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The popular web-based photo album organiser “Gallery” released version 2.2 today.

Alastair Houghton has a great sequence image of last night’s lunar eclipse.

What the hell? I just checked Adobe’s online store with a view to buying Lightroom. They offer two different options: download or shipped box. Guess which one’s cheaper? Nope, the download is almost a fiver more! Same with Photoshop: £569.88 for the boxed version, £586.85 for the download. Apparently, not providing a CD or printed manual at all — these cost extra for the download option — is more expensive than manufacturing & shipping them to you. Or is it that Adobe feels that they can scalp their customers for the “I want it now” factor? That’s pretty reprehensible.

Getty Images buys WireImage. Makes sense seeing as everyone seems to be obsessed with celebrity these days.

Canon announced the EOS-1D Mark III last week. It sounds vaguely like a spaceship from the classic computer game Elite but is in fact their flagship digital camera, designed primarily for sports & wildlife photographers. Specs of note include a 10.1 megapixel APS-H size (1.3x) CMOS sensor, 10FPS with a 110 large-JPEG or 30 RAW image buffer, overhauled 45-point AF system with 19 cross-type sensors, a live-view LCD and an integrated cleaning system. If you know what all that means, you no doubt want one — I know I do — but the estimated £3050GBP price tag might put you off unless you really need it.

How to Make Blink-Free Group Photos is a remarkably clever guide to making sure you have at least one photo where no-one is blinking. Here’s the lowdown: “For groups of less than 20 people, divide the number of people in the group by 3 if the light is good or by 2 if the light is bad.” Click the link for a few more good tips.

PhotoRec is a great bit of open-source data recovery software. It’s cross-platform and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It’ll recover lost files including photos, video, documents and archives from just about any media. It ignores the filesystem and goes straight to the underlying data, so will still work on cards that have been severely damaged or reformatted. It won’t attempt to write to the media you’re trying to recover from, so is safe to use. It also has a great companion program, TestDisk, whose job is to recover lost partitions as well as making non-booting disks bootable again.

Adobe recently released version 1.0 of their wonderful digital camera workflow software Lightroom and Ars Technica have the lowdown with a thoroughly comprehensive review. If you’re a keen amateur or professional photographer then I’d recommend giving it a look, it’s a great bit of software.

One of my photographs has been used by design agency the fifth kingdom for the latest set of adverts pushing the Isle of Man .im domain. Which is nice… Read more…

Iraqi Kurdistan by Ed Kashi. Can’t say I’m that much of a fan, I prefer it when the concept is stronger rather than just bunching together all your shots and pausing on the good one. However, what it does illustrate nicely is that capturing “the decisive moment”, as famously described by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is much, much easier thanks to digital cameras…

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