stefpause.com

Some truly stunning images from SportsShooter.com. I’d recommend browsing through the previous winners links at the bottom of the page, the quality is astounding throughout.

(via Rob Galbraith)

There have been a several articles in the UK press lately highlighting the increasing difficulty photographers face amidst the fearful climate that’s been instilled in the general public by bogeymen such as paedophiles and terrorists. Stop-and-searches have become frequent, photographers are harassed, told to delete images and sometimes assaulted, it’s all quite worrying.

Thankfully, Linda Macpherson (LL.B, Dip.L.P., LL.M), a lecturer in law at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, has created a superb short guide explaining the legal rights of English and Welsh citizens when taking photographs. It’s designed to be portable, so can be printed double-sided on a piece of A4 and carried in your wallet or camera bag, and gives an informative overview that covers restrictions, private property, national security and other issues:

UK Photographers’ Rights

Beautiful work by Wayne Levin

If you’ve got a recent Canon digital compact, this DIGIC II firmware hack may be of interest. It unlocks several hidden features, such as support for RAW, a live histogram and a DoF calculator, and is “hot loaded” so there shouldn’t be any danger to your camera.

(Via Engadget)

My friend Kenzie featured in a BBC article on surfing in the Isle of Man today. The main article photo and eight of the fourteen in the gallery were taken by me, shame the credits are relegated to the alt attribute!

I’ve not got a decent gallery online yet, mainly because I’m not happy with any of the Flickr plugins for WordPress I’ve tried so far, can anyone recommend anything? Maybe it’s time to have a play with Lightroom’s Web Galleries…

12 useful facts, formulas, and photographic rules. Some of them are less relevant these days, what with digital usurping film so thoroughly, but they’re useful to know none the less.

Martin Evening, author of the seminal Adobe Photoshop for Photographers, has an incredibly detailed article on Lightroom’s new (v1.1) sharpening and noise reduction features. This is an update for his latest book, The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers.

Update: Computer Darkroom provides comprehensive coverage of the new features.

James Duncan Davidson has a good overview of the new features in Lightroom. Mikkel Aaland also summarises what’s new. I’ve just had a play with the new sharpening option and it’s much, much better than version 1, here’s hoping the other tweaks are as good!

You can download the v1.1 updater here.

The O’Reilly Digital Media blog has some good tips to speed up Lightroom. For instance, rendering 1:1 (and standard) previews after import makes a huge difference, it’s well worth doing this first rather than having Lightroom compute them on the fly, as otherwise you’ll be constantly waiting for the app to catch up.

A neat Lightroom trick for cloning out dust:

Zoom in to 1:1. Starting at the top-left of the image, press the “page down” key. The window will move down the photo until it gets to the bottom… and then jump across and up to the next previously-hidden part of the image. This’ll repeat until you end up at the bottom-right of your photograph. Fantastic!

It’s the perfect way to quickly scan for and spot out dust; you can tell these guys are really passionate about a great user interface. Via an interview with Mark Hamburg, founder of Adobe Lightroom.