OVER 500 LOCAL, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS PARTICIPATE AT MORE THAN 200 VENUES ACROSS THE GTA.

TORONTO — CONTACT, Toronto’s premier annual photography festival, is launching for it’s 11th year and taking over the GTA. From May 1 – 31, 2007, the work of professional, emerging and established photographers will transform Toronto into a huge art gallery as restaurants, government buildings, public spaces, street corners, hotels, schools, museums and galleries become the backdrop for their work.

Ovolab Geophoto 1.1: introducing the loupe for precise positioning of photos.
Press Release: Torino, Italy (Europe) — April 23, 2007 — Ovolab(R) today released version 1.1 of Ovolab Geophoto, its geotagging application for Mac OS X.

Geophoto is an all-in-one application for geotagging, collecting, browsing and sharing pictures.

Source: Science News
Written by Patrick L. Barry

On the Cover: In one new aspect of computational photography, a dome contains hundreds of precisely positioned flash units. A high-speed camera captures a frame as each flash fires in sequence. Computers can then relight the scene as they reconstruct it.
Debevec/University of Southern California

When a celebrity appears in a fan-magazine photo, there’s no telling whether the person ever wore the clothes depicted or visited that locale. The picture may have been “photoshopped,” we say, using a word coined from the name of the popular image-editing software, Adobe Photoshop.

But today’s image processing is just a prelude.

Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape writes about some of the hits and misses–equipment wise–that 3 weeks on an Antarctic Expedition might bring. I had my own equipment problems; losing 2 lenses due to moisture and an LCS on a camera.

From Michael: I traveled on this shoot with three camera systems – a Hasselblad H2 with a Phase One P45 back and three lenses (35mm, 50-110mm & 210mm); a Canon 1Ds MKII with three lenses, a 24-105mm IS, a 70-210mm f/2.8L IS and 100-400mm f/5.6 L IS; and a Leica M8 with a couple of lenses. In addition I had along a Macbook and four portable hard drives totaling 250 GB of storage. My software of choice for raw processing and editing was Adobe Lightroom.

Source: CNET
Written by Stephen Shankland
News organization Reuters is working with photo editing powerhouse Adobe and camera maker Canon so changes to digital photos can be detected, Reuters CEO Tom Glocer said on his blog last week.

Reuters, the news agency whose image was tarnished earlier this year when a freelance photographer provided doctored photos of bombing in Beirut, wants to ensure such changes can be found.

Adobe opens up access to photography directory to freelance photographers through the NUJ
Source: Macworld UK

Adobe has at last provided codes that enable UK freelance photography members of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to join its photography directory.

DxO Optics Pro v4.1 improves speed and fluidity for greater comfort and productivity. DxO Optics Pro v4.1 is compatible with the all-new DxO FilmPack and is immediately available for Windows and Mac users.

Press Release: PARIS, France — DxO Labs announces the immediate availability of DxO Optics Pro v4.1 — an upgrade to the recently released DxO Optics Pro v4, the company’s flagship automatic digital image enhancement software. Among the many speed improvements in DxO Optics Pro v4.1, users will be particularly impressed with the increased speed with which Raw images are previewed (2-4 times faster than in version 4.0) and the increased fluidity of the sliders (more than twice as fast).

Emphasis shifts to enhanced image processing and ‘hybrid’ still/video models

Press Release: Scottsdale, Arizona — After years of spectacular growth, the market for digital still cameras appears to be leveling off at about $18 billion per year now that most photographers and camera-toting consumers have switched from film to digital photography, concludes IC Insights’ new 2007 IC Market Drivers report.

Just getting Fido to look up as you shoot is not all there is to making a great dog portrait.

Source: Toronto Star
Written by Jennifer Brown

Press Release: Paris, France - November 28, 2006 - DxO Labs today announces the immediate availability of DxO Analyzer version 3, adding groundbreaking innovations to the product’s image quality evaluation and analysis capabilities.

Geotagging hobbyists organize pictures using maps to create a new kind of digital photo album.

Source: StarTribune via NY Times
Written by Ian Austen

Kathleen Bennett recently bought a device that keeps track of her location with help from the satellites of the Global Positioning System. But the Seattle woman is not using it to find her way through the wilderness.
Instead, the gadget is for Bennett’s personal passion, photography. She is one of many people who have taken up “geotagging,” the practice of posting photos online that are linked to Web-based maps, showing just where in the world the shutter was pressed.

Source: Business 2.0
Written by Jon Fortt

A few days ago, two of the brightest minds from Adobe Systems (ADBE) dropped by my office to give me a rare and exciting look at what the software maker is cooking up in its imaging labs.

In the couple of hours we spent together, I learned that Adobe doesn’t just want to revolutionize photo editing. It wants to revolutionize cameras.

Source: Macworld
Written by Rick LePage

As I’m typing this, I’m sitting outside the exhibition hall at the Javits Center in New York, watching a stream of photographers, graphic artists and a large group of art school students pass into the packed hall at Photo Plus East. I have always liked this show—the focus on imaging is right up my alley, and I like the mix of digital tools with the traditional stuff like lighting products and wedding portfolios.

Source: Editor & Publisher
Written by David D. Perlmutter

The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks on the people who take news pictures and on the basic premise that nonfiction news photo- and videography is possible.

I’m not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

Source: Pacifica Tribune
Written by Chris Hunter

Stephen Johnson is a name well-known in the world of digital photography. The Pacifica resident and business owner travels the world to offer seminars and lectures on digital photography. His own digital landscape photography is recognized throughout the world for its amazing quality and innovation.

He also is gradually turning his Pacifica workshop and gallery in the Pacifica Center for the Arts into an internationally known digital photography center, complete with courses, presentations and exhibits.

Press Release: MELVILLE, NY, AUGUST 9, 2006 – Building on the extraordinary success of the D70 and D70s, Nikon® (www.nikondigital.com) today introduced the new D80™ digital SLR camera – an impressively featured, high performance camera that incorporates Nikon’s latest digital and photographic technologies, and offers advanced features as well as automated operation to satisfy any photographer with the passion to create beautiful photographs and preserve special moments.

Source: CNET
Written by Stephen Shankland

Researchers have unveiled an image-processing technique that shows promise for fixing images spoiled by camera shake.

The technique is based on an algorithm that deduces the path that a wobbling camera took when a photo was shot, then uses that path to reverse much of the resultant blurring. The method isn’t a miracle cure, but researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Toronto have used it to significantly help a wide variety of sample images.

Source: The New York Times
Written by Ian Austen

Like many amateur photographers, Joe Dejesus posts his photos online and compares them to the work of others on the photo-sharing site Flickr. At some point last year, a number of landscape photos caught his eye with their vibrant tones and colors.

Their secret was a software technology known as H.D.R., for high dynamic range photography. And Mr. Dejesus quickly became one of its practitioners.

Press Release: August 1, 2006, Cologne, Germany – The Panel, “A Call to Simplify Image Capture/Print Workflow” will be presented at this year’s Photokina in Cologne, Germany, as part of the “Imaging with Mobile Devices” full day seminar. The panel features three digital imaging experts: Eran Steinberg, CEO of FotoNation; Elmo Sapwater, Columnist and Moderator; and John Henshall, Columnist http://www.ChipShopOnline.com and “The Photographer” magazine (UK), who will discuss ways to effectively simplify and standardize mobile devices for ease of use in imaging. The trio will debate intelligent workflow solutions that will remove obstacles, making image printing as easy as making a phone call.

Source: CNET
Written by Erica Ogg

In an age when most cameras are digital and small enough to fit in a pocket, one couple is crisscrossing the country with a custom camera that needs its own van and uses film reels the size of shoeboxes.

Source: Pasadena Star News
Written by Cortney Fielding

PASADENA - The times they are a changin’ - and they’re about to put Joseph Umbro out of a job.

Aim, the full-service photography lab he manages, is closing its doors, unable to stay afloat in the digital age.

Trial Version Offers 30 Days to Test Drive Capture NX - A Powerful and Intuitive New Software That Dramatically Simplifies Photo Editing for JPEG, TIFF and Nikon RAW (NEF) Format Images

Press Release: MELVILLE, N.Y., July 7 — Nikon (http://www.nikondigital.com) today released a trial version of Capture NX(TM) — a new software that is designed specifically for photographers, providing a unique and easy to understand interface with tools that photographers need, but without the level of complexity and clutter of other image editing applications.

Source: International Herald Tribune
Written by Nathan Myhrvold, The New York Times

Digital technology has taken the world by storm, so much so that it might be easy to think the revolution is over.

In photography, for example, it is tempting to think that once everybody has a digital camera, the transition will be complete and things will settle down, right? Wrong. The revolution is taking off; it is only the boring part that’s nearly over.

The Great Luminous Landscape 2006 State-of-The-Art Shootout

Left to right: Chris Sanderson, Michael Reichmann, Charles Cramer, Bill Atkinson
Bill is blurred because he was running around to get into the shot

Written by Michael Reichmann

Source: Associated Press via USA Today
Written By Peter Svensson, AP

NEW YORK — With its market eviscerated by digital photography, Eastman Kodak last year stopped making black-and-white photo paper.