How to Make Blink-Free Group Photos

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.

Fantastic free digital photo recovery software

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 Lightroom v1.0 review by Ars Technica

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.

The .im domain branding

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… (more…)

Photojournalism with flip-book style animation

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…

(more…)