Here's What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters | Raw File | Wired.com

Earlier this year the Chicago Sun-Times made national headlines when it purged its photo staff and replaced them with iPhone-wielding reporters.

To track what many suspected would be a decline in the paper’s visual coverage, Chicago freelance photographer Taylor Glascock started a Tumblr that compares the Sun-Times’ photography with that of its competitor the Chicago Tribune, which still uses staff photographers.

“I think that you can’t just assume that if you give [reporters] a camera they will come out with the same result as someone who is trained,” says Glascock. “If photographers had to write all the stories it wouldn’t be pretty either.”

For about a month now, Glascock has been watching the way both papers cover the same story. Sometimes she posts side-by-side screenshots from the papers’ websites. Other times she posts side-by-side comparisons of the papers’ front pages.

 

Source: http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/repla...

On the Constant Moment- Clayton Cubit.

Imagine an always-recording 360 degree HD wearable networked video camera. Google Glass is merely an ungainly first step towards this. With a constant feed of all that she might see, the photographer is freed from instant reaction to the Decisive Moment, and then only faced with the Decisive Area to be in, and perhaps the Decisive Angle with which to view it. Already we've arrived at the Continuous Moment, but only an early, primitive version.
Evolve this further into a networked grid of such cameras, and the photographer is freed from these constraints as well, and is then truly a curator of reality after the fact. "Live” input, if any at all, would consist of a “flag” button the photographer presses when she thinks a moment stands out, much like is already used in recording ultra-high-speed footage. DARPA has already developed acamera drone that can stay aloft recording at 1.8 gigapixel resolution for weeks at a time, covering a field as large as 5 miles wide, down to as small as six inches across, and it can archive 70 hours of footage for review. This feat wasn't achieved with any new expensive sensor breakthroughs, but rather by networking hundreds of cheap off-the-shelf sensors, just like you've got in your smartphone.

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Photo Project: Tattoo Machines

Portland Tattoo Artist Jason Leisge, owner of OddBall Tattoo asked me to photograph some of his hand built Tattoo Machines before he left for a convention in NY.  Here are the results of a two hour shoot. ​I hope to continue this project with the title, "Machines of Ink and Blood:  Images of custom built Tattoo Machines."

Photo nerd notes: Shot with a Canon 5dm2 with the 90mm tilt shift lens and lit with a few Dedolights. I love my Dedolights!  Shot a few frames for focus stacking then made the background in Modo.  

​Sweep, gun block model and lights in Modo.

Composited it all together and there you have it.  Fun stuff.  If you build your own Tattoo Machines please drop me a line, I'd love to photograph them.​

The Process.

The George Eastman House has done a series of videos about the major steps of the Photographic Process ending with the Gelatin Silver Print.  Interesting to me that it does not go into Digital which I would consider the biggest, most important change to the medium since it was created. 

The Dageurrotype, The Collodion Process, The Albumen Print, The Woodburytype, The Platium Print, and The Gelatin Silver Print.

 

Source: http://www.metafilter.com/

Portrait shoot: Parasols

Did a shoot last night for the band Parasols here in the Studio last night.  Parasols is on the Left and my lovely wife is on the right for a lighting test.  Really happy with the outcome.

Stop Romanticizing About The Good Old Film Days – They Weren’t That Good

If you’re young, and were born into the age of computers, you may tend to romanticize about the good old days you never experienced. I’ve shot more film than most of you. Digital only became available in the last half of my career and I spent more time shooting film than I have yet shooting digital. I was there. I did it every day. I lived it. It wasn’t that great.

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Film was expensive, and processing more so. The chemicals used in the process were so dangerous that the EPA regulated them. They were officially declared bio-hazards. The heavy metals involved are still doing damage to our ecosystem.

It was hard to make very large prints from film. If you shot for publication you had to use very expensive drum scanners that weren’t all that good.

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The image is what matters. Period. How you got it is only important to you and those in the camera club you are trying to impress.

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This a thousand times over. ​I worked in chem labs for years.  Had to wear a haz mat suit to clean the C-41 Machines. It was nasty.

Source: http://photofocus.com/2013/04/17/stop-roma...

How to photograph lightning: A tutorial | Richard Gottardo Photography

A common mistake people make when shooting lightning, is exposing for the scene they are shooting instead of exposing for the lightning shot. Shooting lightning has a LOT in common with flash photography, where the majority of the light in your photo will be coming from the strike itself and not from any ambient light sources.  You will want to set an exposure time for between 20 and 30 seconds where a normal shot without lightning will be totally black. The settings I find that usually work for me are around F/7 ISO 100 and 30s  for lighting that is very powerful and very close, down to about f/5 ISO 100 and 30s for lighting that is a bit farther off in the distance. You will need to take a few test shots to really dial in the right settings.  All of the photos shown in this tutorial were taken at around F/7 ISO 100 30s so this is really a great starting point

 

One of the projects I have always wanted to do but have not had the time or the weather.  Not many lightning storms in Portland.​

http://www.richardgottardo.com/

Source: http://www.richardgottardo.com/how-to-phot...

Copyright Controversy After Appropriated Photo Used to Win Art Contest

In the two photographs above, the bottom image is a photo-manipulation created using the top image. Are they completely separate works of art? What if we told you the second photo was created without the original photographer’s permission and submitted to a contest as an original artwork? What if we told you it actually won?

 

I'll side with it being a rip off and he should lose his award of a new mac laptop.​

Source: http://www.petapixel.com/2013/04/02/copyri...

Thomas Hawk - Why I Quit Getty Images and Why I’m Moving My Stock Photography Sales to Stocksy

Since the Carlyle Group (read their wikipedia page actually, it’s fascinating) has taken over Getty Images, things seem to have changed. Maybe Getty’s parent is trying to wring as much profit as their stock business as they can, but it feels like artists are getting the short end of the stick even more these days.

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While Stocksy isn’t exactly “occupy” stock photography, rather than me getting 20% and Carlyle getting 80%, I’ll be paid a much fairer 50% payout. The exciting part about Stocksy though isn’t just the higher payout, it’s that the members of Stocksy actually OWN the agency. That’s right, after paying out costs, Stocksy will distribute profits to it’s members — so members will get dividends and actually hold real equity in the business.

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If you are a photographer, consider signing up. One bit of warning here though, Stocksy is being *very* selective about the photographers that they are adding. I have felt a little bad because some of my good friends and talented photographers haven’t been asked to join

 

​And here is more on Stocksy via Cnn.

"Photographers kept coming to see me, coming to visit, telling me how bad the industry was, telling me they were disenfranchised, telling me about the competition, this sea of images. That, combined with declining royalties -- they were super frustrated," he said. "They were looking to me to get back in the game. I just couldn't ignore it anymore."
He's not aiming to conquer the world -- something iStock did as it pioneered the "microstock" market that exploded when an army of digital photographers mobilized to sell photos globally on the Internet. That growth accelerated dramatically when Getty Images acquired iStock for $50 million in 2006. This time around, Livingstone is looking for "sustainability," concentrating on a high-end foothold
Source: http://thomashawk.com/2013/03/why-i-quit-g...

Personal work- Hawaii 2013

Some images from Hawaii this year.  All of these are taken around the town of Paia with the Fuji x100.

Shooting High-Resolution Macro Photos of Snowflakes

The manual for the MP-E 65mm lens I use has an aperture conversion chart, which allows me to calculate the “effective aperture at given settings and magnifications. For example, setting the lens to a 5:1 magnification and f/16 will result in an aperture of f/96. At that aperture, diffraction limiting plays a huge role in giving you a blurry image, and your snowflake still wouldn’t be in focus from front to back.

My solution is to slowly move the camera forward and backward through the focus of the snowflake, firing off as many images as possible. I may take up to 200 images of the same crystal, and then choose between 30-40 of them to combine together. Because I’m shooting hand-held, the frames I need are often unevenly spaced and out of order.

Each image is done entirely hand-held. No tripods or focusing rails are used in any of my images. I’m often asked why, and the answer is: necessity. If I took the time to line the subject up perfectly on a tripod, the snowflake will have either melted, blown away or be smothered by other falling snow.

 

Source: http://www.petapixel.com/2013/03/19/shooti...

Strobist: In-Depth: The New Fujifilm X100s

Essentially, what you have in the X100s is a tiny, super capable camera with fast, sharp glass that handles like a Leica M. The 16MP X-Trans chip is the best APS-sized chip I have seen—in skin tones, high ISO and sharpness. (They changed the distribution of the RGB pixels and lost the low-pass filter without getting moiré.) It is also insanely customizable. And silent.

Again, echoing Zack Arias here when I agree that Fuji is the new Leica. As someone who used many different Leica M film rangefinders, this thing is more Leica M than any digital camera Leica has made yet. By a long shot. And at a small fraction of the cost. If you woulda just used your film M camera with a 35/2 lens permanently on it, as many did, this is your camera.

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The sweet spot with the X100s is to shoot on (L)100 ISO, at 1/1000th of a sec at f/2 with the built-in 3-stop ND filter engaged. That will underexpose full daylight. You can then overpower the sun with a small flash and shoot wide open in the process for gorgeous backgrounds at f/2.

Because of the ND filter, the equivalent exposure for your flash would be as if it were exposing something fully at f/5.6 at ISO 100. Doable, at modest range with a speedlight in an umbrella. And you can own the sun at any aperture with any monobloc. 

 

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Good review of the new Fuji.  I have the older x100 and i love it more then any digital camera I have owned. The new one sounds like a hell of a update.​

Source: http://strobist.blogspot.in/2013/03/in-dep...

L'Oreal Pulled Ads Because They Used Too Much Photoshop

The advertising in question was challenged before NAD by The Procter & Gamble Company, a competing maker of mascaras. P&G took issue with advertisements featuring visuals of model’s lashes and product performance claims related to eyelash length and volume. P&G asserted that the visuals were identical to those that appeared in Canada and the UK, together with a disclosure that stated “Lashes were enhanced in post-production.” NAD is an investigative unit of the advertising industry’s system of self-regulation. It is administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus. Upon receiving NAD’s initial inquiry, the advertiser advised NAD that it had permanently discontinued all of the challenged print and broadcast advertisements prior to the challenge and affirmed that the in-store advertising would soon be replaced with new advertising.

 

Interesting.  Note how they had to include a disclaimer, “Lashes were enhanced in post-production.” and it was still pulled for false advertising. Oddly enough I am in favor of realism in advertising.

Source: http://www.asrcreviews.org/2013/03/nad-fin...

Photog Uses Crappy Client Photos to Get Hired

Photographer James Hodgins of Sudbury, Ontario has come up with a creative visual solution for a perennial marketing challenge: Convincing clients who think they can shoot their own photography that they will get better results if they hire a professional photographer.

“People are visual. When you start talking lights, they tune you out,” Hodgins says.  One day it dawned on him to invite a client to tag along on a shoot with her own camera. “I said, ‘You take the picture you would have taken, and then I’ll take mine the way I would.”

 

Photographer: James Hodgins

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Oh man, great idea.  May have to use this one with a few of our clients as well.​

Source: http://pdnpulse.com/2013/03/photog-uses-cr...

The Phase One IQ260 Sensor, long exposures return

The result of the short-term project was the Phase One IQ180, based on an 80mp sensor co-developed by Phase One and Dalsa. It raised the 1-min@ISO50 bar set by the Phase One P 65+ to 2-min@ISO35. The improvements were modest, but greatly appreciated by many photographers who found that 1 minute was just at the cusp of what they needed and 2 minutes was enough to placate most of their long exposure needs. But many landscape and architectural photographers needed much longer exposures still, and this would require much more than small tweaks. It would require a complete redesign, an entirely new technology, and close collaboration between the hardware, firmware, and software teams.

 

Source: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/...

iPad Photo Workflow | CreativePro.com

For the traveling photographer—or anyone who shoots in the field—the release of the iPad offered the possibility of a much lighter, easier field kit. Unfortunately, for the first few years of the iPad’s existence, the software did not exist to facilitate a pro-level workflow. Over the last few months, though, a few new apps have hit the store, and they’ve brought some important new post-production capabilities. Depending on your post needs, you might now be able to get away with taking only your camera and an iPad into the field.

 

Source: http://www.creativepro.com/article/ipad-ph...