Industry Blogs

Could photographers be clearer in wanting their images sent wirelessly & immediately to iPads and similar tablets, turning these devices into extensions of the back of the camera?  I seriously doubt it.

At the moment you can kinda-sorta do some interesting things, as long as you have a traditional Mac/PC in the loop.  Here’s a 3-minute demo from Brent Pearson:

More details about the setup are on Brent’s site. [Via]

Relying a regular computer largely defeats the purpose of using the tablet, of course.  Photogs want to be shooting with a tablet-wielding assistant on the red carpet; checking lighting on set by reviewing raw image data; and just chimping on vacation.  The whole point is to avoid lugging a 5-8lb. laptop & to carry a ~1lb tablet instead.

Here’s hoping that device makers are working on a Bonjour-like solution that’ll let cameras, computers, phones, and other devices in close proximity locate one another, then exchange data (stills, live video streams, etc.).  If nothing else I’d stop wishing that my iPad included a camera for capturing raw materials for sketching, as I’d instead just use my phone as an extension of the tablet.

I’m pleased to say that the Pixel Bender Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop CS5 has been revised to address a number of bugs discovered after the initial release.  It’s ready for download from Adobe Labs. [Via Zorana Gee]

I began a solo week of Mr. Mom duty in the park yesterday, trying so hard not to be this guy:

In six work days at Adobe, Margot has logged more miles than I have in a year; madness. Go get ‘em, champ.

Hi Gang: I’m back, and as you might imagine—I had just an amazing time! I met so many great people; I got to teach 4 sessions in the conference tracks, and three on the Expo floor, I had meetings, I went to parties, I got to play with my band, I stayed up way too late, and just had a ball.

Rather than giving you a thousands words, here are some pictures that tell the story better than I can (photos by official PSW photographers Brad Moore, Drew Gurian, and Josh Bradley).

Above: During David Ziser’s “Live Wedding Shoot” Pre-Conference Workshop

Above: The NAPP Photo Safari on location; taught by Joe McNally, Moose Peterson, and Crew.

Above: The proud winner of an Apple iPad, during the “Faux Olympics” during “Photoshop Midnight Madness!” (Our way after-hours session just for fun).

Above: Vanelli gets the crowd going before the doors to Midnight Madness open.

Above: Talking Twitter: Scott Bourne and Rod Harlan during our Twitter class on the Business Track

Above: Hey, isn’t that frequent commenter Mike Reeves there right of center?

Above: Deke McClelland during his “Channels & Masks” workshop

Above: Laurie Excel showing how she uses OnOne Software’s Photoshop plug-ins in her workflow during an Expo Floor presentation.

Above: Rod, Scott & Terry posing with another Midnight Madness Winner! (She won a custom-made NAPP baseball jacket, with two tickets to Photoshop World Orlando in the pocket!).

Above: Larry Becker is choosing contestants for a Midnight Madness game, and she’s yelling “Pick me. Pick me!” He picked her!

Above: Intellectual Property Attorney Ed Greenberg (front) with photographer’s rights advocate Jack Reznicki, (seated) during their class for photographers on how to protect your images (from our new business track).

Above: Amazing wedding photographers Cliff Mautner in one of his classes during his first time teaching at Photoshop World. He totally rocked it!

Joe McNally during his live class on shooting portraits with small off-camera flash. Here he’s taking a portrait of Adobe’s Russell Brown (follow this link to see the results from the shoot above over on Joe’s blog).

Above: Artist Fay Sirkis during her session on Painting with Photoshop CS5.

Above: McNally doing a live demo at the Manfrotto Distribution booth on the Expo Floor.

Above: Web guru Janine Warner during one of her conference sessions.

Above: A group pic of the instructors featured in our after hours “The Art of Digital Photography” roundtable. L to R: Joe McNally, Jay Maisel, Vincent Versace, Julieanne Kost, Moose Peterson, Joe Glyda, Jim DiVitale, and John Paul Caponigro.

Above: One of the way cool photo set-ups created by the creative team at Westcott, so you could just walk up and shoot. I don’t want to spoil it, because I’m doing a special post on Friday just about this, but this was coolest thing on our show floor ever, and attendees were over-the-top loving his (you’re seeing just one small part. More Friday).

Above: Adobe had their best booth ever, with computers running every single version of Photoshop ever (museum style), on the outside of the booth, and on the inside, an intimate presentation area attendees get up close with the people behind the product.

Above: My band, “Big Electric Cat” during the attendee Party at the House of Blues. (that’s Kalebra to my left, Felix Nelson in between on bass, and Scott Stahley back on the drums. You’ll see lead guitar player Tony Llanes in just a moment).

Above: Another booth on the floor that was drawing huge crowds was Dell’s “Photoshop Wars” presentation, where attendees, and instructors, battled it out. Very well done, and loads of fun (plus, Dell gave away lots of Dell monitors!). That’s Corey Barker and Larry Becker above.

Above: There’s Tony, rocking the House of Blues (with Felix on bass behind).

Above: Russell Preston Brown doing a presentation in Wacom’s booth.

Above: Joe Glyda during the free one-on-one Portfolio Reviews (note: a lot of people brought their portfolio on their iPad this year. Cool!).

Above: Veer draws a crowd to their Expo Floor booth.

Above: Soaking it all in during one of the conference sessions.

Above: Peter Bauer during his induction into the Photoshop Hall of Fame

Above: Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayan shares the crowd’s passion for Photoshop during the opening keynote.

Above: Adobe VP John Loiacono, Me (obviously very excited), and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan grab a photo op during the opening keynote.

Above: Photoshop Product Manager Bryan Hughes talks to the crowd about NAPP’s involvement in Adobe’s “Just Do It” program that brought loads of tweaks, enhancements, and improvements to existing features in Photoshop CS5.

Above: Adobe’s Worldwide Creative Suite Evangelist Terry White during his live demo during the opening Keynote.

Above: Adobe VP “Johnny L” kicks off Adobe’s keynote presentation.

Above: NAPP’s Creative Director Felix Nelson gets made-up backstage by Make Up Artist Shelley Giard for our KISS parody (he’s got Crop Tools for his eye makeup). I was the Move Tool. Matt was the Clone Stamp, and Dave Cross was the Hand tool.

Above: The doors open for the Opening Keynote, and the crowd gets settled in.

Above: After the opening parody of VH-1’s “Where are they Now?” show, chronicling the history of the fictitious KISS-like band “NAPP” the curtain drops (kabuki style) and boys play “I want to Photoshop All Nite…..and Retouch Every Day!” live! (with song lyrics captioned on screen, as seen here).

Above: The band in mid song. Full Disclosure: (a) Yes, we were really playing live! (b) That’s Felix on the far right on bass and me playing the “Flying V” in the center (c) Although Dave Cross was the lead guitarist in the video, and Matt was the drummer, Dave and Matt don’t really play, so we used a bit of trickery. Thanks to the make-up, we were able to substitute Big Electric Cat drummer Scott Stahley and guitarist Tony Llanes in their place. We made sure the camera guys never did close-ups on either Tony or Scotty, so the crowd just assumed it was Dave and Matt (and we heard that again and again throughout the conference: “Man, I never knew Dave Cross played such an awesome lead guitar!”).

Above: NPS (Nikon Professional Services) was the official sponsor of our “Real World Concert Photography” Pre-Conference workshop, and the class instructors (L) Scott Diussa and (R) Alan Hess had the crowd judge the best overall image from the live shoot part of the workshop, and then awarded the winner a Nikon D300s and lens!

Above: Senior Portrait artist (and kick butt instructor), James Schmelzer during his “Quality of Light” Workshop.

Above: Richard Harrington during his class on how to shoot and edit video taken with your DSLR.

Above: Checking out the new gear at the Really Right Stuff booth.

Above: Zack Arias during his class on things you need to know to be a professional photographer.

Above: MPIX Rocks! (see his shirt!). MPIX sponsored our live taping of Photoshop User TV on the Expo Floor, and we had Joe Dellasega from MPIX on as our guest, and he gave away loads of cool goodies—and gave a special one-day only discount to everyone watching. (Hey, I just noticed—that’s one of my portraits [football player], hanging in their booth. Sweet!).

Above: During the closing ceremonies I introduced Julie Stephenson, our Conference Director, and the crowd gave her a spontaneous standing ovation. Julie does a truly amazing job, and it shows!

Above: Photographer Michael “MJ” Green was helping out over at the Westcott Photo Shootout.

Above: John Paul Caponigro connects during one of his class presentations.

Above: Ben Willmore during one of his sessions, lit by the light of his laptop.

Above: The Father of Modern Color Correction, Dan Margulis, challenges his students with advanced classes on Lab, CMYK and Curves.

Above: Dave Cross, Canadian at Large, during one of his Expo Floor classes.

Above: Johnny L poses a question we don’t want to know the answer to.

Above: Heading back from class. Nothing else to do. Ho hum. Oh wait…this is Vegas!!!!

That’s a quick visual tour of this year’s Photoshop World. Our video team is putting together a video tour of the experience, but they have hours and hours of footage to go through, but I’ll let you know when they get it finished (probably in a week or so).

Thanks to everybody who helped make this a record-breaking show for us in more ways than one. By the way—-if this looks like a lot of fun, you can sign up later this week for next year’s show, coming to Orlando, Florida in late March. Hope I’ll see you there!

Like yesterday’s repost of Jasmine Star, I’ve had a giant volume of requests asking to repost THIS recent episode of chasejarvisLIVE with National Geographic photographer of Food and Culture AND Barnaby Dorfman, Foodista.com’s founder and CEO, to my YouTube channel. It’s my pleasure to get it out there for those who missed it live.

Penny DeLosSantos is a force of nature, having traveled the world over on assignments targeting food and culture. Hear her story here. Also not to be missed, whether you’re into food and culture OR entrepreneurialism get the amazing story of Foodista.com founder Barnaby Dorfman. Now in his 5th successful startup with this amazing online encyclopedia of food, there’s plenty to learn from him.

[Lastly, these two vids have been live for a couple days already...if you want to be first to get this content when it goes live, best to subscribe to my YouTube channel here.]

From Adobe Creative Suite User Group of San Jose organizer Sally Cox:

Join us online for our new webinar series, starting with “Photoshop: From the Ground Up – Part 1″ on September 23, beginning at 6 pm. All levels of expertise can benefit from this free series.

These online meetings will cover all major aspects of Photoshop, beginning with the basics.

Here’s what we will cover in detail in “Photoshop: From the Ground Up – Part One”:

• User Interface
• Basic Keyboard Shortcuts
• Terminology and basics concepts of image manipulation with Photoshop

Then, we will break into online “groups” and offer two sessions, for each of the following:

• Toolbar – review of the basic tools and how to use them
• History Panel – how and why to use this in your workflow
• Selections – choosing the right tool for each situation
• Layers – what are they, why you need to use them
• Working with Text – formatting and styling
• Layer Styles – creating and editing beautiful imagery

• Huge:
  • British scientists are using a dried-out lake bed as a massive white balance card for satellites.
  • “The Big Unit” is to become 7-foot-tall rock concert photographer. (Presumably it’ll go better than his career in the Audubon Society.)
• The Big Picture features a great set of silhouette photos. [Via]
• Telling a photographer that his camera takes great pictures is like telling a chef that his oven makes great meals. [Via]

Today is Labor Day in the United States, and our offices are closed, so we’re taking today off here at the blog but I’ll be back tomorrow with some after-show coverage from Photoshop World.

By the way: I looked up Labor Day in WikiPedia, and here are a few interesting tidbits about this American Holiday:

Traditionally, Labor Day is celebrated by most Americans as the symbolic end of the summer. The holiday is often regarded as a day of rest and parties.

The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City.

In U.S. sports, Labor Day marks the beginning of the NFL and college football seasons.

(NOTE: It was the start of my football shooting season, as I shot the LSU Tigers vs. North Carolina Tar Heels game Saturday night from the sidelines, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta with my buddy (and guest blogger) Paul Abell (I’m in the Atlanta Airport as I write this). I’ll be posting some shots on Thursday.

Have a great Labor Day today. Don’t forget to rest and party!

Planning ahead is a good thing, and I always try to pre-think a job before I head out. It gives me ideas to fall back on if nothing jumps out at me at the location.

But you can pre-plan things too far. So much that they blind you to better ideas and leave you banging your head against the front windshield even as you drive away from the assignment.

That's exactly what happened to me last week when I was assigned to shoot one of the coolest pieces of tech I have ever seen.
__________


You are looking at a real, prosthetic limb in the photo above. But not just any prosthetic limb, as this limb has quite a bit of special sauce.

For one thing, much like your own mostly-dark-meat arm it can move in 22 different ways -- brushless motors everywhere. It has a ton of processing power inside the hand. Not a lot of space there, but you want the thing to be modular with the smarts at the end. That means you can attach it to partial limbs.

Much like Popeye, this thing has its power in the forearm. That is where the user-replaceable, rechargeable battery is. And it has power to burn. It can curl 50 lbs. That's more than my arm will do.

Oh, and did I mention it is designed to be controlled by the human brain? Just like in Firefox, where Clint Eastwood has to think in Russian to fly the advanced fighter jet he just stole. It gets impulses from the brain and provides neural feedback so your brain kinda knows what is going on with it.

My first thought when I saw it: Where is the rest of the cyborg it was attached to, and where do you have to shoot it to kill it. (People always aim for the head in the movies, but this thing has its brain in the hand. So it pays to ask.)

The folks at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab hate it when people write stuff like that, because they really are not trying to hatch a T-virus. (Of course, that's also what SkyNet said.) They just want to give high-level function back to people who have lost a limb.

And they are doing it, too. Live, clinical trials within a year with these things, thanks to a $34 million dollar DARPA grant. Sorry, Steve Austin. $6MM doesn't really cut it anymore.

So you can probably already tell how stoked I was when I got the assignment to shoot this thing for a local biz pub. And the fanboy stuff only got worse when I got to the lab.

Fortunately, I knew exactly what I wanted to do -- all planned in advance. I had a cool idea for a portrait of Mike McLoughlin, the head of the Modular Prosthetic Limb project. And I also wanted to get a sexy product shot of the arm itself.



For a variety of reasons, the portrait I visualized wasn't coming together. So I did the photo above which was perfectly serviceable for the assignment, but not what I had hoped. Then I circled the wagons and worked the product shot to salvage at least one of my preconceptions.
__________



The lighting was pretty simple -- on axis light with an Orbis and four SB-800s spread around the floor to create highlights along the edges. On the clock face, the wrap lights were about at 2:00, 5:00, 8:00 and 11:00. Power levels were all about the same by the time the lights hit the arm. (I cranked up the Orbis a little to compensate for the light loss.)

Except for the Orbis, everything was hard light. This gave me a lot of shape and highlights. The Orbis mostly erased the shadows and makes the whole thing look strangely soft.

In the setup shot above, you can see the distances involved. You cannot see all of the flashes, but the highlights on the floor will point you to them. Dave Kile (who was helping me) piggy-backed my flashes with a channel-1 PW as I pulled the ring away between shots. (I was shooting through the ring for the actual shot.)

Background was a cheap poster board, in a complementary color. I'll usually bring three or four different colors if I am gonna do a small product shot. Way easier/cheaper than background paper.
__________


While I was on location, I was thinking that the portrait I wanted which did not happen. But at least I got the product shot I visualized. It wasn't until I got back to the car and was reviewing photos until the photo I missed hit me.

The portrait I wanted would have been cool. But the iconic picture was right behind my subject the whole time.

I should have shot a still life at the workbench.



You know, just like any other DIY hacker's work area -- soldering iron, pliers, a smattering of little parts and a couple cyborg limbs that mark an amazing leap in bio-mechanical science just sitting around. Static, but a great narrative.

I am such an idiot for missing it.

Of course, I even fawned over the workbench while I was there. But I was so blinded by the pictures already in my head (especially 'cause one of them was giving me fits) that I did not see it.

Pre-planning is not a terrible thing, and I am not ready to give it up. But you can bet I will be on guard for awhile against stupidly missing found pictures because too much thought is being given over to the preconceptions.
__________


Read more::

:: APL to Test Thought-Controlled Prosthetic Limb ::

New: Strobist Index

• Cover lovers:
  • David Pearson spent a large chunk of last year working on a fantastic series of covers for Cormac McCarthy’s books.
  • PSDTuts rounds up “50+ Kick-butt Book Cover Designs.”
• German wheels:
  • Janis Joplin’s 1965 Porsche art car is far out. (And here I thought she was into Benzes.)
  • Jenny Holzer comes, very oddly enough, to a set of Keds. I remain much more drawn to her BMW art car. [Via Margot Nack]

Hi friends. Lots of requests to re-post this episode of chasejarvisLIVE with Jasmine Star to my YouTube channel. So here ’tis. Those of you in the USA on the 3-day weekend celebrating Labor Day should find some time to take a peek.

Reminder that her EPIC 5 day Wedding Photography course is downloadable for a bargain $149 over here at creativeLIVE.com.

Also, chasejarvisLIVE featuring National Geographic photographer, culture and food maven, Penny DeLosSantos as well as Foodista.com founder Barnaby Dorfman will re-post tomorrow…

[Lastly, these vids have been live for a couple days already...if you want to be first to get this content when it goes live, best to subscribe to my YouTube channel here.]

A couple of indispensable blogs were posted this week. First, John Loengard’s guest blog on Scott Kelby’s Photoshop Insider.

This I would suggest as a must read for photographers and picture editors alike. Tremendous economic pressures over time have fractured and adversely affected the historic and important relationship good picture editors have with the photographers they employ. This post, and John’s well reasoned and direct advocacy for the role of the photog in the world of publications, is very well taken.

The other is up on Strobist.

Greg Heisler burst onto the magazine scene around 1980 or so, and single handedly changed magazine photography. I am not overstating the case. His singular sense of light and color impacted so thoroughly that just about every picture editor out there was lining their magazine up for pictures that looked like Greg’s. He had lots of imitators (myself included) who devoured his stuff, looking at catch lights to see where he put what kind of flashes, and wondering what gel pack had produced the vibrant color palette that attended his pix. I could stand at magazine rack and look at a display of a couple hundred mags, and pick out a Heisler cover.

I have worked with Rudy, and can thoroughly corroborate what Greg breezily refers to as the “moment of truth,” on this shoot. This cover was done of Rudy at his personal zenith, and when a public figure is at such a point, their handlers are like a very effective offensive line in football, blocking all charges. The behind the scenes negotiating just to get Rudy to top of the Rock must have been intense. Then, of course, once he gets there, is gonna go up on the edge of the roof? Rudy’s actually pretty cool about that stuff once you get him to the location. Pretty down to earth, or edge of the building type of guy.

The planning of the light is very cool to listen in on. So is the lesson that could be easily glossed over. Research. A week of going to the location at the exact time of day to determine the look and feel of the light. This was an intense collaboration between an extremely talented photog, a picture editor who did and said all the right things to get the subject on board, and a magazine willing to go the extra mile to get something done right. This was the correct mix of craft, obsession, funding and preparation.

This photo is memorable, and memorable isn’t easy. You generally don’t get memorable from a $50 stock pickup.  Rudy was an icon at that moment in time, and thus demanded an appropriately iconic photographer. That combination is the reason we are still looking at this picture.

More tk….

Liquify + Pixel Bender: Nifty.

[Via]

At Photoshop World this week, performance testing lead Adam Jerugim presented a performance guide with hardware recommendations and information about the CS5 performance preferences.  I’ve put his notes in this post’s extended entry.

Operating Systems: Mac OS 10.6.4 and Windows 7 64-bit

CPU: Intel Core i7/Xeon or AMD Phenom II/Opteron with 4 cores. More than 4 cores gives diminishing returns.

RAM: Enough to keep Efficiency readout at 100%. If Efficiency is low (<95%), adding RAM will provide biggest benefit. 4GB will cover most digital photography uses. 8GB leaves room for other apps and fits huge documents in RAM.

Video Card: Any modern card with at least 512MB VRAM; 1GB if doing heavy 3D work.

Disk: Use a separate disk for Photoshop scratch. If you spend a lot of time opening / saving large data files, another separate disk for data files will speed that up. Faster disks are better. RAID0 is faster. SSD is faster yet. RAID0 of SSDs is fastest but super expensive. If you have plenty of RAM (meaning your Efficiency readout is 95% or more), separate/faster disks for scratch provide minimal benefit. If Efficiency readout is low, a separate SSD for Photoshop scratch will be a big win. SSD boot volume will speed booting and app launch, but not Photoshop operations.

Memory Usage: this should be no higher than 70% on systems running 32bit Photoshop or with less than 4GB of total physical RAM. On systems with 8GB or more, use 70% if you plan on running other applications at the same time as PS, or higher (up to 90%) if you only plan on using PS on your system.

Efficiency %: can be found in the document window drop-down options. Operations fit in RAM when this 95% or greater.

History & Cache: if you work with small documents with lots of layers, start with the Tall and Thin button (which will set cache levels = 2, tile size = 128K/132K). If you work with large documents with few layers, try the Big and Flat button (which will set cache levels = 6, tile size = 1024K/1028K). Using more history states uses more scratch disk space.  More history states may also use more RAM, particularly when running actions or scripts on large documents. If you see Efficiency drop below 95%, especially after running actions, try reducing history states or adding RAM.

Scratch Disks: a separate drive for Photoshop scratch disk will avoid slowdowns from Photoshop and the OS trying to access the disk at the same time. If your Efficiency number often drops below 95%, the gain can be large. Faster disks are better. A RAID0 array is faster, an SSD faster still. If using a RAID or SSD, try setting the Tile Size to 1024K – AMD CPUs prefer 132K / 1028K sizes, but 128K and especially 1024K are more efficient for RAID and SSD use regardless of CPU type.

GPU Settings: you can change GPU settings by clicking on the Advanced Settings button. For more more modern video cards there will be three options: Basic, Normal, Advanced. Changes to this setting will only take effect after PS restart, and would be worth experimenting with if painting performance is sluggish.

Heh heh. This is doubly funny as I watch this in a hotel room with the actual Bryan O’Neil Hughes. (Note: Contains some minor nudity & dirty hand gestures, in case that sort of thing offends you.)

In case the embedded video doesn’t work for you, here it is on its original page.

I get notions, and they stay with me. One has been, for a while now, to come up with a decent portrait of Russell Brown, the wonderfully mad genius of Photoshop. Dr. Brown, as he is sometimes called, is a visual guru who combines the madcap energy of The Absent Minded Professor with an extraordinary ability to explain and teach the wilder, denser paths of that wonderfully woolly thicket known as Photoshop. The Senior Creative Director at Adobe Systems, he is also an Emmy winner for his instructional shows that explain Photoshop to the masses. When he’s in full cry, his knowledge of Photoshop and what it can do is so vast, to me, he might as well be speaking rapid fire Korean, so little of it do I understand.

Russell, whirling dervish that he is, could only hold still for a few portraits, but we managed to pull together a couple frames during my small flash seminar here at PSW in Vegas. I just really enjoy interesting faces, and the prospect of bringing appropriate light to them. This combo is a 24″ EzyBox Hot shoe soft box, with a silver Tri-grip reflector for a background rim. Two SB 900 units. 70-200mm lens. Worked the second one with a tiny bit of desaturation.

Great face, lots of fun. Having a blast at PSW. Great crowds, great people, and a wonderfully talented group of instructors. I wish that just by sitting in the instructors lounge I could somehow soak some of this stuff up by osmosis.

More tk….

Hey everyone, Brad here again with some more shots from the first day of Photoshop World Las Vegas. Images from the opening Keynote, various events throughout the day, and the After Hours Party at House of Blues (photos by Josh Bradley, Drew Gurian, and myself):

RC Concepcion getting the crowd to their feet with a t-shirt toss before the keynote

She’s a big Scott Kelby fan

Scott and the NAPP band open up the keynote with “I Wanna Photoshop All Night (And Retouch Every Day)”

Adobe Senior VP & GM of Digital Media Solutions Business Unit John Loiacono (Johnny L) and his “security detail” take the stage for the keynote presentation

Russell “Presto” Brown demonstrates the magic Photoshop CS5

Johnny L presents Scott with a copy of his could-have-been best-selling book, “Down and Dirty Trixie”

Scott poses for a picture with Johnny L and Adobe President & CEO Shantanu Narayen

Shantanu Narayen addresses the crowd during the keynote

A full class checks out Scott’s new Down and Dirty Tricks class

Moose Peterson gives a one-on-one portfolio review

Big Electric Cat performs during the After Hours Party at House of Blues

Scott and Tony Llanes rock the After Hours Party at HoB

Scott Diussa joins Big Electric Cat on stage for a song during the After Hours Party at HoB

Tony Llanes plays during the After Hours Party at HoB

A reader recently asked whether there’s a running list of lens profiles (enabling automatic correction of distortions) included in Lightroom 3.x & Camera Raw 6.x.  Why yes, yes there is. [Via Tom Hogarty]

• As President Obama announces the official withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq, the NY Times presents an interactive photography retrospective, Drawing Down and Moving Ahead in Iraq.
• The Denver Post starts with images of the withdrawal, then moves back to feature photography from the course of the war.  Rough and gripping, and essential to remember.

Hey gang, Brad here with a quick bit of news on David Ziser’s Captured By The Light 2010 Tour.

David is kicking the tour off in just a few days in Phoenix on September 7, then heading to Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, and a bunch of other cities between now and November 4.

During the event, David will talk about lighting, composition, lenses, and more to help you get dramatic and intriguing portraits, as well as the best software and shortcuts for getting the job done quickly in post to save you time and money.

Not only will you learn tons about wedding photography (and photography in general), but you’ll get a free DVD, handbook, and the chance to win other great prizes (including Photoshop World passes)!

If you’ve read David’s book on wedding photography, Captured By The Light, you know that he is the go-to guy for anything you want to know on the subject. And if you haven’t read it, then check out these customer reviews (over 50 five-star ratings!) to see what you’ve been missing out on.

David’s coming to 20 cities throughout the U.S. between now and November 4, so check here for the full list to see if he’s coming to yours.

It’s only $79 for the whole day, and when you register, be sure to use the promo code CBLNAPP10 to get $20 off. This is one tour that you do not want to miss!