Camera Blog: 12/05/10

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Times Square Photographs Wanted by New-York Historical Society

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The New-York Historical Society is soliciting digital photographs of contemporary Times Square from West 42nd to 47th Streets at Broadway or Seventh Avenue.

Face2Face 3D for iPhone

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First Rodeo Software has released Face2Face 3D 1.0, billed as the first 3D face swapping and blending app available on iPhone and iPod touch. The app lets you swap and blend faces within your photos by manipulating 3D models of the faces using the touch interface of the iPhone.Unlike traditional 2D methods, which often make it look like a cutout head has been pasted onto a body, Face2Face’s 3D algorithms automatically determine and compensate for the orientation and shapes of the heads. “This allows for faces to be rotated away from the camera, and provides very convincing blends with the user required to position only a few points within the images,” the company said.Face2Face 3D 1.0 is $1.99 and available through the App Store in the Photography category.

First Rodeo Software

First Rodeo Software releases Face2Face 3D face blending iPhone app

Vancouver based First Rodeo Software today announces Face2Face 3D 1.0, the first 3D face swapping and blending app available on iPhone and iPod touch. The app lets you swap and blend faces within your photos by manipulating 3D models of the faces using the great touch interface available on the iPhone. Face2Face finally makes it easy to create smooth blends between faces, even if they were not directly facing the camera when the photo was taken.

Vancouver, Canada - First Rodeo Software today is pleased to announce the release of Face2Face 3D 1.0, a new face swapping and blending app for iPhone and iPod touch. Requiring minimal user input, the app lets users swap or smoothly blend between pairs of faces in photos. The results are often startling and hilarious.

Unlike traditional 2D methods, which often make it look like a cutout head has been pasted onto a body, Face2Face’s 3D algorithms automatically determine and compensate for the orientation and shapes of the heads. This allows for faces to be rotated away from the camera, and provides very convincing blends with the user required to position only a few points within the images.

The app creates a full 3D model of each face which is fun to play with using the iPhone/iPod touch screen. Users can rotate, translate, and zoom the 3D “masks” to achieve exactly the effect they want with the overlaid face. When the creation is complete, it can be shared via email or Facebook, or saved for later viewing. A short video tutorial is bundled with the app so that users can get fantastic results immediately.

Device Requirements:
* iPhone or iPod touch
* Requires iOS 3.0 or later
* 16 MB

Pricing and Availability:
Face2Face 3D 1.0 is $1.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Photography category.

Face2Face 3D 1.0: http://www.firstrodeo.ca
Purchase and Download: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/face2face-3d/id404882288
YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS-E1GKoU-E
Screenshots: http://www.firstrodeo.ca/gallery.html
App Icon: http://www.firstrodeo.ca/PR/Face2Face3D/Icon.png

First Rodeo Software is a 2-person company based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, specializing in advanced image processing and visualization. Copyright (C) 2010 First Rodeo Software. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, iPod and iPad are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries.

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23 Beautiful Still Life Photos

Creating still life scenes is a great way to practice your photography. It allows you to compose and control almost every facet of the photographic process from composition through to post production and is especially good for experimentation when you are learning how difference camera setting interact. You can also produce some fantastic images. This collection is a great example of what can be done with a bit of planning.

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If You Had $2000 to Spend on Photographic Gear ? What Would You Buy?

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If I gave you $2000 to spend on camera gear – what would you buy?

We did this hypothetical exercise around 18 months ago (with $1000) and it was a lot of fun and I thought that seeing as many of us are researching photography gear for Christmas presents that it might be fun to do again to see what everyone is eying off!

And because I’m feeling generous this year I’m going to increase your hypothetical cash to $2000 instead of $1000 (you can thank me in comments).

So here’s how it works.

Lets use Amazon’s Camera and Photo area as a guide so we’re all talking the same prices.

Surf through around and identify what camera gear (cameras, lenses, flashes, accessories) that you’d get if you had $2000.

Tell/and or show (with a link) what you’d get in comments below. Tell us why you selected what you did.

What would you order?

Perhaps a little Canon Powershot S95 (currently the ‘most wished for’ camera on Amazon)

Or maybe a Nikon D3100 (one of the most bought cameras in our popular digital cameras list)

Or perhaps you want to use the opportunity to try a Micro Four Thirds Camera and would pick up the Olympus PEN E-P2.

Or maybe you’d just blow the whole lot on a lens you’ve been lusting after – like the Canon 85mm f1.2L II USM (the one I’ve been eying off for months now…. Sigh….)

Don’t get too bogged down in the details – I’m really just curious what everyone else is looking at gear wise at the moment.

Looking forward to seeing what you ‘order’ (hypothetically of course).

Post from: Digital Photography School

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ElcomSoft Discovers Vulnerability in Canon’s Original Data Security System

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Accroding to net-security.org, ElcomSoft has discovered vulnerability in Canon’s Original Data Security System. The system, which is aimed at guaranteeing authenticity of photos captured with supported Canon cameras, uses secret keys to calculate authentication data. Researchers from ElcomSoft are now claiming they have been able to extract these secret keys and use them “for adding authenticity signatures to a set of manipulated digital images”, Net Security reports. ElcomSoft has alerted Canon to the problem.

Source: Net Security

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Lightroom?s Selected and Most Selected Images

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One of confusing things when you?re getting started in Lightroom is understanding the concept of selected images and the most selected image in Lightroom.

Step 1

To see this at work, start in the Library module and press G to move to Grid view. Click on any image to select it and Shift + Click on another image. You?ll now have a sequence of images selected.

Notice that in both Grid view and on the Filmstrip the first image that you selected has a lighter border around it than all of the other selected images and notice that the unselected images have darker borders.

The image with the lightest border is the most selected image and it is the image that will be affected by changes that you make to various settings, in particular when you are working in Loupe view with multiple images selected.

Step 2

What you have selected in Lightroom and the view you are in impacts how changes are applied to an image.

In Grid view if you select the Quick Develop panel and choose a different white balance setting then all the selected images that are selected will be altered.

Step 3

However, if you are in Loupe view and if you make the same change only the most selected image will be altered and not all the selected images.

Grid and Loupe view work very differently and it?s important to understand, particularly in Loupe view, that when you have multiple images selected, there is one that is most selected.

Step 4

When you have all images in a folder or collection selected it can be difficult to see just how to deselect the images. To deselect a selection, click outside the thumbnail area of any of the selected images in an empty area of the cell it is in. This deselects the current selection so only the image that you just clicked will be selected.

Post from: Digital Photography School

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If You Had $2000 to Spend on Photographic Gear – What Would You Buy?

If I gave you $2000 to spend on camera gear – what would you buy?

And because I’m feeling generous this year I’m going to increase your hypothetical cash to $2000 instead of $1000 (you can thank me in comments).

So here’s how it works.

Lets use Amazon’s Camera and Photo area as a guide so we’re all talking the same prices.Surf through around and identify what camera gear (cameras, lenses, flashes, accessories) that you’d get if you had $2000.Tell/and or show (with a link) what you’d get in comments below. Tell us why you selected what you did.

What would you order?

Don’t get too bogged down in the details – I’m really just curious what everyone else is looking at gear wise at the moment.

Looking forward to seeing what you ‘order’ (hypothetically of course).

View the original article here