Don Schaefer's List: Digital Still imaging

"Photographer Nick Cool came up with one of the strangest pieces of do-it-yourself camera gear that we’ve seen so far this year. He took an ordinary stainless steel sink filter — yup, the thing that catches food at the bottom of kitchen sinks — drilled various-sized holes through it, and stuck it into a filter ring after taking out the glass. The resulting photographic sink filter takes soft focus photos with pretty strange-looking bokeh in the background. Changing the size of the holes drilled into the plate produces different bokeh styles."

"After 20 years of “scanning into Photoshop,” the latest Macs, OS X, and Photoshop CS6 have made so many changes to their architecture that users of some older scanners—as well as current users of Apple's Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8)  are finding it impossible to do this any longer."

"The latest generation of display calibration products from the major manufacturers use a library of display models to allow them to make more accurate measurements of the gamut of various display types. While this technique increases display calibration accuracy, it can also cause concern amongst users who upgrade from earlier models, only to find that the gamut graph using the new calibrator appears to provide them with a smaller gamut than they were achieving with their older calibrator."

"German photographer Geraldine Lamanna has a great series of photographs titled “Powder Dance” that captures the elegance and powder of dance using white powder. Inspired by the music video for the song “Rolling In The Deep” by Adele, Lamanna coated dance instructor Olivia Maciejowski and two her dance students with powder, and then had them bust out their moves for the camera. The resulting photographs are meant to show “echoes” of the movement."

"Emma Kisiel holds a bachelor of fine arts with an emphasis in photography from the University of Colorado Denver. She was awarded the Photography Department Recognition, Trustee, and Academic Honors Scholarships at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her work has been featured online at Design-Freak, Design For Mankind, ShareSomeCandy, RootSpeak, Lenscratch, Esquire Magazine, Russian edition, and F-Stop Magazine."

"That changes today with the introduction of Amazon Glacier. It’s a new uber-low-cost storage service for people who just want a place to dump their data without having to worry about it. Pricing starts at a crazy-low $0.01/GB/month.
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It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, especially when it comes to inkjet papers. You have your favorites and maybe think, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But sometimes a change may be just what you need. With that in mind, we picked our favorite inkjet papers that have helped us create some bold, new looks with our printed photos.

John Paul Caponigro is an internationally renowned environmental artist whose work has been purchased by diverse collections including Estee Lauder and the Smithsonian. Author of Adobe Photoshop Master Class, he is a contributing editor for Digital Photo Pro, columnist for Photoshop User, AfterCapture, Luminous-landscape.com, and Apple.com. A highly sought after public speaker, you can experience his technical lectures in his DVD series R/Evolution. He teaches digital photography and printing workshops around the world. A member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame, a Canon Explorer of Light, an Epson Stylus Pro, and an X-Rite Colratti, his clients include Adobe and Kodak. Learn more by visiting www.johnpaulcaponigro.com and get his free enews Insights with over 200 free lessons.

The Cruel Radiance:

Photography and Political Violence, by Susie Linfield University of Chicago Press, 344 pages, $30


Top Chinese party officials being denounced by revolutionary guards, 1966.

Photo by: Li Zhensheng, from the book, 'The Cruel Radiance.'
In an era when photography has become an inseparable part of our lives, and accessible to all, it is important to contemplate its moral and political significance. The huge quantity of photographic images that bombard us daily obscures boundaries between different types of photography and shunts aside the most important category of all: professional documentary photography, or photojournalism.

We must draw a distinction between documentary and every other type of photography. If in the past (before the rise of digital photography ) the photograph served as proof of the existence of reality at a particular instant, that is no longer the case, mostly because of the ease with which digital technologies can be used to create virtual representations of reality.

For Aperture users though up until now the workflow has been less than ideal. All edits were done in Photoshop (or Bridge, I guess) and so all the lovely features of Aperture were totally unused. But that’s no longer the case. Now you can send them an Aperture Library, and they will send that Library back — with all the edits you asked for. Since you only have to transfer the masters once, any additional back-and-forths are very quick to transfer, and you can easily keep a history of your edit by simply holding on to older versions of the library. Any adjustments are done in Aperture itself, so if you want to tweak the work they did, you don’t have to start over again. It’s truly an ideal situation for any Aperture user.

fter years in the commercial photography business, and countless bids under my belt, only one-thing remains constant…no two bid requests are alike. Putting a bid together for a client can be a taxing process. So before going into the details of a winning photography bid there are a few things to consider that can help the process along.

"Sponsored by DxO Labs, DxOMark provides objective, independent, RAW-based image quality performance data for lenses and digital cameras to help you select the best equipment to meet your photographic needs"

"Adobe Photoshop is really useful tool for web designers, graphic designers and also useful for photographers who using Photoshop for photo retouch, some time they shot normal pictures but after that enhance picture quality after using Photoshop tools for make more beautiful Photo results.

If there are fine lines, wrinkles, freckles, and other not pleasing to the eyes which you want to eliminate in your picture, Photoshop can make you look stunning and perfect. In these listed Adobe Photoshop Tutorials you may retouch your old pictures for new and even try to apply some amazing effects for reshape your pictures, hope you enjoy and leave your comments…"