© New York Times Magazine

Characters are build up from acts, actions and inac­tions, but more often than not, best cap­tured in one frame.

Produced by the NY Times Magazine, directed by Solve Sundsbo; Javier Bardem, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Jesse Eisenberg, Chloë Moretz, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Jennifer Lawrence, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel, Anthony Mackie, Robert Duvall, Lesley Manville and Tilda Swinton put a one-minute act and cap­tured it as a gallery of clas­sic look video por­trait with musi­cal arrange­ment by Owen Pallett.

Overwhelming? Confusing? One too many? How about spar­ing your­self fif­teen min­utes to enjoy this per­sonas on screen before they changed their mind.

The lens blog has a writeup for this spe­cial Hollywood Issue, and words has it that the actions were cap­tured by the RED EPIC and ONE dig­i­tal cin­ema cam­era sys­tem.

© Mark Dadswell/Getty Images

The dusk is set­ting as we slowly reach the end of 2010. One of my favorite edi­to­r­ial team, The Boston Globe pub­lished a 3-part spe­cial fea­ture of forty remark­able shots from their photo of the day archive. The jump will take you to part 3, but you can find the rest here: Part 1, Part 2.

© Fujifilm

The FinePix team is fully aware about the hype on the X100, and they don’t want to let us down, indeed.

Interesting key feature:

• Optics will be an auto-focus 49mm ring, fixed lens 35mm ƒ/2.0. No Image Stabilization.
• The cam­era will have a ded­i­cated RAW but­ton that allows instant tog­gle to shoot RAW+JPEG, with in-camera RAW devel­op­ment mechanism.
• 3-mode auto focus — with user-selectable focus points — will be intro­duced: AF-S, for sta­tic and AF-C for con­tin­u­ous, mov­ing objects and nat­u­rally a man­ual focus with 1) dis­tance indi­ca­tion for pre-focus, 2) elec­tronic viewfinder from the lens-barrel ring.
• The APS-C CMOS sen­sor is capa­ble of ISO extended to 100–12800 from the stan­dard 200‑6400.

Even more details (geek mode on):

• Shutter lag will be around 0.01 sec­onds, I’m not sure if that’s the ball­park fig­ure for DSLRs, but Fuji claims it to be comparable.
• It will have dig­i­tal film sim­u­la­tion (Provia, Velvia, Astia lovers rejoiced!)
• The 3-stop inte­gral ND fil­ter can be switched ON/OFF manually

Despite the obvi­ous inspi­ra­tion and design sim­i­lar­ity, Fuji con­firms that the X100 is not a rangefinder cam­era, and insists that ‘MADE IN JAPAN’ to be etched at the cam­era back-plate, not the bottom.

Promotional stills for 2001: A Space Odyssey that looks more like a high-end doc­u­men­tary rather than sci-fi.

For those who haven’t heard, Kubrick was a pho­to­jour­nal­ist, and remem­ber, it was done in the 60s. (via DF)

In time where dig­i­tal (numeriqué, merci!) IS pho­tog­ra­phy, John Sypal of the pop­u­lar blog Tokyo Camera Style still fid­dles with film and shares his devel­op­ment meth­ods:

The main thing that used to hold me back from get­ting a lot of film done in one day was that it took too long for the reels to dry. Residue from the pre­vi­ous round of pro­cess­ing was mess­ing up the edges of my neg­a­tives, and some­times intruded into the frames them­selves. However– I solved this by first dry­ing them with a clean towel, and then set them to dry under the stove fan atop a tower built of dark­room chem­istry trays.

With his method, he was able to process 22 rolls of black & white neg­a­tive in one day, ready for enlarge­ment and/or scan­ning. Impressive, now I’m feel­ing nostalgic.

© Cecil Stoughton

Pete Souza, the Obama Administration’s Chief Photographer revealed that he and his team aver­ages about 20.000 image cap­tures per week, some are pub­lished online from this flickr page.

Accompanying the PBS’ National Geographic spe­cial pro­gram (aired Nov 24), a book is being pub­lished by the National Geographic Society that fea­tures select work from the White House’s pho­tog­ra­phy depart­ment, as well as the behind-the-scenes from some of the most well known shots like the one fea­tured above.

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On another topic, The Chopping Block is pro­duc­ing a lit­tle movie that you should check out too. I’m curi­ous if our friends at Adobe has some­thing to do with this?