Extra Geeky Category

Check out this video of a Nikon D3 shutter release in super slow motion at Jeffrey Fried’s blog!
Via GRINZ

Ever wonder what a Leica lens looks like sawn in half? Check out this photo gallery at Wired to find out!
Thanks to Jim Heid for the heads-up!

Gordon Coale has a great explanation of how Packard shutters work: the super old-school pneumatic shutters that you can use on large format lenses without shutters of their own.
Used shutters are plentiful on eBay, and you can still buy them new (for a lot more money) from The Packard Shutter Company.

Check out Rob’s DIY 555-based remote timer for Canon SLRs! He says:

Canon makes a SLR camera remote timer that sells for a couple hundred dollars. Using inspiration from various web sites I built one for myself using about $15 worth of parts from RadioShack.
First, it is a simple wired camera remote control. Just plug the [...]

Photo News Today’s Dennis Hays says:

After meeting both John Sexton and [Kodak's] Scott DiSabato at the 2007 Photoplus Expo in New York, I sit down with them and discuss the introduction of the new [see previous post] T-MAX-400 B&W film. John goes into some detail regarding the films ability and his impressions from use.
As more [...]

Here’s the abstract of a paper by Anat Levin, Dani Lischinski, and Yair Weiss:

Colorization is a computer-assisted process of adding color to a monochrome image or movie. The process typically involves segmenting images into regions and tracking these regions across image sequences. Neither of these tasks can be performed reliably in practice; consequently, colorization requires [...]

Apparently the newsstand price for LensWork magazine will be increasing to US $12.95 in January 2008. Yeow! But, to be fair, LensWork has exceptionally high print quality and no advertising.
(Subscription rates may or may not be affected, I’m not sure.) Subscription rates will remain unchanged.

Solarization is overexposure to the point of tonal reversal, where areas on the film that would be totally black (the sun, for example) start to get lighter again. You can achieve the same thing printing in the darkroom by turning on the lights during developing. (Technically doing it in camera is called soliarization and in [...]

Mark Antony Smith has nice reviews, with sample images, of Adox CHS 50 ART and Adox CHS 100 ART black and white films.

MTF charts are graphs of lens resolution that are meant to give you an idea of how a given lens performs at different points across the frame. (Most lenses are sharpest in the centre and get a bit softer as you go out, and these charts illustrate that characteristic.) They’re easy to read once you [...]