A 4×5 In My Pocket (a new strap, too!)

About fifteen years ago I switched from shooting 4x5 film to shooting small sensor digital. The switch was a big one--I had to give up resolution and important controls regarding what was in focus and the shape of things as projected on the film. But what I gained was mobility,…

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See Spot Go

[Originally published in an old blog on February 9, 2012] I’ve quit photography a few times, the first time in the 1980s. As the art on display got worse and worse, as the praise for the same works gushed and gushed, I thought, “Fuck it. This is a stupid way…

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Albuquerque: Petroglyphs and Shadows

In 2005 I found myself passing through Albuquerque and thought I'd stop by the Petroglyph National Monument. It's not very big. Maybe at one time it used to be out there, on its own in some pristine setting, but now it's butt-up against the sprawl of the ever-sprawling city, "adobe"…

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Making Zaido: An Interview with Yukari Chikura

The photobook Zaido by Yukari Chikura was published last year and has been featured in nearly every "top ten" list. The book is now listed as "out of print" by Steidl, the publisher, although stock remains at booksellers. You can see my review of Zaido here. I chatted with the…

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Design by Ernst Reichl

Many years ago many of the camera manufacturers also had their own magazine. One of the less well known of these is Exakta Magazine, which highlighted the today equally obscure Exakta camera. To set itself off from the rest, Exakta Magazine hired several of the top graphic designers in the…

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I’m Giving My Book Away

My idea--I'm a genius at marketing my work, it should be obvious by now-- was to send a free copy of Computational Photography each month, given postage-free* to a reader drawn randomly from my subscriber list. I mean, I would ask them first if they even wanted a copy of…

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Justin Remes On Movies that Don’t Move

We've talked before about furniture films (also called static films). Prof. Justin Remes specializes in this interesting genre of experimental filmmaking and here shares with us his "top ten" list of historically important static films, aimed at introducing readers to the development of films that exist somewhere in the space…

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Codes In Space

You've seen the video of NASA's Perseverance, landing on Mars. The thing is the size of a small car, parachuted into the Martian atmosphere, then falling toward the surface, the fall then arrested by on-board jets which slowed the spacecraft to hover a few dozen feet off the ground as…

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Tour of Computational Photography: Title Page and Overture

Computational Photography, as it developed, became less and less like a regular photobook and more and more like an art project in itself. In a regular photobook you'd start off with an introductory text, followed by an essay from a curator or scholar associated with the kind of work that…

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Exploring the Mayan Ruins (In Books)

After going through William Frej's exciting photobook, Maya Ruins Revisited (see my review here), that excitement carried on and I wanted to dig deeper. Do you want more, too? The first place to start is the most obvious: One essay in Frej's book offers a good summary of what is…

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