Istanbul laughs at efforts to capture it in a photo. It laughs like a frantic stock trader on the floor of the NYSE might laugh were he asked by a wayward tourist to smile for a photo.

A camera can never record the wondrous complexity of the place: the tastes of the seafood meze beside the Bosphorus, the sound of the call to prayer reverberating through sinuous Ottoman alleyways, or the bustle of suited businessmen and women among the mirrored skyscrapers. In Istanbul, a camera feels inadequate....

I recently tried an experiment: On a trip I really wanted to photograph, I left my camera bag behind and brought only an iPhone.

I wanted to see what I could do with just the phone’s camera. The results?

Read more at: 5 Great iphone Apps for the Travel Photographer

Adobe scientists and programmers were hard at work with a new feature called “content aware fill” in the coming Photoshop CS5 when they accidentally created what they believe is the first “self aware” piece of software.

Adobe programmer Dave Smith describes the day that content aware became self aware....

Read More....

Great article today in the NYT.... (not exactly news - this is about 5 years tardy - but good anyway  )
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/business/media/30photogs.html?pagewanted=1

Jeff Pflueger: Are you making photographs of people or taking them?

Working with a population as vulnerable as war refugees was difficult enough, and now we were being tailed by a man in a suit, like something out of a bad spy novel. But we only improve our craft through challenge, I thought.....

The First Travel Photo and the Future of Photography

01.28.10 | 11:15 AM ET

Professional photographers have a secret to great photography. For decades, the secret was out of reach for the people who weren’t working professionally, mostly because it was too expensive—in dollars, time and storage space.

Today, everything has changed, and the secret is available to everyone with a digital camera....

Read more on WorldHum

There is a bond between travel writers and photographers that goes beyond cravings for weird food and questionable style (I’m thinking of the convertible pants/shorts I own). You see, “photography” literally means “writing with light.”

Think of the implications: Writers have their keyboards (electronic typewriters). Now we photographers have our light writers. Or think of the people on our travels who don’t want to be photographed. Who’d ever say no to, “may I make a light writing of you?”

When I snagged my first big photo assignment with a major magazine, National Geographic Adventure, I traveled to a remote mountain range called the Arrigetch Peaks north of the Arctic circle in Alaska.

It was the most remote I had ever been. Just getting there required a flight to Fairbanks, 250 miles of dirt road, a rattling bush flight in an overloaded prop plane for another couple of hundred miles, and then two long days of trail-less hiking. If anyone on our team got seriously hurt or sick, our best hope was to radio a passing plane with the VHF. A plane happened to fly overhead once every few days.

Audio Stream:

Copyright 2.0 Part I - Introductions, beginning presentations

Copyright 2.0 Part II - Questions and Answers

Thanks to Jim Goldstein of Exif and Beyond for editing and compressing the audio files.

And thanks to Nate Bennett and the AAU audio technician for making sure that the recording happened!