Link: It’s Nice That : Illustrator Andrew Groves does weird, charming, fun things for some big names

Recurring motifs include the outdoors, tree stumps, magic and strange little men and there’s just the right mix of charm and weirdness which keeps his work fresh and interesting

Link: Maggie Steber’s 25-Year Quest to Photograph Haiti’s Beauty – NYTimes.com

To much of the outside world, the image of Haiti — when it pops up at all — is one of catastrophes, both natural and man-made. Violence, grinding poverty, flood, earthquakes all leave a lingering image of a benighted nation bereft of tender moments.

Maggie Steber thinks that’s nonsense — and she has the pictures to prove it.

Don’t be misled, they aren’t all tender quiet moments, the photos are…

1. a funeral
2. pilgrims
3. dancing
4. looting
5. a slum resident weeping
6. a presidential inauguration
7. a voodoo spirit of death ceremony
8. crying mourners at funeral
9. a schoolgirl
10. a dead man in an alcove
11. a country market
12. “when the man reached the shore, another policeman shot him in the head, and his body was thrown into the back of a truck.”
13. cart pullers resting
14. market day
15. homeless boys in voodoo temple
16. a boy
17. Haitians searching the rubble for valuables
18. residents of a state-run home for the aged, whose dormitory collapsed

Leica claims it’s their most perfect lens ever – the MTF charts certainly support this, but we will of course have to use it in the field to see if a) these claims bear out, and more importantly b) whether we can see the difference under typical shooting conditions.

Link: L E N S C R A T C H: Dr. Eran Gilat

Israeli photographer and Doctor, Eran Gilat, has combined his work as a scientist (Neurobiology and Imaging) with his love of photography in his series of still lifes, Life Science.

Link: Hands On: Facebook’s New iOS Camera App That Isn’t Instagram | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

Facebook’s first camera app for iOS, aptly and simply dubbed Facebook Camera, highlights the company’s commitment to its mobile business. But considering Facebook’s recent purchase of the photo-sharing app Instagram, it’s hard not to compare the two.

Link: Bronx Parkour: Jose The Amazing (a photo essay) – Boing Boing

Last year I was in a desolate part of Hunts Point, talking to a friend. A group of about ten teenagers came down the street, loud, filled with energy, and seemingly marauding (kicking over cones, jumping on and over stationary cars, etc). I have never had a problem in my twenty years in New York City, but that does not mean I don’t stay aware. As they passed, out of the corner of my eye I spotted Jose, do a back flip over a hydrant. Amazed, I yelled out to him. He and his friends, who were also warily eyeing me and my friend, thinking we were cops, were planning to run away, but his friend Henry had a sprained ankle, so they stood their ground.

Link: Timm Rautert’s Photographs of the Amish and Hutterites : The New Yorker

A recent book from Steidl brings Rautert’s black-and-white photographs of the Amish together with his vivid Kodachrome images of the Hutterites

Called Invision Agency , it is a spinoff of the 150 years old Associated Press. Tired of taking a beating from Getty, loosing photographers, staffers and market share, the financially suffering AP images has decided to fight back and open fire.

Link: Worth a look: Razistan | dvafoto

Razistan is a newish Tumblr site devoted to telling original stories from Afghanistan. Founded by a host of acclaimed photographers, writers, and editors (Pieter Ten Hoopen, Sandra Calligaro, Javier Manzano, Fardin Waezi, among others) the group aims to keep attention focused on Afghanistan now the the US’s, the world’s, and the media’s eyes have moved on

Link: L E N S C R A T C H: Carl Corey

We are a country of entrepreneurs, self-starters, and determined individuals that make up the core of our American dream.  Long before the Fortune 500′s, there were mom and pop day-to-day desires to carve out a living, and a life on one’s own terms.  Carl Corey takes a look at those self-starters who have created family businesses in Wisconsin and have managed to stay afloat for 50 years or more.

Link: John Nack on Adobe : Photosmith 2 enhances Lightroom-iPad integration

I’m delighted to see that Photosmith has released version 2, enabling multi-image tagging, bidirectional sync with Lightroom, native Eye-Fi support, and more.

can be set to ISO 2500 with little noise penalty – at 100% magnification it appears as very, very fine grain; perhaps comparable to an ISO 400 B&W film. Better yet, there doesn’t appear to be much loss of dynamic range, either

Even though I am a photographer, I try to avoid being a voyeur. It has always been my ambition not only to look, but also take part in life, which can be quite frustrating, especially if you have a tight deadline. If I meet someone playing soccer in the street, I immediately feel like playing with them instead of just watching. I never found it interesting to look at someone from the other side of the street, or to be “invisible” as a photographer. I hope this is the reason why people never feel like a voyeur looking at my images– because you feel that you are taking part.

Link: Sète 2012 : Christopher Anderson | La Lettre de la Photographie

Christopher Anderson arrived in Sete during a Saint Louis celebration evening. He immediately mingled amongst the jousters, became one of them, became a “Knight of the Tintaine”

Link: Sète 2012 : Gilles Caron | La Lettre de la Photographie

Born in 1939 in Neuilly-sur-Seine (France), Gilles Caron died at the age of 30 in April, 1970 on the N 1 road connecting Phnom Pen to Saigon. Just like Robert Capa, he is a legend in journalism and in photography

Link: Harlan Crichton – In The Shadow of The Burning Dog | LPV Magazine

As a twenty-two year old male I am part of a wartime generation. A minority of my generation has chosen to participate in the war; most have remained stateside. As one who chose to stay I am interested in the people who left. They have experienced the brutality of war and I have not. In this body of work I have embedded myself in the aftermath of their homecoming

Link: 50,000 new visitors to cartoonist’s site results in an extra 23 books sold – Boing Boing

Cartoonist Lars Martinson submitted the first installment of the Kameoka Diaries to Reddit. As a result, his website, which gets about 100 visitors a day, had 48,342 visitors in a single day. He thought he might sell a couple hundred more ebooks than usual because of the new influx of visitors. That was a gross overestimate.

Link: An English Photographer Goes to California for Milk and Ping-Pong Balls – NYTimes.com

He put down the digital camera he had been using, picked up a 35-millimeter film camera, bought some black-and-white film, rented a darkroom and set about creating scenes to photograph as opposed to reacting to things or events as he had been doing in his documentary work. He threw a Ping-Pong ball throughout Los Angeles and spilled milk around San Francisco, taking pictures as he went. “I wanted this to be less sociological,” Robin Maddock said.