Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Leica M7 set at 133.000 $

Capture

This is the first of the series with the round serial number 3,000,000. The set with this special serial number was presented to the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado in May of this year by Dr. Josef Spichtig CEO of Leica Camera AG. The award of special cameras with round serial numbers to important personalities is part of the company's long tradition. With this presentation the company is honouring the all-encompassing humansim of Salgado's photographic work which documents human fates in work groups such as 'Workers' and 'Migrations'. These are important contributions to subjects which occupy the world's attention. Condition A+, absolutely like new condition, absolutely without any signs of wear.

Not exactly cheap…

Celo

G1

Contax G

In 1994, Contax introduced an apparent oddity: a new line of interchangeable-lens rangefinder cameras that did not use the established Leica-M or Leica-screw lens mounts.

The new camera, the Contax G1, used the "G"-mount, an electronic autofocus mount. Critics were quick to accuse the camera of not being a "true" (mechanical) rangefinder, since it used autofocus and electronically-linked mechanisms. But the AF mechanism in the G1, and later the G2 (introduced in 1996), does indeed use a twin-window system much like that of the older mechanical rangefinders—only in electronic form.

The lenses made by Zeiss for the G-series quickly established it as a camera of worth: the original 45mm f/2 Planar was joined by a 28mm f/2.8 Biogon and a 90mm f/2.8 Sonnar; a 21 f/2.8 Biogon, 16mm f/8 Hologon and a 35mm f/2 Planar were added later. The 45mm Planar in particular gained renown as the sharpest 35mm camera lens ever tested by the Swedish test site Photodo — outclassing even the illustrious Leica50mm Summicron.

With its titanium clad body, sophisticated electronic rangefinder and superb lenses, the G system has not been equalled in the years since its introduction. To its fans, the Contax G2 is the finest 35mm camera ever produced.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Incredible CGI storytelling

Filmmaker Bruce Branit has created World Builder, in which "a strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves."

Thursday, March 12, 2009

SimpleViewer

grab SimpleViewer is a free, customizable Flash image viewing application.

  • Intelligent image pre-loading.
  • Intuitive image navigation
  • Lightweight (17k).
  • Customizable interface - Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position.
  • Resizable interface - Interface scales to fit browser window.
  • Cross platform - Windows/Macintosh/Linux (requires Flash 8 or higher).
  • Flash 8 detection. Users without Flash 8 are messaged to upgrade Flash.
  • International font support.
  • Keyboard Navigation (Cursor keys, Home, End, Page Up/Down)
  • Mousewheel navigation
  • Optionally right-click to open image in a new window.
  • Free!

What is Onexposure?

Onexposure is an artsproject and a photo community with a difference. Take the most talented photobloggers of the web and other famous photographers as well as many serious amateurs, select their best work and put it all in one place - there you have Onexposure. Everyone is welcome to contribute, but every photo is screened, which means it has to be approved by an editor before being published.

Onexposure is like a constantly evolving high class photo gallery with new art every day. We don't judge over good and bad, or over art, we merely decide if a photo fits into our gallery or not. Like in an arts gallery, you can buy many of the photos as prints and hang them on your wall. Onexposure also offers a premium membership, which includes unlimited image hosting and your own professional homepage with complete control over what photos to display.

We created Onexposure because we missed an online collection of only high quality photos, we thought the photo critique was too brief on other sites and we wanted a site that was elegant and easy to navigate. Our mission is to be a source of inspiration and ultimately finding the sublime together, but if the latter doesn't succeed we believe that everyone will develop as photographers and make some friends along the journey.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

FREE editors and IDEs for Java, JSP, PHP, HTML, VBScript, JavaScript and other languages

spp810java Modelworks provides a family of customizable products with a script-based architecture for editing text files and developing desktop and Internet applications. Our current products are JPad Pro and SitePad Pro. Both products include basic Java support that uses Sun's JDK/SDK to compile and run. SitePad Pro includes all the features of JPad Pro plus support for XPath, VRML, C# and other .NET languages. You can download an evaluation version from the downloads page. A free license is available.

A key goal for our products is to make it easy for you to work with many different file types. Syntax coloring makes it easy to identify key words, comments and strings. Code folding (outlining) lets you see the overall structure of a file by hiding sections you don't need to work with. Tabs let you switch quickly between editors. Split windows and multiple windows of the same file are available options. The Full Screen feature can be configured to show both menus and toolbars. A reformat command is available to cleanup indentation. Support for all code pages, including ANSI, UNICODE and UTF-8 encodings, lets you edit in any language.

The workspace panel provides access to help, tools (scripts) and multiple views of projects, folders, and open files. Open files are listed in the windows menu, in a windows dialog, in a workspace open files panel, and visible in the tabbed editor panel. The built-in help system provides content, index, search, and favorites panels that let you quickly look up information in html based document sets (such as APIs in javadocs). You can build your own index files using scripts or download pre-built index files from our site. See theUpdates page for a list of available index files.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Amazing Collection of Cartoon Illustration

1594-main Vector art and cartoon characters always amaze us with creative ideas and inspiration. Here it is an amazing collection of cartoon illustrations , collected by graphicmania.net

Leica M Used Buying Guide: A Not So Objective Guide

m3-us-cam-12-54-490 Few, if any, cameras provoke such heartfelt discussions as the Leica M's. For every opinion expressed here, you can undoubtedly find someone who has the opposite view. I hope this guide helps you find YOUR OWN best answers, not mine.

Other valuable resources there:

  • List of Leica M Mount Cameras
  • Leica M Collectible Investment Guide Not So Objective Picks and Pans
  • Leica M User's Buyer's Guide: Not So Objective Picks and Pans
  • Leica M Used Buyer's Check List Don't Get Taken
  • Leica M Lens User's and Identification Guide
  • Leica M a la carte Buying Guide Poor choices can mean lower resale value!
    Leica M Motors Don't Bother
  • Leica M Used Market Place Things Change
  • Leica M Shooting Tips Some Ways are Better than Others
  • Rangefinder/Viewfinders: More than meets the Eye
  • Accessory Viewfinders: Which to USE?

Also check this: A blog about photography—specifically, the wonderful, tangible reality of photography using real film and vintage metal cameras.

Amazing 3D Typography That Truly Inspires

typography-design Typography and font design has always amazed us with the wonderful design that can be created from character and words.

We collected amazing 3D designs and truly inspired typography for great artists. Here.

Comics grammar and tradition

From a comic lettering web site [?!?]

gram_doubledash gram_connectorComic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic  traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file. The majority of these points are established tradition, sprinkled with modern trends and a bit of my own opinion having lettered professionally for a few years now. The majority of these ideas have been established by Marvel and DC, but opinions vary from editor to editor, even within the same company. I'm often asked to bend or break these rules based on what "feels" best, or more likely, the space constraints within a panel.

As a letterer you're eventually going to see scripts from writers who don't know these standards, aren't interested in them, or just have poor grammar all around. (Although I find the best writers ARE well versed in these points.) It'll be up to you to spot and fix these in the event that the editor misses them.

Fun with Augmented Reality

Wikipedia describes "augmented reality" as "the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time." Now it's come to Flash, with some amazing results.

The GE Smart Grid site lets you print out a sheet of paper, hold it up to your Web cam, and interact with 3D graphics.

Friday, March 6, 2009

LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image Search

We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.