Thomas Barnett Article

Another great article by Thomas Barnett on Esquire. Link I try to read his blog with regularity; the man just makes sense.

It works!

Got my Pentax K20D and thanks to its focus adjustment feature I can finally use my DA 16-50mm lens and few other rather expensive lenses properly.A top of the line lens that actually focuses correctly, what a concept... Good for Pentax as I was ready to dump all my pentax gear if this didn't work.

Here's a shot of my cat with the 16-50mm while I can still fit him in the frame. He seems to have made it his mission to just stop moving and gain as much weight as possible.

omg! autofocus with a pentax!

Old Pinhole

Found some old digital pinhole photos during my last digital spring cleaning.

Madrid Metro

nicely done. Link via whythatsdelightful

This makes the LA Metro ads look like a Reno 911 PSA ;-)

Bless the Internets

Link to FAIL blog. also, go to google.com, type "find chuck norris" and click "I'm feeling lucky"

Awards for Efe

One of my high school friends from back home, Efe Oztezdogan, apparently has won couple awards for his short film “Altyazı”, and it's been shown in various international film festivals. He emailed me about two weeks ago, out of the blue, and it was great to hear from him after so many years. I'm just happy that he's succeeding in his field, as moviemaking had always been his passion. I remember us getting our first video capture card, messing with adobe premiere and figuring things out :-) so cool.

Here's a Link to an article about him. It's in turkish ;-)

:-)

Link to more via Monkeys for Helping

Fascinating

Sunshine

Saw the movie "Sunshine" today, and I'm really impressed.It was visually spectacular, and definitely great use of bokeh with that warm amber color. I enjoyed it as much as Soderbergh's Solaris and there's a nice review, as always, at Film Freak Central.

... I love looking at those NASA videos of the sun in the ultraviolet spectrum by the SOHO telescope; it looks especially beautiful in blue:

P.s. Isn't the sun supposed to expand into a red-giant and burn away the earth in the process of dying out, as opposed to just getting cooler and dimmer?

Beautiful Audi Motion Piece

Saw this a while ago on Motionographer...It's made by Universal Everything (link to original high quality video)

[hana-flv-player video="http://www.denizdurmus.com/photoblog/video/audimotion.FLV" width="480" height="272" description="" player="4" autoload="true" autoplay="false" loop="false" autorewind="true" /] This is beautiful in so many ways :-)

FSA and other photos from the Library of Congress

One forgets about all those photos from the Library of Congress that are in the public domain... Valley of the Shadow of Death, 1855

Prohibition

Walker Evans

Gordon Parks

Dorothea Lange

Montana 1942

Unknown farmer

Switchman, Chicago 1943

Crane Operator, TVA's Douglas Dam 1942

40th street railroad shop Chicago 1942

Illinois central RR

Worker at carbon black plant Sunray Texas 1942

and some other great Office of War Information Collection photos from the 40s

16-inch coast artillery gun Ft.Story VA 1942

"An American Pineapple" :-)

P-51 Mustang

Fighter pilot

test pilot, Long Beach 1942

...and the daguerreotypes

Shorpy.com

Sweet. The first posts are great. "Shorpy.com is a photo blog about what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating. We’re starting with a collection of photographs taken in the early 1900s by Lewis Wickes Hine as part of a decade-long field survey for the National Child Labor Committee, which lobbied Congress to end the practice. One of his subjects, a young coal miner named Shorpy Higginbotham, is the site’s namesake."

Link