Here is a brief excerpt of a DVD culled from a talk that Henri Cartier-Bresson gave in 1973. Coupled with some of his most famous images, he compares the photographic medium to ” sketchbook, a psychoanalytical couch, a warm kiss, and a machine gun”

Of course, this is just a taste. You can purchase the full length DVD from ICP (International Center of Photography).

Crazy week, right? We’ve talked about the tools and the artists. Nice.

And the winners of the weekly giveaway this week are: Galina K. of Brooklyn,NY gets the Daybooks, and Sheryll W. of Morrisville, PA will receive the Scott Kelby book.

Wait till you see what we have for you next week.

Happy Friday!

“Woah” – to quote Keanu Reeves.

That’s about what I said when I first took a look at the new iPHOTO, part of the iLife 08 package of applications introduced by Apple yesterday.
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This is the first major overhaul in 5 years of iPhoto and let’s see if it was worth the wait.

We like to check this stuff out for real and see how it works. It’s been installed on a macbook pro and put through a few paces.
Here’s what we found: Continue Reading »

Apple’s iLife package has just been refreshed. Here is a link for the video tour. We’ll pick up a copy and let you know how it REALLY works. (looks like a new menu in the edit feature: shadow slider adds a new option to up the game a bit.) A first look shows this changes everything for the snapshooter. Sharing (Mac-PC), uploading, organizing, display, everything has been touched.

So said one of the greatest photographers of the past century.

[photopress:bresson_2.jpg,full,alignright] The work of Henri Cartier-Bresson(1908-2004) embodies his concept of The Decisive Moment, with a sure eye,mind and hand capturing the exact perfect occurence of emotion and design in the only medium capable of capturing the reality of such an expression in a split second: photography. In addition to being one of the founders of Magnum Photo Agency, the body of his work defines classic photography as many of us know it today.

And his photographs are not only the decisive moment of the street; his portraits of his contemporaries illustrate the the same revelation captured on film.

In 1973, an audio/video piece was put together with HCB, commenting on specific images, his philosophy of photography, and perception.

ICP, Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson Paris and Scholastic,Inc. produced this 18 minute DVD of the master and his work. We’ll post an excerpt later this week.

If you would like to spend some time with Henri Cartier-Bresson and assorted guests, like Richard Avedon, on the Charlie Rose Show,circa 2000, check out this link, you’ll love to see Richard Avedon in the second one. Or watch right here: Continue Reading »

We hope you dug the review the other day on Photoshop CS3. Yesterday when we made a trip to the Getty Museum for the Edward Weston show, the architecture of the museum is a perfect setting for a panoramic. And when we say panoramic, we mean Photomerge.[photopress:photomergex.jpg,full,alignright]

How good is the new version? Really ?.

We’re going to show you what we shot and what we ended up with.

( image to the right is detail of the Photomerge window with stitching options )

The sprawling grounds of the Getty allow you to turn your camera quite a few directions and compose a fairly graphic pana. You can go horizontal or vertical with some amazing results.

Now this one was done without a tripod, just tried to make sure the shots would have an overlap for the merge.
Not only is the merge virtually invisible, but you do have a choice of how you want to end up.

You can see in this first one, vertical was the way to go with the sculpture suspended for the ceiling.

In this next one, check out how the people sitting on one end of the shot are slightly curved to accommodate the natural curve of the shot.

And all I had was the 18-200 Nikon lens. Wide for sure ,but never wide enough.

The Perspective circle was ticked for this one. (see detail of program window to the right.)Can you see the merge? (samples on next page) Continue Reading »