Photography
Exhibits
Ming Thein: Extensive, interesting portfolio and comments on a wide variety of equipment.
The transformation of New York’s Chinatown in the 1980s: Photographs by Robert Glick.
Google Streetview Found Photographs: Some are shocking, some are beautiful.
Beautiful Macro Images of Snowflakes: Moscow photographer Alexey Kljatov produces lovely, extreme closeup snowflake images using a compact camera with a reverse-mounted Helios 58mm F2 lens.
Long exposure of fog flow: Several minutes under moonlight; a study in fluid flow that is also a lovely photograph.
Portraits of New York by Joseph Michael Lopez: Not Woody Allen’s Manhattan.
A New York that Doesn’t Really Exist Anymore: Samples from Richard Sandler’s new book, The Eyes of the City, look interesting.
500px: Amazing photography of deep-sea creatures by Yung-sen Wu.
Manhattan Hike 2005: Ken Rockwell’s photo essay of his hike of the entire length of Manhattan. It’s a lot of fun, with some really great photographs, taken with a tiny point-and-shoot.
Don’t Call Clay Benskin a Street Photographer: Noir images taken in lower Manhattan.
Capitol Reef National Park and Grand Staircase National Monument: Bryan Jones’ stunning images and video of these two places in Utah.
Hiroyuki Ito’s New York City: Strong street photography.
Images of bioluminescence: from the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Image Library.
Jeff T. Alu: mostly greyscale, somewhat abstract landscapes; prints available.
Library of Underwater Images by John Petrak: Extensive, high quality, and well organized.
Jørn Tompter: Many pointless portraits of boring people and pictures of walls painted with pictures, but there are few strongly original compositions here that make it worth a visit. The site is entirely in Flash.
A tribute to the beauty of Wild Skies.
Michel-Jean Dupierris: he’s here and here.
Information
On Photography: Susan Sontag’s classic book is still worth reading.
The Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x Macro Lens and Insect Photography: Illinois-based biologist and photographer Alex Wild describes the advantages and difficulties of using this specialized tool, with stunning examples of the results.
Clarkvision: Articles and detailed demonstrations of techniques and topics in various areas of photography.
Thoughts on Demosaicing for X-Trans Sensors: Fuji does not provide the technical information needed to process their raw files. Here is some research into reverse-engineering a raw processor.
Multicolr Search Lab: Find images from Flickr that contain the color combination of your choice. This is a slick, fun, and possibly even useful tool.
Another Skirmish in the Photography Copyright Wars: Insightful open letter from a photographer to the band “Garbage” explaining why they can’t have the product of his labors without compensation — and why it was rude to ask.
Sony’s Questionable Claim: Is their new camera as good as medium format film?
Consensus on the Nikon Green Cast Problem: Two photographers agree about color problems in Nikon’s full-frame DSLRs.
pdiff: Perceptual Image Difference Utility: Fascinating project. No deb package.
Canon 5DSR versus Sony A7R II Image Quality Comparison: Ken Rockwell shows that an extremely high-quality lens can perform worse than an ordinary lens on a camera the latter was designed to work with.
Who’s the Dick?: Guy uses a photograph without permission to promote his commercial album, which is itself a re-performance of someone else’s music, and the photographer he ripped off gets called a “dick” for not lying down.
Bryan Jones on the Fuji X-Pro1: Detailed, and generally very favorable, impressions of this mirrorless camera system and two of its lenses.
New Kertész Book: 500 images from one of the best photographers of all time. In a related note, I was in a bookstore today (September 11, 2011) and took a look at an enormous tome of Ansel Adams’ photographs of the American West. I own some briefcases that this book would not fit in. I glanced at the price, expecting something over $100 — it was $40. How is this even possible? Have prices for photography books dived precipitously while I wasn’t paying attention?
Panorama scripting in a nutshell: This is a short document describing the various Open Source tools and techniques available for working with panoramas in a non-GUI environment. The examples are based on Linux experience, but most of them should work on OS X or Windows with minor modifications at most.
Cuba And The Automobile: Bryan Jones’ evocative photographic study and essay.
World Cup 2015 National Harbor Audience: A big crowd watched the US defeat Japan on a huge screen.
CameraAxe: A “tool for photographers to trigger cameras or flashes based signals from various sensors”.
Planning for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse: This excellent, illustrated guide from 2015 covers weather, roads, crowds, navigation, and strategies for wrangling photographic equipment. And more.
Single-shot compressed ultrafast photography at one hundred billion frames per second: Movies of laser pulses reflecting off mirrors and travelling through media.
Image “Cloaking” for Personal Privacy: “an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how their own images can be used to track them. At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny, pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these ‘cloaked’ photos as you normally would […] if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, ‘cloaked’ images will teach the model an highly distorted version […] when someone tries to identify you […] they will fail.”
Ethical Questions Raised by Photographing for NGOs: James Estrin’s discussion of the potential conflicts of interest that arise when photographers accept remuneration from advocacy or aid organizations features some arresting images, especially those of Khaled Hasan (spelled incorrectly as “Hassan” in the Times’ caption) documenting the stonecrushing industry in Bangladesh.
Cameras and Lenses: Wonderful interactive tutorial about optics, sensors, and the physical and technological process of photography. Well done and well written.
Creative Photography Techniques: 20 Tips for Stronger Images.
Nebulosity is now free and open-source: The capture and processing application for astronomy photography is now developed on Github. For Windows and macOS only.
Monkey Selfie Issue Resolved: Some entities specifically mentioned by the US Copyright Office that can not create copyrighted works are the ocean, the supernatural, plants, and monkeys.
Criminalizing Photography: James Estrin’s 2012 interview with Mickey H. Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association.
How to Expand Dynamic Range: With special reference to Fuji cameras, but generally interesting.
The 100 billion frames per second camera that can image light itself: Detailed attempt to describe how the imaging system works.
Raw photo development with darktable: A brief introduction to the sophisticated free-software program for processing your camera’s raw files by Jonathan Corbet, the LWN editor.
ImageTragick: Tracking Imagemagick’s security vulnerabilities and offering work-arounds.
Detailed Olympus OM-D preview: No image tests or samples yet, but a fairly detailed user report from 2012.
Dance Photography Tutorial: Peter Norvig has put together a guide to photographing indoor events that’s likely to be useful for the beginner. But he leaves out one crucial thing.
The ultimate camera strap?: Made entirely in the USA with sophisticated techniques and materials.
A look at darktable 2.2.0: The latest version of the free and open-source photography workflow tool is a jump in sophistication and usefulness.
Strobist: Welcome to Strobist.: “This website is about one thing: Learning how to use off-camera flash with your DSLR to take your photos to the next level.”
Film Resolution: The Pixel Count of Film: K. Rockwell’s analysis.
The Dizzying Grandeur of 21st-Century Agriculture: Stunning use of photography, video and web design in this piece on the architecture of food production in The New York Times.
Jonesblog does NYC: I enjoyed Bryan Jones’ photo-essay about Manhattan. It features strong compositions, interesting captions, and clever uses of the geometrical distortion of a fisheye lens to create a framing device.
Landscape Photography with a DSLR: Carsten Krieger explains how to use tilt-shift lenses and multiple exposures on a DSLR to approximate large-format photography.
How to get a photograph of the five planets: The trick is to know where to look, and when.
The Online Photographer: “Our mission: to help connect today’s photo enthusiasts to photography’s culture: its tradition, history, industries, best practices, accomplishments, literature, theory, legal issues, and current events.”
Raw photo editing with RawTherapee: Jonathan Corbet’s brief look at RawTherapee, a free-software program for editing raw files from cameras, with some comparison to darktable. RawTherapee is a bit simpler than darktable, but the author found it slower, and it seems somewhat less sophisticated.
Polio’s Return After Near Eradication: A frightening and depressing article, notable for Diego Ibarra Sanchez’s strong photography.
GIMP 2.99.14: “Goodbye, floating selection. Hello, stroked text!” Both are welcome improvements. No more reaching for the menu to select “Paste as a new layer.” Now it’s what you get when hitting CTRL-V.
Selfie by Monkey: … creates copyright conundrum.
A Fantastic Group of Reuters Photographs: This recent crop of news photographs happens to be a stunning collection of images.
Lens and camera variation: “A funny thing happened when I opened Lensrentals and started getting 6 or 10 copies of each lens: I found out they weren’t all the same .”
PetaPixel: A bit heavy on the advertising, but plenty of great articles and photography.
Why I love my Leica: An historical appreciation.
“bbum”’s photographic study of an emerging cicada: Before they dry their wings are a lovely green.
High-speed macro photographer shares his setup: Behind the scenes of Markus Reugels’ lovely water-drop imagery.
The algorithm for a perfectly balanced photo gallery: “Ever since we started working on Chromatic we knew we wanted the photos to be as big as possible. No tiny thumbnails, no square-cropping, no wasting of precious screen real estate.”
Bell Labs Creates Lensless Single-Pixel Camera:
Scientists at Bell Labs have built a prototype camera that uses no lens and a single-pixel sensor. This rather counter-intuitive idea is based around a grid of small apertures that each direct light rays from different parts of the scene to the sensor, and can be opened and closed independently. […] Because there’s no lens to focus the resultant image has infinite depth of field, rather like a pinhole camera.
GitHub - lclevy/canon_cr3: “Describing the Canon CR3 fileformat from Canon M50 / EOS R / SX70 HS / EOS RP…”
CHDK Wiki: CHDK allows you to extend your Canon camera’s functionality by loading a program from the memory card. It makes no permanent changes to firmware and is completely reversible. You can add a battery meter (strangely absent on some Canon models), live display of overexposed areas, and much more. You can even write scripts to control your camera.
HDR photography with iPhone 4: A brief introduction to the rudimentary High Dynamic Range[@hdr] photography[@hdrExamples] built in to the iPhone 4. It looks like you can get surprisingly good results, although the three frames are taken with a delay[@iphone4-HDR-framespeed] of ⅛ to ¼ sec., even with a much faster shutter speed.
DKNY Apologises to Brandon Stanton: They had violated his copyright by displaying hundreds of his photographs in a store window.
James Duncan Davidson has some useful articles about photographic techinques and tools.
Viewfinder: “[…] a novel method for users to spatially situate […] their photographs, and then to view these photographs, along with others, as perfectly aligned overlays in a 3D world model such as Google Earth.” Visit the link for an impressive video, and read the brief article in the NYT.
The Histogram as the Image: cleverly hiding the “real” image as the histogram of a gif file.
Sense and Sensors in Digital Photography: A very interesting article by Charles Maurer full of good sense on the subjects of resolution, sensors, lenses, and more.
Here are some practical notes by Charles Maurer on color matching for digital photography, published 4 Oct. 2004.
