Digital Photography School has a great post on 13 Lessons to Teach Your Child About Digital Photography that apply to anyone interested in learning more about photography. My favorite lessons include…
Of course how old your child is and their interest in photography depends on how deeply you can get into these subjects.
Photo portfolio sites are moving beyond the simple Photoshop/Fireworks exported images thrown onto a page to where the site should showcase the photographers vision and personality while being cutting edge in order to attract new clients. Layers Magazine looks at three distinct approaches to photographers web portfolios.
My favorite photo portfolio sites are CSS driven sites that are easy to navigate and showcase the images with plenty of white (or black) space. I really don’t care for the flash driven sites with images thrown all over the place where you to make your mouse do back flips to get around.
I have had a Canon Powershot A95 digital camera since April 1995. I bought the camera to take with us to Maui and it took awesome photos, but after I got my Canon 20D Digital SLR I haven’t used it for much more than shooting videos. Today, I was shooting video of my kids with it and after I took a couple of seconds of video the LCD went black with some brown highlights and light streaks. Every second of video I took after that looked just like that LCD screen: black with brown highlights and light streaks. I could go back and look at older movies that I had shot and they looked fine, but the new video looked horrible. It was obvious to me that the image sensor was knocked off center or had a short in it or something. I thought the camera was trashed since it has been out of warranty for at least a year already.
Just to make sure there wasn’t anything I could do I visited Canon’s support website and found a Service Notice describing my problem exactly and offering a free repair. I called their toll free service number and now they are sending me a shipping label to send my camera in for a free repair.
That is great service! I have recommended Canon digital point and shoot cameras to friends and students for a number of years because of their quality photos, custom settings, ease of use and durability. Just when I thought I had found a flaw in their product, I discover instead that I can add great service and integrity to the list.
Kodak is introducing a new lowlight color image sensor filter that will producer crisper photos. The new filter uses “panchromatic cells that are sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light and collect a larger amount of light striking the sensor.” Then, a computer algorithm converts the electronic pulses from the cells into an image file. Kodak’s general manager of the photography company’s image sensor, Chris McNiffe, said “We’re talking about a 2-to-4-times improvement in (light) sensitivity.” The new filters will be incorporated first in mass-market point-and-shoot cameras and camera-equipped mobile phones beginning sometime next year. The new filter will be used in low-end phones first because camera phones are using smaller sensors to begin with and smaller sensors generally mean smaller pixels, which means lower sensitivity.”
Today at PMA ‘07 Microsoft announced a new “Photo HD” format. According to the Microsoft press release…
“HD Photo offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG, with fewer damaging artifacts, resulting in higher-quality images that are one-half the file size. In addition, HD Photo offers increased image fidelity, preserving the entire original image content and enabling higher-quality exposure and color adjustments in the image. This new format offers the ability to decode only the information needed for any resolution or region, or the option to manipulate the image as compressed data.”
Is this going to be like PNG replaced GIF or actually going to work?
POP photo is reporting on the first $3M Photograph. An Andreas Gursky diptych sold for over $3.3 million at a London art (not photo) auction to an undisclosed bidder.
I’ve seen a couple of very interesting Time Lapse movies and I have been investigating the best techniques for shooting and putting one together. I found one pretty good tutorial on the equipment needed and technique and decided to try one out.
In this video I collapsed 16 minutes down to 6 seconds running at 6 frames per second. The recommended timing for time lapse videos is 10 to 15 frames a second, so I ran it pretty slow, but this 16 second video is short and 15 frames a second ended up running on about 10 secnds long. The first time I uploaded the video to YouTube I had compressed the video down in MPEG4 to 320X240 at 6 fps and then uploaded it and it turned out really ugly and pixelated. Then, I just turned around and uploaded the full size .mov quicktime file (69 MB) which was 1000X667 at 6 fps and it handled YouTube’s compression pretty well.
This one turned ok for a first attempt. I think I should have dragged my shutter on the camera more to blur the motion. I think I’m going to try this again at night sometime on a busy street corner to get headlights moving down the street. It would aslo be fun to do with a parade. So, be on the look out for more time lapse experiments.
In his Web Tips column on Poynter.org Sree Sreenivasan looks at some web based Photoshop Alternatives. The four web based photo editors he recommends are
I’ve never used any of these, but I plan on checking them out. Especially Picnik.com which he says integrates well with Flickr (check out my Flickr flash badge on put on the right hand side of this page).
Kodak whose photography business has virtually collapsed with the popularity of digital photography is flipping the traditional printer pricing model on its head. Instead of selling the printer cheap and charging enormous sums for ink, Kodak plans to sale the printer between $100 and $200 and sale the ink for around $25 a pop rather than $60 to $80 for replacement ink. Manufacturer’s make as much as 75 percent profit on the sale of ink (a $32 billion worldwide market).
The end result of this move is the reduction in cost of printing your own photos from around 40 to 50 cents each to 10 cents each (and that price is before the ink pricing war takes off). Which means that printing your own photos will be cheaper than getting them printed online through some photo service or at your local Wal-Mart or Walgreen. Of course, the photos printed with cheap ink won’t be the same as your prints ordered from the professional photo house (just like the Wal-Mart one-hour photo service isn’t the same).
The Arkansas Highway Department was forced to close the Arkansas Hwy 7 bridge over the Ouachita River South of Arkadelphia due to flooding on the South side of the river. When they close the bridge during a flood long-time residents enjoy walking out over the river to watch the swift current.