Photographic links of the week.

Pictures of the central plains ice storms
Cool family shots (from John Nack's blog)
Amazing areal images from London. (From Rob Galbraith's blog)
Summer in the southern hemisphere.
Funny juxtaposition.
Rash of naked hikers in the swiss Alps? I thought this has always been popular and not something new?
Why icebergs are blue (this is the correct explanation!)
Gigapan released their panorama robot.
Capture video with any Live View capable Nikon DSLR, even those that don't support video capture!
Win good stuff in the Aperture Nature Photography Workshop contest.
Beautiful images from one of my favorite National Parks. I found this guy's website after searching for images of a lake I wanted to photograph this spring. I do lots of photography in RMNP myself as many of you will know.
Most poignant photos of the Bush presidency selected by some major photo editors.
Inauguration day (NPR).

Sunset in Roxborough state park

I should have been there a little earlier but still nice. The link goes to the flickr page.

Some old images from this summer

I redid some images from last summer. I had a blogpost about them before. Here they are:

The full set from this place is here. I put one on flickr too if you like commenting.

Ginormous panorama of inauguration

I just discovered an amazing panorama from president Obama's inauguration speech. This was done using the Gigapan robot. The amount of detail in the 1.5 Gigapixel panorama is absolutely amazing and worth checking out. Already people have discovered Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone. I have written about making high resolution images using stitching before, but this is of a different magnitude!

Excellent D3x review

Thom Hogan has a very good review of the new D3x up on his site. As you would expect he says it is the best DSLR made to-date but presents doubtful value to most photographers. Might be right for some, mostly landscapers with a lot of money to burn.

New Chrome release

See here and download here (not really ;-) ). Still no color management like modern browsers such as Safari and Firefox have, even though Chromium is based on WebKit (the core of Safari). Guess I shouldn't be surprised. Also, even though it has WebKit roots, there is no Mac version.

Update. I just discovered that Google maintains a feature request forum. Color management is in Issue 143 and in another issue they updated it with the (misguided and bad) idea to ignore color profiles and do everything in sRGB. You can go to the first issue and vote for it.

My Lightroom 3 wishlist

I wrote a post on inside Lightroom listing my wishes of where Lightroom will go in 2009. Most of these are probably pipe dreams, but hey if one cannot dream! Check out the posting and see if you have other wishes or whether they are similar to mine.

Picasa 3.0 beta - no color management?

I just downloaded and tested Picasa 3.0 which google brought out in beta for the Mac. The program has an interesting UI and is nice and speedy. However, it does not colormanage. What the ...? Does Google realize that it is 2009? More than 15 years after color management was introduced to a main stream OS? Nowadays color management is a basic requirement for photographic apps. The absence of it makes Picasa useless for serious amateur or pro photographic work. Even worse, on uncalibrated Macs used by most consumers (i.e. the Picasa target audience), all colors will be wrong and images will have too low contrast making it even useless for amateurs. This is because out-of-the-box Macs come calibrated at the wrong gamma. Also, this means that if you have a laptop display, even if you calibrated and profiled it, you will always see the wrong colors. Therefore, my advice is to avoid this program like the plague until they fix it!

How Picasa displays two identical but for the color profile images (click for 100% image converted to sRGB from my monitor profile, so you can see what I see on my calibrated and profiled adobeRGB gamut display).


As you expect for color-stupid apps on a wide gamut display, the sRGB image is too saturated, and the prophotoRGB image looks green and too dark.

Both are quite far off as this image shows which is in sRGB for the web:


This is going to be even worse on a standard uncalibrated Apple laptop display, where everything is going to be severely desaturated and too low contrast.