Photo Opportunities: Breast Shaped Clouds?

Breast shaped clouds? That’s mammatus clouds to you! [From the BBC]

The BBC reported on some interesting cloud formations that occurred over England a few days ago. Mammatus clouds, so named because they look like breasts, form underneath cloud formations under the right conditions. The picture above is particularly nice as the setting sun caught and highlighted the clouds against the threatening gray of the rest of the cloud. It’s a great example of why you should always have a camera to hand to capture these and other moments.

Photo Inspiration: Tourist Toy Photos

Toy Eiffel Tower by Michael Hughes

Photographer Michael Hughes has a great idea for what to do with your camera when you go on holiday. Pick up some tourist toys or postcards of the local landmarks, then go take a photo of yourself holding the tourist object in front of the real thing. Genius. You can have a lot of fun with this idea, not only with replacing the real thing with a copy of itself, but also putting something stranger over the top, or taking the same object round the world with you and photographing it in different locations.

Lightning in Slow Motion

Obviously this isn’t a static photo, but it was such a beautiful example of how a lightning strike builds up that we had to show it. You can see how the electrostatic charge spiders down from the top left, with many small tendrils each searching for an earthing point. Then, blammo, one of the points a third from the left hits ground and there’s the bright arc we all know and love.

You could take the same video with a handy lightning storm and some patience. Oh and you may also need a high speed video camera to slow it all down as the initial part happens in microseconds and most digital cameras only support slow frame rates such as 15 or 30 frames per second (FPS) to save their memory cards. And remember to stay safe!

Related content:

• How to take Lightning Pictures

Adobe Release Lightroom 2.0 (UPDATE: Some issues!)

UPDATE 2008-09-11: As of this time there have been some serious performance issues observed with the first release of Lightroom 2.0. Mostly these are extreme slow downs with large-ish catalogs as the software struggles to get out of its own way working with large numbers of photos (1000s+). A lot of professional photographers are advocating sticking with Lightroom 1.4.1 until Adobe release a much-improved point release. So I’ve changed my recommendation to a ‘hold’ for now. More info when a new release arrives.

Adobe have just announced that the latest version of their photo workflow software, Lightroom, is now available. Lightroom 2.0 extends the well established cataloging and processing package with key features such as multiple monitor support, extended memory addressing (for those of us with over 4Gb RAM), more targeted dodging/burning and increased ability to export to online photo sharing apps such as Flickr. None of this is world shattering, however it all adds up to a slicker, more compete product that the original. Plus the new version has been in open Beta for a while now, so you can expect most of the major bugs to be gone.

A while back I compared both Aperture and Lightroom’s capabilities, and found that both offer an unsurprisingly similar range of features since they target the same group of users (professional and aspiring professional photographers with a huge photo library that use a lot of RAW). Ultimately I found Lightroom to be my product of choice, although it’s lack of multiple monitor support was my biggest frustration. Aperture’s biggest failure is that it is only available for Apple OS X, so Windows users are out of luck. As a split Mac/PC user this was a stopping point for me. So having decided to purchase Lightroom I was pulled up short when I found the 2.0 Beta had been started, indicating an imminent new product launch. My choice was then to buy Lightroom 1.0 for $299, and then pay an unspecified upgrade price (turns out it was $99 as I thought it would be) when 2.0 hit the stores - there was no sensible decrease in Lightroom’s price prior to this upgrade (silly Adobe). So instead I got a shared beta licence from a friend and have been using the Beta 2.0 since then. Now it’s time to splash the cash on my own copy - finally.

Photo Fun: Clones (aka, an Army of Me) - Episode 2

This follows on from the last article - how to take photos to make a ‘cloned me’ image, so if you haven’t already read that you might want to first.

Now you should have at least a few photos of you with the same background composition, but with you in different positions, all downloaded to your trusty computer. So fire up Photoshop and get ready for some cut and paste action, along with good ol’ layers and layer masks.

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