I was recently turned on to the absolutely killer commercial photography of Mitchell Feinberg. An American working in both Paris and New York, he does some of the best product photography around. Check out these examples.

I struggled to find my favourite examples from his site for this article, as there were tons of them. The most striking ones are these recent pieces of work for Muse Magazine, which are technically advertisements or product photography, for products that have been scultuped out of a kind of mold. It’s as though their imprint was left perfectly inside drying cement, only dozens of times more detailed.

The polo shirt is an especially striking example, and each one from this series gives a strangely satisfying emboss to these handbags, watches, and wallets. I love the fact that each product is entirely drained of colour and essential shape, and the photo is as much about the cracked texture and broken surface of the environment around the indent as it is about the prouduct being represented.

Here’s something I never thought I’d be stunned by: makeup and cosmetics photography. Feinberg makes this stuff look luxurious and entirely alien. Flipping through a fashion magazine, stuff like this might get missed, but when seen as part of his impressive portfolio, it’s some beautiful work.

This red/blue combination is especially beautiful–he’s turned lipstick and… that blue thing (what kind of makeup is that, anyway? I’m clueless) into what looks like an unconventional homage to abstract painting.

And then there’s his food photography, which I’m still unsure about. He approaches it with the same eye he lends to the cosmetics, which means much of it looks alien and interesting, and hits you with a fresh burst of the unexpected. That’s good, but does it make me want to eat what he’s shooting? Not exactly, but I don’t think that one set of criteria is all that matters. A lot of this work is for the New York Times Magazine, which publishes some of the best food writers in the country, and they’re not always writing about how delicious and fun it is to eat things.

For some reason the aesthetics of Feinberg’s embossed series made me think of this model by Hans Op De Beeck that I stumbled upon recently, which is just a rapid-prototyped (unless it’s entirely computer-generated–I can’t tell) model of a modernist, Le Corbusier-styled apartment flat, only with additional touches like satellite dishes on every balcony and the first signs of decay. It occupies the space between real life and Corbusier’s blueprints: a pristine white model of what his famous designs eventually became. De Beeck calls it a “silent witness to the crumbling of modern thought.” Sure, why not?

Photographer and Professor Paho Mann has been getting some recent notice for his photos of various junk drawers and medicine cabinets, and with good reason. He presents them extremely well, on a minimalist black background, shot exactly from above.

Do our junk drawers and medicine cabinets say anything about us as people? More importantly, if they do, is it something interesting, something worth recording? I’d say many of these examples do–there’s something melancholy about looking at what we choose to throw in such a drawer, and why this specific container–this squared zone full of miscellany–is nearly ubiquitous among households. I use a laptop, and my current desk features a keyboard drawer. It became a ‘junk drawer’ about 3 days after I moved in.

My favorite objects are the ones that get thrown in there only temporarily, the kind of things that sat on a counter for too many days until being shuffled away with the vague mental promise, made to no one in particular, of future retrieval. Paper plates, a single snapshot, the expired batteries.

Mann’s website describes him as investigating the “physical manifestation of individuality”, and several of his other projects realize this attempt with an energy that such work demands, especially his ambitious ‘Sort‘.

I find myself drawn to artists and writers who try and catalogue the detritus of consumable products, usually because it’s such a wide and all-encompassing topic that do it with any style or depth takes a large amount of talent and patience.

Anyone can grab various ‘found objects’ that have been discarded, de-contextualized, and forgotten. It’s creating a compelling narrative out of them that’s hard. There are plenty of abandoned things in the world, and plenty of photographers with good cameras ready to shoot them, but finding thematic unity in randomness often comes late, if at all.

I think the finest contemporary ‘collector’, as it were, is undoubtedly Luc Sante, who besides his books and exhibitions (plus these great pieces)occasionally publishes short narratives or thoughts on his blog, Pinakothek. It’s highly recommended, as is Paho Mann’s site.

It was only yesterday when Olympus went ahead and released a new concept camera, capturing some semi-classic styling in a new format called micro four thirds. This new format is a conscious attempt to return to the old SLR types popularized by cameras like the Canon AE-1–it’s an entirely different approach for digital SLRs that shies away from the big bodies popularized by most cameras, but still allows for interchangeable lenses.

With that in mind, I decided to round up some examples of modern digital cameras that are beautifully designed, but keep to the best traditions of classic camera bodies. This has been a definite trend of late, with manufacturers realizing that the same old grey-rectangle isn’t how it always has to be when it comes to a digital camera.

Why get stuck in the exact same manufacturing ghetto when there’s a huge tradition to draw upon? With big thanks to the invaluable Retro to Go website for their tireless mentions of many amazing products, let’s run down the list:

5. Olympus Micro Four Thirds (Concept)

This is only a mockup of the aforementioned Olympus, but I hope it comes to market in something like this form. It’s a different direction for the digital SLR, and stands out from the rest of the classic bodies we’ve seen on the other cameras today. Obviously it needs some polishing, but here’s hoping the general idea gets retained.

4. Leica C-LUX 3

And the parade of Leicas beings. Here’s their attempt to inject clean lines and classic design into what is otherwise a basic, contemporary digital camera design. It doesn’t look so far off from some of the cameras you might find in a big-box superstore, but the subtle detailing makes all the difference.

3. Leica D-LUX 4

A wonderful metal body and a ridiculous level of simplicity make this look miles away from most digital cameras you’ve seen before. Wonderfully done.

2. Rolleiflex MiniDigi AF 5.0

Yes! A redesign of the famous Rolleiflex top-down camera design that started all the way back in 1929. You use a crank (purely aesthetic, this part) and look down at this camera from above. This remake is actually done by a Japanese manufacturer who has reproduced the original Rolleiflex design in miniature (the originals are insanely popular in Japan).

1. Leica M8 and M8.2

Yeah, these are new digital cameras. Leica has a massive, half-insane following around the world, and online you can find no shortage of endless diatribes that debate the exact differences between two limited-run lenses from the 1960s that only seventeen people have tried. Every artistic realm has its hardcore subculture full of passionate devotees, and what Steinway is to pianists and B&W is to audiophiles, Leica is to photographers. These two cameras (above is the M8.2, at the top of the page is the M) pull the famous Leica M-series, first introduced in the 1950s, into the digital realm–and the incredible bodies are easily the best I’ve seen in digital cameras of this type.

If you’ve got any more examples of some fine-looking digital cameras, let us know in the comments!

Anyone who shoots photos or video with any kind of serious interest likely had a mild breakdown a week ago, as Canon suddenly launched the newest in its line of high-end digital SLRs–the EOS-5D Mark II. It also received a reasonable amount of press on various design blogs, and there’s one reason above all: HD video. The camera is ridiculously powerful, with a 21-megapixel sensor and reportedly stunning low-light conditions (iso 25600, for the love of god). That same sensor, with all the same ISO options, lets you shoot actual HD for up to 30 minutes, using any lens you can attach to the camera.

This means your expensive fisheye, your heavy-but-amazing telephoto, hell, any lens you have is suddenly a high-end HD lens. The implications for that are stunning, as many have noticed; the top consumer dSLR is now, basically overnight, an incredibly versatile video camera not tied to any fixed set of optics. This means video productions previously unthinkable due to lighting constraints and lens prices are now within the reach of anyone with, say, $10,000. Needless to say, the hyperbole is flying on this one, and for good reason.

Most of said madness surrounds Reverie, the short film/ad made by Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Vincent Laforet. A large-format quicktime version hit the web on Monday and promptly exploded. Laforet is an “Explorer of Light”, which means he’s “one of the photographers that works with Canon on making better cameras,” and after a quick visit to Canon’s offices, he managed to convince the company to lend him the newest, just-arrived model for the weekend in order to see what he could do with it.

The potential was there for making a short film that would be hosted on the Canon website, but nothing was guaranteed. Laforet had never shot a film before, ever, and had less than 12 hours of preproduction. When you see the results–sans filming or location permits, on a budget of $5000 that included a 2-grand helicopter ride–it starts to dawn on you that this really is a watershed in digital imaging, exaggeration aside. There’s a youtube version below, but the full quicktime HD edition is far better.

Laforet explains exactly why the camera is going to change the industry:

The 5D MKII camera produces the best stills in low light that I’ve ever seen – what you can see with you eye in the worst light (such as sodium-vapor street lights at 3 a.m. in Brooklyn) – this camera can capture it with ease.

It was shot with 100% still photography equipment (lenses, grip/mounts, and a single Profoto 7b battery strobe pack (the strobe wasn’t used – just the modeling light))- with the exception of an expensive video tripod and head, and an LED light…

This camera is the ultimate “equalizer” – you no longer need half-million dollar’s worth of high definition video cameras and lenses delivered by a truck with its own driver to shoot a high definition film in low light – you just need a $2,700 camera and a few lenses

This is a leap of change that is sped up – it’s happening overnight.

A few other photographers got their hands on some pre-production models, including incredible Vancouver wedding photographers Bebb Studios, who posted several samples and a video review. Bebb’s Jennifer strikes the same note:

In my personal opinion, this camera changes everything.

Not to mention that the camera shoots directly in quicktime, which is instantly usable in Final Cut Pro, according to Laforet:

It produces Apple’s Quicktime .mov files btw – simply copy them off of your CF Cards – double click on them – and they open up in the Quicktime player w/o a single hiccup at 1080p… Drop them into Final cut pro and start your edit… no rendering is necessary. Oh – and realize that it took us less than 20 minutes to copy over more than 12 hours of footage off of the CF cards…

Canon’s suggested retail price (for the body alone) is $2,699.00. It ships in November, which means this year, thousands of Christmas-morning, present-opening videos will suddenly look far too professional.

Looking through the inspiration section on del.icio.us, I came upon this great livejournal, showcasing the work of Russian artist Dmitry Maksimov.

His art evokes the spirit of Japanese toy design, implanting its imaginary creatures into a surreal context, using photoshopped photographs that retain enough reality to be off-putting and familiar at once.

The other reason this evoked a Japanese aesthetic for me is Maksimov’s usage of tilt-shift effects, which mimic miniature photography on a grand scale. He’s just taken it one step further, and actually inserted his own “miniatures” into the landscapes. The double-take we all did when we first saw those amazing Japanese tilt-shift photos is carried to its logical end here.

It immediately made me think of what a live-action Hayao Miyazaki film would be like, marrying his blob-like designs with realistic backgrounds. Although a large part of Miyazaki’s charm comes from the fully animated realization of his world, it made me wonder how well his aesthetic could translate into a live action feature.

Imagine Studio Ghibli and Pixar teaming up to create an animated feature with near photo-realistic backgrounds and a perfect CG integration of Miyazaki’s patented style. Disastrous or wonderful? Would their two approaches be compatible? Pixar’s debt to Miyazaki’s storytelling chops is well-documented, but I wonder if each studio’s visuals could ever be brought together. Maybe one day.