Saturday, 19 September 2009

Periodical Revolution

m9_brochure_english_RZ_low-1.1-2.jpg

We need some honey for the tea, butter for the bread, something that would stir up some sweet sensation in the camera industry, just like how Apple put an ‘i’ in technology that changed the game forever.

Jason Fried (37signals) nailed it nicely on his next generation commentary:

Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses.

Leica practically invented modern photography, allowing many visions of beauty become ubiquitous without poisoning it. With their recent announcement of a slew of revolutionary products, they have started something that might be ‘It’; the game changer that we all long for.

They are the perfect example of Fried’s statement above.

The next generation bends over via daringfireball.net

9 September 2009
Getting Creative with Rain ★

Photographer, Matt Roth:

For the most part I applied the same lighting mantra to each photo: I wanted rim light for separation and definition and I needed a main light so you could see their faces/action; I also wanted to showcase their athleticism in a way you would NEVER see during game play.

Read more of his commentary from the posts’ discussion

PS. Don’t forget to protect your gears.

(via Strobist)

8 September 2009
The World’s Most Compact Full-Frame Camera ★

“A.”, a friend of The Online Photographer has summed it up nicely (while I’m dancing around proudly of this coming attraction):

By showing just how compact a full-frame camera can be, it’s hard not to think the M9 will serve for years to come as a benchmark in “large sensor/small camera” discussions.

A little objection to Mr. A: I’m young and I consider myself digital, but I’m well aware of how brilliantly small M cameras and its lenses are!

Read: The Online Photographer: The World’s Most Compact Full-Frame Camera

Snow Leopard’s New Default Gamma Setting ★

Adobe Principal Scientist Lars Borg:

Macintosh, in 1984, introduced us to desktop publishing and to displays with shades of grays. Publishing at that time meant printing presses, and the dot gain of a typical press (then and now) corresponds to a gamma of 1.8. As color management was non-existent at the time (the first color management solutions did not appear until early 1990s, when color displays became more available), Apple’s pick of a 1.8 display gamma enabled the Macintosh displays to match the press.

Snow Leopard uses a new default gamma of 2.2, resulting in a darker, deeper shade of color in your display. I have been calibrating my display (check out SuperCal) with this setting since Mac OS X Tiger to match my local printer’s Windows dominated operating environment, and it’s no surprise that Apple is going down this road, as it’s only logical & easier for users like me to deal with production.

John Nack on Adobe: Why your Web content will look darker on Snow Leopard via Daring Fireball

The World in Color, early 1900s

7 September 2009

Back when color photography was a mere concept, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii were producing artwork that were groundbreaking & unique at time:

The surrealistic painting look of the image were the result of modern digital process dubbed the Digichromatography, the team recreated the color digital image from the scanned originals and processing them to recreated the color to be as natural as possible. The similar processed, applied with different techniques was used by Prokudin-Gorskii to project the image for viewing at that time.

A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii . He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter.

Hosted at the US Library of Congress are exhibits of some of his photographic archives, in times of extreme modernization and over simplification, it’s a relief to see the world so flatly serene and raw with a product of such meticulous effort.

If you’re in a hurry, make sure you check out the Architecture & the People at Work section, it’s quite a revelation to see such colorful images coming out of the 1900s.

Making Color Images from Prokudin-Gorskii’s Negatives

4 September 2009
Frankencamera: The Open Source DSLR ★

A breath of fresh air for the Photo Industry to what UNIX/Linux are to the software industry.

The whole field of computational photography is and will change the way we do photography, the question is what do people work on next? For the last ten years or so there’s been a megapixel war as everyone knows, that has finally winding down the asian camera manufacturers to no longer compete based on the number of megapixel so they began to compete on one another feature. We’d like them to offer lots and lots of (new) features.

Features of this prototype camera model:

  • In-camera micro-lens array to enable post capture focus adjustment
  • Smart in-camera level adjustment
  • High Dynamic Range Mode

I wrote some thoughts relating to this issue a while ago here, that basically reflects the reason why an open-source initiative is always good for the industry.

Read the full report (with video) or see the project page below.

Camera 2.0: New computing platforms for computational photography via Physorg.com