Digital Bolex D16 Footage Has Been Seen

I have to admit that the news about this camera has seemed to pass me by, even though it's been talked about for almost 2 years. It's still not quite available, but Bolex has made some footage from the new camera available to view on their website. The low light capabilities are impressive.

This camera is supposed to sell for less than a new Canon 5D Mark III and it seems to fit a similar niche that the Blackmagic cinema cameras do. And it can mount a wider range of lenses and shoots RAW footage, so that is all good. But what is that crank on the side of the camera for? And I even like 1950s Space Age aesthetic to the design. Retro and Modern at the same time. Go to Bolex here to watch the sample videos and learn more about it.

Olympus Introduces Its New Flagship Camera

Olympus has introduced a new camera, the OM-D E-M1. Like the already existing E-M5, the E-M1 is a Micro Four-Thirds camera styled after DSLRs, but this one is intended to be their new top of the line model. It will have a 16 MP sensor and a host of features, like dust-, splash-, and freeze-proof construction, tilting touchscreen LCD, 2.36 MP EVF viewing, 5-axis image stabilization, PC sync terminal, full HD video, built-in WiFi, focus peaking, 10 fps shooting, and something new called Color Creator, which allows the user to adjust color from the top of the camera. Interesting. It seems like the added grip is a good idea for this camera. The original OM-D E-M5 has always felt a little small to me, so a bigger grip would help that.

 

The body alone will run around $1400 and for around $1950, you can get the E-M1 with the new M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 12-40mm f/2.8 PRO lens, which is weather sealed, features a constant aperture of f/2.8, and which is equivalent to a 24-80mm lens in full-frame terms. Olympus also has another PRO lens in the works, an M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO, which is equivalent to an 80-300mm lens. With these new offerings, Olympus is creating a pro-level system that will be a real competitor to full frame camera systems from Nikon and Canon, and competition is good for everyone, of course.

International Street Photographers Day

 Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Tomorrow, which is Thursday the 22nd of August, is International Street Photographers Day, so go out and do some street photography! It's also Henri Cartier-Bresson's birthday, so think of him while you are doing it!

Free Online Images from the Getty

Photo by Eugene Atget; digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

It sometimes seems like we, as a society, are leaning ever more towards a more creatively close-minded frame of thought. When companies are trying to patent naturally existing genes and organisms, that is going too far. And companies like Disney are pushing the boundaries of artistic copyright ever farther. As a creator myself, I feel kind of mixed about this, of course. When is it appropriate for anything to fall out of private or commercial ownership and into the public domain? It's a complex problem with a multitude of answers and viewpoints.

Photo by Lewis Hines; digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Anyways, in a move that contradicts my previous statement, the Getty Museum and Trust are making a great many images in their collection available as free downloads through their Open Content Program. There are some restrictions for the commercial use of these images, but we now have access to a great many rather famous and significant  images from the beginnings of photography (mostly images from the first century of photography), not to mention a "few" paintings, sculpture, drawings, and more. There are close to 5000 total images. You can download 300 ppi JPEGs that are suitable for printing at home, so you can print off some classics for your own home or office, or use them as classroom examples, if you are a teacher.

Eugene Atget is well-represented in the offerings, as well as Walker Evans, Lewis Hines, and Nadar, an early superstar photographer. And in a small warning, a few of the photos in the program could be considered inappropriate and possibly objectionable. If you are a teacher and letting your students peruse the archives, please keep this in mind. There's even a nice painting of Irises by some Dutch guy, that some of you may like. You can read about the program here and browse through the images in the program here.

Painting by Vincent Van Gogh; digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

A World at War

U.S. Marine Gunnery Sgt. Carlos "OJ" Orjuela by Louie Palu

The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is hosting a photography exhibit that looks at 165 years of war called WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. If you're in the area, be sure to check out the comprehensive exhibit; it features more than 300 images. You can see the website for the exhibit here. The exhibit is up until September 29, 2013.

This morning, National Public Radio's Morning Edition did an excellent story on the exhibit that is worth listening to and you can do that here. They include segments of an interview with Louie Palu, a photojournalist who works in conflict zones. Both the exhibit and the story are vital reminders of the power and relevance of the still image.

Lomography Brings Back the Petzval!

It's kind of funny that as digital photography achieves ever higher resolution and lower noise (grain), photographers feel compelled to resist the inherent sharpness that digital offers. Lensbaby has done well for themselves by making lenses that offers generally poor optical quality. Now don't get me wrong, I own and use Lensbaby products myself and dearly love them, but they are not the pinnacle of lens sharpness and aberration-free designs. But maybe that's why we love them. It's their optical quirkiness that attracts us.

Anyway, in a similar vein, Lomography is introducing a "new" lens that is actually the resurrection of a quite ancient lens, the Petzval portrait lens, which was designed by Joseph Petzval in 1840 while he lived in Vienna, Austria. His lens was quite revolutionary for its time with a fast f/3.6 aperture (the only other rival lens had an aperture of f/15!) and more than adequate sharpness, especially in the center. One of the optical qualities that set it apart from modern lenses is that while modern lenses try to maximize sharpness from corner to corner and make the center of the image as sharp as the edges, Petzval's lens only achieved critical sharpness in the center. This is referred to as flatness of field, which the Petzval didn't have, but it did have a way of separating the center subject from the background that was not matched by any other lens.

So Lomography is working with the Russian optical company Zenit to make a new version of the Petzval  lens, while keeping the brass aesthetics of the original and offering them in current Nikon and Canon mounts. It will be an 85mm f/2.2 manual focus, of course, lens that uses fixed, slide-in Waterhouse stops for its apertures from f/2.2 to f/16, and they are saying that the results it will give are nearly impossible to duplicate by digital means. They are running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the manufacture of these lenses and you can read about their project here. Sounds kind of cool and the image examples they have are really beautiful. I'll follow this project with a great deal of interest.

LightZone is Now Free!

LightZone, a non-destructive photo-editing program somewhat based on Ansel Adams's Zone System, debuted in 2005 and was created by Light Crafts, Inc. It offered a more visual-based approach to image and tone manipulation and was remarkably intuitive with a relatively easy learning curve, especially when compared to Photoshop. It remains unique in that you can remove, reverse or change any step of your processing at any time in any order even in different sessions. Try doing that in any other program! And it worked in 16-bit.

I tried out LightZone shortly after it came out in 2005 and I remember liking it a lot. It took a visual approach to image manipulation, rather than a numbers- or values-based interface. And I was able to get good looking results almost immediately that were surprisingly hard to match in Photoshop. Photoshop is easier to use in cut-and-paste operations, where you area changing the image a great deal, but for just optimizing an image to look its best, LightZone was really good and fast. It was particularly good for black-and-white. It was almost like photographers designed it for other photographers to use. Imagine that!

Well, Light Crafts, Inc. went out of business in 2011 and LightZone went away, except it didn't. Fans and former employees kept the interest going and in December 2012, Light Crafts released LightZone to open source. And now a group calling itself the LightZone Project has come out with a new and free downloadable version (V4.0) for Windows and Linux, with a Mac version on its way. Actually, if you want the Windows version, hold off a bit and keep checking back since the initial release has some bugs in it that they are in the process of fixing. When they fixed things with it, they expect it to include 64-bit compatibility.

LightZone was a great program that offered features and flexibility that no other program had and now that it's free, there's no reason not to give it a try. You can download it and learn more about it here.