ASMP

The ASMP (Air-Sol Moyenne Portee) is powered by by a ramjet [statoréacteur] with an integrated accelerator. Armed with a tactical nuclear warhead, the ASMP is produced by Aerospatiale, except for the military head, that is provided by the Atomic Energy Commission.

The ASMP’s nuclear warhead has five times the power of free-fall weapons it replaces. This supersonic missile is guided by a standalone system of inertial navigation that provides it precision requise and allows the launcher aircraft to remain a safe distance from the enemy defenses. The propulsion system constists of a statoréacteur using liquid fuel developed by Aerospatiale. The necessary speed for ignition is reached with a solid rocket motor accelerator housed in the combustion chamber of the statoréacteur. ASMP became operational in May 1986 on Mirage IVP and beginning in 1988 on Mirage 2000 N. It was also adapted on Super Standard for the National Navy, and on-board on the aircraft carrier Foch.

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UPDIG

I’m pleased to see that the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines brought out by the UPDIG Working Group, comprised of leading organisations representing commercial, magazine and advertising photographers are largely in agreement with the advice I’ve been giving for some years in various features on this site. The APA (Advertising Photographers of America), ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers), EP (Editorial Photographers), NPPA (National Press Photographers Assocation), and various other organisations now have an agreed document which suggests guidelines and best practices, along with suggestions for various workflows. You can either read them on the web or download a PDF document containing all the current guidelines and recommendations. There are some areas, for example IPTC comments, that are not yet covered.

You can read much more about almost everything in the UPDIG guidelines in features on About Photography, listed in the Digital Photography section and particularly in the Digital Printing area.

Initiatives such as this are a great help to all working in photography - making sure that what you supply looks right when published. The suggestions on supplying work to printers are particularly useful, although it would help if the printers all got together in some similar initiative to standardize their ways of working. At the moment it is all too easy for photographers to be blamed when things go wrong.

Go to: photography@about.com

It’s a vexing problem. A photo starts out looking great in the studio, but by the time it gets published, the colors are off, the resolution is wrong or some other technical problem has cropped up.

Tired of a lack of standards, a coalition of photo associations has decided to lay down the law.

At the PhotoPlus Expo last week, 11 photographer associations, led by the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), released the first version of the Universal Photographic Digital Imaging Guidelines (UPDIG).

UPDIG, which had been under development for a year, launched this month with a web site and a 16-page booklet of best practices for photo professionals.

The document has three goals: To ensure digital images look the same as they’re transferred across various platforms, to ensure digital images are properly adjusted for their intended viewing device or printer, and to ensure every file is coded with the proper metadata, such as caption and credit information.

Some of problems addressed in this document are as old as photography itself: how to translate light into pigment. Digital imaging has made the process increasingly sophisticated, and photographers, assistants and editors now have the tools to do work that previously could only be done by skilled film processors and production people.

“There are a lot of tools now that are available… and a lot of them are not being used or are being used improperly,” says David Riecks, a commercial photographer in Urbana-Champaign, Ill., and technology chair of the Stock Artists Alliance. Riecks was one of several contributors to the document.

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