Go here, to the Atlantic’s first installment of 2012 in photos, and scroll down, immediately, to photo number 19:
Julian, a two-month old pet monkey, bites the ear of Kan, a transvestite performer, backstage at the Tiffany’s Show in Pattaya, 150 km east of Bangkok.
NatGeo’s contest is in again; the second batch of their winners is particularly fine. The bat shot (#22) and the one of the owl (#50) are really, really great.
Two Star turned ten. There were pictures. Enjoy.
(Also: related content.)
This tab has been open for a while, so I’m not sure where it came from, but the astronaut gave a 30-ish minute talk at Luminance 2012 about the challenges and awesomeness of shooting in space.
It’s worth your time. For serious. Fun fact: hard drives fail quickly in zero-gravity, and nobody (to Pettit’s knowledge) has figured out why, so they transmit the raw files back to the ground as quickly as they can.
For more Pettit, check out his blog or his Flickr account.
But I did throw this up on the intarwubs, just to amuse myself and a few other people. Shot with the Olympus still camera, which is sort of amazing, really.
Observe my 2012 photo folder:
The top box encloses the 12 events between June and early July wherein I took pictures.
The bottom box starts when I bought a new camera (to replace the one stolen in early September), and encloses the 20 events between early July and late October.
As should be obvious, I’m still pretty darn happy with the Olympus.
I liked these better as black and white.
The triumphant return of JW Americana, with photos by yours truly.
The Jackson niece just turned five. There are pictures.
This new camera I picked up has made me pretty happy. I’m sure I’m leaving a little on the table vs. a DSLR, but the size more than makes up for it.
But that doesn’t mean I’m entirely pleased, and here’s why: Every piece of documentation for the Olympus refers to it as having a USB port. It ships with a cable that looks like USB, too, and sports two ports that look, at first glance, like one is probably micro- or mini-USB.
I happened to use the supplied cable the first couple times I downloaded pix, so I didn’t actually notice that there was anything weird until this weekend.
When I was out of town.
I hadn’t bothered to take the actual Olympus cable with me because, as a pretty seasoned traveller, I keep a couple spares in my “travel kit” that live in my bag all the time.
It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that I realized I had a problem. The ports on the Olympus may technically be a variant of USB and not just some goofball “fuck you port” from Olympus, but the end result is the same: you can’t buy a cable for this camera at Best Buy or Target. You have to use the fancy CB-USB6 cable.
This sin is compounded by the fact that Oly seriously downplays the incompatibility of the supplied faux-USB cable; it’s just called a “USB cable” in all documentation, and sports a normal USB tip on the computer end. Only DEEP in the manual (supplied only on PDF) does it state that users should only use the supplied cable. Cute.
Here’s the news, Olympus: People in 2012 have an expectation of easy connectivity. Pretty much everything has a normal USB port on it now. That’s how shit should work. The era of needing to keep up with dozens of different cables for one’s devices is past, and thank God for it. Using this connector today is complete bullshit, and represents a giant fucking step backwards. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
It also makes me a whole lot less excited about my new camera. I feel a little duped, to be honest. So, you know, fuck you for that, too.
This is mostly a camera experiment.
In the years since I bought my old camera, the game changed a bit. The Rebel didn’t shoot video at all, but now basically every reasonable camera system shoots HD video really, really well — entire movies and TV shows have been shot with the now obsolete Canon 5D Mk II, for example.
Now, to do video at a professional level, you need to control lots of other factors (chief among them sound and lighting), but the core ingredients are there, which is pretty rad.
As an experiment, I shot this clip (1:10) of one of Amanda Palmer’s opening acts, a sax duo called Ronald Reagan who bill themselves as “Boston’s Premier 80’s Pop Saxophone Duo”. The focus drifts a little (operator error), but overall I’m totally shocked by the clarity. I was standing in a scrum of people on the floor at Fitz, holding the camera over my head to get a better angle. I mean, seriously, this is amazing.
Anyway, here it is.
I also grabbed a couple other clips, but this was the best of the lot. One is plagued much more by the focus drift issue, and the other was during an all-hands-on-deck finale of “Careless Whisper,” which was played at eleven, so the mic got a bit overloaded. But this one’s a good example of what this little camera can do.
I took the new tiny camera with me to the Amanda Palmer show last night at Fitzgerald’s. I took a few pix.
The little Oly did VERY well, though I need to learn a bit more about keeping the focus constant when shooting video. It also appears I’m gonna need that battery grip (or just another battery), because I only got to about 450 shots before it was done for the night. I got super spoiled with the Rebel, which would shoot for days, but if this is the main drawback I encounter, I’ll be TOTALLY cool with it.
All shots with the Olympus M.Zuiko 45/1.8, which turns out to be a GREAT lens. It’s not the equal of the Leica 25/1.4, but for things like this it’s perfect.
Writer and photographer Richard Kadrey provides 1,000 words on the subject.
(Btw, that link is SFW, but the rest of Mr Kadrey’s Flickr may not be.)
Other than some neat pix of Mrs Heathen and the cats, this set is kinda thin, but here it is anyway.
Interesting note for the photo-geeks in Heathen Nation: the stolen Rebel had a top ISO of 1600. The new hotness, an Olympus E-M5, shoots at ISO 25,600; the pix of Sen. Wiggins are examples.
No, seriously.
In her younger years, it appears Christina Hendricks trended goth.
Dolphins. That’s what.
Ermegerd.
I have, as most Heathen know, quite a few pix available over at Flickr.
Sometimes, I get an email notice that someone has made one a favorite. This is almost always a friend or relative expressing enjoyment of a photo of some other member of our extended family or circle of friends.
Almost.
Today, I got a favorite notice from a name I didn’t recognize at all, for a relatively odd picture from a clown-themed fundraiser a few years ago:
The user has no photos of her (?) own to peruse, but checking her list of favorite pictures was, well, revealing:
Very well then. Carry on.
Once again, some pix.
Hey, Wiggins likes ’em:
On Sunday, Briton Bradley Wiggins became the first person from the UK to win the Tour de France. It was pretty cool.
Also cool: Part 2 of the Atlantic’s InFocus feature on the Tour, which includes the answer to the question nagging every Tour fan this year: where was the devil?
The Atlantic’s InFocus this week is all shots of the Tour de France so far. Picture #27 is especially lovely.
Like, maybe, 70 years ago? Yeah, well, somebody found it.
(h/t: Senor Mantler.)
It is possible that you are unfamiliar with the activities of Maddie the Coonhound. Let’s fix that.
This is rich.
Shawn Nee already has a pending lawsuit against the LA sheriff’s department, and now has photographic and video proof of their continued blatant disregard for the law.
This will not stop until more police are found personally liable. If a badged bully or two loses their house, maybe they’d get the message that they are not a law unto themselves.
Via The Agitator.
The inevitable crop of D800 unboxing videos have arrived now that Nikon is actually shipping this $3,000 lovely, but clearly the best of the genre is this one that’s in Klingon.
(h/t Agent Triple F)
Our dear pals Anneliese and David had a baby. At her first birthday party, I took a few pics.
I suppose the inclusion of No. 22 was sort of inevitable in this collection of kisses, but it made me smile anyway.
Those lion photographers have posted an amusing followup video that includes encounters between the roving cameras and the lions.
Since one of those things apparently contains a 1D, I think they may qualify as the most expensive cat toys EVER.
“Hey, why not mount a video-capable digital camera on the end of a drill?”
Stay with it. There are several iterations.
This is awesome. These guys created remote controllable buggies for DSLRs so that they could get close enough to actual no-shit lions to take some pretty amazing pictures.
Because there’s just a touch of noise at ISO 102,400.
I think all thoughts of the Heathen camera platform switching to mirrorless just went out the window. Wow. Just wow. (Also wow: $3500.)
The whole Digital Photography preview is online, but it’s really only for photo nerds.
Another in the series of “I’m scared of new things!”: Pro photog whines about Instagram.
HeathenPix taken at Christmas in Louisville are finally up.
A couple years ago, I discovered the cross-body sliding-loop camera straps from Black Rapid. It was a mildly novel but obvious riff on the idea of a camera strap, and lots of simliar products have graced the marketplace over the years, but the BR version was well made and well-reviewed. I bought one, and have enjoyed it.
But I will never buy another one, and I encourage everyone in the sound of my voice who is considering a Black Rapid purchase to look elsewhere, too, because they are aggressively using patent chicanery to shut down similar products despite the obviously invalid nature of their “patent”.
Luma Labs, maker of a similar product, document the sad situation, complete with citations of prior art, in an open letter to their customers.
Dating back to last spring, actually. Moral: Is more fun to take than to edit and process.
The Imaginary Image Tumblr is a list of descriptions of photos that do not exist, but should.
The mothball fleet in Suisun Bay, California is a collection of a couple hundred essentially abandoned ships (at one point, the site had over 2200) once awaiting reactivation, and now awaiting the shipbreaker (with at least one exception, asa the USS Iowa is there, too, as it waits its turn to be a museum).
Recently, some intrepid photographers decided to sneak in, explore, and take a few pictures while avoiding patrols. Enjoy.
This one is especially for Edgar, but most of the rest of you will be amused by it, too.
Go watch this set of really fantastic time-lapse shots. The bits of the Milky Way are just astounding. Hat Tip: Rob.
John Cusack, Johnny Depp, and Hunter Thompson in a convertible. Via the excellent ThisIsNotPorn.
Jeff Bridges, about whom we’ve written before, shot a bunch of fine pictures on the set of True Grit. Enjoy.
We rambled out to the Forbidden Gardens of Katy last weekend to enjoy their closing sale; photos ensued.
I’m now caught up:
Enjoy.