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(Photo in screenshot by Rob Galbraith/Little Guy Media)
A chat today with Apple’s Kirk Paulsen, Senior Director of Applications Product Marketing, and Joe Schorr, Senior Product Line Manager for Photo Applications, revealed a number of interesting things about Aperture 2, the most significant upgrade to Aperture since the fall of 2006.
Here are notes from the call:
Check it out here.
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While that all changes with Aperture 2 which can read RAW files from the Nikon D3, D300, Canon 1Ds Mark III, Hasselblad H3D-II and other cameras, some photographers may already be wondering about the future. Will Aperture 2 be ready for the coming wave of digital cameras or will photographers have to wait until the next version of OS X comes out first?
We got a chance to talk to Kirk Paulsen, Apple’s senior director of Application Product Marketing, and Joe Schor, Apple’s senior product manager of Photo Applications; about this very issue. Read what they said after the jump.
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At first, I only looked at Francesca Romeo’s portraiture (especially “Series 1”), but her work from a cemetary (“Series 3”) has grown quite a bit on me now.
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If you have seen any of Jacob Riis’s photographs, you have probably never forgotten them. Riis was the Danish-born police reporter who in the late 1880s brought magnesium-flash photography into some of the darkest and most troubled spots in New York City — the tenements near Mulberry Bend, where Columbus Park now stands. New immigrants were crushed together there in some of the worst squalor and highest population densities ever recorded on this planet.
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Richard Butler was kidnapped in the southern city of Basra on Sunday, a police source told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.
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Artist Lori Nix builds incredibly detailed tabletop worlds and photographs them, from visions of disaster to glimpses of insect life. Her most recent collection, The City, depicts hyperreal decay and abandonment in an urban setting
Check it out here.
Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested several people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago.
The arrests were made in pre-dawn raids in Aarhus, western Denmark, “to prevent a terror-related murder,” the police intelligence agency said. It did not say how many people were arrested nor did it mention which cartoonist was targeted.
However, according to Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that first published the drawings on Sept. 30, 2005, the suspects were planning to kill its cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. It said those arrested included both Danish and foreign citizens.
“There were very concrete murder plans against Kurt Westergaard,” said Carsten Juste, the paper’s editor-in-chief.
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I chose the iPF6100 for testing because for me it represents the sweet spot in the line. For many fine art photographers a 24″ printer is about as big as can be handled outside of a commercial print studio, and also is able to produce prints that are usually as large as one needs. Readers should be aware that these four models are quite similar, except for paper size capabilities. (The 6100 is also not that much larger than the 5100, for those that are deciding between the two, though of course it doesn’t have a multi-sheet cassette feed for sheet paper, only single feed,the same as all other 24″ and larger printers).
The iPF6100 sells for about US $3,500. It’s main competitors are the HP Z3100 at about $4,800 and the Epson 7880 at $4,000. This makes the Canon the least expensive of the three, though there are promotions available which make shopping for price a matter that you need to conduct yourself on a local basis. In any event, the major differences to be noted are that the HP, though it costs quite a bit more, has a built-in spectrophotometer and self-profiling capability. Of course another difference that separates the three models is that the HP and Canon printers allow use of either matte or photo black inks at any time, while the current large format Epson pigment ink printers (excepting the 64 ” / $15,000 Epson 11880) require that these inks be swapped, a time consuming process and one that can cost $75 or more in wasted ink.
Check it out here.
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Aperture 2 delivers over 100 dramatic, new features including advanced image processing,
a streamlined interface, faster performance, and unprecedented Mac integration
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Apple this morning has released Aperture 2, a new version of its pro imaging application for Mac that boasts over 100 new features. The application is available for the cost of shipping to those who purchased Aperture after January 1, 2008; otherwise it’s a US$99 upgrade, or US$199 for a new license.
Check it out here.
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Driftless: Photographs from Iowa (Duke University Press, 2007) by Danny Wilcox Frazier came out with Frank’s words of praise as the forward to the book.
I stumbled across a copy of it a few weeks ago in the Harvard Book Store and was drawn to the images before I read anything about Frank’s role in making them known. Frazier’s decision to consider the effects of people and resources migrating from failing rural economies to the coasts and to cities was very interesting in itself but the images made the topic all the more severe. It is “as though the heart of America were being emptied.”
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Continuing the pimping (not in the Chelsea kind of way) of Hollywood’s actors and Oscar nominees, NY Times Magazine has an article featuring the people they thought were the breakthrough actors of 2007. Along with it though are some wonderful photos taken by one of my faves, Ryan McGinley. Overall the photos aren’t his best, it kind of feels like he made them a little more mainstream and a little less conceptual. But it’s also kind of cool to see him shooting big name actors and actresses.
Check it out here.
Mac OS X 10.5.2, released today as a free update to the current version of the Mac operating system, adds support for RAW files from the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, Canon PowerShot G9, Hasselblad CF-22, Hasselblad CF-39, Leaf Aptus 75s, Nikon D3, Nikon D300 and Sony Alpha DSLR A700.
Once installed, applications such as Apple’s Aperture, iPhoto and Preview should be able to view and convert RAW files from these cameras. Non-Apple applications that draw on the same OS-level code may be able to as well, though some may require updates of their own to utilize the expanded RAW file support.
Check it out here.
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Olaf Otto Becker is one of my favourite landscape photographers. Given his new book Broken Line has just been released, I asked Olaf whether he would be up for a conversation, and I was very excited when he agreed to one.
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I don’t know if Douglas Kirkland has ever thought of becoming a director, but all his images contain the rich, contradictory synthesis of the stills from a successful film. If he had become a director instead of a great photographer, he would have told stories of men and women on the run from reality, reckless lovers considered mad by the world around them, exalted in their attempt to make sense of the events in life which nobody around them can understand. The perfect stills in his book, Freeze Frame, in my opinion, make up his film. It does not matter that the story refers you back to other famous films; all directors quote the colleagues they love and Douglas uses them to narrate his film. The camera (let’s call it that) focuses on the central characters – isolated, laughing, tired, concentrated, in thought, arm in arm, in a trance, but always detached and far from the universe surrounding them, the universe to which they seem not to belong. A world which looks at them with indifference, as though they were misfits desperately searching for a connection, for an impossible story.
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Douglas Kirkland:
My first encounter with a movie star was with Elizabeth Taylor in Las Vegas. I looked directly into her violet eyes and said, “I’m new at this magazine. Could you imagine what it would mean to me if you gave me an opportunity to photograph you?”… A beat of silence, then she said, “Come tomorrow night at 8:30.”
The photo session was a great success and was published worldwide. Thus, my career working in the movie industry was launched.
All doors seemed opened to me and everyone around me vigorously encouraged all forms of experimentation. I carried my camera through this period with a child’s wide-eyed wonderment and exhilaration. I was living a fantasy and I felt my mission was to record everything, from the beat of the flower children and the fashion of the day, to the brightness and shadows in the lives of movie stars.
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We have fun, don’t we?” Douglas Kirkland calls from downstairs after a long day of working on this book, arguing and laughing. Editing thousands of images to create “Freeze Frame” was both an emotional and exhilarating process, watching our life through the work, discovering images we didn’t remember existed, seeing ourselves through the 40 years of our marriage.
Our relationship began in 1965 in Paris on the film set of “How to Steal A Million,” with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. I was a 21-year-old student at the Sorbonne; my mother worked for the film company. Douglas came to take pictures of the movie stars and romanced me by the Seine. We fell in love, continued our love affair while meeting in London, Rome, Venice and Madrid. It was my first taste of working together and it was wonderfully exciting and romantic. We eventually got married in Las Vegas late one night.
The Sixties and early Seventies were a period of abundance for photojournalism and we enjoyed the best of it. We lived like millionaires without the responsibility of being rich, staying in the best hotels of Europe and mingling with the “aristocracy” of the cinema. It was all very unpretentious, full of joie de vivre, and we embraced it heartily.
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by Adam Dean:
In the climate of fear surrounding Bhutto and Pakistan in general, due to the deteriorating security situation and massive double suicide bombings that marred her homecoming in October, the days of hundreds of thousands of supporters attending political rallies were a thing of the past. On my way to the rally both my hotel concierge and taxi driver had warned me of the dangers of attending Bhutto’s rally as there had been another suicide bomber apprehended before detonating his explosives at a rally the previous day in Peshawar. With the benefit of hindsight, it seemed like the writing was on the wall.
The security at the gates into the park was very thorough and once inside the security seemed much better organized and the rally went ahead as expected. There were a handful of local wire photographers there along with John Moore of Getty Images and myself. We were leaving after the rally, assuming Bhutto would make a quick exit for security reasons, but hundreds of supporters managed to break through the barriers in the park and surround her convoy as she tried to make her departure. Once again she came out of the sunroof and started greeting her cheering fans as her vehicle crawled along the road. I was about 20 meters from her vehicle and started shooting with a long lens as it turned and came towards me.
Check it out here.
