January 2009 Archives

Andreas Gefeller

Andreas Gefeller - Supervisions

Microsoft

All I Wanna Do Is Zoom Zoom Zoom Zoom by Farhad Manjoo

The demo seemed magical, conjuring a whole new way of collecting the thousands of photos that each of us now produce during our lifetimes: Imagine being able to review your Grand Canyon vacation not as a static slide show but as a tour of the 3-D environment produced by your and everyone else's pictures.

Farhad Manjoo

Lunatic

Lunatic

Lunatic gives the opportunity to photographers to promote original stories and images.

It also aims to provide space for creative work within photojournalism.

Lunatic is bi-annual online photo magazine presenting new work from known and unknown talented photographers from all around the world.

Lunatic

Roy Bass

A survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms

There is something very romantic and sad about a darkroom, especially when you see if fully lit up and decorated.

I know the experience of printing your own pictures under the red light glow is going to be something I describe to my kids.

They will be bored, but I won't care, it's a magical experience.

piratebowling

David Bergman

How I Made a 1,474-Megapixel Photo During President Obama's Inaugural Address by David Bergman

I made a panoramic image showing the nearly two million people who watched President Obama's inaugural address.

To do so, I clamped a Gigapan Imager to the railing on the north media platform about six feet from my photo position.

The Gigapan is a robotic camera mount that allows me to take multiple images and stitch them together, creating a massive image file.

David Bergman

Timothy A. Clary

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall by Errol Morris

We are at a crossroads.

It is the beginning of a new administration and the end of an old one.

There are those who would like to forget the last eight years.

It's the magic-slate idea.

As if you could lift up an acetate window and those eight years would suddenly vanish.

Errol Morris

bookforum.com

Seeing Eye to Eye by William T. Vollmann

How should we parse a documentary image that directly or indirectly portrays evil, injustice, anguish?

What rights and duties, if any, does our understanding engender?

William T. Vollmann

Atget

Camera and the Consciousness by Manisha Verma

You can photograph anything now.

Robert Frank

Tim Walker

Fashion Forward (Not for the Fainthearted) by Roberta Smith

The center is inaugurating a year of fashion photography exhibitions called "2009 Year of Fashion" with four synergistic exhibitions.

They culminate in an engrossing survey of pictures from Edward Steichen's years at Condé Nast (1923-37), when that pioneer photographer more or less invented fashion photography and celebrity portraiture.

Roberta Smith

Adobe Press

16 How-To Tips for Using Photoshop Camera Raw by Chris Orwig

Chris Orwig offers 16 Camera Raw tips, including setting the white balance, using split toning, and making localized adjustments.

Adobe Press

Michelle McSwain & Ryan Warnberg

Also go to Painting with Light & Night Photography.

Jim

Painting With Light, Artists Make Images That Glow

Watch artists Michelle McSwain and Ryan Warnberg, collectively known as MRI, demonstrate how to paint with light.

Vision expert Stephen Macknik, of the Barrow Neurological Institute, explains what the images teach us about the human visual system.

NPR

John Olson

I blame the parents

John Olson's extraordinary photographs of the 1970s biggest rock stars at home with their folks beggar belief.

Guardian

Elizabeth Etienne

Also go to Make a Book.

Jim

Become Your Own Bookmaster by Elizabeth Etienne (PDF)

Beth Dow

Beth Dow - In the Garden

Toshihiro Yashiro

At first, he spun alone, "on tables, on tatame, in museums standing or lying on plinths, in the park and in schools (by invitation)."

"Using costumes like a painter's palette. He spins in wigs and luminous jumpsuits in orange and green or in a ninja -- like costume of plain black".

Beierle + Keijser

Julius Shulman / Eric Bricker

Also go to Shulman.

Jim

Julius Shulman - Visual Acoustics

Philip Blenkinsop

Goran Galic & Gian-Reto Gredig - Photographers in Conflict

Dorothea Lange / Dennis Dunleavy

Also go to Light.

Jim

Dennis Dunleavy - Reading Light

Bill Cunningham

Bill Cunningham and Greta Garbo by Jason Kottke

Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times.

(I love Cunningham's On the Street dispatches.)

The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.

Jason Kottke

Barbara Mensch

Barbara Mensch - Emily's Bridge by Bonnie Yochelson

SHORTLY after graduating from Hunter College in 1978, the photographer Barbara Mensch moved from SoHo to the top floor of a walk-up on Water Street near the South Street Seaport.

The charming but decrepit 19th-century brick building was shared by several artists, who sought the low rents and the seaport's industrial grittiness.

Ms. Mensch and her neighbors now own the building, which they have renovated.

Bonnie Yochelson

Sam Hampton-Smith

Stained Glass Effects by Sam Hampton-Smith

Photoshop ships with a filter called Stained Glass, but it's disappointing to use - it creates facets, and borders these with black leading, but it doesn't take account of how light interacts with glass, or the glows and diffusion that result.

With a bit of know-how you can create a far more convincing and pleasing result without using this filter at all.

Digital Arts

graphics.com

Photoshop Fundamentals: Create a Hand-tinted Photo Effect with Apply Image

Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander - Obama's People

Joseph Niépce

Also go to Pinhole Photography.

Jim

Available Light by Beverly Spicer

As visual journalists, photographers and filmmakers are concerned primarily with light.

Technical image-making evolved from the revelation that light could somehow be captured and recorded in its variations by a device analogous to the light-gathering capacity of the human eye.

Hence, in 1826, using a camera obscuro backed by a pewter plate coated in light-sensitive bitumen, Frenchman Joseph Niépce produced the first photograph.

Beverly Spicer

Russell Kirsch

Top 10 Incredible Early Firsts In Photography by JFrater

I love photography, and while I am not a particularly talented artist behind the lens, I get many hours of enjoyment out of it.

Combine that with my love of history and we were bound to eventually have a list of incredibly historical firsts in the realms of photography.

This list works in reverse chronological order and focuses mainly on the earliest years and most significant breakthroughs in photography.

JFrater

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton

The book's provocative thesis is that our propensity for creating music, literature, drama, and the visual arts is the product of Darwinian evolution, and that our taste in art arises not from cultural indicators but from universal, innate preferences.

Michael O'Donnell

Martin Schoeller

Also go to Portraiture Now: Feature Photography.

Jim

Martin Schoeller & Steve Pyke - Portraiture Now

Photographs by the New Yorker staff photographers Martin Schoeller and Steve Pyke from the exhibition Portraiture Now: Feature Photography, with audio commentary by the photographers.

New Yorker

tiltshiftmaker.com

tiltshiftmaker

Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.

tiltshiftmaker.com

Justin Quinnell

Also go to Slowlight (PDF), Solargraphs, & Pinhole Photography.

Jim

Justin Quinnell - Stunning photographs of landmark captured over six-month period

The spectacular picture shows each phase of the sun over Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge taken over a six month period.

Telegraph

Jim Clark

Jim Clark - poetryanimations

Thankyou for visiting this channel dedicated to Virtual Animated movies of great poets reincarnated through the wonders of computer animation reading their best loved poems and presented in the style of old scratchy movies.

Jim Clark

Mathew Brady

From Daguerreotype to Photoshop by Craig Lambert

In the photograph, Henry James Jr., the future eminent novelist, is only 11 years old.

He stands beside his seated father, Henry Sr., a somewhat portly, bearded man resting his hands atop a cane, an appurtenance necessitated by the wooden leg that replaced the one he lost in a fire as a boy.

Craig Lambert

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty - Portraits Taken by the Writer as a Young Woman (in Hard Times)

In 1936 Welty got her chance: her short story "Death of a Traveling Salesman" was published in Manuscript magazine, and a solo exhibition of her Mississippi photographs was presented at the photographic galleries of Lugene Opticians on Madison Avenue.

But eventually she gave up photography to focus on her writing.

(Sometime in the 1950s she left her camera on a bench in the Paris Métro and never allowed herself to replace it.)

Karen Rosenberg

Ellen Wallenstein

Also go to Ellen Wallenstein.

Jim

Ellen Wallenstein - Opus for Anne: A Still Life

Ellen Wallenstein will present her work Opus for Anne: A Still Life, which she made during three years she spent as a hospice volunteer visiting Anne, a cancer patient, at her apartment in Greenwich Village.

School of Visual Arts

William Eggleston

Point and Place: William Eggleston's Vibrant Spaces

After having spent some hours at the Whitney Museum among William Eggleston's photographs, I couldn't stop my mind's eye from framing each passing place as an interesting photograph.

I was in a taxi on the way to the airport and thinking hard about walking straight to the duty-free shop to see what they had in the way of cameras.

But in the end, I knew better than to waste my money. I've been around images long enough to know what illusions they can work.

Barry Schwabsky

Sheng Li

Icy days and nights

Today is the opening day of the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, in Harbin, China.

The festival lasts for one month, and features large ice and snow sculptures, ice lanterns, swimming in the icy Songhua River and more.

The northern hemisphere is a hospitable place for ice festivals these days, so in that spirit, here is a collection of recent photographs of all things frozen, and some of the ways we live and play with ice.

boston.com

Ron Dudley

Nature Photographers Online Magazine - Editor's Pick Awards 2008

The 2008 Editor's Pick Awards are now in the NPN history book.

As with the previous 7 years of this annual recognition of nature photography excellence, the process of selecting just 24 photos out of the thousands posted every year in the NPN image critique galleries is no small task.

Jim Erhardt

Callie Shell

Callie Shell - 'Time' Photographer Captures Obama Moments

One of the people with a front row seat at the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., was Time magazine photographer Callie Shell, who has been covering Obama since 2006.

NPR

Marcus Bleasdale

Career change: Banker-turned-photojournalist by Sally Williams

As an investment banker, Marcus Bleasdale was paid £500,000 a year to sit in front of 10 computers and 25 phones.

'My job was to produce for the bank,' he remembers, 'almost like being a battery chicken, sitting there laying eggs.'

There were perks, of course, and before the age of 30 Bleasdale was the owner of two houses and a 1968 Porsche 911, and he spent weekends skiing in the Alps.

Sally Williams

SAMETIME 7:15

A Year Of Photographs, Taken At The 'Sametime' by Leah Scarpelli

What began as a collaboration between a teacher and his former photography student evolved into an experiment in how art can be an integral and integrated part of daily life.

The photos became an online gallery, where nothing was for sale and no public comments were allowed, though viewers could e-mail the artists, and a counter kept track of the number and locations of visitors.

Leah Scarpelli

Alain Briot

Landscape Blurs Part 1- Notes on Process and Approach by Alain Briot

In the fall of 2008, I started working on a series of images where the main characteristic involved moving the camera while taking the photograph.

This is a process I had tried in Paris in the early 1980s under the guidance of Scott McLeay with whom I was studying photography at the time.

Unfortunately, at that time my attempts had been unsuccessful for reasons we will see shortly.

Alain Briot

Stan Banos & Mark Page

Expiration Notice- Accepting Submissions

It's on!

Stan B. of Reciprocity Failure and Mark Page of Manchester Photography will be accepting submissions on an ongoing basis, for Expiration Notice- the online gallery for photographers thirty five and over, who have no gallery representation, and have long had that outstanding body of work or recent project that just shouldn't be denied.

Stan Banos & Mark Page

Joel Rosen

Using a handmade steadycam for the Kodak Zi6 BY Joel Rosen

One of our cool new products for this year is the Zi-6 Pocket Video Camera.

It's designed for shooting video and even better, it makes getting the results out of the camera and onto the internet, where people can actually see it, really easy.

It's not as sophisticated as bigger camcorders but it's much smaller and lighter, which is great, but it's also more subject to vibration and shake and I hate camera shake.

Joel Rosen

Kodak

Why Printer Ink Costs So Much by Rik Fairlie

Lots of people like to print photos on their home inkjets, and many printer companies say their products output snapshots at costs that are on par with what you'd pay at a photo kiosk.

But, in many cases, that's misleading.

Rik Fairlie

Carl Weese

White Balance, Part I: Accurate Color by Carl Weese

Light, natural or artificial, indoors or out, is constantly variable.

We notice the warm, reddish light of sunrise and sunset, but there are subtle variations all the time.

We generally don't notice the color of ambient light because our eye/mind perceptual system adapts, much as it adapts to changes in light intensity.

Carl Weese