Luminance Speaker Videos Now Live

Video: David Burnett speaks at Luminance 2012 from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo. PhotoShelter has begun to release speakers' videos from their Luminance conference held last month in New York. The first three videos are from the first session of the conference. And they will be releasing additional speaker videos in groups in the coming weeks. The first group is available now on the Luminance website. If you missed Luminance, or just want a recap, check out our blog posts from the two-day conference. Follow the ongoing conversation started at the conference or tweet your reaction to the videos with #luminance. About Luminance PhotoShelter, the leader in portfolio websites, photo sales, marketing and archiving tools for photographers, hosted Luminance 2012, a fresh new conference to bring together leading voices from across industries to answer the question: What’s next for photography? This two-day conference featured two dozen top speakers from a variety of organizations that…

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Zack Arias Luminance
Zack Arias speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Photography’s Bright Future, Day Two at Luminance

Scheduling note: Speakers Leila Boujnane and Chris Chabot were not able to speak during the first session. Zach Arias was added to the morning session and spoke on social media. Andrew Fingerman, PhotoShelter CEO, opened the day thanking yesterday's speakers for a generous and thought-provoking day. He also observed the overwhelming positivity at the conference from both the speakers and the attendees. It's great to see the excitement about the future of photography and and it's exciting to be a part of it, he said. Eric Cheng, director of photography at Lytro was the first speaker of the morning. He spoke about light field photography, which differs from traditional photography in that it captures the directional information of light entering a camera. Light field photography takes 3D images that can be refocused after they are taken and are fully interactive. The images open and can be manipulated on desktops and smart phones…

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Peter Yang Luminance
Peter Yang speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Four: The Light Tamers

The first day of Luminance ended with presentations from three very different photographers. Their presentations were accompanied by strong visuals from their portfolios. We've included links to their work below, we highly recommend taking a look. Barbara Davidson opened the session showing her Pulitzer Prize winning work "Caught in the Crossfire." This body of work, shot over three years, shows the perils of gang violence in Los Angeles. Just because it wasn't a traditional breaking news story, she thought it was an important story to cover and she decided to take it on as a long-term documentary project. Davidson believes gang violence is one of the social ills affecting the inner cities of our country. "We don't only have to go to Afghanistan and Iraq to cover injustices," she says. These injustices are happening here in our backyards, she says. "It's easy for us to ignore it in our own country because…

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Alan Taylor Luminance
Alan Taylor speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Three: Packaging Media

Eileen Gittins, CEO and founder of Blurb, a digital book publisher, spoke about the 21st century book: what is it now and what might it become? She spoke about how print provides a different experience than digital. Books have physical mass and this may make people feel that they matter more, she says. When she makes the decision between a physical or a digital book she thinks about whether it is something she wants to keep or something she wants to consume. But that's not to say she doesn't see the value in digital. What we used to think of as a book is changing before our very eyes, she says. To help explain this phenomenon, she used an analogy: before there was TV there was radio and when TV first came out it was a lot like radio on TV. Over time TV developed into a new medium entirely. This is…

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Donald Pettit Luminance
Dr. Donald Pettit speaks at Luminance. Photo by Michael Treola.

Luminance Session Two: Photography’s New Frontiers

Cory West, engineering manager for Facebook photos started off the second morning session with a discussion about social photography. Some time back he was interested in the relationship between memory and quality of life. After coming across various articles about the way that we remember things (it turns out that as a result of having instant access to information, we've begun to optimize our memories by not remembering facts in order to better remember how to FIND facts), he decided to do a social experiment with his photos. He photographed 7,000 photos at 27 different social events and posted 950 curated shots on Facebook. He received 880 incidents of participation on 400 of the 950 posted photos. What he found surprising was that 55 percent of the activity was from people he didn't know. When he looked at the data, the numbers did make sense, as he had many more friends of…

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