Galaxy Hyper Speed 120mm Film April 15, 2016
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Galaxy Hyper Speed, Metaphor Online, Petapixel , comments closed
Peta Pixel continually surprises me with its discoveries. This week has been incredible. The Lytro Cinema Camera, credit card sized film that doubles as a camera and now Galaxy. Time to pull out the Hasselblad film cameras again. Direct positive photo paper is not typically the domain of 120 medium format film cameras. For those you usually use … well … film. But the folks at Galaxy Photography are changing the game with Galaxy Hyper Speed 120: rolls of direct positive photosensitive paper for medium format cameras.
http://petapixel.com/2016/04/14/galaxys-direct-positive-photo-paper-now-available-medium-format/
The product is a followup to the Galaxy Hyper Speed direct positive photo paper the company Kickstarted last year. But where that paper is meant to be used with large format cameras or pinhole setups, the Hyper Speed 120 can be used inside the many readily available 120 film cameras out there.
I will definitely try out the large format and 120 mm stock initially and show my results on this site. On a website the film looks great, nice tonal range and contrast. Quite excited by the concept.
It’s the same exact ISO 120 direct positive paper, just wrapped up and ready to go for a different format.
Photographic Storeage: a potent new technology February 18, 2016
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online, Petapixel , comments closedThis Glass Disc Can Store 360 TB of Your Photos for 13.8 Billion Years: a story by Michael Zhang Peta Pixel
If you back up your photos on optical disks or storage drives, there’s a good chance your data won’t last as long as you do due to things known as “disc rot” and “data rot“. But what if you want to ensure that your precious photos live longer than you? Good news: a new “eternal” storage technology may be on the horizon.
Scientists have created nanostructured glass discs that can storage digital data for billions of years.
Researchers at the University of Southampton announced this week that they’ve figured out how to store huge amounts of data on small glass discs using laser writing. They call it five dimensional (5D) digital data because in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation plays a role too.
The glass storage discs can hold a whopping 360 terabytes each, are stable at temperatures up to 1,000°C (1,832°F), and are expected to keep the data intact for 13.8 billion years at room temperature (anything up to 190°C, or 374°F).
It’s a discovery that “opens a new era of eternal data archiving” because the discs have “virtually unlimited lifetime,” the university says, and museums, national archives, and libraries could benefit from having this eternal storage.
So far, scientists have preserved important documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Magna Carta, and Kings James Bible on individual discs that will likely survive the human race.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recorded on a 5D glass disc.The researchers are now looking for companies to help bring this data storage technology to market. No word on when it might appear or whether it will be available and affordable to ordinary photographers, but perhaps one day we’ll be able to store our entire lifetime body of photos on a single disc that is guaranteed to survive us (and all our descendants).
Image credits: Photographs by the University of Southampton
CLERA August 13, 2015
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor, Metaphor Online, Petapixel , comments closed
Photographer Anton Orlov has created what he believes is the world’s first camera that’s both completely transparent and fully functional. It’s called CLERA, short for Clear Camera, and is a camera that you can also look into while a projected photo is being exposed.
Orlov first got the idea for this camera while working in a dark box with wet plate collodion photography. He noticed that the sunlight streaming in through the red windows didn’t cause any light fogging in the resulting tintype photo.
“That’s when it struck me,” he writes on his blog. “Why not make a camera out of red material that would filter out UV and blue light!?”
Orlov then set out to turn his camera idea into reality. What he ended up creating was a simple daguerreotype box camera with a 19th-century Petzval lens purchased on eBay, red sheets of a nearly indestructible polycarbonate, and a spare 4×5 camera back.
After days of experimentation and “debugging,” Orlov figured out how to make the camera work flawlessly in any condition. Here are some test shots created along the way (some show some fogging):
So what’s the science behind this? “It’s rather simple really,” Orlov tells PetaPixel. “Quite a few photo materials are not sensitive to red light (think a red safelight in any darkroom — paper there doesn’t fog) and so red light being all around those materials is no problem.”
“These materials include the first photo technique the daguerreotype, tintype, photo paper both positive and negative, lithographic and orthochromatic films, and others that I likely missing right now,” he says. “If it was panchromatic material like regular black and white films we mostly see today they would surely fog to oblivion with that much light around.”
Orlov is now selling custom CLERA cameras to photographers who are interested. The camera can be designed around a particular lens of your choice — just drop him an emailto get the process started. Pricing is $350 for 4×5 (and smaller), $500 for 5×7, and $700 for 8×0.
A CLERA 2.0 is also on the way: Orlov says he’s working on a sliding box design that allows for various lenses and shorter focusing distances (the current camera has a min distance of 6 feet).
(via The Photo Palace via Phogotraphy)
The World’s Most Expensive Photo December 13, 2014
Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Metaphor Online, Petapixel, Uncategorized , comments closed
The airways and Internet tubes have been filled with news that Peter Lik has sold a black and white photo of Antelope Canyon for a record setting $6.5 million, raising eyebrows amongst many photographers. This tops the previous record holder, Andreas Gursky, by nearly $2.2m.
Andreas Gursky’s Rhine II sold for $4.2m – the most expensive (verified) photo ever.
As with his 2010 piece, One, the purported sale was to a private collector, and therefore there was no way to verify the claim. Rumors have swirled for years that Lik’s investors “buy” his works at absurd prices as a marketing stunt to generate interest in his work. Lik has multiple galleries in the US and in his home country of Australia, and aggressive sales tactics are a hallmark of the galleries’ style.
Price, of course, is arbitrary, and one could make the argument that the eye-rolling is rooted in jealousy. But I think that this is naive and dismisses the collective taste, experience and knowledge of most photographers. Let’s be honest, this is not a remarkable image in any sense of the word. Nor is it a remarkable unremarkable image like Gursky’s Rhein II.
Sara Friedlander, Vice President, Head of Evening Sales at Christie’s explained that the price of a photo in the art world is based on an amalgamation of uniqueness, provenance and scale. You can dispute the validity of the art world’s own self-righteousness and tendency to boost the price of its favorites, but you can’t dispute Friedlander’s criteria.
