Ron Leach

There’s a little company in Tuscon, Arizona that is literally working on some giant ideas—like a digital camera with so much dynamic range it can capture both the sun and the stars in broad daylight!

Spectral Instruments has built a 20-year reputation as a premier provider of cooled, high-end CCD-based camera systems for scientific imaging applications from astronomy to pre-clinical drug discovery. This new project, the “1110 Series,” involves a camera with a 112-megapixel, black-and-white sensor without a Bayer mask or filter of any type that could “detract from the overall image sharpness.”

The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust recently discovered and restored a treasure-trove of century-old cellulose nitrate negatives left behind by the ill-fated Ross Sea party when they were rescued after spending three years struggling to survive on Ross Island after their ship broke loose from it’s moorings and blew out to sea. The small box of 22 unprocessed negatives were part of more than 10,000 objects conserved at Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s hut and brought back to New Zealand by the Trust and painstakingly restored.

While we often devote this column to a discussion of evolving technologies for innovative photographic gear, this month we’d like to tell you about some changes we have in the works for Shutterbug and solicit your input for updating the magazine, our website, and our social media initiatives.

Photography is full of `scapes: landscapes, seascapes, and cityscapes
are all very popular subjects. But the next time you grab your camera and head
out for a day of shooting, why not take try to capture what's on "the
other side" and shoot some windowscapes for a change? There are a couple
of different approaches to take. You can use a window as a compositional device
to frame your subject, or you can concentrate of photographing objects you find
inside or behind a window.

A polarizing filter eliminated the distracting reflections in this scene shot through a window on a bright, sunny day. Photography by Ron Leach

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