- The Big Picture features some terrific images of this month’s total solar eclipse.
- Edward Burtynsky, known for chronicling humans’ impact on the planet, is experimenting with carbon transfer printing in hopes of making photographic prints that last 10,000 years.
- GM Progress on Parade comes from a time when Detroit design set the pace for the world.
- Alexander Hassenstein captured a cool long-exposure image of women’s fencing, part of a larger set.
- More from the big bits/pixels front: peep Peter Carr’s 42-foot-wide HDR panorama,
- PhotoCalc is "a utility for iPhone and iPod for photographers to calculate exposure reciprocation, depth of field, and flash exposure." [Via Fergus Hammond]
- Martin Evening provides a helpful write-up on how auto-masking works in Lightroom’s local correction brushes.
Ah, the old archival print debate. There is only one problem in carbon transfer, the carbon print is absolutely archival, but the paper it’s printed on is not. The project describes experiments to create a special archival paper that will last 10,000 years. It doesn’t exist. It never will. There is no experiment to be done, it’s impossible.
I will quote my instructor, back when I was taking a full-semester course in archival photographic techniques, “Photography is only 150 years old [well, it was back then when I took the course] so all we know is that some photographs can last 150 years.”
At least I can credit Burtynsky for understanding that inkjet prints are not archival. There is no current inkjet technology that can produce a print that would be considered archival in the sense photographers and art curators have used that term for decades. There is no way to adapt any current inkjet technology to make archival prints. As an active practitioner of truly archival photographic printing methods, it is my greatest fear that the current generation of photographers is producing artworks that will rapidly fade to blank sheets of paper. Meanwhile, I have watched the value of my work plummet when inkjet prints are sold as archival, and can be produced for a fraction of the cost (and effort) of my archival prints. Fake archival prints are destroying the value of real archival prints.
About Photocalc – Add and level function and it is perfect. If you want a level just get the free Labarynth game. Click on setting and there is a 2 way level that can be zero’d to any angle. Love it for doing panos.