Will be away for next ten days..

Update(21-Feb): Looks like it will take another 10 days before I find some time to write! See you then..

Life has been keeping me busy and also sleepy(!), I will have to leave this blog without much activity for another ten days. Jan-07 has been one of the most active months on this blog, and looks like it will not be the same in February. I will be away from this page for a short ten day duration, and will be back to usual after that. See you then!

Steve McCurry

McCurry's people and portrait photographs are one of the best I have seen, and are my favourites. I never wrote about Steve McCurry on this blog, since most people would already know about him anyway and would have seen a good lot of his work. But time and again when I revisit his gallery to admire those images, I realize I can't resist talking about how great his images are. And most important - his images and style of photography are very distinct and hardly any one has made images like his, that really gets the viewer involved with the image.

Sometimes his images reminds of what Ken Rockwell loves to say - that photography is more of an art form than technical, and if you want to excel in photography, you will do good to join painting or design lessons more than Photography classes(see this page). And nearly all of McCurry's photographs look like paintings framed keeping in mind just what the viewer would want to see.

If you have not yet seen his gallery on the web, do not wait, just go ahead and click!

Shall we drop 'digital' from 'digital camera'?

In the last year or two, digital cameras have become commonplace to an extent that you hardly see any film cameras around, be it a touristy place, a party or a function. In fact I have sometime noticed people looking oddly at someone turning up with a film camera! I was wondering if the name 'digital camera', which was once used to distinguish digital cameras from film camera is still relevant. The same logic applies to the phrase 'digital photography' too. Isn't time we use 'film camera' as a case of exception and let the word 'camera' indicate a digital camera by default?

Well, I shall make a small start and stop using the phrase 'digital camera' in this blog. But I shall let the title of the blog 'Digital Photography World' remain for some more time before thinking of changing it.

On a related note, a news item reads that shipping volumes of digital cameras have dropped for the first time in the last quarter. That could well mean that the migration from film cameras is nearing its end, and also that the technology is stabilizing. A year down the line, most of the camera sales might come from upgrades and fresh buys and not from those migrating from film.

On an unrelated note, I just don't like the idea of some people referring to film cameras as 'analog cameras', like this report. Blind use of the word opposite to 'digital' simply doesn't fit well here. In fact a lot of film cameras had considerable amount of digital technlogy(like metering) even when they were running on film, and I would rather see the term 'film camera' used.

Panasonic getting serious about photography?

I don't so much track camera releases or who is doing how in the market other than Canon and Nikon, but sometimes they catch my attention. I made my customary visit to dpreview.com today and looked as if Panasonic is spamming dpreview! They have launched not one, not two but six new/upgraded digital cameras. Most of the camera websites also seem to have been flooded with the same news. There seem to be so many point and shoot digital cameras out there, and the competition is so high, no wonder some of the older second tier companies have stopped making digicams.