Before I begin with an observation of a photo that emerged from yesterday’s horrific bombings, I’d like to first take a moment to acknowledge the insignificance of my thoughts vis a vis the tragedy that has unfolded. There have been many great pieces that have already emerged in the first 24 hours like this one from Bruce Schneier of The Atlantic. That said, I blog about salient issues in photography, and there is no better time to discuss an issue than when it is in our collective consciousness.
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Photographer David Orias of Santa Barbara, California photographs waves with a slow shutter speed, capturing their movement, color, and power as they roll in from the Pacific Ocean.
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For his project titled Motion, Brooklyn, New York-based photographer Bill Wadman shot portraits of dancers with a slow shutter speed in order to capture their movements through motion blur. The resulting photographs look like a strange fusion of photography and painting.
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People often laugh and poke fun at the cliche of impossible image enhancements seen in TV shows and movies, but you won’t be laughing when you see what SmartDeblur can do — you’ll be gawking in amazement. Created by programmer and image processing expert Vladimir Yuzhikov, the program can magically reveal details in photographs that are blurry due to poor focusing and/or shaky hands.
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When Thomas and Anneka Geary paid professional — and we use the term lightly — photographers Ian McCloskey and Nikki Carter of Westgate Photography £750 to capture the happiest day of their lives, they were probably expecting something a little bit better than what turned out: blurry and poorly framed shots captured from terrible positions that are being called “the worst wedding pictures ever”. Not one of the photos showed the groom’s parents.
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This photo published by Chinese site xjrumo may be the first to show the APS-C sensor found in Fujifilm’s upcoming sleek mirrorless camera. The sensor is rumored to be a revolutionary organic sensor that will allow its performance to rival that of larger full frame sensors.

Fuji Sensor APS-C (via Photo Rumors)

How much does a camera vibrate due to your finger pressing the shutter or the mirror flipping? Camera Technica decided to conduct a test by strapping a laser pointer to the hot shoe of a Canon 7D. They then filmed the red dot on a far wall against some text while shooting normally (i.e. pressing the shutter with a finger), using a remote shutter release, and finally with a remote shutter as well as mirror-lockup.

You might be surprised at how much movement the camera experiences even if the shutter is pressed carefully. Lesson learned: for the sharpest possible photos, use a tripod, a remote shutter release, and the mirror-lockup feature on your camera.

DSLR Mirror Vibration (via Foto Actualidad)

Alexandra Pacula paints beautiful oil paintings of cities at night that look like blurry, long-exposure photographs.
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Unshake is a free program available for all operating systems that takes your blurry photographs and attempts to make them clearer. While it’s not miraculous or perfect, it does in fact help in making photographs more usable, especially at lower resolutions (i.e. for the web).

Here’s a before-and-after example using a quick snapshot I took this past weekend with an outdated point-and-shoot camera:

If you have problems using the program on a Mac, try opening the Unshake.jar file directly at the last step. Larger photographs might also take much longer to “unshake”, while lower-res (i.e. 500px wide) photos were completed very quickly.

Unshake (via Lifehacker)