Dan Winters’ unique ability to sculpt with light has long been a personal inspiration of mine. Now more than ever his work is everywhere. He’s won more awards and contributes to more magazines than I can list. When I was in an airport a few weeks ago I glanced across a wide walkway full of people and caught a glimpse of this Time magazine cover of Tom Hanks on a newsstand. In that split second from some 80 feet away I just new it was Dan’s image. His lighting is so dramatic, so distinct (yet never the same) I just knew it was his.

Austin American-Statesman photographer Jay Janner recently made this portrait of Dan in his Driftwood, TX studio – the first of it’s kind in front of Dan’s handcrafted photo booth in his Driftwood, Texas studio.

FLYP magazine published a great article on his work and career. Highly recommended viewing. Included in the article are two videos where he talks about his devotion to photography and what makes a great portrait.

If you haven’t already I’d encourage you to spend some time at Dan’s website. Better yet, order his book Periodical Photographs from Aperture.

I’ve always been a fan of high-end displays like those from Eizo, Barco, Quato, NEC and the like. At the same time I recognize that these pinnacles of technology are hard for most people to justify. I love discovering displays that are affordable yet meet the demands of the most finicky printmakers. Simply put, some ~$800 displays hold up darn well against $2000+ displays when they are well calibrated and it’s this “best value, high quality” category that I get excited about and often recommend to my clients.

All of these displays use an LED backlit lightsource, IPS LCD panels and eco-conscious materials. These first two technologies are crucial for demanding professionals. The LED lightsource provides consistency across the screen, a boost in color gamut, power savings, lower heat generation and can achieve the lower luminance (brightness) levels that print professionals need. The IPS LCD panel provides a wide viewing angle so that the viewer doesn’t experience the density shifting that’s become so common with laptop and most LCD displays today that use the less expensive TN LCD panel technology. A lot of companies (more…)

LR3beta2 is out! Here are some noteworthy points:

• • Speed is greatly improved.
• • Importing has been improved and refined.
• • Tethering for popular Nikon and Canon cameras is now supported.
• • Watermarking is improved (although still not ideal).
• • Luminance Noise Reduction has been added to complement the new demosaicing and color noise algorithms.
• • New Vignette styles.
• • Adjustment Brush and Gradient tools can now be stacked to strengthen the effect.
• • New Print Layout capabilities with Rotate to fit and Rotate Cell options.
• • Video files can now be imported from DSLRs along with still images.
• • The X key conveniently toggles the orientation in the crop tool.
• • Perspective Control and Soft Proofing are not in this beta (but are in development for future release).
• • While LR3beta1 catalogs can be updated for use in LR3beta2, LR2 catalogs still cannot be. This is after all, a beta release that is not intended, nor recommended for production work.

Commentary
The biggest thing for my own workflow is the speed and overall responsiveness of this release, which is better than any 1.x or 2.x  release. When I upgraded to the 21mp Canon 5Dmark2 I’ve been frustrated with the responsiveness of Lightroom ever since – until now. It’s pretty hard to go back to 2.6 for production work. On high resolution 20+ megapixel files, LR3beta2 is far, far faster – sometimes more than 20 times faster when lots of localized adjustments are used. (more…)

Today is our beloved image editing application’s 20th birthday. Many of us have spent more time with this little app than we have with our own kids. As much as I have loved using Photoshop over the last 20+ years, I look forward to the day that I can retire it. I say this not because I’m tired of Photoshop, but because I’m excited about the future.

Parametric workflows, like those available through Adobe Lightroom, Express Digital Darkroom and Apple Aperture are clearly the way of the future and offer huge productivity advantages over one-image-at-a-time, pixel editing workflows like Photoshop’s. While photographers switch to parametric applications, Photoshop will continue to be an excellent application for non-photographers like designers, architects, 3D professionals, etc.

Happy birthday Photoshop, you have been great. Let’s take a fun ride down memory lane. But let’s not reminisce and look to the past for too long. Let’s stay focused on the future, which for most photographers, lies elsewhere. The future is great – and it’s all parametric.

You know night photography has become mainstream when Apple uses a night image for the default background image on their newest device. Note the star trails near the top! I would guess this is a ~25 minute exposure not too long after sunset considering the daylight glow along the horizon and gentle lighting on the foreground. If anyone knows who’s image is used on the iPad, please let me know.

Update: The iPad background image is licensed from RIchard Misrach. (via Mark Menjivar)

Update: See this in-depth article about the image and Misrach at ARTINFO

My good friend and mentor Dan Burkholder is boldly blazing a new path in a way that only he can. Dan is shooting exclusively with an iPhone and is making and exhibiting some serious fine art prints from it. Don’t laugh – Dan’s not just snapping low resolution images and applying filters to them, he’s capturing sometimes dozens of frames, stitching them together and using half a dozen applications to develop the images to his liking. His final results are fairly high resolution files that make for nice prints. His images are made and developed completely on the iPhone.

In his own words these images are "Untouched by Mac hardware or Adobe software. It’s liberating in so many ways. For the first time we have both camera and darkroom in the palm of our hands." Dan has, at the moment, four "iPhone Artistry" workshops planned around the country that focus exclusively on iPhone based image capture and development. Visit iphoneartistry.com to see more images.

Dan is also credited for inventing the digital negative for contact printing process, pigment over platinum and pigment over gold leaf printmaking.

I’m pretty impressed with LR3′s new demosiacing, sharpening and noise reduction in LR3′s new process rendering. To the right is an image taken at this month’s workshop in Mono Lake (larger view). This is a 15 second “star points” exposure taken at 1600 ISO with a 5Dmk2.  Below is a side-by-side detail comparison, processed in LR2.5 on the left and LR3b on the right. Click the image below to view at it’s full resolution.

Tom Hogarty, Lightroom’s Product Manager, has lots to say about this beta in his blog. In it he says:

“We’re only halfway through our noise reduction efforts but believe that you will be very pleased with the results so far. We’ve actually disabled the previous Luminance Noise Reduction so that you can focus on evaluating the Color Noise reduction implementation.”

I’m finding a few reasons to actually increase luminance noise reduction on high res long exposures in low light, so I’m yearning to see these sharpening tool evolve a little further from where they are in this beta. But I’m impressed with the results so far.

Tom also points out that images previously developed in previous versions of Lightroom will initially appear the same in LR3 with a warning triangle that appears above the upper left hand corner of the Histogram. If this triangle is pressed, the image will be re-rendered using LR3′s new processing, including the new demoasiacing, sharpening and noise reduction algorithms. The screen grabs above were taken before and after clicking this triangle using LR’s detail panel defaults. It appears that LR3′s new process quality improvements are best seen on high ISO images, especially those from 20+ megapixel cameras files.

Having used several cameras for a lot of long exposure night photography lately, I think the Canon 5Dmark2 is quite likely the best camera on the market for long exposure night photography right now. Here are some of the highlights:

6400 ISO for testing
Being able to take photos at 6400 ISO has huge benefits for the night photographer. Night photographers tend to waste a bunch of time taking long exposures only to discover they need to reshoot with a better exposure. Testing exposures at high ISOs can save huge amounts of time but doing so has been clunky as it requires complicated math when using a camera that has a ISO ceiling of 1600. Now that that ceiling has been lifted to include 6400 ISO we can make a direct translation from ISO 6400 exposures in seconds to ISO 100 exposures in minutes. For example, a 15 second exposure at ISO 6400 is the same as a 15 minute exposure at ISO 100 (Canon’s native ISO). Nikon users can figure that a 15 second exposure at 12,800 ISO is the same as a 15 minute exposure at ISO 200 (Nikon’s native ISO).

Either way, this means a night photographer can quickly determine the optimal exposure at a high ISO before committing to a long, final exposure at the native ISO. This has provided me with significant time savings and more optimal exposures on the 5Dmark2.

Low noise
To make a long story short, the noise levels are shockingly low, even during very long exposures (like 30+ minutes at ISO 100). Even 6400 ISO images are less noisy than one would expect, (more…)