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Today’s Photography Site of the Day (which, if you haven’t noticed, isn’t published daily) is photoethnography.com. This site is the work of Karen Nakamura, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies at Yale.

On her site, Ms. Nakamura says “Photoethnography can be considered both an applied methodology of an academic social science discipline (Visual Anthropology) as well as a form of artistic expression and social critique, akin to street photography or documentary photography.”

While not necessarily always dealing with photography, you will get a good sense of the person and photoethnography by reading her blog. As would be expected, she has photography and covers social justice issues. This is the part of the site that continues to be actively updated. The rest seems to not be updated often, unfortunately that includes the gallery. That’s OK though. There’s still some great info here.

She has a good, though short, links page.

I like her Equipment page. In it she recommends inexpensive equipment, mostly film based cameras, to get into photoethnography. There are some great recommendations here. I’d give you direct links, but the site is frame based so I’ll just mention some of the content available here.

-Buying classic cameras
-Recommendations
-SLR vs Rangefinder
-35mm vs. MF
-Instruction Manuals
-Batteries / Books
-Camera Bags / Tripods
-Light Meters / Finders
-Repairs / Humidity & Fungus

A few of the links are broken and most of the content is a few years old. But I think it’s still valid. There is a lot of information on this site.

She has a set of pages devoted to her camera collection. These include pictures and text describing the camera. Very nice work. Again, this is a link on the equipment page.

She talks about her favorite street cameras:
Canon P
Yashica Electro 35 GX
Olympus XA
Nikon FE
Nikon S2
Leica M3
Leica M7

and her favorite cameras overall:
Bolsey C22
Canon P
Canonet GIII QL17
Kodak Retina
Leica M3
Leica lenses
Nikon S3
Olympus XA
Pentax 6×7
Spotmatic II
Yashica GSN

While she lists these as her favorites, she has information on about a hundred cameras.

One thing that I wish she would promote more, is her video work. She has films available on Amazon that she mentions in her blog, but she doesn’t seem to have good pages devoted to them on her site. She might get more sales and bring more attention to the issues she has covered with some better marketing.

Her videos are:
Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan
and
A Japanese Funeral

I’ve spent hours here and will spend some more. I’ve only touched on a bit of the site. I recommend that you check it out.

Every once in a while, I find myself on Rob Skeoch’s site, The Picture Desk.

I enjoy this blog for a few reasons. For one, Rob is into film and digital photography and is a working pro. For another, he has his own company selling photography equipment – rangefinder cameras and lenses, large format cameras (Toyo and Canham) and lenses and manual focus lenses for DSLRs, such as Zeiss lenses for Canon EOS bodies and Zeiss lenses for Nikon bodies

Now, I’m not so much into sports photography, and he shoots a lot of it. What I like, though, is that he is not afraid to buck the trends.

When everyone else is only shooting a Nikon or Canon DSLR, he’s out there with a Sony A500, Sony A550, or Sony A850. Sometimes, he shoots a Leica or has even borrowed a friend’s Nikon D700 to try it out with one of the manual Zeiss lenses he sells.

The good people at Zacuto put together this year’s DSLR shootout comparing Kodak and Fuji movie films with video footage shot on some top DSLR cameras.

This year’s shootout used the Canon 7D, Canon 5D Mk II, Canon T2i, Canon 1D Mk IV, Nikon D3s, and Panasonic GH1.

They compared the same footage shot with each camera. To take away as much variability as they could, they used Zeiss lenses on all the cameras.

The commentary about each was provided by top film industry people. The Zacuto site says “The test results were projected in a 2K theatrical environment at three screening locations: Stag Theater at Skywalker Ranch, LucasFilms Ltd., AFI (American Film Institute) Theater in Hollywood and the FilmWorkers Astro Color Timing Theater in Chicago. Hear commentary from the screenings by top ASC, Hollywood, Indie Film and Event & Convergence Photographers.”

I have to say that I generally hate film and digital comparisons. I love them both. I have an admitted bias towards film, but I think digital is very cool. I loved this comparison though. Not so much to see if digital beat film. (So far, it didn’t, but it’s pretty darn close.) I really liked seeing the kinds of tests that top notch people in the industry performed, the observations they made, and the awesome video they shot. I’m looking forward to more episodes of this.

My only regret is that I would have liked to have seen as many Nikon models as Canon, but other than that, this was very good.

Click here to see the Zacuto DSLR Shootout

To see products made by Zacuto, click here
Some examples are the Zacuto Z-Grip and the Zacuto Z-Finder