© The Hell Gate
Thoughtful, simply awesome company statement-cum-about-page from our colleagues at The Hell Gate.
I love this particular bit:
In the end we are all just “lucky passengers“
Great choice of name too.
7 December 2010
| Stanley Kubrick’s Odyssey ★ | pineapples101.blogspot.com |
For those who haven’t heard, Kubrick was a photojournalist, and remember, it was done in the 60s. (via DF)
Jehsong’s Universe
© Jehsong Baak
Jehsong captured not the world that he lives in, but reflects the inner universe he lives by, he described himself as (he puts it candidly) “I’m a narcissistic photographer”, a splendid truth that many photographers refuse to admit.
Little to be known we both shared some common path of our past:
From age 22 to 29, Baak stopped taking pictures. Baak refers to this period in his life as “hibernation,” Baak reminded himself of Jon Rush’s story about oysters bearing pearls. Baak told the story in an interview with Shots Magazine (Shots 99, spring 2008): “He said that oysters need salt in order to survive, but that it’s painful when salt comes in contact with their flesh. The suffering oyster produces a fluid to cope with the pain and the fluid and salt mixed together produces a pearl. He told me to go out there and make my own pearls.”
We often let ourselves being carried away only to find our true nature.
I had the honor to meet and briefly conversed with Jehsong in Siem Reap during the Angkor Photo Festival, in which his work was among the featured and is a personal favorite of mine.
You can hide behind the spotlight, or choose to shy away behind the lens, but you always know a true passion when you see one. Right, Jehsong?
30 November 2010
| A total lack of spousal or parental responsibilities ★ | kenshukan.net |
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.
27 November 2010
| The President’s Photographers ★ | fastcodesign.com |
© 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.
19 November 2010
| World Without Photoshop ★ | marcolinaslate.com |
Get the free app here.
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?
All You Need is Love
After Israel & Palestine, Apple Inc. v. Apple Records holds probably the longest ego fight in the modern history of human development, only this time, the Bible never mentioned that Newton’s favorite fruit — the sweet a-p-p-l-e that would inspire his lifelong obsession — would become the commercial names for some of the world’s biggest cultural cult icons today.
I’m pretty sure most of The Beatles are inside some, if not most of Beatles lover’s iPod, so this doesn’t change much, but it does signal something significant, it renders the manifestation of hope, of change, it reaffirms love as the fabric of our society, love as the real cultural fuel of progress, is that no matter how hard and long of a battle can be, love is all you need to resolve things.
This special section on Apple.com has many photos & videos of The Beatles through the years in America, something that I don’t see very often, like the one shown above, it’s timeless.
On the other side of the wall, performers behind the immensely popular Cirque Du Soleil showman has been moving muscles & perfecting the moves for their next — you’ve guessed it — a beatles-themed show The Beatles LOVE. Dominic Champagne, writer, director & the original creator of the show explains:
“I wanted to create a Beatles experience rather than a Beatles story, taking the audience on an emotional journey rather than a chronological one, exploring the landscapes and experiences that have marked the group’s history.”
It doesn’t stop there, he has his eyes marked on every scene in the show, and this one for All You Need is Love caught my attention:
A montage of The Beatles projected on red Kabuki curtains that fills the audience with wonderful nostalgia and a message of LOVE.
Yes. Love is all you need.
17 November 2010
| Nik goes 64 ★ | niksoftware.com |
They had to rewrite the core code entirely to make it 64-bit compatible across the board, and introduce a new product in the process: Nik HDR Efex Pro.
15-day free trials available (registration needed).
Angkor Photo Festival
Passion, they say, moves the world, for one thing it helped moved the rocks from the mountains, and being shaped into the likes of the Angkor Wat, Borobudur, and many of the world’s oldest wonders.
If a vision is the manifestation of a person’s most sacred thought, what would happen if you bring some of the greatest talents & visionaries together in the deep settlement of an early civilization, an old city of ruins of The Angkor Wat.
Celebrated for the 6th year since 2005, this year’s Angkor Photo Festival is to commence this coming weekend through the weeks of November. The week-long celebration will feature more than 110 photographers from 47 countries with the great curatorial support from Yumi Goto, Antoine d’Agata, Françoise Callier and the Angkor Photo Festival team.
I am fortunate to be able to attend this year and It will be a long coming after years of passing hopes & opportunities. Now the time has come, I look forward to meet the colleagues that I never knew I had, and the friends that I have yet to know.
The Telegraph has more.
11 November 2010
| Sfumato ★ |
© Annie Leibovitz
Related to this last post, the subtle, smooth and near shadowless lighting style of the likes of Annie Leibovitz is called the Sfumato, a technique believed to be pioneered and popularized by Leonardo da Vinci, who began to practice it consistently on his late-career paintings, perfected it on his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa:
The most prominent practitioner of sfumato was Leonardo da Vinci, and his famous painting of the Mona Lisa exhibits all the advantages of the technique. The historical value of this painting consists precisely in the subtle but accurate way in which emotions are expressed. This expression is due in no small part to the gentle shading that sfumato promotes. Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.”[2]
While it’s relatively easy to achieve the affect in modern studio photography, it is a different story for capturing the life in it, photographers like Annie is masterful at achieving them consistently, but that too, comes after decades of practice and a skillful digital retoucher.