Adam Amenguel - #411 photographer but with future

Adam Amengual was born in Queens, NY and raised on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His father Angelo gave him his first camera at 12 and he started documenting his friends and his surroundings. After studying the basics of photography in high school he continued his photographic education at both Massachusetts College of Art and Parsons School of Design. After art school Adam moved to Brooklyn, NY and began assisting photographers in advertising, fashion, celebrity, and music. Over the past 6 years he has assisted many well established photographers. He has worked with Ruven Afanador, Don Flood, Danielle Levitt, Norman Jean Roy, Art Streiber, and Ben Watts, just to name a few.


Adam is currently located in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Kate and dog Shug. His clients include The U.S. State Department via Lipman Hearne, Inc. Magazine, Time Out New York, California Real Estate Magazine, Swindle Magazine, New York Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, Sony BMG, Nobu and Tank Theory. His work has been shown in galleries at THIS Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts Boston. His recently completed project entitle "Homies" has been featured on several blogs including Time's LightBox, Prison Photography, This Is the What, Conscientious, and We Can Shoot Too and is in the permanent collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.


Adam was also just recently awarded with an honorable mention in En Foco's New Works Photography Awards #15 Fellowship, 2011-12 and was just named number 411 on Peiter Wisse's 500 Photographers.


Material from http://www.adamamengual.com/

Adam Amenguel PHOTOS:

Cost like GOLD photos -TOP16

1) Cindy Sherman, Untitled №96 (1981), $3,890,500, May 2011, Christie's New York.

2) Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent II Diptychon (2001), $3,346,456, February 2007, Sotheby's London auction. A second print of 99 Cent II Diptychon sold for $2.48 million in November 2006 at a New York gallery, and a third print sold for $2.25 million at Sotheby's in May 2006.

3)Edward Steichen, The Pond-Moonlight (1904), $2,928,000, February 2006, Sotheby's New York auction.

4)Unknown photographer, Billy the Kid (1879–80), tintype portrait, $2,300,000, June 2011, Brian Lebel's Old West Show & Auction.

5)Dmitry Medvedev, Kremlin of Tobolsk (2009), $1,750,000, January 2010, Christmas Yarmarka, Saint Petersburg.

5)Edward Weston, Nude (1925), $1,609,000, April 2008, Sotheby's New York auction.

6) Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe (Hands) (1919), $1,470,000, February 2006, Sotheby's New York auction.

7)Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe Nude (1919), $1,360,000, February 2006, Sotheby's New York auction.

8)Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy) (1989), $1,248,000, November 2005, Christie's New York auction.

9)Richard Avedon, Dovima with elephants (1955), $1,151,976, November 2010, Christie's Paris auction.

10) Edward Weston, Nautilus (1927), $1,082,500, April 2010, Sotheby's New York auction.

11) Peter Lik, One (2010), $1,000,000, December 2010, Anonymous Collector

12) Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey, 113.Athènes, T[emple] de J[upiter] olympien pris de l'est (1842) $922,488, 2003, auction.

13) Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sete (1857) $838,000, 1999.

14) Eugène Atget, Joueur d'Orgue, (1898–1899), $686,500, April 2010, Christie's New York auction.

15) Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol (1987) $643,200, 2006

16) Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1948) $609,600, Sotheby's New York auction, 2006

 

 information from PhotoLIVE4u

Instant Digital Camera - Polaroid Z340

The new camera from Polaroid with built-in printer.

 
In the 1980s, the company released a Polaroid camera, capable of making instant photos. After almost thirty years, the company returns to the once successful idea. The new model Z340 can do both digital and paper photos.
Due to the built-in printer Zink, require less than a minute to print just the captured image. Feature of the device is the lack of cartridges, as with dye crystals are located directly on special waterproof paper. The complete set includes 10 sheets of 7.6 by 10 inches.
If  you desire, you can use the Z340 as a normal digital camera. 14-megapixel sensor supports high-definition video (1280 x 720 pixels).
Z340 Instant Digital Camera Polaroid will cost about 300 dollars

information from TRENDYMAN.RU

Fachion phography matter - Terence Donovan

Terence Donovan was a celebrated photographer and film director, perhaps best remembered for his fashion photography of the 1960s, or for the music video to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love". 

He was born in Stepney in the East End of London, and took his first photo at the age of 15. The bomb-damaged industrial landscape of his home town became the backdrop of much of his fashion photography, and he set the trend for positioning fashion models in stark and gritty urban environments.

Along with David Bailey, he captured, and in many ways helped create the Swinging London of the 1960s: a culture of high fashion and celebrity chic. Both photographers socialised with actors, musicians and royalty, and found themselves elevated to celebrity status. Together, they were the first real celebrity photographers.

Donovan shot for various fashion magazines, including Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, as well as directing some 3000 commercials, and a 1973 movie Yellow Dog. He also made documentaries and music videos, and painted.

Inevitably, Donovan brought these two distinct approaches to magazine portraiture too. His first photograph for Vogue, for example, a portrait of the conductor George Solti walking the streets of Covent Garden, is a skilful long-lens observation shot, but throughout the 1970s and 1980s and frequently for Vogue, he concentrated on the studio portrait, wherein any element of chance was, for the most part, removed. The results - most particularly a series of headshots of the comedians Max Wall, Norman Wisdom and the writer and wit Osbert Lancaster - are determinedly unflattering with no indulgence to the sitter’s vanity or the ‘look’ of the magazine. From 1970, while continuing to shoot fashion for a variety of magazines, he explored in earnest the more lucrative field of advertising photography, also turning his hand to the moving image.

 

Vintage prints of Donovan’s fashion and portrait work, particularly those from the 1960s and 1970s, are rare. Even more so are ‘signed’ works. He belonged to the generation that never considered that there could ever be a market for what was essentially commercial photography, no matter how accomplished. Donovan’s diffidence went further. As a working photographer he spurned compilations of his work or exhibitions of past  highpoints, because, presumably, he felt the best was still to come. In his lifetime, he published only three books of his photographs. None was particularly historical nor any an anthology of his greatest moments and all were idiosyncratic. The first in 1964 Women Throoo the Eyes of Smudger Terence Donovan, was a slim booklet of women he had recently photographed . Glances, the second, coming nearly twenty years later in 1983, was a book of nudes and the third and last, Fighting Judo from 1985, the most unexpected: a ‘blow-by-blow’ manual of judo moves. (Donovan was a black belt 1st dan).

Unsurprisingly, there are few signed prints in the Donovan archive. However, what has surfaced is a cache of contact photographs, curiously authenticated. For the decade 1959 to the end of the 1960s, Donovan separated from his contact sheets, and invariably printed up to the standard of a finished print, those images he favoured for publication – promptly stabbing them clean through with the point of a pencil. This is surely a forceful stamp of authorship and authority from one of British photography’s foremost identities. And one whom, it must be said, made strenuous efforts to avoid a conventional photographic legacy.

Donovan committed suicide in 1996 after suffering depression as a result of steroids he'd been taking to treat a skin condition.

Terence Donovan photos:

Material taken from PHOTOlive4U

makro PHOTO

Taking close-up pictures of small things is called "macro photography." I have no idea why. Perhaps because the small things in macro photography are generally larger than the things you are taking pictures of when doing "micro photography". If you really want to be pedantic then you should say you are doing "photomacrography".

What Kind of Camera

Point and shoot digital cameras can have remarkable macro capabilities, but for best results you want a single-lens reflex camera. These allow you to attach special-purpose macro lenses and show you in a bright optical viewfinder what you will get on the sensor.

A typical setup might be a Canon Digital Rebel XTi  with a Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM . This lens is designed for the small-sensor Canon cameras and gives a working distance equivalent to 100mm on a full-frame photo camera. The lens is specified to focus down to "1:1" or "life size". This means that the smallest object you can photograph that will extend to the corners of the final digital photo will be the same size as the sensor inside the Canon Rebel camera, 15x22mm. A professional photographer might use Canon EOS 5D  and a lens designed for full Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM. Confusingly, this lens is also specified to focus down to "1:1", but this time the sensor is 24x36mm in size, the old 35mm film standard. So you can't take a photo of something quite as small as with the cheaper equipment.

In the film world, the 35mm photo camera systems had comprehensive range of macro lenses and accessories and some medium format systems, such as the Rollei 6008 would have at least a few lenses and extension tubes. Only the extremely patient ever did macro photography with a 4x5 inch view photo camera.

Close-Up Lenses

Your eyes don't focus so great on really small things either. Do you try to pull your cornea a foot away from your retina? No. You stick a magnifying glass in front of your cornea. You can do the same thing for your normal lens. Unlike your cornea, it even has convenient threads for attaching a magnifying glass. The magnifying glass screws into the same place where a filter would go.

Macro Lenses

The best macro lenses are the latest autofocus mount models made by Canon and Nikon, typically in focal lengths ranging from 50 to 200mm. Each lens will focus continuously from infinity to 1:1. You can shoot the moon and capture the bear claw without stopping to change lenses or screw in filters. How do these lenses work? Do they just have a much longer helical than the 50mm normal lens? Yes and no.

Macro Zoom Lenses

Macro zoom lenses are not macro lenses. They don't allow significantly greater magnification than a 30mm or 50mm normal lens and they deliver low quality.

Exposure

Unless you are using close-up lenses, when doing any kind of macro work, you always have to consider the effective f-stop. Even if you are using the SLR body's built-in meter, which will correct automatically for light loss, you can't turn off your brain. Why not? Because the effective aperture affects picture quality.

Taking pictures through a pinhole results in tremendous depth of field but very low sharpness due to diffraction. This is why lenses for a 35mm film camera stop at f/22 and don't go to f/45 or f/64. Large format camera lenses provide these smaller apertures for two reasons: (1) the lenses are longer (f/64 on a 210mm lens is not all that small a hole); (2) the negative won't be enlarged very much.

If you're at 1:1 and have selected f/22 on the macro lens barrel, you need to look at the lens markings and/or the close-up exposure dial in the Kodak Professional Photoguide to learn that your effective aperture is f/45.

If you're using a handheld meter, you absolutely must use these corrections (e.g., meter says f/22 but you're focussed down to 1:1 so you set f/11 on the lens barrel).

Lighting

A good quick and dirty lighting technique is to use a through-the-lens (TTL) metered flash with a dedicated extension cord). A modern handheld flash is extremely powerful when used a few inches from a macro subject. That lets you stop down to f/16 and smaller for good depth of field. You can hold the flash to one side of the subject and have an assistant hold a white piece of paper on the other side to serve as a reflector. If you want a softer light, you will have enough power in the flash to use almost any kind of diffusion material. The TTL meter in the camera will turn the flash off when enough light has reached the sensor.

Lighting is the most important and creative part of any kind of photography.

Focus

With a depth of field of around one millimeter for precise macro work, camera positioning and focus become critical. If you have a good tripod and head, you'll find that you have at least 10 controls to adjust. Each of them will move the camera. None of them will move the camera along the axis that you care about.

That's why people buy macro focusing rails, e.g., Adorama Macro Focusing Rail . These are little rack and pinions capable of moving the entire camera/lens assembly forward and back. You use the tripod to roughly position the camera/lens and then the macro rail to do fine positioning.

The photos below are snapshots from the garden of the Getty Center. They were taken with a fancy Canon EF 180mm f3.5L Macro USM , but without a tripod.

Macro Photo Gallery

 information from http://photo-live-4u.blogspot.com/

Rollei 35 - Limited Edition

This one here will cost you 5,800 Euros

classic version which comes for 4,500 Euros.

Bring back the 60s style with the world’s smallest camera, the Vintage Rollei 35 Photo Camera. The limited edition photo camera is distributed exclusively in Italy by Mafer and is available in 38 different versions.The photographic camera can be customized, so in case you have a certain vintage design in your head go ahead and also, you can specify the type of lens you want. The Vintage Rollei stands true to its name with its titanium structure and a vintage style operation of a mechanical movement on a 135 film. The designs offered by the company are classy as well as eye-catching. Our personal favorite is the gold finished photo camera which has 1,000 Swarovski crystals embedded on its body.


text from PHOTOGRAPHY

Tilt-Shift Photography

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras; it usually requires the use of special lenses.
“Tilt-shift” actually encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to change the line of sight while avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.
Another, less cost-intensive technique called “tilt-shift miniature faking” is a process in which a photograph of a life-sized location or object is manipulated so that it looks like a photograph of a miniature-scale model

Tilt-shift miniature faking


A common technique for making an image of a full-size scene resemble an image of a miniature model is to have the image progressively blurred from the center to the top or bottom, simulating the blurring due to the limited DoF of a typical image of a miniature. The blurring can be accomplished either optically or with digital postprocessing.

Techniques

Optical

Miniatures can be simulated optically by using lens tilt, although the effect is somewhat different from the shallow DoF that normally results in close-up photography.
In a normal photograph, i.e., one not using tilt,

• The DoF extends between two parallel planes on either side of the plane of focus; the DoF is finite in depth but infinite in height and width.
• The sharpness gradients on each side of the DoF are along the line of sight.
• Objects at the same distance from the camera are rendered equally sharp.
• Objects at significantly different distances from the camera are rendered with unequal sharpness.

In a photograph using tilt,

• The DoF extends between two planes on either side of the plane of focus that intersect at a point beneath the lens .
• The DoF is wedge shaped, with the apex of the wedge near the camera, and the height of the wedge increasing with distance from the camera^.
• When the plane of focus is at a substantial angle to the image plane, the DoF can be small in height but infinite in width and depth.
• The sharpness gradients are at an angle to the line of sight. When the plane of focus is almost perpendicular to the image plane, the sharpness gradients are almost perpendicular to the line of sight.
• When the plane of focus is at a substantial angle to the image plane, objects at the same distance from the camera are rendered with unequal sharpness, depending on their positions in the scene.
• Objects at greatly different distances from the camera are rendered sharp if they are within the DoF wedge.

Despite the differences, for a scene that includes relatively little height, lens tilt can produce a result similar to that of a miniature scene, especially if the image is taken from above at a moderate angle to the ground. For a completely flat surface, the effect using tilt would be almost the same as that with a regular lens: the region of focus would be sharp, with progressive blurring toward the top or bottom of the image. The image of Jodhpur was made from such a scene; although the blurring was accomplished with digital postprocessing, a similar result could have been obtained using tilt.
Miniature faking using tilt is less effective if a scene includes objects of significant height, such as tall buildings or trees, especially when photographed at a small angle to the ground, because there is a sharpness gradient along surfaces that are obviously the same distance from the photo camera.
Though probably less common, similar difficulties arise if an object has significant extent along the line of sight, such as a long train receding from view, again photographed at a small angle to the ground, because parts of the train that are obviously at considerably different distances from the camera are rendered equally sharp.
With a view camera, tilt can usually be set with movements built in to the photo camera; with a small- or medium-format camera, a tilt-shift lens or adapter is usually required.

Tilt-Shift photo gallery 

taken from PHOTOGRAPHY