Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Google Labs 'Similar images' allows you to search using pictures
Friday, September 18, 2009
Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008 showcase
This year’s competition attracted over 2,500 photographers who together submitted more than 6,700 images. The resulting exhibition of sixty works, includes the four prize-winners and the winner of the Godfrey Argent Award, which this year goes to the photographer who submitted the best portrait in black and white.
Through editorial, advertising and fine art images, the mix of international entrants have explored a range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family.
Featuring many images previously unpublished, the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008 represents a unique opportunity to see some of the most exciting contemporary portrait photographers working today.
PRIZE WINNERS
The prize winners for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008 were announced at the awards ceremony on the 4 November 2008 at the National Portrait Gallery:
The First Prize was awarded to Lottie Davies for Quints, 2008 from an ongoing project entitled Memories & Nightmares
Lottie Davies was born in Guildford, Surrey in 1971. After studying philosophy at the University of St Andrews she moved to London to learn about photography and work as a photographic assistant. She has been a professional photographer working for a range of lifestyle and travel magazines since 2000 and has exhibited at the AOP Gallery, the Schweppes Photographic Portrait Prize (2006) and at the Foto 8 Summer Show 2008. Memories & Nightmares is a series of portraits represented by the subject’s early childhood memories or nightmares. Quints, shot on large format, was inspired by her friend Caroline’s nightmare in which she was pregnant with quintuplets. Davies used a model, Alicia, to stand in for the subject to allow herself greater freedom to interpret the story and the quints were modelled by Alicia’s niece, Marla.
The Second Prize was awarded to Hendrik Kerstens for Bag, 2007
Hendrik Kerstens was born in 1956 in The Hague, Netherlands. Winner of the 2001 Dutch Panl Award Kerstens is a self-taught photographer who initially turned to a model close at hand, his daughter Paula. Since starting to photograph Paula in 1995 Kersten’s work has been exhibited in over 40 exhibitions across Europe and the United States. In his portraits Paula is always depicted as being austere, serene and illuminated with a characteristic ‘dutch’ light. In September he will open his first solo New York exhibition at the Witzenhausen Gallery. Kersten’s short-listed portrait was conceived in New York when he noticed the excessive amount of plastic bags given away in shops. As a humorous reaction to this environmental problem he photographed the plastic bag in the style of a seventeenth century cap.
Third Prize was awarded to Catherine Balet for Ines connected with Amina, 2007 from the series Connected.
Born on the outskirts of Paris in 1959, Balet graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris and began her career as a painter. Since 1998 she has progressively turned towards photography and works as a freelance photographer for French and International publications. Specialising in portraiture, her first book, IDENTITY, was published by Steidl in Sept 2006 and examines the social and aesthetic significance of signs, labels and dress codes of European teenagers. Her work has been exhibited in three solo exhibitions in Paris and is now touring major French cities. Ines connected with Amina is the first image from a new series called Connected which explores the themes of intimacy, technology, and globalisation. The series utilises the lighting of the computers, telephones and i-Pods for long exposure portraits of young people in their everyday technological environments.
Fourth Prize was awarded to Tom Stoddart for Murdoch Reflects, 2007 commissioned by Time magazine
Born in 1953 Tom Stoddart began his photographic career on a local newspaper in his native north-east England. During his time as a photojournalist he has witnessed the war in Lebanon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the election of President Nelson Mandela, the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the wars against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Notably, in 1997 Tony Blair gave Stoddart exclusive access to his election campaign, and his recent extensive work on Africa’s AIDS pandemic has been widely published and exhibited. Established as one of the world’s most respected photojournalists, Stoddart works closely with Getty Images, to produce powerful photo essays on the serious world issues of our time. His shortlisted portrait is of Rupert Murdoch in his office at News International in Wapping to illustrate a story in Time magazine about his $5 billion acquisition of the Dow Jones & Company.
Godfrey Argent Award
The Godfrey Argent Award, which this year goes to the photographer who submitted the best portrait in black and white, was awarded to Vanessa Winship for Sweet Nothings, 2007 from the series Sweet Nothings
This winning portrait is from a series of portraits inspired by a government campaign to educate rural girls. Winship visited a dozen schools to produce forty-five images of girls posing with their sisters or closest friends.
Born in 1960, Winship’s own childhood was spent in Lincolnshire where she developed an interest in black and white photographs of her family. This youthful fascination has continued into her own projects which are exclusively black and white. ‘For me, it feels strange that people associate black and white photography with reality and truth’ she says. ‘Yes, I am trying to be honest in my work, but I am not presenting it as reality. It is very much a two-dimensional representation of my perception of something.’
You can read more about the exhibition,check out opening times and listen to interview with the artists on the National Portrait Gallery web-site.
Friday, September 11, 2009
9 - Trailer - Films Coming Soon in Cinemas - Movie Trailers, Reviews from MyMovies.Net
Release Date: 30/10/2009
Certificate: TBC
Genre: Action / Adventure / Animation / Cult / Fantasy
Director: Shane Acker, Tim Burton
Producer: Timur Bekmambatov
Cast: Elijah Wood, Jennifer Connelly, Martin Landau, John C. Reilly, Christopher Plummer, Crispin Glover
Synopsis:
When 9 ("The Lord of the Ring‘s" Elijah Wood) first comes to life, he finds himself in a post–apocalyptic world. All humans are gone, and it is only by chance that he discovers a small community of others like him taking refuge from fearsome machines that roam the earth intent on their extinction. Despite being the neophyte of the group, 9 convinces the others that hiding will do them no good. They must take the offensive if they are to survive, and they must discover why the machines want to destroy them in the first place. As they‘ll soon come to learn, the very future of civilization may depend on them.
This is a delightful animated feature and reminds of the Blender open source movie. Highly recommended!
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
Pixelmator 1.5 Spider released!
Here is a list of the new features and bug fixes:
New Features
• Save for Web
• Slice Tool
• Trim
• Reveal All command
• Info Labels indicate: elliptical and rectangular selection size; Magic Eraser, Magic Wand, Paint Bucket tolerance level; Eyedropper color (when clicked and dragged); Crop, slice, and transformation dimensions; Gradient tool angle and radius; and guide position
• New File Info sheet
• New Export sheet
• New Image Size sheet
• New Canvas Size sheet
• Send to Mail and iPhoto
• Italian language
• Web Colors plug-in for Apple Color Picker (automatically installed on launch of Pixelmator 1.5)
• Mac OS X Snow Leopard support
Improvements
• PSD, PDF, layered TIFF, and images from iPhoto Library will now open as new documents
• Double-clicking a Painting tool opens the Brushes palette
• Double-clicking Gradient tool opens the Gradients palette
• Edit menu bar items are enabled when entering a license code
• Welcome screen improved
• Creator type is now set for PXM documents only
• German, French, and Spanish localizations updated
• Minor user interface improvements added
• Help documentation updated
Corrected Bugs
• A bug that caused incorrect Levels and Curves histogram when layer opacity is lower than 100%
• A crash that occurred when opening some TIFF documents
• A crash that occurred when printing some small images
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Tuesday, September 08, 2009
ShortCourses.com - The On-line Library of Digital Photography
An excellent web-site that offers online courses in digital photography is http://www.shortcourses.com
They offer a range of courses on such topics as:
- Digital Cameras and Other Photographic Equipment
- Using Your Digital Camera
- Digital Photography Workflow
Powered by ScribeFire.
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Thursday, September 03, 2009
Panasonic Introduces New LUMIX DMC-GF1 :
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Canon announce EOS 7D DSLR
Megapixels 18 Sensor type CMOS Autofocus points 19 Crop factor 1.6x Lens mount EF/EF-S Metering system 63-zone TTL Frames per second 8 ISO min 100 ISO max 6400 Screen size 3 inch Card format CompactFlash Type I/ II
(Microdrive compatible
UDMA compatible),
external storage with
WFT-E5Battery model LP-E6 Weight (g) 820 Size 148.2 x 110.7 x 73.5mm Aspect ratio 3:2 Autofocus system TTL-CT-SIR Exposure modes Auto (Stills and Movie),
CreativeAuto, Program
AE, Shutter priority AE,
Aperture priority AE,
Manual(Stills and Movie),
Custom (x3)Screen resolution 920,000 File formats JPEG, RAW Flash type In-built, Hotshoe Flash guide number 12 Flash metering E-TTL II Flash sync speed 1/250 Integrated cleaning Yes Live view Yes Buffer depth (raw) 15 Buffer depth (jpg) 126 Shutter speed max 30 sec Shutter speed min 1/8000 sec VF coverage 100% Vertical grip BG-E7
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