It’s Saturday afternoon and I am having a blast experimenting with the new edit plugin from Nik Software called Silver Efex Pro.
I downloaded the trial as soon as I heard it was available and it is really addictive. For the past two hours I have been going through images I took years ago that probably would have never seen the light of day as a color image.
Silver Efex Pro allows you to easily and with great creative control, convert your color images to black and white. you can of course also work from an original B+W image.
We’ve seen some really fantastic videos online lately.
How to use your cell phone to pop popcorn. A professional kicker putting a football between the uprights from 110 yards away. A ball girl making a remarkable catch as she scales the outfield wall. And a tornado ripping through Nebraska.
All these videos have one thing in common: They didn’t happen.
Well, the twister happened, but news organizations that used the video retracted it Thursday. According to The Associated Press, which distributed the clip, a storm chaser claimed the footage as a manipulated version of a video shot four years ago.
Photographer Louis Lesko took to the stage in the late morning to introduce the interesting idea that photographers should let their images be pirated.
As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a fact that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.
Alec Soth wrote a seminal photography blog (here) then one day up and quit. And, I’m not talking “hey, I’m getting tired of this s* I think I’ll pull back a bit,” I’m talking Bermuda-triangle-sudden-radio-silence quit. I always figured the man’s got his reasons and we’ll leave it at that. But, after you’ve been on the sharp end of a blog for awhile the reasons present themselves and I started to develop theories about it. I decided to ask him “what’s up.”
Earlier in June, China launched a week-long series of anti-terrorist drills called “Great Wall 5”, in preparation for the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games. The drills involved emergency responders, “police forces, the People’s Armed Police, the People’s Liberation Army and the health, environmental protection, meteorology and transportation departments.” according to China’s Xinhua News Agency.
So it’s a flattering to hear that Getty Images is validating our approach and recognizing our success by reaching into the flickr community. No other competitor in their history has forced Getty to change their model. This is a great sign of encouragement for us. Getty’s CEO Jonathan Klein describes this new endeavor as “the best imagery from a fresh collection of high-quality images chosen by us from Flickr’s diverse and prolific community.” If it sounds familiar, it should be, something very similar is printed on our homepage.
But rather than compare lexicon, let’s clarify some of the key points and differences of this announcement.
The mother subsequently admitted that she had exaggerated injuries she said had been sustained by the boy during an attack by governing party militia. In multiple interviews, she said that youths backing President Robert Mugabe had thrown her son to the concrete floor — and she still says that event did occur.
Crowds in Arkansas came for the lure of cage fighting and $1 beer, but police say what they got instead was men ripping each others’ clothes off and kissing _ a stunt suspected of being orchestrated by Sacha Baron Cohen of “Borat” fame.
“We had a contract for cage fighting. We were deceived,” said Dwight Duncan, president and CEO of Four States Fair Grounds in Texarkana, where the first of two Arkansas fights raised suspicions last month.
J Bennett Fitts is an interesting photographer with an acute appreciation for the tradition of banality throughout photographic history. Ultimately, I think the reason his images are so successful is because he can take something that’s been approached innumerable times and breath new life into it.
Along comes the 900. I’ve had two for a few weeks now, and the unit is, well, smooth. What can I say? Ed Fasano, a General Manager at Nikon, asked me what I thought after handling it, and I told him, “Well, if the SB800 is a real nice Chevy, this baby’s a Cadillac.”
As nice as the new sensor sounds, the question is asked – Who needs a %$%#@ 50MP sensor anyway? In fact there are ongoing discussions currently on many web forums (including this site’s) on this very topic. It almost seems as if there’s a backlash underway against such a high resolution chip.
I find this hard to understand, but there may be two factors at work. The first is from within the DSLR crowd. 50MP is so far beyond what is now available in a 35mm format camera, and likely will always be so given the price, that there may be a bit of sour grapes at work.
