The Obsidian Stock Blog

Oregon’s premier photo stock agency, Obsidian Stock, has partnered up with Absolut Vodka’s Lomo campaign to bring you one of the coolest, hippest tools of the photo trade: the Holga camera.

We are raffling off 10 of these hot little gadgets in an effort to inspire, mobilize and spark creativity among Oregon photographers. The contest is FREE to enter and anyone can take part - aspiring amateurs and pro shooters alike.

To find out more about what the heck a Holga is anyway, and how you can get your hands on one, just go over to Obsidian Stock’s Lomo site and fill out the form for a chance to win.

And for a little Lomo inspiration, check out AbsolutLomo’s wall of pictures.

If there’s one thing you can assume about the typical photographer shooting in Oregon, great shots of known landmarks will almost certainly be found in their portfolio. Mt Bachelor? The fantastic Oregon coastline? An assortment of beautiful and impactful shots featuring a wide array of landscapes, flora and fauna?

There will always be a need for this content in the publishing/creative world. But the need pales in comparison with the type of shots buyers are clamouring for. Shots that can arguably be more difficult to organize and accomplish successfully. And no, it’s not of rainy days in Bend…

It’s all about LIFESTYLE baby

Yes, Lifestyle. Buyers are constantly looking for shots that convey Oregon ‘lifestyle’. What exactly does that mean? It means PEOPLE, young and old - old and young, experiencing countless activities in Oregon. Shopping. Hiking. Biking. Swimming. Kayaking. Walking their dog. Strolling through a park. Entering a restaurant. Eating, napping, gawking, driving - you name it. The field is wide open for the photographer looking to build a sellable portfolio of stock expressing the nebulous concept of LIFESTYLE.

Do you feel like you could use a guide in your quest to build a stock library? Please contact us - we would love to help you!

Microsoft has been busy in the realm of photography recently.

Not only have they been actively promoting the scRGB color space and introducing a new photo file format, the software giant’s engineers have just unveiled something called Photosynth to the world.

Still at the “technology preview” stage (which means that you can’t download/buy it yet), Microsoft Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

Go watch the slick promo video to get a better idea of what Photosynth actually does.

From the Alien Skin press release:

“Alien Skin Software today released Blow Up, an all-new plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

Designed for both photographers and graphic artists, Blow Up offers the highest quality image enlargement available. Better than Photoshop bicubic and other third party solutions, Blow Up preserves the crisp lines and smooth colors in a source image. It can scale images up to 3600% — 6 times in each dimension — with no stairstep, halo, or fringe artifacts.

The software sells for $199 and is available for download on the Alien Skin website.”

Full Story here.

(Note: Obsidian Stock does not endorse any product or software it hasn’t thoroughly tested in-house beforehand. Any photographers who have tested a product though, are invited to send us their results and observations so we can share them with the rest of our readership.)

Here’s a little pick-me-up for every photographer out there:

“Looking through photo albums makes you happier than chocolate, music, TV or even your favorite drink, according to research revealed today by Orange. The results show that the mood of those viewing photographs was consistently lifted by 11% during mood measuring tests whilst the groups who tried to eat, listen, watch, or drink their way to happiness registered a mere 1% increase.

The tests demonstrate that looking through personal photo albums produces an improvement across all measurements including a person’s sense of relaxation, brightness, calmness and alertness and even their sense of being valued and popular - resulting in a higher happiness score overall.

In contrast, the pick-me-ups people commonly rely on were only successful in helping them relax: Wine by 14%, chocolate by 8%. Photo albums were proven to be a far more effective way of unwinding, with subjects recording an average relaxation score of 22%.”

Full Story here.

In today’s freewheeling world of online blogs, forums and digital communities, it’s easy to view and critique another photographers work - but how would the photographers we consider masters today have held up?

This satirical blogpost explores the interesting question what kind of comments, critiques and suggestions viewers would have posed to the great and legendary photographers of yesteryear - had they posted their work online.

This is way cool:

FrameFree Technologies today announced the launch of FrameFree Studio, the first digital imaging software that allows for the creation of compelling movies from still photographs without a steep learning curve or compromising quality at any bandwidth.

Built on the world’s most advanced pixel-matching and interpolation engine, FrameFree Studio starts with two digital still images of any resolution, and through analysis, interpolation and morphing, automatically provides interactivity and smooth motion between them. The result is a completely new medium and style of visual expression.

A free 14-day Trial Version of FrameFree Express is available for immediate download from http://www.framefree.com.

OpenRaw.org, an organization dedicated to pushing camera manufacturers to publicly document their RAW image formats, has released its 2006 survey of photographers and imaging professionals.

Albeit long, it’s an interesting document that showcases the concerns of people in the industry about ever-changing, manufacturer-proprietary RAW formats and its potential pitfalls.

More than two-thirds of the 19,207 participants expressed concern that they won’t be able to open or edit raw files created by older digital cameras. The most telling statistic is the 90% of respondents who agreed: ‘Once a digital image is written to a file by a camera, data in all parts of the image file should belong to the photographer who captured the image. Camera makers should publish full and open descriptions of all parts of the raw image files their camera produce.’

What *is* the RAW problem, exactly?

From OpenRAW.org: In the short history of digital photography, manufacturers have released numerous cameras with constantly evolving RAW formats. This has lead to the existence of a vast number of RAW “dialects,” even within each major brand, that store image and camera setting data in a different manner.

In some cases, manufacturers have even encrypted the data within newer RAW files. Intentionally or not, this encryption has placed full access to the images stored in these files out of reach of the photographers that took them. Unless, of course, they limit themselves to tools sold by the camera manufacturer.

To date, this vast number of RAW formats has been hidden by the transparent support offered in RAW converter software, provided by both the camera manufacturer and various third parties. At the time of writing, the open source dcraw converter currently supports more than 200 formats. However, as manufacturers lose interest in their discontinued products and drop support for them, the true impact of all of these “dialects” will be felt.

Photographers will find their older images inaccessible, as future software versions lose support for older cameras. In the worst cases, entire brands may disappear, as has already happened with Contax.

The OpenRAW Solution: The goal of OpenRAW is to encourage image preservation and give creative choice of how images are processed to the creators of the images. To this end, we advocate open documentation of information about the how the raw data is stored and the camera settings selected by the photographer.

More info is here.

Most people (photographers and their clients alike) seem at times a little fuzzy on what copyright really means, and how to deal with it.

In today’s Washington Post, Dave Johnson sums up what copyright is, details out the various levels of copyright protection for your images, and the actions you can take if a violation occurs.The article, “Your Photos, Your Rights, and the Law” is a good read if you want to start clearing out those cobwebs in terms of what is legal. Recommended for Obsidian Stock photographers and clients alike.

In my other blog, I’ve written today about a recent gig, photographing Pilates exercises for a friend of mine’s brandnew pilates studio in Bend.

Short of recreating the entire article, I thought I’d rather link to the page where I detail the technique I used to create the motion effects.
Try it for yourself!