Photo&Cameras

Travis Dove isn’t accustomed to winning awards for his work as a photographer, but after his second year entering the College Photographer of the Year competition, the 25-year-old Ohio University graduate student took the competition’s top honor, winning gold in the portfolio category.

Dove has only taken photography seriously for the past two years, but has since interned at three newspapers including the Valley News in Vermont, the Augusta Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer. Most of the work in his winning portfolio was shot for class assignments and personal work, though some was from his most recent summer internship at the Charlotte Observer.

Before winning CPOY this year, Dove hadn’t won any awards for his photography since he was a young child, despite entering images in last year’s College Photographer of the Year competition as well. “I got an honorable mention in a Boy Scouts photo competition when I was a kid,” Dove said. “I think I was about eight.”

This year Dove took the competition seriously, spending hours editing images with friends, other students, and photographers he met during his internships. All his hard work paid off, winning five awards during this year’s CPOY competition. “I can’t tell you how many people I had look at this portfolio,” Dove said. “Things kept coming in and out, in and out.”

In addition to the gold award in the portfolio category that earned him the title College Photographer of the Year, Dove also won gold in the portrait category, gold in the documentary category, and awards of excellence in both the sports feature and pictorial categories.

Several days after learning of his first place award, Dove still had trouble containing his excitement. “It’s unbelievable; my cheeks are hurting right now from smiling so much,” he said. “It’s an incredible honor. Just looking through some of the work I saw this year made it even more special. I’m still in a dream state right now.”

Joining Dove as winners in the portfolio category were Dominic Nahr of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and Brian Frank of San Francisco State University, winning silver and bronze, respectively.

As College Photographer of the Year, Dove will receive a Nikon Digital SLR Camera set, a 14-week internship at National Geographic Magazine, a National Press Photographers Foundation $1,000 scholarship award honoring the memory of Colonel William J. Lookadoo, and a plaque. He will also be brought to Washington,D.C. to receive his awards and present work at the annual Pictures of the Year International/College Photographer of the Year awards ceremony on April 17 and 18, 2008.

The College Photographer of the Year competition was founded by Cliff and Vi Edom in 1945 and is held each year at the University of Missouri-Columbia under the direction of Rita Reed, who has served as the competition’s director for the past six years.

The 10,645 still images and 122 multimedia projects entered into the competition were judged from November 4-9, 2007 by judges Kathy Kieliszewski of the Detroit Free Press, Richard Koci Hernandez of the San Jose Mercury News, Susan Smith of National Geographic Magazine, and Mike Stocker of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. More than 460 student photographers entered work representing 88 colleges and universities in 10 different countries.

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When I saw the first few photos in Gerda Taro’s exhibit at the International Center of Photography in New York (now showing through January 6, 2008), I was especially taken by one that is rather famous. It shows a woman in training to fight for the Republican forces in The Spanish Civil War.

Fought in the years between 1936 and 1939, this was a conflict won by the right-wing insurgent forces of General Francisco Franco, the loser being the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic. It was the one war that the fascists won, and General Franco was able to weather World War II, in which his cohorts Mussolini and Hitler met their fates at such considerable cost to the rest of the world. The fascist dictator Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975.

The Spanish Civil War was one of the saddest of all — a notable disaster for every single Spaniard — although it was a small war by comparison to what was to come. When you read about it in books like The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, or the extraordinary Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, you learn of the amazing heartlessness of and the terrible atrocities committed by all the forces involved. The murder that the Spanish visited on each other was extremely cold-blooded, in which even members of individual families were sometimes at chilling odds with each other.

Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936. Photo: Gerda Taro

Taro’s photograph shows a remarkably fashionable-looking young woman, down on one knee, wielding a handgun at some invisible enemy. She’s in profile, and there is a kind of authoritative majesty about her, machismo that is made even more effective for me by the short heels she is wearing. It is the heels and her youthful beauty that make her seem fashionable. Yet I would not care to compliment her on all that because I fear she’d turn on me with the pistol and fire away at my attempt at charm.

This woman is a real soldier.

There are a few photos around this one that show other women preparing for war, not as nurses or backline providers of food and supplies, but as active frontline fighters. It is one of Taro’s notable strengths as a war photographer that she does not forget how women can fight side by side with the men, and will do so especially when the stakes appear to them irretrievable.

Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, Paris, 1936. Photo: Fred Stein

For the Republican forces in Spain, the fascist enemy was one that threatened to deliver the world to totalitarianism. They viewed themselves as the last defense against such a thing, and that they lost the war meant the rest of the world ultimately would have to defend itself. For many non-Spaniards, it was also a very partisan thing, and Gerda Taro was one of those. Not a champion of the balanced view, she was an ardent supporter of the Republican forces, and her photos show that.

Born in 1910 in Stuttgart, Germany, Taro’s given name was Gerda Pohorylle. At the age of 24 she went to Paris where she met and fell in love with a Hungarian photographer named Endre ErnГ¶ Friedmann. Both were Jewish and held clear-eyed views of German anti-semitism and the destruction it could ultimately bring to the Jewish people. The two changed their names: he to Robert Capa and she to Gerda Taro, and their collaboration with each other was to establish new standards of bravery and artfulness for war photographers everywhere.

Photo: Robert Capa

In 1936 the two went to Spain to cover the civil war there. Capa of course became very famous, particularly for his photo of a Republican soldier at the very moment of his being shot to death.

It is an iconically famous picture, one of many that Capa was to take over the years until his death covering the French-Vietnamese war in 1954. Taro’s career was, sadly, much shorter.

Known by the Spanish as “la pequeГ±a rubia” (the little blonde”), she was a consummately brave woman, photographing very often under extremely heavy fire. Only in her mid-twenties, she seemed impervious to the terrible conditions under which she was working.

Gerda Taro and soldier, CГіrdoba front, 1936. Photo: Robert Capa

Her photos show the effects of war unblinkingly, so much so that it is difficult to view many of them because they are so horrific. Yet there is a real depth of artfulness in the compositions she made and the way her subjects were presented. I think it is not an exaggeration to say her work somehow had Goya in mind and his pictures of war and the peasant class at work. Many would say she was simply a war photographer, but like Capa, Taro was an artist whose canvas depicts the worst that humans are capable of. That her photos are so often so beautiful makes the horror she presents even more terrifying. She’s even capable of humor, sometimes showing people trying to make the best of what they’ve been given in this awful war.

Boy wearing cap of FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936. Photo: Gerda Taro

Taro died on July 27, 1937 while attempting to jump onto the running board of a car when it was struck by a tank. Pablo Neruda attended her funeral in Paris (held on her 27th birthday), as did the French writer Louis Aragon. She was viewed by the French and Spanish left wing as a martyr to the war and, indeed, Gerda Taro is the first woman photographer ever to have died while covering a war. Thousands attended her funeral. Even her posthumous fame was short-lived, though, swept aside by World War II and the continuing ascendancy of Robert Capa as the emblematic war photographer.

The exhibition at ICP rights that wrong. It is the first such showing of so much of Taro’s work, and constitutes a reconstruction of her reputation as one of the finest war photographers in history.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

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Fisheye lens with close up ability designed exclusively for use with APS-C size digital SLR cameras

10mm F2.8 EX DC FISHEYE HSM

• Fisheye lens designed specifically for APS-C digital SLR cameras
• 13.5cm minimum focusing distance and 1:3.3 maximum magnification allows close up photography
• Equipped with HSM allowing full-time manual focus override
• Equisolid angle projection system is possible for art and scientific use

The Sigma Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of the new 10mm F2.8 EX DC FISHEYE HSM lens.

This autofocus fisheye lens is designed for use with digital SLR cameras equipped with APS-C size image sensors. The Nikon version produces a diagonal angle of view of 180°(154°for Sigma, 167°for Canon). The diagonal field of view of this fisheye lens produces striking images with exaggerated perspective and distortion. The minimum focusing distance of 13.5cm/5.3inch, and maximum magnification 1:3.3 allows subjects to be as close as 1.8cm/0.7inch from the lens’ front element. This close focusing capability allows close-up photography and also it is possible to make use of large depth of field that covers wide range of subjects. The Integral hood blocks out extraneous light and the Super Multi-Layer Coating minimizes flare and ghosting, creating superior image quality. The HSM(Hyper Sonic Motor)ensures fast and quiet autofocusing and allows full-time manual focus override by rotation of the focus ring. This lens is supplied with a gelatin filter holder at the rear, allowing the use of gelatin filters.

Source: www.livingroom.org.au

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Tokina has announced a new macro lens for Canon and Nikon crop sensors, the AT-X M35 PRO DX. Equivalent to a 53.5mm focal length on Nikon DX and 56mm on Canon APS-C, this lens revives the ‘normal’ macro segment which has been sadly absent in recent years, at least for crop sensors. A focus limiter is present, accelerating operation when used for regular photography, and Tokina’s Focus Clutch design makes switching from automatic to manual focus a snap - literally. The lens is due to be available from December 21st at a price of ¥68,000 (approx US $600). Pricing and availability for markets outside Japan are yet to be announced.

Tokina AT-X M35 Pro DX

Tokina AT-X M35 Pro DX specifications

Focal length (35 mm equiv.)	• Nikon DX - 53.5 mm • Canon APS-C - 56 mm
Aperture	f/2.8 - f/22
Lens formula	9 elements in 8 groups
Closest focus distance	14 cm
Maximum repro. ratio	1:1
Aperture blades	9
Filter diameter	52 mm
Dimensions (D x L)	73.2 x 60.4 mm
Weight	340 g

By: www.dpreview.com

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© Jack Howard Click photo for more images of the Think Tank Airport International.

Think Tank Photo is running a holiday promotion on its Airport International rolling camera bag. Customers who purchase the bag by January 1, 2008, will receive a free AI Low Divider Set, which usually runs $49. The divider set fits inside the Airport International to create room for both photo gear and a laptop. Go to Think Tanks’s Web site for further details on the promotion.

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The Photographers Eye is a book about learning to see and visualize a photograph before you ever snap a picture. The composition and design of a photograph is one of those enigmas that some people seem to naturally have, while others have to work at to get it right. The fact is, though, the composition and design of an image is one of the most important aspects of your vision. To get it wrong is to lose the grasp of the viewer taking in your work.

The digital age has brought two new elements to design. First, there is the instant feed back from the camera. This gets the photographer more involved at conception. The second element is the image editing capabilities that are available today. These allow one to continue the design process long after the shutter has snapped.

The Photographers Eye sets out with the goal of making anyone envision and shoot great digital photographs. It intends to be different in that it wants to explore the actual process of taking photographs — to show how photographers compose an image. The Photographers Eye breaks down into six chapters covering 191 pages.

Chapter 1, "The Image Frame," examines how photographs are created within a spatial context called the viewfinder frame. You will look at frame shape, cropping, filling the frame, placement, and how to work with frames within frames.

Chapter 2, "Design Basics," shows how composition is essentially the organization of all the possible graphic elements within the frame. It is formed from graphic design principles and follows the same guidelines as would any other graphic art. These include Gestalt perception, balance, dynamic tension, patterns, visual weight, and content.

Chapter 3, "Graphic and Photographic Elements," explains what graphic elements are; two dimensional forms that appear within the picture frame. Because in painting and illustration there is no need to be realistic, abstract treatment is acceptable. Most times though, in photography, you have to use what is there to direct the viewer to your intentions. Here you will explore points, horizontal and vertical lines, curves, motion, moment, and exposure.

Chapter 4, "Composing with Light and Color," brings out what the effects of tone and color have on an image. Tone and color are two separate, yet related concepts that influence our perception of a photograph's meaning. Freeman explains the dramatic modeling through the use of lights and darks. You will examine chiaroscuro, color in composition, relationships of color, muted colors, and the use of black and white.

Chapter 5, "Intent," explains why, in the end, what determines the composition of a photograph is the purpose. What the purpose is should be examined before you make the compositional decisions. These intents can be reactive, planned, simple, complex, conventional, or challenging.

Chapter 6, "Process," within photography, is one of those things that is difficult to analyze. This is partially due to the fact that the composition and taking of the photo is, in comparison to painting and the other arts, one of relatively short duration. Many times even the photographer is unaware of the thought process, but nonetheless there is an evaluation and structure at play, and it is discussed in this chapter.

The Photographers Eye is one of those wonderful finds that brightens one's day, and gets them pumped up to go on a shoot. This, in my opinion, is one of the best books on composition I have ever had the pleasure to read. It is easy to read and not filled with empty jargon.

Even though the topic of design and composition is certainly subjective, the topics are concrete and can guide you down the path to understanding what works. It is very well thought out, it covers the hard basics: lines, shapes, and balance, as well as the more esoteric topics such as chiaroscuro, the search for order, and reactive thought.

If you are looking to improve the compositional aspect of your photography, if you want the design of your images to improve, then look no further than The Photographers Eye. I rate this a must have.

From: feeds.blogcritics.org

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Photoxels review the Nikon Coolpix P5100 where they write - ‘The Nikon Coolpix P5100 gives the photographer a quiet feeling of confidence that it can handle any photographic challenge. It will appeal to the serious amateur photographer desiring a compact and light digital camera with an effective image stabilization and full control over camera operations…. The Nikon Coolpix P5100 strikes a good balance between ease of use and richness of features: it is point-and-shoot easy to use and also packed-full of practical features advanced photographers like to have in their digital cameras.’

Source: www.livingroom.org.au

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PhotoShelter has opened its online stock photo marketplace, The PhotoShelter Collection, to buyers. First announced and opened to photographers for submissions in September 2007, the Collection now offers image buyers access to an edited selection of images. According to PhotoShelter, more than 5,000 photographers have uploaded over 225,000 images to the Collection to date. The Collection complements PhotoShelter’s Personal Archive service, which provides a platform for individual photographers’ image archives and portfolios, and includes e-commerce tools. Images in the Collection are available for immediate royalty-free or rights-managed licensing, and can be purchased with a credit card or corporate account.

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The other type of fisheye lens available is the diagonal variety which squeezes a 180° angle of view into a standard rectangular format. This new 10mm F2.8 EX DC Fisheye HSM from Sigma is just such a lens. That said, it captures a true 180° vista only when mounted in front of a Nikon DX sensor - users of Canon and Sigma DSLRs make do with 167° and 154° respectively. A built-in lens hood and HSM focusing are here and the lens will focus down to 1.8cm (0.7 in) from the front surface of the lens giving a reproduction ratio of 1:3.3.

Press Release:

Fisheye lens with close up ability designed exclusively for use
with APS-C size digital SLR cameras

10mm F2.8 EX DC FISHEYE HSM

• Fisheye lens designed specifically for APS-C digital SLR cameras
• 13.5cm minimum focusing distance and 1:3.3 maximum magnification allows close up
  photography
• Equipped with HSM allowing full-time manual focus override
• Equisolid angle projection system is possible for art and scientific use

The Sigma Corporation is pleased to announce the launch of the new 10mm F2.8 EX DC FISHEYE HSM lens.

This autofocus fisheye lens is designed for use with digital SLR cameras equipped with APS-C size image
sensors. The Nikon version produces a diagonal angle of view of 180° （154° for Sigma, 167° for Canon）.
The diagonal field of view of this fisheye lens produces striking images with exaggerated perspective and
distortion. The minimum focusing distance of 13.5cm/5.3inch, and maximum magnification 1:3.3 allows
subjects to be as close as 1.8cm/0.7inch from the lens’ front element. This close focusing capability allows
close-up photography and also it is possible to make use of large depth of field that covers wide range of
subjects. The Integral hood blocks out extraneous light and the Super Multi-Layer Coating minimizes flare
and ghosting, creating superior image quality. The HSM （Hyper Sonic Motor） ensures fast and quiet
autofocusing and allows full-time manual focus override by rotation of the focus ring. This lens is supplied
with a gelatin filter holder at the rear, allowing the use of gelatin filters.

10mm F2.8 EX DC FISHEYE HSM specifications

By: www.dpreview.com

Read the rest of this entry »

Both CogniSign and BrightQube are developing new technologies to search for stock photos using visual clues rather than the traditional keyword-based model.

Monterey, CA–At this year’s 6Sight conference, two companies showed innovative tools for finding stock photos online. CogniSign demonstrated its xcavator visual search technology, which is currently in beta, and BrightQube showed its recently launched multiple-source search engine.

Xcavator offers users three different ways to search for images: by keyword, by visual comparison, and by color. The visual comparison search lets the user select a photo to find similar images. To search by color, the user chooses a color from a virtual palette. Hue can be adjusted with a circular slider on the outside of the palette, and intensity can be adjusted with a slider inside, allowing very precise color selections. Image, color, and keyword searches can be combined to refine a search. In its current beta version, xcavator searches iStockphoto’s collection. CogniSign plans to end the beta phase and make several other stock collections accessible with its search tools by 2008. You can try the xcavator search tools out for yourself at http://xcavator.net.

BrightQube’s recently launched search engine includes photos from numerous stock collections and individual photographers in a multiple-image display that the company calls its Dynamic Mosaic. To search for an image, a user enters a keyword and views hundreds of results as thumbnail images in the Mosaic. This provides a visual overview of the search results, which the user can then explore by zooming into the Mosaic and magnifying individual images. Enlarged images show pricing and other information. Additional search tools include filters for price and image resolution limits, as well as selectable criteria for sorting images. Try a BrightQube search at www.brightqube.com.

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