I'll tell you a secret. I can't get at all excited about JPG Magazine anymore since the whole shakeup with Derek, Heather and "the new JPG" I'm still subscribed to the JPG newsletter, still subscribed to the JPG blog in my feed reader and I've been waiting for something to get excited about but haven't seen anything that fits that bill. They keep announcing all kinds of technical bells and whistles like Facebook plugins that hold but nothing exciting to me as a photographer and a lover of photography. This may be an unfair statement but it's my honest take on it so I'm putting it out here: it seems like Derek and Heather's vision of JPG was a photography magazine that used cool web technologies to process submissions whereas the "new JPG" is a web company and one of their commodities is a magazine. That's just my very outsider take on the situation.
Flickr has just announced upgrades to its online upload utility.
Here at Flickr, we want to make sure your photos arrive safely, efficiently, and with style. That why we've dumped our dusty old web upload form, and replaced it with a super-duper, sexy-ified, shiny new web uploader.
CNET has a very interesting interview with Neal Krawetz, founder of computer security firm Hacker Factor. Of late Krawetz has turned his attention to digital images and the truths and lies they tell. This is particularly interesting to me in a journalism context.
Take USA Today. Every now and again, they put up pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And they will modify the pictures. I'm not sure who's modifying the pictures--whether it's the photographer submitting it or the intern who's putting them together or someone else at USA Today--but they'll modify it to increase the brightness, for example, on Hillary.When you increase brightness on a picture, you bring out all the things like wrinkles that really aren't attractive. And they'll soften the picture on Barack Obama to make it look better.
And on helping publications avoid "modified" images.
In my talk, I actually give some pointers for the mass media like Reuters. If they really want to publish pictures that have been unmodified, here's how you can tell. One way is to use quantization table fingerprinting.If the picture claims to be from a digital camera, and the quantization tables, which are used for compressing the image, don't match the camera, then you know that it's been manipulated. If Reuters had done that, it would have caught the fake photos.
Of course virtually every digital image, just like every darkroom developed image, is going to have some level of modification and manipulation. Burning, dodging, contrast, etc.. The question for me in terms of photojournalism is does it alter the fundamental truth and story of the photo. Photoshopping out a power line crosses that line between truth and fiction for me whereas upping the contrast a bit doesn't. I don't envy the photo editors that have to draw that line between truth and fiction but the lines do have to be drawn. As we've discussed before there are just too many instances of photographers in photojournalism situations taking huge leaps over that truth/fiction line to ignore the problem.
We've discussed the very cool Moo cards and notecards before. Now they've stepped up their game and are now producing stickers. While stickers are very cool and I can come up with several cool uses for them what I really want Moo to start making are post cards. I'd love to take some of my shots and turn them into nice, solid post cards. Is that on the agenda Moo people?
A brief apology for the radio silence. I was moving across state lines and getting settled in my new house. Onward.
The NY Times Circuits section is all about digital photography today and includes some really interesting stuff. Particularly interesting articles are It Isn't That Images Fade, It's That They Can Vanish about image loss with inkjet prints, When Are Photos Like Penny Stocks? When They Sell about microstock photography and Sharing a Hobby, Online and in Person.
Flickr partner Moo has just launched a new product, NoteCards.
NoteCards - square prints made from your own photos or designs. They have a magic flap on the side, to make them stand up proudly on your mantel, bookshelf or window sill, and are perfect for mailing to friends.
I love sending and receiving real mail. Can't wait to design some of these and integrate them into my stationery rotation. 16 cards cost $24.99 US.
via Laughing Squid
Tags: photography, Moo, Flickr
Curious what you and your friends were uploading to Flickr one year ago today? Check out One Year Ago, I Flickr'd... for an easy way to find out.
Flickr is a great way to tell our stories as they happen, but it doesn't do a very good job of retelling those stories once they're over. Some of us have been sharing our lives with Flickr for 5 years now! Why doesn't Flickr help us remember all the fun we've had?This page will tell you what you posted to Flickr a year ago. If you'd like, it can also show you photos from your friends. Did you post photos of the same thing?
Photography enthusiast Nick Pagazani was hindered by the range and fixed location of his camera's flash. Since his camera has no connector for an external flash, he needed a light-activated slave trigger to fire a remote strobe. It had to ignore the pre-flashes used for red-eye correction and fire only on the main flash. His solution: Use a microcontroller to count pulses from a phototransistor and trigger the strobe at a switch-selectable count.Case #96: Nick Has an Illuminating Flashback at Design News
I think this is a little too complex for most people (heck, it's way too geeky for me) but it's a neat project to look at.
Lee & Sachi spent 2006 traveling around the world. They documented their experiences in 29 countries both in words & images on their blog. The images include some breathtaking panoramic pictures. Well worth checking out.
See their Flickr feed for larger versions of the panoramas.
via DSLR Blog
Tableau is an open source application that makes building lightbox style photo galleries easy.
Monoslideshow is an extremely slick, extremely flexible Flash app for displaying slideshows on websites. All the heavy lifting is done by an editable xml file so even Flash novices should have no problem making impressive slideshow displays. Monoslideshow sells for $19.95.
Um spoiler alert for an already aired episode of CSI.
Thanks to CBS on demand (and the insane amount of money I pay each month for digital cable) I watched Thursday night's episode of CSI this morning. The episode is called "Happenstance" but since it's already aired I'd like to rename it "The Photographer Did it!" As an episode of CSI it had had the requisite twists and turns but the main point is a photojournalist murder his editor to keep her from spilling the beans that his Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of American soldiers in Iraq was actually a composite. He'd taken a bunch of boring, mundane stuff and pasted it together to create one dynamic shot.
It made for a good storyline on CSI but this is actually a very serious topic that working photographers and anyone buying photography has to deal with. Earlier this year Reuters fired a freelance photographer in Lebanon for significantly digitally altering his photographs that many felt changed the context and meaning of the events in the photos. The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer over the summer for altering the colors of a sunset in one of his photos. The photographer said he made the edits to make the colors in the photograph more true to how they actually were. In other words he was trying to improve upon the limitations of photography not change the meaning of the photo or deceive anyone.
In some of my portrait work I've done some serious photo editing to soften backgrounds, increase shadows, etc and the photographs have benefited from it and my clients were very happy. I don't discuss what levels of photo editing have taken place with the client not because I want to deceive or trick them, they simply aren't interested. They want to see the end product not all the steps and processes that lead up to it and they want that end product to make them (or their child) look interesting and beautiful. Photojournalism is a whole different ball of wax. Lots of magazines and newspapers have written guidelines and rules on what is considered acceptable photo editing but as technology improves it's going to be harder and harder to figure out what is Photoshopped, what is real and what the difference truly is.
Online application Satellite 1.0 offers a very painless way to build a website around your Flickr feed. Unlike some similar applications I've seen Satellite seamlessly handles individual images, sets, thumbnails and even tags.
Satellite is an online application for displaying a gallery of images remotely from your flickr.com account.It can be used as an off the shelf website that uses the Flickr API to make calls to your Flickr account so you can take full advantage of Flickr's Organizr and keyword capabilities which are then mirrored on your personal site.
When you upload images to Flickr, your website is automatically updated!
Satellite is CSS based, so you may customize its look and feel by downloading themes or creating your own.
To see a demo of Satellite in action check out Gravityroom.com.
Satellite requires a Flickr account and a php enabled web server.
Tags: photography, flickr, photo sharing
Blogger Chris Heilmann shares his code for creating unobtrusive (meaning not ugly) Dynamic Flickr Badges.
Being bored yesterday night, I thought that it would be really cool to have a flickr badge that can be navigated (x pictures forward and backward), has a preview in middle size mode (lightbox style) and is generally nicely unobtrusive.
Tags: photography, flickr, photo sharing
Still in beta photo sharing software KoffeePhoto has some interesting features that make it worth a look. It's a combination organizer, backup service and presentation tool. Organize your photos into albums, save them on KoffeePhoto's p2p network, share your albums, present slideshows and receive comments on your photos, and order prints. Unlike many photo sharing apps I've seen this one supports Windows, Mac, and Linux (!).
A word of caution: p2p networks are a little scary to some people and you should make sure you're very comfortable using one (and all your necessary security protocols are in place) before you sign up.
Tags: photography, KoffeePhoto, photo sharing
AdoramaPix is bringing the treats instead of the tricks this Halloween. For a very limited time they are offering 50 free 4x6 prints. To get this very special offer you need to login to AdoramaPix, upload your fantastic digital images and place your order using the super secret special code PXHAWE06. This offer expires 11/07/06.
Lunchboxes cost $35, ship within a week and for an extra $10 you can have pictures on both sides of the box.
Nikon gave their new D80 dslr camera to a group of Flickr users. The users shot with the D80s and many of their shots have been turned into a brilliant ad campaign called stunning nikon. Nikon did themselves a great service with this campaign. Word of mouth and in the case of photography, visual evidence, is far more persuasive than any traditional sales or marketing campaign. Other camera makers should learn from Nikon's example (I totally volunteer to test any and all Canon or Pentax cameras or equipment).
via Jaffe Juice
Tags: photography, Nikon, d80, Flickr
ProtectMyPhotos is a slick new online backup service that automatically syncs the photos on your computer with secure, offsite servers. Online backup isn't new or sexy but automatic backup that's secure and completely simple to set up and run? That's the new hotness.
Download a small application, tell it to either scan your whole system for photos or tell it which folders to scan and then let it run quietly in the background and do its thing. After the initial time consuming scan and uploading process ProtectMyPhotos unobtrusively makes sure the photos on your hard drive match the photos in your online backup. Add new photos? ProtectMyPhotos detects them and automatically uploads them to the datacenter. Delete some photos? ProtectMyPhotos let's you know about any discrepancy so you can make sure that what you deleted is what you actually want gone. It's very cool and very easy to use.
I keep mentioning the simple factor here because I'm thinking of getting my grandmother a subscription to ProtectMyPhotos for Christmas. My grandma loves digital photography and digital photos. When she thinks about her computer it's in terms of how many pictures she can get on it, how safe her photos are on it, how easily she can get to her photos on it, and how harshly she needs to warn the grandkids not to mess up her photos on it. A simple, automatic back up process would give her peace of mind and save me hours of DVD backup burning on visits. That's right, ProtectMyPhotos is so easy and painless to use I feel confident hooking my grandma up with it.
The free account allows unlimited backup of low res jpegs. The paid account is $49.95 per year and works with nearly every image format you can think of including RAW files. In addition the service is stretching the limits of its name by allowing you to back up video, mp3 and other audio files, office documents, and financial documents (Quicken, MS Money, etc). You can access your files from anywhere with a secure web based file browser and restore any lost files with a click.
Tags: photography, backup, ProtectMyPhotos, file backup, photo backup, data backup
PJ Chmiel is a graphic designer who is touring a big chunk of the Eastern and Southern United States (and a little bit of Canada) on his beloved scooter Ramblin' Man. He's keeping a very detailed and interesting travel journal but even more interesting are the thousands of pictures he's posting to Flickr. He photographs things he finds interesting along the way, hostels and motels he's stayed in, people he's met on his journey. It's a great big slice of "This American Life" and I'm loving every frame of it.
He doesn't always have an internet connection so he uploads in bulk when he can. That means not every thing is titled, tagged and labeled but he's working on it and the images are well worth looking at even if you don't know specifically what town in Vermont or South Carolina or Louisiana they came from.
Tags: photography, documentary photography, americana, flickr
Remove moving objects such as tourists or passing cars from your photos. Take multiple photos from the same scene and Tourist Remover blends them into a composite photo without any interfering elements.
Tags: photography
The Microsoft Research department has a free piece of software available that allows you to stitch together multiple exposures of a group shot to come up with a composite image where everybody's eyes are open, nobody is mid-yawn or completely looking the wrong way.
MSR Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image.
Of course Group Shot is for Windows only.
New blog photoshopit wants to help you get the most out of your Photoshop experience. It's got tutorials, examples and even a page full of free PSD files to give you a jump start on lots of projects. The site is only a couple weeks old so there aren't a ton of articles yet but still enough to get you interested and more than enough to encourage you to check the site frequently or subscribe with your favorite RSS feed reader.
Let's talk about RSS for a second. Do you know what it is and how useful it can be to you? If you don't, fear not. Back in Skinny Jeans explains RSS the Oprah Way and makes it's incredibly simple to understand.
Another great tool from fd's Flickr Toys is the new Hockneyizer. It takes a single photo and turns it into a David Hockney inspired collage.
Tags: photo sharing, photography, Flickr
photofront is a cool online application that takes your Flickr sets and turns them into very slick, flash based galleries. The galleries are beautiful, navigation is easy and intuitive and setup takes less than 2 minutes. You select which Flickr sets get turned into galleries so this application makes it dead simple to create very professional, very good looking photography portfolios or just really cool slideshows, much cooler than the default Flickr ones.
photofront is free but the paid version (one time $10 fee) gives you access to pro features like removing ads from your galleries and allowing you to customize gallery titles and subtitles. Well worth the $10.
Tags: photo sharing, photofront, photography, Flickr
David Hobby of the brilliantly helpful site about lighting Strobist has an interesting article about Photography's Vanishing Middle Class. In the article David discusses giving photography information on the internet "for free", how the microstock industry is devaluing photography and photographers, and making a living as a professional photographer in a world full of serious amateurs and semi-pros. Perhaps even more interesting than David's article is the discussion it has provoked in the site's comment section.
Continue reading "Is MicroStock Bad Business for the Photography Industry?" »
Photographer Doug Plummer just got a brand new Epson Stylus Pro 4800 Color Inkjet Printer and it sounds like he's in love with it.
Wow. What took me so long? The Epson 4800 is an amazing printer.Color prints, of course, look fabulous. Black and white, however, is awesome. I am now a big step closer to shutting down the darkroom for good.
Read Doug's First impressions of the Epson 4800
Popular Science's cool How2.0 feature has instructions for turning an old laptop into a digital frame that automatically pulls images from your Flickr feed. It's a bit too hardware intensive for me to ever consider doing the project but for the more brave amongst us it will be an excellent DIY photography project. As the article notes if you're not geeky enough to build the digital frame yourself you can always buy one from ThinkGeek.
Tags: flickr, photogrpahy, diy photogrpahy
Flickrshow creates simple javascript slideshows of your Flickr sets. Simply put in the id number for the set (found at the end of the set's url), choose a couple of details and flickrshow spits out the necessary code and tells you were to put it within your site's html. Very simple, very cool and very useful.
Tags: flickr, photogrpahy, slideshow, flickrshow
My cousin Melissa just graduated from college. Before heading off to grad school in the fall she's going to spend 5 or 6 weeks in France. She asked for some photography tips to make her travel shooting the best it can be so she comes back with kick ass photographic evidence of the trip. Although Melissa was the inspiration for this post the information can be used by anyone about the hit the road, skies or seas this summer.
Continue reading "Documenting the Journey: Tips for Travel Photography" »
Aaron dropped word that B&H (one of my favorite camera gear spots) has an even better deal on the Digital Rebel XT than J&R. The B&H package includes a Sandisk 1GB Ultra II CompactFlash Card. Camera body, 18-55mm EF-S Lens and CF card sell for $794.95. Your $100 mail in rebate makes the total $794.95. It's an outstanding deal.
A Canadian photographer was taking a photo of the exterior of the new Starbucks in her Toronto neighborhood when the owner ran from the building and told her she wasn't allowed to take pictures. A tourist group was in the area, heard the owner's craziness, and staged an impromptu shoot-in, while the owner glared at them from inside.
The photographer is wondering about the truthfulness of the owner's statements that you can't take pictures of Starbucks even from the street or sidewalk. I know it's untrue if you're in the US but I'm really uncertain about Canada. There is a really strong photoblogging community in Toronto though so I'm sure there is someone who can and will explain if and how the owner is wrong.
In the pointless yet entertaining category you can insert your photos into the Kodak museum commercial. It's not as impressive as you might hope but the last shot is pretty cool with your "most dramatic image."