Photography and Imaging 2

In light of what Charley posted it reminded me to share with you guys some of the weird photo tools / websites I have stored in my bookmarks...

1) Rsizr - So despite it's extremely hip name that cuts out all the vowels, rsizr is actually a pretty interesting little tool. It's motto is something along the lines of "lossless image resizing." What this means is you can resize your images, e.g. make them square format or reformat it to 8x10 by essentially not losing any details. It doesn't work very well on portraits but does with everything else (assuming you're not cropping off half the image). To really understand what it does you have to try it, but I think it gives an interesting idea of what is to come in the future.

2) Standford's Vector Magic - Assuming everyone knows what a vector is, this little program vectorizes your images. I use it all the time when I need to design a poster and all I have is a really small clip art image, or a small image from my own library. You can vectorize it and then resize it to whatever proportion you need.

3) Shutterfly - I'm sure most of you already know about this website, but shutterfly is a cheap and easy way to make little (or medium sized) photography books. I've used them before for and the quality is actually pretty nice. If you ever have a project you want to turn into a book or simply want to make a portfolio of your work, I would definitely look into their designs.

A few photographers you might find interesting:

1) Matt Stuart - Matt reminds me of a modern day Elliott Erwitt. He finds pictures that have a subtle irony or just make you chuckle. I'd check out the color ones first and then move through the black and white. If you're into street photography, I think you can definitely learn something from him. I think the best part is you usually don't catch what's going on without looking a little harder, but when you find it it's worth it.

2) Mark Jenkins - His street installations are insanely creative. You can't not enjoy looking through this gallery.

3) Steve Mccurry - Words can't express

I like to look at work done by people our age and two people I've found that are doing really well are :

1) Lara Jade She's 18 and in the UK... I would advise you to look at - Portfolio --> Projects --> Crime Scenes, and Phobias. Then go to the Conceptual galleries. Everything else is great too, but those are my favorites. If you're not into extreme photoshop work than you probably won't find any merit in her work, and same goes for...

2) Joey Lawrence He's 17 or 18 I forget, either way really young. I'm pretty sure he decided to postpone college and travel the world taking photographs. I don't love his fashion or commercial work but I definitely think there's some amazing stuff in his Personal Gallery --> Photojournalism

Alright that's it for now. Hope someone finds something they like.