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

onOne Software Announces Acquisition of Liquid Resize Technology

Portland, OR, January 17, 2007 onOne Software, Inc., provider of world-class software solutions for professional photographers and graphic designers, announces today the technology acquisition of Liquid Resize which introduces a ground-breaking new way to resize images using a technique known as "seam carving" to reduce the distortion that typically occurs when manipulating the aspect ratio of an image.

Read the Press Release

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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