Want to plan out and test your studio lighting setups before setting up equipment and bringing subjects into the picture? German software development company Elixxier has been developing a software program designed to help you do just that. It’s called set.a.light 3D STUDIO, and is, according to Elixxier, the world’s first software dedicated to photo studio simulation.
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Back in May, we wrote about a photographer named John Butterill and his brilliant idea of using a Internet-connected phone to share his photo adventures with people whose mobility was limited. Google liked Butterill’s story so much that they’re sharing it as an example of the different things you can do through Google+ Hangouts. The video above is a neat look at how Butterill came up with his idea, and how the concept quickly spread around the world.
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Video Game Tourism has an interesting article about the growing art of video game photography, or artistic snapshots captured in the virtual worlds of games:

Games are spaces of experience as much as entertainment. It shouldn’t surprise us that the photographic gaze, that eye for composition and purely visual aesthetic, finds ample opportunity for snapshots in these virtual spaces. In fact, it’s surprising that in-game-photography – for purely aesthetical reasons as opposed to documenting victories or snapping a pic of an impressive vista for use as a desktop wallpaper – is still as unexplored a country as it still seems to be.

[...] The art of in-game-photography is still in its infancy, but it seems obvious that, with constantly increasing photorealism and the popularity of open-world-games, more and more photographers will also look for inspiration and picture opportunities in virtual worlds. Games are places as well as entertainment; and after all, as Elliott Erwitt’s quote at the beginning reminded us: Photography has little to do with the things we see -, and everything to do with the way we see them.

The piece features five leading video game photographers: Duncan Harris, Iain Andrews, James Pollock, Josh Taylor, and Leo Sang. Some of their work is so eye-catching that game companies have asked to use the photos in their promotions.

The Art of in-game Photography [Video Game Tourism]

Image credits: Photographs by James Pollock and Iain Andrews

The last time C. Corey Fisk walked was in 1992. She has multiple sclerosis, an incurable disease that affects the central nervous system and gradually took her ability to walk and leave her bed.

But early February, she went on a photo walk with photographer John Butterill in the woods behind his house in Ontario, Canada — all from her own home in northern California.
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Robert Overweg is a photographer who works in the virtual world. His series, “the end of the virtual world“, contains images captured in popular computer games at the edges of the “world”. Based in the Netherlands, Overweg has been working exclusively in the virtual world since 2007.
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Google recently added high-quality street level photographs to Google Earth, presumably using the imagery captured through its Street View van cameras. While it’s an interesting development, the fact that everything is flat is a bit strange, and makes you feel as though you’re looking at an outdated video game. How many more years do you think it will be until we’ll be able to virtually tour the streets of a city in true 3D?