Sam­ple photo using Ektar 100.

I tried a roll of Kodak’s new Ektar 100 film. As adver­tised, it has very fine grain. How­ever, it suf­fers from the same prob­lem that all C41 films have–you’ll def­i­nitely get some color, but any resem­blance between the color you get out of the film and the color that was there in real­ity is purely coin­ci­den­tal. I do have a sec­ond roll to try out, but I think I’ll be stick­ing to Kodachrome.

Birds in the water at Santa Mon­ica Beach.

Recently I’ve been shoot­ing more Kodachrome.

Fujifilm’s killer medium for­mat film cam­era. It has long been only a pro­to­type. We first heard about at last year’s PMA trade show and were able to see a wooden ver­sion of it at Pho­tok­ina in Sep­tem­ber 2008. But now, it’s offi­cial. Fuji­film is weeks away from releas­ing its GF670 Pro­fes­sional medium for­mat film cam­era. Here is our full arti­cle about it.

Out­side of Japan, the cam­era should be released under the Voigt­lander Bessa III 667 name, which Cosina will dis­trib­ute. [The British Jour­nal of Pho­tog­ra­phy]

The ear­lier announce­ment had already raised my inter­est. From the addi­tional infor­ma­tion, it looks like it will be about the same size as a Leica, and smaller when folded. Still no price, but I’ll prob­a­bly buy one when they’re released.

A few weeks ago I learned about Kodak’s new C-41 film, Ektar 100. It’s out now–Samy’s in LA had a big pile of it. I bought a cou­ple of rolls to try out.

Rock Pho­tog­ra­phy Is Fad­ing Fast. What has hap­pened to great rock con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy? Is it part of a bygone era, or has the music indus­try for­gone pho­tog­ra­phers due to con­trol issues? A mix of both, says Mark Paytress in Cre­ative Review’s arti­cle “Three Songs and Yer Out! The Dying Art of Gig Pho­tog­ra­phy” (reprinted from a recent issue of M mag­a­zine). The “three songs” refers to an industry-wide guide­line that pho­tog­ra­phers are allowed access to the artists only for the first three songs of a per­for­mance. The prac­tice started as a cour­tesy to per­form­ers to keep dis­tract­ing flash bulbs to a min­i­mum. But then it worked its way around the scene and became the rule at most venues. Artists and their man­age­ment blame the venues for enforc­ing the rule, while the venues insist they’re just doing what they’re told by the man­age­ment. [Utne Reader]

This arti­cle doesn’t tell the whole story. Those restric­tions cer­tainly exist, but you only encounter them once an artist has become suc­cess­ful enough to have “peo­ple” and play at venues with “secu­rity.” If you stick to smaller venues such as (in Los Ange­les) the Hotel Café, Molly Malone’s, and the Trou­ba­dour, you can still shoot through the entire show. Using a flash is dis­cour­aged or even banned at some of these smaller venues, but then flashes going off in small venues are really annoy­ing to every­one, and tend to pro­duce bad pic­tures besides.

This doesn’t help peo­ple who want to make a liv­ing as con­cert pho­tog­ra­phers, because there’s no money in shoot­ing the acts who play at these smaller venues. How­ever, any­one doing it as a hobby will have plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties, and all of those big suc­cess­ful artists who can’t be pho­tographed start out play­ing at small venues. (Well, except for the totally man­u­fac­tured idol singer types, but the only rea­son to pho­to­graph them is for money.)

Kodak has announced a new color neg­a­tive film, Ektar 100. In gen­eral I’m not very fond of such film, because of the dif­fi­culty of get­ting the col­ors right, but it’s cer­tainly worth try­ing a roll just to see what it’s like.

…it is more than coin­ci­dence that ornate descrip­tive­ness fell out of favor at the very time pho­tog­ra­phy began to be widely published.

Galen Row­ell

Voigtlän­der has released some infor­ma­tion on an upcom­ing cam­era design, the Bessa III, which looks pretty inter­est­ing. It’s a fold­ing medium-format cam­era which is appar­ently switch­able between 6×6 and 6×7 for­mats. If it’s not too expen­sive (and Voigtlän­ders usu­ally aren’t), I might buy one to sup­ple­ment my Rollei­flex. Cur­rently the price is listed as “noch keine Angaben,” which I’m told is Ger­man Cor­po­rate­s­peak for “we don’t know yet.”

Why I Don’t Post Pho­tographs on Face­book. Imag­ine while on vaca­tion with your fam­ily you cap­ture this exquis­ite pho­to­graph of the Golden Gate Bridge, and that you are so proud of it that you post it on Face­book so all your friends can see it. If some­one on the Face­book staff sees your pho­to­graph and really likes it, Face­book can use it to adver­tise Face­book. They can license a post­card com­pany to use it on a post­card they sell. They can even license the image for the cover of Time mag­a­zine, use by a travel agency or any­one else. You will never know about it and you will never receive any com­pen­sa­tion for it. [Arti­cles and Reviews by Wal­ter Rowe]

Twins chase the news on L.A.‘s dark streets. It was push­ing 11 on a Fri­day night, and Austin Raish­brook wanted to be prowl­ing the streets of Los Ange­les look­ing for mur­der and mayhem.

Mired in a pocket of messy down­town traf­fic, the 32-year-old British trans­plant clenched the wheel of his Police Inter­cep­tor Crown Vic­to­ria and cursed out loud. Every few sec­onds, he turned his atten­tion to the lap­top com­puter glow­ing beside him, check­ing for any fresh crash alerts on an inter­nal Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol website.

One of the three radio scan­ners clipped to the visor above Raishbrook’s head crack­led to life. A Los Ange­les Police Depart­ment dis­patcher reported gun­shots on 110^th Street, near Broad­way. A vic­tim was lying in the street.

[…]

“With shoot­ings, you need to get there quick enough to get the shot of them load­ing him into the ambu­lance,” he said, weav­ing in and out of lanes and blow­ing past cars that appeared to be stand­ing still. “Unless he’s dead on arrival. If he’s D.O.A., you’ve got all the time in the world.”

Raish­brook has an iden­ti­cal twin brother, Howard, who also spends most nights in a Crown Vic, mon­i­tor­ing police scan­ners. The broth­ers don’t wear badges of any sort. But if it’s late at night in Los Ange­les and there is a police pur­suit, shootout, ter­ri­ble car acci­dent or a good-sized fire, chances are they’ll be there. They’ll be the ones with the video cam­eras. [Los Ange­les Times]

It’s ironic that I came across this arti­cle so soon after read­ing a (badly repro­duced) copy of a book by Weegee, a pho­tog­ra­pher famous for doing much the same thing (with a still cam­era) 70 years ago in New York.