What becomes immediately apparent from viewing the photographs in the five POV Female Beirut books is the divide in Beirut between war and everyday life. Published by oodee, the collection of monographs is the fifth in a four-year series exploring gender, geography, and gaze in disparate cities around the world through the work of young female photographers. The latest, captures the overwhelming tension between the pull of conflict and the desire for normalcy in the Lebanese capital. Each of the five female photographers it features—Ayla Hibri, Lamia Maria Abillama, Lara Tabet, Randa Mirza, and Caroline Tabet—visually incarnates this clash in vary different ways, but it appears clearly in all of their work.

Beirut, Lebanon, has been plagued with a history of conflict particularly since the 1975 civil war divided the country. After surviving that 15-year-long struggle, Lebanon faced yet another war in 2006. This history evokes a strong response in the photographers that live there, causing each woman to use her camera as a tool to process the disturbance.

For a literal interpretation of the dichotomy between war and everyday life, Randa Mirza digitally manipulates her images in order to make ambiguous final products. Mirza’s series, “Parallel Universes,” is comprised of archival images from the 1975 and 2006 wars, digitally fused with photographs of the tourists Mirza saw during her travels.

“In 2006, when I made those images, Lebanon was experiencing a terrible return into the experience of yet another war,” Mirza tells American Photo, “I was hurt and I wanted to hurt the viewers [with my images] whose lives were not affected by what was happening to us.”

Caroline Tabet also confronted her wartime experience head-on by photographing the day of the ceasefire that put an end to the 2006 war. Her “Disintegrated Objects” series captures personal possessions scattered across devastated land. The familiar remnants, like boots and a child’s jacket, are portrayed strewn across unfamiliar territory, suggesting the unnerving fate of their owners without overtly showing it.

Playing on the same idea of the intrusion of war into the domestic sphere, Lamia Maria Abillama photographs female subjects wearing military uniforms in their homes for her “Clashing Realities” series. The photographs embody the way in which war burdens the women who are forced to wait at home as heavily as it does the soldiers on the battlefield.

Lebanon is largely divided between two religious faiths: Christianity and Islam. These faiths, like many, can foster skewed gender rights when being practiced conservatively. Basic rights such as child custody and divorce are not always guaranteed for women in Beirut, making this particular portrayal of the city an essential one.

Ayla Hibri turns the lens on the male gender in her “Real Prince” series. Her images explore the culture of the motorcycling men that serve as the modern-day Lebanese knights. In place of white horses, these men have carefully adorned motorcycles, and her images question who they are and what they are chasing.

Lara Tabet plays quite literally with the idea of the societal darkness that can overcome a country. Tabet’s series, “The Reeds,” consists of blurred, darkened images taken at night in one of Beirut’s rare public spaces. Each photograph is reminiscent of the view seen out of hazy eyes, blinking away sleep.

“The camera serves as a seduction tool as well as a transgression tool,” Tabet tells American Photo, “I chose a public space that had a dual function: a romantic one during daytime and a more predatory sexual function during night. I was interested in these two opposing poles.”

The variety of photographic work in POV Female Beirut is vast while being simultaneously cohesive, and each books offers a deeply personal, feminine account of life in Beirut. Greater than mere documentation, these photographs are the physical manifestation of each woman’s emotional response to living in a country constantly faced with political and social unrest.

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At this year’s Rework Deep Learning Summit in Boston, Google research scientist Kevin Murphy announced a new project called Im2Calories that will use deep learning algorithms and pattern recognition to analyze photos of food, and estimate the total calorie count.

Im2Calories assesses the size of each piece of food in relation to the plate, and it takes condiments into account as well. The program doesn’t require high-res images, so standard Instagram uploads work just fine.

As of now the algorithm is still not entirely accurate, but Murphy said that it will become increasingly smarter the more people use it.

Im2Calories is still in the research phase and has not been released to the public yet, but it would be interesting to see what effect, if any, it has on people’s eating (and Instagramming) habits. Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time this concept has popped up. We wrote about an app with a similar goal way back in 2011. It will be interesting to see where Google can take it.

We wonder if it will be able to recognize the telltale, Instagram-friendly shine of a Chii’s hamburger bun.

[Via: Popular Science]

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Five Photographers have created an image that they are claiming is the world’s highest-resolution panoramic photo to date. The image is of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the European Alps, and it is part of the in2white project led by Italian photographers Filippo Blengini and Alessandra Bacchilega.

The team climbed to altitudes of 11,482 feet to complete the project by capturing every detail of the mountain and the surrounding landscape.

To make the image, the team used a Clauss precision pan-tilt head and a Canon EOS 70D with a 400mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens on a 2x converter. The picture took 35 hours of shooting to make over the course of 15 days, and is comprised of 70,000 individual images stitched together. The final image is a whopping 365 gigapixel photo, and took two months in post to perfect.

While the image as a whole is an extra-wide shot, the way it was made allows for incredible detail even when zooming in.

The whole panorama with zooming abilities and more info on the project can be found on the in2white site.

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Software developer Jonas Wagner has just created a free online analog film editor based off of Pat David‘s 2013 set of color lookup tables.

The website is powered by Javascript and applies the film emulations to any photo you upload. The editing process exists only within your browser, so you are not submitting your photos to Wagner’s service (if that’s a concern of yours).

The site includes a lengthy dropdown menu of various film stocks you can emulate, and there are also sliders that allow you to adjust brightness, contrast, vibrance, grain, and vignetting.

We tested three of the many options, and here are the results:

Once you have edited an image and are content with it, you can click Download at the top of the screen to save a copy of the edited version to your desktop.

Wagner has explained his process in detail in a blog post here.

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If after reading our tips for better bird photography you ran straight to the woods with your camera, then this new software could be a great addition to your app arsenal. Merlin Bird Photo ID can identify bird species from a single image.

The site was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Visipedia research project, and as of now can recognize 400 of the most common birds in the United States and Canada.

After you have taken a photo, you simply draw a box around the bird in the image, click on its bill, eye, and tail, and tell the program where you took the photo.

Merlin uses the eBird.org database containing more than 70 million bird sightings to identify specific species. The program will then present you with the top three matches to your image, including photographs and sounds from the birds.

“It gets the bird right in the top three results about 90 percent of the time, and it’s designed to keep improving the more people use it,” Jessie Barry, the Merlin Project Leader at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a statement, “That’s truly amazing, considering that the computer vision community started working on the challenge of bird identification only a few years ago.”

The website is currently free to use, and a mobile app is apparently in the works. If image identification is your thing, check out these other programs that identify images from leaves to calories and everything in between.

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A Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS lens that’s part of the LensRentals fleet was returned without a problem, but when the technicians inspected it to make sure everything was ok, they found a very unpleasant surprise.

A fly had lodged itself deep inside of the weather-sealed lens, between the glass elements on either side. It took a technician four hours to remove the fly from the lens, and as he worked he captured images that show just how dust and hair can end up stuck in your lenses.

“The point to be made here is that there are huge openings into the inner lens through the helicoid slots,” LensRentals wrote on its blog, “Obviously anything that gets inside the lens is free to move about to the inner elements. Dust particles, spiders, or in this case a fly, are all going to find their way down inside the lens.”

The technician ended up having to fully disassemble the lens, and it just goes to show that even a weather-sealed lens will inevitably have openings where air (and creatures) can get through.

You can read the rest of the story over on LensRentals’ Blog

This occurrence is actually not unheard of. Last year we interviewed a Canon technician and he had a similar story to tell about a lens that a National Geographic photographer brought back from the jungle.

The post A Fly Got Trapped In This Weather-Sealed Canon Lens appeared first on Popular Photography.

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Flickr is currently facing a slew of complaints from upset users after its beta auto-tagging system mislabeled sensitive images. The recently implemented tagging system applied tags such as “animal” and “ape” to portraits of people, and “sport” and “jungle gym” to images taken of concentration camps.

The auto-tagging system was introduced by Flickr to help search functions and clarity, but since it’s May 7 release the algorithm has made a number of offensive and awkward mistakes.

“We are aware of issues with inaccurate auto-tags on Flickr and are working on a fix. While we are very proud of this advanced image-recognition technology, we’re the first to admit there will be mistakes and we are constantly working to improve the experience,” a Flickr spokesperson said. “If you delete an incorrect tag, our algorithm learns from that mistake and will perform better in the future. The tagging process is completely automated – no human will ever view your photos to tag them.”

Flickr has already removed the “sport” tag from many concentration camp photos, and appears to have entirely removed the “ape” tag from the auto-tagging vocabulary.

The auto-tagging was clearly created with good intent, but it seems like this new algorithm needs a little more time until all the wrinkles are ironed out.

[Via: The Guardian]

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Animals have long been the perfect photography subjects, offering both a massive variety in appearance and an inherent lack of the self-consciousness that can hinder the sincerity of the portrait-making process.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s “In Focus: Animalia” exhibition, on view from May 26 – Oct. 18, 2015, and the subsequent publication of the book Animals In Photographs, celebrates the raw view on life that can only be seen through the eyes of an animal.

The book takes a darker, more somber tone than the usual friendly animal snapshots that inundate our everyday lives through the media, both social and conventional, allowing the viewer to see animal photography in a new, more sophisticated light.

“It is easy to understand why artists choose animals for their subject matter—their lives are profoundly intertwined with our own,” says Timothy Potts, Director of the Getty. This connection between humans and animals is what makes these photographs so touching and remarkable, as if their pain is our own.

Animals In Photographs weaves a visual path from the small, gold-framed daguerreotypes of the 1850s to sumptuous modern-day photographs filled with rich color and detail. Though the range of dates and techniques in the collection is extensive, the underlying themes in the photographs are clearly tied throughout the centuries.

There is an irrefutable darkness present in the collection brought on by images of death and suffering, both at the hands of humans and by forces of nature. This melancholy view of the animal world makes the creatures in the photographs more relatable, as they seem to be exemplifying dialogues that humans often try to express through our own art.

The images are carefully arranged in two-page spreads; one pits a photograph of bird heads tied on strings against one of live chickens, and a resting rhinoceros across from an unknown animal’s skeletal remains. These juxtapositions reduce some of life’s most complex struggles into clear visual representations, much like animals interpret our world in a simpler, more honest way.

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One of the biggest drawbacks of shooting photos or video with a smartphone is how poorly these devices perform in low-light situations. The small sensors inside of our devices aren’t built for shooting in the dark and the internal flash on most phones is pretty crappy. As smartphone photography has become more popular a number of companies have started pushing out products to deal with the shortcomings of the camera inside of your phone. And one of the more popular, iblazr, returned to Kickstarter this morning to raise funds for their new LED smartphone flash, the iblazr 2.

The iblazr 2 has an updated physical design, electronic components and it easily clips onto your smartphone with a new mounting system. The flash measures 40mm x 28mm x 10mm and is available in black, gray, or white for iOS and Android. iblazr 2 also has a simple Cold Shoe Mount and a small diffuser so it can be used with DSLRs too.

The flash uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect with the native camera app on your smartphone and can be used remotely up to 80ft away. One of the neater looking features of the iblazr 2 is a touch sensor that will allow users to adjust the light color temperature from 3200K to 5600K when shooting—giving you an option of splashing your scene with cool or warm light.

The updated iblazr 2 is available to early backers for a $45 pledge, with an expected retail price of $70. Shipment is set for this September.

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Dogs take nothing for granted, and unlike us, an old sock is enough to get them excited. Nikon has picked up on this lovable enthusiasm and has created a camera mount designed specifically for man’s best friend.

Since paws aren’t the best for snapping pictures, the camera mount is automatically triggered by a rise in heart rate. This means when your four-legged friend sees something wag-worthy, the shutter will fire automatically, giving you an SD card filled with the images of your dog’s favorite things.

Nikon calls this heart rate-driven system “Heartography,” and it consists of an elastic heart-monitoring bad as well as a “SmartCase” for the camera. The heart rate data of the dog is sent via Bluetooth and shown on the OLED display of the camera mount.

The product doesn’t appear to be available for purchase by consumers right now, but there are other legitimate doggy-photography options like the GoPro Fetch mount and the Sony dog mount.

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