Articles on blending bracketed exposures as a technique for expanding dynamic range with digital pictures:
Luminous Landscape
Erich Krause
posted by Alan Little at 1:54 AM

"Technical perfection is not the goal of photography: seeing life is" - another classic Ellis Vener quote from photo.net
posted by Alan Little at 6:04 AM

The Magnum website now has some online portfolios, including Raymond Depardon and some fantastic stuff by Harry Gruyaert
posted by Alan Little at 6:59 AM

Wow. For once photo.net has an interesting Photo Of The Week - Kumbh Mela at Allahabad by Jean-Pierre Verbeke. This is stunning. His other Kumbh Mela photos are brilliant too
posted by Alan Little at 6:57 AM

Minolta have fixed the problem with the uselessness of the old driver software for the Multi Pro with negatives. Excellent. Now I have "the best sub-$50,000 [slide] scanner in the world", and it works with negs too which is handy since I have a pile of good medium format negs from India that i haven't been able to do anything with yet.
posted by Alan Little at 3:15 AM

Interesting & well-written feature about Alex Webb on about.com

… and a good biographical article on James Nachtwey
posted by Alan Little at 6:48 AM

Useful review & commentary on Nikon lenses by Ron Reznick at Digital Outback Photo
posted by Alan Little at 3:28 AM

Interview with leading British landscape photographer Charlie Waite on photo-i. Lovely pictures, and interesting that Charlie says he does all his exhibition prints now with one of the new wide-carriage Epsons, and thinks they are better than Iris prints. (I ordered my Epson 2100 over a month ago - still eagerly waiting for it to arrive).
posted by Alan Little at 4:31 AM

Useful & informative photo.net discussion of the relative merits of the Minolta Multi Pro & Nikon 8000 ....just after I finally committed and bought a Multipro
posted by Alan Little at 6:00 AM

Mac vs PC video & Photoshop benchmark - current "high end" G4 dual-processor macs are pathetically slow. Not surprising - they're basically a 2-year old spec. Wait for the new ones in August - they look a bit more serious (according to the rumoured specs that were on the web a couple of days ago but now appear to have been suppressed by Apple's legal department)
posted by Alan Little at 4:27 AM

Discussion on Inkjetart.com of the new Epson pigment inks & what black (photo or matte) to use with what papers
posted by Alan Little at 11:57 PM

Very informative discussion on Luminous Landscape regarding the relative merits & difficulties of scanning slides vs negs
... and more on the same subject here on photo.net
posted by Alan Little at 4:30 AM

Yahoo discussion group for the Minolta Multi Pro scanner - from which, it sounds alarmingly as though this scanner is practically useless for negs (or at least, the Minolta-supplied software is, and Ed Hamrick is struggling to get it to work reliably with Vuescan). In which it wouldn't be much use to me, no matter how wonderful Ken Rockwell thinks it is for slides. Hmm. Maybe I should be thinking about the Nikon 8000 after all.

Of course, what I should really do is take some of my pics to a shop that has both, and do some tests.
posted by Alan Little at 2:24 AM

Sharpening

Tutorial/comparison on sharpening techniques & tools. Doesn't rate Nik Sharpener Pro very highly at all (and it's expensive). Best: manual masking out of parts of the image for different degrees of sharpening. Slow & laborious. Second best: UltraSharpen - uses a some kind of gaussian blur algortihm for contract masking so as to only sharpen - I assume - the higher contrast parts of the image. Cheap & quick.
... and here's a super-informative discussion on how and why to use ordinary photoshop usm properly, on the large format photography discussion on greenspun.com.
... and a tutorial on Luminous Landscape on how to selectively sharpen only higher-contrast areas / edges, so as not to get nasty grain-sharpening artefacts in other parts of images
posted by Alan Little at 4:40 AM

I like this guy's attitude (and some of his pictures)
posted by Alan Little at 5:09 AM

"Terrorism becomes bad art" - Eric Raymond on what is (and isn't) "art" I basically agree with what Eric is saying here.
posted by Alan Little at 2:58 AM

Sebastião Salgado has a website
posted by Alan Little at 4:42 AM

oh dear. was searching the web for stuff on Ernst Haas, all of whose books seem to be out of print & therefore expensive collector's items. and found the official Ernst Haas studio wesbite. it is the most appallingly awful piece of flash-infested bollocks

On the other hand, there's a vast collection of wonderful Haas images online at the Hulton Getty website
posted by Alan Little at 5:11 AM

“Our autobiography is written in our contact sheets, and our opinion of the world in our selects” - Bill Pierce's columns on photojournalism in The Digital Journalist
posted by Alan Little at 4:51 AM

Very informative photo.net discussion on scanning b&w
posted by Alan Little at 3:21 AM

Piezography (digital bw printing) review from View Camera magazine. What is the "Epson 7000"?
posted by Alan Little at 12:59 AM

"You look for the chaos in life until you find the chaos in your soul looking back at you in some sort of recognizable way, and then you look at & for that as long as you can until you have to look away."
Ellis Vener, in a photo.net discussion about Garry Winogrand
posted by Alan Little at 7:22 AM

“It's just seeing - at least the photography I care about. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Anyone can learn how to develop” - Elliott Erwitt.

More brilliant Elliott Erwitt stuff on photoquote.com
posted by Alan Little at 3:04 AM

Guide to b&w films from Photo Techniques mag. See also guide to color neg films by famous printing expert ctein. They also published a guide to fast (400-800) colour neg films by ctein, but I can't find it anywhere on the website
posted by Alan Little at 1:41 AM

informative article on grain aliasing in CCD scanners - why fast films actually look far grainier scanned than they are in real life, because of interference effects between the size of dye clumps in the film and the optical resolution of the scanner.
posted by Alan Little at 12:44 AM

Tour schedule for the Ansel Adams at 100 exhibition. London (Hayward) July to September, Berlin October to December.
posted by Alan Little at 5:31 AM

Outdoor Photographer interview with Steve McCurry
posted by Alan Little at 2:25 AM

A very informative photo.net thread on practicalities of shooting in India. Link to this in the S.I. photo article.
posted by Alan Little at 2:54 AM

Mike Dixon, portrait & wedding photographer in Tennessee. Some nice b&w work.
posted by Alan Little at 11:33 PM

Some stunning pictures in this photo.net essay by Sean O'Boyle entitled "photographing ruins". What it's really about is Mr O'Boyle's project photographing derelict industrial sites, or "modern ruins" as he calls them. Although the pics in the photo.net essay are great, the overall quality & interest of the stuff on his own website is patchy.
posted by Alan Little at 3:26 AM

Ken Rockwell's website - good, opinionated writing on gear & technique
posted by Alan Little at 2:01 AM

Found these superb Scottish mountain landscape pictures, including a wonderful Glen Affric panoramic, whilst posting my own Glen Affric photos. This guy's pics are way better than mine :-(
posted by Alan Little at 2:07 PM

photo.net discussion of the Boas celebrity exhibition in London -link to this if/when I ever get round to writing my comments about that one.
posted by Alan Little at 6:17 AM

Interesting essay on the Henri Cartier-Bresson Tete a Tete exhibition a couple of years ago - which I missed by one day when it was at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Damn!
posted by Alan Little at 12:44 AM

James Nachtwey isn't the only Magnum photographer who lives in New York. There are some more powerful images of the end of the post-Cold War era on Magnum's website
posted by Alan Little at 10:11 AM

Medium format scanning - here's a photo.net discussion where people seem to think an Epson 1280U - high end flatbed w/tranny adaptor @ c.$400 - could be an acceptable option for web / small print (to 8x10) scanning. New version, 2450, due soon. Here's a Luminous Landscape review of an ealier version, the 1200U.

Could be a good stopgap option until I decide to spend the money on an LS-8000 or an Imacon.
posted by Alan Little at 5:57 AM

Here's Time Magazine's write-up, with selected photos, of the Nachtwey exhibition at the ICP last year.
Nachtwey does a lot of work for Time Magazine
posted by Alan Little at 9:14 AM

I wept at James Nachtwey's pictures of the ruins of Kabul when I was in New York last summer. Now here are his pictures of the ruins of New York. Number 12 is amazing.
Here's a Salon interview with him about the book Inferno
posted by Alan Little at 5:34 AM

Interview with Ralph Gibson:

I’m not terribly drawn towards the epic event. I’d like to make something totally insignificant into an object of importance, by virtue of how photography works.
…
it doesn’t matter where I am. I’ve been in Japan, I’ve been all over the world and I come back with the same photographs (laughs). It appears that wherever I go I tend to bring my vision with me.
…
Digital photography seems to excel in all those areas that I’m not interested in. I’m interested in the alchemy of light on film and chemistry and silver. … the big emphasis in digital photography is how many more million pixels this new model has than the competitor’s model. It’s about resolution, resolution, resolution, as though that were going to provide us with a picture that harbored more content, more emotional power.



posted by Alan Little at 8:21 AM

Medium format rangefinders - useful reviews of the Mamiya, Plaubel and Fuji rangefinders from a Leica fan
posted by Alan Little at 7:47 AM

The Ultimate Exposure Guide - metering without a meter. Looks very useful, esp. for difficult light situations - concerts etc.
posted by Alan Little at 8:05 AM

Luminous Landscape - interesting-looking landscape photography site with good articles & reviews
posted by Alan Little at 6:41 AM

Hamrick software, home of Vuescan
posted by Alan Little at 6:09 AM

Richard Dawkins on Post-Modernism - relevant to my comments on the writing in Henri Cartier-Bresson and the Artless Art
posted by Alan Little at 6:00 AM

A quick posting on photo.net, and here's the tour schedule
posted by Alan Little at 7:31 AM

New Ansel Adams book to commemorate a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition to celebrate the centenary of his birth (1902). The exhibition is supposed to be touring over the next two years including London and Berlin - must find out the schedule.
posted by Alan Little at 6:52 AM