'Why am I making this picture?'

by Liz Jobey @ The Guardian UK

Ever since 1971, when she was a student at Harvard and decided to take portraits of the people who shared her boarding house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the American photographer Susan Meiselas has questioned the motivation behind her pictures and their relevance to the wider world. She has been a member of the international co-operative Magnum Photos since 1976, but her work has developed far beyond the role of a photojournalist. She spent the end of the 1970s and most of the 1980s in Central and South America on the front line of the people's revolution in Nicaragua and the civil war in El Salvador, documenting the "dirty war" in Argentina, human rights abuses in Columbia and the end of the Pinochet regime in Chile. During that time, and since, working with her own photographs and with other people's, she has expanded her role to that of curator, film-maker, teacher, historian and archivist.

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Double Exposure: William Eggleston and Enrique Metinides

Buckle up for some curious photo road trips

By Leslie Camhi @ The Village Voice

'Life is in color, but black-and-white is more realistic," director Samuel Fuller once said. Two exhibitions—a retrospective devoted to the sumptuously hued visions of a decadent Southern gentleman, and a show of vintage black-and-white prints, south-of-the border tabloid fodder by a man of the people—suggest he was only partially right.

Both artists were given Brownie cameras as 10-year-old boys. But William Eggleston deferred picture-taking until after he'd left the family plantation, when in college and later, as a restless young man-about-Memphis in the 1960s, he began honing a color aesthetic that was part Cartier-Bresson, part visitor from another planet.

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Photograph of Jesus

301 Inkjet tips wins award

As a contributor I am happy to announce that 301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques: An Essential Printing Resource for Photographers by Andrew Darlow was chosen as the winner in the "Photography: Instructional/How-To" category of The National Best Books 2008 Awards, sponsored by USA Book News.

Press Release

Photo Ops: Josef Koudelka Revisits Prague 1968

By Megan Buskey @ The Nation

One afternoon in early September, the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka was administering a bottle of cognac to a group of well-wishers at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, two placid, spacious rooms on the ninth floor of an office building on Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan. The occasion was the opening of an anniversary exhibition of photographs Koudelka had taken forty years earlier, during the invasion of Prague by Warsaw Pact forces tasked with extinguishing the Czech spirit of political reform. At the time, Koudelka was 30 and a relative newcomer to his art. He had never taken photographs for the purpose of reportage (his portfolio at the time mostly featured pictures of Gypsies and the theater), but he turned out to have a natural gift for documentary photography.

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Interview with Henry Wilhelm

Michael Reichmann interviewed Henry a month or so ago and has put the interview up on the Luminous Landscape site.

Click here to view

Random Image

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

I must applaud Mark on the development of his site! It has come a long way and continues to develop nicely. There is a load of information on the permmenance of digital printing.

"Aardenburg Imaging & Archives was founded in 2007 by Mark McCormick-Goodhart. It is located in the historic Hyde House in Lee, Massachusetts. AaI&A collaborates with serious amateur and professional print makers, photographers, and artists who work with digital printing processes. We are carefully building an archive of digitally mastered photographs and fine art prints. Our goal is rigorously to document the late 20th and early 21st Century digital printing technologies used to make photographs and fine art prints. Aardenburg's collecting policy emphasizes the materials and processes rather than any specific genre of artists or subject matter. "

Aardenburg Imaging & Archives

The Expansive Lens

Peter Campus, Douglas Gordon and David A Ross in conversation @ TATE Etc.

Peter Campus was one of the first artists to explore the formal possibilities of film and video technology. Douglas Gordon, who admires Campus's work, is best known for his iconic video installation 24 Hour Psycho. The two artists talk to curator David A Ross.

DAVID A ROSS : Both of you have worked in the medium of video, but starting in different decades and different cultural environments. For example, Peter, when you showed your video installations at the Bykert Gallery in 1975 there wasn’t much cable television. However, what you have in common is a deep and serious engagement with cinema. I know you are both fans of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film that underscores the idea of looking, the psychological complexity of being looked at, the gaze of the camera, but also the obsession of recording and filming – all aspects that relate to both your bodies of work.

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Adobe CS4

Adobe's SVP of the Creative Business Unit - Johnny L and Photoshop Product Manager John Nack show off some upcoming CS4 technologies as well as technology Adobe is working on beyond CS4.

Podcast

Indecisive moments

Australian and Japanese artists explore the ambiguity of time, memory and reality

By ASHLEY RAWLINGS
Special to The Japan Times

Henri Cartier-Bresson's legacy of the "decisive moment" had a profound impact on photography. As a cofounder of the photographic cooperative Magnum Photos in 1947, his philosophy influenced a whole generation of photojournalists, and, for decades, Magnum photographers were instrumental in constructing the popular impression of reality. They crafted a collective memory of history as a set of succinct narratives told through images captured in the briefest of instants.

echnology and developments in "photomedia" since the '80s, contemporary artists have rethought the role of time in photography. With this in mind, the curators of "Trace Elements: Spirit and Memory in Japanese and Australian Photomedia" have brought together 10 artists from Australia and Japan for a heady exhibition that is meant to address the notion of photomedia as a "memory- creation device."

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Layers to Comment on Layers of Imagery

By KAREN ROSENBERG @ New York Times

As it sifts through the riches of the extraordinary Gilman Collection of photographs, acquired three years ago, the Met is slowly bringing its holdings of contemporary photography up to speed. In the fall the museum dedicated a new gallery, the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall, to the exhibition of post-1960 photography.

“Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960” is the second installation in this space. It is better than the first, largely because of its variety of works (by artists male and female, young and old, American and European, famous and fledgling). Thomas Ruff and Hiroshi Sugimoto are here, but so are Janice Guy, an artist turned dealer who is benefiting from a sudden interest in her early self-portraits, and Mark Wyse, a young photographer who is also active as a curator. The 21-artist mix isn’t perfect, but the curator, Doug Eklund, deserves credit for taking a few risks.

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Photographer Sam Abell talks about Richard Prince

A MONTH!

Wow. Things have been very hectic this Summer and it has been a month since my last post. I have assumed new responsibilities at the school here and have been on the run.


I did however escape for 10 days to do a little unwinding. I packed up the mountain bike and drove to the mountains of Pennsylvania east of Scranton to visit a long time friend, Brian, on his farm. Excellent riding and fishing at his family cabin.


Then on to the Finger Lakes of New York and my family's cottage on Cayuga Lake. The fresh air and fresh water was just what I needed!

Then there is the wine trail. It has been a while since I made the rounds by bike and I had forgotten how fun it can be.



Tiffany's friend Rob decided to do some spearfishing and viola he landed a nice carp (if you like carp!)

Aristocracy of Talent for an Egalitarian Art

By Roberta Smith @ NY Times

From the daguerreotype to the cellphone snapshot, the history of photography has unfolded as a series of miracles, each of which has profoundly altered our understanding of the time-space continuum. As the innovations become familiar, the photographs become miracles in another way, as connections to a past we’ve never seen.

“Framing a Century: Master Photographers, 1840-1940,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, manages to operate in the gap between both kinds of miracles, innovative and talismanic. It presents the history of a medium as well as history itself.

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Access All Areas

By Christy Lange @ FRIEZE

Taryn Simon’s photographs of restricted locations reveal an unsettling side to the American Dream

‘It’s 3am and something is happening in the world […] There’s a phone in the White House, and it’s ringing.’ So began the narration of a recent television advertisement for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, unleashing a flurry of discussion about the White House telephone and the candidate best suited to answer it in case of a global emergency. The folklore of the White House ‘red phone’ was, in fact, first exploited during the 1984 presidential campaign, when it represented the tenuous hotline between Washington and Moscow. It’s telling that the Clinton campaign was so eager to revive this anachronistic symbol: though Barack Obama accused Clinton of exploiting ‘the politics of fear’, Clinton had in fact tapped into a deep-seated American fantasy about the backstage operations of the United States government and its national security apparatus, at a time when that backstage is probably more expansive and dimly lit than ever. Americans, apparently, are still intrigued by the ‘red phone’ as a potent symbol of national secrets and the intricate bureaucracy hidden behind them. The country operates not only on freedom and transparency, but also on things that are unseen and unknown to most of us. Perhaps that’s what makes Taryn Simon’s 2007 publication of her photographic series ‘An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar’ so timely and appealing.

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"For want of a new territory..."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia "Head #06 2001"

Max Kozloff on Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography @ TATE Etc.

The camera has always been a socialised instrument, well equipped to describe shifting behaviour, environments and manners. Of course we rely on it to give a specifically factual account of them. Inevitably, situations change, but this testimonial function of photography remains constant. Before the advent of Photoshop, whatever the circumstance or event, be it impromptu or staged, there could be little doubt that the camera recorded it through an act of witness. Its observational power would appear to have served as a fixed, credible reference to realities that fluctuate indefinitely. Over the past few decades, however, we’ve come to understand that a scene may be filtered through photographic motives other than, or at odds with, the purpose apparently intended. The facts are delivered, but their content has to be reckoned with freshly, and on uncertain terms.

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Cornell Capa 1918-2008

"...as the founder of the International Fund for Concerned Photography, and the founder of ICP in 1974, Cornell was a singular force in the world of photography, opening our eyes to the power of the photographic image as an agent of change."

May he rest in peace.

ICP tribute

DIY film

Pretty ingenious!

FLICKR page

Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera

by Jonathan Richards @ TimesOnline

A device that lets a camera take pictures with 100 times the resolution of the most advanced models on the market is poised to revolutionise amateur photography.

The Gigapan allows people to take pictures which are more than a gigapixel - or 1,000 megapixels - in size, effectively turning a single photograph into a panoramic experience, around which the viewer can navigate on a computer.

Yet the actual camera used is no more specialised than a regular digital model.

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Gigapan website

Robert Rauschenberg

A touchstone for all of us... Rest in Peace..

New York Times article

Robert Frank: melancholy and menace

@ The Telegraph

Catching his subjects off-guard with a camera peeking from his jacket, the photographer Robert Frank 'captured a sad poem right out of America on to film', as his friend Jack Kerouac put it. As Frank's masterpiece, The Americans, is reissued after almost 50 years, Michael Shelden looks at his work

On patrol near the Mississippi river one afternoon in November 1955, Lt RE Brown of the Arkansas State Police spotted a suspicious, 'foreign-looking' man driving down the highway in a battered old Ford and pulled him over.

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Life Before Death noch mal leben: portraits of the dying

by Beate Lakotta @ Lens Culture

Few experiences are likely to affect us as profoundly as an encounter with death. Yet most deaths occur almost covertly, at one remove from our everyday lives.

Death and dying are arguably our last taboos – the topics our society finds most difficult. We certainly fear them more than our ancestors did. Opportunities to learn more about them are rare indeed.

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Starn Twins @ 20x200

20×200 has been getting all sorts of press lately (NY Times, Houston Chronicle, WIred Magazine just to name a few), and they’ve featured some well known artists. They now have added to their accomplishments an edition by two people in the highest level of art stardom, Mike and Doug Starn. Unfortunately the work went almost immediately.

20x200

Conservators face issues in preserving video

By Hugh Hart, Special to The Times

"Video is a fugitive medium," said Getty Research Institute's Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for "California Video," running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the '60s, '70s and '80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.

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The MIssing Criticism: Papageorge on Robert Adams and 'What We Bought'.

@ Eric Etheridge

In 2000, the Yale University Art Galley acquired the 193 prints that comprise Robert Adams' book What We Bought: The New World (cover right). Two years later, Tod Papageorge wrote this critical appraisal, which also includes a significant amount of details about Adams' working method, derived from conversations with the artist. The essay originally appeared in the Yale University Art Galley Bulletin.

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An Image Is a Mystery for Photo Detectives

By RANDY KENNEDY @ NY Times

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the world’s leading Talbot expert and asked if he could grace the sale’s catalog with any interesting scholarly details about the print — known as a photogenic drawing, a crude precursor to the photograph.

“I got back to them and said, ‘Well, the first thing I would say is that this was not made by Talbot,’ ” the historian, Larry J. Schaaf, recalled in a recent interview.

“That was not what they were expecting to hear, to say the least.”

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Keeping His Eye on the Horizon (Line)

By PHILIP GEFTER @ New York Times

The soft-colored photographs of Sze Tsung Leong capture contrasting landscapes: the verdant green of Germany; the mirage of shimmering towers in Dubai; the urban geometry of Amman, Jordan; the red tiles roofs of Italy. But always the eye is drawn to the distinct line where sky meets earth.

In Mr. Leong’s panoramic photographs of major cities and rural landscapes around the world, the horizon line consistently falls in the same place. So when his images are hung side by side — as 62 of them are now at the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea — they create an extended landscape of ancient cities and modern metropolises, desert vistas and lush terrain.

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2000 frames per second

LightZone Promo -Today only!

MacUpdate is running a 1?2 off promo of LightZone today.

LightZone: built for photography
"LightZone fully embraces fearless visual experimentation. LightZone provides a unique visual approach to digital photo editing, allowing you to focus on what you want to do with your photos, not how you do it. All operations are live and have an immediate effect upon which you can make new editing decisions. No more guess work. The software allows you to enhance photos in a simple and natural way, without the steep learning-curve found in many other software programs."

LightZone website

MacUpdate Promo

Run, Don't Walk!

Apple Releases Aperture 2.1

@ APPLE

CUPERTINO, California—March 28, 2008— Apple® today released Aperture™ 2.1, which introduces an open plug-in architecture that makes it easy for photographers to use specialized third party imaging software right from within Aperture. Available today as a free software update, Aperture 2.1 includes the Apple-developed plug-in, Dodge & Burn, which adds brush-based tools for dodge (lighten), burn (darken), contrast, saturation, sharpen and blur. Over the coming months, third party software developers will deliver image editing plug-ins for localized editing, filters and effects, noise analysis and reduction, fisheye lens correction and more.

“The image quality in Aperture 2 has won over the most demanding photographers,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing. “Now, thanks to our open plug-in architecture, users can access an entire industry’s worth of imaging expertise without ever leaving Aperture.”

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Robert Frank’s Unsentimental Journey

by CHARLIE LeDUFF @ Vanity Fair

Published in 1958, Robert Frank’s photographic manifesto, The Americans, torched the national myth, bringing him such comrades as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and—for a controversial documentary—the Rolling Stones. On a trip to China, the 83-year-old rebel of postwar film still defies expectations.

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

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Sony DSLR

WARS

Once again Magnum in Motion has created a powerful piece.

Magnum in Motion

Coin. Smile. Click!

By JOHN STRAUSBAUGH @ New York Times

ON a recent sunny but frigid morning, I strolled up Broadway through Times Square with Näkki Goranin, a visitor from Vermont making a pilgrimage through the swirling crowds and the sensory overload of all the signage. We stopped on the west side of Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. It looked nondescript to me, with the usual fast food, souvenir shop, gym and drugstore.

But Ms. Goranin, a photographer whose book “American Photobooth” (W. W. Norton) has just been published, declared it “a landmark in photo history.” Because, she said, in 1926, roughly where the gym is now, a Jewish inventor from Siberia named Anatol Josepho (shortened from Josephewitz) opened a photo-booth concession, the first Photomaton in the world.

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The Indecisive Image

A detail from Marco Breuer’s Untitled (C-498), 2004, made with scratched chromogenic paper.

by Eric Bryant @ ArtNews

In Marco Breuer’s recent photographs, black specks dance across a white surface, leaving faint trails that mark the passage of time. Sensuous blocks of yellow glow like crystals lit from within, and drippy parallel lines that seem to sit on top of the paper call to mind Action Painting. Made without camera or film, these lush, textured works, collected in Breuer’s 2007 book Early Recordings, defy our basic notions of what photography can be. Breuer achieves his effects by burning photographic papers, scraping their emulsions, and experimenting with chemical formulas that were popular in the 19th century.
Breuer is one of a wave of photographers now gaining recognition for work that abandons recognizable subject matter. “Abstraction goes back to the very beginnings of photography and has come back in different revivals,” says Roxana Marcoci, photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “There were the New Vision people in the 1920s and another group in the 1960s, and it is here again right now.”

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Take Your Pic

by R.C. Baker @ Village Voice

Someone had a blast putting together this show of photographs taken between 1945 and 1960. First off, many of these 55 pictures are simply great images. An untitled shot from Robert Frank's "The Americans" captures one man closing huge double doors on another man; the rough grain in this 1956 photo hones the feeling that something shabby has transpired in this high-ceilinged space of wall sconces and heavy molding. The geometric composition of cobblestones and a pedestrian crosswalk in Toni Schneiders's 1952 view of a sedan speeding past two American soldiers in Frankfurt, Germany, conveys the sense of a victor's imposed order beginning to wane, as the natives start hustling again. But the juxtapositions are what really get the juices flowing:

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Post War Perspectives @ Laurence Miller Gallery, NYC
Lawrence Miller Gallery

Classic Polaroid

Recovering the Complex Legacy of the Photographer Jacob Riis

by VERLYN KLINKENBORG @ The New York Times

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

By Riis’s time, social and political reform efforts had been going on for half a century, but to little effect. What made the difference was his photographs, which Riis used in popular lectures and in his best-selling book, “How the Other Half Lives,” published in 1890, five years before the Mulberry Bend tenements were finally torn down.

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The Modbook

The One and Only Tablet Mac®
by Axiotron
The Axiotron Modbook™ is a revolutionary slate-style tablet Mac that enables users to draw and write directly on the screen.
Axiotron’s innovative design and manufacturing process integrates an Apple® MacBook® computer, state-of-the-art Wacom® pen-enabled digitizer technology and Axiotron's own proprietary hardware and software components into a complete tablet solution, the Axiotron Modbook.
Built for artists, mobile users, students and professionals, the Modbook’s condensed form factor and integrated pen-based user experience offer unprecedented flexibility and control over the creative process.

Read more about it

NICE! and not a bad price $2290

Big Shots

by R.C. Baker @ The Village Voice

The San Francisco–based photographer John Chiara grew up with a large tumor hanging from his chin; for medical reasons, it couldn't be removed until he was 15. The artist says that, as a kid, he was "really outgoing" until the benign growth was excised, after which he suddenly "got all shy." Something similar is going on with his large, one-of-a-kind landscapes shot with a ridiculously ungainly camera the size of a U-Haul trailer, which he tows around the Bay Area in search of resolutely unspectacular vistas. You won't see any inspiring shots of the Golden Gate here, just self-effacing images of serpentine curbs fronting scrubby hills or rooftops fringed with jagged foliage. Each photo is named after a different intersection, such as Sunnydale at Russia. The titles heighten the deadpan allure of these dark prints, as does Chiara's working method: He crawls through a trapdoor into his mobile camera, focuses the lens, tapes up a five-foot-wide sheet of Ilfachrome paper, then uses his hands to dodge and burn the image during the typical 20- to 40-minute exposure.

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Canon’s Iris Registration Mode - Biological Copyright Metadata

@ Photography Bay

Canon is using Iris watermarking to take photographer’s copyright protection to the next level.

. . . to provide an imaging apparatus that makes it possible to protect the copyright of photographic images by reliably acquiring biological information of a photographer . . . - US Patent Application No. 2008/0025574

Stories like the recent discovery of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir’s stolen Flickr images that surfaced on iStockphoto make all photographers cringe. Many photographers go to great lengths to protect their images. Past attempted solutions include watermarks on the front of images. I can recall this practice from my childhood years with the Olan Mills studio gold embossing in the bottom corner.

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RAW Support upgrade!

With the recent 10.5.2 update to Leopard, Apple applications now support the Sony a700 RAW format!! I didn't think it would bother me much when I first purchased the camera, but it has grown to be a major pain to have to preview the jpg files, write down the image number, then open the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw. Now I can even scroll through the RAW files using QuickLook. EXCELLENT!

Apple camera support page

Hollywood, without the songs

By Peter Conrad @ The Guardian
In trying to praise revolutionary communism, Alexander Rodchenko captures the contradictions of the Soviet system

Mechanically augmented by the hyperfocal lens of his Kodak camera, his eyes were able, like those of a far-seeing prophet, to look into the future. The stepped balconies of his apartment house climb into the sky, and a fire escape on the side of the building - forgetting that its function is to help evacuees get down to the ground - speeds impatiently upwards, bound for the secularised heaven promised by socialism. A thin, shaved, pine tree, seen from a low angle, looks like a prototype of the pylons that wired the sky and distributed energy to dynamise Russia. Rodchenko admired the agitated reconstruction of reality in Dziga Vertov's film Cine-Eye; he too made the eye a kinetic agent, not just a passive receptor of impressions. The still image is mobilised in the jittery chaos of the photomontages he designed for Mayakovsky's poems, and a visual art strives to make a verbal noise in his poster for a campaign to democratise literacy: Lili Brik widens her mouth to proclaim the good news about the availability of books, and a silent photograph turns into a loud-hailer.



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SEE ALSO: Making strange by Craig Raine @ The Guardian

Lobster

I have been investigating the "demo" version of this tool and like it.


From their website:
What does Lobster do?

Lobster works inside Photoshop to accurately separate the tonality and colour of your image using the Layers palette.

Lobster creates four new layers from your RGB image: Luminosity (a very specific type of tonality) and Red-Green-Blue Chromaticity Set. (Covering Hue and Saturation).

This separation allows a "divide and conquer" approach to the editing of your images, where for example changes can be safely and accurately made to your Luminosity layer without affecting the Hue and Saturation of your file - an action not possible in Photoshop.

Lobster gives you new uses for and insights into the following elements of Photoshop:
Levels, Curves, Selective Color and all other Adjustment Layers.

Lobster website

Modern-Day Cowboys Frozen in Time

@NPR.org

Photographer Robb Kendrick traveled 41,000 miles searching for cowboys. His six-year quest took him across 14 states, Mexico and Canada. He emerged with a collection of images that seem trapped in time.

The men and women featured in his latest book, Still: Cowboys at the Start of the Twenty-First Century, stare out at the page, solemnly, without the slightest hint of movement. These cowboys, with their long twisting mustaches, "taco" rolled-brim hats, bandanas and rawhide lassos look like relics from another era.

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Walker Evans: image problem

@ the Telegraph

As a photographer and documenter of the Great Depression, Walker Evans showed immense compassion, humanity and heart. But as a husband, he was shallow, selfish and heartless. In this extract from her revealing new autobiography, his ex-wife Isabelle Storey tells all

Isabelle Storey was 25 in 1958 when she moved to New York with her husband, Alec von Steiger. While he was away working on location, she met Walker Evans, 30 years her senior.

Ursula opened the apartment door and I glanced at the slender, grey-haired man reclining on the sofa. His face was in a cloud of cigarette smoke and he seemed to pay no attention to Plush, who ran across the room and jumped up into my arms. Ursula, herself not much taller than Plush, tried to calm the poodle down and led her towards the sofa.

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Jobo announces GPS digital camera add-on

At PMA, JOBO is showing a nifty digital camera add-on called Photo GPS, which attaches to the flash hot shoe of any digital camera and records GPS data as you shoot. (If your camera has a PC terminal, you can still use an external flash unit.)

Once you’re back at your Mac, you download both your images and the GPS data file from the Jobo unit, which has a USB port. The company’s software uses a location database to match the images with the GPS data, and the software adds the location data to your images’ EXIF metadata. If you’re using Raw-format images, the software will create an XML file that stores the GPS data, readable in programs like Aperture and Lightroom.

Jobo plans to ship the Photo GPS mid-year for $159.

Well, It Looks Like Truth

By HOLLAND COTTER @ New York Times

After an autumn of large, expert, risk-free museum retrospectives, the time is right for a brain-pincher of a theme show, which is what “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” at the International Center of Photography is.

Organized by Okwui Enwezor, an adjunct curator at the center, it’s an exhibition in a style that’s out of fashion in our pro-luxe, anti-academic time, but that can still produce gems. The tough, somber little show “Manet and the Execution of Maximilian” at the Museum of Modern Art last year mixed grand paintings with throwaway prints and demanded a commitment of time and attention from its audience. The payoff was an exhibition that read like breaking news and had the pull of a good documentary. It was the museum’s proudest offering of the season.

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Sigma DP1

The Sigma Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of the Sigma DP1 compact digital camera featuring a 14 megapixel FOVEON X3 direct image sensor (2652 × 1768 × 3 layers) as used in the Sigma SD14 digital SLR.

The DP1 is a completely new type of camera offering the full spec. and high image quality of a DSLR in the body of a compact camera. It is powered by the 14 megapixel Foveon X3 direct-image-sensor, which can reproduce high definition images rich in gradation and impressive three-dimensional detail.

It is possible to record images in RAW or the widely used JPEG in four resolution modes. It offers five Exposure modes and three Metering modes as well as being equipped with a built-in flash with the Guide Number of 6, hot shoe, neck strap and 2.5 inch TFT color LCD monitor with approx. 230,000 pixels.

The DP1 has the high resolution and functionality of an SLR, plus adaptability in terms of accessories, all built into a small body. A wide range of accessories, optical viewfinder 「VF-11」, Lens Hood「HA-11」, and Electronic Flash 「EF-140 DG」are available for the DP1 camera.

Read the Press release

Camera site

Sony Develops 35mm full size CMOS Image Sensor with 24.81 Effective Megapixel resolution and extremely high signal conversion speed for use in Digital

Press Release
Tokyo, Japan - Sony Corporation today announced the development of a 35mm full size (diagonal:43.3mm/Type 2.7) 24.81 effective megapixel, ultra-high speed high image quality CMOS image sensor designed to meet the increasing requirement for rapid image capture and advanced picture quality within digital SLR cameras.

Press Release

Of course I just purchased a Sony a700 last Fall!!!

The Commons

Through a pilot program called The Commons, the Library of Congress has partnered with Flikr to post collections of images online in hopes of the public helping with the tagging process and possibly more identification information. Flikr, which routinely requires Creative Commons licensing, is also working with the Library of Congress for a new rights designation on these images.

Currently there are two collections of images online. These are: 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s.

The Commons