Yesterday we launched a new Japan photography discussion list for amateur and professional photographers as well as photography enthusiasts living in Japan or with an interest in Japanese photography who wish to exchange ideas, discuss new and emerging digital imaging technologies and camera equipment, discuss exhibitions and other photographers' work, arrange outings and gallery visits, and promote their own work in a receptive environment. Anyone is welcome to participate.

Photojournalist Joe Nicholson's site has a great selection of colour news singles.

Jerry Uelsmann is a photomontage artist and surrealist photographer who has been working with multiple exposures for more than 30 years. His site features an extended interview with the artist.

Influential photographer Duane Michals also works with multiple exposures and with carefully constructed cinematic sequences to create his conceptual photographs.

In Nine Kallitypes, Philippe Moroux creates image with the kallitype process.

Robert Mann uses a lensless pinhole camera to make his ethereal photographs.

The Women Surrealists in Mexico exhibition currently at Bunkamura also features the work of two very interesting photographers...and two more reasons to see this show.

Lola Alvarez Bravo shot numerous intimate portraits of Frida Kahlo, including as well as experimenting with photomontage.

Kati Horna, a little known Hungarian photographer outside of Mexico who counted Remedios Varo amongst her close circle of friends, also has a number of evocative works in the exhibition.

Zosia Zija, a Polish actress and photographer, has an elegant flash photography portfolio (via Pixelsurgeon).

gmtPlus9 has returned to Japan and is back posting great arts-related content again. His pointer to the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania reminded me that Roberto, an Italian photographer living in Tokyo, directed me to this same website recently after we were discussing my upcoming trip to Eastern Europe. Many travellers have made a pilgrimage to the site, 12km north of Siauliai, containing hundreds of thousands of crosses of all shapes and sizes. The hill was continually bulldozed and destroyed during the Soviet era up until even 1985, but the crosses kept returning and now serve as a memorial to Lithuanian national identity. I'll be visiting there myself late next month while on the road between Riga in Latvia and Vilnius in Lithuania.

A silver award winner in last year's Canon Digital Creators Contest, Tcheupel Garager's ACTE3 photography site features a new selection of work. In addition to the repackaged Tokyo series (with some wonderful images of Tokyo's subway), most notable is the Scene 3/August VDO series which has thirty 10-second long video clips; each subsequent clip is linked to the last in a surprisingly interesting way. Check it out for yourself.

The Morning News has posted a striking photo feature about New York's tattoo convention by J Geoffrey Badner, whose own site features strong reportage photography complemented by a lovely minimal muted colour palette.

For the photo project, Chance Encounters, Douglas McCulloh spent six years wandering across urban Los Angeles, randomly photographing the people and places he encountered. Each day, he would draw a slip of paper that selected a coordinate on a 5,151 grid map of LA, then drive there and spend all day photographing (Thanks, Kurt).

After a week's break, esthet.org is back on a rock solid new host, Segment Publishing, based in Sydney. Big thumbs up to Jeremy Bogan, the host owner, for making the transition so easy, and thumbs down to Uplinkearth for their shoddy, robot-like approach to customer service and unacceptable amounts of downtime (email, Urchin stats, web hosting, etc). Hats off also (and a large pitcher of beer) to Mr Antipixel for his assistance with the move. As the new DNS has not propagated 100% yet, a few of you won't be finding your way here until the weekend.

Today, here is the final installment of my mini tour of Eastern Europe photography highlights begun a few weeks ago, concluding with an extended post focusing on Finland.

On the nature front, first up is a small collection of images of bold red sunsets in Finland (via Coudal). Another nature photographer, Juha Kinnunen, captured the other-worldly colours of the Aurora Borealis seen in central Finland.

This Finnish photojournalist that I have previously posted about is definitely worth a second look. Ilkka Uimonen has a most impressive portfolio site. His work can also be seen on foto8 (a story on surviving in the mountains of Afghanistan), Magnum Photos (a collection of black and white images of the turmoil in Israel), National Geographic (where he offers advice to aspiring photojournalists), and POY (he won First Place in the Spot News category of the Magazine division in 2003).

Pekka Nikrus has a great photography site with an extensive collection of the work he has shot and exhibited over the past ten years. The Cosmos Hotel series comprises a beautiful collection of palladium prints.

Veikko Kankkunen's site features a lovely collection of dance stills.

Mikko Säteri has an impressive flash site with fashion and advertising photography.

Dreamland by Jukka Korhonen is a collection of moody, sepia-toned stills of abandoned objects, such as a bus, a boat, and a kiosk.

The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki houses a large collection of contemporary and early Finnish photography as well as foreign daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and ferrotypes. The Finnish version of the website is much more extensive than the English one. The Helsinki City Museum also has a vast historical photography collection.

Under the Helsinki Sky contains 8300 photographs of Helsinki shot between 1969 and 1987 by Eeva and Simo Rista. Follow the instructions on how to search...if you can't read Finnish, then consider it a wonderful lucky dip with all kinds of interesting visual treats! What is this woman doing?

Since 1971, Arno Rafael Minkkinen has been photographing himself as part of the landscape.

In closing, I just want to note my sadness in learning today of last week's passing of St Jude, long-time geekgrrl, cyberfeminist pioneer, author of the Cyberpunk Handbook and How to Mutate and Take Over the World, and ex-senior editor of Mondo2000, the first magazine to give me a taste of cyberculture back in 1990. She coined the expression "Girls Need Modems" (I even had that as a t-shirt in the mid-90s) and was to be the first of my cyberfeminist role models over the coming decade.

John Loomis is the Florida-based photojournalist behind BlueEyes Magazine. He has a dynamic selection of singles and projects to check out, and a visual journal coming soon.

Zabriskie Point is a new photoblog by Nick Kilroy featuring a series of uniquely coloured and composed stills. Bush 2003 reminds of the moving waterfall paintings by Tadanori Yokoo.

Permit me to stray from the theme of photography for a moment. My excuse? I just love those Mexican women surrealists! Beginning this Saturday at the Bunkamura Museum of Art in Shibuya is the exhibition, Frida Kahlo and Her Times, curated in the context of other women surrealist painters such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. This show coincides with the screening of Frida, which I mentioned last month. Until 7 September.

Things are on go-slow on the esthet.org front as I am currently moving hosts this week. Stay tuned...more regular updates coming again soon once site data exporting, importing, and tweaking has been completed. Until things are ticking over properly again, let me point you in the direction of Nanjo Toshiyuki's Japanese photo blog filled with lots of great online photography discoveries...no knowledge of Japanese required to follow those links! (Thanks, Kurt!)

Some good reasons to get yourself along to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu this month and next:

If you only have a little time, then the Robert Capa documentary, Capa in Love and War, is an absolute must-see. I caught it yesterday and was mesmerised by Anne Makepeace's marvellous film of this inspiring Hungarian photojournalist and one of the founding members of Magnum Photos whose life was tragically cut short in Vietnam in 1954. Until 21 July.

Works by the World Press Photo 2003 award winners and finalists are also on display. My personal highlight was this photo essay by Brent Stirton about Xhosa male initiates in South Africa undergoing ritual circumcision. Until 21 July.

The exhibition of work from the Day in the Life of Africa project, shot by 95 photographers in 26 countries over the course of 24 hours in February 2002 using Olympus E-20 digital SLR cameras, closed today at the photography museum.

Upcoming photography-related events in Tokyo:

Rock'n'roll Eye, an exhibition of rock photography by Mick Rock begins at the museum this coming Friday, 18 July. Featuring signature works of iconic rock figures such as David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, and Debbie Harry from the 1970s through to the present day, this show will definitely be worth checking out if you are a rock history enthusiast.

Another film coming soon to the photography museum's cinema is Christian Frei's War Photographer about American photojournalist James Nachtwey. From 6 September.

Leni Riefenstahl, filmmaker and photographer, has just completed her latest film, Impressions of the Deep, at the tender age of 98, on the beauty of marine life from around the world. The film screens at Cine Saison Shibuya from next month.

Tim Hixson, a Sydney-based photographer, has a couple of lovely photography galleries on his site: the beach selection, shot over a summer at Avalon Beach with four plastic cameras, is definitely worth checking out, as is the plastic camera colour gallery (via Sublimate).

Philip Cartland, the designer and producer behind African Aperture, has his own Kenya travel photography site.

In the July issue of The Digital Journalist, Molly Bingham, the freelance photojournalist who went missing in March in Iraq before turning up in Jordan 8 days later, recounts her experience. A small portfolio of her work is online on the World Picture News site.

Also in this Digital Journalist issue, Mark Loundy writes on the business of editorial photography and young or inexperienced photographers who charge unprofitable fees, effectively driving market prices down and creating unfair competition for other photographers who make a living from their work.

Gary Gladstone drove 38,000 miles across the US, visiting the small towns with strange names that he encountered along the way. The local folk from places such as Bitter End, Boring, Gas, Embarrass, Intercourse, Peculiar and Hell allowed themselves to be photographed in their native surroundings.

New York photoblogger Brooklyn Kid has moved over to a great looking new site, Meccapixel, which showcases his digital photography rather well (via photojunkie).

In yesterday's Asahi Shimbun, there was an interesting article on the push to make two large government-funded art museums, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, more profitable. The photography museum has been run since 2000 by Yoshiharu Fukuhara, former president of Shiseido, who has been insisting that his staff focus more on the financial bottom-line than they did previously.

nyclondon.com features great black and white photography of the two cities R Gardiner has lived in over the past four years. His photolog has a great selection of images shot with a Leica M6.

Madamjujujive has uncovered a fantastic travel photography and journalism site by Martin Wierzbicki, who travelled around the world for three years. His photo galleries contain a stunning collection of images. Martin suggests that anyone considering long-term round-the-world travel read this helpful travel guide (via MeFi).

Continuing with the theme of travel photography today, Steve McCurry, renowned photojournalist, has a lovely portfolio site containing images from Angkor Wat, India, and Tibet, as well as the famous photograph of a young woman in Afghanistan (who was found by National Geographic 17 years later).

Bill Hocker has shot an interesting collection of portraits of local and indigenous people from around the world.

Last but by no means least, here is a powerful travel portfolio by Glen Allison. His India collection of highly saturated and vibrant colour photographs is superb. Do check out this site in its entirety (via Conscientious).

Picking up where I left off with Latvian photography last week, today I am continuing my tour of photographic highlights from Eastern Europe, and I have put together a bumper collection of links from Russia for you. Enjoy!

The Fotomuseum Winterthur is currently showing a retrospective of Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov's work documenting the social and historical conditions of the former Soviet Union, and life in Russia after the Soviet Union's demise in 1989. He was also awarded the Citibank Photography Prize in 2001.

Alexei Titarenko creates beautiful medium-format sepia-toned images of St Petersburg. Using long exposure techniques, the city looks deserted and yet timeless, filled with only traces and shadows of the people living there.

Alexey Tikhonov photographs his friends and his city, as well as being a street photography enthusiast.

Sergei Maximishin is a photojournalist who grew up in the Crimea, and served as a Soviet army photographer in Cuba in the mid 1980s. He has a great selection of singles and photo essays from Russia, India, and Iraq.

While I can't read the Russian on Georgij Poilov's site, I would suggest you just click through some of the links to take a look at his diverse photography styles. When you mouseover the links on the home page, the changing reflected images in the camera lens are rather cool!

Andrey Chezhin is an interesting conceptual photographer who makes lovely black and white diptychs as well as series of prints, created from transposed negatives, shot in Amsterdam, New York, St Petersburg, Stockholm and Warsaw.

photographer.ru is a good Russian photography site available in English (click the English link at top right). In one article, Pedro Meyer and Ivan Sigal write about photojournalists flocking to Central Asia and the Middle East to gain access to Afghanistan, following 9/11.

This site documents the beautiful decorations of the Moscow underground, displayed as QTVR and still images of architectural details, mosaics and other interesting features (via madspedersen).

I'll be finishing this thread with Finnish photography highlights shortly.

In an article in today's NY Times (registration required), Ken Belson discusses the marketing of new cheaper digital SLR cameras (such as the Canon 10D or the Nikon D100) to the amateur photographer.

Feast your eyes on this fantastic photojournalism portfolio by Toby Morris (via thingsmagazine).

Black and white portraits of stunning hairstyles on African women shot during the 1940s, 50s and 60s (via African Aperture).

James Fenton writes in last weekend's Guardian about Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others and her notion that photographers are now "being held to a higher standard of journalistic probity" with zero tolerance for staged news photographs.

A simple but lovely photography portfolio of Terry Gillespie's work.

Two interesting celebrity portrait photographers with attractively presented sites: Bradley Patrick and Michael Mueller (via Newstoday).

The new issue of BlueEyes Magazine features two great photo essays: Ashes to Ashes by Rich Glickstein captures the aftermath of the conflict in Baghdad, and Raising Helana by Lissa Gotwals documents how the lives of two older men changed after they began raising their grandaughter.

Peter Yang's site has a series of interesting portraits of both himself and his friends (via buffoonery).

Untitled and Unsung, a photography portfolio by Tim Carpenter (via netdiver).

This month's theme on LaLaLand is urban textures. Another reader-submitted project is treeskin.

In 1955, Swiss photographer Robert Frank spent two years travelling across the US expressly to observe and photograph what he saw. Now, five artists participating in the American Photography Project will attempt a similar endeavour while travelling across the country for two weeks, documenting their trip with still and video photography (via pixelsurgeon).

Sacha Dean Biyan has a very different style of photography online at eccentris. While I have mentioned both sites previously, I didn't make the connection that it was the same photographer until now (via Styleboost).

A selection of images of Katharine Hepburn from the Magnum Archives, with many shot during the filming of 1959 cinematic classic, Suddenly Last Summer and A Long Day's Journey into the Night from 1962 (via wood s lot).

Digital Photography Review gives the full lowdown on the new Canon PowerShot G5, and weighs it up alongside the two other 'five-megapixel, four times zoom' digital cameras on the market, the Sony DSC-V1 and the Nikon Coolpix 5400.

Talented Sydney-based photojournalist Tamara Voninski has just launched her beautiful new portfolio site, featuring photo essays on "the laneway" occupied by the "morning-after" crowd following the big Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras party, camel races in outback Australia, and Hens Night. This lovely flash site with a clean, minimalist aesthetic was designed by the Shanghai-based satirist behind Chairman Meow.

Another interesting photoblog from Baghdad (via indigoblog).

space.com offers a tutorial on how to take great photographs of the night sky (via Still Journal).

Two other helpful tutorials for photographers struggling with the many functions of Photoshop: editing the curves and levels in your images.

Exposur3, a lovely personal photography site by German-based Chrys, presents images of the caves in Gibraltar and Southern Spain. Chrys also publishes a selection of his photography in his fotogalerie. Take a little time to explore!

The latest issue of 28mm.org is now online. My personal highlight is Kurt Easterwood's aptly-titled and exquisitely photographed black and white photo essay on Japanese sumo wrestlers, Grace and Girth. I also like the series of colour photographs of non-restored signage from Las Vegas, Neon Boneyard by Laura Domela (see my previous post) and the abstract images of roses by Matthew Kalenuik.

Travels with Valerie and Joe is a new travelogue/photoblog documenting their adventures around the world (via PhotographyBLOG).

Finally, a couple of "words and images" photo-centric blogs I enjoy regularly: Conscientious by Pittsburg resident Joerg Colberg, Dublog by Chris Waltrip, and The Solipsistic Gazette blog consistently interesting photography finds, focusing on both contemporary and historical photographers. 990000 has been recently redesigned and is definitely worth visiting regularly too.

Last night I visited Bic Camera to have a play with the new 5-megapixel Canon PowerShot G5 digital camera which has just hit the stores in Japan. To buy or not to buy? For me, it was basically a no-brainer (I realised that I can live with its shortcomings), so I'm now the proud owner of a shiny new black G5. While it's nowhere near being one of the lightest or smallest digital cameras on the market, I decided that what I sacrifice in portability, I gain in terms of a full range of features and functionality that meet my particular needs. I'll begin posting images shot with the G5 once I launch v3 of this site in late summer.

Orcagirl shot a lovely collection of ocean-side images while sailing around Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve (Queen Charlotte Islands) in Canada for ten days (via the newly redesigned Pixelsurgeon).

Tom Stoddart won the World Understanding Award in the Picture of the Year competition for his photo essay on the AIDS crisis in Africa.

My Red Self is a uniquely presented photography portfolio by Helena Kvarnström (via Design is Kinky).

KnoxPix uses a quirky and fun ViewMaster and reel metaphor to allow the viewer to see the images. Elizabeth Knox's site also won a PDN/Nikon Self-Promotion Award for Digital Promotion in 2002 (via Scene 360).

Zoozoom, an online magazine for fashion photography, creates digital backgrounds for many of its photoshoots. The 'zine is also collaborating with Adam Harvey on the Internet Portrait Project to "create a snapshot of the Internet audience" by collecting thousands of headshots which will be "compiled, layered and compressed".

Kyle Sackowski shot this interesting photo essay on the drag queens of Tokyo, mostly performers at the former drag bar, Blue Oyster Lounge, in varying states of dress and undress.