ImageCounty

Nikon 24.5 Megapixel DSLR

2008-12-01T07:43:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-30T05:32:00.000-05:00

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?

2008-11-29T08:33:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-28T09:27:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-28T08:40:00.000-05:00

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

2008-11-19T05:27:00.001-05:00

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

2008-10-26T09:33:00.003-04:00

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.

Color-Coordinated Art Buying

2008-10-08T07:10:00.000-04:00

The Guardian's Arts Diary has a short piece that is both amusing and distressing at the same time. According to someone from Christie's, well-heeled collectors have some small reasons that guide their choices in large investments into art. They prefer bright, cheerful colors over brown; get confused if you have to plug something in; and want items smaller than the average Park Avenue elevator. Nothing like elevated aesthetics.

Leonard Nimoy's Full Body Project

2008-10-06T05:14:00.001-04:00

Wandering in Northampton, Mass. the other day I stepped into the R. Michelson Gallery because I noticed that it had a showing of Leonard Nimoy's photography. The building is an old bank and the photos were in the vault - a collection of images from several of the photographer's topic projects. Some of teh new material is a departure from his typical work and shows a new range for his eye.

In the past, Nimoy has concentrated on studies of the female figure - well lighted, shot, and printed, and certainly imaginative. For example, there are images from his black & white project and the Shekhina (Jewish concept of a female spirit of God) project. But after a point you have to start asking how much more can be done with the perfect body of an actor, dancer, athlete, or model. It's just that so much has been said visually about the subject that finding something new becomes difficult.

Nimoy finally realized this and had a chance to shoot what he calls the full body project: images of large women who are part of a burlesque review. While some of the photos are homages to classic images, I found that the personality of the participants came though with a sparkling strength - far different from his other work. Instead of images of nude bodies, he achieved images of nude women. They aren't classically beautiful, but they are in many ways far more interesting than physical "perfection," and help remind that the very concept is ephemeral. (Just look at the work of Rubens.)

Nimoy is working on a new project - Who Do You Think You Are? - in which he tries getting people to reveal secrets about themselves in front of the camera and show their "other selves." It seems to me that this new direction of more confrontation and exploration of people relates in a way to his background as an actor, where he had to become a vehicle to allow a character not himself to come forth. His latest work is a visual aspect of the same process of discovery and creation.

A New Twist

2008-10-05T10:28:00.000-04:00

I'm going to put more effort into this blog but am expanding the scope. Instead of just photography, it will also cover more traditional art forms as I find myself spending a lot more time with a sketchbook and pen/pencil/charcoal in my hand.

Reporter Arrested for Photographing Senators, Donors at Democratic Convention

2008-08-28T09:50:00.000-04:00

Once again we see a heavy hand coming down on those daring to use a camera in public. This time it was Denver police arresting an ABC News producer for taking pictures, on a public sidewalk, of Democratic senators and big contributor.

A police official later told lawyers for ABC News that Eslocker is being charged with trespass, interference, and failure to follow a lawful order. He also said the arrest followed a signed complaint from the Brown Palace Hotel.

Nothing like trespassing on a public sidewalk. This is just one more in an alarmingly growing series of people taking photographs being hassled by authorities. Maybe it's the memory of how video has captured police in brutal activities, or perhaps it's a thought that power brokers should be able to hide from public site even when out in the open. But it's bad.

SFMOMA Bullies Photographer?

2008-08-11T11:48:00.000-04:00

Supposedly, San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art had a photographer forcibly ejected from the establishment because the man had the temerity to take photographs, even though the museum's own web site made it clear that it was permissible! The link comes via boingboing.

In that vein, I'll applaud Boston's Museum of Fine Art for generally allowing photography and only prohibiting it for specific exhibitions. One of my own favorite photos came from shooting a piece of modern sculpture on a first floor gallery.

Building Artificial Faces

2008-07-30T11:55:00.001-04:00

Don't like your face online? There's software that can automatically swap out features from a library of other people's mugs. It looks like a variation on morphing, only the software is taking eyebrows, eyes, mouth, nose, and so forth, from one face and blending them into another's. It could be used to protect privacy -- but it also increases that unease over the nature of reality when that world meets a digital realm. Don't like your face on Match.com? Change it. I understand the desire for privacy, and yet I also appreciate how quickly we are slipping through the looking glass into a place where nothing is as it seems, literally.

Photographing an Eclipse

2008-07-29T07:35:00.000-04:00

I've done a lot of night photography, and been known to shoot the moon, literally, but was taken with the idea, in an article, of photographing a solar eclipse. Personally, were I readying myself to head to Siberia or the North Pole (where the viewing is supposed to be particularly good), I'd probably set up both digital and film cameras to get all the advantage I could. As the author says, the only way to really get a good image, and not just glare behind a black disk, is to use mathematical modeling, which is similar to what the human vision does in registering differences in illumination and then turning that, via the brain, into an image.

The article's author is an academic who has done a lot of research and whose web site has some astoundingly good eclipse photos.

Photojournalism Pros Fade Out

2008-07-28T10:21:00.000-04:00

Many editorial outlets look to microstock photography and sites like Flickr these days to pick up cheap (or free) images for their use. That means less work for professional photographers - a lot less. Here's an interesting article asking the question of what will become photojournalism in an age of amateurs.

SanDisk Introduces Non-Erasable SD Cards

2008-07-15T15:15:00.000-04:00

SanDisk has come out with a write-once, read-many (WORM) SD memory card for cameras. Given the format, I think it's clearly taking aim at the prosumer and professional markets. Why would you want a card that would only record and never let you erase or modify an image? A couple of reasons come to mind. One, mentioned by the Engadget post, is in situations - law enforcement, legal uses - where you want to "prove" that the contents could not have changed. But there's another: when you are shooting something critical and you want to ensure that you've minimized the chances of losing data. Grant you, that would be seldom, as immediately dumping the contents onto one of those standalone back-up drives is generally enough, but when you want both the best and suspenders for peace of mind, it's nice to be able to get them both.

Afghan Art Price Competition Includes Photographers

2008-07-07T06:51:00.001-04:00

A person who helped create a national art price in Afghanistan had a piece in the Financial Times describing it. Two photographers are involved, and if you scroll down the piece, you can see a shot from one of them: two soccer players looking playfully out of place in the mountainous landscape. It's a photo with humor, cultural relevance, and pleasing composition. It's one of the rare times I've seen a "rule of thirds" composition look so natural and unplanned, with leading lines helping to focus the eye. A very nice image.

Inkless Photo Printers Coming Sunday

2008-07-03T06:43:00.001-04:00

This Sunday, Polaroid will introduce its new inkless printer that uses technology from Zink Imaging, according to the VentureBeat blog:

Zink, whose name means “zero ink,” has talked about its innovative technology for some time. It basically embeds chemical dyes inside paper. It passes the paper through a heater, which melts the dyes in the right places to create images on a piece of paper.

The advantages seem clear. Printers could be smaller, because you wouldn't need to have an ink delivery system in the machine. You also wouldn't run out of ink.

However, the cons also seem obvious. The paper will be more expensive and, for the time being, you won't have a choice of supplier. That is likely to reduce the flexibility you can have in interpreting images by using the paper whose characteristics seem closest to what you envisioned.

Old Camera Gallery

2008-07-02T06:50:00.001-04:00

The site that Andreas Wolkerstorfer set up doesn't feature pictures of old cameras. It features pictures from old cameras. I think of it as more of a curiosity than anything else. However, if you've been thinking of using a pinhole camera, or maybe loading a Holga with some film to give it a spin, you can get a sense of how things might come out.

Citizens Keep Watch on Photographers

2008-07-01T07:02:00.000-04:00

Via the Nobody's Business blog by colleague Rogier van Bakel, Colorado has been busy:

Hundreds of police, firefighters, paramedics and even utility workers have been trained and recently dispatched as "Terrorism Liaison Officers" in Colorado and a handful of other states to hunt for "suspicious activity" — and are reporting their findings into secret government databases.

The term for the people is "terrorism liason officer." One type of suspicious activity? Taking photos "of no apparent aesthetic value." Is part of their training a crash course in deconstruction and art theory?

Future terrorism "is going to be noticed earliest at the most local level," said Robert Riegle, director of state and local programs for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in Washington.

So when those terrorists try to corrupt our moral fiber with badly-taken photos, we'll be ready. The problem, of course, is that now so much can get classified as "suspicious." There are some famous photographers who took pictures of ordinary places and items who could technically get into hot water these days.

Some Great Photographer Interviews

2008-06-27T05:24:00.000-04:00

When I was looking at the A Photo Editor blog yesterday, I noticed a link to another site that I thought I'd pass along. PixChannel is a site that has video interviews with great photographers, and is a way of learning more about the craft, art, and business.

The New Photo Book Market

2008-06-26T08:08:00.002-04:00

Traditional photo book publishers have been screaming about the change in their market and how it's so tough to make a buck anymore. But in this interview that photo director and blogger Rob Haggert does with Radius Books publisher Darius Himes, you get the sense that while the market has changed, it's opened doors for a lot of new, smaller publishers. The problem, I suspect, is that it now becomes next to impossible for photographers to make a buck directly off their books, which means they have to change their business models. Unfortunately, such are life and its version of black comedy, economics.

Two Freebies from O'Reilly

2008-06-25T05:50:00.001-04:00

O'Reilly Media, a publisher of technical books and, more recently, titles on photography, has two free offerings. One is a webcast on Thursday, June 26, 2008, with photographer Rick Sammon, who will discuss "10 Key Ingredients for Cookin' Digital Photographs." Pre-registration is necessary and space is limited.

The other is a video podcast - 101 Photoshop Tips in 5 Minutes - by Deke McClelland, who does a fast-paced short music video that literally is about Photoshop tips. Some people will do almost anything as marketing. The link is supposed to be here, but when I tried, I got an error message that the site was "unable to forward this request at this time." Maybe their server was taking five after sweatin' to the oldies...

UPDATE: Here's a link that works.

Non-Art Art Photography Exhibition

2008-06-19T07:50:00.000-04:00

The Village Voice has an interesting article on an exhibition, at New York City's International Center of Photography, of the work of commercial photographer Bill Wood. A Fort Worth, TX-based photographer, he did general commercial work that eventually found its way into the hands of collector Diane Keaton, who actually had them basically packed away for 20 years until she really looked at them.

What I found of particular interest was the ambivalence that Keaton and the writer have toward the photos. They aren't "art" - he's not "another overlooked or local genius on the order of Mike Disfarmer or Weegee," as writer and curator Marvin Heiferman puts it. But as the article's author Martha Schwender notes, they are striking. Yes, there is the danger of a social equivalent of Sergei Eisenstein's theory of montage, in which a scene in a movie can take on different meanings based on the context. Taken out of the original commercial context, these photos might take on the sense of commentary on values and mores:

But there's something that makes me hesitate at viewing these photos through the filter of our current standards, either for fashion or political correctness. This is not out of charity because Wood (essentially a good ol' boy who was born and died in Fort Worth) never "rose" to the level of Frank's or Winograd's distanced critique. Nor is it out of nostalgia, a longing for a time when the U.S. was at peace, and businesses (like Wood's) were owned and operated by individuals rather than conglomerates, and development, to people living in the vast American West, meant prosperity rather than destruction. Instead, it's partly because Wood's images of Americans smiling in their uniforms, offering a quick product demonstration, receiving congratulations, or finally getting sick and lying in their coffins, were taken by a fellow striver.

I'm likely to be in the New York City area at some point in the near furture, and this show at the ICP seems like one worth catching. If Bill Wood fails to interest, there are two other exhibitions that look promising: Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan and Arbus/Avedon/Model: Selections from the Bank of America LaSalle Collection.

Indian Art Buyers Take to Photography

2008-06-18T08:15:00.000-04:00

According to this story from IANS (Indo-Asian News Service), art collectors in India are starting to hold photography in higher regard:

Classical art photographer Aniruddha Mukherjee feels that photography as an art stands out because it captures 'time and space' and yet transcends both at the same time through abstract touches, play of light and intelligent studies in colour.

'There are very interesting things happening in photography in India. A group of photographers (Atul Bhalla for instance) are adding experimental layers to their photographs to make it more attractive to buyers as collectors' items. They are going beyond conventional photography,' Mukherjee said.

Although most of the sources in the story are either photographers or sellers of photography - which would make them all people with axes to grind - Mukherjee is interesting because he started as a portait painter, but found that the cost of all the labor going into a portrait was "a bit too steep" for most buyers. However, a portrait photographer can still get a "classical portrait" while charging a lot less. Another source in the story, photographer Ajay Rajgharia, noted that photographs are a tenth the price of a painting. And so, photography still remains the literal poor cousin of canvas.