Articles about Photography

Using a Linux distribution as your desktop operating system can be hit or miss. Depending on your needs, it may work brilliantly or horribly. You see, most mainstream apps are not available, so you must depend on alternative software. For instance, for some users, GIMP is a passable replacement for photoshop and Libreoffice for Microsoft Office.

When it comes to photo management, there is really only one great Linux app -- Shotwell, by a company called Yorba. If you do amateur or professional photography and you want to organize your photos, there really isn't a better piece of software on Linux. Sure, there are alternatives such as F-Spot, but Shotwell is the definitive app. Sadly, it hasn't been getting the attention it needs lately, which was worrying to some users (myself included). As a result, Yorba has handed over development and the recipient is rather surprising -- the Elemenatary OS team.

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Better last than never. Colleagues Ian Barker, Alan Buckingham, Brian Fagioli, Mihaita Bamburic, Wayne Williams, and Mark Wilson have all picked their favorite tech for the year. I join them. Only things I actually have used qualify for consideration.

My list focuses on one aspect: Value. Which products I see delivering the most value for money spent. Surely your value choices will differ. You can spend 25 cents and get loads of value from something or $2,500 and little at all. With that short introduction, I present my five favorite tech products of 2013 (and one from 2005, newly discovered).

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Throughout the year, I work pretty darn hard -- I wear multiple hats. Because of this, I decided to spend the holidays in sunny Florida as a working vacation. Sadly, the airfare was a bit too expensive, so I decided to drive there from New York.

Unfortunately, the place at which I am staying does not have WiFi or Television -- a nerd's worst nightmare. As a tech-writer, I was going to have to think smart about which devices I would bring and which would stay home. You may be surprised by my choices.

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Bing is a decent search engine, and the daily images that adorn its homepage are always worth a look. Late last week the Bing team announced the ten most popular homepage images for 2013, which includes an aerial view of Gardens by the Bay and the Super Trees in Singapore City, a night shot of Mount Shasta in California, a mangrove seen from underwater in the Seychelles, and Lulworth Cove along the Jurassic Coast, in England. As well as showing off the pictures, the Bing team provides a link so you can download them for use as desktop wallpaper.

If you’d prefer to have the images cycling in a screensaver, the Bing team has now made that possible too, in the form of a new 13MB "Wallpaper & Screensaver" Pack.

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With an early start into the digital technologies, Kodak was able to create industry leading technologies and digital cameras ahead of its competition. It took another ten years before the digital cameras became the largest segment of the camera market. Total sales of digital cameras surpassed those of analog cameras for the first time in 2002. In hindsight, Kodak had had over twenty years to respond to an existential threat. Given the extraordinary time Kodak had, and the massive and decisive action it took, we would expect Kodak to have easily handled this major technological change in its industry. Unfortunately, the reality was something else. By 2003, Kodak was only one of five large players in the digital camera arena and was losing money. Its market share in digital cameras was less than 25 percent, and within the next few years it continuously lost market share and profits. On January 19, 2012 Kodak filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, marking the end of a 131-year history as one of America’s leading companies.

This failure was not due to a difficulty in technological transition, or to getting blindsided by a disruptive innovation, or to the speed of the change.

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Photosynth is a free panoramic photo app that can take your pictures and stitch them together into some of the most beautiful images you will find on the web. The app was publicly released in 2008 and is now moving to its third generation, designed to mesh with last week's update of Bing Maps.

Microsoft claims the new update to its 3D technology delivers "a dramatic step forward in smoothness and simplicity, and is what we now recommend for anyone with a D-SLR or a point-and-shoot camera". This is only a technical preview at this point, and the previous two generations of Photosynth are still available.

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Take a picture with a digital camera and your JPEG will usually have plenty of metadata attached: camera name, model, date taken, flash mode, ISO speed and more. You might then add a title, author, comments maybe, and this can be a great way to ensure you can find particular photos later.

Share the image later, though, and the metadata goes with it, potentially revealing all kinds of personal data (even your home address, if the picture is geo-tagged). Unless, that is, you use BatchPurifier LITE to remove any tags first.

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Yesterday marked a rather unique holiday. No, not simply that it was both Thanksgiving and also the first day of Hanukkah, but it was also the first time that these two occasions have shared a day since way back in 1888. Given that, it probably shouldn't come as a major surprise that this would lead to extra traffic on social media websites.

That was exactly the case for photo-sharing service Instagram, which announced record traffic for the second straight Thanksgiving. This time the Facebook subsidiary failed to reveal actual numbers, as it did last year, when it announced more than 10 million photos shared and a staggering 200 images per second.

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If you’d like to do something different with your digital photos then most image editors provide at least some artistic effects you can try. They’re not always that interesting, though, and after you’ve tried ten "Oil Painting" filters which don’t produce anything vaguely painting-like, it’s tempting to just give up. But wait: there is another option.

AndreaMosaic is a free tool for creating photo mosaics, pictures which are themselves built up of other images (check the program samples page if you’ve not seen these before). The technique only takes a few minutes to master, but delivers pictures with an appealing, abstracted look, which look great on anything from a Facebook thumbnail to an A3 page (or even larger printed formats).

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Finnish maker Nokia has released Nokia Refocus, a new app for its flagship Lumia Windows Phone 8 smartphones with PureView cameras that allows users to choose new focus points after snapping pictures. The feature is similar to what Lytro cameras deliver, but adapted to work on smartphone hardware.

The philosophy behind Nokia Refocus is to give users the ability to "capture first and then focus and re-focus later to produce interactive photos", says the Finnish maker. The app is designed specifically for "scenes with a great contrast in the depth of field, like macro shots".

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High Motion Software has announced the release of ImBatch 2.0, its comprehensive image batch processing tool.

As before, you can use the program to resize or rotate photos, tweak colors and contrast, apply effects, set tags and more. But now you’re also able to apply new "AutoEnhance" tasks, which do their best to automatically optimize your target images.

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The Lumia 1020 is famous for its camera. The Nokia smartphone offers a 41 MP shooter with Xenon flash, Zeiss lens and OIS (Optical Image Stabilization). It’s capable of producing photos at a whopping 7712 by 5360 resolution and recording 1080p video at 30 FPS.

Apple’s 8 MP iSight camera on the iPhone 5s is much weedier in comparison, although it does have some tricks up its sleeve, including a sensor that increases the area available for pixels by 15 percent. But even so, pitted head-to-head you’d expect the Nokia phone to win easily right? Apparently not. According to Laptop Mag, it’s Apple’s new phone that takes the crown.

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Back in August, when the weather was still warm, Microsoft announced a new contest surrounding its Bing search engine. The Hometown Homepage Photo Contest was designed to bring attention to local photographers, both amateur and professional, and provide them the opportunity to get some recognition.

The winner was chosen by the public after the Bing team narrowed the choices down to nine finalists and will receive a Nokia Lumia 1020, 500px membership, and a canvas of the image. Plus, the photograph is appearing today as Bing daily image, bringing nationwide recognition.

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My first contact with Microsoft's homebrew Facebook app for Windows Phone 8 revealed one of the least desirable social experiences that a smartphone user can have on any modern mobile platform. The first iterations of the company's offering were terrible, but luckily things started to pick up after the beta version that arrived in late-April.

Microsoft released a couple of major updates since then, bringing the Facebook experience on Windows Phone 8 to a decent level of usability. Some oversights can still be pointed out, such as the lack of a built-in security code generator but, generally speaking, all the important bits are there. And, today, Microsoft issued another update which brings the version number to 5.1. Let's take a look at what's new.

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Seattle-based ACDSee Systems International has released both ACDSee 17.0 and ACDSee Pro 7.0, major new releases of its photo tools for Windows. The new releases come less than 12 months after the last major updates, but offer competitively priced upgrades that are less than half the price of the full versions at $29.99 and $59.99 respectively.

The new releases include a number of additional editing tools and filters in addition to a tweaked user interface and enhancements to key areas such as image management.

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