Welcome to the end of the week everybody. A few quick Friday hits:

• David duChemin, over at thepixelatedimageblog, has a video review up for the Polaroid Pogo printer that I mentioned several weeks back. You need to go here to check out the review.

• Joe McNally has a new book coming out. It’s called The Hot Shoe Diaries: Creative Applications of Small Flashes and it’s available for preorder here.

(Grace Kelly - Photographed by Yousuf Karsh)

• Finally, here’s a wonderful website about the life and photography of the late, great Yousuf Karsh. Karsh was one of the masters of 20th century photography. I recently checked out a book from the local public library with a bunch of his work and I was blown away at some of the classic, iconic photos he’d taken. See his work and read the stories behind it here.

“To avoid floodings on typhoon season, the city of Saitama in Japan features an impressive storm sewer system. Its construction started in 1992, and its composed by giant concrete silos (65m tall, 32m wide) connected by 6.4km of underground tunnels 50m below the surface. It also has a giant tank: 25.4m tall, 177m long and 78 wide, with 59 concrete columns.

This impressive structure is opened for tourists.”

The size and scope of this sewer system is unbelieveable. Just take a look at the truck in the picture above to get a sense of how big this project was. I’m totally blown away by it. How do they build something like this? It must take stuff like math and physics or something.  Go here to check out more pics and YouTube videos.

(Copyright Joe McNally)

• Joe McNally has a really poignant blog post about the life size polaroids he took just after 9/11 and the search for a permanent home for them. The actual process of how you go about shooting a polaroid this size is amazing, but the story of the photos themselves and the people in them is even more amazing. Here’s the link to the post.

That’s it for today. See you tomorrow with more.

First up today is a pretty cool new printing technique that you may not have heard of called Zink. Zink has been out for awhile, (I remember reading about it months ago), but I don’t think it’s really permeated the public consciousness yet. Here’s the description from the Zink website:

ZINKâ„¢ is a breakthrough technology that produces on-demand color images and photos - without ink, ribbons or toner. The ZINK Technology enables a new category of color printers and paper that work as a system to print in a whole new way.

The key to this process is the patented ZINK Paperâ„¢, an advanced composite material with cyan, yellow, and magenta dye crystals embedded inside and a protective polymer overcoat layer outside.

Before printing, the embedded dye crystals are colorless, so ZINK Paper looks like regular white photo paper. A ZINK-enabled device uses heat to activate and colorize these dye crystals.

Leading manufacturer’s of photographic printers and paper are getting on board.

And who should be leading this ZINK revolution? Polaroid, of course! It makes sense that the company that brought you the instant camera would get behind a technology like this. I believe that Polaroid is licensing this  technology for their new line of portable printers, but I’m not completely sure if they’re the inventors of it. (edit-They didn’t invent it, strictly licensing it.)

Coming this fall, Polaroids’s PoGo printer works wirelessly with your phone or digital camera. Wirelessly transfer images from a Bluetooth-enabled camera phone to the Mobile Printer and print instantly. I’m not sure about a price point yet, but this is definitely something people will pay for. Check Polaroid’s space for more info.

That’s it for today! Check back tomorrow for more.