Photoshop Time Travel and New Fuji Camera!

 "1982+2005, Paris, France" by Chino Otsuka

Chino Otsuka, a London-based photographer, is working on an interesting series of self-portraits, which pairs the present day photographer with herself from the past. She takes old family photographs of herself and inserts new self-portraits of herself into the old pictures, using Photoshop to age the new images to match the old. This is done seamlessly and the images play with the notions of self and the passing of time. Otsuka wrote this passage about this series:

If,

again

I have a chance to meet,

there is so much I want to ask,

and so much I want to tell.

"1980+2009, Nagayama, Japan" by Chino Otsuka

You can see her images at her own website and at the blog, My Modern Met. Otsuka has also published a book of these images, titled Photo Album. Check them out.

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Also, in a bit of unrelated news, Fuji will officially announce a new camera in their X-series of cameras, the X-T1. They released a teaser photo of it and it looks like Fuji is aiming for some of Olympus' territory. The X-T1 is styled after SLR's of the past with a faux-pentaprism in the middle of the top and plenty of dials to complete that nostaglia-ridden aesthetic. They will formally announce the camera on January 28th and we will discover what it can do then. I'm not sure this camera is really needed, since Fuji already has the excellent and well-regarded X-E2, but what do I know? Camera companies seem to be spending a lot of time looking backwards for inspiration these days.

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.

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.

Miroslav Tichy: Outsider Photographer

 Photo by Miroslav Tichy.

Almost from the beginning of photography, at least after the advent of Kodak cameras that put photography into to hands of the common person, photography has had something of an unsavory reputation. Photographers would lurk around the swimming holes of yesteryear hoping to spy upon and capture the images of naked or nearly naked young women. It actually became something of a public nuisance for a while. Currently, our distrust of photographers working in the public spaces is more related to issues of terrorism, but that is another story.

Miroslav Tichy and one of his cameras.

Anyway, the folks at Messy Nessy Chic have done an excellent story on a photographer that captures that quaint, old-fashioned air of "perv-i-ness" and also manages to serve as an example of the outsider (or folk or naive) artist that happens to use a "camera." Outsider photographers are kind of rare. His name was Miroslav Tichy and he lived and worked in the small town of Kyjov in the Czech Republic. One of the things that set him apart was that he built his own cameras out of spare parts and trash, including grinding and building his own lenses. His photographs are an interesting combination of crudeness and elegance and the article is worth checking out here. Thanks to Wayne Kraft for pointing this story out to me.

Skin Smoothing Photoshop Tutorial

Photoshop Roadmap has published a video tutorial from photographer Lee Varis. You can watch the video here. It follows an unusual, but straightforward technique for smoothing skin tones. As these types of techniques go, this one is simpler than some, but maybe not as useful for handling extremely rough complexions. Varis recommends it for portraits that need only a subtle smoothing of the skin tones. It's worth checking out.