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An interesting map is available on strange maps blog :

The creator of this map has had the interesting idea to break down that gigantic US GDP into the GDPs of individual states, and compare those to other countries’ GDP. What follows, is this slightly misleading map – misleading, because the economies both of the US states and of the countries they are compared with are not weighted for their respective populations.

You can read more on that subject here.

This is a great Mercedes ad with Alonso, Hamilton and Hakkinen

Pentax US has today announced the opening of PentaxPhotoGallery.com a stylish and sophisticated online photo gallery dedicated to photographs taken with Pentax equipment:
Pentax Photo Gallery

Some great photos are there, I recommend you checkout this site even if you are not a Pentax owner (I am not).

The update of Adobe Camera Raw 3.7 is available for download.

The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in became the latest must-have tool for professional photographers when it was released in February 2003. This powerful plug-in has been updated to support more cameras and include more features, and is available as part of Adobe Photoshop CS2. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 is now also available and is built upon the same powerful raw processing technology that is available in the camera raw plug-in.

That means that settings from Photoshop Camera RAW and lightroom are compatible. A modification made from Lightroom will be the same in Photoshop CS2. Great!

Downloads:

• Camera Raw 3.7 for Mac
• Camera Raw 3.7 and DNG Converter 3.7 for Mac
• Camera Raw 3.7 for Windows
• Camera Raw 3.7 and DNG Converter 3.7 for Windows

Adobe has just released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

You can buy it for a special introductory price (US$199 instead of US$299) from around the world (price is different for each region) until end of June.

Lightroom had been made by photographs for photographs. It changes the way you are processing your pictures. It is more intuitive and you will quickly have a great result.

I’m a click away to buy it… quick!

I have discovered a new great plugin for WordPress: Snap Preview Anywhere.

After following the easy setup wizard, you will have a small script to add to your template page before the head tag.

This plugin is displaying a window containing a preview of the linked page. It is fun and everybody is seeing the site he will navigate to.

It is now installed on this blog, try it and enjoy it!

Several articles have been recently published on the new HP Z3100.

This printer has been announced at Photokina 2006.

Here is a list of important new features for an HP printer:

• First large format printer from HP that uses pigmented inks and is in direct competition to equivalent printers by Epson (7800/9800) and now also Canon (IPF 5000, IPF 8000)
• Features a built-in XRite Eye-One spectrophotometer. The printer can calibrate and profile papers using this spectrophotometer.
• 12 colors with extra Red, Green and Blue with larger gamut (we will only look into this when we find pictures of friends and clients that need a larger gamut (our images are not very saturated and we even print more and more B&W or muted colors )
• 4 black and grays (photo black and matte black loaded at the same time like with the Canon IPF5000)
• Gloss Enhancer to avoid bronzing and gloss differential
• Clog prevention technologies
• Very high permanence rating from Wilhelm Imaging Research (>200 years). We take all these data with some grain of salt but it still proves that today’s printer manufacturers pay a lot of attention to longevity.

Some articles and videos have been published on this printer. I will talk about them in this article.

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Bron Elektronik AG has published a useful tool for photographer: a light shaper comparison.

You can compare the effect of different light combos on a model.

So before buying a new softlight reflector or a soloflex, try the tool to check it is what you really wanted.

Outbackphoto has just published an article with all the tools they have used in 2006: “Our most used new editing tools in 2006“.

They are talking about:

• LightZone 2.0
• Photomatix 2.3
• Akvis Enhancer
• Alien Skin Exposure

I highly recommend the reading of this article.

This year I was at Bucharest for the new year.

In 1989 when I was seeing the revolution at the television I could not imagine being at the same Revolution Place few years later to celebrate the entrace of the Romania into the European Union.

As a matter of fact, I was there!

This video has been made at the Revolution Place when Romania has celebrated its entry into European Union. Being French, my country is part the EU since I am born. So it was great to be in a country that was newly part of it and was celebrating it.

Everybody was enjoying this moment and had a lot of hope.