Brandymore Castle

The man behind the Olympus Pen cameras, the OM-1 and the XA, Yoshihisa Maitani died yesterday at age seventy six. He lived to see his Pen camera system reborn as the Pen Digital through the work and enthusiasm of a new generation of engineers. The new E-P1 is not an exercise in nostalgia but a camera that acknowledges its ancestry while breaking new ground with its mirrorless design, compact lenses and in-camera digital image processing. This photograph of my OM-2n looks a bit like a shrine in light of today's news. My original XA-2 bought circa 1986. A classic camera and novel industrial design from Maitani's hand.

I have been strongly in favor of what I have called, for lack of a better term, "in situ preservation" of vernacular photographs. The idea for this slowly emerged out of my experiences with my own family photographs. There were several generations of photographers among the branches of our family tree, starting with my grandfather, my grandmother attended photographic school and worked in the darkroom at her husband's studio and had an early fascination with photography as a child, her favorite uncle was a photographer. Her father's mother's brother was a well known and successful 19th century photographer and stereoview publisher, whose three sons went on to become photographers. We inherited a wealth of photographic heritage and a vast treasure of old photographs. I grew up around photography as a child, not intensely as perhaps a child of a concert pianist might grow up around constant music and the grand piano in the living room, but absorbed this heritage by ...

Today, I posted the following to the GenPhoto email discussion group. I thought it would make a good addition to the blog as well. Google has a new service called My Maps enabling anyone to create a public or private map containing descriptive markers for just about anything. The markers can contain rich text and images. Card photographs make an ideal subject for mapping, since they generally are imprinted with the location of the photographer's studio on the back or front. This makes is possible to create a marker for each studio. If the photograph has a known date (a tax stamp date, indicated in writing or estimated from the card style or knowledge of the subject), studios can be mapped as the photographer moves. I have mapped the known studio locations for J. G. Mangold , a significant nineteenth-century studio photographer and publisher of stereoviews in the Quad Cities region and Florida. I encourage everyone to note the photographer's imprint on the back of the card pho...

The New York Times obituary section notes the death of John Backus, who led the team to develop the FORTRAN. I suspect the members of the priesthood, coding in machine code, were the ones saying it was an impossible task. It is difficult to see how something so seemingly obvious could be such a struggle to achieve, but that is the way with hindsight. It is difficult and daunting to face into the wind. It takes courage and persistence. Words to live by: “You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.” -- John W. Backus (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/obituaries/20cnd-backus.html 19 Mar 2007)