It’s an unfortunate element of assembling a good camera kit these days, but I think that in some cases users are too quick to blame image weakness on camera gear (see almost any photography forum). Sure the gear plays a huge role in image quality, but not more than user skills during capture, post-processing and printing. Of course we don’t want our gear to be the weak link. Roger’s article highlights some good points to consider when buying gear.

Peter’s website can be found here. I especially like the “Parisians” portfolio set.

I photographed the bridge in 2005 to produce a black and white image and have wanted to revisit the spot for a color image when the light and skies were more interesting for color photography – and I wanted to shoot it with Phase One/Mamiya medium format equipment. About a week ago we had a day with potential for better light and skies for such a shot. So I headed to the river in the late afternoon, set up to shoot, and waited until the sun had nearly fully set. The view of the bridge and the interesting lines and shapes of the water-polished serpentine make it a pleasant place to hang-out while waiting for the light.

FACT: 1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency. Take the online color challenge, based on the official FM100 Hue Test by X-Rite.”

X-Rite has a fun color vision test based on the FM100 Hue Test. Take the challenge here.

You may have to wait for the smoke to clear a bit, as the Phase One servers are a little choked today.

From Nixon to the Beatles, Bette Davis to U2… Over the past 60 years, The Observer’s Jane Bown has photographed many of the world’s greatest personalities. On the eve of her retrospective, she talks to Robin McKie about her life’s work.”

Check out the article and video here.

You can download the Lightroom 3 beta here. It’s a free download. There’s a “First Look” preview of the beta at The Luminous Landscape, in which Michael Reichmann sheds some light on the upcoming version features.

I’m not a Lightroom user, but I’m happy to see this version upgrade coming for those who are. Users of the beta can provide feedback to Adobe via the Lightroom forums.

Photomicroscopy is photography of microscopic subjects using cameras attached to microscopes or similar devices. Nikon is one of the preferred brands of microscopes for such photography because of the quality optics and the rigidity of certain models. Other quality brands include Leica Microsystems and Olympus. Isolation from vibrations is of paramount concern for this type of photography. I have two Leica MZ12 stereo microscopes and lots of fiber optic lighting equipment. I need to dust off my camera adapters (they’re not really dusty, just in storage) and try this subject again. I have never gotten the quality of the results shown by most of the samples in the Nikon competition. I’ve not been able to isolate my microscopes from vibration in their current locations. Maybe this winter I’ll give it another try.

Some of the images in the winning and finalist sets are amazing. Take a look.