Author: Nicolai Grossman

Roid Week 2006: post a Polaroid a day for five days

Nicolai Grossman 2 Comments

Flickr members Cate and Lori Baker (Lori just finished co-editing the now-available benefit photography book, Signs of Life: Surviving Katrina [blogged previously]) have declared 11–15 September, 2006, to be Roid Week!

The idea is simple: shoot a Polaroid a day for five days and post them to the Roid Week group on Flickr. Roids! Cate! Lori! Sweet!

(You do have to be a member of Flickr to upload, but free accounts are available.)

If you’re new to Polaroid, you can get the lowdown from this primer at Omnimatter.

How to build and calibrate a photo-plane light meter

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Science photographer Ted Kinsman wrote this piece on building and calibrating a photodiode-based light meter:

Being in the professional science photography business, I often get asked to photograph the strangest stuff using some very weird lens combinations. Lately, I was asked to take some motion pictures of "microscopic animals". So I set up the microscope and attached it to a 35-mm motion picture camera – but how do you measure the exposure?

A typical answer would be to use a standard film plane meter, but such a device would not fit my situation, and I would still have to perform a calibration on the device.

The answer to my problem was to simply build the type of meter I needed and then calibrate the device…

Continue reading at Microscopy-UK

Via Paul Beard of A Crank’s Progress blog

Lens marks and image quality: shocking truth revealed!

Nicolai Grossman 5 Comments

How many times have you seen "small cleaning mark on lens, does not affect image quality" in ads for used cameras? Is it true? What about severe defects, like, say, "a loose spiral spring, some odd hardened liquid bubbles, dust, and a unidentified German insect in the lens"? Jurgen Kreckel, who repairs and rebuilds vintage medium format folding cameras, took such a lens—a 50/1.4 Planar—to Dresden and found out.

The results are nothing short of shocking.

Pinhole photography group show in Ann Arbor, MI

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After a successful pinhole workshop at the Ann Arbor District Library in August, photographer Matt Callow is curating an exhibit of work created by the workshop participants, to be displayed at the Malletts Creek branch along with a selection of photos of the workshop in action.

Opening reception Friday, 22 September, 2006 at 7pm, at 3090 East Eisenhower Parkway, Ann Arbor, MI, US.

Details at the library Web site.

Mitsubishi Electric develop deblurring flutter shutter camera

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Following this month’s 33rd Annual Siggraph Conference in Boston, MA, a research team at Mitsubishi Electric is catching the attention of camera manufacturers for their photo motion deblurring technology, called a flutter shutter camera.

The flutter shutter camera is a modified camera that can capture moving objects at an exposure time of over 50 milliseconds, like high speed motion cameras. Using a coded exposure sequence, the new flutter shutter camera could recover text from a speeding car and sharpen images, according to the researchers.

Introduced in early August, three Mitsubishi Electric researchers presented the abstract, "Coded Exposure Photography: Motion Deblurring using Fluttered Shutter" at the largest computer and graphics conference, Siggraph. After one year of research development, Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab (MERL) senior researcher Ramesh Raskar, MERL visiting researcher Amit Agrawal, and Northwestern University computer science assistant professor Jack Tumblin launched the new prototype with the goal of deblurring photos.

Continue reading this article at DigitalCameraInfo.com or read the paper at Mitsubishi.

The sample photos are nothing short of jaw-dropping. This combined with Ren Ng‘s plenoptic camera that allows post-exposure refocussing [see previous post] would be a truly amazing thing.

Via The Online Photographer

Omnimatter: “Rediscover Polaroid”

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Aaron Muderick has written a solid primer on Polaroid photography:

Every film photographer will tell you about the shots they lost because the lens cap was on, the film was bad, the camera setting was incorrect, or their own technique was mistaken. In the film era, one only found out about these critical mistakes days or weeks later when the film was developed and processed. By this time, the shot was lost forever. Digital changed all of this with the tiny video screen on the back of each camera.

However, the inventors of the digital camera were not the first to solve this problem of image turnaround. In 1947, a Harvard dropout was driven to invent by the impatience of his three year old daughter: “Daddy, why can’t I see my pictures NOW!”. His name was Edwin Land and his company was Polaroid.

Continue reading at Omnimatter

Another View: photographs from the Seresin family collection

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This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see some of the most famous images in photographic history in their original form as vintage black and white prints. Because of their age and calibre these prints are very valuable. The photographers include some of the best-known names from early to mid 20th century, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, Eugene Atget, Josef Sudek, W. Eugene Smith, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Mario Giacomelli, G.H. Brassai, Manuel Alvarez-Bravo and others…

Continue reading at PATAKA

The show runs through 10 September, 2006, at PATAKA, Norrie Street, Porirua, Wellington, NZ.

Via GRINZ

Group show: "Out of the Darkness: The Contemporary Revival of Early Photography"

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This exhibition features the work of contemporary photographers who choose to have direct contact with the photographic process in its most basic chemical and alchemical form—instead of working with current digital technology, these photographers have chosen to revive archaic 19th century techniques.

Artists include Chuck Close, Sally Mann, Jerry Spangnoli, Christopher Bucklow and Abelardo Morell.

The show runs from Thursday, 26 October, 2006 – Thursday, 7 December, 2006 at the University of Central Florida Art Gallery, Orlando, FL, US. The gallery is open 9:00am–4:00pm, Monday through Friday.

More info at the gallery’s Web site.

Via Pinhole Visions