I was initially surprised that I felt emotional at the news of Steve Jobs' passing but actually it does make sense. More than just respect for the man's accomplishments and his character, it just would seem obvious that I should care a lot since I owe a lot of my career and lifestyle to Apple.

I've used a variety of Apple products all the way to the nearly the beginning. My parents bought my brother and I an Apple ][+. Then it became an IIIc, a ][GS and then my father's company acquired a MacSE at about the same time I became interested in computer graphics. I was a big Apple fan right from the start even as other friends and people were acquiring PCs. Of course the first PCs were incomparably crude compared to the existing Apples and first and second-generation Macs. And when the PC revolution suddenly took hold in business, then the bad days of Apple began. My father wrote on his Facebook yesterday that he felt as though he had lost a brother. Extreme, perhaps, but I can see why.

The only known surviving photo of iconic wild-west gunman Billy the Kid, which you may recognize, was bought by billionaire William Koch for the billionaire price of $2 million. To his credit, Koch said he was going to let it be exhibited in museums.

Read more in The Telegraph.

Comedian Stephen Fry witnesses the endangered kakopo (flightless parrot) jumping on a photographer and trying to mate with his head.

From the BBC series Last Chance to See.

The camera world is abuzz by what could be a truly game-changing technology that will excite not only photographers but engineering geeks. I had heard it rumoured before now the announcement has hit. 31-year old wunderkind Ren Ng is now touted in the NY Times for developing a technology that can take an image that can later be adjusted for plane of focus and depth of field, all from the same captured information. The Lytro website explains it:

The light field is a core concept in imaging science, representing fundamentally more powerful data than in regular photographs. The light field fully defines how a scene appears. It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene. Conventional cameras cannot record the light field.

I did not attend the riot. From where I was at downtown the riot was a wisp of smoke coming from the direction of the CBC building more than a mile away. But plenty of other people were in the center of it and took ream after ream of highly embarrassing footage of young people making the entire city foolish in front of national media. I was incensed, but you know, not willing to take part in the gawking. Hence you will see no photographs of the black mark on the city here.

If you want, you can look at the incomparable Lung Liu's slideshow on Photoshelter here of the madness. He said on Facebook that he escaped with bruises and I bet the tear gas wasn't very nice either. Good work, Lung. Also, my friend Andrew Ferguson was in the same place and also escaped unscathed. Here is his set. The Globe and Mail has a very good slideshow including some poetic images amidst the stupidity.

You can see the gaiety of the time in this slideshow of Paul Trevor's shots of children in Liverpool of the 1970s. All black and white, the almost forgotten photos the British photographer made during an assignment to document a bleak inner-city, were shuffled away in his drawer. Perhaps these ones didn't meet the concept of the assignment. Now rediscovered, a new show concentrating on the lives of giggling, playing, kissing and fighting children (and their families) in that time is now on in England all summer.

See the slideshow in the Guardian.