SnapperTalk

If you liked the sound-and-still-images presentations on the Magnum in Motion website, you might be interested in Soundslides - an impressive application for Mac OSX that enables users to easily create this type of multimedia presentation. Combining your still images with an audio track, titling and automatic caption info extraction, it exports it all as a Macromedia Flash piece ready for upload to any webserver. There are some sample slideshows to look at on their FAQ page

The software is created by Joe Weiss - interactive producer at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina - and there is a short review of Soundslides here. Joe also keeps track of some of some the best multimedia work that’s being produced on the net in his blog

This article at LetsGoDigital citing a story in the latest issue of Leica Fotografie International (LFI), reckons that Leica is working on a digital rangefinder camera. Photographers have been waiting for such a camera for years… the closest attempts being the Epson R-D1 which from user reports didn’t quite live up to expectations.
It would be great to see such a concept properly enacted, but prior experience from Leica hasn’t exactly been great when it comes to digital cameras and I suspect it will be a long time indeed until we actually see such a camera. The site posts basic non-official specs for the camera which they say may be ready by 2007:

- 10+ Megapixels
- 1.33x multiplier
- Secure Digital card slot
- Kodak image sensor
- RAW + JPEG format
- 2.5-inch display
- Lithium Ion battery

Note: The images above are from the LFI article, but it is unknown if these are just computer-generated mock-ups, or photos of an actual prototype Leica M7 Digital - as written on the body.

It’s that time of year again, with various publications starting to post their selection of the best pictures from 2005. I’ll update this as new ones are published, so feel free to leave a comment with any you might come across that I’ve missed:

MSNBC - The Year in Pictures 2005 (both Editors’ and readers’ choices)
Time Magazine - The Best Photos of the Year 2005
Reuters - Pictures of the Year 2005
Yahoo - 2005 Year in Review
Washington Post - Best of the Post 2005
New York Times - 2005 The Year in Pictures
Panos Pictures - The Best Pictures of 2005

NewsCom has posted galleries of selected year-end photos from each of the following agencies: AFP, EFE, EPA, GDA, Getty, Icon Sports, KRT, MaxPPP, Reuters, Sardine, SIPA Press, Wenn, UPI and Zuma on their site. You have to enter a login/password but a demo one is printed on the login page.

Here’s a strange one… Camera Toss (The Blog) details “a form of extreme kinetic photography” known as camera tossing, which basically equates to thowing your camera in the air and taking pictures whilst it is airborne. Judging by the number of contributions to the site, and on Flickr’s Camera Toss Group it seems there’s a fair few people practising this don’t-try-it-with-your-new-shiny-dslr pastime. For those who do want to give it a go, there’s advice here

Merry Christmas to you all, and especially those having to work over the holidays.
Hope you have a good one and 2006 treats you well.
Best wishes… Ben

A new competition has been launched for UK-orientated press photographers called “The Press Photographer’s Year“. Sponsored by Canon and in association with the British Press Photographers’ Association, the new competition will end up being published into a book and accompanying exhibition. “Entries are welcomed from professional photographers based anywhere in the world and of any nationality, however the entrant must either be working predominately for the British news media, or are submitting work destined for foreign news media but featuring the UK.”

American Journalism Review has a good & lengthy article about the dangers facing journalists working in Iraq - both on the threats posed by U.S. forces themselves - as well as the dangers from insurgents, kidnapping gangs and the general security situation.

My predecessor at AP in the Middle East, John Moore, who is now with Getty Images, has a nice article in December’s Digital Journalist about his experiences photographing “The Widows of Dujail” - the women left behind after Saddam Hussein’s forces allegedly rounded up their fathers, husbands and sons in retaliation for a 1982 assassination attempt against him. With the Saddam Hussein trial starting to gear up - some of which I recently photographed - it’s a timely piece and some nice photography.
Also in the issue is a feature piece by Philip Robertson based on the new book “Unembedded” about working as a journalist in Iraq, and one by Ron Steinman on Paul Fusco’s photographs of funerals of American soldiers who died in Iraq, which was written about in a previous post on this site.

Veteran Photoshop plug-in creator Fred Miranda has a very clever plug-in called DRI Pro. The idea behind bears its origins in the old split-grade black & white printing where you would expose an image on multi-grade paper partially at high contrast and partially at low-contrast, thus increasing the dynamic range of the resulting image. This plug-in claims to bring that functionality to digital images and will appeal to imaging perfectionists and those needing to handle high-contrast and/or badly exposed scenes.

To start you would need two identical images - one exposed for shadow detail and another for highlight detail. If the camera was on a tripod one could theoretically shoot two separate frames and start from there. Or you could take an original jpeg and save it as two TIFFs each with different tonal adjustments made to capture the shadow and highlight detail. But where this plug-in would really find its raison d’être is with RAW images. RAW images capture a much higher dynamic range than a jpeg and so you would process the same RAW file twice - firstly adjusted to capture the upper levels/highlights, and another time to capture the lower levels/shadows. Once you save these two resulting images and feed them through the plug-in, it would blend the two to create a single image that captures both the shadow and highlight details.

I haven’t actually tried the plug-in, which can be ordered from the site for $19.90, so if anyone has please let me know how well it works. There are manual ways to achieve similar blending results described in this tutorial at Luminous Landscape and this one at Samy’s Camera.

Skype has launched a Beta version 2.0 of its popular voice-over-IP (VOIP) application. New features include video-calling if you have a webcam, real-time contact search, the long overdue ability to put contacts into groups, and various others. There’s a good review of the new version on the VOIP & Gadgets Blog