ellipsis…

i came across this on APE. renowned war photo journalist James Nachtwey won the 2007 TEDPrize. along with being presented with the award he received $100,000 and a wish. a wish to change the world. Nachtwey’s wish: There’s a vital story that needs to be told. I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. on October 3rd, 2008, he will reveal his wish to the world.

i recognize James Nachtwey from his work in Darfur. i had bought a book on Darfur for a friend’s birthday last year, and his images are almost 50% of the book. his images are stunningly beautiful. his subjects are the wartorn, neglected people of the world. a hard thing to swallow sometimes. if you have never seen his images, check him out. “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” – James Nachtwey

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that brings people of those industries together. top thinkers and doers around the world present their new ideas. for all of you who have an iPhone or a iPod Touch, the inventor of multi-touch, Jeff Han, presented his revolutionary touch screen at TED.

if you have a couple of minutes, watch James Nachtwey’s TEDPrize Wish speech. I’m super excited to see the story he and TED are bringing to light.

if you’ve read my blog before, you’ve come to realize that i do my best thinking in my car, driving. best time: at night. best weather: raining. it just makes for a very pensive, reflective state of mind for me. once again, tonight was one of those nights, and it was perfect; 12:30am, raining, and everything going by seemed like cinema.

i was over at my best friend’s house. as per usual we were sitting on his couches, drinking wine. it’s what we do. ever since we came back from europe, we’ve crack a good bottle of wine and just talked life. tonight was a bit different though. steve is getting married on saturday, and it was the last time i’d be cracking a bottle with him as a single guy. not an overly momentous occasion, but it still has it’s significance. we covered every topic, as per usual; relationships, jobs, faith, where we were both going life. it was a good night.

months before we had talked about if i wanted to be in his wedding or if i wanted to shoot his wedding. i told him it was up to him. at the time i wasn’t overly eager to shoot friends weddings, but now i rather enjoy it. after some thought, steve asked me to shoot his wedding. not because i can or because i was a photographer, but more because he wouldn’t trust anyone else with the job. and i would agree, i wouldn’t trust any other photographer with the job of photographing his wedding. to be honest, i wouldn’t know what to do with myself standing up there infront of everyone.

as i drove home, i started to realize that this will probably be the most important wedding i would shoot thus far. it is the closest one to me, with the most meaning. things have to be perfect. they have to be more than perfect. all of the technical is there. and i know how they are since i’ve photographed them before. but the feeling, the emotion has to be there, though the lens. that’s the more than perfect part.

i can’t help to think that in some way this is a turning point for both of us. up till now we’ve both had the freedom of being, well, not married. since europe, where we were kind of in the same place in life, we’ve gone and carved our unique paths, both about to do things that will change our lives. steve getting married and me, well, i’ve got somethings in store that are going to start altering my life in ways that i can’t even predict yet. but that’s for a different post. i remember getting off the plane in venice with steve and smelling the sea breeze, it was amazing! it doesn’t help that my girl is currently in italy racing. -GO KITTY!- but the memories we’ve shared are experiences that i will never forget. and from here on in i will have to make some room for his wife. which won’t be too hard, she’s one of my sister’s best friends. we kind of set them up LOL. but you know what i mean.

things start off tomorrow and will most likely be a blur till i get home saturday night. good friend, best friends, are hard to find in this life, they are gifts that only come around ever so often. so this wedding will be an honor and priviledge to shoot. i would not want to be doing anything else that day.

oh, and mental airplanes is a matthew good song. if you know it, there is absolutely no relevance between his song and this post, other than the fact that it was the song playing in my little blue rav4 on the way home.

i’m a bit late on this one, Adobe made available a release candidate version of Lightroom 2.1 five days ago. a release candidate is the version of software that has been extensively tested and is in it’s final stages before being officially released. there will probably be some minor changes to the software before it becomes widely available, but they release it to the public to test and give feedback on.

i, and everyone else who is using LR2.0, have been bitching about it’s performance. LR2.0 runs on my jacked-up Mac Pro as slow as LR1.0 did on my old school G4 PowerBook. importing pictures took upwards to an hour, doing any adjusting would always result in a spinning ball, and i would always have to wait for previews. there are some awesome features in 2.0, like spot and gradient adjustment, but none of that is valuable to me if it take forever to do. i almost reinstalled LR1.4 because 2.0 was just taking too much time to use

LR2.1 appears to have fixed all of that. and even in it’s release candidate version, things appear to be running smooth. importing is quick and snappy, no more spinning ball, and previews (even 100% previews) render almost instantly. post processing is again a happy time, not a @*#!ing throw my mouse through my monitor time.

you can find the Lightroom 2.1 release canidate here.

Photokina 2008 is in full-swing, and this fall seemed like the time to launch some new technology that might change the industry. personally, i think the biggest news was dropped by Leica who is the first to bring in a new format to photography since the crop-frame (1.5x) sensor was introduced. a sensor that is 56% bigger than a 35mm full-frame sensor, officially 0.75x lens factor. the Leica S2 body looks a lot like their R series film SLR bodies. it also looks like Leica is partnering up with PhaseOne to handle the digital side of things. the partnership alone is a big thing. Leica has always positioned themselves with industry leading companies, Panasonic & Olympus, and now with PhaseOne i can definitely see some stellar cameras being developed between the two of them. Leica, not to out do themselves, has also launched a full line of 9 lenses along with the S2; 24mm ultrawide, 30mm tilt-and-shift, 35mm wide, 70mm standard, 30-90mm standard zoom, 100mm short tele, 120mm macro, 180mm telephoto, and 350mm telephoto, pretty impressive. release date of S2 is slated for sometime late next year.

Leica S2

another format that has emerged, but with less force, is the new micro-fourthirds from Panasonic & Olympus. i guess it’s not a new format, but a new take on an existing format. micro-fourthirds is a mirrorless & prismless camera that shrinks a SLR down to a mini-SLR or a rangefinder size camera. what they have basically done is put a fourthirds sensor into a camera small enough to carry around. this looks like the beginning of the rangefinder style & size of digital cameras with fourthirds or APS-C size sensors. maybe these will be good enough to replace my trusty Konica Hexar with.

Olympus Micro-Fourthirds Prototype

HD video has also hit the digital SLR scene. i’m almost as excited about this feature as i was with live-view, as in i’m not. it’s a cool feature, and i guess it was inevitable, but i still have mixed feeling about the feature itself. the new Nikon D90 and Canon 5D mrkII have 720p and 1080p HD video recording respectfully. each company put their new camera into the hands of some big time pros. Chase Jarvis (one of my favorite photogs) for Nikon and Vincent Laforet (my 2008 Beijing Olympics source) for Canon, both produced videos using the new camera. it was interesting to hear Chase Jarvis’ comments on it since he is also a cinematographer and a film maker. Vincent Laforet decided to make a short-film to demonstrate the 5D mrkII’s capabilities. Vincent is claiming that HD video in a SLR is industry changing, i wouldn’t go as far as saying that it’s industry changing, the Leica S2 is industry changing, but the feature is interesting. the video/film camera industry is still rocking and i don’t foresee a dSLR taking over anytime soon.

Nikon D90. Click on the image to see Chase Jarvis’ video

Canon 5D mrkII. Click on the image to see Vincent Laforet’s video.

the big three medium format back/camera companies have broken the 50MP mark. Hasselblad launched their new H3DII-50 back in august, Leaf launching their Leaf Aptus-II 10 (56MP) and PhasOne with their P65+ (60MP) just before Photokina. vitual full-frame 645 sensors with massive file size for the commerial pro. i wish i could afford one of these backs, so pretty!

Hasselblad H3DII-50

the last big announcement is the much anticipated Sony A900. the Sony A900 is a full-frame 24MP SLR. to be honest i haven’t looked a lot into this camera a whole lot. i had a change to look at it this past weekend and it’s probably the biggest camera i’ve seen in a while. the grip is massive.

Sony A900

what else is worth noting… Nikon finally announced a new 50mm f/1.4 lens with AF-S. now owners of a D40, D40x or D60 have a 50mm prime that they can autofocus. i’ve been waiting for this lens for a while now, i almost bought the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 instead. Canon now has a new 24mm f/1.4L lens, and Lensbaby has revised their line that includes a new lens. Leica updated their M8 to M8.2. they also introduced the fastest prime lens in the world, Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95. with a price tag of over $8k, it better be able to cut daimonds. a company named Pretec has unveiled the largest compact flash cards so far, 64GB and 100GB. 100GB in my D3 is way too much memory, though i’m sure one of those 50+MP backs would appreciate it.

Nikon AF-S 50mm f/1.4G

Canon 24mm f/1.4L

Lensbaby – The Composer

Leica Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95

i think that’s it. well, at least everything that is really super interesting. there was, of course, a whole wack of point & shoot cameras that were released. and Adobe released CS4 which has some good speed upgrades, and finaly brings 64bit to Windows. on a none Photokina topic, RED ONE has said that they are bringing out a camera that will “kill the dSLR” late next year. if they release anything close to what have done with the film/cinema industry, Nikon and Canon better watch out.

over the last couple of days i have been switching my blog from cutenews to wordpress. it didn’t take quite as long as i thought it would, and i’m really happy how everything switched over. and best of all, everyone can comment again, LOL. for those who had the cutenews RSS, you will need to resubscribe. there is a whole bunch of new gear coming down the pipeline over at Photokina; some expected, some surprising, and some that could be industry changing. more to come on that later.

My dad passed this along to me today. It’s a bit old but it still applies to business today. This list is from the first Profit 100 Issue in February 1989.

1) Share the wealth.
2) Beg, borrow and steal ideas even from big companies.
3) Service till it hurts.
4) Don’t lose the small-biz feeling.
5) Pick a niche and make it better.
6) Be flexible, and respond quickly.
7) Have a real fear of debt.
8) Every employee has a first name.
9) Concentrate your resources.
10) Never grow for the sake of growth.

It’s good stuff to keep in mind as we get bombarded by clients.

i shot a quick editorial piece for Avenue Edmonton Magazine in early August that was a bit of a challenge. the story was on the Remand Centre in Edmonton, and the idea was to shoot someone in handcuffs outside of the facilities with a gloomy, dark mood. the challenge came when the day of the shoot was plus 30 degrees celsius, and and there was barely a cloud in the sky. there goes my dark gloomy mood. the angle i wanted was right infront of the building so that sign would be in the background (the Remand Centre really just looks like every other office building downtown, so without the sign no one would really recognize it). the other problem i had run into was by 5pm the sun was already westward bound, almost splitting my image in half with a shadow. throw up a flash through with a small softbox for a fill and see what i can create.

initially the idea that the art director and i had come upon was to photograph almost the entire building with the model in the foreground. low angle, shooting up. with so much contrast that proved to be difficult. put on a polarizer to see if i could bring back some of the sky, in the end it just killed all the detail in the building. f/16, f/22…. this is where a camera that can sync past 1/250 would have come in very handy. polarizer goes back in the bag. out comes the ND8. i started to shoot some tighter frames, something a bit more artistic, and with a shallower depth of field. ND filters are fantastic!!! there was still the balance of exposing the model and the shadowed building in the background. no huge budgets here to light an entire building.

after some post to bring the mood down, i started to think of what else i could do to add some emotion to the image. i don’t play with them a whole lot, but the thought of adding a dirty texture to the image came to mind. and so i did. played with a couple of them and finally decided on a dirty floor that brought an awesome feel to the images. pitch the idea to the art director, she loved it, and that’s that. looks like they took the dirty theme and used it for the entire article design. not too bad…. everything in the end worked out and the image works really well with the layout. next time i’m shooting at night, and bring the army to light up the building.