Image of a Planet and Its Star Over 63 Light Years Away

Although it might not seem like much, the photo above might just be the most extraordinary image you have ever seen. Not because of crazy high megapixel count or amazing composition or even subject matter — we’ve seen images of planets orbiting stars before — but because it is the first ever image of a planet and its star over 63 light years away.

The image was taken by the Gemini Planet Imager, an incredibly powerful instrument that sits right here on Earth — in Chile to be exact. Using the magic of Adaptive Optics, they were able to capture this groundbreaking image of the 10-million-year-old planet Beta Pictoris b orbiting the massive star Beta Pictoris. 

Robert Capa in colour sheds new light on a black-and-white master

Guardian (UK) article, found on Flipboard.

New immigrants disembarking from the Theodor Herzl, near Haifa, Israel], 1949 -50 Photograph: Robert Capa/International Center of Photography/ Magnum Photos

What a fish

 Article found on Flipboard, from Petapixel.

A few years ago, Bangkok-based photographer Visarute Angkatavanich started selling his work through microstock sites, and so he went in search of some interesting subjects to populate his gallery and generate some sales. Interestingly, he found what he was looking for in his own house: his pet fish. Ever since he was a little boy, Angkatavanich has owned different kinds of fish — everything from goldfish, to guppies, to Siamese fighting fish — and he quickly realized that they made the perfect subjects. “I found that nowadays there are so many different kinds of fish that come in unique shapes, colors and pattern,” he told us over email. “I am fascinated by them, and so I started taking their photo.”

André Kertész

Patron came in looking for books on André Kertész. Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition. Kertész never felt that he had gained the worldwide recognition he deserved. Today he is considered one of the seminal figures of photojournalism.[1][2]

The Fork, or La Fourchette, was taken in 1928 and is one of Kertész's most famous works from this period.[9] 

Distortion#49, one of the images in the Distortion series Kertész took during 1933

 


Patron recommended Of New York ... *

Roman Vishniac (1897-1990): "best known for his scenes of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the years before the Second World War."

Rodrigo Moya

http://goo.gl/fFDTX

item in February ? 2013 issue of the New Yorker

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Langston Hughes, by Carl Van Vechten

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

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.

Read more: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/04/03/2011-military-photographer-of-the-year/#ixzz1r7MoPFUq

Kodak Bankruptcy

One look at photography

The Once Great Eastman Kodak Company in its Glory Days (Photos)

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?

Useful tips for shooting in low light

Lives in photography

Edward Steichen : lives in photography

Donovan Wylie

From a periodic email from Magnum Photos, saw his work.

Carl Van Vechten

Reading In search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line, by George Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006). Van Vetchen figures very prominently in the book, as an important figure in her life: mentor, friend, sponsor. A look at his Wikipedia entry does not even mention her.

Van Vechten was a complex man, in many ways. One of his pursuits was photography. The Library of Congress has a collection of his photographic works: Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten at the Library of Congress features a searchable database of photographs taken by Van Vechten.

Another one is Carl Van Vechten's Portraits from the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University features a searchable database of over 9,000 black and white prints.

Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million

Experts: Ansel Adams photos found at garage sale worth $200 million
By Alan Duke, CNN - July 27, 2010 9:01 p.m. EDT

Los Angeles, California (CNN) -- Rick Norsigian kept two boxes he bought at a garage sale under his pool table for four years before realizing they may be too valuable to store at home. The Fresno, California, commercial painter learned this week that what was in those boxes he paid $45 dollars for a decade ago could be worth more than $200 million. "When I heard that $200 million, I got a little weak," Norsigian said at a Beverly Hills art gallery Tuesday.

Art, forensic, handwriting and weather experts teamed up to conclude the 65 glass plates in the boxes were photographic negatives created more than 80 years ago by Ansel Adams, the iconic American photographer whose images of the West inspired the country.

Adams heirs skeptical about lost negatives claim