Microsoft expert, Kostas Mallios discusses the move to photography becoming one with video in the future.

At the Pro Photo Summit, Kostas Mallios, general manager of the Rich Media Group at Microsoft, talked about the direction he believes photography is headed and what he sees coming in the near future. Having video and still-image capabilities in the same product is something he saw as inevitable and very exciting...

News from Microsoft’s Pro Photo Summit

At Microsoft’s third annual Pro Photo Summit, held earlier this summer in Redmond, Wash., some of my favorite parts were the “Five Minutes to Wow” segments. Basically, each presenter had five minutes to demonstrate a product or technology and elicit a “wow” from the audience.

The presenters were from Microsoft’s research group and from several other companies, and they showed some pretty amazing things. Multigigapixel images; 3-D models of landscapes and cities constructed from hundreds of images; a new image file format; new and better techniques for sharpening images – all these and much more were presented during the two-day summit...

The ability to make your own coffee-table book is now within reach with today’s digital tools.

At one time or another, every photographer, professional, serious amateur or hobbyist has dreamt of having work published in a beautiful coffee-table book. Seeing your images pop off the printed page in an elegant, professionally created photo book is just a major rush. Many wedding and portrait photographers I talk to still get a thrill when they see their client reverently turning the pages of a just-finished album...

After many months and several public betas, Adobe finally released Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, its professional photographer’s “toolbox” for importing, processing and managing digital images.

Designed from the ground up, Lightroom incorporates the latest digital imaging concepts and technologies, such as automated workflow processing, nondestructive editing and support for multiple file formats, including JPG, TIFF, DMG, PSD and more than 150 raw file formats..

It should come as no surprise to digital photographers that, within 48 hours of Apple’s October 2005 Aperture debut, iView Multimedia and Extensis both announced new versions of their own products. Adobe also released new photo software in January.

iView Media Pro Version 3 has some great new features, including a lightbox, better workflow tools and an improved user interface. The Pro Lightbox lets you compare up to four images side by side in a full-screen view, including the histograms, labels and rating for each image...

A look back at photography's huge technological strides in the last 20 years.

May 1989: Seattle – So I’m here in Seattle on my first trip to the Pacific Northwest and wow, is this a beautiful area! If I ever get tired of L.A., this might be a place to check out. Flying in over Mount Rainier was a treat, but by the time I got my Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic II out, added my SMC Takumar 55mm lens and loaded a roll of Ektachrome 100, we were getting ready to land. I’ll have to plan better and hope I get a window seat on the way home.

After my trip, I did a little slide show for some of the people in my office. I heard several comments that if I ever get tired of programming IBM mainframes, I could become a professional photographer. I’ve got a couple of images that I’m going to print as large Cibachromes and enter them in some contests…

Selected winners, runners-up and other images from this year's Envirnomental Photography Invitation exhibition, presented this summer at Art Wolfe's Seattle gallery.

Known for his passionate advocacy for the environment, nature photographer Art Wolfe created a conservation-themed photo contest in 1997 as "an event for the advancement of photography as a unique medium, capable of bringing awareness and preservation to our environment through art." This year marks the 10th anniversary of Wolfe's annual photography exhibit, which has gone through some name changes and is currently known as the Environmental Photography...

Here at PhotoMedia Central, we look at a lot of photographers’ web sites. We’ve found that there are, indeed, some good, some bad and some … well, you get the picture.

If there is one thing that photographers need to understand about their web sites, it is what my publisher likes to call “impressive simplicity.” Keep it simple and knock their socks off with your images. Don’t waste people’s time with fancy technology or unusual navigation just to be cool.

For most photographers, the primary purpose of their web sites is to promote themselves and their work...