The photographer counts: One… His wife Yvonne holds the chair up. Two… The assistants get ready with the water and the cats. Three… The assistants throw the cats from the right and the bucket of water from the left. Four… Salvador Dali jumps… and miliseconds later—Philippe Halsman takes the photo. Click!… Actually—28 times "Click!".

After taking several pictures of a hard-disk-casing grill (see the Blue-red macro (part 1) story first), I wanted to improve on the drama of the photos—to create something more 3D, more engaging.

Most photographers like sweets too :) So let me steer away from photography-topics-only for a moment. Along with the muffins' photos, I would like to share my recipe, that I find to be the best (from what I tried) in terms of muffins' texture, taste and dampness.

A few months ago I had an opportunity to participate in a group photo along with some good friends of mine. Usually, I participate in the type of photography that I know well and been doing for several years—landscape, urban or inanimate things (examples here). But this time I decided to get on a relatively new ground for me—portrait/people photography—that also fascinates me.

Thanks to NGUYEN DINH Quoc-Huy, we have yet another on-line tool for creation of the lighting and studio-set setups. Below you can try to create your own diagram online, and save a result as *.jpg file on your disk.

Since July 2006, for over two years, the adventures of a feathered, part-time newspaper photographer, have been a source many readers' daily laughs.

On the tenth "Eco-Products 2008 Exhibition", which took part in December 2008 in Tokyo, tokyobling took these photos of a D3 with Nikkor 12-24 lens—cut in half. As he wittily put: "(…) the staff politely ignored my feeble attempts to take a decent photo through the counter glass. I felt slightly incestous: a Nikon D60 photographing a crippled D3."

When a little over a year ago Google announced that previously-unseen "LIFE" photos are available online, for many people it meant sleepless nights, spent in awe and countless discoveries. Let me introduce you to one of them—photos by Howard Sochurek, that he took in Moscow, during the Christian Dior's collection show in July 1959.

"On a stifling July day in 1918, 18,000 officers and soldiers posed as Lady Liberty on the parade [drill] grounds at Camp Dodge." (…) "According to a July 3, 1986, story in the Fort Dodge Messenger, many men fainted—they were dressed in woolen uniforms—as the temperature neared 105 degrees Farenheit [41 degrees Celsius]. The photo, taken from the top of a specially constructed tower by a Chicago photography studio, Mole & Thomas, was intended to help promote the sale of war bonds but was never used." (Grover 1987)

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a process in which a photograph of a life-size location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature scale model. By distorting the focus of the photo, the artist simulates the shallow depth of field normally encountered with macro lenses making the scene seem much smaller than it actually is. (source: Wikipedia article on Tilt-shift miniature faking)