Websites

Michael Zhang

New Look Strobox Even More Useful for Learning Lighting

When we featured Strobox back in 2009, it was a simple idea: provide an easy way for photographers to create lighting diagrams and share them with others. Since then, they've upgraded their website to include a gallery where you can browse photographs done by others, view their lighting diagrams, and comment on them.

If you don't have a full arsenal of lightning equipment, you can filter the photos by what kind of lighting equipment was used to browse photos that are more relevant to you.

Michael Zhang

Webinpaint is a Poor Man’s Web-Based Content Aware Fill Tool

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill feature was quite a hit when it came out earlier this year, but what about free alternatives? Webinpaint is a web-based photo app that aims to do just that. You simply open up an image, paint over the area you'd like removed, and click the "Inpaint" button for the app to do its removal magic.

From tests I've done with the app, it's pretty clear it doesn't come close to the power of Content Aware Fill. However, for simple photographs without much texture or clutter, the app actually works quite well.

Jessica Lum

Easy HDR Editing with Oloneo PhotoEngine

French company Oloneo has just released a free beta for their product, PhotoEngine. The software is a straightforward HDR creator and non-destructive editor that allows you to quickly merge HDR photos. Additionally, it has features that can adjust specific light sources in the photo, to change the white balance or the exposure. This could come in handy when shooting HDR frames that have a variety of different light sources with different temperatures.

Jessica Lum

Macro Portraits of Emerging Mosquitoes

Brothers Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas, the same UK-based duo who created a remote-control BeetleCam to photograph wildlife in Africa, decided to get up-close and personal with some of nature's less desirable creatures. The two originally noticed mosquito larvae in stagnant water sitting in the backyard of their home, and decided they'd found their next photo subjects. They patiently set up the photo shoot, waiting for key moment when the adult mosquitoes emerged from their larval state. It's fascinating how delicate and alien the pesky critter is up-close:

Their patience and planning went a long way, Will tells us:
We did a bit of research into their development and discovered that it takes about 1-2 weeks (depending on the temperature) for them to develop into the adult form. This gave us a good amount of time to devise a set up to photograph them as they emerged.

Over the course of about 14 days, we kept a keen eye on their development. We kept the larvae in a glass of distilled water indoors and covered it with perforated cling film - we didn't want to suffer any bites during the night! Once the larvae had turned into pupae, we knew they were close to hatching. We soon discovered that when one straightened out, we had about 5 minutes until they hatched.

Michael Zhang

Flickr Gets a Makeover, Photo Pages Stretched and Redesigned

If you login to Flickr today, you should see a notice at the top of your photo pages informing you of a soon-to-be-released redesign and allowing you to preview it. The new design features the photograph much more prominently, upping the size from 500px wide to 640px on a wider page. The goal seems to be making the page cleaner and more minimalistic, with many of the icons moving to drop-down menus. There's also a heavier emphasis on geo-tagging, which appears as a small map to the right of the photo.