To find new photos on Flickr

Favorite the photos that strike you. Later, go back and see who else favorited the same ones. Explore those photostreams.

Some photo links, or RSS food

Here are a few links to sites that I enjoy:

• Flak Photo: this one is definitely well-known in the Serious Art Photo world. You'll be noticed by Important People if you get your work up here. I think it's great because it has an RSS feed with really big images, and it never posts more than one photo a day.
• photographs on the brain: the Tumblr of Bryan Formhals, one of the prime movers of the Hardcore Street Photography group on Flickr. He tumbls interesting articles on photography and striking images from 'round the internet. Note that this is not part of the "network of cool" photographers, which is a good thing.
• Hardcore Street Photography: basically the best Flickr group. The images are highly moderated, so you can subscribe to the feed and end up with around 15-20 photos per week. They're usually of a very high quality, but what really sets this group apart is the discussion. This is an actual community of people who are extremely interested in talking about street photography. It's well worth stopping by, even just to lurk.

As I started writing this, I was just thinking of sharing "links." All three of these sites are highly adaptable to RSS, though, in fact with the exception of the HCSP discussion board I do not visit these sites at all. So, got any hot feeds of your own?

Las aventuras de Barbaverde by César Aira, pp 9-10

The first pages of a 2008 novel by César Aira, Las aventuras de Barbaverde or The Adventures of Greenbeard. Translated by Daniel Abbe. Buy the book here: Argentina, México. See a picture of the book in real life here or here.

The Giant Salmon

I

The reception of the old hotel Savoy de Rosario, a hurried weekday morning (time: close to the present). A young man had drawn close to the counter and was waiting for the moment to be able to interject a question, with a mixture of impatience and uncertainty. The employee of the hotel, an older man, was speaking with a pair of travelers with bags, who could have been coming or going, one just as easily as the other. A younger woman, who must have been the receptionist, was speaking in the corner with a man in a blue suit. The young man wondered whether he should interrupt. He would have done it in other situations, but this time he feared that he might come to require the good will of the hotel staff, and he didn’t want to set himself against them. It bothered him that there were more people behind him, other travelers probably, chatting and perhaps waiting their turn as well. The situation became more complex when a pair of men with briefcases entered and marched up to the counter; they turned to the woman with confidence, like old friends, and began to speak with her. He began to doubt whether he’d be able to ask his question, which in any case was nothing special; he only wanted to know whether the famous Greenbeard [Barbaverde], who he’d been sent to interview, was staying at the hotel. Obviously if the response was yes, he’d have to ask to be announced, and explain his task further. It wasn’t so simple, and he didn’t really know how to do it. He was improvising, or better waiting to begin to improvise.

Aldo Flavor [Sabor] was very young, although not as young as he looked. Skinny, slow and nervous, timid, with an inexpressive and almost absent face (he had more than a drop of Eastern blood), he could have been taken for a child, or an adolescent in the process of growing. He’d thought that this aspect could be useful in his new job, if he could take advantage of it; but knowing how slow he was, he suspected that in the time it would take him to learn how to do this, he’d already have been transformed into an adult who looked like an adult. Although no one can calculate the effects of time beforehand.

For the moment, his experience had taught him to not feel like an adolescent. Since graduating a few years ago from the Faculty of Humanities he’d been teaching classes in high schools, and the daily and fastidious contact with kids who were in reality what he only looked like had showed him, gradually, how much of a difference there was between him and them. Actually, it was this perception of these differences – each day more intolerable – that had, on the whole, brought him this morning to the lobby of the Savoy.

Tired of giving classes on language and literature to students whose obstinance he understood and nearly let contaminate him, Flavor had been aware of any possibility of employment that presented itself. When it finally did, he didn’t wait to jump on it, above all because it wasn’t just any old opportunity, but because it was one that filled him with expectations. A space opened up on the staff of reporters for the local paper, and the recommendation of a friend did the rest. It wasn’t a coveted job, except by him. He felt that soon, magically, he’d be moving on to the world of reality, and he left the classrooms like someone exiting a bad dream.

Obviously in his state of journalistic initiation, he couldn’t hope for really exciting assignments. But he wasn’t making distinctions in this way. To go out in search of information, and later put it down in writing, seemed to him a rich activity in itself, a mixture of the craft of observation and the magic of happenstance. The first morning, as he was eating breakfast, his mother warned him that it was most likely that they’d send him to take note of the protest of sewers in some neighborhood, or to cover the inauguration of a hospital room. It could have been that way, and surely it would be that way at some point, and he would have done it with the same curiosity and sunny disposition of the guileless novice. But his first mission, by unusual luck, led him to adventure, happiness and love.

Using Picasaweb

I've decided to start using Picasa a bit more for photo sharing, mostly to exercise a higher level of quality control over the stuff I'm putting on Flickr. I've said it before but I should stop worrying so much about Flickr, those shiny stats are very distracting. It's more important for to develop than to get views. That is ancillary. Ironically the complete deficiency of community and stats on Picasaweb makes it attractive for posting lots of "work in progress" shots, i.e. pretty much everything that I'm taking.

Parque Rivadavia, Buenos Aires

Here's a link to some pictures from Buenos Aires, on Picasa, straight out of the scanner. I'm not blown away by any of them, really, but I know that some people (hey, my family at least) will be interested in seeing what I'm up to, visually or otherwise. I like writing the captions on Picasa, anyway.

Addition by subtraction?

I've told a few people that I'm not that much into my D40 anymore. Film is more fun, I just haven't really wanted to pick it up, etc etc. I've really got to put my money where my mouth is now, though, because it got stolen out of my apartment, along with some lenses and my XA (ouch). In some ways this could be helpful - by reducing two legitimate camera options, I will probably stick to the Nikon FM and the Golden Half. This means it's all film for the near future. I recently acquired a copy of Photoshop, which I don't actually know how to use, but I'll try to teach myself, like with most parts of my photography game.

A story about Donald Knuth

Donald Knuth's son taught math at my high school. Another teacher once related the following story about him:

Donald Knuth sat down to write a book, but he found that he was having too many thoughts. He started to write them down one by one, and then using a shorthand, but he found that even then he still couldn't write them down quickly enough. So he just wrote down the first letter of each thought. After filling up pages and pages with letters, he went back and wrote the book from these notes.