On Monday afternoon, just hours after the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced, Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Kim Komenich was standing at a Wells Fargo bank in San Jose, California when he noticed the man in front of him hand the teller a note. As the teller began to empty a cash drawer, Komenich proceeded to wrap his arms around the robber in a stifling bear hug.
Police found Komenich and Fernandes still entwined in their awkward embrace. They quickly arrested Fernandes and his two suspected accomplices, who had remained in the customer waiting area. They were later booked on robbery charges. No gun was ever found.
Komenich, an assistant professor at San Jose State University, is no stranger to dangerous situations. In 1987, while working for the San Francisco Examiner, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Spot News Photography for his coverage of the Philippine Revolution and the fall of Ferdinand Marcos.
It just so happens that Daniel, the man for whom the cake was made, recognized it on PetaPixel and emailed us with more photographs and some background:
That cake was my groom’s cake, which was presented as a surprise by my awesome wife during our wedding reception. Knowing how much I love photography and my 5Dmk2, my wife commissioned BethAnn (owner of Studio Cake) to create this amazing piece. Since you were wondering what the back looked like, I thought I’d send you a pic…the picture on the screen is a shot from our engagement shoot (by Ray of Apertura Photography).
It’s amazing how much the cake resembles the actual camera. We love the engagement photograph displayed on the “LCD”. Sadly, Daniel informs us that the photo itself wasn’t edible.
This cake sets quite a bar for photography-related cakes. If you have any photos of similar cakes, feel free to email them to us!
In his recent Twitter Q&A session regarding House being filmed with a 5D Mark II, director Greg Yaitanes answered a question about differences of the new setup by saying, “focus was hard with these lenses but more “cine-style” lenses are being made as we speak.” Lo and behold, new cine lenses are being announced!
Carl Zeiss has just announced the first set of prime and zoom lenses designed specifically for HDSLR cameras. The new Compact Prime CP.2 and Lightweight Zoom LWZ.2 lenses have interchangeable mounts and can be used on F (Nikon), EF (Canon), and PL (traditional cine camera) systems.
The primes range in focal length from 18mm to 85mm and can be used on full frame cameras, while the zooms are limited to crop sensor bodies. Here’s an interesting quote from the press release:
The trend of filming in high definition using a digital SLR camera is unstoppable. Moviemaking today is unthinkable without this technique, whether for independent filmmakers, television producers or professional still photographers who wish to expand their services.
Pricing was not unannounced, but the lenses will be available starting June 2010.
Real time photo sharing service TweetPhoto has raised a $2.6 million Series A investment from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.
The San Diego-based startup is one of the closest competitors of TwitPic, the most popular photo sharing service for Twitter. As long as Twitter doesn’t compete in this space with 3rd party sites by starting its own service or acquiring one of the services, the future looks bright for TweetPhoto. Last year, TwitPic raked in $1.5 million in revenue and turned down an offer “much higher than $10“.
Although TweetPhoto still lags behind TwitPic in terms of traffic, TweetPhoto is attempting to ensure its growth and survival by spreading its eggs across multiple baskets. Unlike TwitPic, TweetPhoto has expanded to support other social networks including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Foursquare.
GigaOM also reports that the company is thinking about changing its name, and will likely do so at some point in the future.
Real time photo sharing is just getting started and, if the investors are correct, we should be seeing much more growth and innovation in this space in the near future.
Apparently, there are plenty of people who find a traditional camera strap to be a (pardon the pun) pain in the neck.
Italian company CPtech recently announced a camera holster design, the B-grip. It’s a strap-free contraption screws in to the camera body like a tripod head, and then is clipped into a holster for a belt — a utility belt, perhaps?
The whole idea is that the camera can be quickly released or carried securely against the photographer’s body. The B-grip will run you about $50.
The B-grip will probably create some competition for Shai Gear’s similar belt holster, the Spider Holster, which looks and sounds more like a Bruce Wayne-Peter Parker collaboration. Unlike the B-grip, the Spider Holster doesn’t actually clip in; it slides in and out for easy access.
The Spider Holster has been out for about a year now and costs about $110 — if they’re in stock.
Personally, I don’t trust my butterfingers with a strapless camera; I usually wrap the strap around my hand several times if it’s not around my neck or shoulder.
What are your thoughts? Are you a strap-free daredevil or are you a seasoned strap-manager?
A signed print of Edward Weston’s Nautilus Shell purchased for $10 in 1927 has been auctioned off for a whopping $1,082,500 at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.
We reported last month that the print, purchased by a young photographer named Bernice Lovett, was estimated to fetch up to $500,000.
The photo ended up going for more than double that amount.
Edward Weston created the photograph in 1927, the same year Lovett purchased it at San Francisco’s East West Galleries. The photograph is now regarded as one of the great modernist photographs of all time, and this sale places it among the most expensive photographs in the world.
Another of Weston’s photographs on the list is Nude (1925), which sold for $1,609,000 at the same auction house in April 2008.
NachoFoto is a new image search engine that attempts to deliver relevant results for a specific kind of query traditional search engines haven’t focused on: dynamic keywords.
These are keywords for which the resulting photographs should change over time.
For example, if someone searched for “tiger woods” this past week, they were likely looking for photographs of him at the Masters. However, traditional search engines such as Google returned exactly the same images as they did the week before. A quick Google search for “Tiger Woods” shows many images of him, but nothing specifically from this week. A NachoFoto search of the same term returns photographs ordered by freshness.
Another example would be the searches for “earthquake”. Those who search for the term “earthquake” prior to a major disaster would have greatly different expectations than those who searched for the term immediately after. As of now, Google does not offer any way to sort or filter by time in their image search.
Traditional services like Google built their reputation upon relevancy, but newer services such as Twitter have demonstrated that the ability to surface “trending” topics is important to users as well.
This new service is an interesting look at a feature image search engines should have, but unless someone acquires NachoFoto, it probably won’t stand a chance if the feature is added to existing search engines.
The New York Times’ Lens blog is attempting a project similar to the worldwide 4am project we covered recently.
A Moment in Time is an attempt to capture a slice in the history of the world by allowing readers to submit photographs taken at Sunday, May 2, at 15:00 hours (U.T.C.).
While the photographs don’t have to be taken exactly at the specified time, they ask that you try to stay within minutes of the target. Once you’ve taken a photo, submit it through submit.nytimes.com/moment.
The submitted photographs will then appear on both the Lens blog and on NYTimes.com, and notable photographs will selected and featured more prominently on the blog.
If you’re interested in participating, mark your calendar and be ready with your camera on May 2!
Photojournalists Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register and Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post won Pulitzer Prizes this year in photography.
Chind’s photo of a harrowing water rescue photo won as the Best Breaking News Photograph. The photo, published July 1, 2009, shows a construction worker dangling above the rapids of a dam, in an attempt to reach a victim in the water. The Pulitzer board say the photo captured “a heart-stopping moment.”
The victim and her husband had gone over the edge of the dam on a boat. Rescuers could not reach the pair with a crane. According to the National Press Photographer Association, Chind took the photo from a nearby bank crowded with rescue workers and firefighters. A worker in a makeshift rig was lowered down towards the water and managed to save the woman after several attempts.
Walker won the Best Feature Photography for his intimate photo essay of a teenager, Ian Fisher, as he entered the Army. Walker documented the young man for 27 months, following him as he recruited, trained, was deployed to Iraq, and finally returned.
The Pulitzer board described Walker’s work as “an intimate portrait of a teenager who joins the Army at the height of insurgent violence in Iraq, poignantly searching for meaning and manhood.” Color versions of Walker’s essay can be seen on the Pulitzer website and the multimedia package can be seen on the Post’s website.
Here’s a fun concept design imagining the classic Kodak Brownie reintroduced to for the 2012 London Olympic games as a simple digital camera. Designer James Coleman says,
After researching the history of the Brownie I realised that Kodak often made special edition Brownies for major events such as World Fairs or anniversaries. Being from London, I chose to design a Brownie for the upcoming 2012 Olympic games.
The only control on the camera is the shutter button, and it has three lenses — two for the viewfinders and one for the actual exposure. Rather than looking at an LCD screen or pressing a viewfinder to your face, you gaze into one of the two viewfinders from above depending on whether you’re shooting a landscape or portrait image.
What do you think of this design? Would you enjoy it as a novel “toy” digital camera?
A signed print of Edward Weston’s Nautilus Shell purchased for $10 in 1927 has been auctioned off for a whopping $1,082,500 at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.
The New York Times’ Lens blog is attempting a project similar to the 
Photojournalists Mary Chind of The Des Moines Register and Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post won Pulitzer Prizes this year in photography.
