Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images

I’m one of those people that whenever I fly, I try to get a window seat. As long as it’s not picth black night, or flying through clouds, my nose (or camera) is glued to the window. On a couple cross-country flights, I’ve actually gotten a stiff neck and cramps from being twisted in my seat.

Now I can experience that same pleasure, pain free, thanks to an incredible screensaver. And if you can relate to what I described above, than you should definitely check out Holding Pattern; A cinematic Screen Saver. I’ve installed this screen saver and it works great. In fact, it’s only the second time that I’ve installed one on my system that isn’t one of my screen savers.

A very special thanks to Lifehacker for posting this.

When can you make money selling photo prints of another person for tens of thousands of dollars, not pay the subject anything in return, get sued by an elder New York City Orthodox Jewish man, and win? Why, when you’re selling ART, of course! At least, so says Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Judith Gische when she ruled in favor of photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia. You can see the photo and read more at the Gothamist.

Digital photography offers some wonderful capabilities over traditional analog film counterparts. One of the main areas many people like to tout is the extended dynamic range of digital vs. film. Photoshop has a tool called “Merge to HDR” where you can take a series of images at different exposure values, and Photoshop will blend them together to create an image with as much dynamic range as you can possibly imagine. (For the less experienced, Dynamic Range is the range of detail in an image from the first detail visible in black shadow area, to the last bit of detail visible in a highlight.) The problem is that when the Dynamic Range is increased well beyond the scope of we’re used to seeing in traditional photography, the result might look fake.

Flickr has a pool of HDR images that you can browse through, and see good examples of images using this technique. Other images will show almost surreal edges, and in many cases, you can see blatant transition areas where the software just didn’t blend too well.

If you want to learn more about HDR, you can check out this tutorial on Luminous Landscape, and a more technical explaination on Cybergrain

Picture: Sunset light over the hills of the western Sierra, near Moro Rock, Sequoia National Park, California

This week I’ve had a bunch of computer problems, including an external hard drive that failed to power-up. This was a back-up drive, so it wasn’t too critical an issue, until I realized that this was the only place I had the full res versions of my coverage from our trip last summer to Sequoia National Park. Doh!

I’m surprised at myself to have let my DVD back-up process slip through the cracks on this. I called several data recovery centers, and got quotes starting at $1,500.00. That would have been a tough decision, as all but a few shots would be irreplaceable. Fortunately, the problem was not with the drive itself, but the power in the case, so all is safe. I immediatley copied this set of images to another disk. – That’ll teach me!

Harold “Doc” Edgerton built a special camera to photograph the detonation of early atomic bombs in the Nevada desert. I’ve seen the slow-motion film coverage of this, but seeing the still photos has quite an unexpected visual appeal. I recall my first thought when seeing the moving picture was along the lines of, “I wonder if that’s what the Big Bang looked like?” Now, I think that these shots of the rapidly expanding plasmatic wave of mass converting to energy could look likethe baby picture for our universe. I was also reminded of a scene in the recent Nova, The Elegant Universe, where they tried to demonstate how multi-dimensional points in space would appear. If we could visualize what multiple dimensions of space would look like, would they be at all similar to Edgerton’s photos of the nuclear explosions?

On another note, thanks to Space.com for posting a nice full screen version of this galactic Hubble Space Telescope photo. A benefit to paying taxes in the US is that these are our photos, and I’ll download and use them as my desktop wall paper.
Click HERE to see the full image at Space.com.

Does Getty Images + iStockphoto = iRobot?

Did the big Getty turn against us working photographers by gobbling up iStockphotos? Now even the “low-balling” RF shooters who ripped the value rug out from under the traditional RM market have been “low-balled”. This could only happen by the largest microsite being gobbled up by the largest supplier of visual content, and brought into the fold, or should we say chewed up and swallowed whole. Won’t it be a case of grand cosmic irony if the “traditional RF” suppliers start crying about the threat to the value of their work?

I come to write this after responding to a post over at Thomas Hawk.

I replied:

I am one of those professional photographers you refer to in your post, and yes, I agree that this is a bit of a scary wake up call. Personally, I’d love to see ….

Read the rest of this post »

The last few years have seen a real intrusion on my love for taking pictures; Keywording. It’s a hate thing, really. I call it the bane of my (professional) existence. But it is the necessary evil in the stock photo industry. I have a hard time feeling like anyone else can keyword my images better than me. For example, would someone else know when to apply the term “exfoliation” to as scenic picture taken in Yosemite?

It is practically guaranteed that every time I sit down to keyword, I wind up asking myself, “Can I find or afford someone else to do this for me?” So far, I haven’t made the plunge, but the good folks over at About The Image have made a nice list of vendors that actually provide keywording services. I’m sure it will come in hand when I just can’t to do the job myself anymore.

And as a final note, keywording is one of the toughest aspects of this job. It takes a huge amount of mental energy and focus. I like to say that after a day of keywording, I feel like someone stuck a straw in my skull and sucked out all my grey matter. But if the images aren’t keyworded correctly, the simple truth is that buyers won’t find your images.

It has to be done, and it has to be done right the first time. Sometimes though, I wish I had a job taste testing cauliflower.

Picture: Coastal Pier and fog, Wm. R. Hearst Memorial State Beach, San Simeon Bay,
Central Coast, San Luis Obispo Co., California

This image was taken while on one of my first trips to the Cambria / San Simeon Coast while shooting for my California Coast book. This pier sits below the famous tourist landmark Hearst Castle, and is along the edge of a pristine and quiet little bay. I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of the fog and the tiny cresting wave in this image. I just had a chance to make a couple 24×36″ prints of this photo. One was a Limited Edition Lightjet, and the other was an Epson inkjet. It was very interesting to see and feel the tactile differences between the two printing methods. I still prefer the look, feel, and texture of the Lightjet, which is produced on real photographic paper, but the Epson is still quite impressive.

You can see more pictures from the Central California Coast in my online web gallery.

Photo: Naturalist laying with elephant seal on sand beach, at Piedras Blancas, near San Simeon, California

I know this looks like fun, but please, don’t get the wrong idea. This man is a professional naturalist. This is the season when seals become quite plentiful along the California coastline. There are few places where the seals are as easily accessible as here at Piedras Blancas, which is just north of San Simeon. The only big problem with having the seals so close to people is that people (tourists) feel they can get as close to these animals as they want. Fortunately, the majority of visitors obey the posted signs that warn that it is a crime to approach or harass these animals.

See more images from the California Central Coast in our online gallery.

For those of you that follow along on the web with Alexa, StockPhotoTalk has posted a nice list of numerous stock photo related companies and agencies. For those of you that aren’t familiar, Alexa tracks web site traffic, with the busiest site getting the lowest number. For example, Yahoo is #1, Google is # 3, etc.. There are caveats as to how these rankings are determined, but you can read about those on Alexa’s web site. In case you don’t have the Alexa toolbar, and wonder where my site would fit on the list, I’m currently hanging around 50,000.