Irving Penn, known for his style of stark simplicity that revolutionized fashion and portrait photography, died today at his home.  He was 92.  It was just a week or so ago that I saw my first Irving Penn prints in a private collection.  Paul Mobley had a great story about buying a Penn photo (the last one below) in lieu of a couch while being a broke CCS grad in NYC.  When he met Penn later and told him about it, he asked, "Where do you think that couch is now?"

RIP Irving Penn.

I just completed the website for Dirkhund Training, and I really love the way it turned out!  All the photography is by me as well, and you might notice that there are a few photos of my dog in there : )  Erin specializes in obedience, behavioral and aggression training in dogs.  If you have a wild dog in your life and are looking for training, give her a call.  Check out the site in full at: www.dirkhundtraining.com.

Labels: dogs, friends, websites

I've written about our friend, Emily, before—I designed and currently maintain the website for her foundation, Let's Rock CF.  She happens to have cystic fibrosis and has devoted her life to raising money and awareness for a cure. She sets up benefit concerts, runs half-marathons, and for the past three years has ridden her bicycle from Detroit to Chicago to raise money.  Just the fact that she can do these things while having CF is amazing.  She's a pretty inspiring person.

Well, her newest challenge is a cross-country ride from Chicago to Los Angeles where she hopes to appear on the Ellen DeGeneres Show to raise awareness of cystic fibrosis with Ellen's large national audience.  (She started this past Tuesday and I believe she's in Denver now.)  She originally was planning to bicycle there, but due to an injury is bicycling part-time and riding a vespa the rest of the time.  Her trek is being logged via video postings on SPIN Earth, and you can view photos and/or donate on her site page at letsrockcf.org/e2e4cf.html.  We wish her the best of luck on the road, and seriously hope she makes it on the Ellen show!

Labels: friends, inspiration

The second high-res image has been released from the ESO's GIGAGALAXY Zoom project and it's pretty amazing. It's available as a download here.  This time, I don't have to do any news reporting since they provided a great summary on the site:

The second of three images of ESO’s GigaGalaxy Zoom project is a new and wonderful 340-million-pixel vista of the central parts of our galactic home, a 34 by 20-degree wide image that provides us with a view as experienced by amateur astronomers around the world. Taken by Stéphane Guisard, an ESO engineer and world-renowned astrophotographer, from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope, this second image directly benefits from the quality of Paranal’s sky, one of the best on the planet. The image shows the region spanning the sky from the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer) to Scorpius (the Scorpion). The very colourful Rho Ophiuchi and Antares region features prominently to the right, as well as much darker areas, such as the Pipe and Snake Nebulae. The dusty lane of our Milky Way runs obliquely through the image, dotted with remarkable bright, reddish nebulae, such as the Lagoon and the Trifid Nebulae, as well as NGC 6357 and NGC 6334. This dark lane also hosts the very centre of our Galaxy, where a supermassive black hole is lurking. The image was obtained by observing with a 10-cm Takahashi FSQ106Ed f/3.6 telescope and a SBIG STL CCD camera, using a NJP160 mount. Images were collected through three different filters (B, V and R) and then stitched together. This mosaic was assembled from 52 different sky fields made from about 1200 individual images totalling 200 hours exposure time, with the final image having a size of 24 403 x 13 973 pixels. Note that the final, full resolution image is only available through Stéphane Guisard.

I stumbled across this today, and it is truly an amazing view of the night sky, as captured by Frenchman Serge Brunier for the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) GIGAGALAXY ZOOM project.  Brunier captured the 1200+ images that make up the composite between August 2008 and February 2009.  The end result is an 800-million-pixel panorama of the entire Milky Way!

This panorama was shot with a digital SLR and hobby telescope at two of the ESO's observatory sites in Chile, La Silla and Paranal; plus La Palma, one of the Canary Islands.
To really appreciate it, you have to go to their site and view the high-res interactive version.  Using Zoomify, you can zoom in on different segments to full-resolution.  Check it out here: www.gigagalaxyzoom.org/  They will also be releasing another image September 21st.

I seriously love this stuff.

Labels: foto news, inspiration, links

I just finished the new website for local band, Wolfbait.  Check it out in all it's (simple) glory at wolfbaitlives.com.

Labels: friends, music, websites