Black Diamond Productions

Hello,

I wanted to introduce myself. I am the photographer for Mystique Magazine, Mark Daughn. I’m going to be in San Francisco this week. I wanted to give you several invitations.

Here is the deal: I want to do the first of a series of meet up’s in San Francisco. "What is a meet up?" you ask. It is a time and a place that I hang out and meet with people, fans, models, students, art directors, all in a social setting. At each of these I’ll drag along what ever model I can get, so all you photographers and fans can meet them in person, book shoots, say hi, and get comfortable in a non shooting environment. The wonderful Miss Luana Lani will for sure be there. She is in San Francisco that week shooting. If you have wanted to meet her or shoot her, this is a great chance.

So come check out my first meet up! You can come pick my brain for photo wisdom, or I’ll tell stories, or maybe we all will end up dancing on tables. Who knows what will happen?

I have no idea how popular this will be, might be just me and a bunch of beautiful models hanging out drinking wine or a bunch of folks. I’d like you to just send me a quick email telling me you are interested and will attend.

Date: Wednesday, Feb 10

Time: 6 PM to 8 PM

Place: Library Bar in the Clift Hotel, 495 Geary St

Last but not least, I am available for consultations and mini workshops, seminars, etc. while I’m in town. If you’re interested in any of that, email me for details and tell me what you want.

I will be announcing a bunch of workshops for this year in the next few weeks so keep an eye out for that as well. You can sign up for my newsletter that will keep you up to date on all of my workshops, shoots and seminars at

http://markdaughnworkshops.c.topica.com/maanMgbabV7LzaTtoYvbaeQFoD/

The best address to email me is workshops08@markdaughn.com.

Sincerely,

Mark Daughn

Reposted from Petapixel.com

Ginormous 5200mm Canon Lens on eBay

by Michael Zhang on January 6, 2010

If you have an extra $45,000 lying around, you might still be able to purchase the Canon 5200mm f/14 lens that was listed on eBay last month. It ended on December 14th with 0 bids (I wonder why…). Here’s a screenshot, in case the listing is removed:

Here’s an old advertisement that was displayed on the auction, demonstrating the power of the lens:

For an even better idea of how powerful the magnification of this lens is, here’s a video made with the lens attached to a video camera:

Some of the facts and figures listed in the auction and on the video page are pretty interesting… The lens has a minimum focusing distance of 393ft/120m. It weighs 220lb,100kg without its stand. In a flyer promoting the lens, Canon states that,

This is the only ultra-telephoto lens in the world capable of taking photographs of objects 18 to 32 miles away (30km to 52kms away). Having a focal length of 5200mm, Canon Mirror Lens 5200mm can obtain one hundred times as large an object image as that of a 50mm lens.

What’s even more interesting, is that if used with a DSLR with a crop factor (i.e. Canon 50D), the lens is effectively a 8320mm lens. Wowzers.

Obviously, this lens isn’t very practical for things aside from spying on someone across a city, or staring at some portion of the moon. It seems like the lens would primarily be used for astrophotography. Can you think of any other examples of where this focal length could be useful?

(via PDNPulse)