Every month, Shutterbug columnist Joe Farace chooses his favorite photography websites and online photo portfolios from readers. Here are four photo sites he thinks are a cut above.
A few months ago I made some suggestions for improving your website. One of these was to avoid using Adobe’s Flash mainly because it blocks the millions of potential visitors to your site who are using Apple iDevices.
Each month in this column I gather a collection of websites, sometimes with a loosely related theme. This month’s sites have little in common except an excellence of vision, proving they are not only most uncommon but the result of hard work.
This month marks the anniversary of a column that began in Shutterbug magazine in 1999 as Website of the Month and along the way evolved into Web Profiles. We’ve now moved the column exclusively online and I continue to seek out seek out new websites, to boldly go…sorry, I got carried away.
May was National Photo Month, the former home of Take Your Camera to Work Day, and the month I was born, so you might say it’s a month for celebrating the art and science of making images, no matter what that medium—film or digital—may be. This month’s column features images from the U.S.A., Canada, and Slovakia, and each website and photographer showcases the joy of image making with the ability to share their work with like-minded individuals around the world, which is the main reason why photography is the universal language.
The Pentax K-1 ($1,796.95) is the first full-frame (36x24mm) SLR from the company since it introduced the legendary LX film camera back in 1980. The Pentax K-1 has a 36.4-megapixel sensor that lacks an anti-aliasing filter to increase sharpness and image quality, a trendy feature these days. Pentax spins it differently by including an AA Filter Simulator that eliminates moiré without requiring a physical anti-aliasing filter.
For me, the Mark II designation forever conjures up images of the classic Jaguar Mark 2 automobile, but this new Pentax DSLR may change my mind. When testing the original Pentax K-1 for Shutterbug I was impressed by its outstanding construction and image quality. That thing was built like a tank with styling reminiscent of the classic medium format Pentax 67.
The Pentax MX was a 35mm Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera produced from 1976 to 1985 and, for a time, was the company’s flagship SLR. It was solidly built featuring all-mechanical construction, including the shutter, and only the metering system was battery dependent. The new all-digital, all-electronic Pentax MX-1 couldn’t be more different. For openers, the MX-1 is not an SLR but an advanced digital compact camera with the kind of retro styling that’s all the rage these days with camera designers and, apparently, camera buyers, too. So, how does the MX-1 stack up?
In 1979 Pentax launched the ME Super as a manual focus, aperture-priority automatic SLR with an electronic focal plane shutter. It was small, light, and by all reports had excellent ergonomics. It used the by-then ubiquitous K-mount lens system and was sold successfully through '84. Fast forward to 2007 and Pentax Imaging launched the K100D Super D-SLR with a few of the...
Over the years, photographers have come up with a lot of clever names for "available light." When working under less than ideal lighting condition, you'll hear some people call it "available darkness" or "unavailable...