© Luma Labs

Luma Labs:

Going back to the draw­ing board has given us a cam­era strap like no other. It pro­vides a unique com­bi­na­tion of exquis­ite com­fort, incred­i­ble flex­i­bil­ity and amaz­ing stability.

Skillfully turn­ing cri­sis to oppor­tu­nity. And a killer name to go by.

© Devastudios, Inc. for Paramount Pictures

One of my favorite stu­dio brand­ing in the his­tory of movies has a slick new logo.

It has a wider view­point that includes the sur­round­ing of the Wasatch moun­tain range, and appears to depict a sun­rise instead of a sun­set like the soon-to-be-retired logo it will replace after Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol.

Unlike pre­vi­ous attempts with new logos, this new land­scape actu­ally looks bet­ter, but some­thing caught my eye: high­lights on the peaks doesn’t seem to have been ren­dered accu­rately based on the posi­tion of the sun & the lev­els on the three peak lines; the ren­der­ing would have been pos­si­ble only if a) there’s a sec­ond light source from the left of the pic­ture and b) the sun in the back­ground is set a lit­tle higher.

It’s just wrong to my eyes, but then again, I don’t work in Hollywood nor I have been to Utah, so I may not be the best judge of that.

Update: Saw it on the big screen today, and I stand cor­rected. The lower peaks pro­trude higher than the curve on the left-flanking peaks, the shad­ows are indeed nat­ural, though the sun appear lower than it should be. On the other hand, Brad Bird lived up to my expec­ta­tion, he not only deliv­ers but lifted the bar higher for the Mission: Impossible fran­chise plot-wise, the mellow-romantic drama from M:I 3 is refreshed with a less-than-perfect actions and fail­ures which makes Hunt and his team more human. I won­der how long till we see M:I 5.

© Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for Time

Great images (some). Ugly truths (most). Poorly curated (all).

Initiated by the tal­ented shooter, my friend Deny Salman, ‘Indonesian Photography Books’ is ded­i­cated to curat­ing and cat­a­loging pho­tog­ra­phy books from Indonesia, a place of gem hid­den in plain sight.

Photographs from HCB’s book above can be seen here.

© Joel Biddle

Captured by a 17-year-old stu­dent from England, Joel Biddle’s images cap­ti­vated me much more than the rest.

Pretty scary how some­one packs so many tal­ents at that ten­der age. Let’s hope life treats him well so his tal­ents do not shy away from the world.

© ironwindow13

Complete with step-by-step howto, video and pho­tographs. This one uses a Sony Pocketable, but maybe a Canon S95 will fit too. View linked page in English.

© Leica

90-second short by Wim Wenders, star­ring Wim Wenders and Wim Wenders’ Leica M8.

Over at The Next Web, Nancy Messieh wrote a piece titled ‘Did Apple rede­fine pho­tog­ra­phy with the iPhone?’. In it, she raised the ques­tion and laid out her argu­ments to sup­port her hypoth­e­sis on Apple’s increas­ing invest­ment in iPhone’s pho­to­graphic capa­bil­ity, and the dis­rup­tive effect it had on the way we deal with photography:

Some might say that the iPhone has cer­tainly rein­vented pho­tog­ra­phy but not for the bet­ter. With the rise of apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic, PicPlz and count­less oth­ers, fil­tered smart­phone pho­tog­ra­phy has dom­i­nated social net­works much in the same way that the iPhone has dom­i­nated Flickr.

The prob­lem with apps like Instagram is that some peo­ple take pho­tographs of things they nor­mally wouldn’t, slap a fil­ter on it, and think it’s fit for shar­ing. Whether this is Instagram’s fault or not really comes down to opin­ion. Would those peo­ple be just as likely to share pho­tos taken in front of the bath­room mir­ror, pho­tos of their break­fast, pets, and more?

[…]

Instagram’s power is in the fact that it cre­ates a com­mu­nal expe­ri­ence. Part of the allure is the fil­ters, which are pos­si­bly among the very best avail­able in any smart­phone app, but what good are shared pho­tos if no one is look­ing at them. Apps like Instagram cre­ate an oppor­tu­nity to share images, but when we take a closer, more pro­fes­sional look at them, do they still meet the grade?

The thing that makes the iPhone a com­pelling tool for pho­tog­ra­phy is its straight­for­ward­ness. You shoot, you tin­ker, you share, and peo­ple can see it imme­di­ately. Technicalities dis­ap­pear behind the final image’s effects & fil­ters; the moment becomes the indis­putable story with­out sec­ond guess­ing the shut­ter speed and the aper­ture value.

Camera mak­ers have long fought for tech­ni­cal edge and spent ridicu­lous amount of money mar­ket­ing their prod­ucts that way. It turned the table around and made the cam­eras, lenses the star of the show with the pho­tog­ra­pher as the side­kick. Did some­one know what kind of can­vas, brush and paint Da Vinci used for the Mona Lisa? Does it matter?

What mat­ters to me now is that what­ever the rea­son iPhones are the most pop­u­lar dig­i­tal cam­era in Flickr, it puts a smile to its users and the friends & fam­ily sur­rounds him/her. It made pho­tog­ra­phy fun again.

© Jason McCarthy

Lovely per­sona behind the mil­i­tary uniform.

© 1949 Stanley Kubrick/LIFE

Take a closer look at those pair of eyes. He sees beyond his, or the subject’s points of view, some­how man­aged to raise the view­ing field to that of the spectator’s and infuse a lit­tle touch of his magic. He was a com­plex soul fight­ing his free­dom off it, encap­su­lat­ing the com­plex nature of human ten­den­cies into a frames after frames of golden moments.

From the curators:

Images in this col­lec­tion show the drama—both human and artistic—that infuse Kubrick’s work. Included are: the pho­to­graph used on the cover of the Kubrick book, Drama & Shadows, of a young woman mak­ing her way down a steep set of stairs while car­ry­ing a pile of books pre­car­i­ously tilt­ing books; show­girl Rosemary Williams intently apply­ing makeup as the equally intent young Kubrick pho­tographs her. His sub­jects are as var­ied as the city he worked in: he catches Broadway actress Betsy Von Furstenberg study­ing her lines; prize­fighter Walter Cartier in the cor­ner between rounds; Dwight Eisenhower, also between rounds—after World War II, before he became President of the United States—when he was Columbia University’s pres­i­dent, and per­form­ers from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Also by Kubrick: Chicago, 1949. (via DF)

Michael Reichmann threw a first-look on the Fujifilm X10:

… the laws of physics get in the way of our fan­tasies. The major cam­era mak­ers are doing a fine job of push­ing the bound­aries of what’s pos­si­ble, but there are still fun­da­men­tal lim­its. Ultimate low noise requires large sen­sors with large pix­els. Large sen­sors require large lenses. Fast lenses for large sen­sors are inher­ently big and heavy.

And yet:

The cam­era has a 12 Megapixel 2/3 inch EXR-CMOS sen­sor. This means that the sen­sor is 8.8 X 6.6mm (typo cor­rected) in size, about dou­ble the sur­face area of most pocket digi­cams. The lens has a 7.1 to 28.4mm focal range, which trans­lates to 28 – 112mm in full frame 35mm terms. This means a 4X mul­ti­pli­ca­tion fac­tor com­pared to stan­dard FF 35mm. By com­par­i­son a Micro Four Thirds cam­era has a 2X fac­tor sen­sor, while a typ­i­cal digi­cam sen­sor might have a fac­tor of 5X to 7X.

Another thing — the zoom ring:

One of the X-10’s sin­gu­lar fea­tures, which will appeal to many pho­tog­ra­phers, is that the lens zooms via a twist ring on the lens bar­rel. This ring is also the camera’s On / Off switch. To oper­ate, sim­ply turn the ring, which switches the cam­era on with the lens at first at its widest focal length. Then, if you wish, con­tinue to rotate the ring until you have the fram­ing that you want. This is a very appeal­ing fea­ture com­pared to the stepped elec­tric zoom func­tion of most other cam­eras in this class.

The OFF detent is nicely firm and the zoom feel is very lin­ear, with a smooth heli­cal gear mov­ing the lens from 28mm to 112mm in less than 45 degrees.

It didn’t take more than a cou­ple of days of shoot­ing to deter­mine that hav­ing a man­ual zoom ring on the lens, com­bined with the On / Off switch, is one of the clever­est new cam­era designs in ages. Kudos to Fuji for com­ing up with some­thing that is not only unique but really pho­tog­ra­pher friendly and useful.

Design turns prob­lems into solu­tions, obsta­cle into advan­tage, but most impor­tantly breed­ing imag­i­na­tion through lim­i­ta­tion — in Fuji’s case: phys­i­cal size vs. opti­cal excel­lence. As I have said repeat­edly on the excel­lence of Fuji’s new X-series team, they seem to have nur­tured some great design virtues and approach in their X prod­ucts, and the results are pay­ing off.

© SyFy

Katie Sackhoff:

“It’s inter­est­ing that every­one thinks there is some­thing hid­den in that Last Supper photo, like if you look hard enough, you can find a hid­den mes­sage in it. To be hon­est, I think we would have had to be in on it to cre­ate a hid­den mes­sage, and we were all just there hav­ing a photo shoot.”

Da Vinci was a genius. (via @Shanghaidaddy)