"Barrel of truth," "rock your eyes"

Possible new contender for the flickr stars series:

More excellence here. [Update: it appears as though these screenshots may the last we ever know of this elusive genius. Because we're definitely not following him to deviantart]

Via photographs on the brain

GRD I recession

The price should be coming down on this... It's what happens when you launch a new model.

Obama sigh

People at work are all in a huff about these photos on Barack Obama's flickr, taken backstage on his (eventual) victory night. I think they're pretty interesting to look at. The problem my geekier colleagues have with them is that they're underexposed, blurry, etc. Yes, they look like the median Facebook picture... but my response to this is... who actually *cares* (besides you obviously)?

"omg worst. exposure. evar!111"

Have you seen these photos yet? Does the poor technical quality hurt you on the inside? Could you have taken better photos of this event? If so, are you secretly bitter at this poor, hapless photog?

I'm just happy to have a real (human) president for the first time in my life as a person with some political conscience. For reference, here are Callie Shell's photos of Obama, and Big Picture's set, both of which are great.

Photophlow

Photophlow is the most exciting site I've found in a while. Back in the day, I used to use IRC chat, a really simple text-based chat client, to kick it with other random people on the internet. Photophlow is like a fancy IRC chat room customized for flickr users. Everything is tied to your Flickr ID, so you can look through your favorites, search flickr, or browse the photos of the other people in the room with you. It's not just text-based, either: you can post images for the whole room to see, and the entire interface is very graphical. Rooms can be associated with an existing flickr group, with a single person, or you can just make your own room.

photophlow room (image in the room by nicksantan)

If people actually use this, it could easily become one of the most productive online photo communities. There's a real possibility for discussion and criticism.

Check out the site! And drop by the Golden Half room if you do!

Also, I want to say this: productive online interaction should always be pointing towards something "in real life"—there is no point spending all your time behind a screen. I always hear about how great the Flickr community is, but I have the feeling that it takes too much effort to get anything out of the forum style of interaction that currently exists on the site. Chat is different; it's much more direct and much more human. Photophlow has the chance to create real-life communities, if for no other reason that that they'd necessarily take place in real time. That seems like a good starting point to turn a purely online interaction into a personal one.

Flickr star: mulberry_kei

On the heels of yesterday's Golden Half post, I want to highlight mulberry_kei, who has posted many of my favorite photos to the Golden Half Flickr group. Her Golden Half is very blurry, but it produces a pleasant effect.

Small axe

If I was serious about trying to stamp out as much "bad internet photo discourse" as I could, I'd have to look no further than Flickr commenters, who might rival Yelp in their inanity:

He doesn't quite take photos, no he doesn't, he purely experimenting with photography, I hasn't seen one shot that he took as a photographer, but as an experimenter.

Parse this sentence: you'll find nothing! Unless you can think of a photographer who isn't also an experimenter, that is. Photography might be the most "experimental" of art forms, although that's a different discussion.

It's not worth coming down hard on people or groups that don't deserve it. Do you know who falls in that category? Hamburger Eyes. As I was reading all these insipid Flickr comments, the thought occured to me that even though Hamburger Eyes doesn't articulate anything verbally, that's not a goal they've set for themselves: the Hamburger Eyes magazine has no words.

guess the year

I hope amart continues to throw good looking photos up on the Hamburger Eyes blog.

Reader mail 3: "no such thing as no post"

The subtitle of this post comes from a message I once read in the forum of a Flickr group called something like "NO POST PROCESSING!" Someone started a thread saying: "when i take photos on my camera i'm shooting in RAW. is it ok if i change the temperature and stuff before i post to this group?" There was some back and forth, and a few people approached the question philosophically, but my favorite answer was this quieter one: "no such thing as no post :)"

"great contrast! lol"

On to the mail, which was in response to this recent analog vs digital post:

I tend to belong to the "pro-digital" camp but my main argument on the matter is that if any of these big film or vinyl people existed today, they would totally avail themselves of modern technology. You don't think a Man Ray or a Bresson would be using Photoshop? Anyways, I have definitely thought about the subject a lot and that's not to say that I don't understand the value of analog photography or music or whatever. But it drives me crazy when people cling to some idealized past.

To make it clear, I don't hate technology, and I definitely don't think that the existence of the Adobe program Photoshop heralds the death of "photography." Speaking as someone who claims to love film, I currently scan all my negatives myself so that I can edit them on the computer. That's not very romantic! I don't develop my own film either, which probably makes me a bad person in some militant photo-camps I don't even know.

"d00d, want a link to this kewl torrent site?"

I'm terrible at using Photoshop, but I recognize how useful it is to everything that I'm doing right now. I agree that there's no need to idealize the past. It's not like people were actually helped by their technical limitations, they just found creative ways to work with what they had. A hundred years from today, photographers will no doubt wonder how we, the godforsaken people of 2008, ever produced anything worth looking at using such a primitive tool as Photoshop. (But they will only think to say this while looking at our images!)

To answer the good question posed here, I am sure that Man Ray wouldn't be so foolish as to ignore Photoshop. He'd probably use it well, too, because I think Man Ray was on point. That's just a guess, though. Hey, everyone knows that Star Wars Episode 4 was so great because George Lucas' shoestring budget made him work hard for his visual effects. Everyone also knows that Star Wars Episode 1 was so wretched because it was a just plain terrible idea, which happened to have millions of dollars' worth of technology thrown at it. This does not mean that lots of technology makes for bad results, or that "bad" technology makes for good ones. Better ideas make for better results, so in terms of photography, the bottom line should always be the image. The way that it's produced should be secondary.

By the way, the only meaning of my Star Wars example is that George Lucas is a hack.

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.

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.

A nice use of HDR

I've hated on HDR photography in the past, but I just found someone who uses it in a more subtle way than you might find on world famous geek blogs. I like this picture because it doesn't immediately scream, "look at me HDR is cool!" It looks like the only thing that's really been altered in this photo is the clouds, and to me this is pretty tasteful. How long until we see in-camera HDR? This feature would probably lead to more garish HDR photos floating around the internet (check out one of the comments on this picture to see what I mean) but this is the first time I've seen an HDR photo that actually looked good.

by →RiGHt !!

Hey Arturo, are you still trying to cook something up with this technology?

Flickr star: madcappp

In lieu of posting my own material, which will come in time, I'd like to highlight people who inspire me.

I keep a close eye on Flickr, so I know when users I like have made new posts to the site. Madcappp does not put up photos very frequently, but I see a relation between these long intervals and his quiet compositions.

I know that for every image that makes it to Flickr, there must be plenty of imperfect ones. Still, I prefer to imagine that the time between posts corresponds to the conception and realization of a single idea.

Of course that's not the case, but who's to know the difference? The value of keeping an uncluttered photostream.

The Library of Congress joins Flickr

That's very exciting news! Anyone can tag photos, too.