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Around The Horn
11 December 2019
In this recurring column, we highlight a few items we've run across that don't merit a full story of their own but are interesting enough to bring to your attention. This time we look at the Americas in darkness, distilling the year in photos, journey orchestration, the Fujifilm X-H1, the iPhone 11 Pro, Twitter, portraits and your remote release.
- The Americas in Darkness is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. Suomi's "day-night band" of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight, some of which have been removed to emphasize the city lights.
- In From 500,000 Photos to 116: How Our Editors Distill the Year in Pictures, Lara Takenaga reveals how the final set of images was derived, organizing them into months that were pared down from hundreds to dozens before the cutting to about 10 for each month. Not easy when your White House photographer alone shot 12,000 images.
- Adobe used Journey Orchestration to hook "hobbyist photographers into using various aspects of the free mobile app [Lightroom] in hopes of enticing them to become fulltime subscribers," writes Alex Dal Canto. "Basically, we're giving them the tools to educate themselves within the product, to understand how to use it and hopefully drive them to be more engaged with it since they now have the tools and knowhow to start editing their photos like a pro," explained Randy Ang, Lightroom product marketing manager.
- Kirk Tuck anoints the Fujifilm X-H1 as the Best Camera Value of the Year at $1,200 with a battery grip and extra batteries. He makes his argument with a delicious set of images.
- In Brave New World: The Surprising iPhone 11 Pro, Ming Thein makes a few educated guesses at how Apple implemented computational photography in the iPhone 11 Pro. "We now have not just a truly pocketable visual scrapbook, but one which is transparent enough not to have to require imagination or make excuses for," he writes.
- In Twitter Will Now Preserve JPEG Quality for Photo Uploads on Web, Darrell Etherington Twitter will no longer transcode JPEG images uploaded in tweets. Thumbnails yes, but not the image you get when you click through. Exif metadata will continue to be stripped.
- In What Makes a Portrait Good?, Chris Orwig quotes the French poet Charles Baudelaire, "A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound." Most of his portraits are done with natural light, he writes, so this isn't about gear.
- Derrick Story advises, It's That Time of Year -- Find the Remote Release for Your Camera. You can look through your sock drawer, he says, or find the remote release app for your camera on your phone.
More to come! Meanwhile, please support our efforts...