This just in from The Telegraph. Images of James Dean and Clint Eastwood star in an exhibition to celebrate the changing faces of Hollywood and the evolution of portrait photography. The images, on display at the Getty Images Gallery in London, depict 1920s icons from the silver screen through to present-day box office heavyweights. The portraits were selected from the Getty Images’ archives, to represent both the influential individuals and photographic styles which shaped the decades. In addition to highlighting the changing fashions and faces of Hollywood, the images also offer an insight into the changing technology, techniques and styles of portrait photography enabled by the early cameras, to the high resolution digital SLRs of today. The show opened on March 8 and and runs until April 3. Admission is free. Visit www.gettyimagesgallery.co.uk

You can visit The Telegraph for a peek at some of the photos on display.

"There’s one thread running through the PMA photography trade show this year: mirrorless, interchangeable-lens cameras. These cameras, pioneered by Olympus and Panasonic with their Micro Four Thirds format, have become very popular with pros and serious amateurs who want great results but don’t want to lug around a big DSLR. Samsung has already shown its commitment to its NX format with eight lenses announced in under two months, and Sony is also getting in on the game sometime this year with a mirrorless Alpha.

"This is great news, but what does it mean for the DSLR, which has for years been the fastest growing sector of the camera market? A DSLR used to be the only way to go if you wanted a camera that had a big sensor and a reasonably responsive shutter. The other benefits, like interchangeable lenses, are arguably only there for the more serious. Take a look around you next time you’re in a tourist spot and you’ll see mostly sub-$1,000 SLRs with the kit zooms still on the front."

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/mirror-less-cameras-the-death-of-dslrs

As Polaroid tries to pull itself out of bankruptcy, the classic camera-maker has resorted to a last-ditch effort to free up funds — the company has announced it will be selling many of its signature prints at auction June 21 and 22 at Sotheby’s in New York.

Of course, these are not just any photographs up for sale. Pieces from masters like Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, William Wegman, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lucas Samaras will be on display, amounting to a collection of 1,200 individual photographs. The auction is expected to fetch a record $10 million.

The complete article can be foud here.

Paul Birwell has a wonderful commentary on not becoming a pro photographer. Some very good advice. Keep up the good work Paul.

1. Don’t show your work to anyone other than family or friends.
2. Design your web site so that it’s impossible for a photo buyer to do business with you.
3. Only post your “second-tier” images on your web site.
4. Bring only your best images to an image critique.
5. Just do photography.
6. Stop learning.
7. Don’t look at other people’s images.
8. Don’t treat your photography like a business.
9. Just take photos; don’t tell stories.
10. Treat ethics as an inconvenience to be avoided.

The full commentary can be found here.

A new article "Composing with Color" by Alan Briot is available at Luminous Landscape. This essay is part of Chapter 5 in Alain’s second book Mastering Composition, Inspiration and Personal Style.  The book was published in August 2009.  You can find more information about this book, and sign up for Alain’s pre-announcement list, at this link:http://beautiful-landscape.com/Articles-Book-2-1.html.

"Color is all around us.  And yet when we photograph in color we rarely consider color as an element of composition.  Certainly, we do see the color in the scenes, the objects, and the elements that we include in our images.  However we do not, at least not without training, see color as an element that changes the composition of our photographs depending on how we use it."

The entire article can be found here.

In the spirit of computational photography one artist, Nikki Graziano, overlays graphs and equations on her work. The entire article with numerous images can be found at wired.com.

"Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.

"When graphed, this trigonometry function produces an ever-repeating wave of peaks and valleys that mirror the natural curves Graziano sees in plants." (October 2008.)

  image copyright Nikki Graziano

Found a few good links at Wikipedia for computational processing that I thought would be good to share.

• Panorama mosaicing
  • Steve Mann and R. W. Picard "Virtual bellows: constructing high-quality images from video.", In Proceedings of the IEEE First International Conference on Image Processing, Austin, Texas, November 13-16, 1994 [Adobe PDF]
  • Steve Mann and R.W. Picard "Video orbits of the projective group a simple approach to featureless estimation of parameters ", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, pp. 1281 - 1295, Vol. 6, Iss. 9, 1997
  • Szeliski, R., Shum, H.-Y. (1997). "Creating full view panoramic image mosaics and environment maps", Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM Press, pp. 251-258.

• Matte extraction
  • Joshi, N., Matusik W., Avidan S. (2006). "Natural Video Matting using Camera Arrays", ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH).
  • Chuang, Y.-Y., Curless, B., Salesin, D.H., Szeliski, R. (2001). "Video Matting of Complex Scenes", ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 243-248.

• Digital photomontage (see also photomontage)
  • Agarwala, A., Dontcheva, M., Agrawala, M., Drucker, S., Colburn, A., Curless, B., Salesin, D., Cohen, M. (2004). "Interactive digital photomontage", Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM Press, pp. 294-302.

• High dynamic range imaging
  • S. Mann. Compositing multiple pictures of the same scene. In Proceedings of the 46th Annual IS&T Conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 9-14 1993. The Society of Imaging Science and Technology.
  • Mann, S. (1994). "Being 'undigital' with digital cameras: Extending dynamic range by combining differently exposed pictures", MIT Media Laboratory Perceptual Computing Section Technical Report TR-323, also appears in Proc. IS&T 46th Annual Conference, May 1995, pp. 422-428.
  • Debevec, P.E., Malik, J. (1997). "Recovering high dynamic range radiance maps from photographs" , Proc. ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM Press, pp. 369-378.
  • Steve Mann, "Comparametric Equations with Practical Applications in Quantigraphic Image Processing", IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Vol 9, No.8, August, 2000

• All-focus imaging
  • Haeberli, P., "A Multifocus Method for Controlling Depth of Field", Graphica Obscura, October, 1994.