For those of you who have not heard his name, Dr. Alan Rabinowitz is the Director of Science and Exploration for the Wildlife Conservation Society . It’s a Bronx Zoo based wildlife nurturing and ecological preservation agency that does world wide researches and undertakes preservation and conservation initiatives.

I recently saw one of the documentaries by Dr Alan Rabinowitz made by the National Geographic Society – titled In Search of the Jaguars. It details the life and the heroic work of Dr Alan from his early days growing up in Brooklyn, NY to the rest of his life spent in an undying effort to save the Jaguars in Central America.

Although the Jaguar project of Central America has taken up the most of Dr Alan’s better life, he is also known to discover the smallest deer species – the leaf deer and communicating with the Tarons – the Mongolian pygmies who faced  near extinction. The documentaries are published in his book “Beyond the Last Village“.

While you read and see his work, you get to realize what an immense source of strength this person had been throughout his life. Refusing to  give up at daunting challenges, he has fought over twenty five years of his life for the safety and preservation of some of the most fragile species and cultures of our planet.

Today, while his Jaguar project has gained some momentum and has interested similar minded conservationists, Dr Alan Rabinowitz  is facing a harsh reality. He has been diagonized with Leukemia. But not deterred by his physical challenges, Dr Alan Rabinowitz continue to lead the conservation initiatives till today.

You could read more about him on the web at Save the Jaguar. As a last note, the Wildlife Conservation Society runs completely from donations and some of their most critical projects are funded out of donations from people who want to save this planet.

Upholding their banner of “trustworthiness and creativity“, Nikon is going to celebrate it’s 90th anniversary in July 2007. Founded in 1917 as Nippon Kōgaku; the company was renamed Nikon Corporation, after its cameras, in 1988. Nikon is one of the Mitsubishi companies.

Celebrating this occasion,  the President Michio Kariya laid a clean vision for the next decade – “Our Aspirations – Meeting needs. Exceeding expectations” as Nikon steadily moved ahead to its 100 birthday.

Nikon will retain it’s brand logo of the hashed yellow square, meant to represent “Transforming imagination into creativity“. The sequential white rays symbolize “infinite possibilities within the domain of optics” while the yellow has an emotional significance of “depth” and “passion“. The bold black name of Nikon within the logo emphasizes the solid “trust” and the “commitment” of the company.

Quite truly, Nikon has evolved as an institution of creativity. Starting with the F mount cameras in 1959, and the 3D color matrix metering of the early 2000, Nikon has shelved competition from Canon, Sony and Panasonic. Albeit the staunch followers of Nikon are more than willing to bear the high prices for the quality they offer.

More news available on the Nikon Corporate website.

Note: We are now integrated with photoduniya.com and have moved to a new location. Please update your bookmark. Click here to go to the new location http://www.photoduniya.com/photography-blog/

.

When digital technology and advances made in digital sensors have created excellent cameras, it has constantly challenged the ability to store digital files – be it images or movie files. While Tera Bytes have become cheaper and softwares are becoming more efficient in retrieval of files, the main challenge that digital photographers and video makers face is that of an era of evolving file-creation technology.

The traditional CDs have slowly given way to the more efficient DVD format allowing us to store more images on a smaller media. The DVD format has constantly evolved and is going through another major evolution right at this moment! The Blu-Ray is in! Developed by the Blu-Ray Disck Association and funded and supported in various capacities by close to 200 world renowned electronic device & movie makers.

Contrary to the current disk writing technology of using the red laser beam (that has an effective wavelength of 650 nano meters) the Blu-Ray will use a Blue Violet laser (with an effective wavelength of 405 nano meters) allowing the technology to pack more content within the same space of the disk. A single-layer Blu-Ray disk can store 25 Gigabytes of content compared to 4.7 GB of a DVD and a double-layer Blu-Ray disk can store as much as 50 GB compared to 8.5 GB of a DVD!

While the Blu-Ray technology is supported by a large array of disk makers and industry leaders including:

Apple Computer, Inc.
Dell Inc.
Hewlett Packard Company
Hitachi, Ltd.
LG Electronics Inc.
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
Pioneer Corporation
Royal Philips Electronics
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Sharp Corporation
Sony Corporation
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
TDK Corporation
Thomson Multimedia
Twentieth Century Fox
Walt Disney Pictures
Warner Bros. Entertainment

a competing technology, named the HD-DVD, is extensively developed by Toshiba & NEC.

Although at this time, the Blu-Ray evolution is backed up by the largest number of the world’s leaders of electronic device manufacturers and movie makers, the capacity advantage is surely in favor of Blu-Ray. With a larger Numerical Aperture of 0.85 exceeds that of HD-DVD’s 0.65, allowing it to put in more data on the same disk. As a comparison, a single-layer Blu-Ray disc packs in 25 GB vis-a-vis 15 GB for a HD-DVD while a double-layer Blu-Ray disk packs 50 GB compared to 30 GB for a HD-DVD.

Launched recently, the camera that will intrigue all digital users is the 160 mega pixels 6×17 panoramic model from Seitz Phototechnik, AG. The image size of 7,500 x 21,250 pixels (60mm x 170mm), with a total resolution of a whopping 160 MP produces RAW (16-bit) image of 307 MB & uncompressed TIFF file (48-bit) of 922 MB. The camera uses Schneider, Rodenstock , Linhof Technorama, Fuji or any other large format lenses.

To match the camera, the digital back comes with impressive writing speed of 300 MB/sec & an ISO range from 500 to 10,000 ASA. The special sensor is produced by DALSA Corporation exclusively for Seitz. Ref: http://www.roundshot.ch/

SanDisk has aggressively produced CF cards to go along with such a massive electronic device. In 2006 Photokina it launched the 12 GB and 16 GB Extreme III CF cards with writing speeds of 20 MB/sec. Not to mention the cost that pro’s shell out for such gadgets – a whopping USD 800.00 for the 12 GB and USD 1050.00 for the 16 GB.

And yes, with such a capacity, you can shoot without the worry of running out of space!