22 Incredible Photos of Faraway Places

Thailand

Chances are you already know Steve McCurry as the man who took one of the most iconic photos of our time. It was of a 12-year-oldAfghan refugee girl who’s piercing green eyes told us her harrowing story. The image itself was named as “the most recognized photograph” in the history of the National Geographic magazine and her face became famous as the cover photograph on their June 1985 issue.

Beyond just that one photo, McCurry has shot over a million images spanning 35 years. More than anything, he is one of a few that has that amazing ability to capture stories of our shared human experience. As he says “Most of my images are grounded in people. I look for the unguarded moment, the essential soul peeking out, experience etched on a person’s face. I try to convey what it is like to be that person, a person caught in a broader landscape that you could call the human condition.”

Looking through his large body of work, we get to experience fantastic faraway places we can only dream about visiting. It’s in his incredible photos that we feel connected to the world at large, appreciating our similarities and our differences, our cultures and our histories, and our past and our present in a truly unique and everlasting way.

Afghanistan

Yemen

Tibet

Cambodia

India

Burma

Eastman Kodak let McCurry shoot the last ever produced roll of Kodachrome transparency film. The film, known for its rich saturation and archival durability of its slides, was discontinued last year. The roll will be the subject of an upcoming documentary by National Geographic. Can’t wait to see it.

Steve McCurry

(from mymodernmet)

Monster Waves… Tricky Lighting… Astounding risk… Timeless Photographs

“The Shorebreak Art of Clark Little” is nothing short of epic. Getting inside, over and under 30-40 foot waves is no small feat, especially with bulky camera equipment, and a goal of finding that perfect angle and lighting condition that makes a perfect shot.

(all images copyright Clark Little, used with permission)

Clark Little is pretty well known today as the foremost shorebreak art photographer (his art has been seen on “Good Morning America”, and featured in a number of glossy magazines all over the world). But as much as we like the fantastic shots of various wave’ innards, we are even more impressed to see him pitched against dangerous, massive amounts of water – violent waves, where you only have a moment to make that shot and to get out of the harm’s way.

With exclusive permission of Clark Little Photography we publish today the rarely-seen photographs of Clark Little heading with his camera into…

Into the Vortex!

(Clark with his camera “inside” and “under” the waves)

Encounter with a Wave (almost alien-like in intensity, if you ask me):

The Result: Out of This World

A glorious, almost Mandelbrot-like complexity is simply striking in this “Glitter” photograph (our favorite):

Unusual, over-saturated colors show up inside crystal clear waves, reflecting kaleidoscopic world around them:

There is also a place for pure abstraction, even psychedelic touches:

This image is titled “The Twelve Disciples” – see if you can spot some faces inside that wave, too:

Here is perhaps his most famous image: the wave’s “mohawk”, an amazingly colorful splash, featured recently inside National Geographicmagazine:

Another singular splash:

Inside the belly of the beast: “The Twister” photograph shows what a violent wave is made of -

Even in the absence of killer monster waves, the shorebreak art can look slightly alien… Here is the little “Frosty” guy:

(all images copyright Clark Little)

The Book! The Ultimate Spectacular Photo Book!

Can’t get the computer screen wide enough and HD TV capable enough to give justice to Clark Little’s slices of glorious wave eye-candy? Well, now you can order his book, a coffee table-sized huge book, in fact arguably a “mother of all coffee table books”: 182 pages, over 100 photographs, 12×12 size, weighing close to 7 pounds.

Make sure you own a coffee table big enough to do this book justice (you might have to move your coffee cup closer to the edge, but then you might be already seating at the edge of your seat – with excitement over Clark Little’s fantastic images).

(Clark Little with Jack Johnson (musician) and Kelly Slater (9-time Surfing World Champion) at book signing)

Some of Clark’s newest images can be seen here… don’t forget to look for his book in your bookstore, or order it online.

(from dark roasted blend)

Microsoft Rolls Out Impressive Enhancements To Windows Live Essentials Suite

How the next DSLR should be

As you know I love photography and I have a nikon d300 with a nikkor 18-200 and a sigma 10-20.

This are my thoughs on how I would like this sort of cameras to evolve in the next years:

1. Pixel-wise they are OK already. Around 12 to 20 Mpx is more than OK.
2. I would rather improve the sensor to be able to shoot at nights. I hate flash and noise. Nikon D3s in in these lines. My future camera should be great shooting with low light and have nearly zero grain (noise).
3. They should geotag photos. These cameras should come by default with a GPS. Now you can buy an external one (see my latest post), but ideally it should be integrated.
4. I shouldn’t bother to connect the camera to a PC. I should be able to get home, and via my home wifi (or you could configure this) the camera should be able to upload the photos to your media centre, to your flickr, smugmug, picasa or whatever service you use for online backup. Now you have eyefi doing something similar, but it should be out of the box with the camera, being able to configure it: local pc, HD, online service… or if you are traveling and find a hotspot, then be able from the camera menu to upload them somewhere.
5. HD video, sure.

Most of this things can already be done with your phone. Phones are getting beter and better on photos and video, with 8Mpx and HD video… so DSLRs should not be less. They will always be beter optic-wise and sensor-wise.

PhotoTrackr Plus brings geotagging to Nikon DSLRs, leaves your hotshoe open

Oh sure, Nikon’s got its own solution for adding native geotagging to your existing DSLR, but the GP-1 dongle definitely has its drawbacks. Aside from sucking down around 4x more power than Gisteq’s new PhotoTrackr Plus, it also eliminates the ability to use a dedicated flash in the hotshoe while capturing GPS data. Moreover, it has to warm up every time you turn the camera on / off, and there’s just 18 tracking channels compared to the Gisteq’s 44. Regardless of the back and forth, we do appreciate the PhotoTrackr Plus’ ability to plug directly into the 10-pin terminal that few amateurs even think to recognize, though we do fear that the reliance on Bluetooth could cause issues if you stray too far from the transceiver. Still, this newfangled dongle is far superior to its past iterations, both of which simply logged data as you went and then added metadata after you synced the information with your images via PC; this dongle, however, embeds the data right away into every image. Better still, there’s even a price advantage to going third party — Nikon’s aging GP-1 is pushing $200 on many webstores, while the Gisteq apparatus can be procured right now for $179. Take your pic, as they say.

PhotoTrackr Plus Exclusively for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

New geotagging solution sure to save time and make shooting much more enjoyable for Nikon DSLR owners.

Brea, CA (PRWEB) May 28, 2010 — The world of photography has changed drastically since it began, and now that anyone who has a digital camera can attempt to go professional, there is more and more cause for serious photographers to look at tools like the PhotoTrackr Plus, found online at: http://www.gisteq.com/plus

PhotoTrackr Plus for Nikon
When you talk to professional photographers, or even serious amateurs, about camera companies you’re basically talking about either Nikon or Canon. These are the top two digital SLR camera manufacturers out there today. The GiSTEQ company has now created a unique geotagging solution specifically for one of the top brands of cameras, the Nikon. This geotagging device is designed to make tagging photos that are taken on a Nikon DSLR easier, and much more enjoyable, for any camera lover.

Digital SLR cameras are much more affordable now than they have ever been before, and some professionals in the photography business estimate that within the next ten years a vast majority of camera owners will have their own DSLR, if they don’t already. That is one reason why some believe that more GPS trackers and other gadgets are flooding the market now. But while some gadgets are simply silly, others, such as the PhotoTrackr Plus for Nikon, can actually help photographers to become better.

“It’s great that anyone who wants to experience the wonder of photography can do so, but even a consummate professional can forget where they took a specific picture, and no one wants to waste time marking where they took every photo. This device makes it quick and simple for anyone who has the right DSLR cameras to be able to geotag their photos,” said Eric Liu, the President of GiSTEQ Corp.

The PhotoTrackr Plus has a number of features attached to it that both professionals and amateurs will love, and one of the most important is that it can geocode pictures taken in RAW format. Many photographers opt to shoot in RAW so that they can easily fix any exposure mistakes that are made. The PhotoTrackr Plus allows you to geotag photos in both RAW and JPEG format. The GPS data is imported directly into your photo as you take it, so no extra steps are necessary, which speeds up the processing workflow, and there is no extra software needed to run the program, simply plug and play.

One truly unique aspect of the PhotoTrackr Plus is that it is capable of geotagging photos with the last known location, so that if you’re unable to access a satellite signal, the device will save the information until you are in sight of a satellite. Compatible cameras include the Nikon D200, D300, D300s, D700, D2X, D2Xs, D2Hs, D3, D3X, and Fujifilm S5Pro.

For more information, visit the GiSTEQ site at: http://www.gisteq.com/plus

(from engadget)

Back up your photos in the cloud: Flickr or Picasaweb?

Photography is one of my passions. I have http://norai.net with some nice photos that I don’t actually update very often just because it requires and effort of, opening Lightroom in my mac, connect to the photo folder in my media centre, edit those that I think can go to the web, export them to 800px upload them… bla bla…

It is a petty because I have tons of photos. It is a petty also that those that I have in norai I have not a full size copy of them as I just did it for the web…

I have a very peculiar workflow for photos. My media server with 2x2Tb HDs has about 150Gb of Jpegs and 150Gb of Raws.

When I take a photo with my nikon d300 I take it in Raw (only for the past couple of years), then I save it in a Photos Raw folder with the date-event folder. Then I process them with DxO which generates a Jpeg with the corrected noise, lens distortion and so. I move the jpgs to a folder named the same in a Photos folder.

Picasa is the program I use in the media centre to  see the photos.

On the other hand, the photos I take with my iPhone are in my Mac using iPhoto. I don’t know why… but I take a lot of photos with the iPhone.

Up to now I used to upload the Jpgs to my servers downstairs where I have Gallery2 from menalto. It is good, but videos are not great and again it is here and I am trying to move away from depending on my server.

Now I was considering to have an offsite copy of all my photos. I could go for something like backblaze (or mozy, though I prefere the first), pay $5 per month and forget, or go for an online cloud gallery. This backup solutions are good. Backblaze lets you back up usb drives connected to a machine, even if they are not always connected. I have the Media server with 2Tb and then it has 1Tb USB drive and a 500Mb one… so it would be a good option… but the stuff I really need is in my mac (320Gb) which backs up to a TimeMachine in the Linux Server….

The two major players are Flickr and Picasaweb. Sure you have Smugmug which is the one that looks the best and others such as expono, snapixel.

For me the ideal would be picasaweb basically because I don’t care about the community (where flickr is strong) and it is just a switch in picasa to have everything sync with the web. If I work on the face tags or locations, everything is happily synchronised. In addition to this I like the fact that I can keep my folder structure in the media server and picasa will just be a layer to display it and synchronise it with the web.

So what is wrong?

Google sells space. Basically 20Gb for $5 per year or 200Gb for $50. I have 150Gb of Jpgs. Unfortunately there is NO SERVICE that would allow me to upload my NEF (raw files) and they will create the Jpgs or something.

This is expensive. I would have to go for 200Gb so $50 per year.

Another problem is that there is no good iphone app to upload from the iPhone your photos and videos to picasaweb (hello!!).

Then we have Flickr. Flickr is cheap. $25 per year for unlimited space. If I just want a backup then why not go for flickr?

I don’t like it. I know the community is the best one, so if you want to promote your photos then it is far better. If you want to make profit by selling them then smugmug pro is the winner ($150 year).

Flickr has not desktop app. They don’t respect my folder structure. If I choose flickr and I have 150Gb to upload, I would love to keep my folder structure in sets (this is what flickr considers folders) but the flickr uploadr doesn’t allow that. So I would end up with 50.000 photos in a bucket and then do the job online to classify them on sets, collections do the map thing (which sucks compared to google map) and faces… (again!!).

So here I am. On one side the winner is google, but I think they are expensive and I don’t know how fast my storage demands will grow, but for me today is twice the price of flickr.

On the other side, everybody use flickr. I guess you get use to it, but the sycn and the process of uploading the photos… for that I continue with gallery2 in my servers, I copy everything to an external HD, I plug it in my mums and I rsync it once in a while. But then what do I do with the videos I take with the phone? Put them all in youtube?

Maybe…

Anybody went to this hard choice?

walking men

Walking Men 99™ is a site-specific Public Art Installation, surrounding the site of the upcoming Four Seasons Hotel in NYC’s Downtown area, a photographic collage of 99 pedestrian traffic-light icons collected from around the world. The installation will remain on display for one year, starting January 16th, 2010 through January 15th, 2011.

Flickr and Google Map: Great Mashup

You take the best photos of flickr and you put them in a mashup in Google maps, and this is the result:

http://www.earthalbum.com

Sigma 10-20 for Nikon

This is a sample:

Sigma 10-20 for Nikon

I got my new lens for the Nikon d300, the Sigma 10-20!
I’m so looking forward for the weekend!

Sell your photos online

Sell Your Photos!
Fotomoto enables photographers to sell photos on their own website without sending their customers elsewhere.

::norai.net is gone for photos only

During this weekend I have been working on both sites, tokao.com and norai.net. I decided to focus ::norai.net on what is best: photography. 

::norai.net has been up since 2000. The actual domain was bought in early 2002. It has always been a mambo/joomla CMS and a lot of energy went into it at the beginning but lately little updates. I even closed the community, forums and registration. It was packed with tools, experiments that nobody was using, so I decided to concentrate on photography only. Say bye to the old ::norai.net and say hello to the new one.