RAW processing improved in Aperture 1.1

Apple has revealed that the next release of Aperture, the company's pro photo workflow application, will be about more than just support for Macs using Intel processors. During a press briefing yesterday at the PMA 2006 trade show in Orlando, Florida, Aperture product manager Joe Schorr showed off numerous refinements in the upcoming v1.1, including what appears to be much-improved processing of RAW files, as well as greater control over contrast, sharpening and noise reduction during the RAW conversion.

Aperture @ Apple
Rob Galbraithe review

Photographers and Copyright Laws in Flux

There is a proposed amendment to the Copyright Act which will make it easy for copyrighted work to be used with no concern for copyright. It is ridiculous in my opinion, and one of the largest pro-photographer groups (the ASMP) is doing what it can to stop it from being signed into law. Basically, it says (quoting from the ASMP website) "a person or other entity who wants to use a copyrighted work is required to make only a "good faith, reasonably diligent search" to locate the copyright owner. If, after making such a search, the user is unable to locate the copyright owner, he/she/it gets an almost free license to use the work."

The Copyright Office Report

The ASMP call to action to send a letter to your lawmakers as well as a longer description

Carolyn E. Wright, Esq., of the Law Office of Carolyn E. Wright, LLC, is an attorney specializing in legal assistance for photographers. Here is her Blog

Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance

For more than 40 years, Robert Adams (born 1937) has photographed the landscape of the American West, particularly in California, Oregon, and his home state of Colorado. His work is inspired both by his joy in the inherent beauty of the landscape, and his dismay at its exploitation and degradation for residential and commercial development.

In his images of main streets, tract houses, trees, and waterways, Adams records two kinds of landscapes, one damaged by people and the other somehow beyond their power to harm. He asks us, through his photographs, to consider where we live and how we relate to our environment.

Getty Announcement

New York Times Review

Los Angeles Times Review

New large format Canon printer due in April

Canon U.S.A has introduced the 12-color imagePROGRAF iPF5000 pigment ink large format printer that sports a new Lucia inkset features red, blue, green, gray, photo gray, cyan, photo cyan, magenta, photo magenta, yellow, regular black, and matte black pigmented inks.

The printer loads all 12 ink tanks at once and utilizes automatic switching between regular black and matte black, helping to eliminate wasted ink and time swapping out ink tanks, according to Tod Pike, senior vice president, Imaging Systems Group, Canon U.S.A. The imagePROGRAF iPF5000 model uses Canon’s new dual print head design that has a total of 30,720 ink nozzles. The iPF5000 printer employs 2,560 nozzles per color for a maximum resolution of 2400×1200 dpi (dots per inch) and a four picoliter droplet size.

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Rob Galbraithe Review

Crane & Co. Museo Silver Rag

by Pete Myers @ Luminous Landscape

Suggesting a new fine art photography paper to photographers is likely akin to discussing religion — every one has an opinion — and what works for one, likely does not work for others.

Nevertheless, a new fine art paper, Crane & Co. Museo Silver Rag, is entering the market, with a release date of late February 2006, coinciding with this year’s Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show. As a beta tester of this paper, and in chorus with many of my fellow beta testers, we have come to regard Museo Silver Rag with true endearment. Why the enthusiasm for a new paper, in a market choked with paper choices?

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A Big Sale Spurs Talk of a Photography Gold Rush

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

Photography has had "it" moments before — times when the comfortingly concrete facts of the marketplace signaled to curators, dealers and photographers that the medium had finally arrived, fully embraced by the world of fine art and serious collecting.

In 1981, a huge print of Ansel Adams's famous "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" sold in Los Angeles for $71,500 — at the time the highest price ever paid for a photograph, and an even more stunning figure because Adams was still alive at the time.

Records have continued to be broken steadily. But until last year, when a contemporary photograph by Richard Prince sold for $1.2 million at Christie's, no single print had ever broken the six-figure barrier at auction. So when Sotheby's announced this week that "The Pond — Moonlight," a platinum print by Edward Steichen owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had sold for almost $3 million to an anonymous buyer, it was as if continents had shifted in the photography world.
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An exhibition of John Szarkowski at MoMa

John Szarkowski: Photographs is the first retrospective of the esteemed photographer’s work. The exhibition features Szarkowski’s early photographs—beginning with pictures of his native Midwest dating from 1943 and continuing through his acceptance of a curatorial post at The Museum of Modern Art in 1962—as well as his later works, many of which were made around his farm in upstate New York.

MoMa LISTING

His music as images

By Christopher Reynolds @ LA Times

In a bid to step beyond the shadow of Graham Nash, the singer-songwriter, Graham Nash, the photography collector, and Graham Nash, the photo-technology innovator, an emerging photographer has unveiled his first major museum show at San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts. His name is Graham Nash.

Or as the artist/musician/collector/entrepreneur puts it, "It's just me, trying to shoot off my mouth." The show, titled "Eye to Eye," includes 80 images and runs through April 30.

'Eye to Eye' is Graham Nash's first major museum photo exhibit.

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Adobe Lightroom Beta II

Project: Lightroom is Adobe’s effort to engage the professional photography community in a new way, giving you the opportunity to kick the tires and shape the feature set of a new tool being created just for you. Ultimately, we want Lightroom to be truly built from the ground up by photographers, for photographers, helping solve your unique workflow challenges.

ADOBE INFO/DOWNLOAD PAGE

Storing Your Digital Images

By Vincent Bockaert @ DPreview.com

If you value your digital images, you should have a proper backup system in place. In this article, we will look at two storage methods and some backup tips so that you can enjoy your images not only in the short term, but also much further into the future.

Magnetic Storage - Hard disks

The building blocks of digital images are "bits", which can either be "zero" or "one". Magnetic storage devices such as hard disks distinguish a "one" from a "zero" by changing the magnetic properties of the disk in that location. The great thing about hard disks is that their capacities are constantly increasing while prices are constantly dropping. Two hundred gigabyte (1) hard disks (3.5" IDE 7200rpm with 8 MB cache) currently retail under US$100. Such hard disks can hold about 70,000 six megapixel JPEG or 23,000 six megapixel uncompressed RAW images. That's about 700 JPEG or 230 RAW images per dollar.

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Unfrozen in time

The daguerreotype is back
This has been a bleak year for conventional photography. On January 12th, Nikon announced that it would no longer make most film cameras. A week later, Konica Minolta said it was quitting the camera business. These developments follow last year's bankruptcy filing by AgfaPhoto and Kodak's decision to stop making black and white paper.

Digital is clearly king, and the silver-gelatin process that dominated photography for more than a century is in its death throes. Such evolution is natural; the daguerreotype, the tintype, the salted-paper prints that peaked during the 19th century all melted away, as better or cheaper forms arose. But photographic progress has not pleased everyone—and some artists are reviving the antique tools of their trade. Long exposures and cumbersome equipment are back. The movement's leading lights include, for example, Mark Osterman and France Scully Osterman, whose Rochester studio specialises in collodion, a process that was abandoned in the 1880s and involves a syrupy liquid poured on to a glass plate.

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the history of digital, fine art printing

by Harald Johnson
While artists have been using computers to create and even output images for decades, things didn't really take off until two groups on opposite sides of the U.S. started to put their attentions on a new way of imagemaking.

In 1980, Jon Cone, who was educated and trained as a traditional fine-art printmaker and who owned an art gallery in New York City's SoHo district, founded an experimental and collaborative printmaking studio in the waterfront town of Port Chester, New York. There, from 1980 to 1984, printmaker Cone worked with artists in the media of silkscreen, intaglio, relief, monoprint, and photogravure.

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Biology and the Bauhaus

By Peter Anker @ TATE, ETC.
László Moholy-Nagy moved to London in 1935 and quickly established himself (along with Walter Gropius) at the heart of the avant-garde community in the newly designed Lawn Road Flats of London's leafy Hampstead. He brought with him his belief in the importance of "nature as a constructional model" to determine functionality in art and design, and his vision to "add to the politico-social a biological bill of rights"...

READ ON

Part II "The Gesamtwerker"

'Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World', sponsored by BMW (UK) Ltd, Tate Modern, 9 March - 4 June. Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World, with texts by Achim Borchardt-Hume,

Fiddling With Lens as a City Burned

By CAROL KINO @ New York Times
SOON after Oct. 17, 1989, I stood on a hill in San Francisco, watching as my apartment and all my worldly possessions burned to the ground in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake. A photographer had already captured me for posterity, sobbing as I saw the smoldering rubble of my building for the first time, and for a while, photographers seemed to attend my and my neighbors' every move, whether we were scavenging the remains of our building or waiting in Red Cross lines.

The earthquake had effectively wiped away our collective history, but at times I had the weird sense that another sort of history had sprung to life. Our travails seemed to parallel events that I had seen many times before, in photographs of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. As it turns out, my sense of déjà vu was right: that quake, a 7.8 temblor that left the city burning for four days, is considered to have been the world's first widely photographed disaster.

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The Scanner Photography Project

I ran across this site today and found it pretty interesting. Michael Golembewski has been creating his own digital cameras for years by combining a scanner and a large format camera. His latest camera combines a Horseman 450L monorail 4x5 camera with an extensively modified Canon LIDE 20 "from which I have reomved the lamp, pinhole lens assembly, and CIS sensor housing. I've made the scanner light-tight using duct tape and putty, covered with a hefty dose of black spraypaint. It might look crude, but it works very nicely. I've attached a modified lens board directly onto the scanner, so it can easily be connected to the Horseman. The lens board attachment holds the scanner optics at the same level as a ground glass plate. This allows me to compose and focus shots on the ground glass, instead of with preview scans - it's much faster. I have two lenses that I use with this model - a Kompur lens from 1915, and a found 8x10 enlarger lens".

Adobe Mactel Software: Not Until 2007?

Adobe Systems on Wednesday said it has no plans to re-release its current applications as Universal binaries that can run natively on both Intel- and PowerPC-based systems, and instead will focus on delivering native support for Intel Macs along with the next major versions of its software.

APPLEINSIDER.COM

PUBLISH.COM

Photoshop Killer Tips

Produced by the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). This site hosts a variety of tips and tricks for photoshop users that can either be viewed as quicktime movies immediately or subscribe to the video podcasts via iTunes. Hey, it's all free!

PHOTOSHOP KILLER TIPS

Color Management tools compared

"A Closer Look" is an article written by Dan Reid for Great Output magazine. It is a very good comparison between the most commonly used monitor calibration and profiling systems examining key differences between ColorVision Spyder 2, GretagMacbeth Eye-One, Monaco Optix XR, and ColorEyes Display. If you are just getting started or a serious digital printer this is a must read.

Published 2005

"A Closer Look" by Dan Reid (PDF format)