photography ¦ kremalicious

Crossdressing, Compression and Colliders: The First Photo on the Web

Great piece about the first photo on the web, not only interesting from a technical point of view:

de Gennaro had been toying around with a scanned .gif version of the July 18th photo, using version one of Photoshop on his color Macintosh. The .gif format was only five years old at the time, but its efficient compression had made it the best way to edit color images without slowing PCs to a crawl.

The photo is quite horrible but so emblematic for a lot of stuff the web is used for today. As the article states, this was basically the beginning of fun on the web. But, although really not great, I don’t think Niépce’s photo was that horrible.

Go to source ∞

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

Great insight article into what and how exactly Yahoo managed to screw this up.

It is a case study of what can go wrong when a nimble, innovative startup gets gobbled up by a behemoth that doesn’t share its values. What happened to Flickr? The same thing that happened to so many other nimble, innovative startups who sold out for dollars and bandwidth: Yahoo.

As a year long Flickr user I’m just sad about this but hey, we got 500px which probably wouldn’t exist without Flickr’s decline.

Go to source ∞

World Press Photo 2012

The winners of the 2012 contest were announced and the winner gallery is worth checking out.

This years winner, dubbed Photo Of The Year 2011, comes from Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda.

Go to source ∞

The Definite Guide To Watermarks In Apple Aperture

Aperture Watermark example

I received quite a few mails in the last days from Aperture users asking for the best way to add your copyright information or any other so called watermark to your images in an Aperture 2 workflow. Especially new users to Aperture find it quite confusing why there isn’t something like a text brick in the Adjustments panel. So Aperture itself lacks the ability of quickly adding some lines of text to your images but nevertheless it has a watermarking feature.

In this article I will lay out every way I’ve found to add watermarks to your images in an Aperture 2 workflow and will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. The goal of this article is to give you a brief overview about the various ways you can add watermarks to your images so you can easily choose the best one for different needs. In short these are the possibilities:

Canon EOS 50D And New Lens Officially Announced

The successor of the EOS 40D is (almost) here: Canon officially announced the Canon EOS 50D along with the new lens Canon EF-S 18-200/3.5-5.6IS. The EOS 50D and the new lens will be both available in October 2008, Canon says.

The EOS 50D comes with an CMOS APS-C sized sensor (crop factor 1.6) with 15.1 megapixels. Being Canons first DSLR with the new DIGIC 4 image processor the EOS 50D can burst 6.3 shots per second with improved image quality.

HowTo: Create A Mobile Encrypted Aperture Vault

Niepce's Aperture Vault When on the road I always take a little mobile hard drive with me where all my referenced Aperture Masters from the past years and my mobile Aperture Vault (backing up the un-referenced Masters from the current year) reside. But being little and mobile also means the external hard drive can easily be lost or stolen exposing all my pictures to the thief. To avoid that you can use encryption so in the case of a lost or theft the data is not accessible by the thief. This can easily be done with sparse bundle disk images so you won’t have to encrypt the whole hard drive with additional software.

So in this quick tutorial I will show you how to create an encrypted Aperture Vault by using Sparse Bundle Disk Images and by utilizing tools built into Mac OS X. All this can be done in two simple steps.

Noise Ninja finally available for Apple Aperture

Earlier this month PictureCode finally released their noise reduction software Noise Ninja as an Aperture plug-in for Aperture 2.1 and above.

The results are just as amazing as they are with the Photoshop plug-in. But the Aperture plug-in uses a streamlined interface which differs from the photoshop version. But the functionality is the same.

You can download a trial version of Noise Ninja for Aperture (images are watermarked with a grid pattern when you save them) and give it a try. The Noise Ninja plug-in for Aperture is available as a part of the Pro Bundle (US$ 79.95) which includes the Photoshop and the Aperture plug-in. If you have an existing Pro Bundle license you can upgrade it for US$ 20 to include the Aperture plug-in license.

Interested in more Aperture plug-ins? Just have a look at my article First overview: Aperture 2.1 adjustment plugins have arrived to get an overview about what’s available at the moment or browse my blog by the Aperture plug-in tag. Additionally you can have a look at the brand new Apple website for all the Aperture plug-ins and ressources.

Tips for Journalists Reporting From China

Jingjing and Chacha are watching you

As you may know there’s a huge Internet censorship going on in China. Contrary to promises made by chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) this Internet censorship is active during the Olympic Games even in the international media centre. And the IOC shares the current ideas of censorship in China.

And as in every political system with totalitarian elements there’s a good chance you will meet some angry lackeys if you’re going to report about topics the chinese authorities don’t want you to report. But more important they will threat your sources if their identity gets revealed. So if you want to report about the water shortage in the villages around Beijing, the massive air pollution in Beijing or about all the forced resettlements going on in China you should consider some security precautions to protect you and your sources.

New Aperture Plug-In: Nik announces Silver Efex Pro

Beside a new version of Color Efex Pro for Capture NX, Nik announced a brand new plug-in for Photoshop and Aperture. Silver Efex Pro is a tool to create black & white images with the power and simplicity of the U-Point technology. You can easily fine tune portions of your black & white images. It’s also capable of emulating film grain and 18 different types of film while also providing 20 one-click preset styles. But Silver Efex Pro is also capable of color toning the image.

You can get a 15-day trial from Nik’s website. It can be purchased through Nik’s online store for US$199.95.

New Aperture Plug-Ins: Jade And PTLens

Last week two new image editing plug-ins were announced for Aperture 2.1: The PTLens plug-in for correcting barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective and the Jade plug-in for automatic correction of color, levels and exposure.

The PTLens plug-in from ePaperPress was available as a Photoshop plug-in in the past and is well known for its lens pincushion, barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective correction abilities based on a lens model database similiar to Kekus’ LensFix CI plug-in.