By admin | September 23, 2011
Some of my work is on view now at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York. It’s a group show with a long title — the 18th Annual Small Matters of Great Importance National Juried Exhibition: Interior/Exterior. It always feels special to have work shown in the birthplace of one of the greats.
On the front page of The New York Times today is a gee-whiz story on Lytro, a start-up that claims to be developing a camera that lets you focus after shooting, shoot fast (since it doesn’t waste time focusing) and shoot in low light. Interestingly, the big photo blogs have strikingly different reactions to this. The Online Photographer loves it, Ken Rockwell glibly dismisses it as useless and, no surprise here, Nikon guru Thom Hogan slaps us in the face with numbers that temper expectations (if his write-up has vanished from his homepage scroll to the bottom of it for his archive links).
At first Rockwell’s reaction surprised me because he’s a sucker for new cameras — and the guy could sell a 110 Instamatic to Ansel Adams (“It just works!”). Then I remembered Rockwell is interested in getting a completely finished product out of his cameras (a la slides) so why would he want to fool with selecting focus in post-processing? Still, I think he’s missing an important innovation when he scoffs and says autofocus already works just fine on compacts and cell phone cameras already get everything in focus. Compacts still respond too slowly and why should I always want everything in the frame in focus? TOP sounds a bit too enthusiastic about the reality of Lytro’s camera but I tend to fall on TOP’s side of the argument. Hogan takes apart the numbers from both the tech and the business perspectives, saying Lytro’s camera is likely to have an extraordinarily low pixel count and the hardware sales aren’t likely to add up to enough revenue for the company. Instead, he suggests a big part of Lyrtro’s product will be a cloud gallery and software to manipulate the focus-later images.
Lytro is confident enough to say it’s taking reservations for the camera. What I’m interested in is whether Leica will go this route. An M-style camera you don’t need to focus (saving tons of money on the rangefinder mechanism), accepts the old M glass and maybe new glass, too, that can be made more cheaply because it won’t need focusing mechanics. This would change things.
By admin | February 13, 2011
From now through March 27 two of my photographs are on display at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York. The house is where the famous American realist painter was born and spent his childhood. The pictures are part of a group show called Hopperesque: Realism and Light in Photography.
Man in stairway
I took this picture coming up on three years ago, a few months after having begun using the M8, which really allowed me to do much more street work than I had in the film days. Recently I got a pleasant surprise, learning that this image had been used for a book cover, my first. It was an even bigger surprise to learn what book it was used for:
Considering all the crap that gets published in a year it’s really cool seeing my picture on a classic like “Beautiful Losers”. So why is this post headlined, “Always the Last to Know”? Because the glacial pace of the publishing industry means that I learned of this only after getting paid, more than a year after the book came out. And it’s the UK version, not (as near as I can tell) a U.S. release. But I’m not complaining, no, not at all. It’s a real thrill.
