Friday Shout-Outs, General Coolness, and Smart Thinking

Today’s Shout-Outs contain some really cool things, like cool customizations, cool ideas, cool photos, and cool people doing cool things. Pretty cool, huh?

Shout-Outs are a regular Friday thing, and you can be part of it, too. Send us suggestions! If we think it’s worth shouting about, it will show up here in the blog on a Friday. To submit something, scroll to the bottom to see how.

WHEN ELEPHANTS SWIM
Jody MacDonald is an adventure sport and documentary style photographer based in Seattle, Washington. Her work is inspiring, to say the least.

She created a section on her website that’s dedicated to just selling prints of her work, and incorporated a link to these images in her site’s navigation. One print I would love to have on my wall at home is her picture of Rajan, the last known salt-water swimming elephant on earth.

I mean, how great is this photo?!

PORTRAITS OF CHINA
M. Scott Brauer produced a really cool photo project called “We Chinese,” which grew out of a curiosity to find out what Chinese people think about their country and their future.

“In 2010, I traveled throughout major urban centers in eastern China stopping people on the street to ask the same two questions about their country and their future,” Brauer writes. “The respondents filled out a one-page typewritten questionnaire that included these two questions and some basic information including name, age, and occupation.”

“While it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the entire population, the people photographed here expressed a sincere love of country and optimism about the country’s future development and peaceful position in the world.”

The images in the project are also available for licensing from his PhotoShelter website.

ALMOST TOO COOL FOR WORDS

If you want to see a totally awesome PhotoShelter website customization job, cruise on over to the izmostock site, a comprehensive stock photography collection and automotive media library.

The site is using both WordPress and PhotoShelter – and to be honest, it’s so damn cool, slick, and tight, I don’t know how they did it.

Make sure you check out the cool photo rollovers on their front page, and how the pulldown navigation on their WordPress site matches exactly on the PhotoShelter site.

In addition, the site itself is clean and simple and very easy to understand and use. Really effective design.

JUST BELOW THE SURFACE
Photographer David Da Costa knows how to shoot photos underwater, and I recently found a gallery on his website that not only showed really beautiful underwater images, but also educated me on how he does it.

“The primary obstacle faced is the extreme loss of color and contrast when submerged to any significant depth. The longer wavelengths of sunlight (such as red or orange) are absorbed quickly by the surrounding water, so even to the naked eye everything appears blue-green in color,” he writes.

Then he goes on the describe the techniques he uses to solve this problem. I learned something today!

NELSON IN CAIRO
Freelance photographer Scott Nelson is currently working in Cairo, covering the protests amid many obstacles. He was recently intereviewed by James Estrin of the New York Times Lens Blog about “his experiences and expectations as a photojournalist and as a Cairo resident.”

Great interview, and really nice images.

Scott Nelson’s website.

GET SMART!
If you’re a Lightroom user (and even if you’re not) this might be especially useful to you. Texas-based photographer Ken Hurst put together a blog post called “Get Better Organized With PhotoShelter Lightroom Plugin” that shows you, step-by-step, how to create a “smart collection” of PhotoShelter images using Lightroom.

Hurst is using the PhotoShelter Lightroom plugin by Paul Kamphuis, combined with the “smart collection” feature within Lightroom to more easily manage and the images (and metadata) between PhotoShelter and Lightroom.

In this post he shows you exactly how he’s doing it. Pretty cool!

GET A DAILY DOSE OF LEAH
I’m a big fan of the work of photographer Leah Fasten. Leah is a photographer located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and works with both commercial and editorial clients. I really enjoy her style of shooting because she is able to find really nice images in what appears to be very normal real-life situations. (In other words, things I would totally miss if I were in the same place at the same time.)

So today I saw that she was offering up a daily photo via email, and immediately signed up. I can’t wait to see what lands in my inbox each day. Great idea, Leah!

Photo by Leah Fasten

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I am always looking for things to include here in our Friday Shout-Outs – so if you have anything you think is worthy, let me know. One great way to do that is to post a note to Twitter with my name in it (@heygrover), and that way I won’t forget it later. Don’t have Twitter? Email me: grover-at-photoshelter-dot-com.