Nick Didlick is a professional photographer who not only shoots, but teaches the art as well. You could easily be persuaded to title Nick as a photojournalist, due to the tremendous work he’s done in that area all over the world since the late 70’s. He’s shot journalistic work for all sorts of publications, including the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The Times of London, The Sydney Morning Herald and Stern, Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone Magazines. While these are certainly in that vein, Nick has expanded his interests to encompass more than that, and has most recently delved into the fields of editorial and commercial work.

He’s become one of my favorite people to listen to when it comes to photography, and so it was a great pleasure to be able to fire off a few questions to him and get some insight into his view of the world of modern photography, with its abundance of changes and permutations thanks to the digital revolution. Here is that interview. » MORE

Stuck In Customs is a blog run by photographer and writer Trey Ratcliff. Ratcliff is a photographer who has drawn a huge fan base strictly from online attention, and his blog as well as his photography have won numerous awards. He’s regularly featured on sites like Digg and Reddit, and his Flickr page has attracted a huge number of views.

Trey specializes in HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, and as you would expect, he’s quite good at it. His photographic exploits span the world, from Chernobyl to Dresden, from Mumbai to Amish country.

In his “other” life Trey works as the CEO for John Galt Games, but on the web, he’s become the poster child for HDR… so much so that he’s created a popular tutorial regarding HDR (which he wanted me to share).

Despite his busy schedule, we were fortunate enough to have a quick conversation with Trey Ratcliff about his photography. Here’s that interview. » MORE

I know this isn’t still photo related, but it does involve some pretty serious lighting considerations given that the whole thing is done in one take. This video gives a glimpse at the production work behind the very clever music video from Canadian singer/songwriter Feist. If you’re a lighting geek, you might enjoy it.

You’ve like seen a portion of the Feist video on the Apple iPod Nano ad. If not, you can see the original video here. Below is the making of video.

Trey Ratcliff is one of my favorite “unknown” photographers. He’s only unknown because he doesn’t really do this for a living, not because he potentially couldn’t. Since he first visited Chernobyl and published Part 1 of his two part photo essay from the hot zone, Trey garnered the attention of the online community and his blog has earned itself a lot of traffic.

For a living, Ratcliff works for a game company… in fact, he’s the CEO. During his travels, he takes along his camera and shoots high dynamic range images of (seemingly) everything he sees or can get close to.

Despite the “fad” impression I get surrounding the hype of “HDR” images these days, it’s tough not to love their rich, hyper-real quality. What’s nice about Trey’s photography is his use of HDR. Very few people who attempt HDR imaging seem to understand when enough is enough, and push their images too far. Trey’s photography could easily be misunderstood for impeccably lit traditional photography, but they still have that slightly processed look which is typical of HDR.

Go visit the two part Chernobyl Adventure over at Trey’s blog, “Stuck In Customs“.

Every year, the Internet grows, and every year there seems to be a new buzz term or hot technology that gets the net all wired up (so to speak). This year, ’social media’ seems to be the buzz term - and with sites like Digg, Flickr, and Wikipedia, there’s a lot of this ’social media’ to go around. Though not every social media venture has attained success (yet) - it seems that everyone wants on board.

Harnessing the power of people is what it’s all about. People power is remarkably hot, and with the right kind of service, a website powered by people power can be virtually unstoppable, and can attract a legion of devoted fans.

JPG Magazine is hoping to capitalize on this idea. It’s a clever concept, which takes the best of social media sites and expands upon it, by publishing a real life magazine (made out of paper) which is comprised of nothing but user submitted images which were voted up by other users. Every month, a new set of themes is announced, and users try to shoot using the theme as a guideline.

New JPG Features

The JPG Magazine website is an integral part of this process. It needs to be slick, slim, and easy to use. Because of that, it has recently received a few upgrades:

1) For your eyes only box. A small box on your submitted photos that keeps running tallies of how many times your photo has been viewed (not counting your views) and, if it’s a submission, how many Yeah votes it’s received.

2) Favorites. You can easily mark a picture as a favorite, and each photo’s favorites list can be viewed.

3) Photo size toggle. Though it may seem like a small thing, in a voting system it’s important to give each picture equal screen time - so interface is important. You can now toggle between seeing 12 medium photos, or 36 small ones.

4) Social bookmarking. You can now promote your own photos to social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us via the website.

Lossless Business Model

JPG Mag’s service is free. Anyone can sign up for an account, and anyone who has an account can upload or vote on their favorite pictures. Though the magazine itself needs to be purchased, photo contest winners (those who get enough votes) can get a free one-year subscription to the mag plus $100. Despite all this, the magazine can be freely downloaded by anyone in PDF format, with the latest issue here.

It’s really a lossless business model. The great thing for the publishers is that virtually no content creators are necessary. For the users, they get a chance to get their photo in print. For the environment, it means less wasted trees since the required print run is more easily tracked. It’s a clever business model, and while the site may not have the popularity of some of the more major photo sites (yet), it’s this subtle difference which makes it’s potential obvious. It also has some major advertisers already in place, including Flickr and Lensbaby.

JPG Magazine is a social media website, but the difference is they have a tangible end product. Imagine if Digg published a magazine every month with the top twenty or thirty news articles. Subscriptions and possible advertising would significantly offset the cost of producing such a magazine… and it could be a huge draw for fanatic users who would love to get their hands on it.

I’ve been following JPG Magazine for a couple of months now, and it seems to run smoothly, though I haven’t taken the plunge and submitted anything (yet). If you’re interested in photography, go create an account and partake in the community by submitting and voting.

You’ve likely experienced some pretty bad roads in your days of driving, but that’s nothing compared to some of the roads in Russia and east Asia - particularly one that connects north and southern siberia. Dark Roasted Blend gives us a visual tour of the Russian-Siberian road to Yakutsk (as well as some other bad roads and trails).

The absolute worst of the bunch, however, is the Road Of Bones, which is a rough mud road that turns into soup when the rainy season hits, trapping miles of cars and their passengers.

This ‘road’ is a 2000 mile stretch which connects Yakutsk to Magadan, and is notoriously bad. It was built by political prisoners under Stalin’s rule, who were often imprisoned at gulags. Many of these people died trying to construct the road, and their bones became a part of the fixture.

The road is in a state of disrepair and is untraversable by standard road vehicles because of washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams. During winter, frozen water actually helps river crossings.

Incidentally, the Ewan McGregor produced short series “Long Way Round” featured Ewan and his buddy Charlie trying to traverse the Road Of Bones on their motorcycles.

For the guys at xRez, it’s all about “extreme resolution”.

We’re not talking megapixels here, we’re talking gigapixels - with resulting images that are so highly detailed, you can zoom in to even the tiniest object in the distance and bring it in with clear and crisp fidelity.

xRez is like a studio, or a collective of photographers who are commissioned for special projects. They have some unique and highly specialized equipment designed for the purposes of gigapixel level panoramic work, high dynamic range photography, large scale “full dome” panoramas, etc. It’s the sort of stuff we all dream of doing, but very rarely get a chance to.

By combining powerful 3d tools and techniques appropriated from the visual effects field, possibilites arise of new imagery and animation that are truly novel and unprecedented. Applications of these new techniques can range from experiencing stunningly large prints in fine art gallery installations, providing a substitute to live-action shooting in feature film backgrounds, and enriching a national park visitors understanding and interpretation, to name a few.

The team currently consists of Greg Downing (who specializes in 3D based imaging), Eric Hanson (a visual effects designer), and Ron Shirley (a film and photography major) and together they have worked on visual effects for numerous outfits and companies. All these guys are teachers as well as professionals, and they’ve got some interesting work in their online portfolio that shows off this gigapixel obsession.