An Eloquent & Timely Rant

" With the advent of digital technology, and the past two decade long corporate push to crush photographer's copyright trade practices, the model is broken and will surely die soon, unless photographers unify & fight back. That's as likely as herding the proverbial cats... still it's a shocking thing to see photographers slitting their own throats. That's partly due to ignorance and fear - young shooters are not taught the value of copyright and existing trade practices and say yes to whatever terms they are offered just to break in - and older shooters say yes to bad terms out of a very real need not to starve to death. I get it.... "      

                                                       -Photographer Doug Menuez/ No Copyright=The Borg

Beginning of the ultimate demise of the industry or a just-in-time call to arms? Doug Menuez, brilliant Bay Area based photographer has been in this industry for years, sees our livelyhood slowly being eaten away by corporate pressures, ignorance, fear and, one I'll add for the record... Laziness. He shares his thoughts on the matter on his blog: Doug Menuez 2.0: Go Fast, Don't Crash. Please take the time to read his timely rant, in it's entirety, HERE. 

  

Catching Up...

OK... we're through the first major holiday of the season with two more to go in the coming weeks.  Around my house, the annual gobbler (organic & free-range, of course) was plucked, stuffed, roasted to golden perfection and quickly dispatched by a handful of hungry guests. In between hourly bastings, I managed to read a fabulous article by west coast photographer Doug Menuez posted at the Editorial Photographers website. The article is titled "On Chaos, Fear, Survival & Luck: Longevity Is The Answer". You can find it here. It's well worth the read.

In other news, Nikon has been slow to catch up with the competition in releasing a larger, full-frame sensor to it's Pro D-DSLR arsenal. It now appears that that's about to change. Over the long weekend, Nikon Europe announced the pending release of it's newest offering-to-be, the D3X.

Boasting a 35.9x24mm., 24.5 mexapixel sensor, a built-in optical low-pass filter (fear moire no more),  a new 51-point autofocus system with the same auto-focus tracking ability as the D3 and will write to dual CF slots at a mind-numbing 35mb./sec. Some of the reports I have read indicate that .tiff files created from Camera Raw/NEF files will be in the 75mb. range, plenty big enough to finally meet the requirements of major stock agencies and for making large prints without interpolation. Unfortunately, there are no firm reports of a price for this little beauty (rumours have it at around $5.5K) ... or a release date. You can find out more by clicking here.