As a photographer, you will sooner or later bump into the phrase "the decisive moment". The decisive moment is a concept made popular by the street photographer, photojournalist, and Magnum co-founder Henri Cartier-Bresson. The decisive moment refers to capturing an event that is ephemeral and spontaneous, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.
People will do just about anything to alleviate their anxiety. During the last year of writing my doctoral thesis, the worry about being able to finish grew increasingly heavy. The relentless grind of research, constantly being told that your work is inadequate, and believing that 80-hour workweeks are average has its tolls on all students. Once you reach the edge of this process and are pulverized into oblivion, you get a nice, shiny PhD.
You may be wondering what got me through this. The answer? Buying a ton of camera equipment. To photographers, this type of retail therapy is known as gear acquisition syndrome. Someone with this syndrome impulsively buys cameras and related gear, amassing more camera gear than they can realistically use.
Photo manipulation is nearly as old, if not as old, as photography itself. It has been used in state propaganda, to unify nations, for aesthetic and creative expression, to generate fear, and the list goes on and on.
As technology advances, altering photographic images has become quite easy. This begs the question: do the images we see convey accurate information?
There has been a good deal written about the similarities of the camera to the eye as well as the computer to human memory. What I would like to do is clarify the uniqueness of the human brain from camera technology and at the same time show the similarities between brain function, photography and cognition.
It was a day of typically brutal summer heat in Phoenix, and I had the air conditioner blasting as I raced down the freeway en route to some event I was obliged to cover in my role as a general-assignment newspaper reporter.
The scene came to me in pieces as I glanced to the other side of the roadway. A car on the shoulder, broken down and steam billowing from under the raised hood. Somebody, presumably the driver, sitting on the grass embankment nearby, head in his hands. Wearing a full-on clown outfit -- wild hair, floppy shoes, pancake makeup, red nose, the whole package. And looking about as morose and defeated as a clown can get.
Back in July, Lexar vice president of products and technology Wes Brewer confirmed that the company was going to jump into the XQD game in Q3. This was good news for the technology, since only one camera was taking them and one company was making them at the time.
Well, the Nikon D4 is still the only DSLR capable of using the cards at the moment, but now Lexar (a couple of quarters late, but here nonetheless) has officially made the leap with its new 1100x pro series cards.
When Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast back in October, the photograph above was widely circulated by people who believed that it showed the storm bearing down NYC. It doesn't. The image is actually a composite photograph that combines an ordinary photo of the Statue of Liberty with a well-known image by weather photographer Mike Hollingshead.
One of the big ideas that seems destined to explode over the next decade is lifelogging, the ability to automatically capture and store one's life and experiences for future reference. Memoto is a new camera that's trying to be a pioneer in this emerging market. Its name and tagline should give you a good sense of what it does: "Memoto Lifelogging Camera: A tiny, automatic camera and app that gives you a searchable and shareable photographic memory."
When XQD memory cards were announced in December 2011, the CompactFlash Association touted the format as the successor to CompactFlash cards. We definitely seemed to be moving in that direction at first: one month after the unveiling, Nikon's flagship D4 DSLR was announced with XQD card support. The day after that, Sony became the first major memory card maker to announce a line of XQD cards. Six months later, Lexar also announced its intentions to join the party.
Since then, things have died down to the point where you can hear grasshoppers chirping. Not a single XQD-capable camera was announced at Photokina 2012 this past week. Despite being the first to make them, Sony strangely decided to leave the cards out of its top-of-the-line cameras as well.
Lexar has set a new bar in SD memory card capacity with its new 256GB card -- the largest size offered in the SDXC (Secure Digital eXtended Capacity) format. SDXC has an upper limit of 2TB, compared to the 32GB cap that restricts the SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) format.
The official name of the card is the Lexar Professional 400x SDXC UHS-I. It's geared towards photographers who need to "capture, store, and transfer a large number of high-quality photos" and videographers who need to record massive amounts of HD video.
Professor and self-proclaimed cyborg Steve Mann created an eye and memory-aid device he calls the EyeTap Digital Glass. The EyeTap, worn by Mann above on the left, is a wearable device that is similar to Google Eye, pictured right, but he's been making them at home since the 1980s. The goal of his project is to use images to aid memory, or even to augment the memories of people with Alzheimer's Disease or who simply want to preserve their memories more permanently. However, a recent misunderstanding over Mann's technology allegedly caused a confrontation between Mann and several employees at a Paris McDonald's restaurant.
Here's a great little-known tip coming at you via photographer Dan Carr that has the potential to make using Lightroom just that much easier. If you didn't already know -- and it seems most people didn't -- assuming you have enough card readers, you can actually import multiple memory cards into Lightroom all at once.
KEH has published a helpful primer on memory cards that describes the different …
Samsung has released a new line of SD and microSD memory cards that focus not only on speed and …
Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association’s unveiling …
At the end of last year a new format called XQD was unveiled as the eventual replacement …
Well, well, well, look who’s first to the XQD game. It’s not Sandisk or Lexar, but Sony. On the …
Perhaps in response to the growing capacities and falling prices of SD cards, the CompactFlash Association has announced a …
Did you know that a third of the SanDisk memory cards being used on Earth are actually fake? A SanDisk engineer recently shared this startling fact with a reader over at The Online Photographer:
[...] at any given time, approximately a third of the SanDisk memory cards (made by Toshiba) being used out there in the world are counterfeit. As in, not SanDisk memory cards at all—some other kind of cards dressed up as lookalikes.
Thirty percent, was the number quoted. A third, more or less.
To make sure you're getting the real thing, always purchase your memory cards from reputable dealers.
Imagine you snap out of unconsciousness and realize you've been in a pretty serious accident. You have no memory of what happened, but luckily you were wearing a motorcycle camera that was filming your ride.
You've heard the term "photographic memory" before, but have you ever heard of someone who actually has it? Meet Stephen Wiltshire, a UK-born autistic savant with an extraordinary memory that has given him the nickname, "The Living Camera". The above is a short video showing his abilities that will make your jaws drop.
In the Harry Potter series, a Pensieve is a magical stone that allows people to store and replay memories. While photography helps us store moments, there's obviously quite a bit of life that slips through the cracks. The Revue by Vicon is a wearable camera that passively takes photographs through the day to document your life.