Tagging friends in massive group photographs is about to get a whole lot easier. Facebook has just announced “tag suggestions”, which uses facial recognition technology to automatically group together photographs that have the same face in them.
Because photos are such an important part of Facebook, we want to be sure you know exactly how tag suggestions work: When you or a friend upload new photos, we use face recognition software—similar to that found in many photo editing tools—to match your new photos to other photos you’re tagged in. We group similar photos together and, whenever possible, suggest the name of the friend in the photos. [#]
While many people will probably opt for the old fashioned tagging method to have more control over the process, this feature will undoubtedly save many users a good deal of time. The feature will begin rolling out to users in the US over the next few weeks.
If you think making prints at home with your photo printer saves you money over having the prints made through a service, you might be wrong. How-To Geek has a neat tutorial and XLS spreadsheet you can use to calculate the cheapest method depending on your printer expenses. Simply download the file, fill out the boxes according to the instructions, and you’ll learn how much you’re actually paying per-print with your home printer.
“Modern Times” is a short film that offers a glimpse of the future in both the story that it tells and the way it was made — it’s a low/no budget film created entirely against a green screen with friends as actors. Maybe in the future shooting at real locations (or with real people) will be less and less necessary as CGI continues to become more and more mind-boggling. Read more…
When Apple designed the iPad, they opted for simplicity and omitted things like a USB port or memory card slots. This made it more tedious for photographers to transfer a large number of photographs onto their iPads, since the Camera Connection Kit needed for USB and SD Card support comes in two separate dongles. Luckily, there’s a made-in-China knockoff that can ease a little of the pain — the 3-in-1 iPad Camera Connection Kit combines the two dongles into one nicely designed apparatus. Available in both black and white, it comes with a USB port, a SD Card slot, and a Micro SD Card slot. Pick one up over at the M.I.C Gadget store for $29.90.
Bruce Dale spent 30 years as a staff photographer for National Geographic, travelling the world and having thousands of his amazing photographs published in the magazine. In this 10 minute video, he talks about his experiences and shares stories behind some of his favorite photographs. Like the 1978 photo agency documentary we shared yesterday, this one also provides an interesting and inspiring behind-the-scenes look at a particular photography job.
I really love using old lenses on modern digital cameras, but many old lenses have cosmetic issues that make them a little less pleasant to use. Here are a few very cheap and easy things you can do to make these old lenses a little nicer to look at and to use. I don’t advocate doing this to rare collectible lenses; this is for “user” lenses.
Note that these things have nothing to do with internal functionality of the focus or aperture, nor the condition of the glass. That should all be good before even thinking about this. No sense making lens ergonomics better if the lens isn’t known to be worth using! Read more…
Why stick with a boring old Facebook picture when you can use the new photo strip as part of a larger, more creative portrait? That’s exactly what Alexandre Oudin did with his. Read more…
“Moving Stills” is a short 10-minute documentary created back in 1978 to show how New York-based photo agency Contact Press Images operated. It’s a fun blast from the photographic-past — a world where images are captured on expensive rolls of film and where editors review photographs on a lightbox with a loupe.
The Urban Word of the Day a couple days ago on Urban Dictionary was PHOBAR:
-adjective, Acronym for “PHOtoshopped Beyond All Recognition.” A play on the the more popular acronym FUBAR: “F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition,” PHOBAR refers to an image, usually a photo of a person, that has been retouched and airbrushed with digital image manipulation software on a computer so significantly, that the person in the photo is barely recognizable.
So now there’s a simple word for when you feel like saying “too much Photoshop!”.
When a NASA Space Shuttle lifts off, there’s always high definition cameras carefully placed around the launch site, documenting the launch in high-definition photographs and slow motion videos. Back in April we featured a slow motion video of the Apollo 11 launch in 1969, and now here’s another neat super slow-mo documentary of more recent launches (i.e. 2005). If you have 45 minutes to spare, this video is sure to amaze and educate you.
By the way… during the launch, the shuttle burns 1,000 gallons of liquid propellants and 20,000 pounds of solid fuel every second.
