The two most significant advances from the M8 are pretty obvious: it offers a full-frame 24x36mm capture and doesn’t suffer from IR sensitivity. So, no crop factor and no IR filters, precisely what the Leica community has been hoping for. Leica has been telling us for quite some time that both of these items were near impossible obstacles to overcome. So, what happened? The first step was to go further with offset micro lenses. In the Kodak KAF-18500 CCD, the pixel spacing is increased towards the corners to accommodate even greater offsets. The second step was to increase the thickness of the IR cover glass from 0.5mm to 0.8mm, which, combined with a new type of IR-absorbing glass, eliminates IR bleed and still preserves red channel information into the corners. With a new red color filter in the Bayer matrix, the red channel performance is improved further, increasing accuracy and tonal range.
The results of the second annual Blurb-sponsored contest were announced Thursday. Rafal Milach’s project Black Sea of Concrete includes a series of images of the coastline of the Black Sea he created in December 2008 on commission for Belgium-based NGO Demos. Milach’s book emerged from the “editorial” category of the competition. Photographers also submitted books in “fine art” and “commercial” categories.
The reason for my trip in the first place was to attend the Visa Pour l’Image in Perpignan, the 21st version of the festival of photojournalism which takes place in this Pyrenees/Mediterranen town every September. It’s really the perfect place for such an event. Aside from one trip to the beach for a seaside buffet lunch on Saturday, I didn’t’set foot in a vehicle for 5 days.
Rizzoli is publishing a new book Shoot: Photography of the Moment, a survey of informal, snapshot-style photography by Stephen Shore, Nan Goldin, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tillmans and other pioneers of the style, presented alongside the best new practitioners. Shore wrote the foreword to the book, which includes essays by London College of Fashion professor Penny Martin and Ken Miller, the book’s author, who considers the snapshot medium’s history and explains its current vibrancy and popularity.
Big up to Simon Roberts for giving WTJ? an exclusive preview of his ‘We English‘ show opening tonight at KlompChing in Dumbo. If you can’t make it don’t forget Simon is giving an artists talk at the gallery tomorrow Friday from 6.00pm. I can promise it will be well worth the effort.
Master photographer and lighting guru Joe McNally talks with RESOLVE editor Miki Johnson about starting his wildly successful blog – joemcnally.com/blog – and how it has become a community, a source of creativity, and an important part of his business.
With the M9 it is my opinion that Leica has finally fulfilled its mission to produce a true digital version of the classic M camera. The original M8 was exciting but was flawed in many ways. While the M8.2 addressed many concerns it still needed IR filters, and didn’t give full expression to Leica’s wonderful lenses.
Now, with the M9, not only have the M8 series’ teething pains been overcome but numerous worthwhile suggestions made by users and reviewers have been implemented.
Larry was excited about the work from the beginning. We’ve been married almost 40 years, and he has muscular dystrophy. It’s fairly pronounced now, but the pictures don’t show it much; it’s not something I wanted to emphasise. He is a big, strong man, but his bicep is now the size of his forearm, or smaller. It’s got so I don’t want to show it, out of consideration for him. It’s weird: I never said, “It’s going to be obvious you’re losing muscle mass.” But he knows me; he knows I don’t flinch, and he knew what the deal was when he committed to the pictures.
Stephen Farrell, a reporter for The New York Times, and Sultan M. Munadi, an Afghan journalist working with him, were kidnapped by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Saturday. In a British raid to free them early Wednesday, Mr. Munadi was killed. This is Mr. Farrell’s account of their four-day ordeal.
The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (Ciwem) international environmental photographer of the year competition recognises photographers who use their talent to raise awareness of environmental and social issues – from places and people to vulnerable ecosystems and communities that are struggling with a changing climate.
There are five categories and an overall winner. All winning and highly commended entries will go on display in London from 7 October then tour around the UK
Sultan Munadi is dead, and a British paratrooper whose name we may never know. There may also have been Afghan casualties, perhaps Taliban, perhaps not; that we also don’t know yet, for sure. But from where I am writing this, on a sunny autumn afternoon in rural England, the deaths of Sultan and the British commando seem like a grim black cloud darkening the landscape – a harbinger, perhaps, for the increasingly grim news that seems to await us all from a war that seems to be worsening by the day, and heading for worse yet unless our political and military leaders can find a way to turn the situation around.
Photography’s debt to Annie Leibovitz | Art and design | guardian.co.uk:
As celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz’s financial woes threaten to eclipse her career, it’s important to remember how much we owe to her pioneering work
Los Angeles Times photographer Barbara Davidson was recognized at the 2009 Visa Pour l’Image festival with a top award for her coverage of the 2008 Chinese earthquake, while photographers who covered conflicts in Georgia and Afghanistan also took home honors.
Nirrimi Hakanson is a sixteen-year-old aspiring fashion photographer aching to take the world by hurricane, thunder and rainstorm. Of her work she says, ‘Photography took my hands and led me to a personal paradise at age thirteen, and I’ve been self-taught and seeing life through a lens since. My aspirations are heaven high and my potential and dedication higher still. I have a peculiar vision of beauty- I see beautiful where others don’t think to look and I capture it all so they do. I want to be shooting for Vogue before I’ve even reached adulthood. Can you imagine? I am really just an artist who spends more time dreaming than living and wants to finally live!’
Behind the Scenes: Silence at a Festival – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com:
Most shows were the result of the dedication of individual photographers to the telling of a single story. Several of the most talked-about exhibits were by photographers whose projects were driven solely by passion, often with no assignments to sustain them.
Among the highlights were Eugene Richards’s powerful photographs of the effect of the Iraq war on Americans, Brenda Ann Kenneally’s exceptional images of upstate girls in her hometown of Troy, N.Y., and revealing photographs of the Afghan people by Zalmaï Ahad, known professionally as Zalmaï.
Firstly, the X1 was and is a surprise. We had gone to Solms expecting the S2 and M9, but on our second day, with devilish grins on their faces, Leica’s executives showed us several prototype X1s. We all laughed with pleasure at seeing them, because the previous day we had been commenting on how what the world needed was a smaller and less expensive M, or maybe a larger sensored pocket camera. It appears that Leica themselves have been thinking along these lines because the X1 is intended to be a response to both requests.
And now comes the M9, ‘the world’s smallest full frame camera’, which on paper at least looks to be the ultimate digital M; an 18 megapixel full-frame (36 x 24 mm) sensor, still with no low-pass filter but now with a new UV/IR cover-glass filter which means no need for lens filters. Here are some salient image quality related points which came out of an interview we conducted with Leica in Solms
Two weeks ago we visited the Leica Factory in Solms, Germany, for an introduction to the M9 and X1 cameras, and the S2 medium format DSLR system. As well as discussing these new products, we were given a guided tour of the production and assembly areas for the M series rangefinders (including the M9), the M lenses and the S2. Click through for an insight into the painstaking process by which Leica puts together its cameras and lenses.
