Category: Photography

I love photography. For me, it’s like painting, but better. And more accurate. And unlike painting, I can actually participate. I am not a big success or great master by any means. But I enjoy taking pictures. I also enjoy looking at other people work and sometimes sharing it. When I do, this is the category that I use.

Snowflakes, close-up

A few years ago I posted the link to SnowCrystals.com, which had a whole lot of photographs of snowflakes.  It’s time to have a fresher look at the beauty of those ice crystals up-close.  Via kottke.org, I came across this Flickr collection of close-up images of snowflakes done by photographer Alexey Kljatov.

snowflakes

Some are extremely simplistic in structure.  The others are the opposite – incredibly complicated.  Some are by alone, all by themselves.  Yet others are in groups.  But all of them amazingly unique and beautiful.  And available in larger image sizes too.

Realistically colorized historical photographs

Weekly digest email from StumbleUpon frequently has some good stuff.  In this week’s edition, there was a link to 36 realistically colorized historical photos, which does have quite a few images worth your time.  My best three picks would be these:

Abraham Lincoln

 

Abraham Lincoln’s portrait from 1865 – colorized version does make it seem like a much more recent photograph.  The black and white one is cool too, but I don’t find it as engaging as the colored one.  It’s hard to believe that it was taken almost 150 years ago.

Japanese archers

 

A photograph of Japanese archers from 1860, which coincidentally shows one of the techniques for holding multiple arrows at once, that was mentioned in the recent video I’ve shared.

And also this photograph from Washington D.C. in 1921, which is just cool and looks like a frame from a gangster movie.

Washington DC

 

Have a look at the rest of them – there are some really good ones.

 

Clashot.com : make money taking photos with your phone

Clashot.com : make money taking photos with your phone

This sounds much like Instagram with some elements of commerce.  I haven’t tried out myself yet, but I’ve read a couple of reviews.  Interesting tidbits are: no filters included, and that you can group several photos together.

How much dirty lens affects image quality

The photographer Kurt Munger ran an experiment on how much dust, scratches and damages of the lens affect image quality.  The results are very counterintuitive.  At least for me.  Fingerprints, dust, scratches, and even bits of non-transparent duct tape have no effect what-so-ever.  The first signs of something going wrong appear with very serious lens damage, like this:

broken lens

Even then, the image is not as bad as you’d expect.  Here it is.

SONY DSC

Read the whole thing for more details.