Posts Tagged ‘business’
January 24th, 2012 by Allison Gibson Posted in Blog, News
9to5mac is reporting that shortly before he passed away Steve Jobs met with Lytro CEO Ren Ng to discuss cameras, product design, and the ways in which he might apply Lytro’s groundbreaking light field technology into a new generation of iPhone cameras. According to “Inside Apple,” the forthcoming book by Adam Lashinsky, which 9to5mac excerpts in their report, “At Jobs’s request, [Ng] agreed to send him an email outlining three things he’d like Lytro to do with Apple.”
“Jobs actively pursued his goal of reinventing photography, asking the CEO of Lytro to outline three specific things that the company would want to work on with Apple,” reports 9to5mac.
If you’ve forgotten, Lytro is the tiny rectangle camera designed by Ng—a Stanford PhD—that captures “living pictures” that are focused after the fact by capturing an image’s entire light field data in one click. The “living picture” bit means that the image is forever adabtable. Now imagine if this technology were applied to the ubiquitous iPhone camera, which, as 9to5mac points out, is already “mobile photography at its finest.”
Give the circumstances now it’s uncertain whether the Lytro/Apple mashup will ever see the (excuse the pun) “light” of day, but it is a pretty exciting prospect to imagine.
(Gizmodo, via 9to5mac)
January 19th, 2012 by Allison Gibson Posted in Blog
End of the Roll by Creativity103 – Flickr Creative Commons
The NPR/Public Radio International program “To the Point” today invited photographer Eamonn McCabe on air to reflect on the news that Kodak just filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. I listened to the segment in my car, on the way back to the office from lunch, and as I did so I was struck by the irony that by the end of the show McCabe—who is the former Picture Editor at the Guardian newspaper and an award-winning photographer himself—ended up holding fast and proud to the idea that digital photography is inferior to film photography and that it is a dubious format both in process and after an image is captured. This, in the wake of the news that the company that once dominated the world of photography—Kodak—was brought to its knees after its own reluctance to embrace digital technology.
At the top of the segment, McCabe says that he is “just staggered that [Kodak] just couldn’t see this digital revolution coming and couldn’t invest in it,” and that “to be so arrogant and conservative not to change, I just find staggering.” Later on in the conversation, when host Warren Olney urges McCabe to discuss the “quality of the product” in terms of digital versus film, McCabe talks enthusiastically about his Kodachrome days and admits his concern that nobody knows how long digital output will last. “We assume it’s going to last forever,” he says, “but does anyone know?” These days, McCabe is a half film, half digital photographer, though he says, “The trouble with digital is that it’s very hard to fall in love with a digital camera.”
Here’s where things take a turn: “I have a theory,” McCabe says, “Everybody’s taking loads of pictures now on their iPhone…and their digital cameras, but who’s looking at the stuff that’s taken?…You’re taking these pictures, and you might show them to somebody in a bar or somebody at work, but you don’t ever print it.” He calls this “the great mistake of digital.”
He goes on to wax nostalgic about the family photo albums of his childhood—which is all fine and good—but he seems erroneously out of touch with the ways in which photography is viewed these days. It’s as if he hasn’t considered the fact that digital images are seen by millions of eyes every day around the world via the largest family photo album imaginable: the Internet. With these comments, McCabe seems to believe that all digital images taken by the average person are forgotten the moment after the scene is captured and then quickly relegated to the deep dark confines of a hard drive. Has this man never heard of Flickr, for instance? Nevermind Instagram or Facebook—which now has an image collection ten thousand times larger than the Library of Congress.
While McCabe is certainly entitled to his opinion that film cameras are preferable to digital (because right now that’s not even the issue), what ultimately struck me as ironic after listening to his remarks was how he ended his talk by decrying digital photography in a strikingly similar manner to that same “arrogant and conservative” reluctance to change that he first labeled as Kodak’s big failure. This made me wonder: can you really acknowledge and learn from Kodak’s mistakes while you still harbor your own digital reluctance?
January 19th, 2012 by Allison Gibson Posted in Blog, News
In an expected move, Kodak filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy today. According to an announcement at the KodakTtransforms website, the iconic American photo company anticipates that reorganization as a result of chapter 11 will “enable Kodak to bolster liquidity in the U.S. and abroad, monetize non-strategic intellectual property, fairly resolve legacy liabilities, and enable the Company to focus on its most valuable business lines.” In other words, this is a far less grim turn of events that the full extinction of the brand many had predicted. The press release says that “the company has sufficient liquidity to operate its business during chapter 11″ and CEO Antonio Perez relates that “Chapter 11 gives us the best opportunities to maximize the value…of our technology portfolio: our digital capture patents…and our breakthrough printing and deposition technologies.”
(Kodak, via Engadget)
December 21st, 2011 by Allison Gibson Posted in Articles, Blog, Features, Tips
all images © Nicole Franzen
Thanks to photo apps like Instagram, and to our current culture of capture-and-overshare enthusiasm, I can no longer sit down to a meal without snapping a photo of the food. If you take a look at the various tags on Instagram related to the things that people consume throughout the day (#food #eats #noms) you’ll see that I am not alone in the habitual photographing of my meals.
But outside of the realm of iPhonography, there is also a thriving professional food photography world. Yes, this is an actual job that many fortunate (and talented!) folks have managed to carve out for themselves. While some great cooking glossies have gone by the wayside (RIP Gourmet), there is no shortage of outlets for professional photographers to showcase (and cash in on) their work online and in print.
Culinary Composition
Professional food photographers may make their deliciously-staged shots look simple, but the craft of capturing food is no easy feat. Even someone well versed in the other genres of photography will have to relearn the rules when shooting subjects as fickle as couscous or cheeseburgers. And reflective subjects like glasses full of bubbly can offer significant challenges in improper lighting.
So with those sorts of challenges in mind, I’ve asked Brooklyn-based food photographer, Nicole Franzen, to share her tips for shooting food, including advice on equipment, lighting, styling and composition. Nicole runs the gorgeous food and lifestyle blog, La Buena Vida, and her photo clients include Bon Appétit, Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn Magazines, and Gramercy Tavern, among many others.
Below are Nicole’s tips on the craft of photographing food. Grab a fork and dig in!
Read the rest of this entry »
December 6th, 2011 by Allison Gibson Posted in Blog, News
image via Flickr Creative Commons
According to the LA Times today, Kodak—once the kingpin of all things photography: Instamatic cameras! The first digital cameras! Film! Do you remember film?—is losing money at a rate of “more than $70 million a month” and that “Chapter 11 must lurk just around the corner.”
So how does a company that once dominated the field make such a plunging fall from grace? Well, it isn’t all that perplexing: they didn’t adapt in time or in the right ways to the onset of digital. As Michael Hiltzik of the LA Times points out, “Kodak…markets a process technology; and as the chemistry of film has yielded to digital electronics, consumer demand for Kodak’s traditional products has evaporated.”
That isn’t to say that we should completely write off any kind of future for Kodak, but that they confront a different type of obstacle than other declined companies with historical American and global significance. Unlike American car-maker GM, who despite its inefficiency “still manufactures a product with a huge market demand,” Kodak’s former market-dominating expertise has been deemed all but obsolete by digital processing, and yes of course, by the camera phone (which ironically now plagues the digital camera market ).
(via LA Times)
