Fotoviva Art Prints

A Francis Bacon triptych painting has sold for more than £26m, just £160,000 short of breaking the artist’s auction record. Entitled ‘Triptych 1974-77′ and painted in response to the suicide of Bacon’s lover George Dyer, it made a whopping £26,340,500 at Christie’s Auction House in London.

It set a European record for a post-war British or Irish artist, but failed to beat the £26.4m paid for Bacon’s Study from Innocent X in New York last year. Francis was a Dublin-born figurative painter who died in 1992.

Triptych 1974-77 was the last of Bacon’s paintings created in response to his gay lover’s death and shows sequential images of dark, ominous umbrellas and his lover struggling on a near-deserted beach.

The amount of money some art goes for is criminal really – I mean imagine what good you could do in the world and help charities, rather than having a £26m picture hanging on your wall! Kinda selfish if you ask me. Now if you are in the market for some exquisite triptych art we have a much better range – at more manageble prices at the Fotoviva Art Store, as most of our images can be purchased in 3 section triptych canvases. We also offer bespoke sizes to suit your lounge walls. See the Triptych Canvas page for more information.

A 16 billion pixel image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper has been posted on the internet, giving art lovers a detailed view of the 15th Century work. The image is 1,600 times more detailed than those taken with a typical 10 million pixel digital camera. Experts will be able to see segments as though just centimetres away and examine otherwise unavailable details.

The posting comes amid claims a new system aimed at protecting the piece from Milan’s pollution is not working. The original work is displayed in the Italian city’s Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Art curator Alberto Artioli told Associated Press news agency the new resolution avoided the graininess when zooming in to regular photographs.

You can see this work of art in all its 16bn pixel glory at www.haltadefinizione.com

“You can see how Leonardo made the cups transparent, something you can’t ordinarily see,” he said. “You can also note the state of degradation the painting is in.” That degradation has been the subject of controversy this week. An Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, reported that a sophisticated monitoring and filtration system introduced during a restoration of the chapel in the late 1990s was not preventing particles or substances that could damage the work being brought in by visitors.

The Last Supper was painted by Leonardo da Vinci at the end of the 15th Century and, because of the experimental techniques he used, parts of the masterpiece subsequently peeled off and were badly damaged. The BBC’s Frances Kennedy says the paper reported that equipment monitoring air quality inside the refectory showed that levels of fine particle pollution had tripled in the past two years. It quoted experts suggesting these particles could settle on the work, eventually creating a dark misty layer.

More than 350,000 people visit the painting each year, and together with pollution levels rising year by year, this monster of an image may well be recorded now forever thanks to digital imaging.

On the Apple site there is a great feature on Richard Walch, snowboarder and professional photographer. In the article he talks about his new found love, Aperture on the Mac. For those that don’t know, Aperture is similar to Adobe Lightroom and is one of the prefered choices for professional photographers who handle, process and organise large collections of RAW shots.

Apple’s Aperture software running on a 15-inch MacBook Pro is the foundation of the mobile digital darkroom that he carries in his backback — rain, shine or snowstorm — when he goes on a shoot. Aperture’s RAW-focused workflow is particularly important to Walch, who shoots RAW at up to eight frames per second in a bid to capture his fast-moving subjects. He explains: “When I get down the mountain after a full day’s shooting, I normally have around 10 gigabytes of data. Aperture handles it so quickly and so easily”.

Because of these remote locations, and because Walch is himself a rider as well as a photographer, it’s important to travel light. Walch can fit everything he needs — cameras, lenses, laptop, supplies — into his backpack, so that he can begin importing shots into his MacBook Pro while he’s still on the mountain. He explains the advantage: “We normally break for food at some point, and I take that opportunity to import and organise my shots in Aperture. This is great for me, because I can isolate any shots I’ve missed during the morning session, and get them in the afternoon”.

By the end of the day, Walch is frequently exhausted, which is where Aperture’s backup facilities come into their own. Walch says: “During a shoot, I usually hike for many miles, often just to get a single shot, so the last thing I want to do when I get home is spend an extra two hours backing up my work.

“Aperture is smart enough to know which photos haven’t been backed up to my external drive. With one click I can start the process and Aperture does the rest. For me, it’s one less thing to worry about”. Apple have a short movie with Richard’s voiceover here.

Some photographers prefer Aperture, some Lightroom – it depends on your own workflow preference. They both have trial versions so why not download them and see which fits your own style best – it might be that missing part of your photography kit. If you have a preference let us know why…

Are you off on your travels over the summer, or have you been and come back with a collection of pictures you feel the world should see? Well Travel Photographer of the Year has announced that the overall winner of TPOTY 2007 will have the unique opportunity to spend up to two days photographing His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, the Tibetan settlement in Northern India.

This opportunity to photograph the daily life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama is part of an unforgettable visit to India, much of which will be spent in and around Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan Government in exile, allowing the winner time to capture a superb photo essay. But it doesn’t stop there! In addition, the Travel Photographer of the Year 2007 will receive an Apple MacBook with Aperture 1.5 software, Adobe CS3 Web Premium software, a £2,500 TPOTY bursary, and a Plastic Sandwich leather portfolio book. Hows that for a top prize?!

TPOTY organiser, Chris Coe, said, “We are honoured to be able to offer such a magnificent prize for the overall winner of this year’s competition. The High & Wild trip to Dharamsala offers everything a serious travel photographer could wish for; incredible mountain and forest scenery, historical architecture, fascinating Tibetan, Buddhist and Indian cultures, the Tibetan Children’s Village, amazing people photography and, of course, a priceless opportunity – the chance to document a day in the life of the Dalai Lama.”

“This trip, together with the other elements of the prize, provide a once in a lifetime experience and one that travel photographers across the world would want to win. We very much look forward to seeing the entries submitted for this year’s competition. In order to give people as much time as possible, we are extending our closing date to October 3rd.”

TPOTY 2007 also offers splendid prizes for the winners of the three Portfolio categories and the One Shot category, including trips to Tanzania, the Swiss and French Alps and China, the latest professional-level photographic equipment and software, TPOTY cash bursaries and an exhibition at a central London gallery. In addition, TPOTY 2007 has a New Talent category, designed to kick-start or to give a major boost to a new career in photography, and a Young Travel Photographer of the Year category, for those aged 16 and under.

Entries for TPOTY 2007 are now open and close on October 3rd. The competition is open to amateur and professional photographers, and full information and entry forms can be obtained from the website.

We recently came across a website that offers an online course for bringing out the better photographer in you at Proud Photography. The 13 segment interactive course has been developed by prize-winning professionals who will give you personal feedback as they help you develop at your own pace.

Once enrolled you can expect comprehensive and thorough lessons loaded with information designed carefully to teach you how to take over your camera. Online quizzes will refresh your memory from every lesson and homework assignments will give you the confidence you need to put your skills to the test. You will also receive a personal 500MB online gallery that will give you more than enough storage to organize, share, send e-cards and even order your selected prints online.

And if that isn’t enought to get you excited, they are so confident about the quality of the course that they offer a full one year money back guarantee. What’s more right now they have 35% off the enrollment fee so there really is no better time to sign up.

Peter Timko, the CEO of Proud Photography, sums it up perfectly when he says “Unlike other online photography courses, we don’t just gloss over the basics, take your money and run. We cover everything, from the most important basic techniques to how to take the best photos in very specific situations.”

Researchers in Germany have developed the first liquid camera lens. The lens has no moving parts and is capable of switching between two levels of magnification and is considered an important step on the development of liquid zoom lenses. It works by bending light using the curved boundary between watery and oily liquids, and focuses by the application of a voltage.

Although this sounds like something out of Star Trek, it is potentially smaller and cheaper to build than conventional optics and could have a major impact on camera technology in the near future. Samsung have already begun using liquid lenses by building them into some cellphones.

“The creation of a liquid zoom lens would remove the need for mechanical parts, which would be a major advantage,” says Peter Schreiber, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute. Changing a zoom lens’s magnification also affects its focus, and causes problems such as pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration. In order to preserve image quality across a range of magnification, zooms require 20 or more lenses. So far nobody has come up with a liquid lens design that can do that. A first step, however, is to design a lens that offers different levels of magnification rather than a continuous range.

Schreiber and colleagues worked with Varioptic, French pioneers of liquid lenses, to come up with a design that switches from a normal view to 2.5-times magnification. The design consists of four liquid lenses and three fixed plastic lenses and offers a magnification of 2.5 times, while when all four lenses are at their flattest there is no magnification.
“The complete length of the system from outer lens to image sensor is 29mm, but it should be possible to reduce that,” says Schreiber. Varioptic is now considering how to take the design on to the prototype stage.
“The lenses are arranged to prevent image distortion while minimising colour distortion. Red, green and blue images must be recorded in sequence and then combined digitally, a process that would increase exposure times,” says Schreiber, “finding less distorting liquids to build the lenses out of is the answer to that problem.”

So although it potentially sounds like great news, this is probably another new technology which won’t find its way into  DSLR cameras for a few years yet. For smaller lenses such as camera phones it could find a market, but we’ll have to see how this one pans out.

In a surprising move, one of the leading optical glass makers Hoya are to buy out Camera manufacturer Pentax – or at least have them under their name. The merger has been going on for some time behind the scenes with twists and turns in negotiations resulting in a feud within Pentax. The two companies had reached a basic agreement on the merger in December, but Pentax made a change of presidency and cancelled the plan to merge with Hoya citing reasons why the company could survive on its own.
Hoya then prepared a takeover bid for Pentax in an effort to bring about the merger. After much debating at Pentax they accepted the takeover bid by Hoya last week and reached a general agreement on the merger. Hoya intends to launch a friendly takeover bid for Pentax and make Pentax its subsidiary in June of this year.

What this means for the future is open for discussion, but hopefully everyone will benefit from a merger between two of the photography world’s largest manufacturers.

Thanks to developers at the South Korea Electronic Technology Institute we may soon wave goodbye to those awful bright white flashes that not only turn you into the devil with those red eyes and blast the exposure out the window, but also annoy anyone in the vicinity!

Those clever bods have just announced a handy technology breakthrough with a new type of sensor to replace the traditional CCD seen in most digital cameras of today. It reportedly can take a bright, clear picture in just one lux of light, the equivalent to the light output of one candle from one meter away! The sensor is claimed to be over 2,000 times more light sensitive than current technologies allow, negating the need for flash in most circumstances. The new sensor is currently known as the single carrier modulation photo detector (SMPD) for the techies among you! It’s not clear how soon we can hope to find it in new cameras but it will begin launch initially in CCTV cameras and mobile phones. These technologies require a significantly lower resolution, so it may take a few years before the technology evolves into the expected megapixel resolution that photographers expect.

We think it’s about time camera technology took another major leap forward and provided shots that more accurately reflect the world seen through our own eyes. The less work we have to spend post-processing the more time we can spend out in the field with our cameras!

There is a new site in the photography world that’s well worth a look. PhotographyVoter.com is a collobarative project that lets you share and vote for information, articles and photography resources with the photographyVoter community. This fills a void left by the mighty Digg world because they don’t have a dedicated photography section.

If you have any photography related articles that you have written yourself, you can submit them for free on the site. And if you just fancy a read there is a growing collection of interesting writing by photographers from all over the world. The site is seeing rapid growth as the word spreads and we can only see this as a good thing!