OK, OK, last space-themed post for a while, I promise, but I couldn’t resist posting the photographs of Vincent Fournier, they’re astounding. (via Creative Review)

via PDN Photo of the Day.

Earthquake in Haiti – The Big Picture

Donate Now to the DEC (an umbrella organisation for 13 British humanitarian aid agencies).

UK Photographers’ Rights v2

LIFE magazine’s image archive, hosted by Google. You could quite easily lose hours looking through that, there’s so many truly great photos there. (via aphotoeditor.com)

(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

(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…

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.

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](http://since1968.com/article/190/mark-hamburg-interview-adobe-photoshop-lightroom-part-2-of-2), founder of Adobe Lightroom.

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…

Apparently Domicilium’s presentation at the last domain conference went down a treat as no-one else had bothered to pay much attention to advertising or branding, and as a result the T5K’s design skills shone though even more.
Speaking of the .im domain, the effective opening up of the market for second-level .im domains has been a long time coming — previously it was limited third-levels such as example.co.im and it cost an excessive £100GBP or so — but now that it’s opened up it’s the usual land-grab and wild domain speculation.

Each domain is £40 to register, with two letter domains for £495 and one letters for £995. (All ex. VAT.)

Companies selling instant messengers are the most likely to be interested, though they’ll have to deal with the usual squatters and with arbitration happening in the Isle of Man, the world’s oldest continuously running parliament with its own laws and therefore courts, legal matters may be a little trickier and costlier to pursue.

I do wish they’d sort themselves out a proper whois server, though, web-only lookup is just odd…

It reminds me of a story my half-sister told me a few years ago about a famous German photographer, someone who shot for Stern magazine on a regular basis and whose work she’d long admired.

She had an opportunity to watch him shooting a press conference and had this romantic notion that he’d turn up with his trusty Nikon FM2N and a nice bit of manual focus glass, observe the room for a while before picking a good spot, then patiently waiting until… click. The Decisive Moment captured, he’d leave.

What had actually happened is that he’d turned up with a couple of F5s (Nikon’s flagship film camera at the time), jostled with the rest and kept his finger firmly on the motordrive, shooting several rolls in the space of a few minutes. So much for romance; like everyone there, he couldn’t afford to miss the opportunity.

Modern photojournalists take more pictures than ever now that they’re free from the constraints of film and its maximum of 36 frames, processing cost, delay and scanning. The limits now are mostly concerning storage and transfer: camera buffer & CompactFlash sizes, dumping photos to storage devices & laptops, along with how much time it takes to manage the resultant amount of shots.

Not that I’m complaining, while I think actually capturing a quality photograph is simpler, the workflow itself has shifted around and now even more time is spent sorting through the huge stack of shots trying to find it. Thank heavens for software like Lightroom, Aperture and Photo Mechanic, without them things’d be a hell of a lot harder.