Digital Photography on the Web (2008-04-26)

2008-04-26 This is a review of some digital photography web sites. I'll update it periodically.

This is not a list of my favorite sites, although all of my favorite sites will eventually be on it. Some of my reviews are bad ones. A few of the best sites are listed first, but other than that they're in no particular order.

Here's what characterizes a good site:

Timely, accurate, well-written, in-depth content.
Frequently updated.
Mostly the work of one or two passionate individuals, such as Michael Reichmann, Michael Johnston, Uwe Steinmueller, Rob Galbraith, Thom Hogan, Lloyd Chambers, Sean Reid, Martin Evening, Jeff Schewe, Peter Krogh, and Jeffrey Friedl.
If there's a forum, people use their real names.

A site that's infrequently updated isn't bad, just increasingly irrelevant as the technology changes. A site with wrong information and bad advice is worse than irrelevant—it's actually harmful. A couple of sites listed here, Ken Rockwell and Slashdot, can be harmful if you're not careful.

With a few exceptions, I won't cover sites that are mainly discussion forums. Many of these are valuable for tracking down problems with specific pieces of equipment, but mostly they're a waste of time ("Any thoughts on what Leica will do in the M9?"). (OK, I admit that late at night I do enjoy wasting time, and these sites are one way I do it.) And, of course, believing some random poster can be hazardous.

If you have any comments on anything here or any suggestions for sites I ought to include, please email me.

The Luminous Landscape

www.luminous-landscape.com

This is the best digital photography site on the web. It's run by Michael Reichmann, who writes most of the articles, although many of them are guest pieces written by people such as Alain Briot and Andrew Rodney.

Reichmann also appears in videos that you can download; all of the half-dozen or so that I've seen are terrific. Some are part of his video journal, while others are tutorials, the best of which is From Camera to Print, with Jeff Schewe. (It taught me how to print, as I blogged about here.) Their newest tutorial is Guide to Adobe Camera Raw, which I haven't seen but am willing to bet is terrific, too.

The articles, which appear once or twice a week (less often when Reichmann is on one of his photography adventures) are outstanding. Some examples are:

To get to the articles, click on the headings Columns, Essays, Locations, Product Reviews, Techniques, Tutorials, and Understanding Series that appear in the left margin on the site.

There's a forum, too, in which Reichmann, Schewe, and other well-known people sometimes post. Here's my favorite reply from Reichmann to a post about shooting JPEG instead of RAW:

If in the days of film you used to take your client's images to the local drug store, have prints made there, and then watched while the kid behind the counter cut up the original negatives with a pair of scissors and thew them in the trash, by all means shoot JPG on your next commercial assignment.

Schewe once posted:

Ken Rockwell should be drawn and quartered...

Which I agree with (see below), assuming Schewe was speaking figuratively.

The Online Photographer

theonlinephotographer.com

This is Michael Johnston's blog on photographic art, philosophy, technique, equipment, and other matters, updated on average at least once a day. Some of the articles are by guest writers, including, one time, me. (Full disclosure: I also advertise on this site.)

Unusual for blogs, the comments (moderated by Johnston) are worth reading, too. (Some of those are mine, too.)

Digital Outback Photo

www.outbackphoto.com

This excellent site is about "Fine Art Photography in the Digital Age". It's mostly written by Uwe Steinmueller, with help from some distinguished contributing editors (such as Alain Briot).

The site emphasizes up-to-date information over formality, so new cameras are subjects of what Steinmueller calls diaries that he adds to as he goes about using the camera. The news page is updated daily.

There are a large collection of in-depth articles, many of which are on advanced topics that are covered nowhere else. Some examples:

Why Use the ProPhoto RGB Color Space?
Avoiding Parallax while Stitching with Shift Lenses
"High Speed HDR" and Tonemapping (with Bettina Steinmueller)

(Full disclosure: Uwe Steinmueller and I have talked about collaborating on some articles, so I am a potential contributor to the site.)

diglloyd

diglloyd.com

Lloyd Chambers updates his blog here a few times a week, often with insights that go deep into the technology. Chambers's writing is notable for its rigor and objectivity. (For example, in Feb. 2007 he switched from Nikon to Canon because, with the Canon EOS 1D Mark III, he decided that Nikon had fallen too far behind. That was before Nikon announced its latest D3 and D300 bodies, however, and he's now working on a review of the D3, which he'll surely charge for, but you can read his for free.)

Chambers his money from the books and reports he sells (and from advertising), but many valuable articles are free, such as:

Star Focusing and Circular Blobs (Lloyd Chambers)
All About Apple Mac Pro Memory (Lloyd Chambers)
PC or Mac�Making a Sensible Choice (Lloyd Chambers)
Hard Disk Drives (Lloyd Chambers)
Firewire and USB Card Readers (Lloyd Chambers)
Noise and Multiple Exposures (Lloyd Chambers)
Printing on Canvas (Lloyd Chambers)

His reviews are incredibly detailed. A good example is one he used to charge for that is now free (because it's out of date): D200 vs D2x.

Rob Galbraith

www.robgalbraith.com

News items every day, some of which seem to be exclusives, and a few excellent articles a year, mostly about equipment. I understand that is was Galbraith who first wrote about a focusing problem in Canon's 1Ds Mk III, thereby putting pressure on Canon to fix the problem. Some other articles:

The Nikon D3 from ISO 200 to 25600
A look inside Nikon's Sendai digital SLR factory
Italian fresco captured in 9.85 Gigapixel photo

Galbraith's site won't make you a better photographer (unlike, say, The Luminous Landscape or Thom Hogan), but it will keep you informed.

Lightroom News

lightroom-news.com

An excellent site for Lightroom news, run by Martin Evening and Jeff Schewe. Contributors include Ian Lyons, Sean McCormack, Seth Resnick, Andrew Rodney, Mike Skurski, Russell Brown, Mac Holbert, and Michael Reichmann.

The site publishes original material, not just headlines picked up from somewhere else, such as a recent article about the departure of Mark Hamburg, formerly chief architect of Photoshop and, more recently, head of the Lightroom team (written by Martin Evening).

There are feature stories, too, such as one on sharpening and one on Thomas and John Knoll.

George Jardine

www.mulita.com/blog/

George Jardine is a photography evangelist for Adobe who creates videos podcasts that you can download for free, from his site or on iTunes.

Some recent tutorial topics were "Subjective Color Correction" and "The Synchronize Command". Others are on various subjects, such as interviews with photographers Gregory Heisler, Gerd Ludwig, and Catherine Hall. Photoshop News strobist

Thom Hogan

Hogan is best known for his thorough Nikon guides, which he sells on his web site (CD only; no downloads), but he also has lots of free material, the best of which isn't Nikon specific. Hogan's articles are always well-written, thoroughly researched, field-tested, and rigorous. He updates them when things change, too.

I have his D200 guide, and it's excellent.

Some samples:

Serious Support
Getting the Pixels Right
Thom's Quick & Dirty Guide to RAW
Thom's Quick & Dirty Guide to Color Management
Tip of the Iceberg
Carrying 101
Thom's Equipment of Choice
You'll Get a Charge Out of This
Filtration 101
Cleaning your Sensor
How Big Can You Print?

Hogan believes that if you've spent money for a good body and lens, you should put the camera on a tripod, use a low ISO, shoot raw, and take the trouble to focus and choose the best aperture. It seems obvious, but he writes about it anyway, and after reading what he writes you promise yourself you'll actually start doing it.

Ken Rockwell

~~www.kenrockwell.com~~

I'll put Rockwell right after Hogan (see above) because Rockwell believes that you should not use a tripod, should use a high ISO, and should not shoot raw. He's wrong about a lot more than that, too. I think Rockwell must have taken one of Hogan's workshops with his ears set to some weird inverse mode.

Rockwell's best known article is Your Camera Doesn't Matter, yet he writes almost exclusively about equipment and always shoots with the newest model, frequently bragging about how many images he's taken, mostly it seems snapshots of his son, printed at Costco.

Here some of my favorite Rockwellisms:

"Tripods are no longer required, and actually often degrade sharpness..."
Digital Killed My Tripod

"Adobe RGB is irrelevant for real photography. sRGB gives better (more consistent) results and the same, or brighter, colors."
sRGB vs. Adobe RGB

"Image quality is the same in JPG and raw."
JPG vs Raw: Get it Right the First Time

There's no denying that Rockwell can write, but that's like saying that Rush Limbaugh can talk.

You'll want to read Rockwell's articles just for fun, but don't take anything he says seriously. You probably already know how to take JPEG snapshots get them printed at Costco. dpreview, Steves (articles), IR (articles; Dave's Definitive Guide to Buying a Digicam, A Guide to Digital Printers both dated 2001)

Digital Photography Review, Steve's Digicams, and Imaging Resource

www.dpreview.com, www.steves-digicams.com, and www.imaging-resource.com

These are the big three of review sites. If you're looking to buy a new digital camera you'll definitely want to read what they have to say, but there's so much detail that it's hard to know what to make of it. Is a camera that offers four JPEG quality settings better than one that offers only three? Is it a problem that when Panasonic DMC-LX1 was upgraded to the LX2 they didn't reformat its menus to fit the wider screen? I would say "you decide", but you can't, can you?

It's hard to write a meaningful review when the target audience includes everyone at every level of expertise. One of the sites downgraded a camera because of its overly-aggressive noise reduction at higher ISOs, which can be bypassed only if you shoot raw. Since I was interested in the camera mainly because it was one of the few pocketable digicams that can shoot raw, I didn't care about the issue.

I think the best way to use these sites is to get the facts from the reviews, but to ignore the ratings, since they're based on a scale that may not matter to you.

Another problem with these reviews is that they get so wrapped up in fine distinctions in image quality between small-sensor digicams that one can forget that, as a class, they're all inferior in image quality to DSLRs with APS-C-sized sensors. (See my own buying guide.)

Aside from its reviews, Steve's Digicams has a monthly column by Mike Chaney that's worth reading.

DP Review doesn't seem to have any articles at all other than its reviews. Imaging Resource has some, but many of them haven't been updated since 2001. (Example: "For most of the trip, we left the 256MB Lexar card loaded in the Nikon D1x, one of the 96MB cards loaded in the Dimage 7, the 64MB card in the Coolpix 995, and we held the second 96MB CF card in reserve for use in whichever CF-equipped camera needed it.")

photo.net

http://photo.net/

photo.net is probably the oldest photography site, older even than digital photography. Its forums are some of the best and most active (I especially like the digital darkroom forum). Unusual for the web, posts are usually signed with the author's real name, and the discussions are polite and professional.

There are articles, too, mostly written by Philip Greenspun who started the site (and wrote the forum software it uses). They're all worth reading, even though many of them are way out-of-date ("Digital Sepia Toning Made Easy using Photoshop 6"). New articles and updates are rare, but they do show up (one is dated March 2008).

The DAM Forum

thedambook.com/smf

This forum discusses issues related to digital asset management (DAM), run by Peter Krogh, author of the definitive book on the subject, The DAM Book. (Peter also conducts DAM workshops.) An outstanding feature of the site is that Peter himself is likely to answer your questions.

The discussions are polite, professional, and informative, and everybody uses his or her real name. (If they don't, they get a gentle but firm reminder from Peter.)

One of the forums on the site is about ImageIngester and serves as the semi-official ImageIngester forum. I check it every day and answer any questions posted there myself.

Reid Reviews (Sean Reid)

www.reidreviews.com

This is a subscription-only ($32.95/year) site where Sean Reid publishes articles and reviews, mostly about equipment, about once a month. With so few articles, his coverage isn't wide, but it is deep. He had the most complete coverage of the Leica M8 by far, for example.

Reid's emphasis is mostly on rangefinders and lenses for them, but he does occasionally cover other cameras (his only recent Nikon review was on the D200, for example).

One annoying thing about the site is that it uses Adobe Flash, which (on a Mac, anyway), means that the text size can't be changed and you can't use the scroll wheel. (He's starting to address both problems.)

Jeffrey Friedl's Blog

regex.info/blog

Friedl isn't a great photographer, but his photo blog is updated with more new material every day than anyone else's. It's mostly pictures of his neighborhood in Japan, his occasional travels, and, especially, his young son, with some text teaches you a bit about Japanese history and culture, too. For example, his most recent blog article is about how his mother-in-law makes soup. The pictures of soup bowls will never make the cover of Martha Stewart Living, but are fun to look at anyway.

The real value of the site is a few technical articles Friedl has written, the best of which is Digital-Image Color Spaces. He's also the author of several Lightroom export plug-ins, and the inventor of a technology (he calls it "piglet") for building them, and of a nifty utility for examining the EXIF info (and more) of any photo you see on the web. (Readers who are computer programmers will appreciate that Friedl wrote an entire book on regular expressions, which is an example of how thorough he is about everything.)

(Message for Jeffrey: Instead of spending hours a day on your blog, how about just once a week and more technical articles?)

Wirehead Arts (Ken Wronkiewicz)

www.wireheadarts.com

Ken Wronkiewicz is a software engineer turned photographer. His quirky, but always interesting, blog mixes art and science, as in this excerpt:

I realized that part of this was a programming problem. See, I discovered that the sort of logic that I wanted to program in was just getting too obnoxious when written in assembler language. So I sat down and rewrote the firmware in C one day. I had targeted it for the scheduled session with one particular model, who turned out to be a drama-queen flake... so it was not until a bit later that I actually got a chance to use it.

Daily Walks

dianevarner.com

Varner takes daily walks with her camera and posts a photo on her blog once a week or so. It's a reminder that I should be (1) taking daily walks and (2) carrying my camera with me more often.

John Nack on Adobe

blogs.adobe.com/jnack

Nack is Senior Product Manager for Adobe Photoshop, and his blog, updated almost daily, often has inside information that no one else is reporting. Won't improve your photography, but will help keep you up-to-date.

B&H and Adorama

www.bhphotovideo.com/ and http://www.adorama.com/

Like thousands of other people, I've dealt with these two outfits for years. Prices and availability occasionally differ, so it makes sense to check them both before buying anything. They both have great customer service, including returns.

I use these sites to track down what current products are available, even when I'm not planning to buy.

If you get to New York, don't miss the giant B&H store. Adorama has one there, too, but I haven't been to it.

Slashdot

slashdot.org

Shashdot is about computer stuff in general, not specifically digital photography.

Don't spend any time on Slashdot without first understanding how it works and how it doesn't:

Somebody contributes a new item, usually referring to an article.
There's a brief summary of the article or issue, often wildly inaccurate or at least misleading.
Readers make comments in the hundreds, nearly all of which are ignorant, insulting, off-the-point, illogical, biased, or unintelligible. Or more than one of those.

The way to get anything useful out of Slashdot is to check the recent links and to click through to the article, ignoring the summary and the comments.

Some of the items are really wacky, such as this one from yesterday:

Party Ideas For Math Nerds?
rbf writes "A girl I like at my university, a graduate student in mathematics, will be having a birthday next month. She had thought of throwing a nerd-themed party — show up with tape on your glasses, pants hiked up, etc. However, she decided against it because most of her friends are math nerds and wouldn't even have to dress up! So my question for the community is: What fun party ideas would appeal to a group of mostly math-major nerds?"

But most of the items are pretty solid, as long as you don't pay too much attention to the summary and ignore the comments.