Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association’s unveiling of a new Wi-Fi data transfer standard. This new specification should make it easier for other memory card manufacturers to jump into the Wi-Fi-capable memory card game — an arena currently dominated by Eye-Fi (and more recently Toshiba).
Eye-Fi is, predictably, not happy with this latest development. The company is itself part of the SD Association, but has chosen not to back the standard. In a blog post published last week, CEO Yuval Koren argues that any company implementing the new standard would violate Eye-Fi’s patents for technology that took “tens of millions of dollars and several years” to create.
Curious about where people like to take pictures in your part of the world? Sightsmap is a simple Google Map app that takes geo data from the photos uploaded to Panoramio (now a Google service) and uses it to generate a heatmap.
The Girl With 7 Horses is a creative project by photographer Ulrika Kestere that shows a girl traveling to various landscapes in search of her “invisible horses”:
Once upon a time there was a girl who had 7 invisible horses. People thought she was crazy and that she in fact had 7 imaginative horses, but this was not the case. When autumn came the girl spent a whole day washing all her clothes. She hung them on a string in her garden to let the gentle autumn sun dry them. Out of nowhere, a terrible storm came and its fierce winds grabbed a hold of all her clothes and all seven horses (authors note: since they are invisible they obviously didn’t weigh much). The girl was devastated and spent all autumn looking for each horse spread around the country, wrapped in her clothes.
Chilean artist Diego Castillo Roa used a giant wall decal to turn this circular window into a camera lens looking out into the world. It’s a submission in Lipton’s inspirARTE contest.
Image credit: Photograph by Diego Castillo Roa/Lipton
Photographer Lee Jeffries worked as a sports photographer before having a chance encounter one day with a young homeless girl on a London street. After stealthily photographing the girl huddled in her sleeping bag, Jeffries decided to approach and talk with her rather than disappear with the photograph. That day changed his perception about the homeless, and he then decided to make them the subject of his photography. Jeffries makes portraits of homeless people he meets in Europe and in the US, and makes it a point to get to know them before asking to create the portraits. His photographs are gritty, honest, and haunting. Read more…
Bloomberg writes that Kodak’s bankruptcy announcement yesterday was simply another step in CEO Antonio Perez’s grand plan to sell off the company’s photography divisions and patents in order to focus on selling digital printers and ink. At the same time, the company has been quick to reaffirm its dedication to producing film. Kodak marketing director Audrey Jonckheer was quoted by BJP today as saying,
Film (still and cinema) remains a profitable business for Kodak, and we have the broadest and most respected portfolio of films in both segments. We have taken steps to sustain the business as it has declined, and we know that there are hundreds of passionate fans of film for the artistic and quality reasons they cite. We remain committed to make film as long as there is profitable demand for it. And as I noted, it is still profitable.
That’s definitely good news for film photography lovers. Want film to survive? Just keep buying it, and hope other shooters do the same!
Here’s the first photo showing a portion of the upcoming Olympus OM-D (it appears to be the shutter release, two dials, and buttons on the upper right hand corner of the camera). The high-end enthusiast camera will reportedly cost around $1,100 when it starts shipping in March. What are your observations based on this glimpse?
Star Wars Uncut is a remake of the original Star Wars movie created with the power of crowdsourcing. The project started back in 2009 after creator Casey Pugh sliced the original movie into 15 second segments and asked volunteers to use their creativity to recreate the scenes at home. The best clips were combined into a feature length film, which went on to win an Emmy Award in 2010 for “Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media”. Above is the recently-released director’s cut of the film.
San Diego-based photographer Tim Mantoani has an awesome project and book titled “Behind Photographs” that consists of 20×24-inch Polaroid portraits of famous photographers posing with their most iconic photographs. The film costs $200 per shot, and Mantoani has created over 150 of the portraits already since starting the project five years ago. Read more…
A UK photographer who goes by the moniker Hamstify was documenting his town Scunthorpe late last year when he was confronted by security personel outside a Golden Wonder plant and ordered to stop photographing. He was shooting from a public location, so he decided to stand up for his rights and film the argument that transpired. On VisitScunthorpe.com, he writes,
What also aggrieves me is that someone in a uniform representing a company in an apparent position of authority can try and intimidate members of the public by making up laws that don’t exist. This seemed to be an attempt to subjugate a member of the public into accepting what was being told was to be true. Further more hurling offensive insults and puerile slander, like seen at the end of the video, surely isn’t something that someone in that position should resort to.
In general, for UK residents, photography from public places is perfectly legal. There are some exceptions (e.g. buildings critical to national security), but the general rule of thumb is that if you’re shooting from public property police and security guards don’t have the power to stop you.
