Portraits of Courage

What do you do with ten tons of framed, larger-than-life size prints that require climate-controlled storage? That was the dilemma posed by Faces of Ground Zero, photographer Joe McNally's series of giant instant-film portraits of Ground Zero first responders and site workers. Created in Manhattan's "room-sized" Polaroid studio in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, this powerful and historically important body of work consists of 246 portraits, many of which have been exhibited in New York City and around the world. (The work was also published in a Life book of the same name, the proceeds from which were donated to affected schools in lower Manhattan.)

Burt Keppler, Man of Action, Remembered

The irreplaceable Burt Keppler was warmly remembered at a memorial held last week at Manhattan's New School, fondly emcee'd by Keppler protegee and former Popular Photography Editor Jason Schneider. Family, friends, and colleagues such as Popular Photography Editor-in-Chief John Owens, Hachette Filipacchi CEO Jack Kliger, and Canon tech maven Chuck Westfall spoke about Burt, who shared his knowledge with generations of readers at Pop and before that at Modern Photography, as a man of kindness and -- though seemingly unperturbed by tumultuous events in photography -- of action. Which gives me the opportunity to run pictures of the Herbert Keppler semi-posable action figure.

The Little Lens That Could

The Lensbaby, an ingenious optic that brings view-camera style selective focus effects to digital, 35mm, and medium-format photography, just keeps on rockin'. The new movie-camera version of the lens, which we've covered in this space before, has been used by director Eric Schmidt to shoot a new music video for Bruce Springsteen's "Girls in Their Summer Clothes." Watch it (below) and you may long for something sharp!
--Russell Hart

Film, Stills, and Albert Maysles

As Dave Schonauer writes in his recent blog, Nubar Alexanian has photographed on the sets of many of Errol Morris's documentaries, work collected in a new book called Nonfiction. If you've never seen Morris's 1980 Gates of Heaven, do: I remember it as a brilliant series of talking still photographs. Another great documentary filmmaker, Albert Maysles, actually took his own pictures as he created such classics as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. (Those earlier films were produced with Albert's brother and sound man David, who died in 1987.) Albert was in fact a photographer first, and you can catch his vintage black-and-white prints from the 1950s and 1960s, color stills from the filming of Grey Gardens, and his recent "cinemagraphs" at New York City's Steven Kasher Gallery, where they're on display through March 15. The cinemagraphs (below) are printed directly from frames of actual Maysles films.

The High Cost of Printing: A Liquid Comparison

Everyone complains about the cost of inkjet printer ink, but have you ever sat down and figured out what you’re really paying? How does ink, as a commodity, compare to other valuable liquids? If I asked you how much you pay for a gallon of gas, I bet you’d know. Can you guess what a gallon of inkjet ink costs?
     My coworker Russell Hart and I sat down with our pencils to do the math. Now, this was a pathetic sight, because Russell and I are decent writers and editors, and Russell is also a very good photographer, but at math we are, um, rusty. We worked hard at it, though, and we were only dealing in rough approximations anyway, but feel free to check our findings.
     Russell checked the price of a 13ml cartridge of color ink for a Canon Pixma printer, which was about $15. That means a full liter would be about $1,170, which means a gallon of the stuff would cost roughly $4,000. 
    “Yikes,” is what I said when we figured that out. When you pay that much for ink, it gives you a whole new perspective on things—like crude oil.

The Lensbaby and the Diving Bell

Our Photography and the Movies issue, just out, proves that there’s a happily thin line between still and moving pictures—at least for the artists who ply both media. The respective technologies of film and photography have certainly crossed over in many ways. Canon’s D-SLR lenses borrow optical tricks from their video and film counterparts, for example. And going the other way, the Lensbaby (below)—which started life as an innovative still-photography tool—has now played a starring role in an Oscar-nominated French-produced film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
 

Olympus's New-Age Firmware (and a word of advice to E-3 users running Mac OS X Leopard)

Olympus E-system users may have heard that their cameras' maker has issued firmware updates for the E-3 and E-510 D-SLR bodies. Go here to find out what the upgrades will do for your particular model. Unique to the "digital-specific" Olympus system is that accessories such as lenses and flash units can receive firmware upgrades too, and in fact the most recent batch included enhancements for the Zuiko 12-60mm and 100-300mm lenses. If mounted on the camera (keep the flash unit on), they are automatically detected in the update process.

We decided to update our in-house Olympus E-3, a camera we raved about in a recent review. In that writeup I mentioned that I'd shifted autofocus activation and operation from the shutter button to the AEL/AFL button on the back of the camera. I push the button with my thumb to make the camera focus, and release it to lock the focus. (Below, Olympus E-3 product manager Toshiyuki Terada demonstrating the new camera's capabilities.)

Hard Sex: Western Digital's My Book desktop drives

Now that I have your attention, you know as well as any other photographer that digital storage devices are as essential as they are unsexy -- by and large just boxes with a few plugs and a light or two. And external hard drives big enough to back up the contents of your computer become all but invisible when attached, doing their own thing with automatic backup software. You hardly know they're there -- until your computer crashes.

Western Digital's My Book external desktop hard drives are a different story, pun intended. They are sexy, in the sort of industrial-chic way that Apple has perfected. Upright and, well, booklike in shape -- though with a beautifully rounded spine --  they have an elegant satin-metal finish. In fact the My Book Studio Edition I've been testing comes in a silver tone that perfectly matches my G5 tower. (Now if only my socks matched.)

Why We Needed Henry Froehlich

The photographic realm has just lost two giants with the deaths of Popular Photography's Burt Keppler and, now, of Henry Froehlich, former head of medium-format mainstay Mamiya America. Though less visible than Burt to readers of photography magazines, Henry was just as influential in the photo industry, and in some of the same ways. Influence aside, he was a lovely, kindhearted man.

Hands On: Zeiss ZF Macros for Nikon

I've been shooting lately with two new Nikon F-mount Zeiss lenses, the ZF 100mm f/2 Makro-Planar T* and the ZF 50mm f/2 Makro-Planar T*. (I love it when they spell macro that way.) As you'd expect from a Zeiss-made optic they are both simply razor sharp, and are also impressively heavy, in these days of featherweight zooms, due in part to their full-metal barrel. No, they don't have autofocus--nor do any of the other "premium" manual-focus lenses Zeiss is making for Nikon F, Pentax K, and M42 (threaded) mounts--but I haven't really missed it.