If that £2990 is burning a hole in your pocket, you can always console yourself with this solemn advance tour.
For another £15k you could have this 39 megapixel monster from Hasselblad:
But then you’ll need a lot more RAM — each image takes up about 110 MB. It’s almost enough to drive one back to what my Open University colleague Steve Edwards calls “chemical photography”.
Behold a classic M-series camera body which takes all those expensive items of glassware that result in Leica owners being unable to feed their families. But instead of film, inside is a 10.3 MP sensor. And where the film-speed indicator used to be, you’ll find a 2.5-inch LCD screen. Available in UK sometime in November.
Oh — and the price? Er, a mere £2990. Including VAT, naturally.
“It comes”, says the NYT waspishly, “in black and silver; a rakish fashion photographer’s beret and turtleneck are not included”. Huh! The beret is the only thing some of us can afford.
Whatever next? According to Gizmodo…
Here’s a new camera from HP that’ll help you answer that age-old – but always tricky – question from your girlfriend: “Do these jeans make me look fat?” Instead of stepping onto a verbal landmine, take her picture with the 8.2MP Photosmart R927, one of several new digital cameras from HP that boasts a special “slimming feature.” Before you show her the picture, hit the slimming effect in the Design Gallery in playback, and she’ll look as much as 10 pounds thinner on the camera’s 3-inch LCD.
“It’s a pretty subtle change we’ve built into the camera,” Karl Wardrop, HP’s digital imaging product manager told the New York Post. “It’s not dramatic. It slims the center of photos and slightly widens the outside to maintain perspective. It’s like the (fun-house) mirror from the fair, but not as exaggerated.”
While there are many ways to slim (or fatten) a person’s physique in Photoshop and other image editing programs, HP is the first manufacturer to offer the effect in-camera. The R927 is available this month for $399.99. Boyfriends of the world can now breathe a sigh of relief.
En passant… I’ve been taking photographs forever — including a lot of portraits, and I’ve rarely encountered a subject who seemed to be satisfied with his/her image. My conclusion is that most people dislike how they look: and when you show them photographs of themselves they tend to shudder and look away. Odd…
Footnote… This in-camera-correction stuff looks like becoming a staple feature of point-and-shoot digital cameras. The Ricoh R4 Caplio, for example, has a ‘skew correction mode’ which automatically detects trapezoids in images and corrects the perspective so the object appears as if it had been shot ‘head on’. Useful when you’re photographing e.g. whiteboards from below.
(c) Brian Naughton, 2006
This beautiful photograph was taken by my son Brian. See his Flickr photostream for more of his work.
Taken last July by cameras on board the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. From the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day site. The link for this image is here. The blurb explains:
In contrast to the human-made lights that cause the nighttime side of Earth to glow faintly, Saturn’s faint nighttime glow is primarily caused by sunlight reflecting off of its own majestic rings. The … image was taken when the Sun was far in front of the spacecraft. From this vantage point, the northern hemisphere of nighttime Saturn, visible on the left, appears eerily dark. Sunlit rings are visible ahead, but are abruptly cut off by Saturn’s shadow. In Saturn’s southern hemisphere, visible on the right, the dim reflected glow from the sunlit rings is most apparent. Imprinted on this diffuse glow, though, are thin black stripes not discernable to any Earth telescope — the silhouetted C ring of Saturn. Cassini has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 and its mission is scheduled to continue until 2008.
Lovely story on Harold Strong’s Blog…
I had the good fortune to spend two months on the smallest of the Aran Islands, Inisheer (Inis Oirr), in 1962. This was the year before I sat the Leaving Certificate examination, the final school examination in Ireland. At that time if you didn’t pass Irish you failed the examination and couldn’t go to University. So the idea was that I would improve my Irish. This worked and was a fantastic experience. One that has left me with a deep affection for the islanders, their way of life and the Irish language along with a small collection of photographs.
At that time I only had a basic 35mm camera and a few rolls of film. You couldn’t get more film on the island at that time and anyway I couldn’t afford it. When I came home after spending a month longer than originally agreed all I could do was develop the film but no prints! The negatives were kept among my personal stuff, put in a press [cupboard] and forgotten about.
Last year I was using my son’s scanner, remembered these negatives and discovered that they could be scanned. He then introduced me to Flickr and suggested I should put them up there which I did.
I moved on to other things and forgot about them until recently. An email arrived from the ‘Crashed’ music group asking if some of them could be used on the cover of a new CD. The result was that one was used as the outer cover of a CD and two more were used on the inlay.
They were of the wreck of the MV Plassey which went aground on an offshore rock during a severe storm on the night of 8th March 1960. The 11 crew were rescued by the local onshore rescue crew using a Breeches Buoy. It was later driven onto the island during another storm. It is on the rocks in the opening scene of the Channel 4 comedy series ‘Father Ted’…
I’ve just looked at the photographs and some of them (for example this one, of a funeral procession) are very evocative. It’s a lovely little archive portraying a vanished world.
I gave a presentation in the Boardroom at OFCOM this morning. It’s a lovely room on the 11th floor with glass walls and a wonderful view of London. It also has some clever curtains, which let in the light but probably render it opaque to the outside world. After we’d finished I experimented with some shots through the curtain. This is a shot of the view looking towards Tower Bridge. It’s come out looking rather like a medieval etching*. Not a great success, but worth trying. Note the Moire patterns.
Just for comparison, here’s the (uncurtained) view of St Paul’s.
I was reminded, as I stood there, of the great photograph of Wren’s cathedral during the Blitz.
* An alert (and learned) reader emails to say (ever so politely) that the ‘medieval’ reference is baloney!
Part of the American cemetery in Madingley, where thousands of US air force personnel who lost their lives in World War II are remembered. The long wall on the right is engraved with their names, and it makes sobering reading. The cemetery was built on land donated by the University of Cambridge and is a lovely, peaceful place, even if this part of it looks like a cut-down Taj Mahal. In my time, I’ve seen both Bill Clinton and Al Gore here on Memorial Day visits.
A house in our Provencal village, photoshopped in a painterly way. Such a cheap trick, really, but — as Oscar Wilde said — one can resist anything except temptation. Were it not for the car and the satellite dishes on the roof, it might have been almost convincing!
Night-time in Donegal.