Digital Photo Resource

Cool Pichas

2007-08-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the coolest night photos I've ever seen.

Marylin Manson on the O'Reilly Factor!

2007-03-20T20:50:00.000-07:00

Marilyn Manson on O'Reily Factor
Uploaded by DarKwon

George Bush on Lary King Live

2007-03-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

Rudy Giuliani

2007-03-17T01:36:00.001-07:00

Jackass, Circa 1912

2007-03-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

Apparently doing stupid, dangerous things that will probably get you killed is nothing new. Here, a Mr Franz Reichelt built for himself an overcoat come parachute, and tested it by jumping from the Eiffel Tower.

Obviously, it didn't work. Does anybody know the history here? Who are those people moving around on the ground at the end? Not the media - obviously this was a publicity stunt.

Now, maybe it's just me, but the Eiffel Tower seems pretty low to go sky diving from.

Because Photography is Digital

2007-03-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

... and the web is Gutenberg for the 20th Century, I need to give praise to a fantastic piece of open source software that should be of use to today's photographer. FoxEditor is a text editor made especially for xhtml and CSS. It has a built-in page viewer, and buttons on the toolbar to generate html code - tables, hyperlinks, images, divs, comments, colors - to save you time. I love stuff like this, even if I don't believe productivity is God, I do like spending less time on the stupid stuff.

So for a total of $0.00 you've got yourself a free suite of "web content generation" software, from pages to complex image edits:

FoxEdit to edit your pages,
WebMaestro to public changes and manage your site, and
The Gimp to edit your images.

The Reagans Were Drug Addicts

2007-03-06T20:26:00.000-08:00

Apparently they were loaded all the time:

I'm not sure who the Frankenstein-looking guy is, but it's a sign of Cheney's growing power that this old geezer says "Vice President" Bush.

Commedic Observations

2007-03-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

"I think that's how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York
said, 'Gee, I'm enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn't
cold enough. Let's go west.'"
--Richard Jeni

"Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography."
--Paul Rodriguez

A Night With Ann Coulter

2007-03-04T23:20:00.001-08:00

Maryland Boy Gets Toothache, Dies

2007-02-28T12:17:00.000-08:00

This is a tragic story, covered by NBC Online. Sorry do deviate from our digital photography theme, but this is serious, and demands attention. I don't know what the solution is, but a young boy lost his life for want of a dentist. An $80 tooth extraction would have saved a life, and a quarter million dollars in state funds for the Children's Hospital. This is seriously broken, and needs to be fixed.

Bizarre Statues

2007-02-27T19:48:00.000-08:00

We love reporting on the progress of our fellows, and haha.nu is one qualified blog that deserves some attention. Their recent collection of statues defies category ... and logic.

Geek Squad Charges $415 to Replace Hard Disc

2007-02-27T18:58:00.000-08:00

"Best Buy," itself an oxymoron, has reached new heights of evilness. As "The Consumerist" reports, BB's "Geek Squad" not only overcharges for the services they provide - they fleece people for things they don't do, too. In this case, we arrive at $415.00 to swap out a hard disc in a laptop, determined as follows:

$69 - Diagnose computer with "Blue Screen of Death" ( Wrong Diagnosis )
$99 - Backup and transfer data ( Not Performed )
$129 - Install a new O/S
$118 - New hard drive to install O/S onto, even though the old one works
------
$415

Now, the customer took his "dead" hard drive to a friend at work, who managed to recover the data within an hour. The Geek Squad didn't do this because they said the drive was dead, and recovering data from it would be impossible. The customer got $49 of his $99 ( for data backup/transfer ) back on the grounds that Geek Squad didn't do what they charged him for.

Photographers take note. Most people hate dishonest auto mechanics, and for good reason. Our cars are essential for life as we know it, and yet for as much as we rely on them, most of us have no idea how an internal combustion engine works. We're at the mercy of people who know we're at their mercy. Well, digital photographers rely on their computer in the way ordinary people rely on their car, and most of us wouldn't know a kernel if it fell out of our popcorn.

The thing is, neither do the people who charge you to fix your computer. A kid making $7 an hour to be called a geek probably doesn't know how to fix your computer without killing your data. Luckily for us, a PC is easier than a car to fix, and requires less tools. Caveat Emptor.

Fake Steve Jobs Invents Robot Fish

2007-02-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know about Fake Steve ( He invented the freaking iPod - have you heard of it? ), he's the reason blogs exist. Much better than the real Steve, who seems boringly human my comparison. So, Fake Steve is a pretty creative guy, likes to invent cool things. And, like most of the Bay Area, he used to party in his youth.

Anyway, Fake Steve invented a robotic fish to sell to pot smugglers in BC, to allow them to bring their payload over the border in a river, or deep in the ocean. In what's becoming a transparent pattern, Microsoft stole the fish, and managed to uglify it.

Journalist Attacked by Miami Police

2007-02-26T10:55:00.000-08:00

A very disturbing post has turned up on Democratic Underground, confirming the erosion of civil rights for America's photographers:

I ended up spending 16 hours in the Miami-Dade County Jail, a rat-infested institution that is more Abu Ghraib than American Grade.

The incident took place Tuesday night after leaving the media circus in Fort Lauderdale and driving down to Miami to continue working on a journalitic project about the ongoing transition affecting Biscayne Blvd. This wasn't for People Magazine, but my heart was at least into this project.

For years, Biscayne Blvd was known as a seedy motel strip where pimps, prostitutes and peddlers would rule the streets. But lately, several trendy shops and restaurant have started businesses there as well as many urbanites moving to the area.

So I'm very exciting about this story because it has a lot of different elements to it.

Anyway, on Tuesday night, I parked in my usual spot and was having a cell phone conversation with my editor on this story, informing her of all the progress I had done so far. She seemed very excited about it and told me she couldn't wait to read it.

I hung up the phone when I noticed five cops surrounding a man, threatening him with arrest. They were standing in a gravel area between the road and the sidewalk and I was standing on the gravel as well, but I was about 20 yards from them. The gravel area is part of the expansion construction that has been ongoing on the Blvd. One day, it will be open to all cars, but now, it is off-limit to cars.

One of the cops told me to keep walking because this was a "private matter".
I said that I will not keep walking because this is a "public street".
Within seconds, the five officer left the first man alone and came after me. One cop escorted me across the road. As I stood on the sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, the cops began surrounding me, which was when I shot several more shots.

That was when they slammed me against the pavement even though I offered no resistance, causing a deep abrasion on my right knee. One officer grabbed me by the back of the head and repeatedly bashed my forehead against the sidewalk, causing abrasions and swelling to the right side of my forehead.

Another officer grabbed my right hand and bent it backwards in a 90 degree angle, causing me to scream out in pain and continuing to do so even after the handcuffs were placed on me. As I verbally protested, one officer threatened me with a taser gun if I did not stop talking.

The officers charged me with five counts of disobeying a police, one count of obstructing justice, one count of obstructing traffic, one count of disorderly conduct and one count of resisting arrest without violence.

On the arrest affidavit, the officers lied several times in order to justify their arrest. They accused me of photographing them without identifying myself, which is not true (and not even against the law as far as I know). As soon as one of the officers questioned me about taking photos, I immediately identified myself by name and profession.

Then they accused me of stating that “I can do whatever the hell I want” when I said no such thing. I remained professional throughout the entire incident, even as I tried to remind them that I had a full legal right to photograph them.

And they accused me of standing in the middle of Biscayne Blvd while I was taking photos, obstructing traffic, which is why they had to arrest me. This is not true, as I would have been struck by a car within seconds. In fact, one of the photographs I took as they approached me clearly shows that Biscayne Blvd is behind them.

It is obvious that they arrested me because they did not appreciate me taking their photos. This is a clear violation of my First Amendment rights.

I plan on suing the Miami Police Department for false arrest, excessive force, damage to my equipment (so far, my $400 flash is destroyed) and medical expenses incurred since being released from jail, as I had to go to the doctor to make sure no bones were broken as they hurt like hell. I am also going in for a head scan on Monday because the swelling on my forehead has the doctor worried that it may cause internal bleeding.

This is just the beginning, so I will keep everybody in the loop as it expands.

Sir Spam-a-Lot

2007-02-25T23:28:00.000-08:00

Our contemporaries over at My Crazy Inbox have created the Monty Python Spam-a-Lot game.

As funny as this is, it's interesting as a reminder of the so-called generation gap. How many readers are old enough to have watched Monty Python's Flying Circus in its heyday? Who would ever think a handful of British comedians would perform a sketch that would be immortalized, and known to more people worldwide than Superman?

The Onion Covers Vista

2007-02-23T14:19:00.000-08:00

The Onion, known for their satirical style, has covered Vista's launch. Absent from other reviews is the fact, learned here, that MS Paint has not been improved. This makes the sixth operating system from Microsoft, over more than a decade, that uses the ancient, crippled graphics application.

But why does it matter? Shouldn't anybody with any interest in Photography shell out $700 for Photoshop? I mean, come on, the word "photo" is right there in the name! Well, sure, but every now and then you want to do something quick and simple. Besides, if you've already made and enjoyed dinner, who has time to wait for Photoshop to launch?

She's a 10

2007-02-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

Manitou of Flickr has put together some fascinating research on attractiveness. He's taken images of dozens of women, and spliced them together in several ways to rate human attractiveness, and his readers have found a near consensus.

England to leave Iraq

2007-02-21T16:40:00.000-08:00

An unsurprising story shows the beginning of England's troop pull-out from war-torn Iraq. Of all ironies, this is related to digital photography in part because, as the BBC reports, Iraqis are using the internet, and specifically Google Earth and Google Maps, to survive the war. After nearly four years, more than 3,000 dead American soliders and 130 British, along with an uncountable number of Iraqi civilian deaths ( aka "collateral damage" ), the outgoing prime minister Tony Blaire has said enough is enough.

In other news, Norton Antivirus is warning that as many as half of broadband users are vulnerable to "drive-by-pharming," a style of internet attack in which the DNS server in a router. The specific nature of the vulnerability is that users haven't changed the default password. I'm sure my readers know better than this.

Finally returning to photography, I've discovered a gorgeous picture of the Seattle Arboretum, in my browsing of www.PhotoSig.com. The picture is especially impressive because it uses ordinary subject matter, instead of unattainable mountains in Nepal, and yet manages to take a subject most of us would walk past every day, and turn it into art. It's also colorful, contrasty, and dynamic, without resorting to "HDR" techniques.

This is Your Mac on Drugs

2007-02-20T20:36:00.000-08:00

I've always recommended against Macs for photography work, although since they became PC clones with Intel chips, I assumed they must have got better. Apparently not; as SmugBlog reports, Macs simply can't display color properly.

Learn Photoshop from YouTube

2007-02-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Our friends at FortySomething.ca, a popular Canadian blog for people who struggle not to be "over the hill," has published an entry on YouTube videos that teach Photoshop techniques. Many of these are quite basic ( how to resize an image, this seems like saying "Look for Image Size under the Image menu" would do; how to run the built-in frames actions, how to use the eraser tool ), but many are still worth checking out.

Moreover, we hope this is the beginning of a lovely trend. Photoshop is the gold standard for image editing, but the world's biggest complaint about it is the learning curve. Video lessons can help transform that from "too steep" to workable, much like the way in which a ski lift helps you up the mountain. An example is How to Create a Web 2.0 Logo.

Unfortunately many of these videos are of low quality thus far. Many traditional html tutorials are of much higher quality, for example, while there is a YouTube video of the same nature, I find this page on creating black and whites in Photoshop to be vastly more useful and informative. Probably because there are so many examples, and the author takes time to explain why certain techniques are better, and what to look for. Still, as video tutorials evolve, I'm sure these will get better.

Praise to Fellow Blogs

2007-02-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

Our contemporaries at Dark Roasted Blend have done a Valentine's Day series of flowers, but in a creative way. In fact it's gorgeous - you should definitely go see it. Highlights:

Go see the rest of the photos, and have a look around the blog. If this stuff isn't creative, I don't know what is.

Amazing 3D Photography

2007-02-17T21:28:00.000-08:00

This is the most creative approach I think I've ever seen to 3D photography. It's a little rough around the edges, but you really can't go through life without seeing these: http://www.isnichwahr.de/redirect16975.html. The photos themselves look like they're from Burning Man, although the site itself is German.

If You Like Mountains

2007-02-16T01:10:00.000-08:00

Here are some of the most amazing mountain photographs I've ever seen: http://jeffreymunro.com/amazingpics/index.php?x=browse&category=3 I'm not sure whether these were all created by the same person, if they were he's amazingly productive.

What Irony Is Not

2007-02-14T21:40:00.000-08:00

What Irony Is Not

Irony can be humorous, but most humour is not ironic. Some informative examples of what irony is not come, ironically, from the Alanis Morissette song 'Ironic'. Here are a few.

An old man turned 98/He won the lottery and died the next day - Tragedy, not irony.
It's a black fly in your chardonnay - Bummer but not ironic (although there is arguably some irony in the fly being black, however this does at least mean you don't ingest it with the drink).
It's a death row pardon two minutes too late - Not irony, just another example of why the death penalty is fatally flawed.
It's like rain on your wedding day - Not even close, unless you've gone from Manchester to Hawaii for your wedding and get the first rain in August for 30 years, while Manchester experiences glorious sunshine, and how likely is that?
A traffic jam when you're already late - certainly fails the 'unexpected' criterion.
A no-smoking sign on your cigarette break - more of a life-saver than an irony, that.
It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife - Not unless you are in the Acme Knife Factory being approached by a mad axeman and reach behind you for a weapon, only to find that you're in the newly-opened spoon department.

Source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A700958

Happy Happening Valentines

2007-02-14T11:11:00.000-08:00

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
if your white balances is off,
so will be you.

It's the best I could come up with on short notice.

Our contemporaries over at 17things have put together an interesting collection of "HDR" or "High Dynamic Range" photographs. Some of them are quite beautiful, but none looks quite right, and certainly they don't look natural. There are no shadows in most, but more disturbing is the way the highlights seem to radiate like metal in a microwave.

Knuttz, on the other hand, put together a collection of photos showing Hong Kong at various times of day. It doesn't have the overcooked drama of HDR, and yet, with fireworks, storm clouds, and glowing red sunsets, the site shows organic wonder.

And so it Ends

2007-02-13T12:14:00.000-08:00

This isn't exactly digital photo news, but North Korea has agreed to end its nuclear program. This is good news for everyone.

Getting back to photographic news, somebody has invented a tripod device that turns any digital camera into a gigapixel giant. Unfortunately it doesn't come with a supercomputer, necessary to process files that large.

A startup called Satugo ( careful - pop up windows ) has invented a bouncing, yo-yo camera, although they have yet to find a manufacturer. It looks like a fascinating idea, though. Sort of a gimmick and a spy camera rolled into one. Some aerial photos with this thing promise weeks of fun.

In other news, Windows Vista seems to destroy exif metadata. Microsoft's knowledge base ( aka "we screwed up central" ) puts quite a spin on things:

"When you edit the properties of a photo to add metadata in Windows Vista, the third-party software that is included with the digital camera may no longer recognize some proprietary metadata that the digital camera automatically adds to the photo. This metadata is specific to the manufacturer of the camera."

and

"This issue occurs because some camera manufacturers include an EXIF Maker Note tag in an image."

Of course, exif is hardly manufacturer-specific. That's what allows software like Exif Harvester ( subject of another post ) to work. But I'm being too hard on Microsoft; it's unreasonable to expect them to get something right on the first try. Besides, they offer a workaround:

"If you use a third-party program that reads Maker Note tags, and it is important that you can access the tags, do not use the Photo Acquisition Wizard to download the photos to the hard disk. Also, do not use Windows Photo Gallery or Windows Explorer to edit the properties of the image."

NYTimes.com: Its Wild Heart Broken, a City, Like Its Eagles, Rebuilds

2007-02-12T19:18:00.000-08:00

The storm that devastated Seattle two months ago, left towns on the East Side without power for as long as three weeks in some places, has all but leveled Stanley Park in Vancouver. The New York Times report that 10,000 trees were felled.

In other news, Windows Vista has been released for a bit of time, and there are problems. Engadget reports that Dell's upgrade to Vista is anything but "express." There are problems between Vista and iPods.

Super Cameras

2007-02-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

These have got to be the coolest cameras there are - underwater aircraft with IMAX cameras built in: http://deepflight.com/subs/index.htm

Hasselblad has created a 31 megapixel camera, which is a step down from its flagship 39 megapixel model, and yet still very expensive: http://www.hasselblad.com/products/hasselblad-star-quality

Finally, Cedric Tay has created the ultimate 360 degree panoramic camera: http://www.yankodesign.com/product_info.php?products_id=764

Photoshop Brushes

2007-02-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

TutorialBlog has posted an excellent article on Photoshop Brushes. There are a number of downloads compiled from different sites, mostly run by graphic design firms. The desert cracks are exquisite.

Another storm heading this way

2006-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

The National Weather Service is predicting winds up to 50 mph ( just over half the strength of last Friday's storm winds, that took power from large swatches of the Puget Sound region ), and more power outages. Be prepared.

How to Display 5D RAW Files In Adobe Bridge (CS 2)

2006-12-19T11:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, that's right; CS 2. I'm having trouble with CS 3 Beta - it wrote a 50 GB temp file, filling up my hard drive, and getting stuck in some kind of infinite loop. I think I'll wait for the release version.

Still, the question of how to make Adobe Camera Raw translate and Adobe Bridge thumbnail 5D and other new digital SLR RAW files comes up pretty regularly around the 'net. This is very easy to solve, so let's take a crack at it:

In Photoshop, go to the Tools menu, and select Update....
Wait for the updater to do it's part.
Reboot your system when it tells you to.

Viola! The next time you start Photoshop or Bridge, you'll find a pleasant surprise. Pretty easy, wasn't it?

Exif Harvester Software

2006-12-19T10:35:00.000-08:00

I found this on photo.net, ever the useful site and source of inspiration when I look at the work people upload. One of their photographers has created a marvelous little gem of a program.

This software, dubbed "Exif Harvester," and pulls information like the shutter speed, aperture, ISO sensativity level, and lens used from your photos, creating an Excel spreadsheet. Even better, it builds email-sized copies of all the images you throw at it. Ever come home from a trip to the zoo or the beach, and want to send all your photos off in an email without having to deal with a hosting service like Picasa or SmugMug? Here's the solution.

Photoshop CS 3

2006-12-18T13:23:00.000-08:00

Adobe Photoshop CS 3 has been released in beta mode. It can be downloaded here:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs3/

Welcome to Digital Photo Resource

2006-12-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

This blog aims to help everyone from the newbie to the advanced professional get the most out of their digital camera, computer, printer, and the Internet. We'll be including links to popular tutorial sites, how-to articles, software reviews, and more. Watch this space!