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Photographer without legs tells life story from ground up

At first glance, Kevin Connolly's photographs simply capture random people on random streets around the world. But look again, and it becomes clear his photos tell a much more complex story--the split-second shock and curiosity on strangers' faces when they encounter a man with no legs, gliding past on a skateboard, propelling himself with his hands.

Connolly, 22, was born legless. He has gone from award-winning skier who tears down slopes in his custom-built mono-ski to professional photographer probably best-known for "The Rolling Exhibition," his series of digital photos that show strangers looking at him with expressions … Read more

Will Picasa become Google Photos?

There are signs Picasa Web Albums could be renamed Google Photos.

Google Operating System noticed several references to the term in the code that powers the Web site.

Among the examples: "This photo will be available to view and share in Google Photos, Google's free photo hosting service." And: "By submitting this form, you're alerting the Google Photos team to inappropriate content on this page."

Poring through a source code may sound like a dodgy way to predict the future, but programming code snippets can be revealing. Some wording in the Apple iPhone developer kit … Read more

Backing up digital photos in the field

A post earlier this year by CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland pondering how he should store photos while traveling got me thinking about the same question.

I can't claim to have come up with "the answer," but I've thought about the issues, read through some discussions about what people consider best practices, and have tried to roughly quantify relative failure rates. What's right for you will depend on priorities and circumstances, but hopefully the following will offer some food for thought.

Real-world failure rates are hard to come by. However, having been the owner … Read more

SmugMug goes after prosumer photags with SmugVault

SmugMug, a photo host geared toward prosumer and professional photographers, launched a new service Monday called SmugVault.

As the name would suggest it's all about storage, but not just for the standard slew of files you'll see supported on sites like Flickr or Google's Picasa. Instead, SmugVault is all about the files professional or advanced users end up with, like the RAW and TIFF files from high-end digital SLRs, and the PDF and PSD files from post-processing.

The service is tapping into Amazon.com's S3 cloud storage to serve up all that space, and offering users … Read more

Flickr gets Kuler

Although I've yet to find a personal use for it, I've always been intrigued by Adobe's Kuler technology. Most of the implementations we've seen so far, which includes the Web site and integration into Adobe Illustrator, have targeted at generating shareable color palettes from individual user-specified colors or from palette-color drawings. But Adobe extends that to continuous-tone imagery for Flickr users, who can load images into Kuler to generate image-based palettes. John Nack describes how use it (he doesn't explicitly state that you launch it from Kuler, not from Flickr, which confused me for a … Read more

Capture NX 2 takes aim at Adobe

There are a lot of image editors out there, but few of them are designed with professional photographers in mind, and even fewer are designed by photographers themselves. Capture NX 2 for Windows and Mac is one of those rare editors designed by professionals but is easy enough for hobbyists to use, and Nikon has just given it a major overhaul.

Available for purchase at $179.95 or upgrade at $109.95, the program introduces a revamped interface, closer integration with other Nikon programs such as View NX, and a battery of new tools that simplify and enhance the photo-editing … Read more