Photos: 2009 World Animal Day

Here are a few great photos that the Boston Globe collected from the 2009 World Animal Day. To see more photos, go here. To find out more about World Animal Day, go here.

25 Places To Become A Photoshop Expert

The folks at Design River have created a page with links to 25 of the Net's best websites to become a Photoshop expert. Click here to see the Photoshop gurus they recommend.

2010 "Ancient Sedona" Calendars Now Available

I've been photographing Sedona's ancient ruins and rock art for years, itching to turn these inspiring sights into products that other people could enjoy. Thanks to Lulu, an online publishing company that allows you to print (and sell) a wide variety of products on demand, I finally took the plunge and created a couple calendars. You can check out my first creations here. And find out more by visiting my Ancient Sedona website. These 2010 calendars make unique (and inspiring) gifts for the upcoming holiday season.

Los Angeles Sheriffs Unlawfully Detain Photographers' Rights Advocate

3,000 Images Combine For Stunning Milky Way Portrait

3,000 IMAGES COMBINE FOR STUNNING MILKY WAY PORTRAIT
Space.com
October 30, 2009

Original Link

A new panoramic image of the full night sky -- with the Milky Way as its centerpiece -- has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs. The panorama's creator, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University, spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. "This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said.

To combine these images, a simple cutting and pasting job would not suffice. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model -- and hundreds of hours in front of a computer... Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph and fit them together so that they wouldn't look patchy... The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

Read complete article here.