Nikon 24.5 Megapixel DSLR

Whoa! Nikon's come out with a 24.5 megapixel digital SLR that has 51-point autofocus, HDMI output, and 50 MB RAW files that expand out to 140 MB TIFF files - and it can simultaneously record RAW and JPEG images on separate memory cards. Start-up time is 12 milliseconds and shutter lag is 40 milliseconds. It sounds as though it also expands dynamic range but then does some sort of additional image processing to keep shots from looking flat. But the D3x will set you back some $7999 and 2.11 pounds just for the body. That's like hanging a small bag of flour around your neck. Ouch.

Idea for Advent Calendar

A Kodak blogger had an interesting idea: take a picture of the George Eastman House and use its 24 windows as a traditional advent calendar. That made me reaize that if you had any object with the right number of repeated elements, you could do the same. That could be trees in a forest, cars on a lot, or what have you. If you don't have enough elements in a grid, then you could get a row of several and then set the row out multiple times.

Caravaggio Used Photography?

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was an Italian artist at the turn of the 17th century who ushered in baroque painting and true realism. According to an Italian art scholar, he may also have been an early practitioner of photography, using firefly powder to produce short-lived fluorescent images that he could then turn into a sketch and, ultimately, a painting. He was known for working directly on canvas and not developing a series of preparatory sketches.

DIY High Speed Photography

Makezine.com has an intriguing feature on do-it-yourself high speed photography - like capturing a balloon in mid-burst or a water drop as it just hits the surface of a container of water. Curiously, they used a disposable camera because its flash won't last as long as that of a commercial flash unit, which ends up letting the subject blur.

Time Q&A with Annie Leibovitz

Time Magazine had a Q&A with Annie Leibovitz in which readers sent the questions. I* wouldn't call it incredibly revealing, but it was interesting, and at the end there's a link to a video interview with her.

LIFE Photo Archives Online

LIFE Magazine was famous for its own photography. In addition, it had one heck of a photo archive. Now some of that work is available online, stretching as far back as the 1870s (long before the publication came into existence).

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

I'm finding that the description doesn't quite mesh with what I can see on the site. No matter how I search, whether by decade, year, or topic, the maximum number of photos that come back seems to be 200. For those who need old pictures for projects, remember that in the U.S., anything from before 1923 is in the public domain.

Renaissance Portraiture: Propoganda and Photography of the Times

Jackie Wullschlager has an interesting piece in the Financial Times on an exhibition of Renaissance portraiture at the National Gallery in London in cooperation with the Prado Madrid. Looking at oil paintings of faces and figures, it takes some imagination to get out of the current associations and see them as they fit into society of those times:

Humanism and the medium of oil paint were more or less born together. Each enhanced the other as the greatest artists of the day embraced a medium offering un-rivalled scope for depth, naturalism, refinement, psychological complexity. Early likenesses were destined not for the wall but to evoke absent loved ones or – as in Holbein’s treacherously flattering “Anne of Cleves” for Henry VIII – to prepare marriage alliances; once surveyed, or when the subject turned up, they were stored in boxes: thus the small size. In the 16th century, however, their purpose evolved to became more decorative, larger, and more subtly propagandist.

There was no photography, so paintings were the equivalent. I did a quick check in Wikipedia on the history of watercolor painting. Although the earliest examples were ancient, it really began in the Renaissance, yet they were seen as a medium for naturalist work - producing images of wildlife and plants. So oils remained the choice for portraits. I wonder how much economics and time sensitivity played into the smaller image format. Certainly the easy of storing images when someone was around had to be part, much the way we keep snapshots. But also a full-blown large oil portrait would have taken much longer to make and been far more expensive.

One overarching story is the dissemination of portraiture down the social scale. By 1554, satirist Pietro Aretino, whose own sumptuous portrait by Titian hangs in the Palazzo Pitti, lamented that “even tailors and vintners are given life by painters” – and indeed, a highly engaging work is Giovanni Battista Moroni’s courteous “The Tailor”, caught still holding scissors and cloth, to incline his head to listen to us.

I suspect that and the need to create images in shorter periods of time were similarly large driving factors of the format. The article has some real insight and makes me wish I had business taking me to London and dropping me off briefly at the National.