March 2008 Archives

The cynic in me wants to exclude this completely.

[From John Nack on Adobe: A note about PS Express terms of use]

You decide.

Well it didn't take long, the TOS of Adobe's new service certainly favour them over the user, thanks to Addie, and Albert and TK for the heads up, my advice don't bother, especially if you already have Photoshop. There are alternatives out there Picassa being one of them.

Well it will certainly be a fun tool for the amateur and serious amateur alike, some good editing tools, all fairly intuitive, for someone like me. Not quite high end enough and unlike flickr there appears to be NO social component to the app, other than the ability to link one's facebook or photobucket account to it.

Two gig of free usage seems OK, haven't dug around the fine print yet to see where and how they may charge for the service?

The default editing interface.

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FWIW, I'm using firefox to access the site, as Safari at V3.1 doesn't seem to be working.

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Ok after creating an account here's the default interface, more to come.

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Photoshop, joins the burgeoning online application community.

[From Adobe Photoshop Express.]

Will it compete, review to come.

Thanks; again, to TK for the headsup.

Vanity Fair has an article on their website about Robert Frank, at the end I found this video.

I post as regularly as I can remember in a pool called, Picture Australia People, Places, & Events. I recently had an interesting exchange with a member of that team the admins the pool, which leads me to believe they have defined documentary photography, in contemporary Australian culture. Phew, what a relief, I can now put my cameras down rest easy, and concentrate on the more important aspects of life, such as the weekly AFL scores and who will lose the most weight this week on channel 10. Their definition?

... it documents aspects of change and is in focus.

Umm Robert Capa's famous image of the D-Day landings anyone?

During the exchange I received an almost backhanded compliment:-

"...but Picture Australia is more about documentary photography not art photography"

Well I'm flattered, thanks for compliment I think, but wait... are you saying that if a photo is out of focus it is art? Does that mean that if a photograph is in focus it is not art?

Here's the complete exchange,

Just for the record, I can guess when a photograph is art, and sure most photos are documents, of something, but my ideas and attitudes about what constitutes art and documentary photography, are not fixed in stone.

Oh and the photograph they refer to was not out of focus it was suffering from camera shake as it was taken in low light conditions, it's actually usually pretty hard to get a phone camera photograph out of focus.

Here's a great laugh!

..."My Nikon contact tells me their R&D people are now working on a system that eliminates the photographer altogether. Nikon's customer research has discovered that when a photographer takes a great image, they claim all the credit. But when a photographer takes a bad image, they blame the camera.

By eliminating the photographer, Nikon plan to eliminate lousy photos altogether..."

[From Nikon D90 Specifications Revealed]

Now if folks in this thread would just read it!

Shot from the front seat while stuck in traffic.

That's the price I have to pay for an electronic submission to an exhibition I may or may not get a chance to show work in. Besides, I have to print it to THEIR specifications IF I get selected? Hmm I've till Friday to make up my mind?

I mean really twenty five dollars to send an e-mail attachment, can some one please explain why to me?

As I prepare a file for a competition submission, I decided to make yet another zone rule scale to help me think about the values in the file as I tweak it, using photoshop, [because I'm in a hurry] in preparation for the submission, this time in 5% steps.

Click on the image to see the whole image and download it if you like.

Part of the article I linked to yesterday talked about gear, here's another read that takes the photographic gear argument even further, and in the right direction I might add. Not that gear should be the, "be all and end all" of good photography heaven forbid.

Food for thought*.

[From 2point8 » The Future is Alor]

I particularly like these ideas,

…future of photography will not be found in the hushed walls of the gallery, or in the download-disabled watermarked-protected sites of copyright-scared photographers. The future’s already out there, in cheaply printed print-on-demand books, in small collaborative global-web-ventures, in xerox copies taped to lightpoles, affordably editioned prints, and in sites like Mark Alor Powell’s.

* thanks to TK for the heads up.

Simply for the history books, flickr has suffered an unannounced and unexpected outage.

Thanks to my stats on flickr I rediscovered this site this morning. http://www.earthalbum.com. and of course the vain part of myself went looking for my own photos. Very nice tool indeed.

Maps and photography have long been an interest of mine, now with these techonolgies Web is added to the equation quite nicely. In fact this idea will form a large part content of my next e-book.

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Currently reading a book titled, "Thinking With Type", by Ellen Upton, pub Princeton Architectural Press.

In the section where the writer talks about, text, this passage has struck a particular chord with me.

Another Model, which undermined the designer's new claim to power surfaced at the end of the 1990s, borrowed not from Literary criticism, but from human—computer interaction [HCI] studies and the fields of interface and usability design. The dominant subject of our age has become neither reader nor writer but user, a figure conceived as a bundle of needs and impairments-cognitive, physical emotional. Like a patient or child, the user is a figure to be protected and cared for but also scrutinised and controlled, submitted to research and testing.

How texts are used becomes more important than what they mean. Someone clicked here to get over there. Someone who bought this also bought that. The interactive environment not only provides users with a degree of control and self direction but also, more quietly and insidiously, it gathers data about its audiences. Barhtes's image of text as a game to be played still holds, as the user responds to signals from the system. We may play the text, but it is also playing us.∗

∗pg 73 Thinking With Type, by Ellen Upton, pub, Princeton Architectural Press 2004, ISBN 978-1-56898-4483

A whole unit of research there alone in this one quote.

A good write up for my favourite asset management tool

[From Australian Macworld]

Despite the heat today, over 35°C, we managed to go out for Lunch to Lavandula, the place where we married a few years back. I shot a few frames, [Nik also shot a couple], on a borrowed Canon 5d. So far I've narrowed them down to 11, some processing ahead of me, it seems.

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Some old old Nokia Phone shots I've always liked, that have had minimal views, but I still feel are worthy. Especially given then the lack of quality and the fact I had no idea what I was doing?

Not that I have any more of an idea now mind.

Ah the mainstream media still relies on these kinds of adjectives.

[From The world's 50 most powerful blogs | Technology | The Observer]

Exhbition: Body Language: Chinese Photography
Friday, March 14, 2008 - Sunday, May 18, 2008

National Gallery of Victoria
180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne

Body Language highlights key photographs that reflect the tensions in Chinese society as the processes of social change meet traditional culture and expectations head-on. In an environment where free expression is prescribed, these artists use the physical form closest to them (their own body) as a means to communicate in a complex, multi-layered and often coded way with the wider world.

Tickets: This is a FREE event

For full details, including attendance, visit:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/413467

Haven't really been following this debate, but makes for an interesting read

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Microsoft reverses version targeting default.

[From Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Microsoft reverses version targeting default]

This is my favourite bit:-

"given a company-wide reorientation away from proprietary winner-take-all competitiveness and toward interoperability"

Scale and size, are almost irrelevant on the internet. Real in 'our hands' prints are reliant* on scale, as part of the grammar of photography.

Netvibes a neat little tool I'm using to monitor all sorts of feeds data and other Web 2.0 stuff has just added a new feature of a public page and added a more sociable context to the site, page.

You can find me on, this page.

Thanks as always to the hard working and patient Cos for his help fixing my blog, I now have a blog roll.

I've been wanting to add a blogroll to my blog for some time and have not been successful.

Here's a picture of the error message that I have no idea how to fix looks.

Anyone got any idea as to wot's going on?

Does anyone else hate this black background in CS 3? Can it be changed?

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Michael Reichmann in AUSTRALIA

Michael Reichmann, runs the well known Lumious Landscape Website. He is giving a workshop demonstration here in Melbourne, sadly I'm not going to be able to make it and probably it is booked out already? Anyway the details are,

Melbourne: Tuesday 4th March 2008
Sponsor: L&P Digital Photographic
Participation fee: $88 or, $66 for AIPP members
For registration and information about venue and time please contact: info@lapfoto.com.au

Something I will be attending is the CCP workshops run by Les Walkling, sometime this year. So much to chose from, though so I'm not sure which one to attend?

On another note, I'm running some workshops in Photoshop again this year, I've changed the format, they now run over 2 Saturdays, if you know someone who would be interested contact me.

Folio on my mind.

Recently, I talked about a subject I'm teaching this year; that I hadn't taught for some time. Folio, is what we call it a pic.

Well I'm glad I jotted down those few thoughts here, they will serve as a catalyst and reminder of what I hoped to achieve or at the least explore. You see, due to time-tabling issues and the several other logistical areas impeding the progress of the year, we are running behind, and as a consequence we have yet to run a formal class on the subject. When we finally do, week one will be simply be a, this what we are going to do, this is how we are going to do it and this is why we are going to do it sort of class, i.e. an introductory class.

Even so, as a further reminder, here's a bunch of other ideas I am hoping to explore in the class.

What can photography say? How can it say it? Why does it need to be said? Narrative, story and ideas can photography tell a story, and if so what story should it tell?