VACATION !

I will be away from the blog for the next three weeks. I have to spend some ime in England and the Tuscany region of Italy.

Damn shame, eh?

cheers

david

Sex museum plan sparks Rio row

By Tom Phillips @ The Guardian





Telling your 71-year-old grandmother you plan to construct a gigantic replica of a uterus on her doorstep must be one of the least pleasant tasks for any grandson.That, however, is the bind of Igor de Vetyemy, a young Brazilian architect behind a controversial project to build a museum inspired entirely by sex on one of the world's most famous beaches.

Plans to erect the "interactive" Cidade do Sexo (City of Sex) just off Copacabana beach have divided Rio de Janeiro - a city renowned for its sensuality, but also one keen to crack down on sex tourism and child prostitution.

READ ON

SONY USHERS IN NEXT WAVE OF HIGH-DEF

At a press conference in New York on July 18, Sony was first out-of-the-gate to release camcorders using the new AVCHD format with two new models. The HDR-UX1 records AVCHD signals to standard 8 cm (min) DVD discs and the HDR-SR1, which records up to 10 hours to a hard drive.

"Sony’s new HD camcorders bring home movies fully into the home theater fold. They feature HDMI™ outputs for simple, one-cord connection to an HD television with no data conversion and subsequent degradation of picture quality."

Sony Press release

Digital Production Buzz

Adobe Lightroom for Windows

Adobe has released the beta version of Lightroom for Windows.

"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.

We’re releasing a preview build now so that you have plenty of time to give us feedback on what’s working for you, and what isn’t. Whether you choose the beta for Macintosh platform or the newly released Windows platform, your feedback is needed. Download now before the Lightroom beta 3 build expires January 30, 2007."

Adobe Lightroom

Anya Gallaccio's Conceptual Project Yields Zinfandel

By CAROL KINO @ New York Times

AS the British artist Anya Gallaccio concedes, her work is "not exactly art-fair friendly." She once arranged the leaves and petals of 10,000 red roses into a fragrant, Rothko-like Color Field abstraction that gradually shriveled into potpourri on the gallery floor. She installed a 32-ton block of ice in the boiler room of a disused London pumping station, leaving it to melt away over the course of two months.

READ ON

Face Detection Technology

Here's a new one.

From the Spec page:
"The new S6000fd digital still camera is the first Fujifilm FinePix product to feature Face Detection, a new technology designed to significantly improve your picture taking by identifying human subjects' faces in the frame (up to 10 faces) and in real time, determining the optimal focus and exposure settings for the absolute best results possible in any shooting conditions. Behind Fujifilm's Face Detection technology is a newly developed LSI chip combined with patented software that allows the FinePix S6000fd digital still camera to reach a level of performance in digital photography never before possible."
*Available in September 2006

Talk about "point and shoot"! Image stabilization, facial recognition, intelligent flash, dual shot mode, who needs a human? Things are getting somewhat surreal these days.....

FujiFilm Spec page

In Atta Kim’s Long-Exposure Photographs, Real Time Is the Most Surreal of All

By HOLLAND COTTER @ New York Times

Every day, hundreds of tourists snap photographs of a crowd- and car-jammed Times Square. The average picture takes — what? — 15 seconds to shoot? The same picture of the same place takes the Korean photographer Atta Kim eight hours. And his Times Square ends up with only an eerie trace of a human presence, like a deserted movie set.

Other pictures by Mr. Kim, who is making an outstanding New York solo debut in a show titled “Atta Kim: On-Air” at the International Center of Photography, have required less time. A photograph of a soccer game: two hours. Of a couple having sex: one hour. Still others go way beyond the eight-hour mark. “Monologue of Ice,” with its mysterious lozenge of pollen-yellow light hovering in the dark, is the product of a marathon 25-hour shoot.

READ ON

DAMuseful software

Some very useful plug-ins, workshops, and a forum here for Adobe Bridge. The O'Reilly book has also been released.

"Peter Krogh is a photographer based in Washington DC. For more than 20 years, he has provided corporate, advertising, and editorial photography for clients worldwide.

Peter is a member of the Board of Directors of ASMP, the American Society of Media Photographers. He was the founder of ASMP's Digital Photography Standards and Practices Project.

Peter is an Alpha tester for Adobe, with a particular focus on Digital Asset Management and Adobe Bridge. He is currently writing a book on Digital Asset Management (The DAM Book) for O'Reilly Media.

Tom Nolan is a mathematician, software programmer, and lawyer. He writes on-board software for spacecraft for NASA, and practices Communication law."

DAMuseful.com

Southern Exposures: Past and Present Through the Lens of William Christenberry

By PHILIP GEFTER @ NY Times

"They were like perfect little poems," Walker Evans said about the three-inch-square pictures of the American South that William Christenberry took with his amateur Brownie camera.

The Brownie was never intended for exacting documentation or creative expression; it was the camera used for snapshots of family gatherings and vacations in the 1940's and 50's. What a crafty little camera, then, for Mr. Christenberry's persistent chronicle of the regional architecture and artifacts in his native Hale County, Ala. His little snapshots managed to capture the local dialect of his hometown in visual terms.

Mr. Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Ala., not 20 miles away from the migrant farmers Evans photographed that same year and later published in "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" with text by James Agee.

READ ON

Call the tech squad

By Tyler Green, Special to The LA Times

IN the late 1980s, Pamela Kramlich saw a work of video art by Peter Fischli and David Weiss titled "The Way Things Go." The 30-minute piece shows a perpetual-motion machine built by the artists: A car propelled by a kind of firecracker bumps into a bowling ball, which hits a piece of cardboard, which somehow leads to the ignition of a flammable substance in a saucepot — and on and on.

Kramlich loved it. So she and her husband, venture capitalist Richard Kramlich, bought it for $350, their first video art purchase. "I started showing it at dinner parties," Pamela Kramlich says. "People loved it. Especially young people. I said to Dick, 'We should do more of this.' "

READ ON

Non Photography day?

"CELEBRATE THE MOMENT, DON"T DOCUMENT IT"

Interesting concept. I have often asked students that bring in images of beautiful sunsets, do they convey more than the act of being there? There are plenty of times in which I have put down the camera because I knew the moment had much more power than the image of it. Sometimes it's just a Zen thing.

"Non- photography day is an effort on my part to revive the moment by putting down the camera. It is a day to think about how life exists, in essence and not appearance and to understand the inadequacy of the photograph in describing this essence, to bring awareness of the perils of living through the view finder or the display screen…"

I like it.

nonphotographyday.com

‘The thing is there before our eyes, for it refuses to be ignored; but when we endeavour to grasp it within our own hands in order to examine it more closely or systematically, it eludes us and we lose it’s track’

D.T Suzuki- Essays in Zen Buddhism

Samsung and Schneider?

I like the look of this camera, very plain and simple. Samsung is generally a company I would stay away from, but Schneider makes a good peice of glass and at 10 megapixels the image should hold up pretty well. At $400, it may be a great street camera.

"The NV10. With a touch-pad Graphical User Interface (GUI), brushed black aluminum body and compact design, the NV10 measures .7 inch thick and employs a Schneider 3x optical zoom lens (35-105mm equivalent), 5x digital zoom and a 2.5-inch color LCD display."

Will be available in the Fall

dpreview

Photo Reporter

Let's Go Digital

Microsoft acquires iView

iView Multimedia has announced that it has 'joined' Microsoft. MediaPro is a fairly well known digital imaging workflow and management application which was originally created for Mac and later evolved to Windows. In the announcement on the iView website Yan Calotychos, founder of iView, stated quite clearly that Mac support would continue and that the iView product range will continue to be available (and supported).

iView FAQ page