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.
Chase Jarvis Blog: Behind The Curtain: The Guts Of A Commercial Shoot:
Whew. If you’ve tuned in at all in the past few days, you’re aware of what I’ve got cooking. To my knowledge this is one of the first (perhaps THE first?) global, multi-week-long, play-by-play commercial shoot to have its behind-the-scenes life chronicled and broadcast almost in real time via blog, Facebook, and Twitter. This will be the deepest look into the black box of photography that I’ve been able to share to date. By a country mile.
Razon is an international collective of visual storytellers pursuing stories independently, but sharing, inspiring, and motivating each other to seek and convey truths and reasons behind every story to be told.
Intimate Photo Gathering Slated for Geekfest 2009:
At GeekFest 2008, also in St. Petersburg, a young man with a Mohawk chatted with a woman in a green wig. More than a few sported tattoos and piercings. One photographer introduced herself and said shyly, “I cross stitch dirty words.”
See what a little corporate secrecy can do? It drives the public, and the reporters, nuts, kicking up a whole lot of sparkly publicity-dust along the way. And doesn’t hurt that the brand in question is the cult camera-maker, Leica.
I decided to tackle my introduction to North Korea at face value and present what I saw how I saw it, without embellishment leaving it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions.
Far from a simple recording, Stratos Kalafatis seems to be using photography to highlight moments of an experiential relationship with the world around him, idiosyncratic splinters of colour composing a fragmented diary of his life on the island of Skopelos or his short residence in Japan.
3 days of sound and fury, signifying nothing. To paraphrase Shakespeare, this represent Perpignan Visa pour L’image this year. Only a quarter of the crowd of the previous year, less then half the booth of agencies, a paparazzi agency replacing Grazia Neri’s legendary location and a couple of citizen journalist agency present. As nightly projection continue to display images of dismenbered human beings with more violence and gore than a Tarantino movie, the real sign of a massacre was around the agencies booths.
The last Polaroid camera was made in 2007 and the last films are due to expire next month. To mark its passing, the Observer gave some of today’s leading photographers a Polaroid camera for the day while Sean O’Hagan salutes a design classic
PDNPulse: Annie Leibovitz Sued over Lavazza Coffee Campaign:
Pizzetti said in the lawsuit he doesn’t think Leibovitz traveled to Italy for the campaign at all, according to the Bloomberg story.
The campaign was panned by other photographers. Mike Johnston on The Online Photographer called one of Leibovitz’s Lavazzo pictures “The Worst Photograph Ever Made.”
Movie Studios See a Threat in the Growth of Redbox – NYTimes.com:
Redbox’s growth — it started with 12 kiosks in 2004 and now processes about 80 transactions a second on Friday nights — has Hollywood’s blood boiling. Furious about a potential cannibalization of DVD sales and a broader price devaluation of their product, three studios (20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers and Universal) are refusing to sell DVDs to Redbox until at least 28 days after they arrive in stores.
