SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) hosts the Richard Avedon retrospective (jul-nov) and I haven't made it up there yet (sigh…). Hoping to see a few of my favorite portraits from this master of photography: his pictures of Ezra Pound (poet) & Isaiah Berlin (philosopher) from his Literature portfolio and Clarence Lippard (drifter) from…

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are…

Caught a gem on KQED/PBS tonight – http://bit.ly/2AQ8uF American Masters broadcast a profile of Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood writers (Roman Holiday, Spartacus etc.) caught up in the blacklisting of suspected communist sympathizers. Go watch it today or buy the DVD when its released – best documentary I've seen in a while (released as…

Pre-IFA 2009: Canon has announced a handful of compact cameras including models aimed squarely at keen photographers. Top of the line is the PowerShot G11, successor to its flagship PowerShot G10 compact released last year. The G11 replaces the G10's 14.7MP sensor with what it describes as a high sensitivity 10 MP CCD though it…

For years now, the world’s camera companies have been taking the public for a ride. They’ve taught us to believe that what makes one camera better than another is the number of megapixels it has — when, in fact, the number of tiny colored dots making up a photo has very little to do with…

Bill Buckley Jr. passed away on Feb 28th last month and I would be remiss if I did not note here of his passing.  Can’t say I agreed with Buckley very often and know him to have been an imperfect man, but I admired him for his articulate, passionate and erudite defense of his ideas…