WHOA! The Seitz 6x17 panorama camera

From the website:
Key features Seitz 6x17 panorama camera

Create a high resolution 6x17 digital image (160 million pixels) in one second!

Ideal for use with world-class Schneider or Rodenstock large format lenses (on Seitz lens board) or Linhof Technorama, Fuji and other large format lenses (on adaptor plate)

User-friendly camera system and software with 640x480 pixel colour touch screen for perfect preview, editing, zooming and image control

State-of-the art computer technology with gigabit Ethernet file transfer, powerful portable mini-computer (storage device) and handheld control device (PDA) with IP network WLAN connection

Fully mobile and open system:
- full mobility for outdoors assignments (with camera, portable
mini-computer, handheld control device)
- possibility to use in studio and run software on
computer with free choice of operating system (Mac OS,
Windows, Linux)
Uncompromising precision of camera body and accessories

And it only around $30,000 without lens!

And it's size?

Check it out

Smithsonian Photography Initiative

I don't really like the interface, but SPI shows some real promise in terms of innovative use of collaborative tagging and storytelling using archive photography.

Smithsonian Photography Initiative

More info at EYE LEVEL

Leica M8 Hands-on Preview

by Phil Askey and Simon Joinson @ dpreview.com
In 1954, at Photokina (or 'Foto Kina'), Leica introduced the first M series camera, the M3, the first Leica rangefinder body with a bayonet interchangeable lens mount, it was the beginning of a legendary series of cameras and lenses, the latest of which, the M7 is one of the only 35 mm rangefinder cameras still in production. For over half a century Leica has resisted the temptation to change the essential simple design established with the original M3 (it wasn't until 2002 that an electronically-controlled shutter was introduced allowing aperture priority automatic exposure). With an average 10 years between major upgrades and many of the original M3s still in regular use, the M platform is felt by its legion of fans to be the purest photographic tool available, and a welcome antidote to the mass of plastic feature-laden models that make up the rest of the market. Owning a Leica M camera has always been something people do with their hearts as much as their heads - and some of the 20th century's greatest photographers and most famous images were taken using them. It is no surprise then, that - despite talking about it for at least five years - Leica felt no need to rush into things when they decided it was time to bring the M into the digital age.

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THE NATURAL WORLD, IN PERIL AND IN ITS FULL GLORY

By Roberta Smith @ NY Times

“Ecotopia,” the edifying, entertaining and ecologically aware exhibition that opened last night at the International Center of Photography, means to get your attention. Near the entrance a looming, oozing black form threatens to engulf the show, like some leftover Valdez sludge trucked down from Alaska.

This enormous dollop is the first of several that punctuate the galleries. All are made, appropriately, of a lightweight, petroleum-based insulation material called Tubolit, widely used in the construction industry. An environmentally sound replacement for asbestos, Tubolit is recyclable, but it also offers further proof that the dependence on oil, foreign or otherwise, ranges far beyond gasoline.

Erupting from walls and doorways, lining windows and viewing rooms, and providing shelves for video screens and computer monitors, the meandering Tubolit globs manage to evoke not only sludge, but also toxic topiary, exotic rock formations and Flintstone-era habitats. Their symbolic versatility befits an exhibition in which nature is, by turns, magnificent, cute and enduring, while also increasingly dangerous and endangered, thanks to the widening scope of human indifference and exploitation.

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ICP Gallery

Found images

Years ago I bought a box of glass plate 4x5 negatives at an antique market. I ran across them last weekend while cleaning and organizing my office/studio/archive. There are probably twenty plates, but this one caught my attention as I was going through them. There is something still magical about the interaction between a subject and a large camera before the onslaught of mass media and the explosion of images on modern culture. I love old images.

photokina cologne

"At photokina, the focus is on image communiacation. The event is an impressive presentation of the shared future of photography, IT and telecommunications. Imaging is more - and that also applies to photokina 2006. The fair's structure, which is based on an imaging workflow, permits an integrated presentation of the topics of image capturing, image storage and processing, image transmission and service, image output, equipment and supplies."

photokina site

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 Review

by Simon Joinson @ dpreview

Announced bang on schedule exactly a year after the camera it replaces, the FZ50 is the new flagship in Panasonic's big-zoom Lumix range, upping the image size to a class-leading 10.2 megapixels and adding a couple of welcome new features. Unlike the FZ30, which represented a leap forward in design and features over the FZ20 (and closed the gap between fixed lens and SLR cameras further than ever before), the new camera is a fairly minor upgrade.

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Jason Salavon

The Top Grossing Film of All Time, 1 x 1 2000
Digital C-print mounted to Plexiglas
47" x 72". Ed. 5 + 2 APs

After posting the "Between the Lines" article at The Online Photographer, Ken Tanaka (another contributer) brought the work of Jason Salavon to my attention. Very interesting work. He was recently written about and interviewed on NPR. He currently has work on exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington,DC. There is also a write up and interview at Gapers Block

Salavon.com

Between the lines

by Geoff Dyer @ The Guardian
Criticism sometimes achieves the condition of art; certain works of art are also a form of commentary or criticism. Roland Barthes's meditation on photography, Camera Lucida, is a classic example of the former. How to respond creatively to a book that has profoundly shaped the way the medium is regarded? A writer might feel compelled to follow George Steiner's grand advice and "write a book in reply". And if you're not a writer, but a photographer? If you do what Barthes is writing about?

Idris Khan's response was to photograph every page of the book and then digitally combine them in a single, composite image. The result of this homage to - and essay on - Camera Lucida (English edition) is a beautiful palimpsest: a series of blurred stripes of type in which the occasional word can be deciphered and one of the images reproduced by Barthes - a portrait of Mondrian by Kertész - glimpsed. Khan did the same thing with On Photography by Susan Sontag. The whole of the book can be seen in an instant, but the density of information is such that Sontag's elegant formulations add up to, and are reduced to, a humming, unreadable distillation. Already slight, the gap between texts and Khan's images will shrink further if the books are reissued with his "readings" of them - surrogate author photos? - on the covers.

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Digital Tampering in the Media, Politics and Law

by Hany Farid, Associate Professor at Dartmouth

Photography, of course, lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1920s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, Stalin had his enemies "air-brushed" out of photographs. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming more common. Here, I have collected some examples of digital tampering in the media, politics, and the law. To help contend with the implications of this tampering, we have developed a series of tools for detecting traces of tampering in digital images.

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Epson Claria Hi-Definition ink

The rumor is that Wilhelm has results for this product that are so good that Epson is still debating internally on how to present the results. As significant is the design of the supporting print head, which sports a 1.5pl minimum and 5, rather than the current 3 droplet sizes. The combination produces a stunning 4x6 in less than 15 seconds. I would be surprised if we don't see at least some of these advances in wide format.

From the Epson site:
"Claria Hi-Definition Ink is a revolutionary new six-color, dye-based ink technology that delivers unsurpassed image quality and long-lasting results. Claria is tailor-made to fit the needs of the discerning photo enthusiast. It provides vivid, true-to-life colors with a wide color gamut that's ideal for printing your best shots.

Best of all, photos printed with Claria ink will last longer than traditional, lab-processed photos. And, they'll even stand up to spills, smudges and fading. That means you can share and frame your favorite photos, or place them in an album — worry-free."

Epson site

PDF documents

The Revelation of Erasure

By Brian Dillon @ Tate, etc.

The cheap propelling pencil with which I'm writing this essay has a tiny white eraser tucked beneath its shiny top. I hardly ever use it - the action required is just too fiddly, and the metal cap likely to get misplaced between my second thoughts and the last stroke of rubber on paper. And anyway: what happens if the eraser runs out before the lead? A nagging thought like that could wipe the next sentence from my mind before I've erased the last. Actually, rubbing out what I've written - and writing this, as always, will be largely a matter of erasure - is only the most drastic option.A quick scribble will do to rid the page of a botched clause or an unhappy adverb. Alternatively, I might score the offending formulation through with a single line, so that it can be reinstated later, if things get desperate. In a hurry, I'll simply overwrite the old text, reshaping its letters where I can, obliterating others, as though shouting myself down. The result is a scratted mass of grey text, pretty much unreadable to anybody else.

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Kodak overhauls inkjet paper line-up

Kodak has revealed changes to its entire line of consumer inkjet papers. By incorporating porous media technology and streamlining the product portfolio, Kodak hopes to improve the usability of the paper and the overall consumer experience.
A new 'feast-absorbing' porous surface has been added to the manufacturer's papers, to compliment recent advancements in inkjet technology. A quicker-drying surface also claims to reduce damaging smudges and sticking.
To simplify the buying process for consumers and increase on-shelf efficiency for retailers, Kodak has streamlined its portfolio of inkjet papers. Three distinct levels of quality, Kodak Ultra Premium Photo Paper, Kodak Premium Photo Paper and Kodak Photo Paper, will be offered and each labelled with a gold (best), silver (better), bronze (good) colour scheme to differentiate the products. Each paper will be available in a glossy or non-glossy finish and will be packaged in three different sheet count options.

Kodak. com

A flood of empathy

By Scott Timberg, LA Times Staff Writer

CHRIS JORDAN, the Seattle photographer who made his name with dense images of consumer society's debris, headed to New Orleans 10 weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit, out of both curiosity and what he calls "my feeling of personal responsibility." Even as just one of the 6 billion or so who've driven recent climate change, he couldn't shake feelings of guilt. "Three hundred thousand people in my own country losing their homes and personal belongings," he says. "It's like global warming came home to our own family."

What Jordan found in and around New Orleans and what he's captured in his first book, "In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss From an Unnatural Disaster," was "the most shocking landscape I've seen in my life. It took me a while to be able to connect with my own feeling of loss. It's like the experience of being in a family where someone dies of a drug overdose: First it's about them. Then, when the shock wears off, everyone realizes, 'We've all lost something.' "

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Chris Jordan's website

Orphaned

An essay by JASON DePARLE @ NY Times

I spent the Christmas of 1984 in the St. Thomas housing project, a parcel of low-rise New Orleans blight tucked beside the Mississippi River. It was a glorious day. Neighbors sat on stoops with their stereos loud, swapping plates of corn bread and shrimp-stuffed squash. Kids — happy kids — played everywhere, with toys that looked especially new in barren courtyards. Big Wheels, bikes, robots and dolls — they had been liberated from layaway with dollars squeezed from welfare and menial jobs. One mother let her phone service lapse to buy a $100 set of superheroes that her son could not bring himself to like. She laughed and drank a beer. My guide was a teenage tenant, Thomasina Crockett, whose faith in her future had survived the projects for 15 years. “I don’t think God said, ‘Your Mama went out and got pregnant so you have to live in the project,”’ she said. “You can bounce back.”

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Photos by Brenda Ann Kenneally

9/11: the aftermath

Peter Conrad @ The Guardian

Joel Meyerowitz's early photographs were poetic meditations on the sky and the omens that glimmer in it - a twitching nerve of summer lightning that snakes through the blue evening air on Cape Cod; the arch that spans St Louis like a metal rainbow, opening a gateway for Western explorers; the reassuring totem pole of the Empire State Building, with the sun gilding a spire that was designed as an anchorage for airships. Then, on 11 September five years ago, the sky fell in. A few days after the World Trade Centre collapsed, Meyerowitz wangled a pass to the site. He spent the next nine months photographing a sulphurous underworld in which the sky was a remote, mocking memory.

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View Images

In Portraits by Others, a Look That Caught Avedon’s Eye

By PHILIP GEFTER @ NY Times
RICHARD AVEDON set the standard for portraiture and fashion photography in the second half of the 20th century, so it is no surprise that his work is sought by serious collectors. But far less well known than his soigné magazine images is that when he died in 2004 he had amassed a significant photography collection of his own.

“From the time he was 10 and the owner of a box camera,” Truman Capote wrote about Avedon in “Observations,” a book they collaborated on in 1959, “the walls of his room were ceiling to floor papered with pictures torn from magazines, photographs by Munkacsi and Steichen and Man Ray.”

If those tear sheets suggested what Avedon’s own pictures would become, the photographs he collected informed his later career.

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Walker Evans. Or Is It?

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN @ NY Times











A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If it’s a camera with film, a negative is made; if it’s a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.

In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the picture’s integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.

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Booksmart Studio’s announces their fine art metal series

Booksmart Studio has announced a line-up of fine art metal that are coated for inkjet printing with most printers. The line-up of metals includes aluminum-brushed, matte, & satin along with Satin Gold. The thickness of these metals varies from .012 & .016, which allows you to put them directly through your Canon, Epson, or HP printers with a straight pass through. Printing images on these metals give an appearance of being backlite and the image quality mimics that of Ilfochrome with the Aluminum Satin finish.

Booksmart Blog

The Canon 400D

Canon has released info on the new 400D model. I could not find anything on the Canon USA site, but Canon Australia has posted this product page and this introduction page,

"Replacing Australia’s number one-selling D-SLR, the EOS 350D, the new model includes a Canon-developed 10.1 megapixel CMOS image sensor that delivers stunning, professional quality photographs. Super-fast image processing, thanks to Canon’s proprietary DiG!C II processor, ensures the camera is capable of capturing three frames per second (fps) for a burst of up to 27 consecutive frames."

Canon Australia