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Posts Tagged ‘today’s’

Photographer David Burnett with his large-format, wooden camera was the real hero of today’s impeachment hearings

14 Nov

Photographer David Burnett (L), pictured in the press pack at today’s first public session of the ongoing impeachment hearings.

As diplomat William Taylor and State Department official George Kent took their seats in the House today to begin their public testimony, their entry was heralded by a noisy fluttering sound, as attendant photographers shot off hundreds of continuous frames on their Canon and Nikon DSLRs. But one man stood alone, among the fray: David Burnett, veteran, multi award-winning photographer, co-founder of ContactPressImages and large format film enthusiast.

The camera is an ‘Aero Liberator’ – Made by John Minnicks, the Liberator is a custom-made camera, which takes 4 x 5 plates. Judging by today’s footage of David using it, continuous shooting speed is limited to about one frame every five or six seconds.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today’s Digital World

25 Oct

The post Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today’s Digital World appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Adam Welch.

photo-books

Imagine the internet never existed. I know – you’re reading this while on the internet – but bear with me. As a photographer, how would you show your photographs to other people? There would be no Instagram, no Flickr, no Facebook. The reality of this fictional internetless world would leave you with limited outlets for your work. In short, you would have to find a way to physically park your photos in front of the eyes of other humans. Galleries would certainly be an option; magazines and journal publications would be another. Of course, there would be another option; the construction of a photo book.

Aside from a solo exhibition, there is perhaps no better way for a photographer to express their exact creative vision than with a well-executed photo book. Even in today’s elevated climate of digital photography, photo books have managed to keep their foothold as one of the most impactful methods of distributing photographs to the masses, all the while maintaining allegiance to the original photographs as we meant for them to be viewed.

Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today's Digital World

Photo books aren’t nearly as prevalent (or produced) as they once were. However, if you are truly serious about yourself and the photographs you produce, then a photo book might be a wonderful conduit for you to express your photographs – I know it was for me. As paradoxical as it might sound, producing photo books today has never been easier.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the reasons, methods, and considerations you might want to examine if you’ve ever felt the need for something more than just condensing your photographs into social media posts and online galleries.

But…why a book?

We’ve already touched on some of the other ways that you might present your work to the public, so why are photo books so special? Well, it comes down to control, fidelity to your original vision, and the importance you place on both.

Photographs are finite in their original incarnations, meaning there was a time when you didn’t always have to guess how your photos would appear on the different devices. Even photos in widely-circulated publications like magazines would essentially be faithful to whatever the final press copy of the image might have been.

Herein lies the immense benefit of photo books; they are an end in themselves.

Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today's Digital World

With final archival quality of inks, papers and bindings, and even the varied perception of our own eyes aside, a photo book can be your final say on how your work should look. Much like a print, the extent of your involvement in the production process of your photo book (more on this shortly) means you can virtually maintain complete discretion on how people view your images.

This means that a person in Singapore will see the same colors and contrasts a person viewing your photo in Australia, Canada, or Wales.

Three stages of producing your photo book

I’ve condensed the steps of producing a photo book into three broad sections. That being said, a book could be written on each one of the steps themselves. So, we’ll just hit the high points.

1. The inception of the Idea

Of course, this is where any photo book should begin. With some extremely rare exceptions, your photo book should revolve around a central theme or concept. It could be something you care passionately about photographing or something you want to learn more about and show the world. The weird thing about ideas is that they are notoriously fluid, meaning that even though you have a general direction to aim your energy (and your camera), you should remain open to the organic evolution of your initial idea or concept for your book.

In the case of my photo book, “Faces of Grayson,” I initially had no intention of producing a book at all. I was just a person out in the wilderness with a camera. It was only after I examined a few of my images that I instantly knew I wanted to do more with the subject matter and eventually produce a book.

Image: The photo that started it all.

The photo that started it all.

Unless your photo book is strictly for your own personal use and enjoyment, I’d suggest that you don’t approach your idea for your photo book in retrograde. It’s likely not a good practice to simply go through all your photos and force yourself to find a common theme. If you begin with a solid idea that you care about, you’ll ultimately end up with a more cohesive finished work.

We’ll talk a bit more about the actual shooting and choosing of the book images in the next section.

2. Compiling the images

We’ve touched briefly on how it’s usually not advisable to base your photo book on photos already in your image archive. It’s just not a good idea. So, once you’ve decided on the subject of your photo book, approach the acquisition of your content with a Zen-like state of relaxation. Don’t force the work, and don’t force yourself to produce the work quickly.

With that said, pay careful attention that you don’t forget that these images are specifically intended to be part of your photo book. You should always keep the overall theme, feel, and concept in line with your original idea even if that idea evolves along the way.

Don’t rush things

For my photo book, I shot images for roughly two years. In the end, I had a multitude of photos from which I could choose the absolute best.

There is no time limit for obtaining your images. Please, please, PLEASE don’t rush yourself. A rough estimate of when you would like to see your book finally come to life is perfectly healthy. Conversely, subjecting yourself to a self-imposed “deadline” is not. So if there’s one piece of advice I could give when it comes to shooting the photos for your book, it would be not to rush. Instead, be deliberate, take your time, and get it right the first time.

Sequencing your photos

After you’ve completed the principal photography work for your book, it’s time to put it all together. Ask yourself a few questions: Is your book a narrative? Does the story you want it to tell depend on the order of the images?

Some photo books work very well with sequential arrangements based on the chronology of time and the progression of the subject matter through that time. If this is the case for your photo book, then make sure how you assign your images to the pages conveys this dynamic to the viewer.

If your book is not a narrative and instead is more of a compilation of place or subject with no need for sequential ordering, then the arrangement of the photos become less important. However, it should still remain a focus of great consideration.

Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today's Digital World

Once you have completed the task of choosing and sequencing your photos, it’s time to choose layouts and fonts, image sizing and orientation. Also, chooses the amount of supplemental textual narration you wish to include (or not include) with the images.

The majority of this will be left to your discretion unless you conscript outside help from a designer. Deciding on the final flavor of the book is the most difficult and most exciting aspect of putting together any photo book.

3. Printing

All right. This is where things get truly slippery. You’ve completed work on obtaining the photos for an idea that you absolutely love. The images are outstanding, sequencing is beautiful, and you know every last detail of your final grand vision. It’s all going to be perfect!

Well, I’m sorry to break it to you…

It won’t be.

Yes, I know. That truth hints at an underlying pessimism, but it’s intended to be constructive. You see, the key to sustained success with your photography is to maintain a realistic handle on your expectations. If you enter the printing process believing nothing will go wrong, and there will be no unforeseen challenges, then you will be quite discouraged when these inevitable issues arise.

Now that’s out of the way, let’s look at some common (but not all) options you might have for getting your photo book printed.

Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today's Digital World

Print-on-demand

A commonplace service in the literary world, the print-on-demand model is perhaps the easiest and most cost-effective method for getting your photo book published and printed. It also involves the least investment on your part in terms of personal control.

Print-on-demand means just what the name implies; you provide the finished content design, and a printer/publisher/distributor will print a copy of the book each time a copy gets ordered. This is a wonderfully cost-effective way to print small or large numbers of your photo book with virtually no waste. Your book gets printed only when there is an order. Often this method also includes a free ISBN and other perks.

This is also a great option to get your photo book printed and sold with as little overhead as possible. However, there are some downsides to this process. Namely, you will have little or no creative control over paper types, bindings, inks, and other nuances of the book printing process.

Amazon, Blurb and a growing number of other well-known book merchants have begun offering these types of services to photographers wishing to get their photo books distributed to the masses. For users of Lightroom, you can design and send your book to Blurb direct from the Lightroom software too.

Traditional book printers

If you want to go big with your photo book endeavor and have the financial (and marketing) resources to sit at the table, then you might be interested to know that even independently published photographers can have extremely high-quality photo books printed which offer enormous creative control over virtually every aspect of the printing process. This means that you will usually be able to select paper types and binding materials along with physically proofing prints so that your photos look exactly the way you want them to display.

Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today's Digital World

Unfortunately, this isn’t always the most forgiving option for those who are creating their first photo book or have limited means for producing their published work. It involves the willingness to exercise ultimate creative judgment on all aspects of your book, which can be highly stressful. Furthermore, the majority of these types of printing firms have strict minimum printing runs for all printed books.

So, unless you need and are ready to store and distribute upwards of 1,000 copies of your book, this might not be the best route for your project. At the same time, if you do have the logistics in place and the demand is high enough for the quantity involved, the per-copy price of high-volume printers like these translates to relatively attractive profit margins when you consider the quality versus the cost of the product.

I went via this route with my first photo book. It involved organizing an overwhelmingly successful Kickstarter campaign along with a highly aggressive marketing strategy to source the funds I needed to cover the cost of printing. Would I do it again? Honestly, probably not, at least not this way, which brings me to our next option.

photo-books

Limited quantity printing

If you’re looking for a careful balance between precise creative control, costs, and volume, this is likely the best choice for your photo book.

You could easily call this printing method could easily “artisan” printing. It involves a low number of meticulously crafted books, often with finely curated materials and craftsmanship, which can be purveyed more as a personal statement than a mass-produced product.

Limited quantity printing is perfect for face-to-face marketing, where the photo book itself becomes an art piece. Printing costs are relatively high, so in most cases, quantities of twenty or more copies could become slightly awkward. However, books of this nature can demand higher sale prices from collectors and impassioned patrons, and rightfully so.

Value in the effort?

It might be difficult to believe, but there is so much more to say about the in’s and out’s of making a photo book; at least one that you intend to make for the enjoyment of others.

A photo book is more than just making photos and finding a way to bind them into pages. Is it worth it? Does the reward justify the risk? It depends. Have you felt strongly about your subject and feel equally compelled to make photographs of that subject which you then work to compile into a photo book? If so, you’ve already committed a piece of yourself to the project. Anything that carries that much personal investment is, by definition, a success.

So, yes, there is still value in photo books. In a sense, books such as these carry even more value today. We live in a world saturated by the instantaneous. Producing a photo book requires time, deliberate intent, and the willingness to slow yourself down to focus on your true goal.

Will your photo book sell a million copies? Well, it’s doubtful.

However, depending on your expectations, making a photo book could very well be the most memorable, rewarding, and ultimately challenging mission you ever undertake as a photographer. There truly is no other feeling than seeing your own book sitting on your shelf. Believe me.

 

 

The post Photo Books: Value and Worth in Today’s Digital World appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Adam Welch.


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This eclipse photo shows the crazy dynamic range of today’s image sensors

23 Aug
Nikon D750 without any filters at 1/8s, F11, and ISO 100. Photo by Dan Plucinski

We talk about dynamic range (or lack thereof) a lot here at DPReview. But with all of the granular comparisons between the newest models, it’s easy to forget how incredible many of today’s image sensors have gotten in this regard. So here’s a quick example from photographer Dan Plucinski, who captured this photo in Oregon during the total solar eclipse on Monday.

The photograph on the right is a single image, not a composite. Plucinski simply took the shot on the left and pulled the shadows up in post; what you see on the right is the same image, with all of the shadow detail recovered.

The lesson is pretty straight-forward: always shoot Raw.


Photo by Dan Plucinski and used with permission.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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NASA captured photos and video of the ISS ‘photobombing’ today’s solar eclipse

22 Aug
The International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the Sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017 near Banner, Wyoming. Photo credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Plenty of people were pointing their cameras up at the solar eclipse today, but leave it to NASA to capture a little something extra. From his vantage point in Banner, Wyoming, NASA photo editor Joel Kowsky captured a dual eclipse of sorts: the moon obscuring the sun, and the tiny pinprick of the International Space Station obscuring a little bit of what was left.

As the ISS and its six crew members flew in front of the partially obscured disk of the sun, Kowsky had both still and slow motion video cameras trained on his target.

Here’s a closer crop of the photograph above:

Here, a composite that shows the ISS’s full transit across the partial eclipse:

And, finally, a slow motion video of the transit, recorded by Kowsky at 1,500 frames a second:

To see these photos and video in their full glory, head over to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Flickr account.


All photos and video courtesy of NASA/Joel Kowsky

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Peak Design will donate today’s online sale proceeds to Conservation Alliance

22 Apr

If you’ve been eyeing a Peak Design bag, today may be the day to strike. In honor of Earth Day, the company is donating 100% of proceeds from the day’s online sales to the Conservation Alliance. The organization provides a link between outdoor brands like Peak Design and community efforts to protect and restore public lands.

Peak Design also recently launched Give a Shot, a website where wildlife non-profits can connect with visual content creators looking to volunteer their skills for a good cause. To sweeten the deal, the company offers creators who take on a volunteer project credit toward Peak Design goods.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Today’s New Version of Flickr Implements Bulk Downloading of Your Photos — Your Photos Really Do Belong to You

08 May

Flickr Rolls Out New Search, Camera Roll and Batch Download Improvements

Today Flickr is launching a number of new improvements to their service. I’ll review what they are in this post, but in my mind the most significant change coming today is that Flickr is introducing the ability for you to bulk download your photos from their site.

I’ve been critical of Flickr in the past over the inability to easily get your photos back out of the service. While not a silo, Flickr’s never made it exactly easy to get your photos back after you upload them.

You’ve always been able to download your photos on a photo by photo basis, but for someone with a ton of photos, downloading each and every one individually isn’t very practical or user friendly. For a while Flickr had partnered up with a company called Qoop (now out of business) that would bulk load your photos to CDs or DVDs and sell them back to you, but that never sat right with me either — why should you have to pay to get your own photos back? Also for someone like me with over 100,000 photos on the site, how many CDs would that take and how much would *that* cost?

Several third party developers had developed apps that claimed to be able to use the Flickr API to bulk download your photos for you. I tried many of these apps with names like bulkr and migratr and flickrsync over the years and never found any of them very reliable or easy to use.

All that changes today though as Flickr rolls out official support for batch downloading your photos from Flickr.

Now you can fill up that free 1 terabyte (or unlimited terabytes if you’ve got a grandfathered Pro account) with confidence knowing that if you ever want/need those photos back from Flickr you’ll be able to get them back much more easily. As I understand it, there still may be photo limits for how many individual photos you can select in camera roll for a single download for performance reasons, but you can select large batches of photos from the new camera roll and Flickr will convert those photos into a zip file for you and send them right back to you on your computer. The number of photos you can download is unlimited. You can download multiple zip files effectively accessing 100% of your photostream.

Today’s new support for downloading is a very consumer friendly thing for Flickr to do. It is already very generous for Flickr to give people 1 terabyte of free cloud storage for your high res original photos, but now allowing you to get them back as easily as you upload them there makes this even more generous. Kudos to Flickr.

This new download support is part of a new section on Flickr called “Camera Roll.” Camera Roll has been in beta testing for several months now, but this downloading feature is newly available today.

In addition to download support, Flickr also now allows you to easily grab a batch of photos from your camera roll and share them as sort of an album on the fly via url. This can be helpful if you have a batch of recent or specific photos that you want to email to one person, or share on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere — with this new feature you just select them in camera roll and create a shareable url. Even if you have photos marked private you can share them with others with these special url links — sort of like a shareable guest pass but much easier to generate on the go.

Flickr is also going deeper now with deep machine learning with Camera Roll. In addition to viewing your photos by date taken or posted, Flickr is now adding in a New Magic View, where Flickr will auto tag many of your photos and build them into commonly grouped albums. You can see all of your sunset photos in one place, or all of your group photo shots in one place, or all of your photos of automobiles, etc.

Some of you who go wayyy back with Flickr, might remember the old Tag Cow company which would do similar tagging for you of your photos. In Tag Cow’s case though they were actually using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and hiring people in places like India and China to manually review and tag your photos for pennies.

Magic View is no Tag Cow though. Instead Flickr is actually using image recognition technology (remember this acquisition?) and algorithms to determine what your photos are of and then auto-tagging them based on this technology. If Flickr gets a tag wrong you will always be able to manually remove the automated tag. The tags that you add will be in a different shade than the auto-tags making it easy to see which ones you added and which ones Flickr added based on this technology.

One of the benefits of having more/better tagged photos on Flickr is that it will allow more public photos to be findable and searchable. This public/private distinction is important because private photos on Flickr are never searchable, except to you.

Which brings me to search.

I am a HUGE fan of the new Flickr search experience. I’ve spent hundreds if not thousands of hours using the search functionality of Flickr. I routinely use Flickr search to scout photo locations, find people shooting in a particular area, stay on top of events happening around the San Francisco Bay Area, and tons of other ways. The new search page is clean and fast. In addition to date posted, interestingness and relevancy you can also now search Flickr photos by date taken.

Flickr’s done an entire rebuild of the back end of the search page to make it super fast and responsive — they will also be porting this new rebuilt page technology to other pages in the weeks and months ahead to improve performance on many other popular Flickr pages.

Although I consider myself a fairly advanced search technician when it comes to Flickr, for many who are not as sophisticated, basic text searches will be smarter. In the past if you wanted to search for the London Eye you’d have to search for “London Eye” with quotes, or merge the two words together as londoneye. With the new search if you type London Eye just as plain text, Flickr is smarter and will realize that you want to see photos of the London Eye not random photos of London mixed in with random photos of eyeballs.

Flickr has also introduced some slick filters which will allow you to filter by colors (or black and white), photo styles such as depth of field photos or minimalistic photos or heavily patterned photos. Unfortunately there still is no filter to only show me photos without those pesky and ugly signatures and watermarks though. ;)

In addition to Camera Roll and improved search, Flickr is also updating their mobile apps for iOS and Android, to provide a more consistent experience. My iOS experience on Flickr has not been good the past few months. Recent activity for me has become completely jumbled and unusable, which is more of a power user problem I think than anything. I’m hoping that the refresh fixes this bug for me — maybe not though. I do like to use the mobile version when I have a few minutes for looking at and favoriting photos of my contacts and it will be interesting to see what this is like once I upgrade.

The changes Flickr is rolling out today continue to make Flickr better and better — a trend that’s continued over the past several years as Flickr has ramped up staff and built a better and stronger team.

No other company today will give you a free terabyte of photo storage for your high res photos.

It always boggles my mind that people actually pay for storage of their photos on things like iCloud, when they could just send everything to Flickr for free. Especially now that you can get your photos back so easily, there really is no reason why everyone in the world should not use Flickr as a free cloud backup storage for all of their photos. Even if you don’t want to mix up every photo on your hard drive or phone with your current carefully curated Flickr presentation, you can just set up a second account and call it backup to Flickr and have a free backup site for your photos.

Are you one of those people who are constantly running out of space on your phone because of all of your photos? Then why aren’t you using Flickr?

More from The Verge, Wired, TechCrunch.


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Today’s Dose of Cuteness – a Collection of Cats in Windows and Doors

17 Jan

By Franck Vervial

Last week I came clean on my obsession with bicycles. My other two favourite things to photograph are doors and windows. What better than if they have a cat in them!?

The French Cat

I have two crazy cats that make me laugh every day. If you’re a cat or pet owner you’ll understand. Even if you don’t have a cat you have to admit, putting one in a window or on the windowsill sort of completes the image, right? Cats can be annoying, cute, or elegant. They have personality. Not everyone is a “cat person” but approach it from a photographic perspective. They can add to the composition!

A student in one of my photography classes showed me this book and I had to get a copy for myself! It resides by my bedside table.

So this week I went in search of cat images. Here’s what I found.

Photos of cats in windows and doors:

By Raffaele Camardella

By Kazutaka Sawa

By helmuthess

By Kat… – quadruple whammy! Door, window, bike and cats! WOW!

 

By Cornelia Kopp

By Jerzy Durczak

By John Ryan

By jamesjustin

By Louise LeGresley

By marc cornelis

By Serena

By Grant MacDonald

By Barbara

By Rasmus Andersson

By Parée

By Francesco

By Paco CT

By Ref54

By Christos Tsoumplekas

By jerry dohnal

By Jorge Sáez

By ++ lichtempfindlich

By *m22

By Jens Schott Knudsen

By Bowen Chin

By ClaireDrouet

By Eric Parker

By Matthew C. Wright

By Ben+Sam

The post Today’s Dose of Cuteness – a Collection of Cats in Windows and Doors by Darlene Hildebrandt appeared first on Digital Photography School.


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Nikon D2X review (Part. 2) – Is it better than today’s consumer level DSLRs?

25 Aug

I look at a more in-depth review, and consider it’s eprformance in relation to today’s consumer level DSLRs.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

******************Copyright Nikon Corporation******************
Video Rating: 4 / 5