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.