With ˜The Last Polar Bear," The Mountaineers Books has launched its new publishing venture, Braided River, with “The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World.”

The book contains nearly 200 color images by Steven Kazlowski, who has been following the creatures for the past eight years. Essays by conservationists, scientists and Alaskan natives supplement the photographs, including one by Theodore Roosevelt’s great-grandson. The Braided River imprint combines nature photography with...

W.W. Norton & Co. has released a new book entitled "Across the Tibetan Plateau: Ecosystems, Wildlife, and Conservation," with a foreword by former president Jimmy Carter. With contributions from noted natural historians and a diverse team of photographers, it tells the story of the Tibetan people’s efforts to protect their land for future generations. Containing some of the first photographs of the region’s rare species, the work looks at...

SanDisk has debuted a new line of flash memory products for high-definition video capture based on the ExpressCard technology. The Express line is available in 8- and 16-gigabyte capacities with recording times of 35 megabits per second for up to 60 minutes on the 16GB card. The ExpressCard technology is a successor to the PC Card standard and connects directly to a computer’s PCI Express bus.
Sony is the first major video equipment manufacturer to adopt the ExpressCard standard, and with SanDisk developed the SxS specification that certifies support for its line of video products...

Peleman Industries has created two new professional binding products: the Unibind BCC10 automated binding machine and the ProBook photo album machine.

The Unibind BCC10 is made for high-capacity production facilities and large photo labs and has the capacity to create 400 photo books per hour. The ProBook allows smaller labs to create professionally bound photo albums as large as...

SDHC Plus Line SanDisk has introduced the Ultra II SDHC Plus line of high-capacity SD cards in 32-, 16- and 8-gigabyte (GB) capacities. The new SDHC cards are designed for camcorders and point-and-shoot digital cameras and offer read and write speeds of 15MB per second. The 32GB card can store up to 8,000 high-resolution pictures or up to 40 hours of video.
The 32GB and 16GB SDHC cards come with a SanDisk MicroMate USB 2.0 Reader at a suggested retail price of $349 and $179, respectively. The 8GB card is $99.

On the cover: Actor Jack Black snarls in a detail of a frenetic collage made for Giant magazine by celebrity portraitist Frank Ockenfels. The original image was torn into pieces and rearranged as a page in Ockenfels’ journal. 

Cover photo: © Frank Ockenfels

Moab by Legion has introduced a new line of digital inkjet papers made out of 100 percent cotton fiber for photographs and fine art. The Somerset Photo paper is available in rolls of 17, 24, 44 and 60 inches by 33 feet. Sheets are available in A4, A3+ and A2 sizes. Somerset Photo archival-quality paper is acid-free and made without unnecessary brightening agents.

Moab has also announced the Desert Varnish Gel to complement its Desert Varnish spray product. The water-based gloss coating is ideal for use with...

If you’re picking up PhotoMedia for the first time, we hope this issue will strike you as visually powerful and editorially impressive. If you’re a longtime reader, on the other hand, you may be surprised by the dramatic evolution since our last issue (Fall 2007, on photojournalism).

Change is almost always a challenge and even a little scary, but in this case we think you’ll appreciate the results of our efforts. A sizeable rise in mailing costs and other expenses for the last issue prompted us to consider reinventing PhotoMedia with a new, slightly smaller and more convenient format — our first revision in more than 11 years — and a complete redesign, from front to back. This allowed us to incorporate many improvements that we had long contemplated. Every square inch of every page has been scrutinized...

Location: Encino, Calif. He turned his family room into an office/art studio.

Preferred shooting studios: Industria in New York and Smashbox in Los Angeles.Major awards: "I have won awards," he admits, "but since I don't enter the call for entries much, I'm not really sure what."
Advice for aspiring celebrity photographers: "Don't do the obvious," Ockenfels cautions. "Find your own voice. Being a portrait or ‘celebrity' photographer is about the opportunity and what you do with it."

Website: FrankOckenfels3.com

Late last year, a print by photographer Andreas Gursky, "99 Cent II Diptychon (2001)," sold for $2.48 million at auction, the second-highest price ever paid for a photograph and the highest price for the work of a living photographer. The record, set last February for a 1904 work by Edward Steichen, was $2.9 million.

The Gursky that sold at Phillips de Pury & Co. in November 2006 is a 22-foot-wide chromogenic color diptych, one of an edition of six, that provides an overhead view of a colorful, crowded...