Over the weekend I was mistaken for a press photographer by the nice people in Rowley.
Well, my cousin Marianne Mather actually is a press photographer in the Midwest. She’s quite good at what she does and has won a number of awards from the National Press Photographers Association and the Illinois Press Photographers Association.

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Yesterday I left the house far earlier than ever before to photograph at sunrise with some camera club folks on one of the beaches of Plum Island.
I like the ocean, but I’ll confess to being a landlubber (photographically at least). So I headed back up the island, over the bridge, through Newburyport, and down […]

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I’ve just started reading the first Harry Potter book. Lisa is dying to talk to me about the most recent book. Apparently somebody dies? (Don’t tell me who it is, or it could be you!)
Anyway, here’s a little quiz that “scientifically” proves that I’m most like Hermione Granger . . . though […]

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After getting my haircut, I cruised the DVD section of the Newton Library. From the recently-rented-and-to-be-reshelved cart I found a Hindi film: आँच (Aanch). I’ve had a hankering for Indian films recently, so I checked it out despite the fact that I’d never heard of the movie or any of its stars (Nana […]

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Today while waiting to get my haircut, I read A.J. Jacobs article in Esquire magazine. Jacobs was inspired by Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat to outsource some of the drudgery of his daily life.
The article is at turns appalling — having someone in Bangalore chat up his parents, really! — and brilliantly funny. […]

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The folks behind the wildly successful Piezography inksets for black and white photography have finally come out with an inkset for the Epson 2200.
Why is this a good thing? Believe it or not, but B&W is not color. I know, it seems obvious.
But all consumer digital darkroom printers use some combination of colored […]

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Conventional wisdom holds that editing an image in Photoshop is best done in an RGB (red-green-blue) or CMYK (cyan-yellow-magenta-black) colorspace. About the only thing most people attempt to do in L*a*b* is sharpen the L* (luminosity) channel, which preserves color balance while sharpening.
Digital imaging contrarian Dan Margulis has just written a book showing how […]

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Lisa and I always used to say that you had to travel somewhere very far away and/or very exotic to have a shot at winning the National Geographic Traveler magazine’s annual photo contest.
Well this year we went some place far away and exotic. Wish us luck!

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Officials in India are trying to make much needed sanitation improvements. In one case the minister of rural development is urging chief ministers to prevent village elders without indoor plumbing from running for office. And in Delhi the government has been ordered to pay 2,000 rupees for each stray cow brought off the […]

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The newest issue of P, Polaroid’s international photography magazine, is online. Once again, it contains a nice collection of art photographs made on Polaroid materials.
In the past I’ve really enjoyed receiving the magazine in print, but bankruptcy can hasten the transition of a free journal to an electronic-only form.

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Over the last couple of weeks I went to Wales, Holland, and Peru as part of my on-going Commonwealth project, which will include photographs from all 351 towns and cities in Massachusetts. I started the project last summer and have already been to many out-of-the-way places. Below are a selection of images from […]

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It might seem odd to those who read the entry about the digital camera that I’m saving to buy to find out that I have a $17 plastic medium-format camera that I’ve just started using.
Awhile back I asked Ben over at Newtonville Camera whether anybody bought the completely manual plastic cameras next to the cash […]

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A couple of years ago — okay, it was more like six — I told Lisa that “the Dow won’t break 10,000 for years.” A few months later it shattered 10,000 on its way to a peak of 11,908.50 in January 2000. My vindication was bittersweet when it sank back into the low […]

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Well you’ve really been faithful readers, and I thank you most sincerely. Last month was the busiest ever for this web site: over 6,000 page requests; more than 25,000 text and image files served; and in excess of 625 megabytes of data sent.
I hope you keep coming back!

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