photography

Ever wondered what the inside of your waffle maker looks like? Yes? No? Well, even if not, you might be surprised how interesting small electric appliances are when you take them apart.

Brittny Badger has produced a wonderful series of still-life photos of disassembled small electric appliances, such as a waffle iron, electric knife, and a can opener. Rather than the usual slapdash tear-down photos one sees of the latest tech gadget, these are artfully composed images that show the inner complexity of mundane objects that we typically take for granted.

As my colleague Denise Gershbein says:

With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's laying on the Web subscription message really thick. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The standard Organize, Edit, Create, and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared with the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $49.99 Plus memberships for Photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup, and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.) And that's too bad, because Photoshop Elements remains a very nice midrange photo editor, but all of these bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.

The program's main advantage is that it's cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome--improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.

Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera, and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.… Read more

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The manufactured quirk, the out-of-the-box individuality--Urban Outfitters is becoming like Target for hipsters. You can get your ironic clothing, mod bedspread, dirty reading material, slightly dinged-up but brightly colored coffee table, wall mirror (in which you pretend not to narcissistically check your intentionally mussed hair)--and now, your retro-hip plastic camera, too. At this point, Urban just needs to start selling organic avocados and MGMT CDs and it'll truly be a one-stop shop for hipsterdom.

But I digress. Heard of pinhole photography? Of course you have, you went to a liberal arts school and took a whole class on … Read more

My favorite types of Web apps are those that try to emulate the look and feel of software. Cutting-edge UI can be useful, but sometimes you just want something that feels familiar. In the case of Pixlr, a new browser-based photo-editing tool, the target is clearly Adobe's Photoshop.

Pixlr lets you grab photos from your hard drive and edit them in a software-like environment. Included are some advanced tools like customizable brushes and multiple layers. Most people won't need these features, but they're there--and free of charge. There's also a small collection of filters and adjustments. … Read more

Developers at the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have conceived a system called Photo Tourism that will allow the viewing of large photo collections in 3D. For example, if you have 20 photographs of the Eiffel Tower taken from various angles, the algorithms will map them together, and as you drag across the image, the picture "turns" and shows you different angles of the structure.

This is achieved by using a technique called Orbit Stabilization, which fixes "the orbit across all angles for a more consistent view." The result? Smoother transition and a more realistic … Read more

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If you like Flickr's explore section but want something with a little more personalization, you should check out Photoree. It's a photo browser that lets you rate a photo up or down like what StumbleUpon does for Web sites. As you continue to rate photos, the engine will tune itself to your tastes--hopefully spewing out more shots you'd find pleasing.

The engine says it needs 100 ratings from you before it can start figuring out what you like and what you don't. In that time you'll probably see a huge chunk of landscape shots and … Read more

Microsoft has always been rather strident on the topic of copyright infringement, as you may have noticed, which makes tale of its "Iconic Britain" photo contest all the more astonishing.

The competition was designed as part of the marketing campaign around Windows Live Image Search, with Nikon as the prize partner. Unlike most photographic competitions, which tend to involve photographers submitting their own work (crazy, I know), this one invited entrants to search for other people's online pictures, then submit the ones they felt were iconic British stuff, in the hope of winning a Nikon camera. As … Read more