ATP Photofinder

"The ATP Photo Finder calculates and records GPS position data and allows you to precisely track the exact location and time of where your pictures were taken. Activate the Photo Finder while you’re taking pictures with your digital camera.

After you finish taking pictures, simply insert your SD, Memory Stick or MMC memory card into the Photo Finder's built-in card slot and the GPS data will be synchronized and added to all pictures on the card."

Photofinder website

British Photographs from paper negatives 1840-1860

Roger Fenton
Moscow, Domes of Churches in the Kremlin, 1852.

At the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

"The first exhibition to highlight British photographs made from paper negatives, this show features approximately 120 works by leading artists such as Roger Fenton, Linnaeus Tripe, and B. B. Turner, as well as many now unfamiliar practitioners. Contrary to accounts provided in standard histories, this exhibition demonstrates that "calotypes"—photographs made from paper negatives—flourished during the 1840s and 1850s. The exhibition follows the progress of the movement from the invention of the process by William Henry Fox Talbot i"

National Gallery of Art

More Images

Lizard Head Peak, Colorado

Shadow Mountain, Arizona

Monumant Valley, Utah

White Birch, Arizona

Near Sedona, Arizona

Mesa, New Mexico

Snow Storm, New Mexico

Strange Places

Nestled next to the San Juan Mountain range off Route 17 stands the UFO information center and observation deck.


There was also a small museum that was unfortunately closed (aliens must not like cold weather). I was able to shoot a few pictures through the door though.


People are supposed to leave items for the aliens to investigate and a small "garden" is set up to greet our visitors.


Some of my favorite welcoming sculptures...


Hurry on back now ya hear....

Compositions That Come Naturally

By RANDY KENNEDY @ The New York Times

Frederick Law Olmsted, with his Victorian whiskers, grandiloquent diction and vaguely utopian transcendentalism, might have been alarmed to learn that many decades after his death in 1903 he would become a hero of postmodern art.

But at least since Robert Smithson, the earthwork pioneer, declared that he found Olmsted more interesting than Duchamp, Olmsted’s creations — particularly his most famous, Central Park — have been revered as a kind of early conceptualism, carefully constructed visions of the pastoral woven into the urbanizing heart of America. Olmsted championed natural simplicity and the curative powers of communing with it, railing against parks so prettified that “the face of nature shall everywhere have become as natty as a silk hat.”

In the early 1980s the photographer Lee Friedlander, best known for his relentless exploration of the American vernacular — nowhere street scenes, spectral television sets, caustic self-portraits — began to develop his own interest in Olmsted, photographing Central Park as part of a growing body of landscape work. In 1988, commissioned by the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, Mr. Friedlander started digging even more deeply into Olmsted, photographing his parks around the country for six years and then continuing to shoot them even after the project ended.

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Images

San Juan Mountains, Colorado

The Great Sand Dunes, Colorado

Parajo Mesa, New Mexico

Dowa Yalanne, New Mexico

Saddle Mountain, Arizona

A taste

Dog Knobs, Arizona

Heading back tomorrow with 550 new images from the road trip. All in all, very sucessfull.

Happy New Year

Wild West tour

I am off to tour the west over the holidays, so posting will be in stasis for the next two weeks.

Denver - Garden of the Gods- Buena Vista - Taos - Santa Fe - Flagstaff- Grand Canyon -Monument Valley -Canyon de Chelle-Mesa Verde - Durango - Hotchkiss - Denver

Have a great holiday!

david

A Big Gift for the Met: The Arbus Archives

by By CAROL VOGEL @ New York Times

Two years ago gallerygoers had a chance to discover the personal side of Diane Arbus in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the portraits that made her famous — powerfully unsettling photographs of dwarfs, transvestites and everyday people — the Met filled librarylike rooms with her photographic equipment, pages from her diaries, books from her home and studio and family pictures.

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life — her complete archives — to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971.

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Image of the week

Cape Hatteras, North Carolina

IPI Awarded Three Grants Totaling Over $1.25 Million for Two Major Image Preservation Research Projects

THE DP3 PROJECT

The DP3 Project: the Digital Print Preservation Portal consists of two lines of research that will examine the preservation of digital prints. One has been funded by a $606,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will make possible an in-depth investigation of the stability of digitally printed materials when they are exposed to light, airborne pollutants, heat, and humidity. The other, supported by a grant of $314,215 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, will be a study of the potentially harmful effects of enclosures and physical handling on digital prints, as well as their vulnerability to damage due to flood.

Image Permanence Institute

Qualifying Photography as Art, or, Is Photography All It Can Be?

By CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD @ Words Without Pictures

With medium specificity a passé historical concern confined chiefly to the pages of art history, it may seem prosaic and anachronistic to question the position and relative validity of a single medium—photography—within the world of contemporary art. In addition, the same question may seem patently irrelevant to those who might justifiably point out that many of the most eminent, critically lauded, and well-collected artists of the twentieth century—Thomas Demand, Jeff Wall, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, and Andreas Gursky, to name a few—all use the camera as their primary instrument. Furthermore, the status of photography as art is rarely drawn into question, and the market currency of the medium is beyond dispute. But does it necessarily follow that the fundamental ontology of photography as a practice has been fully interrogated, understood, and integrated into the discourse of contemporary art, assuming its rightful place alongside traditional media like painting, sculpture, and drawing, as well as new media such as installation and video? In other words, does photography exist as photography in art history and criticism today? And if not, why not? Is photography—and by derivation photography criticism—all it can be?

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If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?

By RANDY KENNEDY @ New York Times

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.

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Image of the week

Hollywood, Maryland

Is Photography Dead?

By Peter Plagens | NEWSWEEK

How is that even remotely possible? The medium certainly looks alive, well and, if anything, overpopulated. There are hordes of photographers out there, working with back-to-basics pinhole cameras and pixeled images measured in gigabytes, with street photography taken by cell phones and massive photo "shoots" whose crews, complexity and expense resemble those of movie sets. Step into almost any serious art gallery in Chelsea, Santa Monica or Mayfair and you're likely to be greeted with breathtaking large-format color photographs, such as Andreas Gefeller's overhead views of parking lots digitally montaged from thousands of individual shots or Didier Massard's completely "fabricated photographs" of phantasmagoric landscapes. And the establishment's seal of approval for photography has been renewed in two current museum exhibitions. In "Depth of Field"— the first installation in the new contemporary-photography galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on display through March 23—the fare includes Thomas Struth's hyperdetailed chromogenic print of the interior of San Zaccaria in Venice and Adam Fuss's exposure of a piece of photo paper floating in water to a simultaneous splash and strobe.

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A portrait of Scorsese

Adobe video tutorials

Adobe has cobbled together a massive library of video tutorials in an elegant web interface. There is no charge to view the videos.

Visit the website

This Year’s Models: Searching for Fresh Approaches in Photography

Scott McFarland’s “Orchard View With the Effects of Seasons (Variation #1)

By MARTHA SCHWENDENER @ New York Times

Bright letters announce “New Photography 2007” on a wall outside the Museum of Modern Art’s photography galleries. Just inside is a room of vintage-looking black-and-white photographs. Contemporary photographers are showing a strong interest in early photography, so your first thought is that the curator has unearthed someone recycling the ideas and methods of Eadweard Muybridge, Alfred Stieglitz or Clarence White.

But no. These are pictures by Muybridge, Stieglitz and White. Keep walking; the annual showcase of emerging photographers is in the next room. After that accidental spark of excitement, though, the show itself is something of a letdown.

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Naked Light

"The emperor has new clothes. Introducing Naked light. Non-destructive image editing. Node-based compositing. Live filters. High-end tools. And infinite resolution. It's image editing, re-invented."

Hmmmm... looks interesting. A public beta is available for download here, but beware it comes with a pretty hefty warning.

"Had I known people would've been this interested, I would've delayed the beta another week or so—this is still probably much closer to an alpha."

Visit website

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law

@ TED

Larry Lessig gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the "ASCAP cartel" to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.

Comment @ TED

Levi Hill and the Hillotype

Christian Patterson posts about the certification of the color Dageurreotype.

"Reverand Levi Hill’s claim in 1851 to have produced naturally colored daguerreotypes, or Hillotypes, has been proved true, according to research by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Foundation."

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The Swipe File

Pirate of the Guggenheim! How Richard Prince stole his way into the art world's heart.

by R.C. Baker @ The Village Voice

If you once sent Easyriders magazine a snapshot of your old lady astride your hog (a pre-Internet way to pimp both your rides), don't be surprised to see her on the Guggenheim's curvaceous walls. Richard Prince's rotunda-filling retrospective includes paintings, sculptures, off-kilter gag panels, and his early-'90s series of workaday beauties rephotographed from the motorcycle mag's back issues, the coarse-grained enlargements heightening the down-market spectacle of breasts popping out of leather vests.

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Steichen Reconsidered in All His Exposures

By ALAN RIDING @ The New York Times

PARIS, Oct. 16 — When artists constantly reinvent themselves, they may be admired for their virtuosity, but they also risk being tagged as dilettantes. Surely, the argument goes, great artists should aspire to depth, not breadth. If they believe fervently in something one moment, how can they turn away from it the next?

It is a question that continues to haunt Edward Steichen’s reputation long after his death at 93 in 1973. He was recognized in his lifetime as one of the great photographers of the 20th century, yet with his penchant for changing directions and playing multiple roles, he bequeathed too many Steichens for easy classification.

Did he excel in all his photographic ventures — in “pure” art, fashion and advertising, portraiture, nature, combat, even as a powerful director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — or did he become a brand name, famous for being famous?

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Views of Tumult Between Two Wars

By ROBERTA SMITH @ New York Times

For some of us in the art world, the history of photography began expanding suddenly and rapidly in the late ’70s. The big bang was a 1978 book of photographs from the collection of Sam Wagstaff. It was an elegant object: a pale pink, stylishly square cover distinguished by a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of tulips.

I remember feeling dumbfounded by the 150-odd images inside, most from before World War I. They were beautiful and riveting in their direct access to other times and places. But while familiar to photo-savvy people, names like Henry Fox Talbot, Francis Frith, Gustave Le Gray, August Sander and Édouard-Denis Baldus were at best extremely vague for most of us.

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Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Out of the shoe box

The photographer's shots, rescued from storage, are on display at Rose Gallery in Santa Monica.

By Hugh Hart, Special to The LA Times

ON the wall of his studio darkroom in Mexico City, Manuel Alvarez Bravo posted a scrap of paper on which he'd scrawled "Hay Tiempo." "There is time."

In 2002, time ran out for Alvarez Bravo, who died at age 100. But by then, with photographs recasting everyday Mexican City street life as lyrical dreamscapes, he had created a celebrated body of work rooted in Mexico's post-revolution artistic renaissance that flourished in the 1930s.

At 95, Alvarez Bravo, slowed by ill health, revisited a lifetime's worth of themes, sifting through shoe boxes crammed with neglected proof sheets and negatives that had accumulated in his studio over the last 60 years, work he'd shunted aside in his perpetual push to produce something new.

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White Stripes Cameras

The White Stripes and Lomography have released special edition Diana and Holga cameras. If you want one hurry, there were only 3000 made. They are going for $180.00.

The website

Master of the Medium

By Maria Morris Hambourg @ ArtForum

It is rare for a curator to reign with virtual sovereignty over an entire medium, but during his nearly three decades as director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (from 1962 until his retirement in 1991), John Szarkowski did. His outpouring of exhibitions and catalogues at the pulpit of modern art and photography placed him on a singular pedestal in a recurrent spotlight, but it was less these conditions than his penetrating mind, eloquence, and perspective that made his opinion matter so much. In a field dominated by journalism and almost devoid of serious critical thought, Szarkowski was a flare of intellect, a lone poet among jobbing professionals. One would be hard-pressed to name another instance in which one man’s vision of an unrecognized art simultaneously created and educated its audience.

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Gallery Vandals Destroy Photos

By CAROL VOGEL @ New York Times

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

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Colour Field Polaroids

I ran across the work of Grant Hamilton and really like the work. In grad school (way back when) I pusued "colour field" painting as well as I could.

Grant's website

Chris Jordan @ Bill Moyers Journal

"For many years, all I was interested in about photography was aesthetic beauty. And so, I would go out looking for that. And actually what I would do is go out driving around the Port of Seattle or I'd go down to Tacoma and drive around the port there. What I was interested in at the time was just color, places where color appears inadvertently or places where there's this color that appears in a very complex and beautiful way, but nobody intended it."

"And one day, I found a pile of garbage that was really beautiful, I thought, and so I photographed it. And I made a big print and hung it on my wall. And people would come over and look at it and they would start talking about consumerism. And they'd walk up and say, "Oh, look, there's an Altoid's can." Or there's a, whatever particularly consumer product that they recognized in the photograph. And then they would start talking about garbage and waste and they would tell me, "Chris, this is a different kind of image that you haven't made before." And they would sort of urge me to follow the thread. And I told them "I'm not interested in all that. Like, don't talk to me about modern art. And don't tell me to come up to date. Just check out my cool cosmic color theory." - CJ

Bill Moyers Journal

Modern Photography in a Brand-New Space

By Karen Rosenberg @ New York Times

Since its 2003 survey of Thomas Struth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been getting serious about photography. In 2005 it presented a Diane Arbus retrospective and, in a stunning move, acquired more than 8,500 works by absorbing the Gilman Paper Company Collection. Last spring it offered a glimpse of video and new-media works from its holdings. (Who knew the Met even had video, let alone a David Hammons?) Now the museum has designated a gallery exclusively for the exhibition of photographs made after 1960.

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Uta Barth (American, born Federal Republic of Germany, 1958)
Untitled (98.2) (detail), 1998
Chromogenic print

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Model Photographer

Successful successor: Larry Fink's Hungarian Debutante Ball, 1978
by R.C. Baker@ Village Voice

Photographer Lisette Model once told her students at the New School, "Photography is the easiest art, which perhaps makes it the hardest." How true—painting and drawing demand specialized training, but everyone takes snapshots, so the Vienna-born Model (1901–1983) instilled in her pupils a search for beauty beyond the surfeit of information that even banal photographs deliver.

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Aperture Foundation

A Wartime Photographer in Her Own Light

By FELICIA R. LEE @ New York Times

Sometime in the spring of 1936, the lovers and photographers André Friedmann and Gerta Pohorylle changed their names and, in the process, the history of photography. To distinguish themselves from other Jewish émigrés in Paris at the time, Mr. Friedmann, a Hungarian Jew, took the name Robert Capa; Ms. Pohorylle, also Jewish and born in Poland, became Gerda Taro. Working at times as “Capa,” an imaginary American photographer, they began documenting the Spanish Civil War, capturing the ruined towns and devastated civilians and soldiers on the Republican side.

Mr. Capa went on to become one of the world’s greatest war photographers. But Ms. Taro, seen by many as the first woman known to photograph a battle from the front lines and to die covering a war, survived in the public eye mostly for her romance with Mr. Capa.

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International Center for Photography

Candid Camera

The cult of Leica.

by Anthony Lane @ The New Yorker

Fifty miles north o Frankfurt lies th small German town o Solms. Turn off the mai thoroughfare and yo find yourself drivin down tranquil suburba streets, with detache houses set back from th road, and, on a war morning in late August not a soul in sight Nobody does bourgeoi solidity like th Germans: you ca imagine coming here fo coffee and cakes wit your aunt, but that woul be the limit o excitement. By the tim you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, th town has almost petere out; just before the railway line, however, there is clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sig outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it But here is the place to go, if you want to find the mos beautiful mechanical objects in the world.

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A Conversation with Mitch Epstein

The photographer talks about his latest epic series, "American Power," and how he struggles to keep the act of picture-making fresh and meaningful.

By Jörg Colberg @ Pop Photo.com

hroughout the last three decades Mitch Epstein has made his mark on the photography world with his wry depictions of everyday life tinged with transcendent beauty and irony. His large-scale color photographs tackle a variety of subjects, ranging from a personal look at his family's business and its relationship to the town he grew up in (Family Business) to American habits of energy consumption (American Power). In order to get a better understanding of Epstein and his work, American Photo contributor and blogger Jörg Colberg conducted the following Q&A with the artist.

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Adobe Photoshop & the Art of Photography

An Interview with John Paul Capinegro
by Steve Weinrebe

SW: Please talk a bit about your journey into digital photography, especially since you were well aware of the art of traditional photography growing up.

JPC: I grew up in an artistic family. My father is a well known photographer and my mother is a painter, turned graphic designer, and she often oversaw the production of artist’s monographs. The first time I saw digital imaging was in the mid 1970’s when she was overseeing production of Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes book. The printing press had a Scitex machine that she called ‘the million dollar coloring book’. The minute I saw what it could do I asked the question: ‘What would happen if artists got a hold of these, rather than a corporation trying to produce a clever ad?’

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Photo Husbandry

by Leslie Camhi @ Village Voice

JoAnn Verburg Voyages Through the Realm of the Domestic

The decay of private life is nothing new, though its accelerating decline has come to seem all but inevitable. It's tempting to blame this state of affairs on technology, on all those devices—iPods, BlackBerries, etc.—that interfere with our ability to focus on the present moment and the person standing before us. But surely the responsibility lies also with a society of unfettered materialism, inclining us to view people through the utilitarian filter of their functions, so that each new encounter becomes another point to be connected on a career trajectory.

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Sony's A700

"The camera’s new 12.2-megapixel Exmor™ CMOS sensor conducts analog-to-digital (A/D) signal conversion and dual noise reduction right on the sensor itself. Noise reduction is applied to analog signals before A/D conversion and the resulting digital signals are then subject to a second round of noise reduction.

According to Lubell, “These digital signals are virtually immune to external noise and interference.”

Clean, noise-free digital signals are then sent to the newly developed BIONZ™ processing engine. Lubell said this engine has been optimized to process data-rich picture information at high speeds, and to reduce picture noise in the RAW data stage before final image compression and encoding. The results are high-resolution, detailed images with rich tonal reproduction."

I WANT ONE!

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The Bizarre Story of Joe O'Donnell

by Marianne Fulton @ The Digital Journalist

It all started with an Aug. 14 New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin for photographer Joe O'Donnell. Martin praised his exceptional work and took special notice of a picture made during President Kennedy's funeral cortege: "And the O'Donnell photograph of John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting his father's coffin became the most reproduced version of that memorable scene." Martin goes on to note that, because he was on the government payroll, Mr. O'Donnell got no personal credit for those photos, although he signed and sold copies of them after his retirement from the White House in 1968.

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