With this technology you can really do a lot with a series or stack of images of the same subject. Let's put it this way, if by any chance you wanted to take a picture of a statue at a park, or a nice cathedral, or a really big object or building. There are always people walking through the frame - if you can't close down the area and still need a picture of the statue, in the park, in it's beautiful setting, but with no people or birds or random elements - what are you supposed to do?

In the past, it was a mission to go through the process of shooting a bunch of images, selecting the closest one to your definition of a nice, clean, tourist-less frame, and begin the hours and hours of painting, cloning, healing, brushing etc., to remove all of your random elements. There are artists who are very good at this process, but I'm pretty sure they would appreciate an alternative method that would help them save time.

Well, this dream has become a reality. Photoshop CS3 can take your stack of images and by analyzing all of them, it figures out which things are permanent in all the images like that building in the distance, the big tree, the sidewalk, and which parts of the images are obscured in one of the frames but not all of them, are healed automatically by borrowing pixels from other images in the stack...

Check out this series of images that all use a fun and striking technique called Slow Sync Flash. This technique combines a slower than normal shutter speed combined with a flash during the exposure. The technique can produce some stunning images not possible any other way. Worth a look.

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NodeBox Test 1 (Dots) from Jon Gos on Vimeo.

Evidently this blog gets read from time to time. I won't go into the nitty gritty, but I just got a call about it, someone upset about the way I had been slamming Lansing in my previous post. They're right a little bit, I was upset when I wrote that and I have to learn to read my posts twice before publishing. I don't want to degrade Lansing or hurt anybody's business - I still think Lansing has a long way to go as a city, but there are many people out there working to change that and I want to wish them well, not step on their toes.

It reminds me that even though we have the freedom to mouth off on this great big internet, and we may think we're anonymous, we really should keep a measure of self control. Hell, I publish my own name on this, so I shouldn't expect to be anonymous. I don't want to seem like a weakling, but after consideration I have gone back and revised that post to better reflect my conflicted feelings on Lansing.

So to those trying to make Lansing a better place: keep on trucking. I still live here, just not downtown, and I'm going to continue to support the city in ways that I can. We'll see...

” Unique and powerful photograph..”
Suggested by Ari

soul on fire, originally uploaded by pstarr.

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This is the Confederation Bridge, which connects Prince Edward Island to the rest of Canada (via New Brunswick). It’s 13 km long. I still don’t think it’s the longest bridge in the world though. Any bridge geeks out there know which one is?