I just stumbled upon the work of Tim Knowles, whose art explores the mostly hidden, obscured, or otherwise unnoticed motion of objects. One of his projects is Tree Drawings:
Drawings produced by pens attached to the tips of tree branches, as the branches move in the wind the tree draws on to a panel or drawing board on an easel. Like signatures the trees drawings tell of the tree's character; a Hawthorn producing a stiff, scratchy & spikey drawing an Oak a more elegant flowing line.
Here's the oak at its easel and the resulting art:
For Vehicle Motion Drawings, he constructed an apparatus to capture the motion of a car being driven...the turns, stops, and starts of the vehicle move the pen over the paper. His postal projects capture the motion of packages through the postal system, both with drawings and photography. (Knowles' Spy Box reminds me of Kyle Van Horn's cameramail.)
Love his stuff. (via waxy)
While working for the FDR administration in 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange took the following photograph:
You've likely seen it before...it's called Migrant Mother and it's one of the more famous American photos. When she took the photo, Lange neglected to note the woman's name (or other details) so her identity remained anonymous while the photo went on to become a symbol of the Great Depression. In the late 1970s, Florence Owens Thompson revealed herself to be the woman in the photo after she wrote a letter to her local paper saying that she didn't like the image. In an AP story about the ensuing flap, Thompson stated:
I wish she hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."
In addition to not taking her subject's name, Lange got something else wrong. Thompson and her family weren't typical Depression migrants at all; they'd been living in California for almost 10 years. Like all photographs, Migrant Mother is neither truth nor fiction but somewhere in-between.
I came across this striking photo by Margaret Bourke-White the other day:
It's a photo of a bread line during the Louisville Flood in 1937. The 1937 flood was one of the worst floods ever to occur in the Ohio River Valley:
In January of 1937, rains began to fall throughout the Ohio River Valley, eventually triggering what is known today as the "Great Flood of 1937". Overall, total precipitation for January was four times its normal amount in the areas surrounding the river. [...] The Weather Bureau reported that total flood damage for the entire state of Kentucky was 250 million dollars, which was an incredible sum in 1937. Another flood of this magnitude would not be seen in the Ohio River Valley until 60 years later.
A diary from Mama Bondurant provides a glimpse into what the flood was like:
January 22---This is another terrible day. The water is still rising and we hear distress cries everywhere. I have tired all day to get West Point, but it is still under water. Jim came home for a little while but went back to Camp Knox to assist in placing flood sufferers from West Point. It is so bad outside. Rain has turned to sleet. Electricity is gone. No lights or radio.
Working as a photographer for Life magazine, Bourke-White also took this iconic photo of Gandhi and his spinning wheel.
Some information on Errol Morris' newest project, a film about Abu Ghraib:
Morris introduced us to his latest project about the Abu Ghraib, and the iconic images created from the prisoner torture. It's his hypothesis that it's a handful of those photos from that we'll remember a hundred years from now about the Iraq War. He explained that this project began with the mystery of two photos by Roger Fenton described by Susan Sontag in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others. During the Crimean War, Fenton took photos of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Two are of the same road, one with cannonballs littering the road, one with the cannonballs in the ravine. The Mystery being which photo was taken first, which was staged?
This is an interesting topic for Morris considering he pioneered the use of "expressionistic reenactments" in documentary filmmaking with The Thin Blue Line.
Update: The film is called "S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure".
Quick! Which photo sharing site community thingie is more popular: Fotolog or Flickr? You might be surprised at the answer...but first some history.
Fotolog launched in May 2002 and grew quite quickly at first. They'd clearly hit upon a good idea: sharing photos among groups of friends. As Fotolog grew, they ran into scaling problems...the site got slow and that siphoned off resources that could have been used to add new features to the site, etc. Problems securing funding for online businesses during the 3-4 years after the dot com bust didn't help matters either.
Flickr launched in early 2004. By the end of their first year of operation, they had a cleaner design than Fotolog, more features for finding and organizing photos, and most of the people I knew on Fotolog had switched to Flickr more or less exclusively. They also had trouble with scaling issues and downtime. Flickr got the scaling issues under control and the site became one of the handful of companies to exemplify the so-called Web 2.0 revitalization of the web. The founders landed on tech magazine covers, news magazine covers, and best-of lists, the folks who built the site gave talks at technology conferences, and the company eventually sold to Yahoo! for a reported $30 million.
Fotolog eventually got their scaling and funding issues under control as well, but relative to Flickr, the site has changed little in the past couple of years. Fotolog has groups and message boards, but they're not done as well as Flickr's and there's no tags, no APIs, no JavaScript widgets, no "embed this photo on your blog/MySpace", and no helpful Ajax design elements, all supposedly required elements for a successful site in the Web 2.0 era. Even now, Fotolog's feature set and design remains planted firmly in Web 1.0 territory.
So. Then. Here's where it gets puzzling. According to Alexa1, Fotolog is now the 26th most popular site on the web and recently became more popular than Flickr (currently #39). Here's the comparison between the two over the last 3 years:
This is a somewhat stunning result because by all of the metrics held in high esteem by the technology media, Web 2.0 pundits, and those selling technology and design products & services, Flickr should be kicking Fotolog's ass. Flickr has more features, a better design, better implementation of most of Fotolog's features, more free features, critical praise, a passionate community, and access to the formidable resources & marketing power of Yahoo! And yet, Fotolog is right there with them. Perhaps this is a sign that those folks trapped in the Web 2.0 bubble are not being critical enough about what is responsible for success on the Web circa-2007. (As an aside, MySpace didn't really fit the Web 2.0 mold either, nobody really talked about it until after it got huge, and yet here it is. And then there's Craigslist, which is more Web 0.5 than 2.0, and is one of the most popular sites on the web. Google too.)
What's going on here then? I can think of three possibilities (there are probably more):
1. Fotolog is very popular with Portugese and Spanish speakers, especially in Brazil. According to Wikipedia, almost 1/3rd of all Fotolog users are from Brazil and Chile. In comparing the two sites, what could account for this difference? Fotolog has a Spanish language option while Flickr does not (although I'm not sure when the Spanish version of Fotolog launched). Flickr is more verbose and text-intensive than Fotolog and much of Flickr's personality & utility comes from the text while Fotolog is almost text-free; as a non-Spanish speaker, I could navigate the Spanish-language version quite easily. Gene Smith noted that a presentation made by a Brazilian internet company said that "Flickr is unappealing to Brazilians because they want to the customize the interface to express their individual identities".
Cameron Marlow noticed that Orkut is set to pass MySpace as the world's most popular social networking site (Orkut is also very popular in Brazil), saying that "Orkut's growth reinforces the fact that the value of social networking services, and social software in general, comes from the base of active users, not the set of features they offer". Marlow also notes that Alexa's non-US reporting has improved over the past year, which might be the reason for Fotolog's big jump in early 2006. If Alexa's global reporting had been robust from the beginning, Fotolog may have been neck and neck with Flickr the whole time.
2. Flickr is more editorially controlled than Fotolog. The folks who run Flickr subtly and indirectly discourage poor quality photo contributions. Yes, upload your photos, but make them good. And the community reinforces that constraint to the point where it might seem restricting to some. Fotolog doesn't celebrate excellence like that...it's more about the social aspect than the photos.
3. Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren't the silver bullets we've been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don't think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.
Update: You can see how much Fotolog depends on international usage for its traffic from this graph from Compete. They only use US statistics to compile their data. I don't have access to the Comscore ratings, but they only count US usage and, like Alexa, undercount Firefox and Safari users. (thx, walter)
[1] Usual disclaimers about Alexa's correctness apply. The point is that among some large amount of users, Fotolog is as popular (or even more) than Flickr. Whether those users are representative of the web as a whole, I dunno. ↩
Some clever photography by Chema Madoz.
This is one of my favorite photos:
It was taken by Josef Koudelka in Prague in 1968, just before the Soviet Union invaded and put a stop to The Prague Spring. To demonstrate the emptiness of the streets at noon, Koudelka stuck his wristwatch into the scene before shooting it. A simple, brilliant gesture that adds not only a temporal dimension to the photo but also a sense of solitary humanity in contrast to the empty streets.
Photographer Clifford Ross shared his list of the necessary ingredients for invention and art at PopTech:
1. curiousity
2. persistence
3. ready to embrace the unexpected
4. ability and willingness to collaborate
Ross showed some rough results from his new pano-camera. I love Ross' Hurricane series:
If you asked me today to choose a medium in which to focus my future artistic energies, I'd have to go with the photo can. After finding this great Photojojo tutorial yesterday on using tin cans and glass jars as photo frames, I selected three recent pictures I'd taken and made this can triptych:
So cool! And simple too. I didn't follow Photojojo's directions exactly and I have a few observations to offer for those looking to play around with this:
- Paper quality. I just used regular old printer paper, not glossy photo paper or anything like that. This made the photos look more like actual cheap labels. I also didn't worry too much about being careful with the glue. Again, a little mistake here and there actually enhances the effect.
- Glue. I removed the original label from the can and glued the photo directly to the can itself. Instead of rubber cement, I used a glue stick with acid-free acrylic emulsion. The glue stick made application really easy. And I didn't apply the glue all the way around the can. I just glued down one end to the can, waited for that to dry, wrapped the photo around the can, pulled it tight, and glued the underside of that end to the end already affixed to the can. (When I tore the existing label off the can, I noticed that's how it was glued on there, so I tried the same thing and it worked.)
- Can size, etc. Shopping in the canned food aisle of the supermarket takes on a different meaning when you're not attempting to find green beans for dinner but trying to find aesthetically pleasing art supplies. I went with a larger can, one with stewed tomatoes; its proportions seemed more pleasing than those of a soup can. The problem was that when I got it home, it was almost 13 inches around, meaning that 8 1/2" x 11" paper wasn't going to work. (I ended up getting some 8 1/2" x 14" paper.) So bring your tape measure to the grocery store with you to make sure the desired can will work with your paper size.
- No pop-tops. A lot of soup cans now feature pop-tops. Get the old fashioned kind instead...the last thing you want is Uncle Steve lifting your photo can off of the coffee table, fiddling with the pop-top, and, hey!, Chunky Vegetable three years past its expiration date all over the place.
- Botulism? Speaking of past the expiration date, what's the shelf life of your artwork? The answer seems to be almost indefinitely when kept at temperatures at or below 75 degrees F, but I wouldn't advise eating anything from your photo cans after a year or two. The risk of botulism is almost nonexistent in contemporary commercially canned food, but if you see any of your art swelling up, throw it out. In addition, botulism dislikes acidic environments, so you're probably better off selecting cans with acidic food items in them, like tomatoes, fruits (without sweet syrups), and sauerkraut. But be careful not to get items that are too acidic...over a long period of time, the acid may eat through the can.
Good luck!
Some photos from a recent trip to Austria, featuring shots from near Linz, Salzburg, and Innsbruck. I went so crazy with the photos in Austria that I didn't take a single picture once we got to Zurich...I was all photographed out.
Here's my first attempt at a panorama of the Mill City Museum and the surrounding area:
Here's a larger version (3000 x 912, 312 KB).
I'm not entirely satisfied with this version. I used a shareware program for OS X called DoubleTake to stitch the images together and it's not suited for this kind of scene. Too much of the image turned out blurry & fuzzy and you have little control over which pieces of the image take precedent over the others. Some of this was probably user error and on some parts of the image (when there were less pieces involved), it did a wonderful job. I'm going to stitch a version in Photoshop by hand (and put a black background behind it) to see how it compares.
Update: Lots of photo stitching suggestions from people. Jake turned me onto Autostitch a few weeks ago, but alas it's not available for the Mac, nor do I have one of those fancy MacBooks on which to run Parallels. Calico is an OS X app that uses the Autostitch code, I may check that out. Photoshop CS has a built-in Photomerge tool that does panoramas. Hugin is a GPLed image stitcher that works on Windows and OS X. (thx galen, dan, jake, arlo, joe, glen, jason, and nicholas)
The Library of Congress has an online photography exhibit called Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943 (thx, shay). The photos were a little low contrast, so I color corrected a few of them in Photoshop:
My goal was not to blow out the contrast or unnecessarily accentuate colors, but attempt to duplicate what these photos would look like had they been taken with a contemporary camera and processed using contemporary techniques and materials.
Bound for Glory and Color Corrected »
I picked up a Kodak Duaflex II camera at an antique store this weekend. I'm going to use to it do some through the viewfinder shots with the D70. The idea is that you take a photo of the Duaflex viewfinder with the SLR camera, thereby picking up all the spots, scratches, and curves of the old lens. A lens hood is required to block unwanted light reflections. Here's a tutorial describing the process. Of course, it was after I bought the Duaflex that I discovered the need for a different lens on the SLR to make it work properly. We'll see if the 50 mm lens at home works. Some results soon. Hopefully.
For our honeymoon, we stayed right on the ocean near Tulum in the Yucatan, about two hours south of Cancun by car. Most of these photos are taken near Tulum, at Chichen Itza, or in Valladolid.
I can't remember where I first ran across Edward Burtynsky's photography, but I've been developing into a full-fledged fan of work over the past few months. From a Washington Post article on Burtynsky:
Burtynsky calls his images "a second look at the scale of what we call progress," and hopes that at minimum, the images acquaint viewers with the ramifications -- he avoids the word price -- of our lifestyle. But what if viewers just see, you know, some dudes and a ship?
"Another photographer might focus on the loss of life or pollution," acknowledges Kennel of the National Gallery. "He uses beauty as a way to draw attention to something. It's a very particular strategy."
The Brooklyn Museum of Art is displaying an exhibition of Burtynsky's photos until January 15. Well worth the effort to try and check it out. The scale of modernity, particularly in his recent photos of China, is astounding. In Three Gorges Dam Project, Dam #4, this huge dam seems to stretch on forever and you don't know whether to goggle in wonder or shrink in horror from looking at it.
Over the holidays, Meg and I went up to Vermont skiing. I skied quite a bit when I was in middle/high school (on the small hills of northwestern WI and east central MN), but I'd only strapped on the boards a couple times since graduating from college. Meg's family has skied at Mad River Glen for years, so that's where we went. After three straight days of hitting the slopes, my back got a little wonky, so on the 4th day I brought the camera along to document a run down the mountain:
There are a few photos of Waitsfield (the town closest to Mad River) and the surrouding area at the beginning of the set, but most are from the mountain, including some of the best winter views I've ever witnessed. The snow covering the trees, the fog at the top of the hill...it looked almost magical. At one point, I was alone on the mountain with my camera, engulfed in fog, no one within 200 yards. With no wind and all the snow & fog muffling the sound, when I stopped breathing, I couldn't hear anything at all.
Where does the time go? It's been more than a month since we got back from Asia, but I haven't posted my photos from Bangkok or Saigon yet. Time for amends, so with my apologies, here are a collection of photos I took in Bangkok.
Here's my posts from the rest of the Asia trip and my photos from Hong Kong. Saigon photos tomorrow (hopefully).
A small selection of photos from Hong Kong. Photos from Bangkok and Saigon coming soon.
We're back in the US, but here's one more post about our time in Vietnam.
1. On our way out to the Mekong Delta, we went through an industrial area, with machine shops, brick-making facilities, and the like. As we drove, we passed a three-wheeled bicycle that you see all over in Vietnam, with a cart in the front over two wheels and the driver over the rear wheel in the back. Lashed to the cart were several steel beams, probably 8-10 of them, each about 2 inches tall and 10 feet long, weight of the whole thing unknown, probably several hundred pounds on three bicycle wheels and a non-existant suspension system. And if that's not odd enough to imagine, the whole thing was moving at around 30 mph, pushed along by a motorcycle whose driver had his left foot on the bolt of the right front wheel, while the respective drivers of the combined conveyance chatted away with little attention to their Rube Goldberg machine. Wish I'd have gotten a photo of it...it's one of the craziest things I've ever seen.
2. Even though the streets of Saigon were packed with motorbikes, you saw very few people wearing helmets, and when they did, they tended to be construction helmets that weren't even strapped to their heads.
3. I got an email from a reader a few days ago wondering why I was referring to Saigon as Saigon rather than its official name of Ho Chi Minh City, the name given to the city 24 hours after it fell to the North Vietnamese. Most of the city's inhabitants still call it Saigon, so I was following suit. It's also quicker to say and to type.
4. Cao Dai is a homegrown Vietnamese religion (established in the 1920s) that is an amalgamation of several other religions. On our trip to the Mekong Delta, we visited a Cao Dai temple, which looked like it was designed by Liberace's interior decorator. Over the altar was a sculpture depicting Buddha, Confucious, Jesus, and Victor Hugo (!!), and I think they were all holding hands or something.
5. On one of the entry forms you need to fill out before arriving in Vietnam, it lists some things that are illegal to import into the country, including:
weapons, ammunition, explosives, military equipment and tools, narcotics, drugs, toxic chemicals, pornographic and subversive materials, firecrackers, children's toys that have "negative effects on personality development, social order and security," or cigarettes in excess of the stipulated allowance.
Children's toys? Negative effects on personality development, social order and security? Bwa?
6. I can't find too much about it online, but one of the more interesting things we saw in Saigon was the photography exhibit at The War Remnants Museum. The exhibit consists of hundreds of photographs of the Vietnam War (the Vietnamese call it the American War) taken by some of the best photojournalists who were working at the time, including Larry Burrows, Henri Huet, Horst Faas, Huynh Thanh My, Robert Capa, and Kyochi Sawada. A powerful and moving record of a tumultuous period in history.
7. Speaking of The War Remnants Museum (which was formerly called The War Crimes Museum and was a little more one-sided in the past), it wasn't until a couple days after I'd gone that I realized that remnants referred to all of the stuff that the US had left in Vietnam after the long conflict, literally the leftovers of war. Tanks, planes, cars, helicopters, guns, photography, children deformed from the effects of Agent Orange, a population depleted of young men, horrific memories, and, finally, a united Vietnam.
Well, summer is definitely over in the eastern United States. The leaves on the trees are going or gone, sweaters and light jackets have started making their appearance, and everyone is sick of tomatoes but drinking apple cider by the gallon. As a goodbye to a great summer, here are a few photos I took over the last few months:
The above photo was taken near the end of the summer on Nantucket, just before sunset.
Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn't even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here's what I use my phone for:
- Clock. I don't wear a watch, so I look at my phone all the time to check the time.
- Taking pictures + sending them to Flickr.
- Voice. I dislike talking on the phone, but when you gotta, you gotta.
- Text messaging. Texting is preferable to voice in many instances and many friends text more often than they call nowadays.
- Taking pictures. I think of this as distinct from the photo + Flickr usage above. The camera on my phone just isn't that important to me without the ability to easily publish them to the Web.
Stuff I don't want on my phone:
- Music. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of cramming a music player into a phone. The user experience needs to be solved first.
- Email. I still use client-side spam filtering so reading my mail on a phone would be a painful exercise. And I can send email from my phone and that's enough...I can handle not reading my email for hours on end.
- Web browsing. I love the Web, but my preferred portable device for accessing it is my laptop. Not worth the extra expense of adding it to my service plan.
What's your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.
My recent design refresh is already bearing fruit around these parts. Behold the new photo album template, which you can see in the Ireland photos, some recent Paris photos, photos from the High Line, etc. The album pages are the first non-white background pages to make it onto kottke.org in quite awhile, which was part of the reason for the design refresh. I tried the photos on white, but I felt they looked better on a darker background, so I went with that. The photos are also larger than they previously were, up from 600 pixels wide to 720 pixels. The file sizes are also quite large (sorry!)...BetterHTMLExport doesn't do the best job in compressing jpgs while preserving image quality. Photoshop's "Save for Web" does a much better job, but that would be a lot more time consuming for me. The search for the perfect solution goes on...
But my favorite part of the albums are the navigation. If you mouseover the right half of the photo, you get an arrow overlaid on the photo that suggests that you can click to move to the next photo (which, of course, you can). Then you can click on the left side of the photo to go back. If you're using Safari or Firefox or anything but IE really, the arrow images are tranparent png files that blend in with the photo in the background. Fun!
Up next: the photo page needs some help.
Ireland is green. Green, green, green. Such a cliche, but it really is unbelievably green. Here are some photos I took on a recent trip there:
We spent a little more than a week in southwestern Ireland, mostly in Cork, Kerry, and Clare. We actually drove through Limerick with a man from Nantucket, which if we'd been less jetlagged, we would have thought was more funny than we did. There was traditional Irish music in a pub in Dingle and Ennis. Some amazing porridge (no, really!). It rained a lot, but you got used to it after awhile. I'd never had a Guinness (for strength!) before and I figured the place to have one was in Ireland, so I ordered a half one night at a pub. I could only finish half of it...even a quarter of a pint of stout was too much for a amateur imbiber like myself.
From The Morning News comes this collection of photographs of celebrities playing table tennis. Among those pictured are Henry Kissinger, Billie Jean King, Lauren Bacall, and Bob Marley. Here are Bill and Hillary Clinton:
I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out just how full of useless knowledge I am: under the rules of the USATT (specifically 10.10), you're not allowed to touch the table with your free hand during a volley as Hillary is doing here. Point to Bill.
At GEL the other day, Rick Smolan, creator of the Day in the Life photography books, told the crowd about his newest project, a pair of books called Cats 24/7 and Dogs 24/7. Both books are composed of pet photos submitted by professional and amateur photographers. One of the ways that people will be able to purchase the book will be direct from a company who will offer the book at a discount in exchange for printing that company's logo somewhere on the book (sorry for the lack of details...I think the company was either Kodak or Proctor and Gamble, the discount is $5, and the somewhere on the book is the cover but don't quote me on any of that). Anyway, a bit of evidence that advertising in books may be a viable business option in the future.
My pal Kdunk, who gave me a lucky dollar to hang on my wall on the occasion of my going full-time on kotte.org, recently posted an intriguing photo to Flickr. As the first commenter notes, "there goes a story". As a creative writing exercise, what's your take on what's going on here? Doesn't have to be true, just make something up. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I think this one may have a few more in it than that.
As promised, some more photos from my recent trip to Paris (first set):
I've been back in NYC for a couple of days and am still jet lagged as all get-out...I was up at 5:05 AM this morning, about an hour before the sun decided to make an appearance. Getting a lot done with all this early rising, but I'm looking forward to more sleep soon.
Oh, and for the completist, here are all of my photos from past trips to Paris:
Jun 2003
Nov 2002
May 2001
The Louvre
L'Institut du Monde Arabe
Churches and cathedrals
Eiffel Tower
Wow, there's some bad ones in there. (And not so bad ones as well.)
So, I'm in Paris for a few days. It's a pseudo-vacation of sorts, but I'm keeping up with the site while I'm here as well. I've had the chance to get out with my camera the last couple of days, something I always enjoy doing here. It feels like cheating in a way...it's so easy to take good photos here. Anyway, here's a selection from the last two days:
The above photo (larger version) is one my favorite photos from the past few months. I was walking around in the Jardin Des Tuileries, saw him reading by the fountain, and just knew I'd found a good picture. I imagine actual photographers get that feeling all the time, but it was a new one for me. Hopefully I'll find a few more good ones for another one or two selections while I'm here.
I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:45 this morning so that I could be in Central Park when they unfurled The Gates, the 16-day public art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I was not disappointed. The whole art question notwithstanding, The Gates are an amazing and moving spectacle, and it was great seeing so many people in the park this morning, sharing the experience. Here are some photos I took:
There's so much in the news these days about our differences, conflict, and fear...The Gates are a perfect antidote for all that and for New Yorkers, a chance to come together and celebrate the city without terrorism or a power loss being involved. If you're in New York anytime before February 27th, I urge you to head to Central Park to check it out.
Here are the rest of my photos from London:
I kept a (paper) notebook while I was in London, and there's some stuff in there that I'll be probably posting here at some point in the (hopefully) not too distant future.
Without intending to, I ended up taking photos of a bunch of faces while I was in London. Here are some of them:
It's been awhile since I've seriously picked up a camera (not that I was ever that serious about it) and I'm a little rusty. I'm hoping to get in lots more practice in the coming months, so the quality should hopefully improve.
After the Met yesterday, I sat on the stairs to watch these two street performers who were really quite good. At the end of the show, one of them did a flip over four people. I made this composite of the photos I took of his jump:
(click for a larger version)
I posted about how I made this image in the cool technique group on Flickr.
As part of a lazy Sunday here in NYC, I ducked into the Met for a couple of hours and wandered around. I've seen the whole muesum at least twice, but I never get tired of it. The Gilbert Stuart exhibition is worth checking out (the room with several of his Washington portraits is fantastic), but NYC photography fans will want to check out Few Are Chosen, an exhibition of street photography. Featured are the photographs of Walker Evans (he took photos of NYC subway riders with a hidden camera), Helen Levitt's photos of NYC street scenes, gritty photos of NYC by an artist whose name I forget, as well as a selection of Henri Cartier-Bresson's work. The collection is fairly small but well worth checking out if you're into that sort of thing.
Since I don't live near a warm beach, I did some Flickr tag surfing this weekend instead. In roughly the order I discovered them, a story:
If you're on drugs, you may end up getting a kiss at a party from a crazy drunk person. If you're lucky, that someone might be a sexy blonde model with a great ass in a bikini.
(Kiss is my favorite, particularly with the hard rock fans sprinkled in.)
Went and took photos of the main protest march today. More tomorrow maybe. (Not more photos, more words.)
Boy howdy, if this don't sound familiar:
The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."
These days, there's talk of banning camera phones from anywhere you could possibly carry one: locker rooms, battlefields, subways, and movie theatres. Awake, citizenry! Our indulgence in hilariousness is at stake here! (via red)
For a friend's birthday, her wife arranged for a helicopter ride and invited a few people along. Never having been on a helicopter before, I happily joined in.
The ride up and down the Hudson only lasted about 7 minutes, but it was great fun. Reminded me a lot of flying with my dad as a kid. And seeing Manhattan from a different angle was a real treat. Here are a few photos I took of the ride.
Congratulations to me for finally joining the 21st century.
Today was the first real spring-like day in New York this year, so Meg and I celebrated by exploring the High Line. I took some photos (click on the photo below for more):
The High Line is an elevated railway that has fallen into disuse and disrepair, currently running from 33rd Street to the Meatpacking District on the west side of Manhattan. Before setting off, we checked on the Web for directions on how to get up there and found that some friends of ours, Jason, Alison, and Jake, had documented their High Line excursions, complete with directions. If you're interested in trying it yourself sometime, I would note that the south entrance/exit to the High Line appears to be closed (new fence, locks, barbed wire), so prepare for a round trip back up to 33rd Street.
I went and checked out the NYC photoblogger event at the Apple Store in Soho last night. A huge crowd assembled to watch presentations by seven NYC photobloggers. Among the highlights:
- Khoi's presentation of Infrangible. A man after my own heart, he still hand-codes his site for each entry, nesting tables within tables and thumbing his nose at structured data. Databases are for suckers! He also does not resize large photos (like this one) to fit on the screen all at once, the idea being that the photo won't have the same impact at 400x600 that it does at 740 x 1113.
- Mike's photos of abandoned subway stations. I loved hearing Mike's story: he's got a cheapo camera and is a self-professed bad photographer, but he loves to shoot, is striving to improve, and, judging from the audience's delighted reaction to some of his photos, his approach to photography is definitely interesting.
- The topic of retouching photos in Photoshop came up several times. Most of the presenters adjust their photos in Photoshop for brightness, contrast, color correction, etc. Purists would argue that this is cheating. I liken the Photoshop retouching stage of the digital photography process to the darkroom stage in analog photography. Ansel Adams performed extensive manipulations of his photographs in the darkroom and few consider Adams a cheater. Khoi had an interesting comment along those lines, saying that the photo out of the camera has to have "it" regardless of any correction done after the fact in Photoshop. In my experience, good photos can be made great in Photoshop, but no amount of manipulation can turn a poor photo into a good one.
- Adam and Scott's description of the simplicity of fotolog.net. You upload photos, your friends upload photos, and the interface allows you to quickly jump from the photos of one friend to the next, keeping up with their visual lives. No need to call it social software or justify how useful the social network is. fotolog.net is elegant in its simplicity and it works. End of story.
- A tantalizingly short look at Eliot's photo management system.
- And across it all, the *barest* of impressions that photologging is an art form unto itself, that it's not just photography + blogging. I'm not sure yet what makes it a unique thing, but the combination of the relative inexpensiveness of producing digital images in mass quantities (with a digital camera, it costs as much to take and store 1000 photos as it does to take 1 photo) and cheap, easy methods of publishing them to the Web has a lot to do with it.
Most of the crowd stayed the whole two hours...which is amazing. After it was over, some of us moved along to a nearby bar to socialize which, according to Jake's introduction to the event, was the real reason for the whole thing in the first place. I only stayed for a bit before hunger and tiredness got the best of me, but it was nice to briefly meet and chat with some of the presenters before racing off to dinner.
I took a lot less photos in Paris than last time I was there (photos!), but I still got some good ones this time around (well, "good" by my standards anyway).
What you don't see in these photos is the series of miracles that occurred during our visit to Paris. There was uber-chef Pierre Gagnaire getting me to eat (quite happily for the most part) 4 or 5 different sorts of fish & seafood, the nearly-perfect weather in Paris during our stay, and, most miraculous of all, we avoided eating in any of the excellent restaurants we ate at during our last trip (save for a bad pain au chocolat habit I've developed in frequenting the Boulangerie Malineau), opting instead for a bunch of new excellent restaurants.
Attorney Bert Krages has compiled a helpful guide of a person's rights as a photographer:
The right to take photographs is now under assault more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples include photographing industrial plants, bridges, and vessels at sea. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.
Ironically, unrestricted photography by private citizens has played an integral role in protecting the freedom, security, and well being of all Americans. Photography in the United States has contributed to improvements in civil rights, curbed abusive child labor practices, and provided information important to investigating crimes. These images have not always been pretty and often have offended the sensibilities of governmental and commercial interests who had vested interests in a status quo that was adverse to the majority in our country.
Something to keep in mind while you're snapping away at your local Starbucks.
The current issue of Digital Journalist has lots of material on the war in Iraq:
We have been fortunate to have direct access to photographers in Iraq, who are embeded with soldiers, on their own, aboard navy vessels, etc. This month we highlight their work and have published their personal experiences. Furthermore, we have coordinated with seven of the best photo agencies and media outlets such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Corbis, and Getty Images to bring their best war photographs to our audience.
There are excellent photo galleries from Agence France Press, AP, Corbis, Getty, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Reuters.
It was such a nice, sunny day in New York yesterday that I went for a walk down Broadway with 200,000 anti-war protesters. After exiting the subway at Times Square, I joined up with the March for Peace and Democracy on 41st and Broadway. Because I went to observe rather than protest, I zipped along the outskirts of the crowd, taking pictures as I went:
The enthusiasm of the crowd was impressive; they really believe in what they were marching for. Despite the strong feelings, the march was peaceful until it reached Washington Square Park. The march permit expired at 4pm and police moved in to disperse the crowd. I didn't witness it, but some protesters maced or pepper sprayed the police and the police responded in kind and with arrests.
Meg and I are getting our NYC apartment fixed up and functional bit by bit. It's hard with work and so much to do in our new city -- not to mention the 300 cable channels (Tivo + IFC + Sundance + HBO = kiss your life goodbye) -- but we're getting there.
This past weekend we made excellent progress, moving the microwave off the kitchen counter to a shelf of its own, installing a new kitchen faucet that offers improved control and more room to manoeuver over our shallow sink, and putting in a new shower head.
Showering with our old shower head was like sitting down to dinner at a compulsive talkers convention; shit was spraying everywhere. The new head is shiny and big but relatively low-flow; it doesn't spray water at you so much as gently rain it down on you, real soothing-like. After a post-installation shower, I caught this reflection of myself in the shiny new head:
New York City received a modest amount of snow yesterday. I grabbed a camera and shot some photos out the back window of my apartment and on the way to lunch.
Enjoy.
I've always liked the look of Lomo photos (typically bright colored and highly saturated with darkened edges), but I didn't want to worry about getting another camera or messing with film & scanning. Yesterday I asked people if there was a Photoshop filter that could turn a regular photo into a Lomo-style photo. Several people responded with the Melancholytron filter and a tutorial on achieving the Lomo effect without using filters.
Since I didn't feel like downloading anything, I tried the tutorial. I started with this picture:
I took this photo on my first trip to NYC in January 2002; it's the Vesuvio Bakery on Prince Street in Soho.
I deviated only slightly from the directions, using one of the overlayed feathered black layers and decreasing the opacity of the white gradient layer to below 50%. Here's the result:
Pretty cool. Now, I wish I could get my camera to do this automatically...it would be fun to slip into Lomo mode now and then.
After months of procrastination and searching about, I finally found out how to export my photos to an HTML slideshow from iPhoto and have it work the way I wanted it to. BetterHTMLExport is a shareware plugin ($20) for iPhoto 2.0 that lets you control image sizes, thumbnail sizes, balance image quality & file size, and output into your own HTML templates. The plugin comes with its own little language (with ifs and loops) that you can use to display any information that iPhoto stores about an image, set variables, and conditionally display or hide certain chunks of code. Pretty powerful and worth the $20. See my Paris photos for an example of the output.
My only complaint is that the filenames can't be modified (although the HTML file extensions can be...to .shtml or .php for example). I'd love it if the image names weren't 1.jpg, 2.jpg..., but something like louvre.jpg or 20021106louvre.jpg instead, similar to how Adobe ImageReady handles filenames when exporting web files.
Update (1/18/04): The latest version of BetterHTMLExport (2.0.10) works with iPhoto 4.
I took about 400 photos when Meg and I were in France last November. I finally got around to exporting some of them from iPhoto (more on that soon) and putting them up. Click on the pic to get started:
Most of the pics were taken in central Paris, a couple in Marseille in southern France, and several in Pompignan near chez Allen et Armstrong. If you're here just for Oliver, he's right here. (Oh and don't worry...I didn't put all 400 photos up, only 70 or so.)
Update: I updated the stereo photography post yet again (you can't write a weblog without embracing writing as an iterative process). Taking a closer look at how I screwed up the placement of the images for viewing, I found the photo taken from the left-most vantage point needs to go on the right side and vice versa. That way, when you cross your eyes, the left eye sees the photo taken from the left and the right eye sees the photo taken from the right.
Earlier post: This is embarrassing. After advising all of you to "keep track of which is the left most photo and right most photo" in my post about stereoscopic photography, I completely ignored that with my examples. Except for the Lisa/Wiggum pair, each of the examples had the left and right images transposed. This means that unless you were standing on your head, you either couldn't see the effect or saw it in a kind of reverse 3-D with the far objects near and the near objects far.
Anyway, you should take another look if you failed to see the effect before...they are all much better now. Thanks to David for catching this.
Stereographic photography (or stereo photography for short) involves taking two slightly different pictures of the same scene so that viewing them in a certain way produces a 3-dimensional image. Having seen some examples of stereo photos recently, I decided to do some research and experiment by making some of my own.
To view the images in 3-D, cross your eyes until a composite image forms in the middle (it even works with the thumbnail above). From what I've read, a small percentage of you (5-10%) won't be able to see the effect, so if you can't get it to work, that might be why.
Stereo photography turns out to be fairly easy to do if you're not concerned with exact results, even if you only have one camera. Choose an appropriate scene and photograph it from two different positions a small distance apart, making sure to keep the camera as horizontal as possible. That distance depends on distance between the camera and the scene, but for most pictures, an inch or two of separation between camera positions is sufficient. For the Lisa Simpson image, the figurines were about two feet away and I moved the camera only about an inch between shots. Make sure you keep track of which photo you took from the left side and which you took from the right. That'll be important when preparing the images for viewing.
Download the photos to your computer and adjust the images in Photoshop (or a similar program) to compensate for any camera unsteadiness. They need to be horizontally & vertically aligned, color corrected, and cropped so that the two photos look as much alike as possible. The easiest way to do this in Photoshop is to paste one image on top of the other in its own layer. Decrease the opacity in the top layer to 50% and adjust to your heart's content.
When preparing the images for viewing, tall images seem to work better than wide images in getting the proper 3-D effect. Keep image sizes small; if the images get too wide, you won't be able to cross your eyes enough to see the effect. To view the images, place them side-by-side on the screen or print them out, placing the photo you took from the right side on the left and the photo you took from the left side on the right (if you don't switch the photos, you'll get a strange inverse 3-D effect). Then cross your eyes until a composite image appears in the middle.
If you're interested in trying stereo photography, here are some links to help get you started:
A Crash Course in Stereo Photography
An Introduction to 3-D (Stereoscopic) Photography
How To Take Stereoscopic Photography
A History of Stereoscopic Photography
A Guide for New Stereo Photographers
The Simple Making of Stereoscopic Photography
Better examples of stereo photography than mine:
Stereoscopic Photography of Flowers in Japan
High Quality Stereopictures
Okuyuki's 3D Photo Gallery
Early 19th Century Stereographs
Stereoviews by Dan Shelley
David's Stereoscopic Photo Gallery
Stereo Photography of Fluorescent Minerals
Celebrity Stereo Photography
I caught this shot of the Invalides dome today:
The sun was about 30 minutes from setting and the sky was just beginning to clear of some dark clouds. I don't think I've ever seen the bright blue of the sky, the dark cobalt blue of the clouds, and the bright yellow of the building together like that before. Wonderful.
Last time I went to Las Vegas, I forgot my camera. Left it in my bag on the floor of the bedroom. I realized my mistake ten minutes after we'd left the apartment and about 2 seconds after we got on the Bay Bridge toward Oakland. Ten minutes? Surely you could have gone back to retrieve it. That's what you'd say if you've never seen the traffic on the Bay Bridge at 7:30 am. Once you're on that great river of suspended pavement, there's no going back; when it spills you out into Oakland 4.5 miles later, it opens up into a vast delta of roadways that spirit you away, always away, from where you began.
This time around, I wasn't going to forget it. Underpants, shoes, vital medicines, those I could do without. My camera was going. And it did.
(Click pic for more...may take awhile for those of you on dialup.)
Congratulations are in order for The Dooce and Jon, who up and got hitched in Yosemite recently. The wedding photos are, hands down, the best I have ever seen.
David Gallagher posted a nice series of photographs yesterday.
Public Lettering, a walk in central London explores a variety of typography around London. It reminds me somewhat of The Minneapolis Sign Project.
This mirror shot by Alison reminded me of a shot I took in Berlin at the Camper store. (Hmm...the Web site has been redesigned recently...)
A Photographica member compiled a collage of his favorite photographs from the site. There as some really nice photos in there...I only wish each of them were linked to a bigger version of the photo.
In keeping with the photo analogy theme of the past few days, Nick offers his view of the Web circa 2002, complete with historical comparison.
And Mike expresses his feelings about dealing with ISPs right now.
Inspired by the photo I posted the other day about the state of the Web, a reader sent me this photo summing up how he currently feels about software development as an industry.
Instead of attending to my work and errands this morning, I spent about an hour looking through the winning photographs in the 59th Annual Pictures of the Year International Competition. I could write up descriptions of my favorite entries with words like "arresting" and "poignant", but my weak prose can't do justice to the photos themselves. Just go have a look.
This photo sums up how I feel about the Web right now.
kottke.org remixed by Google. I got this idea from David Gallagher. What's that name again? That's right, David Gallagher.
A Photoanthropological Look at Bachelorhood. Many things about that seem familiar to me.
Some stuff gleaned from the February 2002 issue of Wired:
TinyApps.org has links to a bunch of useful Windows software that is smaller that 1.44 Mb. The system section seems particularly useful.
Winning photographs from the 2001 Visions of Science Photographic Awards. The close-up images are amazing.
RND#: "The RND# project, which will ultimately comprise 100 short films, explores our increasingly bizarre dependence on and relationship with technology."
I love the cover done by Patric King for The Ever-Expanding, Profit-Maximizing, Cultural-Imperialist, Wonderful World of Disney.
An impromptu Internet art exhibit: a Google image search for webcam32.jpg.
Note: Many of these links are broken. One of these days, I'm going to clean them up as much as I can. -jkottke, 5/27/02
Some reports from the scene, in NY:
- eyewitness video of 2nd plane crashing into WTC
(fast mirror @ apple, mirror01, mirror02, mirror03, mirror04 (de))
- First-hand photos of someone fleeing the WTC and the aftermath. Amazing stuff.
- Video of the second plane crash (if you look carefully, you can see the plane approaching from the left)
- eerie time lapse of both towers burning and collapsing
(mirror01)
- photo of plane just before it hit WTC #2
- amazing photo of second plane crash taken by an amateur photographer
- some photos on Ultradio (almost artistic)
- Blogger search for "World Trade"
- Sara Schwittek (pix)
- Poignant cartoon by Tom Tomorrow
- Super Hyper Demon Child (scroll for pix)
- MetaFilter thread (w/pix)
- some pictures of tower collapsing
- Planet Kevin (pix)
- Animus Rex (pix)
- John C. Glass (pix, especially this and this)
- The Fine Line (text and pix)
- Like an orb (pix)
- Steve Riskus (pix in DC seconds after the Pentagon crash)
- Lackadaisical (pix)
- Lightning Field (w/pix)
- toothpickgirl (w/pix)
- guns media (pix)
- wireless NY (pix)
- Place Name Here (pix)
- Before pictures of the WTC by Dale Sorenson (pix)
- Missing Pieces @ {fray}.
- Lots of first-hand accounts on this Slashdot thread
- lots of stories from stinky.com
- potkettleblack in DC
- Brian Bernstein (in-building acct.)
- The Tin Man
- Netwert IdeaPad
- Exegesis
- Dirt Dirt
- Broadwaystars.com
- primenumber.com in DC
- CamWorld
- pic on momus
- Michelle in DC
- allenplummer.com
- Saranwarp
- Mr. Barrett
- Q Daily News
- World New York
- bgirl
Misc. Stuff
- Some links about talking to children about crisis and trauma
- lots of video from the day (very fast and high bandwidth connection)
- Check to see if people are OK in NY
- A chronology of what happened from CNN
- a design piece from testpilotcollective
- Tara has a resource page up at Research Buzz
Some personal thoughts (I want to get these down to read later):
- I have no context for this. Challenger times 1000. Comparable to Pearl Harbor, but I didn't live thru that.
- All this talk of America vs. the world by our politicians is making me sick and uneasy. This is a human issue, not an American, democracy, or a freedom issue. Someone attacked us all, all of us on the Good Earth.
- I'm so scared right now. I don't want to hear any reports of Americans grabbing the nearest Arab and beating the crap out of him or her. Don't do it. Please.
- Some people cope by hearing and distributing information in a crisis. I'm one of those people, I guess. Makes me feel like I'm doing something useful for those that can't do anything. Or something.
- I'm planning on travelling by air twice in the next month, one flight overseas. I'm not so sure now.
As much as I liked London (I wanted to move there after spending only three days there), Oxford pretty much blew it away. I want to say something poetic here about history and nature coming together to create something special, but I'm not sufficiently inspired right now. Perhaps the photos I took while in Oxford can convey some of that feeling:
- A pair of Oxford street scenes: scene one, scene two. Except for the yellow lines and the blacktop pavement, one might imagine that someone standing where I was standing saw much the same thing several hundred years ago.
- A walking path inbetween two buildings. I love the combination of the lush green of the trees & shrubs and the old browns of the buildings and paths.
- Another view of the same path. I've rarely felt as serene and thoughtful as I did walking along this path. I wanted to walk there forever.
- An Oxford meadow on a hazy day. It looks pretty much like what I thought a typical English meadow would look like.
- The exterior of Christ Church.
- A wall with two S characters on it.
Having only one day to really see London, I got up early that day and stumbled off toward Gloucester Road. In the 8 hours subsequent to getting off the Tube at Westminster, I must have walked about 20 miles around London. Here's some of the things I saw:
- Big Ben and Parliament. London was actually sunny the two days I was there, but as you can see from this photo, the fog, clouds, and drizzle had returned in time for my sightseeing jaunt.
- Large spikes on the fence surrounding Parliament. The Brits are very serious about security. I saw bomb checks happening at both Parliament and the BBC offices.
- The Millennium Wheel was massive. And it looked like a big bicycle wheel.
- Steps down to the Thames.
- Some water draining into the Thames. I liked the color combination of the rusty water and the bright green moss growing on the wall.
- A sign at a restaurant said "Please respect neighbours & leave quietly". Perhaps should have been followed by "after your meal".
- Noticed this sign on the way past Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. That's a ligature, kids.
- The Tower Bridge looks like a toy. I think it's the baby blue color.
- The Tower of London is over 900 years old (well, parts of it are anyway). The tour was a little expensive, but seeing as we don't have many 900 year old prisons to tour here in America, I bought a ticket and went in. On the grounds outside, several ravens were about. The photos don't give a good sense of the scale of these birds...they're huge. I felt bad taking pictures in the solemnly quiet Tower Chapel, but the lighting was too pretty not to. I
