RegisterYourCamera.com is a free online service for registering your photographic equipment. It’s the brainchild of former Intel software engineer, who is an avid photographer. If someone steals your camera, simply enter the serial number and a description of your gear into the online database and you’re done. When someone performs a quick serial number search against the database, your item will then be listed as stolen and the person doing the search may then contact you via your preferred method. Get enough people using this and you have very effective way of track missing gear.
I was just reminded by a list of currently established luminaries in the photography world, that what I knew and the names and images that inspired me during my early, formative years as a photographer are no longer current, replaced by names and images that are unfamiliar and don’t have an iconic role in the photography niche of contemporary culture. What has changed is not the quality of photographic work being done, but that there is now a greater volume of public information in a digitized cultural venue that is huge and rapidly evolving. Today’s photographic talent is simply lost in a deluge of image media of every kind and description. Magazines, newspapers and books still exist but even TV has been displaced partly by the internet and YouTube. How different it is when a movie star, Selma Hayek on a mission to Africa assisting in a campaign to reduce the high death rate of infants, is covered by ABC News in scene where she breast feeding a baby of a local woman who had gone dry. This most humane gesture caught on video has now gone “viral” on the internet. I find nothing to criticize, but in such an instantaneous global village of images, that will soon fade with the next “viral” pop news event, can any image attain a lasting iconic status, much less the person behind the camera who made the image?
Nikon Inc. has announced the AF-S DX NIKKOR 35mm f/1.8G lens, which is the first fixed focal length, fast-aperture DX-format lens that affords photographers superb image quality along with the creative possibilities and versatility of the classic 50mm focal length (FX-format equivalent of 52mm).
The new LumiQuest Quik Bounceis designed for use with or without a ceiling to soften the light and transitioning from the horizontal to vertical format effortlessly.
The next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification, announced at the 2009 International CES, provides up to 2 terabytes storage capacity and accelerates SD interface read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second. The SDXC specification, developed by the SD Association, leapfrogs memory card interface speeds while retaining the world-leading SD interface. Specifications for the open standard will be released in the first quarter of 2009. SDHC, Embedded SD and SDIO specifications will also benefit from the new SD interface speeds.
Serif Ltd announced the release of Digital Photo Suite 2009. The feature-rich software suite makes it simple for everyone to organize, enhance and share their photos in new and fun ways. Combining the tagging and sorting features of Serif’s new AlbumPlus X3 with the best-in-class image stitching of PanoramaPlus 3 and other one-click image editing tools, this package of products offers an unrivalled combination of features and value enabling everyone from novices to experienced photographers to take control of their growing digital photo collections.
This rather enigmatic movie title came to mind this week after engaging in both live and virtual e-mail conversation about the problem of “prints too dark” I have reported and commented on recently. It seems those most likely to have a knowledgeable understanding of the technical cause of this phenomenon, and any possible solutions are the least likely to want to admit the problem even exists. And if photographer computer users are obtaining too dark prints it is because they are at fault: either their home/office environment in which they do their photo processing on a computer is non-standard or their illumination for print viewing is inadequate.
One of the reasons photographic purists usually refer to black and white prints as “monochrome” is that it’s a more precise descriptive term that also covers images produced in sepia and other tones.