The Obsidian Stock Blog

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue has an interesting article today about Nikon’s 18-200 millimeter “superzoom” VR lens.

He raves about the VR (vibration reduction) feature (Nikon says that the VR on this lens lets people take sharp pictures ‘at shutter speeds as many as 4 stops slower than they ordinarily could shoot.’ But I’d put it more bluntly. I’d say that this VR is—what’s the technical term?—magic.) and enlightens about the controversy of a couple of major camera manufacturers’ battle to even include a VR feature right into their camera bodies.

Interested in buying that sweet little lens? Get in line. Even B&H is sold out.

Oh, and something Pogue doesn’t mention: the lens sports a 3.5-5.6 aperture.

From the wonderful new world of podcasting comes a special gem today:

Bend designer Brian Hinderberger interviews Obsidian Stock co-owner and CTO Lance Hardy about the company, our approach to stock photography, and the Artist Directory.

To listen to the podcast, go here.

Obsidian Stock welcomes our newest contributor - Katy Newell.

Born in Portland, Katy has always had a passion for the Northwest outdoors. Though she has traveled extensively through Europe, South America, the Caribbean and beyond, she has lived in Oregon nearly her entire life and will always consider it home.

Her photographic training is entirely self-inflicted, giving her a wonderful untethered freedom in the areas of technique and composition. Katy loves incorporating natural light and negative space into her work, applying these elements liberally to her favorite subjects - rock climbing, macro photography, extreme weather, natural/outdoor portraiture, dilapidated buildings, indigenous people, and scenes from her travels abroad.

She now lives in Crooked River, within sight of beautiful Smith Rock where she spends most of her free time climbing and taking photos.

Go check out her awesome images.

The Central Oregon business publication, Cascade Business News, published an article on Obsidian Stock in its July 19 issue. The article covers the Press Release issued by Obsidian Stock, announcing the official launch of the company along with outlining the mission and goals of Obsidian Stock. You can view the article in pdf format here.

Via DP Review.com:

“Nikon Japan has started a teaser campaign promoting a new compact 10.2 megapixel digital SLR which will be announced on August 9th.

We can only guess that this would be the natural successor to the D70/D70s. The teaser gives away few details other than the fact that the camera will have 10.2 megapixels.”

See the teaser here.

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.

Obsidian Stock is thrilled to welcome world-renowned travel and nature photographer Christian Heeb as our newest contributor!

Christian and his wife Regula are both Swiss-born, have travelled the world - and yet have chosen to make Central Oregon their permanent home.

Their extraordinary talent and adventurous spirit has led them to travel the world and publish over 90 books, with subjects ranging from Southern Africa, Marocco, France, North America and the Caribbean. Their stories have appeared in travel guides and magazines worldwide, and they are published in up to 15 calendars per year.

Numerous galleries, publishers and international agencies represent their extensive photographic files from around the world, but they have chosen Obsidian Stock to represent their Central Oregon imagery.

And of course when they’re not on the road, they relax from their exhaustive pace on their beautiful ranch home in the high desert of Bend.

See more of Christian’s work right 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.