(Click on the Image to see the photos)

We traveled through Cuba in 2008 and I thought it is time to release some of the Cuba photographs I did capture in 2008.

Our trip did take us to:

• Havana
• Vinales
• Cienfuegos
• Trinidad
• Camagüey
• Gibara
• Santiago de Cuba
• Baracoa

You can take a look at this fine Photographs on our PhotoMocha Photography web site by clicking on my name: Thorsten Meyer

(Next I plan to share the Photos I did take in China when we traveled through South-West China in May 09.)

Photographer Gabriele Raith did publish Stunning India Photos from a recent trip through North India.

View great images from India in Gabriele Raith portfolio on PhotoMocha .

Google announced that they’re now hosting around 10 million photos from the LIFE photo archives on Google Image search. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.

Once you are in the archive, you’ll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page. If you decide you really like one of these images, high-quality framed prints can be purchased from LIFE at the click of a button. Think of the holiday gift possibilities! It doesn’t get much easier than that.

You can search the photos directly from the LIFE photo archive start page, or you can simply include source:life with any Google Image search query.

Imagine yourself beneath the Eiffel Tower or in the heart of Times Square. Now imagine being able to see that exact scene in an amazing new way. With Photosynth, you can look up or down, pan from left to right, zoom in, or pull back to reveal the full sense of where you were. Photosynth provides incredibly realistic close-up detail of a place as seen in the collaboration with National Geographic. Exclusive synths of some of the world’s most renowned locations, such as Machu Picchu and the Parthenon, were created using photographs taken by National Geographic.

From the Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. Photosynth is a potent mixture of two independent breakthroughs: the ability to reconstruct the scene or object from a bunch of flat photographs, and the technology to bring that experience to virtually anyone over the Internet.

Using techniques from the field of computer vision, Photosynth examines images for similarities to each other and uses that information to estimate the shape of the subject and the vantage point the photos were taken from. With this information, we recreate the space and use it as a canvas to display and navigate through the photos.

Providing that experience requires viewing a LOT of data though—much more than you generally get at any one time by surfing someone’s photo album on the web. That’s where our Seadragon™ technology comes in: delivering just the pixels you need, exactly when you need them. It allows you to browse through dozens of 5, 10, or 100(!) megapixel photos effortlessly, without fiddling with a bunch of thumbnails and waiting around for everything to load.

Photosynth is a radically new way to use your photography. To help you get the best results we’ve prepared the The Photosynth Photography Guide (1Mbyte pdf)

Using Photosynth

Getting started with Photosynth is easy:

• To begin, just take a few dozen digital photos — 20 to 300 photos are required, depending on the size of the place or object — with overlap between each shot, from a number of locations and angles.
• Next, download a small, free software application to your computer from http://photosynth.com. This software works in concert with the Photosynth Web site, which is also a free service.
• Build your synth in just two easy steps: First, from the Photosynth Web site, click on Create and select the pictures you want to use. Then, give your creation a name and click on Synth, and Photosynth automatically creates and uploads your synth. In about the same amount of time it would take to upload the pictures to a photo-sharing site, you can enjoy your pictures in dramatic and detailed 3-D.
• The finished synth can be accessed from any Windows XP- or Windows Vista-powered computer with a broadband connection. If you want to comment on other people’s synths or create your own, you’ll also need a free Windows Live ID.
• Once created, synths can also be embedded on Web sites, blogs and social networking sites or virtually anywhere HTML can be edited.

Did you ever see a photo or image and though “mm that looks odd, does she really have three arms?”. It might be Photoshoped to death. If you interested in such images you should take a look at photoshopdisasters photoshopdisasters list them all. All the Images that got a little to much Photoshop work on them, all the Images that have been done in a hurry, all the Images that make you wonder how they have done it. Models with three arms, Celebrities with body’s that look like someone glued their head onto someone else body, items that seem to fly, reflections in mirrors that show something else and  many examples can be found on photoshopdisasters.

Click on the picture above to see a sneak preview of the new PhotoMocha web site which is currently being redesigned and will become available to the public in April 2008. On PhotoMocha you can see all the different photographs we did shoot or will produce in the future.

PhotoMocha’s Photo pool includes:

• Country Photography
  • India
  • Sri Lanka
  • France
  • Italy
  • Germany
  • Namibia
  • South Africa
  • Morocco
• Food Photography
• Landscape Photography
• People Photography

Click this text to see the PhotoMocha sneak preview

Read the rest of this entry »

TiltViewer from Airtight is a free, customizable 3D Flash image viewing application. There is also a pro version TiltViewer-Pro which you can purchase to be able to use more features. TiltViewer does support either Flickr Galleries or XML Galleries.

PhotoMocha has a great TiltViewer Example:

• India 2007 Photos  (TiltViewer Pro @ PhotoMocha)

What is new in TiltViewer Version 1.3?

• Added free downloadable version
• Added next/back paging navigation option
• Support disabling of flip button globally or per image
• Support removing link button per image
• Added internationalization support for all text
• Fixed key navigation to empty images
• Drop out frames if image count < page size or if image URL doesn’t exist
• Fixed fullscreen menu option after escaping fullscreen mode
• Updated Away3D engine version for increased performance
• Fixed ‘Where is the debugger…’ prompt for some player versions
• Allow loading into another Flash movie (PRO)
• Added transparent background option (PRO)
• Added link ‘_target’ support (PRO)
• Added frame width option (PRO)
• Added flip button and navigation button color options (PRO)
• Removed preloader text (PRO)
• Added option to disable ‘Go Fullscreen’ menu item (PRO)
• Removed default flickr search (PRO)

TiltViewer is based on PaperVision3D.