TAKEN FROM computerworld.name/asus-wooden-laptop/

Photography can make or break a website - got a great site with lame pictures, then you’ve got a lame website. Today we’re going to take a look at the ones that got it right…

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Incase - Lovely close up photos of the products allow you to see the textures of them. Class

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Nike - Every Nike website has great photography, I’ve chosen to showcase their Golf site here

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Brook Pifer - Large quality photography is the main focus of Brook’s portfolio site, some really striking imagery

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Stratocucine - Large crisp photos of the modernist kitchen designs makes this site

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The Touch Agency - Nice Graphic design portfolio site, uses effective photography to display their work

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Dirk Lambrechts - Great fashion and beauty photography portfolio from Dirk Lambrechts

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Design House Stockholm - Makes use of high quality black and white photos for the background

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Albert Oviedo - Some cracking photos in this Photography portfolio site

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Georgiew - Photography portfolio

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Andreas Burz - Another great photography portfolio

TAKEN FROM /tutorialblog.org

As cities become denser, we all find ourselves wishing we had more space at times, or wanting to make better use of the space we have. Purchasing changeable furniture that adapts to different uses is one solution to this problem. The above example of the Safe Bedside Table is a more funny than useful. However, the transformable, convertible and collapsible designs below are impressively practical.

FlexibleLove is an amazing piece of furniture that is ecological, adaptable and highly practical. Made of minimal and sustainable materials, this piece converts from a single-person chair into a flexible bench seating up to sixteen people. Don’t believe it? Watch the video.

Tagei is a remarkably beautiful piece of craftsmanship, and somehow manages to be an attractive piece of furniture both when collapsed and extended. One could easily imagine using this as a side table and extending it into a bench for gatherings.

Scheren Regal presents an interesting shelving option. This piece would be highly portable for moves and could be used as a side table until more storage is needed, with an elegant but engineered look typical of good German design.

Futaba is a brilliantly simple design solution, and converts with amazing ease. The quick-and-easy method of transformation makes this one of the more practical transforming items listed here.

ChairLibrary is perhaps a little garish but would certainly work for people whose houses are already overly filled with books. The storage spaces make good overflow storage, at least, as a stop-gap measure before buying more book shelves.

Mogga is a remarkably elegant chair that turns into a table. The actually mechanical means by which it transforms is as impressive as the fact that it can so easily convert from one use to another.

Ali is a neat and simple piece of furniture that can be configured in a variety of ways. It can be folded and stored, used as a long sofa or pair of love seats or even folded flat into a bed. This seems a much more streamlined solution than many hide-a-beds.

Doc is another amazing couch-and-bed solution, but as an added bonus: this one converts into a bunk bed for two. This piece seems like a great solution for people who have visiting friends or farmily who bring children on frequent visits.

Fletcher Capstan Tables are beautifully designed and as expensive as you might expect. Still, one has to weigh the cost of one’s furniture versus the cost of more real estate. Either way, it is impressive to see these in action. Know of other collapsing, converting or transforming furniture? Feel free to share below!

TAKEN FROM weburbanist.com

Photography: Starslate

If you think understanding photography law can be a nightmare, try dealing with the horrors that can happen when you don’t understand it.

Or when publishers choose to ignore it, stock agencies hide behind it or subjects try to use it to restrict the use of images.

Here are five photography court cases that should scare the bejesus out of photographers.

1. Lara Jade Coton Versus Bob Burge and TVX Films

Lara Jade Coton, who we interviewed here not long after the story broke, was a 14-year-old schoolgirl in England when she shot a self-portrait wearing a top hat. She was still under 18 when Bob Burge, owner of TVX Films put the photo on the cover of a porn film called “Body Magic.”

Lara Jade, now an 18-year old photography student, had placed the image on deviantART, protected (she’d hoped) with a watermark and copyright symbol.

After being told that her self-portrait was being used to promote porn, Lara Jade contacted Bob Burge who was less than polite. Complaining that her photo was harming sales anyway, he promised to change the cover of his Hustler-rated DVD.

Months later, ads for the film featuring Lara’s image could still be found on the Web.

It was only when Lara Jade used her Flickr page to describe what happened that things really took off. She received press coverage around the world, comments of support from hundreds of photographers… and a court case filed against Bob Burge and TVX films in the summer of 2007.

Photography: Lara Jade Coton

2. Flickr Member Sues Virgin Mobile after Appearing in Australian Ad

Lara Jade isn’t the only underage victim of a company trying to promote itself. Alison Chang, a 16-year-old from Bedford, Texas was photographed flashing a victory sign at a church fundraiser in April 2007. The photographer, a youth counselor, posted the image on his Flickr stream with a Creative Commons license.

Advertising executives at Virgin Mobile Australia grabbed the image and placed it on at least one bus shelter with the caption “Dump your pen friend.”

Ryan Zehl, an attorney for Ms. Chang was quoted in the Dallas Morning News saying:

If a company uses your face in its ads without your consent, then you’re entitled to whatever money those ads generate for the company… It’s Texas law.

Australia, of course, is a long way from Texas but the law suit does touch on all sorts of important issues, including model releases, privacy and copyright as it relates to Creative Commons licenses.

3. Corbis Sued For Losing Photos

Most photographers have nightmares about something happening to their images. So they keep back-ups and they trust stock companies to do the same.

Or at least to look after their photos properly.

Corbis didn’t do either. Early in November 2007, photographer Chris Usher won his suit against the stock company after discovering that it had lost 12,640 of his analog images — one in four of the images the photographer had submitted.

Usher, who used to represent himself, had signed up to Corbis to supplement his sales to Time, Newsweek and other major publications. He asked for his images back when he grew disappointed at Corbis’s licensing deals and billing practices.

Corbis initially denied that they had lost any of Usher’s photos but admitted on the first day in court that they might have misplaced a “mere 5,877.”

This isn’t the first time that Corbis has been sued for losing photos. Arthur Grace was awarded $472,000 after Sygma, a French stock company that Corbis bought in 1999, lost 40,000 of his slides. That case will receive a new hearing and could lead to even higher damages. Chris Usher will have to wait until December to learn the size of his court-awarded compensation.

4. Passer-By Sues Philip-Lorca diCorcia for Selling his Photo

In general, if you’re in a public place, you can photograph it. And in general, if you want to sell an image of someone for commercial use, you need their permission.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia though, thought he was on safe ground when he set up strobe rigs in New York in 2006 and photographed people walking down the street. He didn’t put the photos on ads or mount them on billboards. He placed them in an exhibition and sold them as prints.

And he was sued by Emo Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew, who appeared in one of the photos and considered the sale both an invasion of his privacy and a breach of his religious rights.

The court ruled that although ten copies of the images had sold for up to $30,000 each, they were still considered works of art, were not commercial and were therefore protected under the First Amendment. Nussenzweig’s appeal was filed too late to be considered.

5. Goosed Farmer Seeks $7.5 Million in Damages for Photo

You might be able to argue that a work of art is not commercial but photographer John Burwell could struggle to make the same claim for an image he shot that appeared on greeting card.

The photo, which was taken in 1996 at the State Fair of Virginia, shows poultry farmer Andrew Marsinko with a goose on his knee. Burwell submitted the image to Jupitermedia who licensed it to a company called Leanin’ Tree.

Leanin’ Tree used the photo on the cover of a greeting card with the caption “Since it’s your birthday, you decide — Would you rather get spanked… or goosed?”

Marsinko, who was a well-known figure in goose-breeding circles, is now an even more well-known figure.

He is suing Burwell and his wife, Jupitermedia, Getty Images (who bought the rights to the image) and Leanin’ Tree, for defamation, unauthorized use of a picture, conspiracy and attempted conspiracy, and reckless infliction of emotional distress. Marsinko claims that he did not sign a model release form.

TAKEN FROM blogs.photopreneur.com

This image, depicting many different flying machines, is from the Library of Congress, dated circa 1885. The full image appears below along with many different cropped versions showing the detail of the piece. The Library of Congress description of the engraving also appears below.

No. 18 shows a collapsible Montgolfier balloon from 1784; no. 23 is the design for a glider balloon as described in “Reflections on the aerostatic sphere,” 1783 (September); no. 24 depicts Jean-Charles (l’avocat) Thilorier’s plan for transporting troops across the English Channel to invade England, ca. 1800; and no. 32 shows the dirigible balloon glider used by Charles Guillé for an attempted ascension in Paris, November 13, 1814.

TAKEN FROM www.paleofuture.com

These are our favorite “green” sports cars. Some get awesome gas mileage while smoking the competition, and others use advanced bio-fuels to eek out ever higher performance over their gas-guzzling brethren. Big Oil doesn’t like any of them, because they all mean one thing: if you buy them, Big Oil makes less money.

#1 Greenest Sports Car: Tesla Roadster

Built from the same chassis as the Lotus Exige 265E is a next green sports car, the Tesla Roadster. Tesla has taken the most radical approach to being green; they removed the internal combustion engine and substituted a small 70-pound electric motor. Powered by a 3-phase, 4-pole electric motor producing 248 horsepower, which is good for 0-60 mph in 4 seconds. Despite the 70-pound motor, the battery adds enough weight to bring the total weight up to 2690, which is 600 pounds more than the Exige and Elise. The one thing you don’t hear from the bio-fueled cars is gas mileage. The Tesla can proudly say it gets 135 miles per gallon equivalent.

Download Tesla Roadster desktops in the FastWallpapers.com Tesla gallery

#2 Greenest Sports Car: Toyota FT HS

The Toyota FT-HS finishes out the line up of environmentally friendly sports cars. The FT HS is the only prototype in the line up because it will be the first hybrid sports car. The FT HS promises to be a real performer with help from an electric motor and a 3.5-liter V6 engine. The combination electric motor and V6 are said to produce around 400 bhp and accelerate to 60 mph in under 4 seconds all while producing ultra low emissions.

See more pics of this sweet concept car by Toyota here.

#3 Greenest Sports Car: Lotus Exige 265E

Another offering from the British is the Lotus Exige 265E. The thing that sets this Exige apart from any other Lotus is its ability to run E85 ethanol and 95-octane unleaded fuel. Thanks to the 109-octane rating of ethanol, the boosted 1.8-liter Toyota 4-cylinder inline engine makes 46 more horsepower than its non-ethanol counter part, the Exige S. Its low weight of only 2061 pounds does not hurt either. The 0-60 mph acceleration drops from 4.1 to 3.8 seconds. Lotus has accomplished building the fastest car ever to leave their stables and the first Lotus to promote the use of renewable energy sources at the same time.

Click here to see more desktop background pictures of the Lotus Exige 265E.

#4 Greenest Sports Car: Trident Iceni

A small British company called Trident has produced a two-seater sports car called the Iceni. The Trident Iceni is the only Diesel fueled car that made it into the line up. Powered by none other than a GM sourced 6.6-liter V8 turbo diesel engine. The V8 produces 520 lb/ft torque at only 1800 rpm. That is enough power to propel the Iceni to 60 mph in 3.9 seconds and a top speed over 200 mph. Most impressively, the Iceni can do all this with 60 mpg and 1,000 miles on one tank and it runs on pure vegetable oil. The Iceni is also the only car in the line up that will unfortunately never make it stateside.

Go to the Trident Iceni desktop gallery here.

#5 Greenest Sports Car: Porsche Cayman

Porsche has proved that sport cars can be just as fuel efficient as the common car, if not more so with the Cayman. The Cayman is Porsche’s greenest car ever with a 2.7-liter, 241 horsepower, and boxer-engine. The Cayman starts at $49,400, which is cheap for a Porsche. For under $50,000, you cannot have both the speed and style if you want a Porsche. Performance is good with Porsche’s 0-62-mph claim of 6.1 seconds. The Cayman’s fuel economy is a respectable 23 city/32 highway compared to the more powerful Cayman S’s 20/27 mpg. It’s no Toyota Prius, but it gets the job done, and in style.

See more desktop pictures of the Porsche Cayman here.

#6 Greenest Sports Car: Koenigsegg CCXR

Like Lotus, Koenigsegg has found the use of bio-fuels like E85 ethanol can add substantial performance to their already powerful engine. The CCXR bio-ethanol version of their CCX sports car is the fastest, most powerful sports car that can call itself environmentally minded. With 1,018 bhp, the CCXR will hit 60mph in 3.0 seconds. Its top speed is over 250 mph. This is a car that uses Green technology to increase performance.

TAKEN FROM fastwallpapers.com

We don’t know why, but the first thing we thought of when we saw these photos was a shark. Doesn’t really look like Lamborghini’s bull, but it’s definitely aggressive. So, what’s this, you might ask? Well, it’s the Lamborghini Embolado concept car created by Luca Serafini, student in final year of the Industrial Design Course at the University of Parma, Italy. And it’s a cool concept, not like the Lamborghini Alar, which we presented a few months ago and which was hideous.When Luca designed the concept, he thought of it as a replacement for the current Gallardo model and the whole design starts from the Gallardo. The name Embolado comes from a Spanish festival, named “Embolado Bull” (or Toro Embolado). Luca even created a Superleggera version of the Embolado. Of course, probably Lamborghini will never take this seriously, but still, it’s a great design. You can also check Luca Serafini’s page on deviantart.

TAKEN ROM www.autounleashed.com

How to Spot a Photoshopped Image

BountyFishing works like so:

• Participants go fishing and photograph what they catch
• Participants then submit these photos to the BountyFishing website
• BountyFishing awards cash and prizes for the longest validated catch

The biggest hurdle we faced was how we were going to validate and authenticate the fish photos our users submitted. Photos altered with Photoshop can be incredibly convincing. With a few simple clicks of the “Quick Selection Tool” the fish shown below (top left) was selected, dropped into a separate layer, and stretched to add more than an inch to its length. With a little more work to move the shadow and soften any rough edges, the resulting image (top right) shows no signs of tampering.

Unaltered image

Photoshopped image

The solution we found was to use a piece of software developed by Hany Farid, a professor at Dartmouth College who is renowned in digital forensics. When the fish was stretched, Photoshop filled in the missing pixels by interpolating their values from the original recorded pixels. These regularly spaced new pixels are a specific combination of their surrounding pixels. Such regularities rarely occur in natural images, so their presence can be used as evidence of tampering.

Shown below is the output of the BountyFishing software that detects these correlations – the red-coded regions corresponds to the doctored portion of the image.

This software is used by federal law enforcement agencies and can detect various forms of tampering.
We have exclusive rights to the software for measuring fish, but if you really feel like getting your hands dirty with digital forensics Hany Farid’s website has an interface to MatLab for manipulating and analyzing digital images. In addition to the software above, a few other dead giveaways that a photo has been altered are:

• Excessive cloning - repetition of a particular piece of the photo, often used to stretch or morph images.
• Inconsistencies in lighting and noise. The easiest way to spot altered lighting is to increase the contrast of a photo so all the differences in lighting are exaggerated.
• Look for shadows that don’t match up what’s casting them.
• Optical aberrations, including patterns that aren’t seamless or appear to be inconsistent (or artificially consistent) with the surrounding area.
• Using human anatomy and other reference points BountyFishing verifies the authenticity of the ruler’s length.

We’ve got a flash demo of how we authenticate photos that gives a little bit more information about how this all works.

TAKEN FROM www.bountyfishing.com

  

One of my favourite ‘looks’ is the sort of old-collage feel of old photos and old paper. It’s a favourite because it lets you work images and text together really easily. In this tutorial we’ll put together a poster where there is a main photograph and a lot of text using the old-collage feel.Step 1

This tutorial is based on a job I did a few days ago for a charity client who needed a poster to promote an upcoming event. They are a choir made up of homeless people called the Sydney Street Choir and it’s a pretty neat little organisation which you can learn about at www.sydneystreetchoir.com. The brief was to promote the event use this really nice photo (shown) of the choir down by the Sydney Harbour Bridge shot by John Marmaras and to include some written copy which I’ve shown below the image.

Unfortunately there is a lot of text to go on the poster and although this image is gorgeous, it is very busy, so using the photo as the background for the poster would present problems in getting all that text working over the top. I know this is a problem, because I spent an hour trying to make it work before deciding that I should try something else!

The Text…

www.sydneystreetchoir.com
SYDNEY STREET CHOIR
Performs With

Jonathon Welch
from THE CHOIR OF HARD KNOCKS

Mark Trevorrow
aka BOB DOWNE

Massed Choir of 110 People
Gabriel’s Big Band
Also Featuring Jeremy Brennan

Tuesday 27 Nov 2007 At 7:30PM
Northside Conference Centre
Cnr Oxley St & Pole Lane, Crows Nest
Tickets: $35
All Proceeds to Sydney Street Choir
Tickets Tel: 9439 7822

SYDNEY STREET CHOIR connects with, inspires and empowers, those who are living or working in homeless or disadvantaged communities, through creating music, performance and passionate expression, that truly opens people’s hearts.

Step 2

So if the photo-as-poster model isn’t going to work, then we need another look. I decided to put together what I call the old-collage feel. This is a good one to work with as it’s very easy to combine elements on a page since everything is meant to look a little messy anyway.

The first place we go is to iStockPhoto where I found these four images that I will use to put the poster together. You can purchase the four items from iStock by clicking these links: 1 2 3 4

Step 3

To begin with I used the starburst paper as background by pasting it into the background layer, pressing CTRL-T to rotate and resize it accordingly.

Next I placed the text on the page. I have used Univers Condensed for this poster. Because I knew there was going to be a lot of text, using a condensed font seemed like a good idea so that it’d be easier to get it all in. With the main heading “Sydney Street Choir” I tried a few permutations before deciding that Sydney wasn’t a particularly important word and by shrinking it down I could make “Street Choir” a lot larger and punchier.

After that I used a large soft brush and in a new layer painted black over the top right corner and around the bottom. I then set this layer to Overlay so that it would darken the paper but in an organic way. You can see the result in the following image and the painted areas in the image just below.

Step 4

Next I placed the photo on the stage and because I wanted it to look like something thrown down on a piece of paper I gave it a thick white border. I also added a faint drop shadow so that the photo looked to be interacting with the background. With this look your aim is to get the various pieces of the composition interacting with each other on the canvas. You can do this by overlapping, shadows, adjusting the lighting to match, adjusting colouring to match and so on.

Step 5

Next I wanted to add the paper on to the stage. Because all three items (the paper, the tape and the baggage tag) are isolated on white, it’s quite simple to cut them out. Just use the Magic Wand Tool (W) with a Tolerance set to about 32, then click in the white areas, holding SHIFT down so you can select them all. Then go to Select > Modify > Expand and use a value of 1px. This cuts out a thin border across the whole image and ensures there is no white on the edges. It’s a quick and dirty technique and if you wanted to cut something more complex then you might use a better extraction technique.

Once you have the white selection expanded, press SHIFT-CTRL-I to invert the selection and then you can hit CTRL-C to copy the image out and paste it into the main image.

Step 6

After pasting in the object I added a small drop shadow and moved the paper behind the photo layer (which I had settled in the bottom right corner so as to leave lots of room for text along the left).

Step 7

Now we start adding the text. In the image below all I have done is paste the text in and space it out a little with line breaks. This looks sort of OK, but is pretty boring with everything being uniform. It’d be much better if we worked on the type a little to give it some variation and highlight the more important parts.

Step 8

Here you can see I’ve changed the text so that the names of the main two performers are highlighted, the words ‘from’ and ‘aka’ are shrunk right back since they aren’t important and ‘the Choir of Hard Knocks’ and ‘Bob Downe’ are subtitles. The other three performers (who aren’t as well known) are also shrunk back and will be only really read if the person is really interested. We want people passing by to see the title (Sydney Street Choir) followed by the big acts (Welch and Trevorrow) and hopefully that will draw them close enough to read the rest.

Note also that the text is also set in Univers Condensed (in various weights) and the type sizes are relatively ordered. It’s important to have some consistency and continuity in your text, don’t just have a huge assortment of different sizes and weights and fonts or things can start to look a little chaotic. So the morale of the story is variation is good, too much variation is bad!

You’ll also see that I’ve pasted in a couple of extra photos (of the two main acts) and used the same Layer Style of drop shadow + thick white border on them - but have sized them down accordingly so that the white border didn’t overwhlem the photos. I’ve also transformed and rotated each so it all looks a little random.

Finaly there is also the “sydney street choir” logo which I was told late in the day needed to be on the poster (gotta love last minute client changes!). Now it’s going to be difficult to cut that logo out because it’s complex, but fortunately it’s black on a white background which means all we need to do is set it to “Multiply” and the white will blend away leaving the logo stamped on the paper.

Step 9

Next I pasted in one segment of the tape image from iStockPhoto and have arranged it to look like it’s holding the paper down. Then I’ve written the “Performs With” text over the top to turn it into a subtitle linking the headline and body copy.

I’ve also pasted in the venue details down the bottom and given the text some treatment to highlight and fade back various parts (as we did with the performer list). Unfortunately the text is getting lost down there and since the venue and time is pretty important we need to do something about that!

Step 10

So in a layer down the bottom just above the background I pasted in a dark brown rectangle as shown (just grab the selection tool, draw one in and fill it dark brown) and then set the layer blending mode to Multiply. This effectively makes the bottom much darker and now we can invert the text colour to a beige colour. In case you are wondering the beige colour was selected off the paper above it using the Eyedropper tool since it’s always nice to keep colours matching on the image.

Step 11

Finally I have pasted in the baggage tag up the top right corner and layered it in between the title text and photo, then pasted in that rather long paragraph of description text. And with that we’re complete! At this point to send it off to print we would switch off all the text layers (except the main title) and save as a TIFF file, then open up InDesign, create a new document and place the TIFF file in. Then we would copy in the text in InDesign to make sure it shows up nice and sharp in the final print out poster. But since this site doesn’t really deal in InDesign we won’t go too much into that, I’ve included it though as a few people mentioned this in the comments of the last tutorial

Final Thoughts

This tutorial is not so much about technique as it is about layout and composition. In this case it would have been difficult to make the poster work just by using the photo as a background, I had all of three hours to do the entire job (charity work!), and still wanted it to look nice. Thanks to cheap stock images it’s possible to very quickly put together a nice look that will stand out in the places this poster is going to get put up.

Sample PSD

This download is a tiny version of the file (it’s 300px wide) because all the photos are stock or licensed. However you should still be able to see roughly how the layers interact from this little version. As with all the downloads on the site, any photos are copyright their original owners, please don’t use or distribute them.

TAKEN FROM psdtuts.com

Construction is nearly complete on the Beijing Olympic Stadium, shaped like a massive steel bird’s nest, and the swimming-pool-filled Water Cube, which looks like a piece of glowing alien machinery. This is an actual photo of the buildings at night. We’ve also got some less-surreal glimpses of them too.

Here you can see people posing in front of the Nest last week. And here’s a closeup of the crisscrossed steel girders that form the exoskeleton of the Nest. The Water Cube is actually made of high-tech materials that emulate bubbles to keep the heat inside the building.

TAKEN FROM  http://io9.com