Thursday, October 4, 2012

Hyper photos

A story in Slate, This Picture Is Worth 1,000 Pictures.
Hyperphotos are to panoramic photos what Google Earth is to a globe. You can keep clicking and zooming and clicking and zooming, seemingly endlessly, until you find yourself on a dramatic balcony, looking up a statue’s nose.  (Try it on the image above. The more one zooms in; the more real the image begins to seem.)

Friday, August 17, 2012

Lytro

Another article from Makeuseof: Lytro Light Field Camera: Snap Happy Or Photo Gimmick?

Described by an employee as “the first major change in photography since photography was invented, the Lytro light-field camera is certainly a revolutionary device. The camera shakes things up by replacing much of the heavy and sensitive technology in your typical camera with software. Whether or not it’s worth your hard earned money at this stage is still unclear, however. Even the earliest of early adopters might want to think twice about the Lytro, despite the amazing technology and interactive results that are possible.

A typical camera measures the intensity and colour of light of a scene, be it captured on a roll of film or the sharpest digital sensor. Once you’ve taken your snap, Photoshop aside, there’s very little you can do to change the point of focus on a static image. That’s where Lytro differs. By capturing the direction light is moving and then reconstructing this along with color and intensity, Lytro allows you to change your point of focus once the image has been captured. This is called light field technology, and it’s bound to revolutionise the way we take photos.

Writing own obit

From a column about digital cameras, in Makeuseof: In 1975 the first digital camera came to be after an engineer for Eastman Kodak was tasked with creating what was then dubbed an “electronic camera”. The ensuing breakthrough laid the building blocks for digital photography as we know it today.

A Kodak engineeris responsible for the death of Kodak as a company.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Criminalizing photography

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/criminalizing-photography/

Thursday, August 9, 2012

A tiny little bat


NIR ELIAS / REUTERS
Israeli researcher Noam Tzvikel holds a bat in a laboratory at Tel Aviv University during an examination of the changes in the its nose structure, which reflect the focus, direction and width of its sonar beam, July 23, 2012. Israeli researchers aim to reveal the secrets of bats to shed more light on the behaviour and cognition of the species. They hope their findings could pave the way for new and improved radar systems and robotic technologies. Picture taken July 23, 2012.

From Reading at lunchtime

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Lightining

Picture from wUnderground. And, this other one from back on 19 July:


Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Tour de France, 2012

Gathered here are images from the first half of the 2012 Tour de France. Part 2 will be posted after the finish. [40 photos].

Some of these in the first batch are magnificent. Such as this:

Wow. How I wish, one day, I could take such a photo.

And, part 2 [42 photos] includes:
Breathtaking shot.




 Nice shot.




Saturday, June 23, 2012

Subway an open book


Alongside subway commuters with noses buried in bodice-rippers, biographies and Bibles, Ourit Ben-Haim clutches her camera and waits for just the right shot. The free-lance photographer creates surreptitious portraits of the New York riders as they turn their book pages, publishing the results on her website

 In some cases, the subjects are in a reading reverie and never know they have been photographed. The 700 bookworms featured in photos she has published on Underground New York Public Library, the blog she launched in December, are identified only by the titles of their books.

 Someone, a PN patron, I think,  told me about that site.

Her blog approximates the sensation of reading over a stranger's shoulder. Ms. Ben-Haim acknowledges that the act of taking photographs of strangers without permission might make some people uneasy.

There is a question of ethics, indeed.

On her website, she writes that taking photographs of people without their permission is "not wrong" legally. Ms. Ben-Haim also says that she never hides her camera, answers questions from those who notice what she's doing and discards photos if she thinks the subject would find the results unflattering.

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Silhouette Photography

From the Argus newsletter, 29 examples of silhouette photography.
Etymology of the name: 1798, from Fr. silhouette, in reference to Étienne de Silhouette (1709-1767), French minister of finance in 1759. Usually said to be so called because it was an inexpensive way of making a likeness of someone, a derisive reference to Silhouette's petty economies to finance the Seven Years' War, which were unpopular among the nobility. But other theories are that it refers to his brief tenure in office, or the story that he decorated his chateau with such portraits. The verb is recorded from 1876.

The family name is a Frenchified form of a Basque surname; Arnaud de Silhouette, the finance minister's father, was from Biarritz in the French Basque country; the southern Basque form of the name would be Zuloeta or Zulueta, which contains the suffix -eta "abundance of" and zulo "hole" (possibly here meaning "cave").

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

D-day

Photos from Life magazine.



"Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale — a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was last week." — LIFE after the French capital was liberated in August 1944.

Thursday, May 31, 2012

40 powerful photographs

Iconic photos, including:
Sisters pose for the same photo three separate times, years apart. Via: blameitonthevoices.com


Retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis is arrested for participating in the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.Via: johnnymilano.com

18 pictures for 5/31/12

A day in the world. From Kazakhstan, New Delhi, Alabama, Anctartica, among other places.

Spare Moments: Workers take a break in Dakar, Senegal.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Life And Love On The New York City Subway

Following in the footsteps of Walker Evans, a young Stanley Kubrick, during his tenure as a staff photographer for Look magazine in the 1940s, captured New York City subway passengers on their daily commute in a series called "Life And Love On The New York City Subway." In an age before iPhone cameras filmed every subway brawl and busker, Kubrick shot his subjects from the hip, in unassuming black and white portraits.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Photo-Op: Wave Theory

RoddOwen
Next time you're lying on the beach, listening idly to the sound of the surf, contemplate where those waves come from. What we think of as the main event—the crest, the crash, the spray—is actually the end of a journey that may begin with a storm halfway around the world. Evan Slater, a big-wave surfer and the former editor of Surfing magazine, has an intimate understanding of the sea. His 'Swell: A Year of Waves' (Chronicle, 143 pages, $29.95) is not only a gorgeously photographed guide to the best waves in the world but a lucid introduction to the science behind them. Those imposing breakers that pummel places like Huntington Beach in Southern California may have marched more than 6,000 miles from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf, while an unruly wave off west Australia, like the one above, results from the 'Roaring Forties,' winds that push water across jagged reefs and rocky ledges. Waves that break in particular places have received nicknames like 'The Guillotine' and 'Tombstones.' Mr. Slater applies terms such as 'triple-suck' and 'mutant' to the 'freaky wave behavior' that makes these water forms deadly as well as beautiful. Each winter, swells from Siberia hit Hawaii, California, Mexico and Peru, creating irresistible but dangerous waves, most famously North Oahu's Pipeline. It takes a kind of sang-froid to contemplate the sporting side effects of the 2005 Sumatra earthquake (which 'destroyed some breaks and improved others'). But Mr. Slater's plain-spoken prose shows deep respect for the elements, as do photographs that, at their best, seem to freeze the full power of the sea for study. Flipping the pages slowly, inspecting one wave after another, the reader can almost hear them splash against a nearby shore. The Editors

This book review appeared in the Wall Street Journal and on its website. A fascinating idea.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

French kiss

Robert Doisneau: (14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. In the 1930s he used a Leica on the streets of Paris; together with Henri Cartier-Bresson he was a pioneer of photojournalism. He is renowned for his 1950 image Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville (Kiss by the Town Hall), a photo of a couple kissing in the busy streets of Paris. Robert Doisneau was appointed a Chevalier (Knight) of the National Order of the Légion d'honneur in 1984.

 The pictures are:
Le Remorqueur du Champ de Mars (Tug on the Champ de Mars), 1943
Trois petits enfants blancs (Three little white children), 1971
Le baiser de l'hotel de ville (Kiss by the Hotel de Ville), 1950
Le Chien a Roulettes (Dog on Wheels), 1977
Aside from his Wiki-biography, there are various posts about him.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Spring 2012

Corner of 73rd Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard, 24 March, 5.30 in the afternoon. I recall a picture I took at the same corner, perhaps 9 years back, maybe 7, of daffodils in snow. This year, no snow. Not down here. We did great a 'flash snow' upstate, in the Catskills, this past weekend.


I took this picture near the Phoenicia School, looking north. Looks wintry. And it did, but snow began to melt that day, and was almost fully gone by Sunday.


Magnolias trees have been blooming with lush blossoms this year. They, and other flowers, seem especially vibrant.

This set of forsythia bushes is in front of a house on Lawrence Avenue.


This gorgeous tree stands in front of the Hewlett Woodmere Public Library.


A budding tree in Brookville Park, a favorite walking spot of mine.


On a drive along side streets through southeastern Queens, another pretty spring sight.

Langston Hughes, by Carl Van Vechten

from a Tweet by the Museum of the City of New York:

Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Military photographer of the year

Water Running

Second Place, Sports. U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Reagan Lodge, Headquarters and Service Battalion, Marine Corps Base Quantico, conducts water running exercises during a physcal training session in Ramer Hall, The Basic School, on Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. Sept. 14, 2011.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Elbows

I am not sure how I came across this; I look at so much information throughout the day that unless I specifically tag something I lose track of where I saw it. Twitter might have led me to it in a roundabout way. The artist, Neil Goldberg, is featured in a very recent column by Randy Kennedy in the New York Times subtitled Neil Goldberg Exhibition at Museum of the City of New York. Perhaps a tweet by the Museum, which I do follow on Twitter, is the answer.


One thing I really like about this is that watching drivers's elbows is of to me. Not just of truck drivers, but all drivers, how people stick their arms out of the window of their vehicles interests and amuses me. Even in this photo it is visible that different drivers use different angles: the second from left on the bottom row has his elbow on the edge, while the leftmost on the top row has the elbow completely outside. Both the leftmost and rightmost on the bottom row have their arms on the window. I enjoy seeing the different ways people put their arms out, and it is almost exclusively men that do so, it occurs to me. Some do as these drivers, just sticking the elbow out, whilst others put their entire arm out, some even dangling it.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Photo of the year

Samuel Aranda’s heart-stopping image of a wounded man burying his head in the shawl of a female relative claimed the top spot on Friday in the World Press Photo of the Year contest for 2011 images. The photo, which shows a veiled woman in Yemen clutching a man after he was injured in an Arab Spring demonstration in October, was the winning entry among 101,254 submissions in the competition. Photos poured in from 5,247 photographers in 124 countries and included compelling images from the aftermath of Japan’s tsunami, the uprisings in Tahrir Square, and the ongoing plight of global warming. “What I would really like is for this photo to help the people of Yemen,” Arnanda said in an interview with The British Journal of Photography after learning of the award. “I think it’s a country that is often forgotten.”

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Eve Arnold, pioneering photojournalist

Eve Arnold, one of the first woman photojournalists to join the prestigious Magnum Photography Agency in the 1950s and traveled the world for her work but was best known for her candid shots of Hollywood celebrities, has died. She was 99. Arnold died Wednesday at a London nursing home, Magnum announced. The cause was not specified.

Not specified? How about old age?

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Photographic revolution

A new camera captures hundreds of images and lets you choose your own reality. Given that most photographic im-ages these days are viewed onscreen and never printed (let alone framed), our expectations about what a photograph can be were bound to come into question. The Lytro camera is about to offer us one compelling answer.

Useful tips for shooting in low light