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Thanks, Kai Yamada!

The description for Sverrir Valgeirsson’s free Filmtagger software says it all:

Filmtagger is an application for those of us that still like to shoot film but use the computer to manage our photo collection.

Filmtagger makes it easy to embed EXIF, XMP or IPTC information in the scanned images about camera used, film, ISO, lens, date and other tags.

The program will scan the selected catalog and set the appropriate tags in all jpg or tif images it can find (a backup file will be created).

Download Filmtagger for Mac & Windows

JPG, a crowd-sourced photography magazine, is shutting down on Monday, 5 Jan, 2008 2009. Here’s their good-bye email (thanks to Jonathan Block for the heads up):

Today is a particularly sad day for all of us at JPG and 8020 Media.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but we just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success. As a result, jpgmag.com will shut down on Monday, January 5, 2009.

The one thing we’ve been the most proud of: your amazing talent. We feel honored and humbled to have been able to share jpgmag.com with such a dynamic, warm, and wonderful community of nearly 200,000 photographers. The photography on the website and in the magazine was adored by many, leaving no doubt that this community created work of the highest caliber. The kindness, generosity, and support shared among members made it a community in the truest sense of the word, and one that we have loved being a part of for these past two years.

We wish we could have found a way to leave the site running for the benefit of the amazing folks who have made JPG what it is, and we have spent sleepless nights trying to figure something out, all to no avail. Some things you may want to do before the site closes:

- Download the PDFs of back issues, outtakes, and photo challenge selections. We’ll always have the memories! www.jpgmag.com/downloads/archives.html - Make note of your favorite photographers. You may want to flip through your favorites list and jot down names and URLs of some of the people you’d like to stay in touch with. You may even want to cut and paste your contacts page into a personal record.

- Catch up with your fellow members. Our roots are in this humble flickr forum and we recommend going back to find fellow members, discuss the situation, or participate in another great photo community. www.flickr.com/groups/jpgmag/ - Keep in touch. This has always been much more than just a job to each of us, and we’ll miss you guys! We’ll be checking the account jpgletters@gmail.com in our free time going forward. We can’t promise to reply to every email (since we’ll be busy tuning up our resumes) but we’d love to hear from you.

- Stay posted. Although the magazine is ceasing publication, we’ll be updating you on what’s happening with your subscription early next week.

We’re soggy-eyed messes, but it is what it is. At that, JPGers, we bid you goodbye, and good luck in 2009 and the future.

Laura Brunow Miner
Editor in Chief

If you offer books for sale through on-demand printer Blurb, you have to fiddle with the link before you post it.

The normal thing to do is to copy the address in the location bar of your browser and just paste it. Unfortunately, if you do this while looking at your own book on Blurb, you get a link to view your book in your account. Instead of seeing your book, others are prompted to log into Blurb, and then can’t see it because they’re not you.

The link you get while you’re looking at your book will look something like this:

    http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/394207#store-price

(Go ahead and click it, you’ll see the problem.)

To make a publicly accessible link, take the number out of the link from your account and glue it onto the end of this:

    http://www.blurb.com/books/

So for the link above, you’d have:

    http://www.blurb.com/books/394207

Now anyone can see the book (in this case, Erik Chevalier’s Quartu Sant’Elena social club). Yay!

Check out Francesco Capponi’s latest homebrew madness, a curved-plane top hat pinhole camera. You can see pictures of, and photographs made with, the Abracadabra in this set on Flickr.

Capponi has also made pinhole cameras out of a pine nut, a birdhouse, origami, and a tree. Nice hacking!

Related: Weird pinhole camera roundup here on Photon Detector, Thomas Hudson Reeve’s origami/paper pinhole cameras

[Flyer image removed from Flickr]

If you’re unable to see the show in person, check out this preview online. You can see more of his work at his web site, MikePeters.com, and here on Flickr.

My wife and I were trying to take a picture of both of us together in a sort of co-MySpace fashion: I held the camera out in front of us and she pressed the button. It took a few tries before we got what we wanted, and when we did, we both credited me with it. Which, upon further reflection, really surprises me.

I’ve always considered the photographer or author of a picture the person who pressed the shutter button to make it. Sure, the line can blur a bit with commercial photography or motion pictures, where the final image is the result of large-scale collaboration between art directors, set designers, models, makeup artists, wardrobe consultants, grips, etc., but I don’t shoot like that, so it’s always been fairly clear-cut for me.

It seems that when you get down to actually making the exposure, there are two decisions to be made: where to put the camera, and when to press the button. There are certainly other decisions—lens, film, focus, shutter speed, aperture, etc.—but most or all of those have already been made, or are made for you by automation, before the button is pressed. (We had already selected a Polaroid SLR 680, which has a fixed lens, only takes one kind of film, is auto exposure-only, and we chose to use the auto focus.) Granted, the messed up shots before the keeper were messed up because I aimed the camera badly, not because she hit the shutter at the wrong time, but it seems strange that we both considered it "my" photograph instead of "ours", when we were each responsible for half of the decision-making.

"g." on Polanoid figured out how to make his own Polaroid Chocolate/Sepia peel-apart film! Apparently you need a B&W positive and a color negative… check out these instructions and example shot, very cool!

PolaPremium just released three new, monochromatic, type 100 (3.25 × 4.25 inch / 8.5 × 10.8 cm) peel-apart/pack films. This thread on Flickr says:

These three films were produced by Polaroid employees in the factory in Mexico shortly before the factory was closed forever. Even the packaging was designed by Polaroid employees, making these brand new films 100% Polaroid products, through and through.

100 Chocolate, ISO 80, is apparently the same film as the renowned/smaller/extremely expensive type 80 film of the same name. Run of 30,000 packs that expires October 2009.

100 Blue is ISO 80 and appears to be a full color film, but with a heavy blue cast that looks a lot like expired 669. Run of 15,000 packs that expires April 2009.

100 Sepia is ISO 1500. To me, it’s the most interesting-looking of the films, but at such a weird ISO, it’s probably going to take some fiddling with the exposure compensation dial on most full-frame type 100 cameras, unless you’re lucky enough to have a 180, 190, or 195. Run of 30,000 packs that expires October 2009.

All three cost $16 USD per pack of 10 exposures and are available from the PolaPremium film shop.

Therese Brown just release a new book, Polaroid Kitchen:

Like a warm, comforting visit, Polaroid Kitchen offers up visual treats and brief anecdotes that celebrate the everyday wonders of food and home. Captured through the unique media of Polaroid cameras and film, these photos provide an intimate glimpse of both the necessity and delights of food.

Having both seen her photos and eaten her food (which is excellent), I expect the book is going to be good! It costs $17.95 – $31.95 USD (depending on binding) and is available immediately through Blurb.

You can see more of Brown’s work at her web site, This Is What I See, and here on Flickr.