It’s a brilliant little solution, especially if you shoot with a few bodies or hook up a variety of mass storage devices to your computer. And it’s free!

The stock was revered for it’s color accuracy and archival properties, but it was a difficult stock to develop, so it wasn’t used widely be amateur photographers. Still, if you ever got to shoot with film and had a chance to use Kodachrome stock (in one of it’s many forms) you will undoubtedly appreciate it.

Kodachrome had a good long life. It (and Nikon) were even popularized by Paul Simon in his song “Kodachrome” from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. However, with the meteoric rise of digital imaging technology, it’s not surprising to see it finally retired. It’s a sad day.

Joe McNally is one of my favorite photographers of all time, and he has a slightly different twist to gripping the camera, which is especially useful when taking pictures using a slow shutter speed – allowing you to regain one or possible two stops when shooting.

Even the most modern camera bodies and fastest lenses will experience a lack of light at some point. Perhaps you just want a slow shutter to help create a sense of movement or flow in your shot. Whatever the reason – this is a handy tip. Unfortunately, since Joe is left-eyed, the trick doesn’t work quite as well for right-eyed folks (like me) – but like Joe says, there are elements that even we can take from this.

Well, maybe we all jumped the gun a little with that last post, as it seems like the community surrounding JPG isn’t quite prepared to let it go that easily. As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, JPG has been having financial difficulty and was/is unable to sustain their business model as it’s currently laid out, which isn’t surprising for any dead-tree publishing operation in these harsh economic times — when everyone is staying home and reading the internet. I suspect that even a dead-tree publishing operation as clever as JPG, who takes great advantage of the internet, needs equally as clever a plan to help keep them afloat.

We do really appreciate the suggestions and offers we’ve received via email, JPG messages, Facebook messages, Twitters, blog posts, and savejpg.com– you guys are awesome. If we had known the support would be so strong, we would have reached out earlier. The good news is that this interest has bought us a little more time, so we are now looking to keep the site open at least through next week. We’ll keep you updated when we know more. – Devin Poolman

So they have a little more time to scrape something together, and possibly some prospects as the last two blog posts seem relatively hopeful.

Eye-Fi is the wireless SD card adapter that gives your camera WiFi capability. According to this Gizmodo article, the D60 will “automatically adjust its power timer settings to ensure that photos upload effortlessly for sharing and storing.”

Eye-Fi is getting a big break in this way, since bulkier wireless transfer technology is generally quite expensive by comparison. They’ve even got a photo sharing agreement with Nikon’s My Picturetown service.

I would expect that more manufacturer’s will start jumping on board soon, but if you’ve had any experiences with Eye-Fi, let us know in the comments.

Flickr: Martin Ujlaki

Flickr: vattenpuss

Flickr: brenbat

Flickr: petecarr

Flickr: Zuan

Trey Ratcliff is one of my favorite “unknown” photographers. He’s only unknown because he doesn’t really do this for a living, not because he potentially couldn’t. Since he first visited Chernobyl and published Part 1 of his two part photo essay from the hot zone, Trey garnered the attention of the online community and his blog has earned itself a lot of traffic.

For a living, Ratcliff works for a game company… in fact, he’s the CEO. During his travels, he takes along his camera and shoots high dynamic range images of (seemingly) everything he sees or can get close to.

Despite the “fad” impression I get surrounding the hype of “HDR” images these days, it’s tough not to love their rich, hyper-real quality. What’s nice about Trey’s photography is his use of HDR. Very few people who attempt HDR imaging seem to understand when enough is enough, and push their images too far. Trey’s photography could easily be misunderstood for impeccably lit traditional photography, but they still have that slightly processed look which is typical of HDR.

Go visit the two part Chernobyl Adventure over at Trey’s blog, “Stuck In Customs“.

The absolute worst of the bunch, however, is the Road Of Bones, which is a rough mud road that turns into soup when the rainy season hits, trapping miles of cars and their passengers.

This ‘road’ is a 2000 mile stretch which connects Yakutsk to Magadan, and is notoriously bad. It was built by political prisoners under Stalin’s rule, who were often imprisoned at gulags. Many of these people died trying to construct the road, and their bones became a part of the fixture.

The road is in a state of disrepair and is untraversable by standard road vehicles because of washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams. During winter, frozen water actually helps river crossings.

Incidentally, the Ewan McGregor produced short series “Long Way Round” featured Ewan and his buddy Charlie trying to traverse the Road Of Bones on their motorcycles.

We’re not talking megapixels here, we’re talking gigapixels – with resulting images that are so highly detailed, you can zoom in to even the tiniest object in the distance and bring it in with clear and crisp fidelity.

xRez is like a studio, or a collective of photographers who are commissioned for special projects. They have some unique and highly specialized equipment designed for the purposes of gigapixel level panoramic work, high dynamic range photography, large scale “full dome” panoramas, etc. It’s the sort of stuff we all dream of doing, but very rarely get a chance to.

By combining powerful 3d tools and techniques appropriated from the visual effects field, possibilites arise of new imagery and animation that are truly novel and unprecedented. Applications of these new techniques can range from experiencing stunningly large prints in fine art gallery installations, providing a substitute to live-action shooting in feature film backgrounds, and enriching a national park visitors understanding and interpretation, to name a few.

The team currently consists of Greg Downing (who specializes in 3D based imaging), Eric Hanson (a visual effects designer), and Ron Shirley (a film and photography major) and together they have worked on visual effects for numerous outfits and companies. All these guys are teachers as well as professionals, and they’ve got some interesting work in their online portfolio that shows off this gigapixel obsession.