SionPhoto

Donnie Darko...

You suck at Photoshop.

You do. You're awful.

If you want to be slightly less useless at Photoshop than you were five minutes ago, check out the pixel-pushing skills of tortured tutor, Donnie Hoyle.

 

There are two more episodes, which will take you deeper into Photoshop detail and domestic Hell...

Red Hot XXX Droid-on-Droid Action...

Here's a couple o' pics from a recent shoot for Scientific American magazine, for an article on David Levy, the author of 'Love and Sex with Robots'

The other plan was to have the robots in a church with confetti etc, but my requests were politely declined by various vicars.

I'm now waiting to see if Sci-Am will publish images of what can only be described as saucy cyborgs going at it like a steam hammer (but you know...tasteful).

Here's an image which probably won't get used:

            K9 - style...anybody got any jumpleads?

Of course if they don't run, its just be another scandalous reinforcement of the patriarchal-carbon-based-lifeform-phallic-gender-specific-hegemony which has kept mechanoids oppressed by 'The Man' throughout 'His-Story'.

When the revolution comes, I for one, will welcome our new robot overlords.

Who in God's name has automatic rifles? Dashed unsporting. Probably Belgian.

I've always been a bit bemused by what seems to be a relatively recent trend in photojournalism of using 'retro' techniques and cameras - Holgas, 5x4, Lensbabies...

It is I suppose, as much a symptom of digital disruption as any other (along with the tendency for photojournalism to retreat into elitism), but why re-invent the wheel, when you can have the jetpack?

Or better still, why not just use the best of both?

If anyone approaches, you shout "Halt, Who Goes There" and take down their credentials...

Heres a little SionPhoto podcast experiment...it's the audio from an video interview with Tony Benn I shot a while ago for the MWAW film.

Very little of the interview was shown in the eventual video, so this makes use of the additional footage in another context (its also marginally easier to edit just the audio). Having stuff which can be repurposed via several outlets, is something that freelances should be thinking about, as media begins to converge.

Obviously it's something which can't be done with conventional digital stills cameras. Some people are using sound recorders with digital stills cameras, but its really only a matter of time I think, until the practical advantages of having one machine which captures multiple media (stills, video and sound) begins to outweigh having a device which only does one thing (however great that one thing is), or having to carry around multiple devices.

Multi-use devices and strategies are still in their infancy, but present trends suggest that will change, and much sooner than we all think.

Anyway, enough blah, here's the podcast. Some of the sound is a bit ropey, due to me having to create voiceover narration without having a decent microphone to hand, but you'll get the basic idea...

They Won't Want us To Ask 'Em. They'll Just Want Us To Get It For 'Em...

Here's a short video done for the Soil Association for their annual Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture.

The original brief was just to film the whole lecture - about 'Peak Oil', given by academic Richard Heinberg, but I managed to persuade them otherwise, mostly on the grounds that nobody would be willing to sit through watching a film of the speaker on a podium for over an hour.

So we made a small talking heads intro to their audio podcast instead:

Let the Train Take the Strain...

My friend and colleague Stuart Freedman will be giving a talk on his digital workflow using the Digital Railroad (DRR) platform, at the London Apple Store this evening at 6.00pm.

I'm a Photoshelter boy myself...both platforms have been shaping up to provide sales portals as well as providing off-site backup and workflow tools for photographers, with the DRR Marketplace portal and the recently launched Photoshelter Collection.

I've used both platforms, and have found Photoshelter to be a better option for me, but both are positive steps for photographers, and prove there can be viable ways of leveraging photographs on the Web, without simply seeing or presenting them as commoditised 'content'.

Pandora's Red Box...

Canon and Nikon recently released their new pro-level cameras, amid much fanfare and collective drooling from photographers. But a couple of days ago, two other new cameras were released which arguably, might already render both those digital housebricks obsolete.

I've mentioned the Red video camera on occasions before - the first 25 Red-cams rolled off the production line on August 31st, 2007. Their 'Mysterium' imaging chips produce ultra-Hi-Def 4K video, which is capable of producing a 48MB screengrab...a 300 dpi 13 x 7 inch print.

Screengrabs from the first cameras sold, show images produced at the cameras default 320 ISO, up to a whopping 6000 ISO.

This is more than acceptable for newspaper or magazine use (assuming both newspapers and magazines exist long enough), and of course the video footage can be re-purposed for multiple outputs across several media, from the cinema screen (the footage is superior to 35mm cinema film), through to HDTV, IPTV, the Web and down to mobile phones.

In versatility and cost effectiveness terms, the Red-cam arguably leaves 35mm stills cameras high and dry.

The current Red-cam records video to a hard drive and Compact Flash, and the next Red-cam will apparently, be a 'pocket' camera...so its an avowedly disruptive machine, one which appears to leave most conventional Hi-Def video cams for dust and can easily give most SLR's a run for their money...but also fundamentally questions the need for people to 'snatch' moments from thin air anymore.

Wait...it gets even more disruptive - the Red camera costs a heavy chunk o' change, so its implementation will be slow (ish).

But step forward Casio, who released their new stills camera on the same date as the Red. It shoots a burst of 6 megapixel Jpegs at 60 frames a second, with a pre-burst mode that even records images BEFORE you've even pressed the shutter, and a high speed video mode of 300 frames per second.

The 'decisive moment' was always simply making a virtue out of a technological necessity, but in the process became an article of faith for some photographers.

The question is now that technological 'limitation' has been 'overcome'...what happens now?

The implications for photojournalism are profound...but perhaps no more profound than when a roll of 36 images replaced the single 5x4 sheet film previously used by press photographers.

Was that a retrograde step?

Obviously not.

Lightroom 4 Now Available.

The new Adobe Lightroom Beta 4 is now available for download in both Mac and Windows versions.

I've been using Lightroom across its range of beta versions, and version 4 has undergone what looks like a significant overhaul - it now has a huge range of workflow options for time-pressured digital photojournalists, from initial image capture, through to print and web gallery output.

Asbestos Pants...

If you think crunching through digital image files is heavy lifting for your computer, you should try video.

I've been rendering and editing a small video using Final Cut Pro on my 12" Mac laptop and it gets scorching hot from the processor going into hyperspace to process the DV files.

Rendering a 22 minute video file took 19 hours...which can't be right. I thought the thing was gonna melt its way down to the Earths core...

There is a recognised medical condition caused by excessive laptop use. Its called (embarrassed cough), 'hot leg'...and I accept no responsibilty for the Google ads which will come up after logging that phrase on this blog.

I've experimented with some Google ads (which have been mostly bizarre and made me zilch, in case you're wondering). They work by scanning words on the blog page and putting in 'appropriate' ads automatically...which is why the page was full of ads for Las Vegas weddings a coupla days ago.

I have absolutely no idea why...

Rocket Science...

After reading an article a while back, on the Apple Computer website about New York Times contract photographer Vincent Laforet's Winter Olympics workflow using Apples Automator and Aperture applications, I thought it would come in handy for quick turnover/high volume jobs, so pottered around for a while trying to replicate it, but never really got things to work.

Now thankfully Vincent has outlined his workflow techniques in much greater detail in an article on the Sports Shooter website, and his own site.

Though to be honest, I'm still finding it a bit mindboggling...

There are also rumours abroad suggesting Aperture might be discontinued as a product after the app's development staff were reassigned to other work...so maybe Aperture might become a bit of a curiosity in future, which is a shame (if true), because despite a shaky start, it did contain some revolutionary new ideas for processing and handling digital images.