Zoom-in Online

Tonight (January 8th), the Hasted Hunt Gallery (cleverly named for owners Sarah Hasted and W.M. Hunt) in Chelsea opens what looks to be a great exhibit — Contradictions in Black and White, 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm. It'll be worth the trek in the cold weather, I promise!

One of many great photography pieces I'm catching up on from the holidays was this awesome, informal yet informative interview that Frederick Van Johnson conducted with iStockphoto expert contributor Nicole Young. Check it out!

Adobe released the Lightroom update 2.2 a couple weeks ago, providing photographers with software improvements for the new year. Although the changes aren't drastic in this update, the new 2.2 provides greater usability and increased hardware compatibility. Here are some of Zoom In's favorite photos made with the aid of LR 2.2.

New York Times' technology columnist David Pogue has been a busy guy over the holiday season! His upcoming digital photography book will include a list of "The Best Photography Tricks of All Time" (not an exaggeration!), which appears in developing form here in his column .

Perhaps painting in Photoshop is a growing trend, or perhaps it is just coincidence that I ran across two great tutorials on this topic this afternoon. Regardless, these how-to's are pretty fantastic. The first, from Best Photoshop Tutorials details how to transform your photo into a painting.

Fractalius is a Photoshop plugin that takes standard images and warps them using "extraction of so-called hidden fractal texture of an image", creating what looks like a strange mashup of HDR, A Scanner Darkly comic style, and slow shutter light streaks.

Adobe Lightroom 2.2 released! See a great summary of new features here.

If you're updating from Lightroom 2.1, you may have run into the frustration of deleting your old camera profiles.

The ever-intriguing Nikon Rumors site (motto: "Where there's smoke there's fire") has featured the semi-controversy over the fact that Sony made the sensor for the Nikon D3x, calling into question the validity of the massive price difference between the D3x and the Sony A900. Master Chong has provided a comparison (using the hilarious photo below) between the cameras’ image quality. I’m convinced that the price gap is legit, but not everyone is.

Some people would (and do) pay to have their photo appear in a feature film. Jeremy Keith, adactio on Flickr, was discovered and approached by a representative from Iron Man to have his photo hit the big screen. (Read Keith's story.) How was he found? Keith licenses his Flickr images through Creative Commons. The photo, which was cropped and edited to look great in the movie, started out, even to Keith’s admission as “not a very good photo” — a simple snapshot of a friend from a vacation. But the ease at which one can search Flickr on the Creative Commons site for free, licensed material is what brought Keith the opportunity. The trick is knowing when the exposure you might potentially receive from using a Creative Commons license would outweigh the loss of control you then have over the image.

Before.

Cropped, and after.

This blog has been contributed by Steven Hight , self-described painter turned photographer based in San Francisco.

I have a somewhat unique approach to photography in that I shoot using two separate-but-connected cameras; a digital SLR and a Kodak Duaflex III twin lens reflex camera from 1950. I shoot digitally through the viewfinder section of the old twin lens reflex to get some rather startling and genuinely vintage-looking images.