Tripod Ballheads / Ball Heads For Serious Landscape / Panorama Photographers

A friend of mine who shoots in digital medium format, with ridiculously heavy gear, swears by the "Really Right Stuff" ballheads. She has a BH-55LR ballhead which she uses with a Gitzo tripod to compose her panoramic shots.

You can read more about the Really Right Stuff range here:

http://reallyrightstuff.com/ballheads/02.html

Blurring Reality With Photoshop: When Does It Stop Being A 'Photograph'?

This is a fantastic article by David Pogue, which I came across in the New York Times. The issues/questions it raises about Photoshop and photography are significant. The blog comments following the article are also very interesting, so I recommend you go through these.

The article can be found at:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/photoshop-and-photography-when-is-it-real/?emc=eta1

Happy reading !

Interesting Fine Art Concept

Hey Guys,

Take a look at Alexa Meades's interesting concept of combining real photographic subjects with painted artwork to create compositions:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexameade

Some Tips For The Novice Travel Photographer

Here is an article providing some tips for the novice travel photographer. Not exactly an exhaustive list, but useful nonetheless:

http://blogs.theage.com.au/travel/archives/2010/02/five_ways_to_take_better_travel_photos.html

Cheers

THE BEST OF THE BEST

The entire collection of pictures amassed by the Magnum photo cooperative will be accessible to the public. It is one of the most important photography archives of the 20th century, consisting of more than 180,000 images known as press prints, the kind of prints once made by the collective to circulate to magazines and newspapers.

They are marked on their reverse sides with decades of historical impasto — stamps, stickers and writing chronicling their publication histories — that speaks to their role in helping to create the collective photo bank of modern culture.

The new owners have reached an agreement with the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin to place it there, for study and exhibition, for at least the next five years. It will be the first time that the archive will be accessible to scholars and the public.

The earliest pictures in the archive date from before Magnum’s founding, to the work of photographers like Capa during the Spanish Civil War. The latest are from 1998, when the cooperative stopped using press prints as a way to circulate its images. In between those years are images that make it seem as if a Magnum photographer was present at almost every significant world event — D-Day, the U.S. civil rights movement,the Rwandan genocide, the rise of Fidel Castro — and also around to capture almost every celebrity and newsmaker: Gandhi, Monroe, General Charles de Gaulle addressing the people after the liberation of Chartres in 1944, Kennedy, Ali,Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Havana, 1963.

The prints are relics from an age of photography that has now almost fully passed, due to the technical changes that have taken place in the world of photography, including the digitization of images.

The work of these famous photographers is included: Bruce Davidson, Chien-Chi Chang, Constantine Manos, David Seymour, David W. Dunlap, Dennis Stock, Eli Reed, Elliott Erwitt, Gilles Peress, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Towell, Leonard Freed, Magnum, Philip Jones Griffiths, Randy Kennedy, Rene Burri, Robert Capa.

To view a sample of 14 photographs can be found at LENS, THE PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO AND VISUAL JOURNALISM blog @ new york times.com.

Cheers.

Words Can Blur Photographs

We found a really interesting article on the effect that descriptions accompanying photographs can have on your perception of those photographs.

A very interesting read.

The article can be found at:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/12/thought-experiment-2/?th&emc=th

Cheers

Show Off Your Photos Here (free backlink included)

Do you have an interesting or unusual photo that you would like to share with us? Please send us an email with your photo (10Mb or less) or a link pointing to it. You must provide your full name, company/organization name (if applicable), country of residency, and a short description of your photo not exceeding 50 words.

If we like your photo, we will publish it on the blog, together with your description and a free backlink to your site!

Conditions: We can publish the photo directly on this blog providing that it is 400Kb or under in size, otherwise we will only provide the backlink to your photo. You confirm that you are the legal copyright owner of the image supplied, and that you are legally authorized to submit any provided links. We will not post images or links of sites that are: of a pornographic nature, promoting hatred etc. Any links that are published must be of sites that closely relate to art, photography or photographic printing. The decision to publish, not publish or remove any images or links posted on this blog rests wholly with the administrators of this blog.

Send your requests to: gprnt_temp [at] hotmail dot com

Cheers