| |||||||||||||||||||
Search
So the other proverbial shoe has dropped. There will never be an Adobe Creative Suite 7. Software boxes are gone.
Instead, Adobe is moving to a purely subscription-based model. Everyone’s going to have to pay monthly. Very interesting, with a lot of pros and cons for the user. The company is also introducing a couple of new hardware products - a wireless pen and ruler. (though the latter promotes the incorrect myth that Napoleon was a short man. Tsk!)
Well. This is an interesting development! Sigma have announced a new 18-35mm f/1.8 lens. That’s right - f/1.8 in a zoom lens. It’s only for subframe DSLRs and not full frame (easier to illuminate the smaller sensor area), but it’s still a remarkable technical achievement. The lens is a bit on the short side - it’d have been really useful for portraiture if it were a bit longer - but considering what they’ve produced, I’m not surprised. Guess we’ll see what the quality and pricing are going to be!
The super-luxurious mondo giant sized edition of Sebastião Salgado’s new book, Genesis. On display at the Taschen store, London, for his book signing. In case it’s not obvious how huge this book is, those are power sockets down on the floor. It’s 18×27 inches in size.
Gorgeous photos, but I went for the standard merely large edition. More practical, you see.
The British Museum has a fascinating exhibition on right now of Ice Age art - sculptures and artefacts created by our ancient ancestors tens of thousands of years ago. There’s tons of amazing stuff on show, but one of the most fascinating things to me was a simple bone disc.
The disc is carved with a picture of a bovine animal on each side. And there’s a hole in the middle. But the two images on each side line up perfectly.
So the theory is that this was essentially a really incredibly early thaumatrope. You know the simple trick of drawing a bird on one side of a card and a cage on the other? You then attach the card to two cords and spin it around its axis, and persistence of vision causes the two images to superimpose in our mind, creating the illusion of a caged bird. These were “invented” in the early 1800s.
Apparently not. It seems that persistence of vision was actually being exploited by ancient humans thousands upon thousands of years ago. Amazing.
(note: this isn’t an April Fools Day post - I just happened to visit the museum today!)
Apparently an an ordinary consumer camera, encased in a waterproof diving shell, has survived a 5 year journey across the oceans!
My photos from the Burning Man 2012 festival are now online!
Adobe’s Camera Raw software turns 10 yesterday. Man. Ten years.
American photographer Jay Maisel, his photos, and his ginormous house.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3U7bnIYcvRM
The BBC has a slideshow of some fascinating photos by American photographer Joel Meyerowitz.
“Photography is brilliant at describing and yet not letting you know.”
So I’ve been shopping around for a desk lamp recently. I just want something solid and reliable and convenient to use. Not a complicated problem, one might think.
I want something like the Anglepoise lamp my father bought back in the 1960s. This is a two-arm sprung lamp that holds its position wherever you point it. (Americans who don’t know this brand - think of the Luxo Jr film by Pixar. Anglepoise licensed the spring design to Norwegian firm Luxo, which was later immortalised in the early CGI short.)
