© John Crawford

His ‘Nudes in Landscape’ series is also worth a look.

© Peter Earl McCollough

Seal:

I think the more you take pho­tographs, the more you kind of develop a feel for it. You get bet­ter at read­ing light or antic­i­pat­ing cer­tain sit­u­a­tions. It’s just a ques­tion of tak­ing a lot of pho­tographs and also exper­i­ment­ing with a lot of cam­eras and real­iz­ing what you don’t like.

But here’s the point: Somewhere around Day One of Week Two, the clouds part. You’ll see a logic behind iPhoto that wasn’t imme­di­ately appar­ent and you’ll have for­given those weird choices. From that day for­ward, until some com­pany pro­duces an even bet­ter photo edi­tor or until the heat death of the uni­verse, you’ll be work­ing with an desktop-grade app with few lim­i­ta­tions. Isn’t that bet­ter than an app that you com­pletely fig­ure out in five min­utes and then com­pletely out­grow in five weeks?

Andy took my words out of my mouth and wrote a bet­ter piece than I truly could about this pro-grade app from Cupertino.

Remember the RedPop POPA? The Photojojo folks has intro­duced a com­pet­ing prod­uct aptly named the iPhone Shutter Grip:

Now you can resume your true iden­tity with The iPhone Shutter Grip! It’s an ergonomic grip that makes your iPhone feel just like an SLR (only smaller). It adds a photo and video but­ton right where you’re used to hav­ing a shut­ter button.

The grip con­nects to the charg­ing slot and hugs the sides of your iPhone for a secure hold. (It’ll even adjust to fit over your case!) Just like that, your iPhone is trans­formed into a hand-held camera.

And if you read care­fully, you’ll also find this, some­where on their page:

The iPhone Shutter Grip only works with the “Belkin LiveAction” Camera App.

I didn’t buy it when POPA was intro­duced. I’m not buy­ing this one either.

Ian Ruhter:

It was get­ting late in the day and I made a deci­sion to push my portable dark room around the cor­ner to see if I could shoot some home­less peo­ple that live in skid row. It was going to be a pretty big mis­sion and I was not sure how the peo­ple that live on this street would react to me. All of a sud­den this man in the photo walked up. I started talk­ing with him and after 10 min­utes I asked hi if he would shoot a photo with me.

Wisdom says shoot­ing in the street requires dis­cre­tion and mobil­ity. Sometimes though, the oppo­site would sur­prise you.

So, does it work? Yeah, sure, I guess. It has a tiny lit­tle sen­sor, so like any small sen­sor cam­era, pretty much every­thing is in focus pretty much all of the time any­way. If you actu­ally want to see the power of refo­cus­ing at work, you essen­tially need to com­pose your shot with that in mind. You need to put a hum­ming bird feeder a few inches from the lens, with San Francisco Bay at infin­ity in the back­ground. Lytro talks about how this cam­era elim­i­nates the need to worry about focus. But of course you want to take advan­tage of the cool thing that your cam­era can do, so you end up think­ing more about focus when shoot­ing with this cam­era, rather than less. It would be a dif­fer­ent mat­ter if shoot­ing with the Lytro were like shoot­ing with a 50mm f/1.2 on your Canon 5D Mark III, where your shot of that beau­ti­ful woman can be ruined because you focused on the tip of her nose, rather than her eye. Besides the fact that the Lytro can’t achieve a depth of field that shal­low, it doesn’t have suf­fi­cient res­o­lu­tion to reveal missed focus that sub­tle. That’s not soft focus you’re see­ing, that’s the max­i­mum resolv­ing power of the 1 megapixel image.

I had an inkling about this but it’s wrong to write any­thing about it with­out a test cam­era and images to proof the the­ory on my Lytro piece. I have never read any­thing from ‘Ben’ before, but this Lytro review piece is just great.

Triggered by the recent Facebook acqui­si­tion announce­ment, some good folks are hav­ing a pre­cau­tion­ary action of ‘opting-out’:

Run it, and it’ll down­load all the pho­tos from yuor insta­gram feed into the cur­rent direc­tory, named with the upload date and title. It won’t re-download files that already exist, so you can safely run it nightly and just down­load new pho­tos if you want to do that.

It does one thing: down­load your entire Instagram photo col­lec­tion to your Mac.

Ed Kashi:

“… I found myself ques­tion­ing the valid­ity of my work and the pur­pose of the images I was seek­ing and mak­ing. What good would they do? How could I pho­to­graph this com­mu­nity in a dif­fer­ent way to express another view­point and com­mu­ni­cate a valu­able new story?”

This same ques­tion should be asked, again and again, by every mem­ber of an edi­to­r­ial team, includ­ing, but not lim­ited to the editors.

Courtesy of Canon

Introducing the EOS 1D C:

The cam­era, which Canon is aim­ing at the motion pic­ture, tele­vi­sion and high-resolution pro­duc­tion indus­tries, sup­ports in-camera 4K (4096 x 2160) video record­ing with 4:2:2 colour sam­pling, “offer­ing greater cre­ative free­dom for video pro­fes­sion­als… [and] deliv­er­ing out­stand­ing video qual­ity, advanced low light per­for­mance and film-like dynamic range” in a DSLR-sized body, it claims.

If it is what Canon says it is, and if the tech­nol­ogy shall ever be passed down to Canon’s non-cinema EOS System; ground­break­ing will be an understatement.

© Brian McCarty

Fascinating work of pas­sion by a Memphis-born toy pho­tog­ra­pher Brian McCarty.

Charles Bronson, before he was the Charles Bronson.

Exquisite col­lec­tion of vin­tage F1 pho­tographs. And some more here.

(Uncredited photo, source: ive­g­ot­my­towel)