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Photo Assistant

Mitchell Feinberg's 8x10 Digital Capture Back

by JamesNYC23. August 2011 08:37

APE: Tell me why you created the 8×10 digital capture back and how it works?

Mitchell: When I look back, three years ago, it was crazy that I even tried to do this: design and manufacture the world’s largest color capture back, large enough to cover the 8” x 10” format, so that I could continue to shoot like my glass plate-carrying brethren a hundred years ago.

It was a race against the clock, or, specifically, a race to see if my stocks of 8×10 Polaroid would run out before the back was completed. In the early months of investigation most of my evenings were spent on meandering Internet searches. Months more were spent deciphering unintelligible technical papers. The few companies with the right technical expertise were eventually identified, but it was extremely difficult to be taken seriously. The experience felt like working at a call center, making unsolicited calls for storm windows. Eventually, one firm was convinced, and, after over a year of difficult design work, a first prototype was delivered in February 2010. The first production model was delivered about 9 months later.

The Maxback, as it has been named (the Brontoback, Velocicaptor and Back Scratch Fever were rejected), is the largest non-scanning color digital back in the world, with a capture area of over 8×10 inches. The largest commercially available color digital camera backs are about 4.5 x 6cm in size. It attaches without modification to a Sinar, and delivers high quality interim captures in under 30 seconds.

I use the back while I am working. Once I am happy with a photo, I flip off the back and then shoot a couple of sheets. In this way, I have the quality of 8×10 film, and the immediacy of digital capture. Crazy, right?

PLEASE CHECK OUT THE ORIGANAL STORY HERE

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General

Interview with photographer Lou Benjamin author of: 'The Naked and The Lens'

by JamesNYC17. January 2011 19:23
Here is an interview with photographer and ICP instructor Lou Benjamin. Lou wrote a great book called: "The Naked and the lens." Beyond the fact that the book features fine art nudes and the discussion of thereof, it is also an incredible photo graphic resource with the amount of information it contains regarding photography, digital photography and digital capture.

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General | Interviews

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Stuff people say

"Papa, ... Music is your love, but Photography is your Religion." - Joya D. Hall-Sullivan | Age 10

 

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." - Richard Avedon - 1984


 "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Alva Edison

 

"Any photographer who says he’s not a voyeur is either stupid or a liar." - Helmut Newton


"You don’t have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth." - Annie Leibovitz


"When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track." - Weegee


" The camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." - Orson Welles


"Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already." - Helmut Newton


"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more. " - Nikola Tesla


"I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable." - Richard Avedon


"The first 10 000 shots are the worst." - Helmut Newton


“If I have any ‘message’ worth giving to a beginner it is that there are no short cuts in photography.” – Edward Weston

 

"Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn't have it in the beginning." - Mahatma Gandhi


"Ultimately success or failure in photographing people depends on the photographer's ability to understand his fellow man." - Edward Weston


"If you want reality take the bus." - David LaChapelle


"You don't take a photograph, you make it." - Ansel Adams


"When I have sex with someone I forget who I am. For a minute I even forget I’m human. It’s the same thing when I’m behind a camera. I forget I exist." - Robert Mapplethorpe


" Great photography is always on the edge of failure." - Garry Winogrand


"I don’t think photography has anything remotely to do with the brain. It has to do with eye appeal." - Horst P. Horst


"Be yourself. I much prefer seeing something, even it is clumsy, that doesn't look like somebody else's work." - William Klein


"Avedon claims to have been the best photographer in the '60s - bullshit - Bob Richardson was - despite or because of being insane and strung out on drugs, I managed to do photographs that are considered iconic - being known as the 'photographer's photographer' means I lead and they follow - I'm broke and they are rich." - Bob Richardson


"If you're absent during my struggle, don't expect to be present during my success" - Will Smith


"Either take the lead or follow behind, just stay the fuck out of my way." - James Sullivan

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