COPYRIGHT LAFORET VISUALS INC.  DO NOT COPY *(See Note at the end of this article) 

I had it in my hands for less than 72 hours before I had to send it back – but the time I did have with a prototype of the Canon EOS 5D MKII  will possibly change the path of my career as well as the photography industry to some degree.

(The video that will be released very shortly (to be notified when it does go live – go ahead and subscribe to this blog via RSS or e-mail…)   I’ll announce it here soon – the main hold up is the large file size of the video – and finding a host for it… if only 100 people hit the video – we’ll hit 9 Gigabytes of streamed video…   and that’s with the video that is downsized to 960 x 540 (which is 1/4 of 1080p!) in the Apple H.264 format from the full resolution 1080p RAW footage… the RAW footage that comes out of this camera is STUNNING – so much so that the entire video was cut with the RAW footage – untouched… in any way – no color, noise or exposure adjustment whatsoever… the images you are seeing on this blog – are frame grabs off of the video – those frame grabs were downsized from 1920 pixels wide to 700 pixels wide to fit the page width of this blog – and absolutely NOTHING was done to them either in Aperture/Photoshop or any other software.  Also – the image above was shot with a 45mm tilt-shift lens)

Here is the story behind the short video that I produced with what I believe to be a “game changer”of a camera for the following reasons:   Read the rest of this entry »

I made an important note to myself when starting this blog:  never go after anyone, or attack anyone on this blog – my grandmother used to say:  “If you don’t have anything good to say about something – don’t say anything.”  So I’m not going to make any comments on what I personally think about this – I’ll let the following quotes speak for themselves.  A routine Google search to the responses to this will lead you to what other people think – and are doing as a result of these statements.

These are quotes I’ve found from a PDN Article, and other sites here, here and here

N.B. – I am not vouching for any of the views or opinions expressed in any of the linked articles – I’m just giving you links. Read the rest of this entry »

 Some things you just don’t see coming – and those really tend to sting the most – and leave a mark.

The PhotoShelter Collection will leave a mark – and in more ways than one.

This morning, I received a personal call from Grover Sanschagrin, a friend and colleague of mine who was one of the founders of PhotoShelter and it’s “Collection.”  He told me that the current market forces were forcing them to close down their ambitious “Collection” venture prematurely – while the parent company PhotoShelter and it’s Personal Archive is here to stay.  

For those of you who may be unaware of the PhotoShelter Collection, this venture was a breath of (needed) fresh air in our industry.    Their idea was to create one of the best high-quality photography collections out there – and to leverage new technologies in ways that would allow the photographers to keep a lion’s share of the profits from each sale (both commercial and editorial image sales.)  Unlike most of their competitors – where getting less than 50% of each sale, and in fact where 30% to less than 5% of the total sale ever finding it’s way back to the photographer is unfortunately not an uncommon result – PhotoShelter made a point of “putting the photographers first” and giving them 70% of each sale.   For those of you new to the business – that number is traditionally the amount that goes to the agency NOT the photographer – I just wanted to make that doubly clear.   Read the rest of this entry »