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When Stefani Germanotta was working as a waitress in the West Village in the summer of 2005 (anyone know where?), her coworker Malgorzata Saniewska shot a series of photos of her at Germanotta’s parents’ apartment.
A year or two later, Germanotta became Lady Gaga.
Well, not quite. But the specifications are quite impressive:
The headline specifications are a new 22.3 Megapixel full-frame sensor with 100-25600 ISO sensitivity (expandable to 102,400 ISO), 1080p video at 24, 25 or 30fps and 720p at 50 or 60fps, a 61-point AF system (with 41 cross-type sensors), 6fps continuous shooting, a viewfinder with 100% coverage, 3.2in screen with 1040k resolution, 63-zone iCFL metering, three, five or seven frame bracketing, a new three-frame HDR mode, microphone and headphone jacks and twin memory card slots, one for Compact Flash, the other for SD; the control layout has also been adjusted and the build slightly improved. So while the resolution and video specs remain similar to its predecessor, the continuous shooting speed, AF system, viewfinder, screen and build are all improved, and again there’s the bonus of twin card slots.
DP Review and the Verge also have reviews and it’s available for preorder on Amazon for, whoa, $3500 (the kit lens is $800 more)..
I’ve gotta get over to the MoMA to see the Eugene Atget exhibition. PDN has a selection of photos from the show.
ps. And Cindy Sherman!
What you may have heard: This new kind of camera from Lytro allows you to take pictures without worrying about focusing until after the photos have been taken.
What’s totally cool that I didn’t know until this morning when I followed a link to Heather Champ’s Lytro photos: you can focus and refocus the photos on Lytro’s web site as much as you want. What a fun thing! Try it out with Heather’s photos or Lytro’s default picture gallery.
Bill Eppridge photographed all sorts of people skateboarding in NYC in the ’60s.
Taken by some of the world’s most iconic photographers, a selection of the best photographs ever published in Life magazine from 1936 to 1972. Here’s a photo of Mickey Mantle from 1965:
The caption reads:
In one of the most eloquent photographs ever made of a great athlete in decline, Yankee star Mickey Mantle flings his batting helmet away in disgust after another terrible at-bat near the end of his storied, injury-plagued career.
Mantle was only 33 when that photo was taken but he’d already had 13 extremely productive seasons under his belt and his last four seasons from ‘65 to ‘68 were not nearly as good.
Buzzfeed has a collection of every World Press Photo Contest winner from 1955 to the present. Some amazing photos but in general they do not paint a very kind picture of humanity.
Photographer Hana Pesut takes photos of couples wearing each other’s clothes.
(via @JamesJM)
A list of all the winners of the 2012 World Press Photo Photo Contest. I’m not particularly fond of the overall winner but there’s lots of great photography here.
I love these cauliflower explosions done by Brock Davis…you can find them in his Food Stuff set on Flickr. Here’s the Challenger explosion in cauliflower:
(via @josephholmes)
Camera shutters used to be verrrry slow so to help young kids stay still during the long exposure, the photographer would have the mother be in the frame but typically covered by a blanket or cloth. Like so:
(via cup of jo)
For his new book, Tim Mantoani took hundreds of portraits of photographers posing with prints of their most well-known work. Here’s Neil Leifer holding his photo of Ali standing over Liston.
(via sly oyster)
From photographer Steven Siegel, a reminder of what a magical shithole NYC was in the 1980s. Oh hey, here’s a hole in the Manhattan Bridge walkway:
See also kids digging up graves in Greenwood Cemetary, the abandoned West Side Highway, and what looks like a bombed-out Bushwick. (via gothamist)
Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.
(via stellar)
Inspired by a video of a chain-smoking two-year-old from Indonesia, photographer Frieke Janssens took a series of portraits of kids smoking.
A video shows how Janssens made the photos…the cigarettes were made of cheese.
From The Verge, a new-ish tech site, a mega-guide on everything you need to know about buying a camera. It starts at the beginning with the basics of photography, goes over ISO, aperture, shutter speed, megapixels, white balance, and the major types of camera.
If you’re new to digital photography, the three things you should acquaint yourself with first are the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. The three work in concert, and if you can manipulate and control them all, you’ll take fabulous photos without even touching the rest of your camera. Together, they’re known as the Exposure Triangle, because they control how much light you’re exposing the camera to (aperture), how sensitive the camera is to that light (ISO), and how long your exposure lasts (shutter speed).
I love everything about this…I scrolled through the entire list. This one was my favorite:
(via waxy)
In an excerpt from the introduction to Subway, his collection of photographs of the NYC subway, Bruce Davidson recalls how he came to start taking photos on the subway in the 1980s.
As I went down the subway stairs, through the turnstile, and onto the darkened station platform, a sinking sense of fear gripped me. I grew alert, and looked around to see who might be standing by, waiting to attack. The subway was dangerous at any time of the day or night, and everyone who rode it knew this and was on guard at all times; a day didn’t go by without the newspapers reporting yet another hideous subway crime. Passengers on the platform looked at me, with my expensive camera around my neck, in a way that made me feel like a tourist-or a deranged person.
At the beginning of this video, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, announces calmly:
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Yeah, no biggie.
Dress like your favorite nerdy folk: Nerd Girlfriend is a companion site to the excellent Nerd Boyfriend.
Gothamist has some photos of the new Apple Store in NYC’s Grand Central Terminal.
The company was obviously under tight constraints as to what they could do with the store (they would have loved to encase the whole thing in plexiglass probably), but from the looks of things, they did a marvelous job. There’s so little styling — the whole store is just tables and screens mostly — that it looks like the Apple Store not only belongs there, but that it’s been there forever, like Grand Central was designed with the Apple Store in mind. If you walk around Grand Central, not a lot of the other retail locations can say that, if any. (photo by katie sokoler)
In Focus delivers part one of an eventual three-part look at 2011 in photography. 2011 was a remarkably eventful year.
Here’s part two. See also Buzzfeed’s list of the 45 most powerful images of 2011.
Before he made movies, Stanley Kubrick was a photographer for Look magazine. Here are a selection of Kubrick’s photos of New York City life in the 1940s, even then displaying his keen cinematic eye.
Prints are available. (thx, mark)
Ted Sabarese shot a photo series of people and the fish they look like.
(via ★swissmiss)
Over the past two years, the NYPD has been taking panoramic images of crime scenes in an attempt to better record the evidence.
Each panorama takes between 3 to 30 minutes to produce, depending on the available light, and is added to a database where detectives can access it. Before the switch to the Panoscan, crime scene images sometimes took days to process. Now, soon after the photos are posted, investigators can point and click over evidence from a scene that they might have missed in the hectic hours after the crime.
I wish these were bipartisan, but this suprisingly large collection of prominent Republicans made up with clown paint is still pretty amazing. Here’s Texas governor Rick Perry:
Over at In Focus, Alan Taylor has a selection of submissions from the upcoming National Geographic photo contest. Some really beauties in ther…whoa, UFO!
New from Lomography: the Lomokino, a movie camera that can shoot a 144-frame movie on any 35mm film. And you hand-crank it! Here’s a sample:
Gothamist has a collection of photos of the abandoned train platform underneath the Waldorf=Astoria.
Over the weekend we had a chance to visit the long-abandoned Waldorf-Astoria train platform, which allowed VIPs to enter the hotel in a more private manner — most famously it was used by Franklin D. Roosevelt, possibly to hide the fact that he was in a wheelchair suffering from polio. The mysterious track, known as Track 61, still houses the train car and private elevator, which were both large enough for FDR’s armor-plated Pierce Arrow car. Legend has it that the car would drive off the train, onto the platform and straight into the elevator, which would lead to the hotel’s garage.
Photos by Sam Horine.
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