portrait photography

Regular readers know that as someone who does a lot of wildlife and sports photography, the long lenses in my camera bag usually don’t leave much room for high-quality (read Large) prime lenses. So I took advantage of a recent hiatus between trips to get review units of two of the sharpest primes to test out with my new Nikon D850. First up is the highly-rated Sigma 85mm f/1.4 Art lens.

Among serious photographers there is an oft-repeated mantra that “It’s the photographer, not the camera” that makes a great photo. While that is certainly true, tech companies are working hard to level the playing field. In a recent pair of research teases, Adobe is showing off how it expects to make it possible to fix many of the most common issues with typical smartphone portrait snapshots after the fact, turning them into some pretty impressive final versions. I wrote up my thoughts for Extremetech, or you can read on to see the full Adobe teaser video…

As photographers, we’re all familiar with needing to pull the most detail we can out of an image. Now, Google’s Brain team has come up with a way not just to extract detail, but to add it based on comparing the blurry version with a reference library of potentially-similar images. Since they’ve trained the system with a library of popular media stars, you might like the results even more than the original. Of course, it can’t really be called a photograph when it’s finished. More like an impressionist painting. You can read more about how it works in this article I wrote for ExtremeTech.