Explore, learn, meet new people, what better way to spend a Saturday? Register right now on our website!

There is plenty of space available, but now that I’ve announced it to all 12 of you who still read my blog, all bets are off.

Some of you may be thinking that the weather doesn’t look too good. That depends on how you look at it. The last time Chris and I were in the Cape it was pretty gloomy, which led to some incredible light along the waterfront. Check out the smooth, diffuse glow on this one:

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

If the humidity level remains high, there could be some great opportunities for after-dark lighthouse photographs in the fog, either before dawn at Chatham Light where we’ll begin our journey, or after sunset at Race Point or Nauset lights.

I’m excited to get out there and meet some of you folks, I hope you can make it! Read more and register right here.

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Chris is quick to humbly share his experience and tips for aerial kite photography on his website (graciously hosted by Berkeley!)

I was blown away by the evolution of Chris’s camera rigs, which grew from fixed harnesses with rudimentary mechanical timers based on elastic bands, Silly Putty, and disposable cameras, to what he now uses, a remote-controlled, servo motor-driven, three-axis robot.

It’s definitely not commonplace for someone to possess both a grasp of electronic and mechanical engineering and a hawk-eye for artistic composition. Chris Benton has both.

Part Two: Cars

Aside from being an avid photographer, I admit to a streak of BMW fanboyism. When it comes to sports cars that are still solid daily drivers that make you feel like you’ve personally discovered the center of the universe and you’re sitting directly within it, nobody does it better than BMW.

To hype the release of their latest creation, the Z4 Roadster, BMW hired artist Robin Rhode to dip the Z4’s tires in multi-colored paints and drive it around like a fingerpainting on a warehouse scale. This was one of the most indulgent marketing campaigns I could think of.

I realize this isn’t strictly photography-related, but it is certainly art-related. If you feel gypped, go look at these photographs from the event

And here is a pretty cool video of how they put this thing together:

The next time you’re out shooting, or sitting around the house thinking about how next to use that studio space you set up in the basement, or the garage, or the attic… Think about breaking out of the box and doing something completely different. Robin Rhode did, and I think it came out pretty well.

Anyway, on with the show!

First things first, JPG Magazine is back! After being effectively shut down due to budget and business problems, JPG has resuscitated itself mostly thanks to the outpouring of support from its community and highly visible demonstrations such as savejpg.com which presumably gave investors the confidence they needed to pump more necessary capital into the parent company of JPG Magazine, 8020 Media.

Now that JPG has risen from the dead, maybe I’ll actually contribute something! You should, too.

Second, my little hands-on instruction business, ArtPhotoWorkshops.com is going to be doing a series of low-cost, short “photo-walk” workshops in the New England area. Starting with Cape Cod in a week and then Boston after that, I plan to take us out to Newport, Rhode Island, possibly Northampton, Massachusetts, maybe even out to the Quabbin Reservoir for the nature lovers.

If there are places you’d like to explore and learn technique, composition, and mechanics of photography, leave a comment and I’ll see if we can visit them!

I just returned from Las Vegas and Death Valley on a workshop, no photos to show yet, but I think it was an extremely successful trip. Death Valley is by far one of America’s most impressive sights, I recommend seeing it once in your life (or if you’re crazy like me, twice). Las Vegas is a very challenging location to photograph, but I think I was able to snag at least a small number of cool images in between games of craps and tall beers!

There are a few other cool things I want to share, so stay tuned for kite photography, painting with a car, and my opinions on both.

Someone who would walk into a Ritz Camera (or their other brands, like Wolf Camera) and purchase a softbox made by some second-string manufacturer solely on the recommendation of an AP stringer who got the job at Ritz because the AP doesn’t even like them that much (no offense to AP stringers in general, here), is a fool. Plain and simple.

When the hardened, seasoned advice of a B&H sales associate is only a phone call away, and when that advice is backed by an enormous inventory of equipment available, usually immediately, from their warehouse, it seems a ridiculous proposition to even set foot into a Ritz Camera except in times of utter and complete desperation.

It surprises me to see customers milling about in Ritz without beads of near-boiling sweat rolling down their faces, because I can’t imagine a world where trusting my needs to a place like Ritz could be anything less than forced on me by dire circumstance.

That said, Ritz Camera has filed for Chapter 11 federal bankruptcy protection.

The reign of terror is almost at its end.

I don’t usually do these short news-breaking stories, but this one actually irked me. Rob Galbraith, notable photographer and outstpoken reviewer of photographic equipment and technique, published a story in his blog, Rob Galbraith: DPI, pitting the late-2008 unibody MacBook Pro 15” display against the displays of two similar laptops, the Dell Inspiron and the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T60.

Conclusion? Despite Apple’s long-held position as a maker of laptops uniquely suited to field shooting, Galbraith says, “In ambient light environments which induce screen reflections, the late-2008 MacBook Pro 15 inch’s glossy screen moves deep into the not acceptable category.”

Though it remains in the running for one of the more accurate displays among laptops, it fails to outshine the Inspiron or the ThinkPad in overall color accuracy or viewing angle flexibility, according to Galbraith’s hands-on analysis.

Of course nothing is totally black and white in the field of photography or even technology, so be sure to read his full review and peruse some of the responses on the Slashdot post.

Okay, so I missed the boat on this by a little bit, but I think it bears discussion anyway. Earlier this month, an exhibition came to a close at the Yale University Art Gallery called “First Doubt: Optical Confusion in Modern Photography.” Optical confusion refers to that effect you get when you look at something and it isn’t immediately apparent what it is. The reaction is best when the subject matter is common and well-known, but portrayed in an unusual or misleading way.

For example, the photo to the right (which is from the aforementioned show) depicts a man’s chin, neck, chest, and part of his leg. The contrast and cropping, though, make it compositionally more interesting and somewhat more difficult to “figure out,” visually. I wouldn’t suggest that you run about photographing things in ways that nobody can ever puzzle out, or that high art must in some way be confounding to the general public, but you must admit that a composition that makes you scratch your head for a moment is going to hold your interest for that much longer.

The idea of optical confusion is (clearly) not new. I’m sure you’ve all seen the classic young woman/old woman illusion (shown at left), which, once you visually map out both images, seems to randomly flip-flop between the two in the mind’s eye. In photographic composition, this technique of close-cropping and creatively limiting the viewer’s understanding of what they are looking at can be a very powerful tool.

Take, for example, the image below (by Karin Rosenthal, “Belly Landscape,” 1980—which I snagged from The Online Photographer). When I first saw the image, I really thought it was a landscape; some sort of Adams-esque river valley. Of course by stating the title of the piece I’ve pretty much blown the lid on that optical illusion, but if you squint you can probably see it as a river valley again.

Certainly the specific genre of “body landscapes” is one with its fair share of avid creators, and it would be challenging now to forge new territory (no pun intended) within that space. Nevertheless, we can all take a cue from the clever way that the image misleads the eye.

The next time you’re out photographing or sitting in front of Lightroom (you do use Lightroom, right?), think about how you might add tension and interest to a composition through creative cropping, eliminating some of the most recognizable elements from a subject. Just a small tweak is all it may take to transform a solid, representative image into a thoroughly engaging work of optical confusion.

You can also purchase the official book containing selections from the collection used in the Yale University Art Museum show.

My thorough and attentive friends in the B&H affiliate department have sent word that they now have limited stocks of 5D Mark IIs!

The message reads, “We’ve just received word that the Canon EOS 5D Mark II is available in limited stock. Simply “add to cart”; ignore initial “back-ordered” message.”

According to Mike’s post over at TOP, their stock seems to be fluctuating in and out.

The price is $2,699 and you can buy it right here

We couldn’t ask for a better community. In the week or so since our last email, the outpour of support has exceeded our wildest expectations. Your efforts, such as starting savejpg.com, writing blog posts, commenting on Twitter and Flickr, and generally making your voices heard, have provided exciting new opportunities for us.

We’re thrilled to say that because of you, we have multiple credible buyers interested in giving JPG a home. We will be keeping the site up after all, and hope to have a final update in the next week or so on who the acquirer will be. Thank you for making all of this possible.

Laura Brunow Miner
Editor in Chief

As I write this, it does look like jpgmag.com is still up and running, so feel free to look through the published photos, download archived issues, or check out some of their photo essays.

All of that information is still very important, but I wanted to mention that a good fellow by the name of Adam Parker posted a comment there with a useful link to an article of his where he demonstrates the major shooting modes using… Gasp… Pictures!

You can read his article, Canon Shooting Modes – What Are the Differences? at that link. Bear in mind that it is a very Canon-centric article, and therefore I fully support it!

If you have a Nikon or one of those… Other cameras… This information may still apply, though the names of the modes will probably be different, or you may have more or fewer of them.

The faltering economy has claimed the life of another small business today. I received an e-mail from the Editor in Chief of JPG Magazine announcing that on Monday they’re shutting their doors for good. I only got the e-mail because I have been a registered member of the site for some time and although none of my photos ever made it into the magazine it was always something I wanted to be more serious about.

I guess I missed the boat.

JPG Magazine was a publication, both electronic and print, entirely supported by user submissions. JPG would suggest a series of “themes” and users would submit images that they thought suited the subject. Through a voting process, the best-liked images floated to the top and got published in the magazine. It was a great way for any photographer to get their name out and for the magazine to spread inspiration and thus collect subscription fees.

I’m not sure what their exact business model was; I never subscribed to the print magazine. Perhaps their philosophy was too open and too philanthropic to extract the necessary payments from their members to stay afloat. That’s only conjecture.

Still, it’s a shame to see such a wonderful resource go away. I could spend hours browsing the published photos to find inspiration, and inspiration I did regularly find there.

So now what?

You can go view the published photos on JPG Magazine’s published photos page until Monday (the 5th of January), but after that, it will be gone.

Download PDFs of previous JPG Magazine issues (also until Monday). That way you’ll have all of this great stuff right there on your hard drive.

If you’re looking for inspiration, you can always browse PhotoSIG’s highest rated photos, which are basically mind-blowing 100% of the time.

Check out The Unofficial JPG Magazine Group on Flickr. There are lots of awesome images there, too.

Of course you could always view my gallery...