping is world-wide (your most requested option is here!). As a dedicated site, 500pxArt.com is accessible to anyone looking to purchase and sell exceptionally beautiful photographs.

Site looks awesome. Remember that you can of course follow my work there at 500px.com/AlanBailward

Another list of Best photos of the year 2013 from Reuters. Some really good ones in there, though be warned, there are a few that are a bit disturbing.

The Arcanum: An Online ‘Hogwarts’ Where You Can Learn One-on-One from the Pros

That system has all but disappeared where most professions are concerned, but photographer Trey Ratcliff wants to bring it back into the world of the arts, and he’s doing it through a newly-formed online “Magical Academy for the Mastery of the Arts” that he’s calling “The Arcanum.”

This awesome review of the Canon Top Twin film camera shows just how good (or bad) the good old days of photography actually were. Really a great look at how things were (at least viewed through our current age eyes).

Sad news today on the Everpix Blog that the photo storage and sharing service is shutting down :( I’ve followed Everpix for a while now and really thought they had “made it”. They were well loved by the photography community.

Some more information about the shutdown over in this Verge article.

The upside is that the guys involved are talented, so you know whatever they create next will be awesome. Best of luck in the future gentlemen.

How many megapixels do you need?

So how many megapixels do you need? Here’s the shortest answer we can muster: for most purposes 3MP is plenty, but you might want to shoot at around 8MP for the crispest possible details. 8MP is a sensible minimum for big prints and 4K TVs, and even higher resolutions allow you to crop photos without sacrificing quality too much. However, make sure that very high resolutions are matched by an equivalent increase in sensor size. 

Sony Officially Debuts Two Revolutionary Lens-Style Cameras for your Smartphone.

Earlier today, after weeks worth of rumors and leaks, Sony finally announced the ‘lens cameras’ we had heard so much about. No need to parse through rumors and speculate about what’s truth and what’s fiction, the company’s QX100 and QX10 smartphone-attachable lens-style cameras are officially here.

These are the detachable lenses that will wirelessly beam to your smartphone, but also give you high megapixels and high quality glass.

I’m all over this, though there are a ton of questions to answer first :)

A fantastic photographer and internet friend of yours truly (kinda) announced today that his first eBook TEN is now free. This is a great deal, and even at the $4 or $5 that his eBooks over at Craft & Vision normally it’s a great deal. It’s an eBook all about creativity and getting out of the ‘gear rut’ of photography and back into the Vision side of it.

Short version, just go download it, hey, it’s free right?

Flickr’s new stuff:

• A terabyte of storage
• A new look

Looks very pinterest-y, with a look similar to google+ and the “masonary” photo layout. Looks good so far, hopefully it’s more than a coat of paint and they’re going to really drive Flickr to be a great site.

Adobe talks about cloud only as it effects photographers

Catch the rest of the podcasts as well if you are into photography.

After nearly 10 years, Adobe abandons its Creative Suite entirely to focus on Creative Cloud

A post by Trey Radcliff
Ready to pay Adobe $29.99 a month for the rest of your life? hehe… Or wait, how about $49.99 a month for the complete package?

I think it’s pretty crazy… I like the good old days of buying software and owning it forever. For example, let’s say that I drop my Creative Cloud membership and I want to go back in a few months later and, say, CROP AN IMAGE using Photoshop, then I can’t without paying Adobe again? It just seems crazy!

Anyway, we’ll discuss this on the live show soon - see https://plus.google.com/events/c647hgj11keapdsnva92m5d6uao — we’ll bring this up almost straight away with +Thomas Hawk +Frederick Van Johnson and more!

To me, it seems like Adobe seems more interested in having predictable revenue than making customers happy. This tends to happen in organizations with a lot of bloat where eventually decisions are made by bean-counters and committees. Am I wrong? I don’t think so…

Beautiful Steampunk Link Cosplay by Molecular Agatha

Adobe gives sneak peak of Lightroom-style app for tablets

A Nice story to make Alan Squee….

Related to the last post, check out FocusTwist which lets you focus photos after taking a picture. It’s a $1.99 iPhone app available here.

From this reddit thread comes this Hack: DOF-Changeable Photos with an SLR. It fakes out the any-DoF effect by using a short video manually focused through the entire depth of field and then some online magic to create the “clickable” image.

It’s definitely not the Lytro “take a picture” method, but it’s pretty neat if you find something that requires this particular style of tech.

Hadouken Shoot - Take One is an awesome and professional take on the Hadouken meme. Really cool to see a real photographers take on this, with good lighting, setup, etc. Also Bill Wadman is an expert on making things fancy, so of course it’s awesome.

Nice selection of Roof Topper Photographers on the 500px blog. Definitely something not for the weak-stomached :)

Chase Jarvis goes into MOVI a New Camera Stabilizer from Freefly, including a great movie and behind the scenes movie from the great Vincent Laforet.

Saw today that my favorite site for Photography eBooks has a new free eBook, Craft & Vision 2 available.

Free is free, and C&V has high quality stuff, so run, don’t walk, to your computer to download this now.

Note: There seems to be some sort of wonkiness going with the checkout system right now so it might not be available for download right away. Yea, looks like we killed it.

Found a link on reddit this morning that led me to interesting information on the The Nik Collection (now) by Google.

Short version is that the full collection is now $149 (or if you use DZISER on checkout you can get it for $126.65 USD) instead of the previous $499.

Even better if you have even one of the previous plugins, you get an upgrade to the entire thing free. If you’ve ever seen some beautiful black and white you will want it just for Silver Efex Pro. There’s a 15 day free trial if you want to check out the software first of course.

The awesome David Hobby posted about how he had A Front Row Seat at the 2013 GPP Shootout which includes, awesomely enough, a video of this year’s photographer shootout, which is awesome. I re-watched the last 3 years of the GPP shootout to prepare :)

I’ve heard it before, so when I saw that Pentax is rumored to announce several new DSLRs and a new compact APS-C camera, I’ll say what I’ve said before.

Pentax is rumored to announce several new DSLR cameras (as early as this month, as many as 5 new DSLRs) which will be priced between $400 and $2000.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.” I’ve been hurt too many times before to get my hopes up.

Saw this this morning: Trojan Horse Hidden ‘Beautify’ Photoshop Action Reverts Women’s Bodies to Un-retouched State. Viral marketing at it’s best of course. While I’m all for people being satisfied with themselves, young girls not being pressured by the media, etc, blaming “photoshop” is just silly. So much of what people consider “unphotoshopped images” these days are really just “bad pictures”. You can do a ton to change perception with just a pose, good lighting, and a pretty model before you start doing massive body alterations with the liquefy filter.

But lets call this what it is, a viral marketing add to get you to buy beauty products from Dove. Altruistic as they are, their goal is to get you to give them money in the end.

Picasa web is now redirecting to Google+, long live picasa web.

I have to agree with Leo on this weeks This Week in Google, I don’t mind so much if all the features are still there (though I haven’t used Picasaweb in ages), but the “plusification” of everything makes me a bit nervous.

Great Interview with Photographer Joey L. over on PetaPixel for all you photo buffs out there.

I’m watching the Joey L vs Lara Jade video right now and he’s got some pretty awesome skills.

Finding Vivian Maier - Official Movie Trailer is out. If you haven’t heard of Vivian Maier and have an interest in photography, definitely check out the trailer, which gives you the story.

Can’t wait to check this out :)

I was honoured to do a guest post on Venture Beat for my friend John Koetsier, and after some editing (and a heck of a lot of reformatting), it’s posted:

A photographer and developer with 86 camera apps highlights the best — and worst — iPhone camera apps.

Many thanks to John for giving me the opportunity to do the post!

Awesome news that the (great) site 500px has updated their Lightroom Plugin and open sourced it.

This was an exciting week for 500px Lightroom Plugin! We’ve updated the plugin with fixes & new features and released it open source. Which means better plugin for you and endless fun for developers world-wide.

DPReview has posted their Pentax MX-1 hands-on preview.

This morning Pentax announced the Pentax MX-1, in both silver and black. Here’s the exerpt from the announcement:

Classically Crafted, Contemporary Quality

With its genuine brass covers and advanced digital compact capabilities, the PENTAX MX-1 is where craft design meets contemporary quality. The MX-1’s fast F1.8-2.5 lens, 4X zoom and large 12 megapixel backlit CMOS sensor allow for bright everyday imagery inside a stylish body. As its brass wears with time, feel the good old days come back to life in your images of today with the PENTAX MX-1.

Some of the highlights of the body are:

• 1/1.7” 12mp sensor
• F/1.8-2.5 aperture lens
• 1080p @ 30fps video mode
• 28-112mm 35mm equivelant (4x optical zoom, with digital (ugh) of 1.95x to make 7.8x zoom effective)
• 3” tiltable LCD
• Face and pet face detection
• SD/SDHC/SDXC, with 75mb of internal memory, also Eye-Fi compatible
• Weighs only 12.8 oz (without battery)
• Sensor shift optical image stabilization

I really wish that they’d taken a bit more of a cue from the Fuji X-100 in terms of the sensor, but the modern styling does look beautiful (if the pictures do anything). Also it’ll be interesting to see how the sensor stacks up in terms of low light. Anyone from Pentax out there want to send me a review unit? :)

If you’ve been all angsty about the new Instagram terms of service, you’ll want a look at Instagram vs Flickr, however they (Instagram) wants you to know that they’re listening to your concerns.

Also lets be honest, no one is selling your crappy pictures of a latte no matter how artistic they are.

Snapseed for iOS (itunes link) is my go-to on-the-go editor, and now a couple of weeks after Nik Software was bought by google, the app has been updated, made free (was $4.99, and worth every penny), and updated with some extra functionality (Google+ sharing) and given a swanky new icon.

“Dustgate” (my name) is the new drama associated with release of the Nikon D600 and it’s apparent tendency to accumulate more dust on the sensor than normal. A Photographer created a time-lapse showing D600 ‘dust’ accumulation, via DPReview.

Canadian photographer Kyle Clemens just bought a Nikon D600, but rather than get straight out and start shooting with it, he decided to investigate the widely-reported claims of a ‘dust problem’. Clements set his D600 up with a fixed 50mm F1.8 lens, pointed it at a white wall, and shot 1000 images. Then he created a timelapse video which shows the slow accumulation of debris on the camera’s sensor. Although the exposure of the individual frames isn’t uniform, Clements’ video clearly shows a steady buildup of debris over the course of shooting the 1000 frames. 

Perspective Shift and Living Filters are the new toys available to Lytro photographers.

Perspective Shift allows Lytro photographers to interactively change the point of view in a picture after it has been taken. On a computer or mobile device, both the photographer and viewers can move the living picture in any direction; left, right, up, down and all around. When pictures with Perspective Shift are shared to the web, Facebook and Twitter, friends can experience Perspective Shift without needing any special software. Perspective Shift works on any light field pictures previously taken with a Lytro camera and with any new light field pictures.

Wow.

Funny video Poking Fun at Clueless DSLR Users as part of a mirrorless camera marketing campaign.

I’m secretly terrified I’m all of those people. You guys would tell me if I was, right?

Right??

Chase Jarvis on the New GoPro Hero3 video camera.

Great stuff: The 10 Steps Every HDR Photographer Goes Through:

Well I hope this article made some of you laugh a little as I (somewhat) vaguely described my journey as an “HDR photographer.”  I went through all these phases and I think a lot people reading this have gone through plenty of them as well! I still have Photomatix in my dock and I still take bracketed exposures ‘just in case’ when I can’t capture everything in camera. But now, more often than not, I continually surprise myself by seeing how powerful and efficient programs like Lightroom are at bringing in all those details. I don’t think I’ll ever abandon HDR completely, there are just too many situations that demand it in my opinion. I just know that it’s not always needed and I can now freely laugh at the views I had in the past.

Nice take on the acquisition from Trey Ratcliff: The Importance of Google Acquiring Nik Software.

This is an exciting move from Google, and another indication that Google takes photography very seriously. Most of the silicon-valley-bubble-press probably does not know much about Nik Software, and doesn’t realize that this is a company built by and for professional photographers. Even though their software is designed for “pros”, I’m confident in saying that 90% of their customers are amateurs who are using these same tools to make them look like pros! Nik makes amazing tools, and I am really looking forward to seeing them bleed into my daily life of using Google+.

Personally I’m a bit worried. I really, really love Nik and their SilverEfex and HDR Efex, and with google’s purchases it’s always a toss up between “take this and make it more awesome” and “kill it”. I’ve got my fingers crossed for the former.

Via a Facebook post this morning: Canon announces EOS 6D enthusiast-level Wi-Fi capable full-frame DSLR via DPreview.

Short story is 20mp, full frame sensor, ISO up to 51200 (or 102400 in the high extended noone-will-ever-use-it mode), 3.2” LCD, 97% viewfinder, .71x viewfinder magnification, 1080p video in all the expected FPSs, SD/SDHC/SDXC storage, WiFi and GPS built in, and pretty much everything else that you’d expect.

We won’t know how good it really is until the full hands on and detailed reviews are done, but looks pretty nice that’s for sure! Wonder if this is the start of the end of the APS-C “pro-sumer” cameras, as this will premier at $2099, which is definitely pushing it into the realm of mere mortals (though the sub-$1000 are still going to be more common with the more budget concious photogs out there).

Update: I spoke too soon, DPreview does have a preview up for those wanting a closer look at the new kit.

Trey Ratcliff, of Stuck in Customs, has released a beginner photography level 27 minute video which is pretty cool even if you know what you’re doing behind the lens.

This has been passed around a bit over the last couple of days. The Facebook Timeline of a photograph is a fun look back through history, all the way back to 1000 AD.

Found Yes, You Can Trust Your Professional Photographer via @worstofmayhem. Basically it is a photographers reaction to an article which basically indicates that you can’t trust your photographer because they are probably an idiot who just took a class, quit their job and are now charging exorbitant rates yet has no skills.

Ahh… stupid people. We really cannot legislate against stupid people. Anyone who watches a YouTube video and quits their job to become a photographer with no experience is… well… a stupid people.

It’s a good read, especially if you’re a photographer (or play one on tv).

If you’re vaguely into photography you’ve heard about Craft and Vision, by Mr. duChemin and their excellent eBooks for photographers. Well, Craft & Vision is 3 Years Old and have a slew of announcements including a quarterly magazine, that the C&V community (previously a paid, closed service) is free (Sept 1 anyway), and others. Great way to start off the Monday morning.

While I’m not sure that I’d use something like this, the Quikdraw lens holder does look like an interesting concept, especially for event photographers.

Currently they’re at $39,000 of their $100,000 goal, with 23 days to go. Fingers crossed for Riley Kimball to make it!

Via f-stoppers.

Dear America… the people who put out this sort of Government “Run Hide Fight” Videos are part of the reasons that you are mocked. This video seriously sounds like something out of the book 1984. I’m not as offended by the implication that people “taking suspicious pictures” are terrorists as the idiocy of it all.

I say fight back against the idiocy. Report everything. See someone leave their car to run in and get a coke? Report it. See someone wearing jeans on a day when the temperature is over 20C? Report them. See someone you’ve never seen before near your building? REPORT THEM.

Sigh.

Thomas Hawk welcomes Marissa Mayer to Flickr:

Pretty much ever since the day Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo as CEO I’ve been doing a search for her name as a member of Flickr. I’ve been heavily invested both in terms of personal energy and emotion in Flickr as a place to showcase my photography on the web and have been critical over the years of how Yahoo executive leadership has handled the site.

Update: Not her) :(

Very cool review with images of what the new mirrorless Canon EOS M attached to every canon lens in production

Via reddit’s r/photography.

DPReview has a Canon EOS M hands-on preview for those looking for info on the new Canon Mirrorless system.

The EOS M features a compact, magnesium-alloy body, and will be available in four colours - black, white, silver and red. It has no built-in flash, but instead a hot shoe on the top plate, and in many markets (although not the US) it will come bundled with the new AAA-powered Speedlite 90EX unit. There’s neither a built-in viewfinder, nor connector for an external unit - composition is solely using the camera’s rear screen (which is fixed, rather than articulated).

SLR Lounge has at least some rumors of an interesting new looking [mirrorless camera from Canon called the Canon EOS M]](http://www.slrlounge.com/hot-off-the-press-canon-mirrorless-eos-m-revealed).

The photographically prolific Thomas Hawk has An Open Letter to Marissa Mayer, CEO Yahoo Inc.:

Dear Marissa,

Congratulations on your new position with Yahoo. I’ve been a huge fan of Google for a long time and have admired the work that you’ve done there. Google Maps, specifically, has been a big part of my life. Google Maps is the primary reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android phone in fact. The ability to add my maps as a layer on a mobile device when I go to photograph a new city is, for me, an incredibly important feature.

Yahoo has, with Flickr, the core to launch a serious contender to both Google+ and Facebook. Flickr is not “just photos.” Within the DNA of Flickr is a highly social property with serious potential if given the right resources and attention. Flickr Groups could become a powerhouse for groups all across the web that have nothing to do with photography. Competition is fierce though and time is short. Google Events is the first step towards creating a more meaningful group experience at Google and they did Google Events really, really well. It almost feels like it was built for, yes, wait for it — photographers.

This is not the first letter Thomas has written to various Yahoo CEOs.

I’ve written about Photosmith before as the program that I’ve wanted to build myself ever since I discovered Lightroom and a smartphone. Now PhotoSmith version 2.1 is released promising to fix pretty much all of my complaints about the program when I initially purchased it. Better use of previews, more stable syncing of large collections, and tons more.

Sadly you can’t (currently) get the version 2.1 update due to some release issues that were found right after it went live, and I know that the photosmith team is working hard to determine where the errors are coming from and fixing them ASAP. Ping them over at @photosmithapp with some words of encouragement.

Here’s the official changelog:

Changes:

• Added ability to use LR cached previews during sync, speeding up sync
• Added checking and notification of sqlite and exiftool executables needed for preview
• Added support for searching for filenames by image sequence number (needed for jpg proxy workflow)
• Added advanced sync conflict detection
• Added write permissions check for remote updates
• Added additional networking retries to help re-establish sync communications
• Added keepalive thread to better handle large sync operations
• Re-enabled matching by file date/time with the 2.1 version of the app
• Text/formatting updates to Plugin Manager screen

How I ruined my career:

It wasn’t just an image here and there, either. I took complete shoots and blog posts from other photographers. I even stole a blog post about starting a photography business. The saddest part is that the blog post gave advice like “operate with integrity” and “respect your fellow photographer,” which I obviously was not doing by stealing others’ hard work.

Youch.

Cool deal, if you’re looking for image scanning services, you can get a deal with ScanCafe through 1000memories which gets the price down to $0.19/scan for 1000+ scans. Included is saving the images to your 1000 memories “shoebox” account.

I’ve written about 1000memories.com back when they updated their site in April.

Nice collection over at mashable of 9 Astounding Photoshop Transformation videos.

Great news lightroom folks, Lightroom 4.1 Now Available.

Lightroom 4.1 is now available as a final release on Adobe.com and through the update mechanism in Lightroom 4. The goal of this release is to provide additional camera raw support, lens profile support and address bugs that were introduced in previous releases of Lightroom. In addition, Lightroom 4.1 introduces the following new features:[…]

The standard array of new cameras and lenses supported, bugs fixed, and other minor tweaks.

Once again Vancouver photographer David DuChemin makes me want to sell almost everything I own, pack my bags, leave my life, my job, and everything I know behind and take a camera around the world.

I really really want to do this, and have no idea if I ever will be able to.

His post this morning, Objects of Beauty is a great look at his life. That bastard :)

Got an email today announcing the Pentax K-30.

• 16 MP CMOS sensor
• 1080p HD video
• Advanced auto focus and image stabilization
• 100% FOV viewfinder

Full specs here.

DPReview also has a preview of the K-30 for something more in depth. To me it looks like it’s not the high end K-5, but has a lot of the updated hardware from the K-01.

Gorgeous video of The Making of the Leica M9-P, a gorgeous camera.

New(er) download of the Microsoft Camera Codec Pack to view supported RAW images within the Explorer. Not great new functionality if you’re a photographer and using Lightroom or Bridge or the like, still good to see it’s available for 64bit now as well.

Insisting that they’re not dead yet, Flickr has updated their image uploader. Well, it’s not live yet, but the sneak peak they give shows a pretty sexy HTML5 utility that looks like a pleasure to use. Faster, easier workflow, and bumped max upload sizes (30/50mb for free/pro respectively). Should be live for all users “soon”.

Yosemite Range of Light is an amazing time lapse video of Yosemite by Shawn Reeder.

Simply stunning. Definitely watch this on the largest screen you can in high def.

Preposterously large and rare Nikon 6mm f/2.8 lens for sale in London posted over on The Verge. All I can say is “hello lovely…”.

Seriously though, that’s huge. And remember that’s a 6mm in 35mm format, so it’s a “real” 6mm, not 6mm x 1.5x. I have no idea what you’d even use that thing for, other than an exercise in frustration not shooting your own feet (or in this case, your feet, legs, and waist).

Great stuff from 500px (the awesome photo sharing site) today. First of all they have released the 500px Android app for both phone and tablet, giving android users all the loving of a full on site browsing and if you log in, all the voting, sharing, etc goodness from the site.

Secondly the iPad app has been updated with retina display graphics for the 3rd generation iPad (both for the UI and images, which got a 30% bump in pixel density), new UI and native twitter sharing.

Great stuff! As always you can find my portraits up on my account on 500px.

So the Flash Dock is a hot shoe mount for a DSLR camera to attach your SmartPhone (iPhone is shown, I assume any Android or other smartphone will do). Why would you want to do that you ask? Well, their site makes some compelling arguments, beyond of course, “why don’t you just keep it in your pocket dumbass” :)

Via tuaw.

Pretty amazing vide of the Canon 5D Mark II vs. Mark III vs. Nikon D800 under candlelight shot at alternating higher and higher ISO.

A couple of interesting things to note.

• It’s interesting that either the ISO sensitivity is higher on the Nikon or something is off, as it is letting in about a stop or 2 more light (at least it looks like that visually).
• The 5D Mark 3 looks like it’s doing a lot more noise reduction at higher ISO (looking at detail in the lashes vs the Nikon). That said….
• HOLY CRAP is the response I had at the video from the 5Dm3 at high ISO. It maintains the “not high ISO” look amazingly well.

Via the Brooks Review.

The Verge has the details of 500px launching a $19.95 image hosting plan to compete with Flickr Pro.

I think this is a good step, 500px is an excellent site and they need to be able to make more money to make the site better. Personally I agree with Thomas Hawk on Flickr being dead, but even dead they have a lot of momentum and name recognition on the web.

You of course can check out my 500px portfolio or all my images on 500px.

David Hobby writes about his Ambitious April Fool’s Joke which was almost pulled off. So, so close.

Eight hours behind, I remember getting very little sleep that night, alternating between the glee of launching an epic, intercontinental April Fool’s Day prank on Joe — and wondering what it would be like to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder. Because Joe is a very accomplished joker in his own right. And I am pretty sure he has a long memory.

Make sure you read the full story.

Someone has gone and created an excellent guide for the Camera+ app on the iPhone.

Instagram for Android. Yup, it’s here. Looking forward to seeing even more awesomeness in my feed.

You can get more info about it on Mashable or Engadget. Though honestly, there’s not so much to it that you need too much other information :)

Download from google marketplace Google Play here.

Update: It’s now top hit in Google Play. Yay!

Side-Rant: So lets say you’re an android user without access to the link above and want to search for Instagram on Google Play. You go there, search, and look at the search results. See instagram there? Nope, not at the top of the search results, maybe it’s just some keyword spam in there, it must be in page 2. Nope, how about page 3? 4?… not anywhere in the search results (as of 10am PST anyway). My Android Friend tells me that it could take up to 1-2 (or 12) hours to have new apps indexed, which to me sounds a bit odd for a search engine that prides itself in fast indexing. Seriously, this is a high profile app and you’d think that it should be right up there fast :)

It does luckily show up as the third hit if you just do a normal google search…

How Civil War-Era Tintype Photographs Were Made a great video via PetaPixel. Wow, makes me feel completely spoiled.

Canon v.s Nikon. Ok, even if you’re not a photographer you’ll love this one.

So just as I was heading to bed I see both Twitter and Facebook blowing up (as the kids say) about the fact that Lightroom 4 was released. The initial beta wasn’t that long ago and based on the What’s New in Lightroom 4 from The Lightroom Queen not a huge amount has changed since then. Mostly little tweaks.

The biggest news is the price. Lightroom 3 was $299 to $149, half price. The upgrade cost got a similar cut to $79. No doubt they are combatting both piracy but also the low price of $79 that Aperture sells for in the Apple App store.

Has Adobe no shame about these things? Seriously, releasing this at 11:30pm when I’m about to go to bed. Seriously uncool!

Another Lytro Light Field Camera Review at DPReview.

Digital Photography Review has the Canon EOS 5D Mark III Hands-on Preview now that it’s been officially announced

Most of the key specs are substantially upgraded compared to the 5D Mark II. The new sensor, coupled with Canon’s latest DIGIC 5+ processor, offers a standard ISO range of 100 - 25,600 that’s expandable to 50 - 102,800. An 8-channel sensor readout enables continuous shooting at 6 fps. The shutter is rated to 150,000 cycles and has been refined for quieter operation; the Mark III also inherits the ‘silent’ shutter mode previously seen on the 1D-series (which delays mirror return for more discreet operation). Viewfinder coverage is a full 100%, and the 1040k dot, 3:2 aspect ratio 3.2” LCD screen has improved anti-reflection properties and a hardened glass cover to protect against scratching. And let’s not forget that 61-point focus system from the 1DX - the first time Canon has put its top-spec AF sensor into a non-1-series camera since the film-era EOS 3

A quick look over the specs shows that the Nikon D800 is still king of the megapixels (36 vs 22), but the price is about the same as the the D800 ($3500ish). Overall it looks like a nice upgrade for Canon folks, though I doubt that Nikon users will be jumping over for this (ditto for Canon users jumping for the D800). Interesting to hear what the guys on the Digital Convergence Podcast have to say about it!

12 TOP Google+ Photos for February 21. All I can say is “wow”.

For all the photographer pixel peepers out there, have at it with the Nikon D800 vs. Nikon D700 high ISO comparison. All I can say is “wow”. I’m not saying that the high (25600 ISO) is noise free, but it looks a bit like my 4 year old DSLR’s ISO 800.

Note that images under ISO 3200 aren’t included in the comparison as there is “no visible noise”. Amazing.

500px, a site that’s (in general) hailed as the new and modern version of flickr is currently (9:23am PST Wednesday) down with the message “we’ll be back shortly”. Really looking forward to what’s coming. You can get updates from the @500px twitter account.

Update: Back online now, and looking good!

Thomas Hawk, a long time Flickr proponent and recent Flickr-hater (well, hater is a bit strong, lets say “google+ advocate” has broken some news that Flickr is Freshening Up the Look for 2012. Really interested to see if this is true, and the changes if it is. I haven’t uploaded anything of substance to flickr myself lately, as it just feels…. “old”. A complete revamp like this could really inject some life back into it.

Exposure 4 is here!

Come and get it! Exposure 4 is now available. We have lots of pretty examples and videos. If your brain is exploding with anticipation, then maybe you should go straight to our store.

My brain is exploding. Looks like a great upgrade to version 3.

I’m not sure if the Nikon D800/D800E is Finally Out title is accurate, as I don’t think it’s official yet, but it does look like a lot of info (including images of it all) has leaked out.

After months of waiting and following terribly teasing rumors and small photo leaks, Nikon finally announced the D800! For the full specs, details, photos, pre-order information, and to find out what that ‘E’ means, read below. And don’t forget to keep checking back for updates as they roll out when the announcement goes live tonight!

So is this going to be your next camera? Is this an appropriate follow up to the now 4 year old D700?

Update - Looks like it’s all official, and DPReview has a hands on with the D800.

Press release from Pentax: PENTAX Announces the K-01—a More Powerful Mirrorless Camera

One of the immediate highlights and benefits of this cameras mirrorless body design is its compatibility with all PENTAX K-mount lenses spanning decades. You won’t have to worry and wonder whether an investment in a camera of this magnitude will force you to abandon some of your favored lenses. The fact is this camera was built to be compatible with your existing equipment.

$700+ is a high cost when for a few hundred more you can get a full featured (and not that much bigger) DSLR in the K-5. The fact that the mirrorless camera will use all your existing K-mount Pentax lenses reaching back decades is awesome however. Would much rather it had a viewfinder though, even just a rangefinder style.

Engadget has more here.

Quick video from G+ with a look at the new Photoshop CS6 and Camera Raw. Not a huge amount of new details, as expected Camera Raw follows the new setup that Lightroom 4 showed up with, and the only real details about Photoshop itself is that it’s going to default to a darker theme.

Think you're all cool with your Project 365 (photo a day every day)? Bah, so old school and lame! Check out instead This Is What Madeline Schichtel Did In 2011, 1 Year In Under 8 Minutes, the same idea but applied to video, and with sound. Very nifty!

Good blog post about some Exposure 4 Details at the Alien Skin blog. If you don't know, Exposure is a very sweet Photoshop plugin to add texture and effects to photos, and it looks like version 4 is shaping up to be pretty sweet! It'll be available in February 2012 for $249, or $99 upgrade costs.

The master of small flashes (photographic stuff I mean, you pervs), Joe McNally has his review of Shooting the Nikon D4.

The D4 is an entirely new chapter in the history of the pixels. It arrived in a nondescript box. We all stared at it, like it was something that got sent from a sci-fi movie, and if we opened it, we would find the still beating heart of an alien life form.

Anyone want to contribute a bit of $ for the "Buy Alan a new DSLR Rig" fund?

Beautiful video and story by Jeff Harris, who has been doing One Self-Portrait a Day Since 1999.

Trey has some follow up from his article yesterday on why DSLRs are a dying breed. The article, Scott Bourne and Other Fallout from DSLR Dying article... & Saving Money is great, and a good read.

So Trey, the HDR / Stuck in Customs guy has an interesting blog post of interest to the Photographically-interested folks out there: DSLRs are a dying breed.

I can't picture myself investing any more money in DSLR bodies and lenses. The new Nikon D4 that is coming out? Not interested.

I don't know if I agree with him 100%, more so with the time frame of 5 years or so than that DSLR technology will fade away just like Film did and non-smartphones are. The biggest issue I have with all of them is the viewfinders (I have yet to find a non-optical viewfinder that doesn't suck), but as he says, this too shall pass.

Kudos to Trey for starting a really interesting conversation :)

Cool little video from a photographer that I greatly admire, Chase Jarvis, announcing the Polaroid Z340 Camera, a digital camera with instant printout. Or maybe an instant camera with digital? Either way it's a fun video and an interesting looking product.

Today there was the announcement of The Hipstamatic D-Series - bringing analog back, one exposure at a time. Basically it's a new twist on social networking + camera apps + "toy camera" apps + the iPhone.

The idea is that you set up a group of people who share a "roll" of 24 exposures (argh, why do we have real world limitations in a digital world without the concept of a limit on the number of exposures). Each users' images contribute to the roll and are synced up with everyone else. Release date of tomorrow (Thursday the 15th).

The business model will be the same as hipstamatic, selling camera upgrades and film types, and you get a free camera with connections to your facebook account.

This is a neat idea, sort of a more concentrated and realized version of Color which took a similar tack of sharing photos, except it was a geo located sharing not a social network sharing.

There are a few barriers to having this work I think. The 24 exposures thing, having enough friends who use the app (but not so many that the "camera roll" is used up in 2 or three shots). That said, it's still a neat idea and I plan to download it as soon as it's up and available :) The possibilities for sharing day to day activities with friends who aren't around town are pretty interesting though. Imagine you live in say, Vancouver and have friends you would love to keep in touch with more in say, Philadelphia and Lexington. It'd be pretty cool to share a roll with them and see day to day type images as their day progresses and sharing your own. Now that's something I can get behind.

Pretty amazing story: Days of his Life in Polaroids

His first photo was of his then girlfriend Mindy Goldstein and a friend on March 31, 1979. His last, 6,000 shots later, on October 25, 1997 - his birthday was of Livingston on his deathbed, dying from cancer.

HDR: Before and After is a pretty impressive collection of HDR images showing the before/after in a cool flippy javascripty thing. A nice illustration of when HDR does work and what you can do with it.

Six months ago I mentioned the OpenPhoto kickstarter project, and now, six months later, they open the doors (if you have an invite code). The full writeup is over at Hacker News and according to @openphoto they're a bit overwhelmed right now (but are saving invite requests).

Huge kudos to these guys for making this happen and it's a very cool project. My best wishes to them!

I have an admission to make.

My name is Alan, and I have an addiction to iPhone photo editing apps.

I get the free ones, sometimes pay for them. I love them, the presets, the 70s/80s/90s/Sepia and Black and White and every preset you can imagine.

But I never use them.

This one, however, looks different. Luminance, the universal photo editing app is FREE for a limited time, and after downloading it and having a quick run through, I have to say I'm impressed. An easy to undo timeline, about as many editing options as you'd get out of Lightroom with adjustments to white balance, exposure, hue/sat, split toning, and a host of others, all with easy to understand UI, or just a bunch of what looks like nice presets. So if you're like me people, go off and download this one.

Hey, what could it hurt right?

Amazing images from the National Geographic Photo Contest 2011 over at The Big Picture.

Remember the Lytro? That camera that you can focus with after the fact? Well, it's now for sale, $399 for an 8G model, $499 for a 16G. Interesting (revolutionary? odd?) format as you can see in the images on the camera page. Still, I was expecting a pro level cost for something the size of a truck when this came out, the fact it looks like a real consumer product and under $500? Amazing.

I'm really interested to see how this works in real life (as with all things). The 8G model will store 350 images, my math is fuzzy so you'll have to figure the megapixels, as the details page says it's 11 "Megarays", which I assume sort of translate to MP.

I can't wait till some pro folks get their paws on this one.

Via my buddy Duncan from Lens & Shutter, looks like the Canon EOS-1D X professional DSLR has been announced. Surprised it's not the mythic 1DS Mark 3, however the new machine looks pretty impressive. Here are some high points:

• Available early 2012
  
• 18 Megapixel full frame sensor
  
• Full HD video
  
• Dual Digic 5+ processors (17x faster)
  
• 61 AF points
  
• 10-12 FPS (remembering that this is full RAW on a huge sensor)
  

Another page has a lighter weight look at the features, along with icons for dummies like me to easily understand what's going on :)

Photogs out there will be happy to see that Nik has released Color Efex Pro 4. You can see some of the new bits in a video by Scott Bourne over at PhotoFocus.

Adobe Carousel seems like a really interesting product, except for the (monthly subscription) price. If my quick read is correct, it lets you view and edit your images from your lightroom library from any iOS device.

Flickr has rolled out a new feature called GeoFences, which basically allows you to define areas on a map where your geotagging of photos will not show up. You can set it up from the
Geo Preferences page in your account.

Note though, this feature isn't perfect yet, Thomas Hawk notes that it has a huge security flaw in that anyone can download the original image and view the geolocation data from the EXIF data.

This morning Sony announced (officially) the SLT-A77 flagship APS-C DSLR. DPReview has the full press release.

The long-promised A77 makes use of Sony's translucent mirror technology to offer an impressive 12 frame-per-second shooting rate, despite its 24MP APS CMOS sensor

I thought I was "ok" in photoshop for doing photography adjustments, but after watching this video of the adjustments to a Huntington Beach Panorama I realize I am but a worm.

If you know all about panorama blending you can maybe fast forward to about the halfway mark, for me I was pretty shocked at how easy/awesome you can make a shot look with the stuff he did in the second half, blending a silver efex pro black and white layer in luminosity mode to bring out subtle detail. Well worth the watch if you're moderately interested in photography and photoshop.

Top 10 Ways to Improve Google Photos by the well known Thomas Hawk.

Incredible Photos that Capture Day Turning into Night. Nice, and completely doable without the gear that was used (4x5 camera with a 40 megapixel back and a cherry picker).

When Bored At Work, Build A Camera:

Then the idea hit me like a ton of bricks. I WOULD MAKE THIS PIECE OF GARBAGE INTO A CAMERA. I told everybody that I would do so, and nobody believed me.

Via DIYPhotography.net

Strobist points to a pretty cool use of a "few" cameras with on camera flash. Just a few mind you.

Aryk passed on that now Microsoft Live Photo Gallery now supports raw format, so you photogs who don't have a raw processor, or just want to view your RAW files from the explorer, will be able to. Bonus: it works for 64bit as well (previously not available for free without going to a 3rd party codec pack). Good stuff!

Great video called‪Stand Your Ground‬‏ about a group of photographers on the streets of London who had the audacity to question the security firms and rent-a-cops asking them to stop shooting photographs and video when filming on the streets. Interesting results.

Thomas Hawk does a cool Google+ vs. Flickr vs. Facebook vs. 500px vs. Twitter comparison.

I will try to compare, the best I can, the attention that the same photograph received from each of these sites over the course of 24 hours. If as a photographer you are looking at photo sharing sites, in part, as a way to promote your work to a wider audience, the engagement your photographs receive online may be of interest. This case is very specific and of course everyone's circumstances will differ, but this is my experience.

Fascinating interview/video of Bruce Gilden a famous New York City street photographer that has a ... "unique" way of doing street photography. Watch the video for some great examples of what he does and how he works.

Disposable Camera Captures Its Own Trip Across the United States. Awesomely cool. A disposable camera was mailed in such a way it could be used while "packed" and postal workers were asked to take pictures with it as it went across the US. Easier to view the images in the link than explain it.

After the kerfuffle a while back about flickr accounts being deleted without warning or chance of retrieval, the flickr blog has responded with their new policies and procedures.

Just discovered loc.alize.us, a cool site that combines Flickr images and their geotagging, all wrapped up in a nice web 2.0 frontend. Very sexy.

Trading fear for photos on a stricken plane is the story of a photographer on a plane that had an engine die and shot what he thought were his last shots ever. Dude is hardcore. Check out the reddit discussion on the link.

DPReview has their in-depth Fujifilm X100 review posted. You'll remember the x100 as the gorgeous rangefinder style digital camera that was announced last year and had the camera nerds frothing at the mouth.

Anyone spare a thousand dollars to help me get one? Anyone?

Amateur Photographer Shoots Largest Ever Photo of the Night Sky. Amazing (and zoomable). Via reddit. Remember you can zoom out and rotate around the inside of the "sphere" in the image. Again, mindblowing.

SF to Paris in Two Minutes on Vimeo. Awesome. Make sure you go through the last few seconds for a few quick shots of the setup.

I know it's a promo video, but those photogs in the crowd who know what the Fuji X100 is will appreciate it. The beauty of this camera is amazing (sadly so is the price). Anyone who wants to get me a review unit I'd love you forever! Check the Fuji X100 Official Promotion Video over at RiceHigh's blog.

If you're photographically inclined, you might be interested to check out the new show from the guys at TWiT, in it's "episode zero" format - MostlyPhoto Beta 1 with @mostlylisa (Lisa Bettany) and @treyratcliff (Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs). I'm only about halfway through but it's nice to hear they're not concentrating on gear, but more on what you can do with the gear you already have. Lots of talk about HDR in the initial show (not surprising because Trey is there) and as a bonus at around 28 minutes in you get to watch Trey do a "live" HDR of one of Leo's photos.

Sadly there's not an RSS feed yet, or anything to subscribe to. Looking forward to it going live so I can add it to my own list of photo podcasts.

Update: Beta 2 - Thanks Foz!

BBC has this Audio slideshow that is awesome. Must watch for any photography geeks.

Accompanying the film crews was photographer Timothy Allen. His stunning still images captured unique glimpses of people living in the world's most extreme environments. Take a look at some of them, and listen to him explain how he snapped the most arresting shots.

The collection is called Back to the Future, by photographer Irina Werning, and while I've seen a lot of great pics of people doing the same pose and clothing as a duplicate image from when they were a kid, these shots' attention to detail is amazing.

Eye-Fi has announced a new set of cards with a new Direct Mode which allows wireless transfer of images taken on your camera (with Eye-Fi on it of course) to your iOS device running the Eye-Fi app. 9-5 Mac has a good rundown.

My only reason for not getting the Eye-Fi card is the monthly cost for their geo-tagging service, however with a vacation on the horizon, I might change my tune :)

Update: Looks like I was wrong about the geotagging cost, some cards come with a lifetime included geotagging service.

A second photography related link tonight, check out this Firmware Hack to Bring 4K Video to the Canon Rebel T2i/550D. If you have one of these cameras, and are a bit brave, you might have fun playing with this. 4K video is .... well, damn high resolution lets just say :)

Just in time for the videos you might be making over the holidays, Further Research into Using Chickens as Steadicams has reached a point where you probably want to read the page. Oh sure it's all for fun, but still, it's pretty damn cool :)

Cool video/slideshow of Bruce Dale's National Geographic pictures called 30 Years of BAD Pictures. Awesome stuff.

DPReview has posted a nice in-depth review of the Nikon D7000.

Nikon surprised many people by pushing its enthusiast DSLR distinctly up-market just as Canon was doing the opposite with its 60D. The result is such a highly specified camera that it's generated almost as much interest from existing and would-be D300S customers as from the traditional D90 audience.

The latest In pictures feature has some pretty great shots.

Pretty much any photographer will recognize this video, though I have a feeling that this will fall true with pretty much anyone who is self employed.

What do you do if you have 52 Canon 5D Mk 2s? You make a video of surfers in bullet time style!

Hat tip to the reddit article.

Note the other cool video is this behind the scenes one.

A new twist on old pictures.... 3D Van Gogh, using tilt-shift to give a bit of an update to the old master.

Bernie's Better Beginner's Guide to Photography looks like an excellent resource for beginning photographers looking for a solid understanding of the basics.

I know it's not one of the big two, but Pentax is my camera maker of choice and I figured I'd throw up their two announcements here. First is the K-5, a new pro level body with a 16.3 mp sensor, ISO 80-12800 (@6-7FPS) and 1080p video at 25FPS. Second is a nice addition to their lens lineup the 18-135 F3.5/5.6 zoom, what appears to be a nice walkaround lens, and other than being a bit slower, could be a great replacement for my 16-45 f/4.

Canon and Nikon people, you may continue about your business (though with the vague feeling that maybe, just maybe, in-body shake-reduction that allows you to have 50 year old lenses with 2-3 stops of shake-reduction is a good thing and something you're really like to try out.... Just sayin' :)

Update: DPreview has the news and a short hands on the K-5.

Cool light painting technique using the iPad. Not what you expect.

Hows this for crazy? John Chiara's Photographic Process is to use a large format camera. Large as in "size of a desk" large.

Cool, the photoclass subreddit has started a series of photo class lessons online. Check out Lesson 1 - What is a camera and Lesson 2 - Different types of cameras.

One of the more interesting developments recently in Camera+, a nifty little iPhone app from Tap Tap is the newest update was supposed to include "volumesnap", a setting to allow you to use the iPhone's volume buttons, making it easier to take pictures and having your phone feel a bit more like a real camera. Sadly this update was rejected recently.

Luckily there is a way to
How to use your iPhone's volume buttons for shutter control in Camera+ even without the update, and it works fine even on older (3G) iPhones. Simply:

1. Open up safari on your iPhone and go to cameraplus://enablevolumesnap
   
2. There is no step 2, it's now enabled and you can now open up Camera+ and the volume buttons will trip the shutter when you're in picture taking mode.
   

If you find you don't like this (for example, if you want to change the music volume while you're taking pictures), just go to cameraplus://disablevolumesnap and it will, unsurprisingly, disable the feature.

Another great Daring Fireball Linked List link to a Statistical Analysis of the Attractiveness of User Profile Pictures, asserting, among other things, that iPhone users have more sex (presumably with other people that is).

As an iPhone user, I must agree with this.

</troll>

Some other interesting stuff as well, including analysis of sexiness by camera make, class, flash or no flash, etc.

Wow, I'll never look at eye photographs the same way again.

Great post with examples of Photo Tampering Throughout History. That iconic image of Abraham Lincoln that everyone knows? More like just his head Lincoln.... :)

Fantastic shot and description over on flickr called View From a Car Carrier. Read the description to see what it's like steering one of those huge cargo ships. I also encourage you to go through the rest of the My Office Window set of images showing the varied life of a cargo ship driver who does nothing but ferry these boats in and out of the harbor. This was featured on the flickr blog today.

If you're participating in the Scott Kelby World Wide Photo Walk, you'll be getting a Free Live Online Lightroom 3 Workshop after the walk is over. If you're not, and are into photography, come on out and give it a shot. I'll be at the Abbotsford location if anyone wants to meet up.

I'm not sure where the LX4 went to, but Panasonic officially announces DMC-LX5 premium compact, successor to the very popular LX3. Improvements include a longer zoom (24-90mm), keeping the wide aperture (f/2.0-3.3), and various other UI and form changes to tweak things.

The discussion thread on reddit on the Holga D is pretty awesome. Sadly it's just a concept imagery, but you have to admit, the idea of a digital camera with a crappy lens and no LCD is a pretty awesome concept. Honestly, if the price were right, it would sell. Some good links in the comments for things like a Diana lens for your DSLR (along with lots of snarky remarks).

Proving that you don't need a "pro" camera to shoot fantastic photos, and if you know what you're doing, you can do a iPhone-only pro-fashion photo shoot.

Of course, as cool as it is to see great shots coming from an iPhone, and as true as the "you don't need a $7000 camera to take great pictures" rule is, this video shows that if you have a bazillion dollars worth of lighting gear, a professional model and make up artist, you can get great shots as well, which maybe isn't what they were trying to do :) Still, it's cool. Love the moment in the video at 3:54ish when the phone rings :)

Two good posts for the photographers out there (or if you're being photographed).

• Top 10 Ways To Make A Photographer Fall In Love With You
  
• Top 10 Ways To Piss Off A Photographer
  

I think for me this might be even more exciting than the new iPhone release, seeing on my ride in this morning that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 has been finally released. Very exciting, and the blogs and podcasts are all abuzz....

• Camera Dojo scores an exclusive interview and review of the new features.
  
• John Nack has a list of features that are new.
  
• The Lightroom Journal also has similarly good coverage.
  

Trey Ratcliff, of HDR Tutorial and Stuck in Customs fame, has released another fantastic Stuck In Motion Video. Check out the notes for how he does this. Great work as usual.

This is interesting if you're in the Photography world.... Phase One has aquired Microsoft's Expression Media software. If you remember, "Expression Media" used to be iView MediaPro, a pretty damn good bit of software. It's interesting that a) Microsoft would sell off software that fills a gap in what they have available (though maybe it's not a core competancy of theirs, so they felt it better to put it in the hands of a company that truely knows Photography software), and b) someone aquires software from Microsoft, and not the other way around. It'll be interesting to see what happens here. I've used PhaseOne a bit, and it was more a RAW engine, so maybe grafting that onto the Digital Asset Management (DAM) software in iView-now-Expression Media is something that will put a third pony into the Aperture / Lightroom race.

Fozbaca tweeted out this great article: Master the Art of Photographic Composition. Awesome example images and good stuff!

MacRumors says that Adobe Creative Suite 5 is Now Shipping, so you can grab 'em to check them out.

The idea of putting a camera onto a remote control car and calling it The BeetleCam Project is cool, but the pictures it gets are even cooler. Love the lion image, looks like she's about to give the "Beetle" a good smack to see what it is :)

Yup, it's released. Been a busy day though so I haven't had a chance to look too deeply in. You can check out the discussion of it over on Digital Photography Review, where they highlight the features that are most likely to affect photographers. There's also the 61 minute launch event, and the full CS5 press release.

Pricing and Availability:

Adobe Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended are scheduled to ship within 30 days with availability through Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store and Adobe Direct Sales. Estimated street price for Adobe Photoshop CS5 is US$699 and US$999 for Photoshop CS5 Extended. Upgrade pricing and volume licensing are available.

Saw on Camera Dojo that Lightroom 3 beta 2 is Now Available. Native canon/nikon tethering, improved performance, and support for managing video files. Looking forward to playing with this!

Hows this for a good deal, if you're into photography you can watch Captured By The Light, a 2.5h webcast, free. Sweet! Kudos to David Ziser for making this available.

I don't normally pimp random photos, or Trey Ratcliff's work in general, as I assume that everyone already reads his blog. However the latest shot is frikkin' amazing, and best viewed large and on black (click the image to view it). Amazing detail and beautiful HDR work.

The Pentax 645D has been Announced. Again. I think. The 645D is a medium format digital camera with 40mp of resolution, backwards compatibillity with film Pentax 645 lenses, and a price point of under (a bit) $10,000. A bit pricey, but compared to the Hallelblad at $23,000, not all that bad if you're in that business :)

Kudos to Nicolesy for this great find: Judge Joe Brown & Cheap Wedding Photographers. I'm not sure if His Honor Brown really knows his camera gear or is just repeating what his staff has researched for him, but it's entertaining and surprisingly not dumbed down camera lingo. Well worth the 10 minutes to watch the segment, regardless of your opinion of stupid shows like the "Judge [name]" and it's ilk.

Yet another reason I'm terrified to become a wedding photographer :)

Little bit of photographic inspiration if you're stuck with just a 50mm lens and want to see what you can do with it.

Pretty funny series of videos of Mr. Pixel and Mrs. Grain, a couple in counseling. If you're not into photography, you can probably skip this one.

Fascinating and beautiful collection of photos of The One Who Got Away.

If you're a photo geek, you probably have heard of, and most likely use, either Aperture or Lightroom. You've also probably heard that Apple released Aperture 3.0 recently. Lightroom killer tips has taken a stab at starting some good discussion with 5 Reasons To Stay with Lightroom (and not switch to Aperture). The author is biased (duh) and is responding to this article on switching the other way (Lightroom 2 to Aperture 3). From the LR Killer Tips article:

Obviously there's been a lot of buzz around lately about Apple's Aperture 3. I read an article yesterday titled "Five Reasons For Switching from Lightroom 2 to Aperture 3" by a gentleman named Marco. So I figured I'd take a stab at my own rendition of the "5 things" article (no offense to Marco) and write about 5 reasons to stay with Lightroom.

Personally I think it's not a cut and dry thing. Both programs have their good sides and downsides, and quite frankly, I'd love some features from AP3 in LR and vice versa. In reality though, use what works best for you (as always), but don't go flip flopping every time there's a new software release, cause (most likely) your time and effort is worth way more than that :)

The most awesome Trey Ratcliff (@stuckincustoms), famous for his HDR photographs and tutorial, did a talk for the Authors@Google series, embedded below.

The full talk is almost an hour long, and while I have yet to watch it yet (silly work disturbing my video watching), I look forward to seeing it.

Nice article on how In photography, rules aren't laws. Some great advice and inspiration in there for people who are exploring the world of photography.

Interesting article on an artist's decision to not retouch images of super models he took for a gallery show.

Very cool for the photo geeks out there: First Large Format Skydiving Photographs.

So looking through the What's new in Aperture 3 page, it looks like some people's dreams will come true, with "Faces" and "Places" from iPhoto appearing, brushes for retouching (echoing the local adjustment brushes from Lightroom), presets (they didn't have those before?), and what looks like a gorgeous full scren browser for browsing and viewing. Rounding out the major features is new slideshows with advanced affects, ability to combine video and audio with your photos, etc (sounds like they mixed in some Final Cut/iMovie in there as well).

All I can say is I kinda wish I a) wasn't already invested in Lightroom (come on Adobe, bring us Lightroom 3!!!) and that my main and most powerful computer wasn't a windows machine.

Bending over backwards in Photoshop. Literally is a great post from a flickr superstar, photographer and model. Miss Aniela shows how she created a very cool image from another fairly "meh" one. An interview with her was done for TWIP a while back and can be found here.

Light Chasers Photography has a great article on How to Shoot (Photographs) Like A Terrorist. An excerpt:

Bring the largest camera (or lens) you have
We all know that terrorists want attention - that's why they plant bombs wreak as much havoc as they can. They want people to notice them so they can get their message heard. This means that terrorists don't want to bring around small, inconspicuous cameras - they don't attract any attention. If you want to look like a terrorist, bring out the biggest hunks of plastic, metal, and glass that scream out "I'm a photographer terrorist."

Nice list from Scott Bourne for you photogs out there: Seven Things To Ask Before You Take Your Next Photograph. Via Andy Ihnatko who also added a few of his own on there :)

One of the (sad IMHO) realities these days is that if you have either a site that gets a non-trivial amount of traffic, or want to have the time available to you to run a site as more than a hobby, you need to run ads. Google ads are the most common, and are easily blocked with Adblock. Note: I both use adblock and also run google ads on this site. Anyway, the very cool site 1001 Noisy Cameras is going ad-free.

The site is a plethora of camera related news, with an amazing amount of content each day and while I had to put 'maybe' in the poll, I definitely wish them the best of luck and look forward to seeing how the endeavor goes.

As an aside, over here in UFies land, the income from having ads on the blog is somewhere between $0.07 - $3.50 a day on average (that's $0.008/h to $0.44/h) . Though I do appreciate everyone who goes to visit some sponsors :)

X-Equals is giving away their +X=IMAGE KIT, 2 years set of presets for Lightroom. Hat tip @nicolesy.

Aryk pointed me to a deal that Gizmodo blogged, where you Buy 200GB of Google Storage, Get a Free Eye-Fi Card. The eye-fi geo card details are here.

This pains me a bit. On one hand, I don't need extra storage from Google. On the other hand, 200G of online storage would be kinda nice. On one hand I know this deal is basically hoping that you forget to cancel the 200G of space and keep on paying the $50/year, but hey, you get a $60 wireless eye-fi card for $50, plus online backup.

Some more info here as well, including some of the fine print. One of the items indicates ("...includes one free year of Web Share and Geotagging ($24.98 value)") that the Geotagging is actually a service, not built into the card.

I normally don't like these "N Amazing Photos of [whatever]" type links, but DPS's link of 25 Spectacular Light Painting Images is pretty spectacular.

Great video of Canon and Nikon, a modern day Romeo+Juliet.

BoingBoing has a great story about a Leopard seal teaching photographer how to catch penguins, told by a National Geographic photographer who went to get some shots in the arctic.

I've seen a few of these types of projects lately. Check out Help-Portrait... there are a couple of videos on there that are pretty powerful, make me want to go and grab my gear.

Andy Ihnatko has a great set of images comparing Droid Camera vs. iPhone with surprising results. Remember of course that more megapixels doesn't mean a better image all the time.

Learn And Explore for the iPhone from Nikon, has become available in the US app store. Nice little app for my Nikon shooting friends.

Macworld has a great review of different outsourced scanning services (for negatives, slides, and prints) and compares a couple of the big ones in terms of time, quality, etc. Good stuff if you have a shoebox of slides that you need to do something with.

Other than it looking way too "CG" for a lot of it, looks potentially interesting (assuming they didn't give away the entire plot in the trailer of course).

Whoah, what a way to start the morning! No, I don't mean that it's Windows 7 release day, I mean I was perusing my RSS and saw: Adobe ships Lightroom 3 free public beta over on 9 to 5 Mac. I'll have more links soon as the coffee kicks in. Here is the release notes (PDF). Main changes are "architecture for the growing size of image libraries" (cool, though catalogs and smart folders work well for this) and better noise reduction (sweet), posting to internet sharing sites directly, better watermarking, and a bunch more stuff.

More info on the Adobe Labs page.

Some demo Videos found as well.

Flickr! It's made of people! just launched. a facial recognition system similar to Adobe Elements, Picasa, and iPhoto (and probably others). Very cool feature, I'm looking forward to playing with it.

Now I just wish support for this sort of tech was built into Lightroom and Aperture!

Update: Note that this isn't a facial recognition system, but just a way to tag people's faces manually in images.

Anyone who is into photography probably noticed the new Canon 1D Mark IV was released and here's a pretty awesome video by Vincent Laforet called Nocturne, shot in ISO 6400 with the Mark IV.

Not the camera I'd want slung around my neck all day, but I don't think I'm on the level that I need a Mark IV :) Dana also points that there is some back story here about the short film.

Trey Ratcliff, of the excellent Stuck in Customs HDR blog and tutorial has created a very cool looking HDR Spotting, a Gallery of HDR Photos by the community. HDR doesn't appeal to everyone, but this is a nice resource to see (and be inspired by) some of the "good" ones.

Two bits of Flickr news tonight:

• First is a collection of cloud images called The White Sea. Absolutely stunning.
  
• Second is the announcement via Thomas Hawk that Starbucks has joined. Now I'm not exactly sure why, other than a PR and "making good with the community" (why the photo community? not sure), but it's interesting to see how they do and what they do.
  

Found via the Tack Sharp photography podcast is a great collection of Launch Photography of the Space Shuttle and other rockets. Some really good examples of creative views of the same scene.

Maybe that recent update for the Panasonic LX3 wasn't so great. Seems they are suspending the LX3 firmware update and have announced version 2.1 for October 20th. Via 1000 noisy cameras.

Steve Huff has posted a fantastic 13 page Leica M9 review. Wonder if I can just email them and if they'd send me one to play with?

Just a quick note that if you're one of the lucky ones with an LX3, there's a firmware update to version 2.0 ready for you. The list of improvements is impressive as well, faster AF, a new aspect ratio, new scene mode, etc.

Almost every photographer I know (mostly noobs like me) says that their weak point is taking pictures of people and especially strangers, and I also have never had the balls to ask some random strangers to take their picture. Zack's Street Portraits video shows how to do it and how damn easy it is.

The Flickr Blog has details of Galleries, the latest feature on the site. In a nutshell, galleries are like sets of other people's images. Currently you can use Sets to collect images of your own, Galleries allow you to collect up to 18 images from other people.

The camera nerds will probably drool over the newly announced Leica M9, and balk at the price. Still, full frame sensor, classic range-finder body, compatibility with what people claim to be the best lenses in the world, etc etc. Anyone got a few months of mortgage payments spare that they can give me to buy one? Pretty please?

More details and pricing ($7k!!!) here.

Update: Hands on preview over at DPreview.

I just saw the Panasonic DMC-GF1 Hands on Preview at DPReview. I have the LX3, but this one is a) 4/3rds sensor and b) not that much bigger. Seexxxxxxy.......

The latest from Canon has appeared. Check out the Canon EOS 7D at DPReview. Updated are the viewfinder (100% @ 1.0x magnification), integrated speedlight control, 18mp sensor, 8fps, 24fps full HD movie mode, DIGIC 4 (that's one better than DIGIC 3), and other bits. See the link for way more details.

Well, not only is there going to be an Apple Event in September, looks like Leica is set to unveil new products on 9.9.09. The video says "a collection of ground breaking products", and there's a webcast. Personally I'm excited in so much that I greatly admire the craftsmanship, quality and history, but I'm pretty sure I won't be able to afford it whatever it is. Maybe a new M9? A full frame version of the digital rangefinder? Who knows....

DPReview has the press release and images of the Canon PowerShot G11. This comes of course, right after my dad got himself the G10. Same lens, a downgrade from the 15mp sensor in the G10 to a "high sensitivity" 10mp sensor (maybe they listened to people talking about the insanity of huge megapixels on a tiny sensor), better anti-noise (they claim 2 stops) and various other things. No HD video yet either...

Interesting to see what the people screaming in the forums about how Canon was right and DPReview and their unjustified crusade against high megapixels in P&S cameras have to say...

Update: Engadget has a hands on with the G11.

Models.com has a Keep It Real post with a bunch of supermodels without makeup. Look good too, and as they say, more human than the normal plastic people you see in the supermarket rags. That said, they were also still done in an "artsy" way, with good lighting and using a vintage 70's black and white look to minimize and hide some of the imperfects (instead of airbrushing the smeg out of them on the "well lit" covers). Still, good to see some of these (unrecognizable) people looking more human.

Macenstein has a cool Time-lapse video of a Macworld cover creation. As a photography it's particularly interesting in their lighting setup and the amount of post processing that's involved to get the shiny gadgets to look so shiny. Also I didn't realize what was all involved in setting up and tweaking all the stuff on the cover, fonts, and text and layout and whatnot.