The Modern Century, the first major retrospective in the U.S. in more than 30 years of one of photography’s most original and influential masters, from April 11 through June 28, 2010. The exhibition comprises 300 photographs dating from 1929 to 1989, at least one fifth of them previously unknown to the public, and focuses on the photographer’s most productive decades, the 1930s through the 1960s. Also included is a generous selection of original issues of Life, Paris Match, and other magazines in which many of the photographs first appeared. Cartier-Bresson’s uncanny talent for seizing lasting images from the flux of experience, long identified with the title of his book The Decisive Moment (1952), made him a leading figure both in photography’s experimental modernism of the 1930s and the very different realm of photojournalism after World War II. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century offers a fresh overview of that complex achievement by drawing upon a great deal of previously inaccessible information and images from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, which was established in 2002, two years before the photographer’s death at the age of 95, and which has generously lent 220 prints to the exhibition. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is organized by Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is organized into 13 sections, beginning with 34 prints drawn from Cartier-Bresson’s work of the early 1930s, when the young Surrealist rebel used the quickness and mobility of his handheld Leica camera to invent a new brand of creative magic. Several of his early pictures celebrate motion by freezing it, such as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris (1932), in which a leaping man is forever fixed just before his heel touches the water that reflects his silhouette. Other pictures utterly transform reality, reinventing the life of

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century is organized into 13 sections, beginning with 34 prints drawn from Cartier-Bresson’s work of the early 1930s, when the young Surrealist rebel used the quickness and mobility of his handheld Leica camera to invent a new brand of creative magic. Several of his early pictures celebrate motion by freezing it, such as Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris (1932), in which a leaping man is forever fixed just before his heel touches the water that reflects his silhouette. Other pictures utterly transform reality, reinventing the life ofthe street as Surrealist theater, more mysterious and compelling than the world we know. In Valencia, Spain (1933), for example, a boy gazes upward at a ball he has tossed; because the ball is out of the picture’s frame, the boy is transformed into a figure of rapture.

During my latest trip in China (May 2009 I saw a country that was different from what  I did expect. The trip through China was a very pleasant surprised. We have been traveling through south-west China.  When we returned to Munich I did have 7000 photographs and hours of HD film footage.

Photography is a very powerful medium and a difficult craft and you want to share as many photographs as possible. Good news is that reduced the number of 7000 photographs in the last 2 Months down to 37 (40). There will be a second release with landscape and HDRI photographs later. I hope that some of my photographs they tell you a short story, awake feelings or share with you the emotions I experienced when I did take them. You can take a look at my China Photographs on PhotoMocha.com

ImageSorter is an image browsing application, which allows an automatic sorting by color, date taken, name, or size.

Kompetenzzentrum Mensch-Maschine-Kommunikation an der FHTW Berlin describes ImageSorter as ” The idea of ImageSorter is to find images of which you remember how they look but you forgot in which folder they were. If one or several folders are selected, all images from these folders will be visually arranged such that similar images are close to each other. In this sorted display it will be much easier to find a particular image. Selected images can be copied, moved or deleted (right mouse click).
ImageSorterdoes cache thumbnails and sortings, therefore after images have been loaded once, everything will be much faster.

The current version of ImageSorter (4.0 BETA) sorts images by the similarity of their color layouts. Future versions of the program will support additional ordering criteria. All images within a folder are sorted in such a way, that similar images are positioned close to each other. This sorting scheme makes it much easier to find a particular image within a huge image set.

Naturally also ImageSorter does not understand or recognize image content and cannot distinguish between different people or landscapes. However this program does not need a query image and is suited to display large sets of up to some thousands images in a visually well organized way that can easily be navigated.”

Today happened the local Photo Walk in Munich , we did have rain and rain and later less rain plus a lot of fun. Munich‘s Photo Walk was locally organized by Pia Kleine Wieskamp and Kristine Kamm.

HDRsoft has updated Photomatix Pro. With the release of Photomatix Pro for Windows v3.2 key features like Multi-threading support for Tone Compressor and parts of Details Enhancer have been added. Multi-threading does lower the time you wait if you have a multi core PC.

I used my Shanghai HDR to make examples based on the out of the box presets that are now part of  Photomatix Pro

Shanghai HDR Photos (above)

Presets results now part of Photomatix Pro v3.2

Photomatix Pro updates

• Updated RAW conversion routine to support RAW files from the Canon 500D/T1i, Nikon D3X, Olympus E30, Pentax K-m/K2000, Canon SX1/SX110 and Panasonic GH1.
• Multi-threading support for tone mapping: complete multi-threading for Tone Compressor method and partial for Details Enhancer method. The maximum number of cores used can be adjusted in Preferences.
• Details Enhancer’s Light Smoothing setting (renamed “Smoothing” in v3.2) has now two modes. The new mode is in the form of a slider and produces a slightly different effect. The behavior of previous versions corresponds to the “Light” mode which is in the form of five buttons named “Min”, “Low”, “Mid”, “High” and “Max”.
• Details Enhancer’s Highlights Smoothness setting (i.e. the setting that avoids grey highlights and preserves “clean” skies) has been significantly improved.
• Improved the accuracy of the Tone Mapping preview compared to the final image and changed the size options on the preview dialog. Size options are now ratios of the input HDR image such as 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8. Intermediary sizes are achieved via the ‘Preview Magnification’ setting.
• Histogram of tone mapping dialog in now available per color channel and shows in a separate window. The count and percentile of each level is displayed while the user moves the mouse over the histogram.
• Contextual help for the tone mapping controls shows in an expandable section of the Tone Mapping Settings dialog.
• Batch Processing adds an option for automatically detecting the photos belonging to a bracketed set. This option is useful when some of the photos in the processed folder are not part of a bracketed set and/or when the number of frames per bracketed set varies.
• Batch Processing adds an option for processing a sub-set of each bracketed set. This option is useful, for instance, when the user wish to batch process only three frames of bracketed sets containing five frames taken in one-EV step each.
• Based on requests from time-lapse photographers, Batch Processing now reads any valid Tone Mapping setting XMP file saved under a processed sub-folder, and use its settings to tone map the images of the sub-folder.
• Improved alignment of “by matching features” method.
• Added built-in presets for Details Enhancer. Presets are “Natural”, “Smooth Skies”, “Painterly” and “Grunge”, and are accessible from the Presets combo-box.
• Added ability to tag saved images with keyword set in Preferences. Keyword is added to IPTC metadata of images saved using the ‘File’ menu or created via Batch Processing (though not to via batching of single files).
• Added option in Preferences giving the choice between default and previous settings when starting the tone mapping dialog.
• Changed the name of ‘Process’ button into ‘Save and re-import’ when source images were exported using the Lightroom plug-in and the “Automatically re-import images into Lightroom” box was checked.
• Simplified the layout of the Batch conversion of single files and added ability to set the JPEG quality.
  Improved panning and zooming of opened or processed images.
• Made White Balance and Color Space settings for generating HDR image from RAWs sticky.

Photomatix Pro is a stand-alone program that creates and processes HDR (High Dynamic Range) images, and runs on Mac OS X and Windows XP and Vista. Some of the features of Photomatix Pro are also available as a Filter plug-in of Photoshop CS2/CS3/CS4 and an Edit plug-in of Aperture 2.1.

PhotoMocha China Photography Teaser 1 from StrongMocha on Vimeo.

My wife and I traveled in May 2009 through China. We are currently selecting the Photos which we want to share on PhotoMocha.com. This teaser is for our friends and frequent visitors of PhotoMocha

Shoot on Canon 5D Mark II

Software used:

• After Effects CS4 (Main VFX program we use)
• Cineform ProspectHD (Speed up the workflow with CineForm’s fast compression)
• Redgiant’s Magic Bullet Looks (used to define the style of the Teaser 1)

(Click on the Image to see the photos)

We traveled through Cuba in 2008 and I thought it is time to release some of the Cuba photographs I did capture in 2008.

Our trip did take us to:

• Havana
• Vinales
• Cienfuegos
• Trinidad
• Camagüey
• Gibara
• Santiago de Cuba
• Baracoa

You can take a look at this fine Photographs on our PhotoMocha Photography web site by clicking on my name: Thorsten Meyer

(Next I plan to share the Photos I did take in China when we traveled through South-West China in May 09.)