Already a manufacturer of CMOS imaging sensors for professional digital SLRs, Sony announced this morning at PMA 2008 in Las Vegas that it too would introduce a pro digital SLR this year. The new digital SLR — which is simply being called “Flagship” at this point — will use a new 24.6-megapixel full-frame “Exmor” CMOS sensor and employ Sony’s in-camera Super SteadyShot image stabilizer, Sony said at a press conference at PMA.
Curiously, the resolution of the CMOS sensor in the new “Flagship” Sony camera is a notch lower than a new 24.8-megapixel full-frame sensor Sony announced it was developing yesterday. If it is released as planned, Sony’s new camera would have bragging rights for most megapixels in a current professional full-frame DSLR
The White House News Photographers Association Student Contest Committee announces a new contest open to students from around the world to compete for the honor of WHNPA 2008 Student Photographer of the Year. WHNPA sponsor, Digital Railroad, will host the competition website and the award for the winning student photographer.
The contest submission page will open on February 1, 2008 and entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. on March 1, 2008.
It is with great pleasure that I announce the immediate availability of MarsEdit 2.1, a significant update to Red Sweater’s Eddy-Award winning desktop blog editing application.
I think we’re all aware that the portfolio website is a very important tool for photographers and I’ll go so far as to predict that it will soon replace printed portfolios (bold, I know), so I wanted to create a quick reference guide for photographers looking for templates or designers or examples of portfolios that I like.
Sigma has announced the imminent availability of the greatly anticipated DP1 digital camera. The DP1 has a sensor around the size of those found in most DLSRs – although it is greatly different in terms of design – and aims to offer equivalent image-quality and specification in a compact format. In common with Sigma’s DSLR offerings it utilizes Foveon’s direct-image-sensor technology which detects three colors at each of its 4.6 million pixels (collecting the same amount of color data as a conventional 14 megapixel sensor). Our contacts at Sigma say it will be available in “spring.”
For those of you that are familiar with our recent blog project “Revisit and Retouch” you’ll recognize this image. I provided CameraPorn readers with a set of three bracketed exposures to have a go at creating their own unique version by any means necessary. The image above is not only my entry to the project, but also an exercise in retouching that focuses on the common practice of compositing multiple, bracketed exposures to create a final image that better represents the scene as viewed by the human eye… In more ‘technical’ terms, an image with a higher dynamic range.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how I came to this final image, it’s important to understand what I mean by “higher dynamic range.” Many of you are probably thinking, oh yeah, he means ‘HDR’ imagery like what you create with a program such as Photomatix and see plastered all over flickr, but you’re wrong. As neato as those images can look, they are rarely executed in a way that brings the final image to appear as the scene actually looked to the human eye, which in my opinion, is where the true value lies in creating higher dynamic range images. Creating a tone-mapped HDR image in an HDR program usually leads to oversaturated, dream-like images which look pretty cool but can be created by almost anybody with Photomatix and some bracketed images with little to no skill involved in most cases. Now don’t get me wrong there are some incredibly talented HDR ‘artists’ out there whose work amazes me, but the general image you see on flickr looks too fake for my tastes, and besides today we’re talking about using good old Photoshop and Lightroom. To see how I did it and learn a bit more about dynamic range, read on…
Every assignment/subject/event I have ever photographed in my life has taken less than one minute to capture. It takes a lot of frames at 1/250th of a second to add up to a minute, but it’s all the things we do between this time and that, which make all the difference in the world. Sometimes I wish the people in upper level management would spend more than 1/250th of a second deciding which stories we run centerpiece photos with and which ones we ignore all together. Photography at The Spectrum is an afterthought in most cases, used to fill space between the words on the page. I always ask myself ‘how can I best serve the story, how can I best serve the reader’ with my photos, and when I cover a city council meeting like I did tonight I wonder if my time would be better spent covering an assignment that would be enhanced with visual story telling.
Delkin has announced several new digital photography products, including a four-slot USB 2.0 card reader called ImageRouter, a Dual Universal Battery Charger capable of charging two digital camera batteries simultaneously, a line of ExpressCard SSDs in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities, a 16GB Class 6 SDHC card and more.
yesterday a brief discussion came up under “student work/workshops” that i thought might be interesting to bring up right here….herve brought it up, after seeing my India student essays, with regard to what he described as a “trend” by workshop students in particular and many photographers in general to photograph what he described as “incomplete” or “not quite” photographs….photographs which could possibly require just too too much imagination on the viewers part…not enough “explanation” perhaps….
A seven-year period may seem short compared to a full-span professional career, but in the case of the independent photojournalist Dimitris Soulas (born 1938) this hardly matters.
Soulas worked as a photographer in Germany between 1967 and 1974, a period that coincided with the junta regime in Greece. It was a short but highly creative period that earned him success and recognition. “Dimitris Soulas, Snapshots, Photographs 1967-1974,” an exhibition currently being held at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, reveals the strength and richness in the work of this artist whose commitment to photography, although brief, was substantial. The first large presentation held on the work of Soulas worldwide, it is a touring exhibition that begins from Greece (at the artist’s request). It has been organized by the Museum of Photography in the City of Munich to which Soulas donated his archive, to mark the photographer’s 70th birthday. It is being held in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and is jointly curated by Ulrich Pohlmann (director of the German museum) and Heracles Papaioannou, curator at the Thessaloniki museum. An album with researched essays that place the work of Soulas in its time has been published by both museums on the occasion.
The image adjustment technology, which first appeared in Nikon Capture NX and is that program’s standout feature because of how much simpler it makes the process of applying selective corrections to a photo, will soon be available for both Mac and Windows versions of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements in the form of a plug-in called Viveza.
Last week at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, the surprise hit was a music documentary called ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL, the story of which can be summed up as “Spinal Tap in Real Life” (Stonehenge even makes an appearance). Anvil, who die-hard late-80s metal fans (and possibly no one else) will recall as precursors to Megadeth and Slayer (and contemporaries of the Scorpions and Whitesnake), never “made it” like many of their peers and acolytes- yet they have soldiered on, playing the rawk for 35 years.
The Internet, it seems, doesn’t take advantage of how humans best process information. Evolution granted Homo Sapiens a high degree of visual acuity … Scrolling and linking are inferior modes of taking in information. “Humans are incredibly good at spatial navigation and incredibly bad at navigating through a list of generic icons or generic text.” … These limitations are not lost on the technology giants and forward-thinking entrepreneurs working to commercialize a new way to take in information visually: the zoom interface. In its simplest form, it displays information all at once – all the photos in an album, say, or all the files on a PC, or all the entries in a database, or all the items retrieved in a search – and when you spot something of interest, you zoom down into it. In this way, zooming represents an upgrade from the second- and third-best methods for accessing information (scrolling and linking) to the best option: displaying information like a landscape, and giving people the chance to zoom down to the details … Only recently have engineers had the advances in display technology, broadband connections and video processors capable of coping with a zoom interface. As a result, prototype zoom interfaces are now up and running in labs around the world.
As I survive my sixth layoff in five years, I question the future of photojournalism and am worried about the path we are headed down. Almost every newspaper in the county has laid off, bought out or done away with positions in the last few years. Everyone is trying to cut back on expenses, trim the fat, and keep profit margins up as the economy starts to take a dive. “This is necessary, these are hard times, it has to be done,” we’re told. Newspapers cannot afford to have investigative reporters, or fat staffs, or experienced journalists with higher salaries.
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
Russian avant-gardist Alexander Rodchenko claimed that photography could ‘leave Rubens behind’. Through patterns and unusual viewpoints, his compositions make the viewer see familiar scenes in a different light, observes Craig Raine
All of this got me instantly thinking (and worrying): What kind of Mexican suitcase will we leave to our future generations to find? A SyQuest cartridge from the early 1990’s? A floppy disk? A Zip drive? I’ve always laughed at the prospect of one of the great ironies of the digital era: In the end, only paper will survive. Our grandchildren might venture into an attic sixty years from now and find a stack of gorgeous prints–made from digital cameras and film cameras alike–and then again, they might find the original files to those prints on a CD with faded Sharpie writing. The prints, of course, will be treasured while the CD will get thrown into the trash faster than one can say, “what’s a SCSI drive?”
(To be fair, there are plenty of atrocities on both sides of the fence. Back in the late eighties, someone at a major Washington newspaper, looking to clear some space, threw away negatives from a 16 year period, including many of those belonging to a minor political dust-up called Watergate.)
Not so very long ago, we winced every time we saw someone with facial hair or a backpack. Average people were terrified of opening their mail for fear of getting a face full of anthrax. Those were perhaps our country’s greatest days. Yet that once-phobic spirit that defined our times is drastically changing.
Today, people are making eye contact with strangers on the street. They are whistling on subway platforms, strolling down sidewalks, and generally behaving as if they do not feel they could be killed at any moment. Children can be seen running playfully in public parks, their parents smiling and watching idly from afar when they should be obsessing over an unseen child abductor who will snatch and rape their babies first chance they get. It breaks my heart to see the land I love fall into such a state of non-panic.
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