Extra photos for bloggers: 1, 2, 3

Do you dream of faster lenses, larger apertures, and ice cream?

We do too!

Too bad, brand new lenses don’t drop into our laps everyday.

Fortunately, photographer Ryan Brenizer has developed a way to get specular results from your thrifty fifty or a basic kit zoom lens. By stitching together multiple shots, Ryan makes impossibly shallow depths of field, possible.

Follow a few easy steps and you too can take photos with the look of a faster more pricy lens.

(And when you spend less on new lenses, there’s more money for sundaes!)

How to Apply Brenizer Method

A million thanks to Ryan for letting us feature a few of his photos.

Long long ago, Black-and-White ruled the Earth.

Frosty white highlights frolicked with rich black shadows in the Meadows of Grayscale, and it was good.

Then came Digital, whose dingy whites and muddy grays nearly drove Black-and-White to extinction.

But now, like wild-eyed scientists cloning a mammoth, we’ve found the best ways to convert digital color photos into the REAL honest-to-goodness-that-looks-like-Ansel-Adams-took-it Black-and-White. NOT the pale washwater grays and off-white whites you get with “Convert to grayscale”. And we’re going to show you how.

Converting Digital Color Photos to Glorious Black-and-White

Until recently, if someone said the word “sharpening” to us, we’d whimper and hide under the table.

We mean, what the #$% is a threshold anyway?

Well, we finally got fed up with it, so we did some research. And you know what? Sharpening’s actually not that bad, and it makes a HUGE difference on digital images.*

Here’s our no-nonsense, jargon-free guide to sharpening your photos using Unsharp Mask. It’ll change your life. We promise.

*If you’re printing directly from film, feel free to be smug at this time. You don’t need to sharpen a darn thing.

Photojojo’s No-Nonsense, Jargon-Free Guide to Sharpening with Unsharp Mask

p.s. Hey San Francisco! Wanna help us out with the Photojojo Book? We need people to photograph and places to photograph them in. Check out our wishlist! We’ll make ya book-famous, baby!

The Japanese have gotten hold of a time machine.

We knew it would happen sooner or later.

The weird thing is, this time machine only works on photographs. You feed it a sharp modern photo, and it comes back to you looking like it was taken sixty years ago.

Maybe it came from The Future! Or Outer Space! Or the Underground Lair of the Mole People (yikes)! We don’t know because, well, we can’t read Japanese.

All we know is, if you click “browse”, upload a photo, and then click on the blue button in the middle, the time machine magically oldifies your picture. It might also summon an army of cranky Mole People, we’re not sure.

Click if you must, just don’t say we didn’t warn you.

Eerie Photo Time Machine
via Mareen Fischinger

p.s. We’re looking for more Long Portraits! Email us a link if you’ve got one. This one is happy and cute, and this one rocks our socks.

p.p.s. If you want to get in your momma’s good books, score her one of our custom photo bags for Mother’s Day. Last day to order for rush delivery is Monday the 28th!

Photo credit: Jim Abraham

Oh cross-processed film, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways…

The super-saturated colors
The ultra-high contrast
The retro, artsy style
The way everybody asks, “How did you DO that?”

But alas! Alack! Our digital camera gives us no film to cross-process! How shall we reclaim our Paradise Lost?

With Photoshop, gentle reader: glorious Photoshop. With a curves layer and a “hey nonny nonny”, we are reunited with our favorite old dark-room technique.

Huzzah!

Photoshop Cross-Processing Tutorial

p.s. Today is Chuck Norris’ birthday, which means it’s also the International Day of Awesomeness! Get out there and be the best awesome you can be!

Monster Face Contest Winners! Congratulations to Nix, Kristal, naxwell, tc and Ginny!

New Contest: “Monday Stinks!” Show us how you feel about Monday. How do YOU deal with it? 3 winners every day! Enter here.

Photo Credits: Jo Durber and Lou Hamilton.

Lounging on a beach chair in Tipumungo, margarita in hand, the waves lap at your feet. The far-off sun wanes, painting everything in brilliant color. It’s a postcard-perfect scene that any photographer would drool over.

And then there’s Sunburnt Stan.

There’s nothing like a pesky tourist with a sunburnt nose to ruin a beautiful vacation shot. What’s a photo-loving vacationer to do? It seems like everywhere you go, Stan’s there too, wading into the sea with his arm floaties or building a sand-castle on the beach. (Stan’s a persistent chap, he is.)

Never fear! An ordinarily grim situation turns to triumph, with just a bit of techno-whoozical magic in the form of these three nifty websites/programs. Vacation photos will never be the same again.

Sorry, Stan – we love you, but you’ve got to go.

#1 – How to Remove Tourists from Your Photos – dsphotographic.com
Using layer masks (Photoshop required), photographer Darby Sawchuck shows how to combine the best of several vacation photos into one great photo, blissfully tourist-free.

#2 – SnapMania.com – Tourist Remover
It couldn’t be simpler: take a batch of imperfect photos, run them through the Remover, and voilá – not a tourist in sight.

#3 – Microsoft Research’s Group Shot
Plug a series of photos into this free program, then select your favorite parts from each photo; in an instant, you’ll have a perfect composite photo with the best of the whole series.

p.s. The holidays are almost here, and our friends at Moo are running a holiday card design contest. Submit your favorite photos for a chance at $8,000 in prize money!

Thanks to Neene and Mohamed Abdulla Shafeeg for lending us photos.

Tall glasses of lemonade, your legs sticking to the seat of your car, the days stretching languorously into the evening. What’s not to love about summer?

Oh, right. The stifling heat.

But that just brings us to another of summer’s joys: The cool comfort of the cinema.

In honor of some of our favorite summer blockbusters (Harry Potter and Transformers), we bring you our 10 11 most-favorite movie-effect tutorials. From Scarface to Sin City to Pirates of the Carribean to 300, we’ve got 11 great ways to go Hollywood on your photos. Read on!

p.s. Help us out, Digg this tutorial!

From the forum… Submit your fave food photo, How to print a photo on soft acrylic, the always-popular What am I Wednesdays (WAIW) #5, Ben asks Do you carry a camera around with you? (and so much more…)

If you’re old-skool like us, you remember hurrying home from school, heading straight for your room, and hunching over your keyboard to log into your favorite MUD, slay dragons, and find treasure.

It was a simpler time. A time when computers didn’t have fancy graphics and candy-colored buttons, and if they wanted to show you a cranky green ogre, they didn’t use CG. They used our friends “|”, “\”, “/”, and “.”

Miss it? Well pop in an Air Supply cassette and surf over to Photo2text. Upload a photo and shiny metal robots turn it into in-stant ASCII. Retro-spiff.

High-contrast photos work best, and your file has to be smaller than 200K. Make a few high-tech adjustments, then take it low-fi at Photo2text.

Convert Photos to ASCII Art at Photo2Text

p.s. Want more ASCII art? Check out Christopher Johnson’s ASCII Art Collection, featuring the always-popular “Naked Ladies” section [Maybe not safe for work.. but people, it's ASCII!] And don’t miss the ASCII Art Dictionary or Joan Stark’s ASCII art. If that last page doesn’t take you back, nothing will. It uses java!!

p.p.s. Mac user? Check this out: you can play Quicktime movies as ASCII movies!

You’ve finally talked Claude, Auguste, and Vincent into coming by to check out your vacation photos. You break out the slide show after crudités, and they break out the critiques. When Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh offer advice on recoloring your photos, do you listen?

We’d say yes. And with Photoshop’s “Match Color” tool, giving your photos the color sense of your favorite painter is a snap!

Step 1: Find your painting
To get started, find a painting you’d like to emulate. We had good luck with the images at Wikipedia, and Google’s Image Search is another fine option. Look for paintings that match the feel of your own work. A moody street scene, for example, would be a natural for Hopper-ization, gardens and lakes are Monet territory, and naked ladies in tropical locales are ideal candidates for a bit of Gauguin.

Step 2: Open your files
Save the photo of the painting you’ll use to your computer, then open both your photo and painting in Photoshop. Make sure your photo is in front.

Step 3: Merge ‘em!
Under the Image menu, choose Adjustments, then Match Color. Choose the painting as the source, then tweak the Luminance and Color Intensity settings to your heart’s content.

Ah. It feels good to finally kinda, sorta put those art history classes to use. Check out James Delaney’s tutorial for step-by-step instructions.

Enhance your Photography with Classical Art
[via Lifehacker]

p.s. Don’t miss Photojojo’s Mother’s Day photo ideas for 2007 over at Photojojo Uncut!
p.p.s. All sorts of mom-friendly photo goodies at The Photojojo Store. Order by Monday to get them in time for mom!

If a picture really does tell a thousand words, then a comic strip ought to tell roughly 1500 or so.

Release your inner Stan Lee and let your photos speak up using Comeeko, a site where you can give your photos a little extra KERPOW! with a comic strip-style makeover.

With comic text, tattoos, hair pieces, and cosmetic accessories galore, a few uploads and a couple of clicks is all you’ll need to pit your best friend against Borat or slip the old man into a bikini.

Turn photos into comics with Comeeko