Saturday, August 23, 2008

A Couple of News Items

Microsoft has released PhotoSynth, a “revolutionary” software program. It can combine dozens up to thousands of images (maybe much more?) of a particular location or scene, and then create a 3D image of that place. Then you can “go into” the image and move around and zoom into tiny details. Several months ago I saw an online demo of the program and it was frankly baffling. My mind could hardly grasp what I was seeing. The closest thing to it that I can think of is a scene from Blade Runner, that old Harrison Ford/Ridley Scott classic. In one scene, Ford’s character feeds a photograph (it looked like a Polaroid to me) into a machine and then was able to go deeper and deeper into the image, going through doorways and checking out other rooms, chasing down images and scenes in mirrors—seeing details and views that weren’t visible in the original photograph. It was pure fantasy. At the time. PhotoSynth has nearly the same capability. Isn’t that weird?

Also, Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe have had their online/downloadable tutorial Fine Art Printing: From Digital Camera to Print published by Calumet Photo as a DVD. Reichmann is the man behind that great website Luminous Landscape. If you haven’t checked it out, please do so. I’d recommend the DVD based on my experiences with their tutorials. They produce quality goods.

And one more thing. Specs on a new Canon DSLR have been leaked--the 50D, which will supposedly replace the 40D. The 50D will have a 15.1 MP sensor and a high-resolution 3-inch LCD. This is, of course, unofficial, but I'm sure the official story will come out for Photokina. I just wish info had been leaked about the replacement for the 5D. Oh, well.

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