Boston.com’s Big Picture blog runs a collection of more than 40 amazing photographs from Vancouver Olympics. Hard work, dedication, pain, and pride – both from the sportsmen and photographers. Stunning!
Updated: There is a second post with even more stunning images.
What the duck comics has a well-timed, Ebay-involving solution to the problem that some of us have.
Here is some amazing photography for the day – Sichuan, China. Please do click to see the large version. And I’ll even save you a few clicks to read more about Sichuan in Wikipedia.
Microscope : Carrot Seeds
Wired Science runs a post linking to tonnes of fascinating photographs done through a microscope lens. Little things cropped and magnified look like matters from the other planets. And only the best of the best of the best are selected…
Most of the people who have digital cameras these days don’t know what Adobe Photoshop is, let alone how to use it. And I think, given the complexity of any semi-decent image editor, most of the people would rather quit taking pictures than go through all the trouble of learning how to use such an editor.
But everyone I know wants their pictures to look cool. So, what are they to do? Well, there are plenty of sites on the web that can help you resize and colour correct your pictures, add borders to them and such. But finding those that work for you is a bit of an issue.
Today I got an email about one site that I tried and ended up playing with for a couple of hours – Rollip. This one helps you to convert your picture into a Polaroid shot. There are quite a few options that you can choose, but everything is quite easy and straight-forward. Here is, for example, what I did with my own picture in less than a minute.
You can try it yourself. Play with different borders, fonts for the caption, special effects like coffee mug stains and soft focus. All you do is choose, click, upload, and save the result or share it on the web. Pretty cool!
Pretty soon you’d want a batch processing option, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to find. But imaging how cool it would be to upload not a single picture but rather a photo album. And in the perfect world, I wouldn’t even need to upload, but instead point to a photo set at my Flickr stream. That would have been totally awesome. Hopefully, the guys at Rollip will develop such functionality later on.
Oh, and by the way, if you want to see more examples, there is a Flickr group where people share their images processed with Rollip. There are some pretty cool ones.
China is celebrating 60 years of communist rule. Of course, they’ve organized a huge parade with all their military forces, fireworks, and so on. Boston.com’s The Big Picture blog features quite a few impressive pictures. This reminds me so much of my childhood during the USSR era…
Here is a gallery of kisses for you. You’d be amazed at what and when people kiss.
There are also a few kisses featured in my Flickr photostream.
Google Blogoscoped asks the question:
If your country’s police were to drive around town with cam-equipped cars, automatically taking photos of all public spaces, would you mind? If so, why? If not, why not?
I guess that has something to do with their earlier posts on issues related to Google Street View (one, two, three, four, etc).
I think that public places should be open for non-commercial photography, whether that is by police, mass media, amateur photographers, aliens, terrorists, or anyone else.
When I was in London earlier this year, I was at first shocked by the number of CCTV cameras. It seems like every square meter is covered from several cameras at once. And it wasn’t very welcoming. However, less than a day later I simply got used to them. I couldn’t even see them no more. That hopefully illustrates the extent to which I don’t care.
What about you?
I finally saved enough courage to order some more stuff for my photo toolbox. It’s been a really long while (more than a couple of years) that I wanted to get a new lense, which would have a wider angle view than anything that already have, and a proper flash unit. And here I am, a proud owner of Canon 17-40mm f/4.0L USM lense and a Canon 430 EX II Speedlight flash, plus a bunch of new batteries, filters, hoods, and such.
As with any other new gadgets, there is a lot to read, learn, and try. But I am already happy with how it fits and how it works. Above you can see a self-portrait, practically the second image I took in almost fully automatic mode. Georgeous! This picture has all chances of becoming my new avatar or something. And, of course, a few more images were uploaded to my Flickr photostream. More to come.
