The Photo Stream (again)

There's something about The Photo Stream that keeps me coming back. I have a very low attention span, and I think this must be part of the reason. At that site, I don't have to scan news headlines—I scan photos instead. Looking at photos is something I love to do. I guess there's one part of it that bothers me a bit though and that's the photos that get posted that are ambiguous.

A photo of, say, a tennis player could be many different things. It could be that the subject of the photo won Wimbledon and the shot is of her celebrating. Or it could just be that the shot of her celebrating is the only photo available of her when it's reported that she was involved in some other non sports related activity, which is a bit problematic.

The Photo Stream solves this by providing mouseovers which give you a headline, and I think that's probably the best you can hope for.

Photojojo Time Capsule

Now, here's actually an interesting idea, Time Capsule, which I sort of wish I thought of first. But, I can't think of everything first... Anyway, the idea is pretty simple. Once in a while send out photos from your Flickr stream that are older but were ranked well in "interestingness." That is, those photos that were commented on and viewed more often. Time Capsule will then send them to you in an email. It won't let your best photos be forgotten.

Everyone's favorite newsletter Photojojo has written an article that should clear up most of the questions about What the Hell is the Unsharp Mask?

Strobist DVDs

One of the blogs I often neglect is Strobist, because while it's very informative, it's almost too informative. There's too much content on there to deal with for just an amateur like me. However, I noticed that he's got some DVDs to buy which are probably extremely informative. For $139, from Midwest Photo Exchange, I bet you're getting a few college lighting courses and probably more, so it's undoubtedly money well spent for those who need to know lighting, which is everyone right?

The Chicago Tribune has a gallery up of photos of the Phoenix Mars Lander, and also some of the photos it has taken from Mars.

Comments? You Mean on Photub?

Ever since the relaunch of Photub in late 2006, I've been a bit hesitant to allow comments for particular posts, despite the fact that my homebrew blogging solution supports them, and they would be valuable.

The reasons for this aren't what you'd expect. It's not just "don't want to get spammed" or anything like that—that can be solved pretty easily. The biggest problem is that, since I use shared hosting and am not using PHP as the language to implement Photub, the blog runs a bit differently than it would if I were using WordPress or some other solution.

Photub uses FastCGI, which basically means that the blog has to sit there waiting for requests whenever someone requests a page, unlike a solution in PHP where the blog would just "startup" when needed. When the relaunch happened, my host kept killing off the process that was waiting for requests, presumably because it was doing lots of work when a request came in. What I ended up doing was building caching into the site, so that each page gets rendered (when requested) once ever 5 minutes.

This works out wonderfully, especially since database servers on shared hosting tend to be a bit slow. The readers get faster response times, everyone on the shared hosting server is happy, and Photub doesn't get killed off and leave you with 500 Internal Error pages.

That is, it all works well except when you try to add comments. See, comments happen between the 5 minute refresh mark, and a discussion can't happen at 5 minute intervals. Discussions need the ability to be real time or they aren't very effective. I could have made an exception and on pages with comments not done caching, but it was easier to just leave comments out of the picture.

Disqus to the rescue. Disqus is a blog comments solution that is hosted off site (the only thing I don't like about it actually), but it's loaded up via JavaScript instead. What this means, is that caching doesn't matter on my end, everything gets loaded dynamically when you request the page! It's actually a great concept and is executed very well. Plus, they deal with spam, support OpenID, and lots of options for following replies. They do a good job with it, so why not use it? Anyway, not every post will enable comments, but there will definitely be some now that I can enable a real time discussion system. (Comments are enabled for this post)

Jeremy Cowart Photography

Shootsac

The Shootsac is designed to hold your gear but stay out of the way. It's not designed for transport; instead it's designed for quick access to lenses and anything else you might need in the field. It's inspired by a Prada handbag, and is designed for women, though I don't see why a man couldn't use it (aside from the girly covers). But, if it's functional, why not?

There also giving away some awesome Canon lenses in the month of May, to those lucky enough to order a bag and be selected.

FOZ4 has lots of interesting photographs.

Tag Galaxy

As far as Flickr viewers go, there's no other that comes close in coolness than Tag Galaxy. The rough idea is that each tag is a planet (or satellite) and selecting multiple tags will eventually lead you to the pictures you wanna see. It's neat, and extremely well done.

Tim Flach

The Haunted Pod Village of San-zhi

Carrie has some pictures of The San-Zhi Pod Village in northern Taiwan. It was abandoned, but no one seems to know why. There's also a gallery at FILE Magazine.

Brook Pifer Rockstar Photographer

New PhotographyBB Issue (Issue 4)

Issue 4 of the online photgraphy magazine PhotographyBB is out and I've promised them I'd read it all this time. The articles in the past issues that I have read have been of great quality and on interesting topics, so when I see stuff like:

Regarding this recent release, Dave Seeram - Editor and Publisher says, “Issue 4 is here and fully stocked on our digital shelves! Although we had to delay this month’s issue by one week, this month’s issue is by far our best issue to date! This month we’re taking it to the next level by including photographic shooting techniques, a trip to Vancouver, and even more tutorials than last month, including Photoshop, Elements, and even a Dreamweaver (for the photographer) tutorial!”

in the press release for issue 4, I know for sure that there is good stuff contained within the digital pages.

Now, if only I had a super fast color printer and ink was dirt cheap, I could start reading it on the bus this morning...

EDIT: Incomprehensible dribble fixed.

Eolo Perfido Photography

Eric Ryan Anderson Photography

Greyscalegorilla, known mostly for his awesome photoblog, just finished documenting a 4 month long beard contest. The photos he took of them all, make them look like they're in a band.

Gear Safety While Traveling

Matt Mullenweg, a founding developer of WordPress (this blog being one of the only in the world not powered by it), and photo hobbyist, has recently been a victim of camera theft from checked baggage.

CameraPorn has a bunch of tips for keeping your equipment safe while traveling.

Joey Lawrence Fine Art

Vincent Laforet

Some Words About the Pentax K20D

Alberto Oviedo Photography

Static

Man Babies

Man Babies a site that is deeply disturbing, but also pretty funny. In a picture, swap dad's head with his baby's and you've got a man baby, get it?

Chuck Choi

Thomas Hawk and a few others are working on a new photo show called PhotoCycle and recently sat down to talk to Ansel Adams' son Michael. 10 Interesting Things I Learned About Ansel Adams, is a post he wrote up and posted on Flickr describing the experience and what he learned.

60 Photography Links...

Looks like someone out there is reading Photub and likes it, because it has been written in to be included in the "60" Photography Links You Can't Live Without! Thanks to Joe for suggesting me in the comments. Update: horrible sleep deprived nonsensical writing corrected.

Zach Gold

The Photo Stream

The Photo Stream delivers buzz and newsworthy content to the masses through a rich, eye-opening photo interface.

Note: link was originally broken. Sorry about that

Photoshop Express has added Flickr integration. It's adding features like this that will kill off those other up and coming online editors.

Philadelphia Trash the Dress. Looks like Philadelphians are getting excited about this type of wedding photography.

TwitPic allows you to share photos through Twitter

National Geographic, posted a gallery of bats last year. They're pretty disgusting.

I can't help but find Storm Trooper action figures posing, incredibly hilarious.

Michael Muller Photography

Ed Shoots

David Bergman on Workflow

I recently had the chance to see, renowned concert/sports photographer, David Bergman talk about how he uses Aperture to cull unwanted images and enhance and correct the selects from a shoot. Surprisingly, his daily workflow is not much different than what I have come up with, aside from the fact that I don't use Aperture (mostly because of the fact that it will not run on my Powerbook G4) and he has way more photos and selects to deal with. However, when I had a beta copy of Lightroom (which did run on my Powerbook), it is what I found to work quite well.

Anyway, the basic workflow is the following:

1. Import your entire shoot and add metadata to all the images. copyright info, short summary perhaps of the shoot. This is useful for quick searches through the library later in life. The copyright information, obviously can just save some legal hassle later.
2. Glance at every photo and give it a 1 star rating if it's something that might have potential.
3. Filter out your view to only shots that have 1 star. By this time, you've probably cut the number of shots down by at least half, if not more.
4. Relook at the 1 star images and give it a 2nd star if and only if it's worth spending more time on. You can use a bit more time to decide this, and for similar shots select only the best of them.
5. Filter out your view to only shots that have 2 stars. Now, here is where David's approach is a bit different. He relooks and filters to 3 stars and reserves 4 and 5 stars for exceptionally good photos he wants to use in his portfolio. I on the other hand am not on the same caliber as him and would have next to no shots left if I went to 3 stars, let alone 4 or 5.
6. Correct

After you make your initial selects, which should be a small fraction of the images you shot initially, it's time to make some corrections, crop and perform other edits (in Photoshop or wherever). The next part, for me, is bad because it allows for too much experimenting. For David, his formula works great and it's something I might try when I get some more computing power to power the free copy of Aperture Apple gave me for attending David's talk (Thanks Apple!).

David has sort of a set formula for the sliders and tools he touches and hardly ever strays from it, but makes sure to always correct the white balance first. Then he'll adjust the exposure as needed, possibly warm up the temperature a bit (on the photo, his office is air conditioned) and then turn on the visual display of highlights and black points. He'll then decide what's appropriate for the scene and use the recovery tool to get back some highlights and similarly with the black points.

At this point, the initial image should look pretty good and he'll decide whether or not he wants to use the settings from this picture as the settings for others and if so he'll apply them to the others and continue on. He'll then crop and, if necessary, add a slight vignette.

My correction flow is a lot different, and it's the part of his presentation that I took the most away from. It's possible to get great photographs by doing very little extra work. I used to go through all the sliders and experiment, but I now know it's not necessary, so I'll just not touch them.

You'd never think such a simple flow would work, but it seems to, and I saw him perform it right before my very eyes.

If You Put That Picture on the Internet I'll Call My Lawyer

Thomas Hawk reminds us that public space is within our rights as photographers to photograph people within that public space. His post is in direct response to an altercation Jeremy Brooks had with some bozo on the streets of San Francisco.

Unleash the Power of Your PowerShot

CHDK is a firmware enhancement for many digital point and shoot cameras made by Canon. After loading CHDK, you get access to a ton of features your PowerShot normally wouldn't have.

1. Enhanced ways of recording images: RAW, JPEG, increased video recording times, different compression options
2. Information Displays: live histograms, always on battery life indicator, depth of focus
3. Photographic Settings: longer exposure times (up to 65 seconds), faster shutter speeds (1/25,000 sec, and faster in some cases), automatic bracketing of exposure
4. Scripts: programmable through scripting for creating new features (i.e. trigger shot when movement sensed, change in brightness, automatic bracketing, games)
5. Tethered Shooting

The possibilities are seemingly endless. This is definitely a great hack and most importantly, it's non destructive to your camera. You aren't ever replacing the original firmware—just loading more things into memory on demand.

Digital Photography Facts has some interesting thoughts on digital photography.

ArtCal is the "opinionated guide" to New York city art galleries. This isn't just about photo galleries, but they are included.

13 Great Slow Sync Flash Images

More Dynamic Range in GIMP

Exposure blend is a GIMP plugin which facilitates the process of creating contrast blended exposures. Contrast blending is a popular technique for getting more dynamic range from a set of bracketed images.

(Photoshop users might wanna check here for a few actions and a tutorial.)

FILE Magazine Rediscovered

FILE Magazine is something I've mentioned before, but it's also something I have to say I've forgotten about. They've got an RSS feed, so there's really no reason for me to forget them. Anyway, my recent trip to the site led to finding some pretty interesting projects:

1. The Illuminati Young people illuminated by electronics.
2. Night Aerial Photography
3. Workspace Photos of workspaces. You'd think the photos would have no focus, since workspaces can be quite messy, but these photos have great composition that wonderfully captures where you work.
4. On Coal and Appalachia

I can't say I'm a big fan of the his site's design, but Jim Russi's surf photography portfolio is amazing.