I really recommend checking out Boston.com’s Big Shots in this week in sports. I have really grown to love looking for boston.com’s “Big Shots” pages when they put them together.
This edition is a collection of great photos taken in the sports world this week.
Not only are they great shots, but bravo to the Boston.com team for making sure we get to see them in great quality resolution at a decent size to enjoy!
Photrade allows you to post photos and manage all the photos which you upload into a portfolio. Similar to other photo trading sites Photrade allows you to organize your photos into galleries, and assign tags and titles which will make your photos easily searchable/browsable by visitors to your portfolio.
Where Photrade differs is that it has many strengths and rolls in all features found on several photo sites into a one-stop shop. This means that when you post your photos you have a fully functional photo sharing gallery and print house with which to make your photos available to the masses along with all of the wonderful features that other photo sharing sites have and more. This is perfect for those photographers who spend way too much time uploading there photos to many different sites to both get exposure (photo sharing sites) as well as sell there photos to customers (online photo selling site).
Special guest photographer David Bergman gets ready to present his work flow to the audience
I took the afternoon off today from my day job to attend the Apple Aperture 2 World Tour event here in Boston. Boy am I glad I did. Not only did I get a tutorial on the software with in-depth demos, but I got to see David Bergman (Photographer for Sports Illustrated as well as many popular music acts) demonstrate his work flow.
For the purposes of full disclosure, I have already purchased the software last weekend and I was going to this event to compliment the information I have already gathered from the Apple website. I research my purchases a lot before buying including using the trial versions if available and this purchase was no different. My sentiments going into this event was that Aperture was a great photo RAW converter and management tool. Coming out of the event I so glad that I made the purchase I did, because boy am I right! Not only is it a great tool, but I find that Apple is very commited to this tool and it’s Photographically inclined users, both professionals and amateurs alike.
One of the things I wanted in a photo management application was speed and expandability while still being affordable. Apple has priced Aperture 2 at a retail price of $199 which is about 50 dollars cheaper than Adobe’s competing product “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”. Attendees of the event today got a special discount on the Aperture 2 software. This version is also cheaper than the previous version of Aperture, version 1.5. It isn’t often that a company releases a new version of software and prices new features at a lower price than the previous version.
I hopped on over to CNet this evening where I saw this video shot at Tech Fest 2008 in Redmond WA. It looks as though Microsoft is doing some development work on some next generation photo editing tools. One of these tools allows you to insert people/objects into pictures that weren’t in the original shot. Now, this is not news to anybody who is a Photoshop guru as you can do this accurately in Photoshop or most other photo editing software packages. However, it seems to me that to do something like this in Photoshop is much more involved and tedious than what I saw in the video.
When inserting people and objects into photos, using a set horizon line (determined by the user), the program automatically determines the correct size of the object so that linear perspective is left intact. It also accurately places applicable shadows below the object given the light source direction in the photo.
Another technology demonstrated in this video is used for recovering blown out highlights from photos with similar areas in the photo which are correctly exposed. You can again do a similar thing in Photoshop, but again probably involves 10 times more steps than what is shown in the video to accomplish such effects.
The real question I have is, does software like this make the meaning of photography (think “painting with light”) go away? The fact that you have to get the picture right in the camera anymore is becoming less and less important as technology like this is developed. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are people out there that like this kind of digital art just as there are those who love HDR images and those that still only shoot film (believe it or not there are some people still shooting film out there).
I have been thinking lately how proud I am of the few shots which have just required some minor “global” adjustments to the image just as I would do in a dark room when developing film and making prints. I have been using Aperture 2.0 for my global image adjustments and I am loving it. I have yet to become a Photoshop expert but that doesn’t mean I won’t someday get into it and use it regularly, as I think it is a great piece of software. I am just wondering if photographers still care that the photos come out great right out of the camera rather than just clicking the shutter and thinking “I can fix this later in Photoshop”.
Bottom line, I ponder about this as I grow in my photography hobby, but it is good to know that I am in a hobby that has so many “genres” to explore, I love it!
Don’t count Kodak out of the photography industry just yet, in fact they are far from it! Looks as though this latest Quarterly report was all black! Detailed in this article from the Associated Press (Posted on Yahoo! News), Kodak’s CEO has stated that the restructuring charges and costs have come to an end and Kodak is now poised for growth in both it’s Digital Camera business as well as its inkjet printer business. I for one haven’t looked at Kodak printers my self yet but I have quickly looked at ink prices and I am much more attracted to Kodak’s prices than what I currently pay for ink for my HP printer cartridges. I might look at these Kodak printers more closely.
