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 Phones, networks, all that clickety-click-click |
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PhotoRant.Com
Optimistically world-weary since 1994. |
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Phones, networks, all that clickety-click-click |
Part of
PhotoRant.Com
Optimistically world-weary since 1994. |
Dogs and Lunches, etc
If It Has a Ringtone, It's Not a Camera. Panasonic Lumix's advertising slogan didn't last long -- not, I think, because there would soon enough be a Lumix-branded mobile phone, but because it's a slogan that can easily be interpreted either way: that a celphone is less than a camera, or (oops) that a camera is potentially rather less than a cameraphone.
It's also less than a "camera-puter," which is an aspect that is neither camera nor phone.
In the simplest sense, the camputer is a portal for images direct from your hand to the internet. But what about pictures before they ever leave the phone? If they ever leave the phone?
The utilitarian camera-as-scratchpad notion that's been spreading since the advent of home video (even, for a few, on Super 8) is now something that almost everyone takes for granted. End a meeting with a whiteboard full of scribbles that might be useful later? No time to copy them in a notepad? Use the camera phone. Want to keep a snap of the good-for-once haircut? Want to remember that the car is parked on Level 4 Blue zone? Easy and the photos just as easily cast off when they're done.
Camphone as agent of political change? The jury's out on its genuine effectiveness, but certainly it's had a huge and unpredictable effect on the relations of people, governments, politicians, and the media between them.
Beyond these "useful" applications, though, and beyond the camphone's replacement of point and shoots for a quick facebook-upload fix -- are there new ideas that might be useful creatively? The rapid spread of programs like Hipstamatic and Vignette (or even CamScanner) provide a hint to one other direction, closer to usual photographic practice -- the collapse/reversal of the traditional photo workflow. Sure, you could already take a digital photo and then push it through Photoshop to alter the character of the color and contrast, emulating the look of a particular film stock. The patterns were still the same: capture, process, and (potentially) presentation.
The advent of processing tricks in the camera application collapse the first two steps into one. Just set the camera on "Velvia" and go find some fall foliage. Heck, put the processing and border-generating on "shuffle."
Or even shoot with a different camera and import the images into your phone, rather than spend $500 on Photoshop: which is just what is happening here -- cited by Leica, no less. Established commercial photographer Laura Rossignol shooting on a D-Lux 5 (aka Lumix LX5), and then (after doing selects in Lightroom) "I like to take the post processing one step further and I will email a finished version to myself so I can open it in the Picture Show iPhone app. It allows you to add interesting effects and frames."
(Addendum: Adobe's John Nack made a similar post to this one, wondering: why would you edit on a mobile device?, just a few days ago....)
I used to think that the transparency or negative was the canonical object. As Ansel Adams wrote about it, the negative was like a musical score, to be interpreted by a darkroom performance for each new print. Throw that idea away. Immediate darkroom-ish styling on the fly: whether you think they're insanely great or sentimentally godawful, they're as fundamental a part of the New Beast's nature as is the thickness of oil paint or a trumpet's high notes. Get used to it, this is still just an early wave.
What I Ate: 28 Jan 2011
The flash diet doesn't require using flash, and it isn't really a diet per se, but an alternative to keeping a food diary -- photograph everything you eat. A side benefit is that it gives you an excuse to make at least a few photographs every day.
For entertainment value I've given myself a little rubric:
• Celphone only: twee "FX" apps okay
• "One bullet": c'mon, it's time to eat
• Context: ingredients, locations, companions
Here is a great thing about celphone cameras: they're not Hasselblads. They're more like a real "pencil of nature," in that a pencil has incredible range -- you can use the same pencil to jot down the grocery list or to draw a masterwork. The Hasselblad is more like oil paints -- wonderful for what it does, but too grand and technically involved for casual muddling.
The pictures show a recent bargain toy -- a 7-inch Pandigital Novel eReader (aka "PDN," or "WPDN" to specify the white variant), re-flashed to expose its Android underpinnings and updated to Android 2.1 "Eclair." I managed to pick this one up during a recent clearance at the nearby chain store Kohl's for a tidy $59 (apparently, a few folks even managed to get a $20-off deal -- an Android tablet for $40!). Even at the more-usual price of $199 the Novel is no iPad, but at that price you could by three or four of them (or at the discount, a dozen or more!) for the price of a single iPad (Addendum: Apparently they sold 440,000 PDN's in 2010). So here's a quick review of my experience thus far:
Pandigital are known as much for their digital picture frames as for their e-Readers, and the Novel kind of feels less like a slowed-down computer and more like a turbocharged picture frame. This suits its designated purpose: as a full-color eReader. Not a game machine, or a media center, though in fact it's quite capable of playing YouTube videos or being a music player if the mood should strike you to use it that way. But really the CPU wasn't designed for rapid-fire screen updates. It's a device built around a slower, simpler, long-attention-span sort of experience.
I've got several different devices on hand for comparison, including current iPhone, iPad, a couple of new and old Android phones, and various other small computers, MIDs, readers, and so forth. Given this environment, these are the things that stand out about the Novel:
So what's it good for?
Principally, it's good for its chartered design tasks: reading eBooks and light web browsing. For these, it's excellent. By stripping-away the default Pandigital/Barnes&Noble skin (re-flashing doesn't delete these features, but simply makes them companion apps within the Android Home screen), the full range of Android apps can be seen and tried. I've found that the combination of wi-fi and Google books, Aldiko, & Kindle apps, along with Google Reader and the Skyfire browser, makes it more capable that any other reader save high-end tablets like the iPad or Galaxy Tab.
Key Largo, 2010
I hear that del.icio.us and perhaps even flickr may go away soon. The new joke around the valley is: "if the US really wanted to kill Wikileaks, they'd have Yahoo acquire it."
In the mean time, you might like this.
Speaking of painting and computers, I've been working off and on on "JokerPaint," a little let's-beat-images-senseless sort of toy made using Processing and with a lot of the heavy pixel lifting being done via chains of filters that I've made using the GLSL framework in Andrés Colubri's GLGraphics library. I expect that at some point I'll post it to OpenProcessing.
The image above was generated from the photo in this recent post. Unlike most paint-like image processes, JokerPaint's imaging is continuous and real-time -- never static. It's constantly revising and touching-up and I just picked a frame at random for this still picture.
There is little that can lead you to treasure good photography than to look at a lot of bad photography, interspersed with an occasional gem. Which is exactly what I was doing a few weeks ago on (where else?) flickr, where I was editing group pools.
When I started the New Black and White group, back in flickr's early pre-yahoo fog, there were no editing or moderation tools, it was slow and painstaking to remove each and every pic I felt didn't belong. And at first that was fine, as there were very few pics submitted. Two or three a day. I stopped messing with it, left it fallow -- came back to find a thousand pictures.
Edited those down to a few dozen, watched it fill up quickly again. Eventually the flood was far more than I could manage as anything less than a full-time job, so I ignored it for months until there were more than 55,000 photos in the pool, most of them "flickr noise" of the cute kitten variety.
Rather than even try to deal with all that, I started another group, Contemporary Black and White, and invited a few select members. I thought: at least I don't need to edit them (and I don't -- they've been contributing good stuff). But then I started wondering about the old one.....
...could I realistically edit-down the 50,000+ photos to a little kernel, throwing away 90% or more of them? Only one way to find out....
So I did. It took time, it took special tools, it took regular attacks. I worked in blocks of from 1000 to 3000 photos. As time passed, it was quick enough to see how many really endlessly-repeating tropes there were, each trotted out over and again and usually accompanied by plenty of enthusiastic flickr badges and boosting comments (especially if the photo involved a pretty girl).
As soon as I started deleting, of course, the hate emails started coming in. What was interesting, if not surprising, was that some of the worst "offenders" -- by that I mean people whose "NB&W" photos were dull, often not even black and white, and massively spam-posted all over flickr -- were the most strident of the protesters. A handful of them diffidently pulled their photos (by the hundreds) from the pool. Thank you for saving me so much time! I thought, but also couldn't help but believe that they genuinely thought they were doling-out a punishment, as if I would somehow be harmed by no longer being able to view (and congratulate) their hundreds of bare-tree-on-the-plains snaps ("Don't bother replying back as I'm blocking you." too).
Photography, especially as practiced socially on the internet, is as vulnerable as any craft to the curious backwards-expectation principle: that is, for any skill, the very best people are constantly self-critical and pushing, always knowing that they could do better -- while the weakest practitioners are quite securely smug in their belief that they've got everything licked, under control, no need to reflect or review except to roll in adulations.
In internet-style photography, this is reinforced to a staggering degree, if only because so much of photography, as generally practiced, is about flattery -- just like most online social networks.
In the aforementioned 1951 article, Berenice Abbott places the blame for photography's emphasis on flattery on the proto-pictorialist photographer Henry Peach Robinson, the creator of the famous Victorian melodrama photo "Fading Away," and most especially on his book Pictorial Photography (A sample: "It is an old canon of art, that every scene worth painting must have something of the sublime, the beautiful, or the picturesque. By its nature, photography can make no pretensions to represent the first, but beauty can be represented by its means and picturesqueness has never had so perfect an interpreter."). Personally I don't think he can quite be credited for human vanity, but the gun's still a little smoky.
It doesn't really matter where it came from, but the belief is rampant that "good" photography equals "flattering" (this was exactly the criterion given to me a recent local photo class, a class which also extolled the works of Yousef Karsh as expressing the highest of all photographic virtues). It's a flattery that aims both ways: if your pic is flattering, then it is "good" which flatters the photographer.
The cycle starts there: the photos are flattering, and deserving therefore of flattery, and flattery leads to flattery leads to flickr badges and group invitations and should a tiny shred of actual daylight get into the party the guests will be in a ruinous uproar over its harsh direct brightness.
Not that the angry messages bothered me after the first thousand photos. I stopped informing, just went at it deleting. Didn't look at the names, didn't look at anything but the pics. And saw the same two dozen shots over, and over, and over...
I started to catalog them for a while: "...cute cats, adorable soft-toned children, footprints in the sand at the beach, misty time exposures of water, streets and railroads stretching off into the distance, casual snapshots, rusting cars, ruined castles, silhouetted trees, tele shots of resting seabirds, trees and unidentifiable silhouetted figures in fog, photos of backs of heads, (abandoned) factories, tourist destinations, parked bicycles, wide-angle upshots of skyscrapers, cathedral ceilings and windows, photos of camera collections, geometric airport ceilings, exterior stairways, wistful old statues, people looking bored while drinking coffee, interesting architectural details in closeup, sunlit spiderwebs..." it was actually a relief to leave in at least a few flattering model shots, if only because they weren't another empty craggy landscape.
For the sake of completeness (no, just to be random) I kept some in place, throwing away the OTHER photos just to keep runs of clichéd ones: say, thirty black trees on white (URL approximate), or twenty men with hats, or 30 shots of animals -- in order. Moderators can't rearrange the photos, I could only do this by eliminating the pix between how many runs of shots were just the same, same, same.
What none of the protesters did is what would have redeemed them. Despite repeated patient invitations in the face of their ad hominem vitriol, not one of them was willing to say why their photo deserved consideration, why it was special or worth anyone's time to view. Not one.
I can't help but feel the person who has benefited most from the exercise, though the obvious result is a much better pool of photos, is me -- seeing in a deep way, night after night for weeks, just how many "gorgeous!!" photos are really not worth a second glance and how many of them are in the same narrow predictable range that have been little-changed since the 1860's. Now the real challenge: remembering to avoid them myself while still making photos. At least photos I'd bother putting on the web.
Caveat eyeball.
Okay, I suck. Not a single post since my return from China. Of course, I have tons of excuses, including the fact that I was back in the office for less than one hour before hustling off to the airport for yet another business trip; or that GDC came in the middle of this period; or that I was sick in bed for weeks; or that it's beta time and much software needs writing; or that I keep catching myself putting my web energy into (giant sucking sound....) Facebook; or that a large slice of the remaining time has been happily spent on family and wonderfulness. All true.
I've been listening to session recordings from the recent Singularity Summit. One of the speakers, Peter Norvig from Google (just a few blocks from the Mountain View coffee shop where I'm now typing this) addressed the speculative concern that Google's vast array of computer systems might spontaneously combust into some sort of consciousness, a la movies like The Forbin Project or Ghost in the Shell.
To my surprise, they have already spent some billable time on this, thinking about what to monitor: unexplained and unattributed traffic between nodes, across disks, and so forth. In fact they seem to be ready to shut it down at any time. Which implies that to Google, which is itself an entity that's already behaving according to its own logic as a rational economic being: intelligence, in a computer, is an error condition.
I have been picking, one by one, through the many many MANY unread blog posts that have been steadily accruing in my bloglines feeds. The numbers have been intimidating. Alec Soth, 65 posts. Ed Kashi, 28 posts. Joerg Colberg, 158 posts.... even a long backlog of What the Duck. And that's just the "Shoot Me" folder. It goes on and on. I haven't even dared to get started on the flickr feeds.
These things creep up on me because I want to read in detail and my circumstances so rarely give me time and focus for anything more than a glance. And then the lists grow and keep growing while I'm trying to make time for it.
The experience pricks at a notion I've been having about just how much really, really great imagery there is in the world today. There are ways of coping, like trusting in editorial vision, at least hoping that it will be grand. You can try to be your own editor, which was the point of the Bloglines feeds. But I worry that perhaps even the greatest work just really becomes a blur -- that even at the highest levels there gets to be so much great imagery that the human capacity for distinguishing great from greater is overwhelmed & the only thing left to distinguish anything is the depth and volume of its promotional machinery.
It's been likewise apparent to me that at many of the sites with the busiest posters, there are also many busy commenters, who often seem to be in a bum's-rush against one another to comment often and early. It leaves me curious about the dynamic of the whole enterprise, and the huge impatience of it seems so antithetical to the charters of photography and art-making in general. I have to wonder, for sites like, oh, Conscientious or Mrs Deane (or non-art sites like Corante), just how steep is the dropoff in readership over the first few hours? If today's post gets a hundred hits today, how many does yesterday's post get today? Two? And what about the post from the day before?
A lot of the posts Ive been reading tonight, from the last couple of months, are cross-links and opinions and reprints of obituaries of John Szarkowski. By coincidence, this morning while visiting my office I found a shrink-wrapped copy of his book The Photographer's Eye, a copy I had purchased months ago from Amazon and that had gotten buried under paperwork on my desk. The book hammers home to me the largely-unchanging and well-determined nature of photography itself, and makes me wonder what all the hurry is about. In his introduction, Szarkowski digs out a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables on making Daguerreotype portraits: "We give [heaven's broad and simple sunshine] credit only for depicting the merest surface, but it actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even if he could detect it... the remarkable point is that the original wears, to the world's eye... an exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart, sunny good humour, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen patient attempts on my part. Here we have a man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and withal, cold as ice."
Compare a century later: "Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe... Our whole guise is like giving a sign to the world to think of us in a certain way, but there's a point between what you want people to know about you and what you can't help people knowing about you. And that has to do with what I've always called the gap between intention and effect." -- Dianne Arbus
I will be returning to San Diego on Monday, to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, Legoland, to re-visit the Callahan exhibit in Balboa Park and to have some fun with the family. Drop a line if you're around...
...as if on cue, I received a letter from Schmap saying that they are planning to use one of my photographs in their (allegedly non-commercial but obviously ad-revenue-driven) travel guides.
Not particularly surprising to me, the photo was not marked with a Creative Commons tag, but rather as "© All Rights Reserved." Maybe they don't realize that I habitually send CDs of thumbnails to the Copyright Office to actually register my pix?
Ooops.
As a followup to the earlier post on skepticism about "Creative Commons," it's been sadly amusing to watch the recent flaps declaring flickr (a) as censors but (b) not censorious enough. What seems common to both situations is a failure of common sense, a failure rendered raw with typically abrasive flourish by EPUK's "Sqweegee" in his article on the Schmap smokeup:
Flickr is a mashup of hobbyists who merely want to share snaps of kittens and sunsets and rather a lot of more serious photographers who covertly dream of dumping the day job and becoming pros someday. For now, all are content to share for free, but the expectation is that enough exposure and recognition should eventually lead to fees, fame and stardom if you are good enough.
This is of course romantic rubbish : there really are no clear demarcation lines between pros and amateurs anymore except an insistence on being paid that is being rendered untenable by oversupply. "Pro" means "makes a living." Every aspirant pro who gives away their work "for exposure" undercuts their own future by demonstrating to clients that they need not pay for work they consider good enough to use. So they never will.
Now we all know: that Creative Commons licenses are not meant to cause harm, or so their proponents remind us. They are meant as a shining pathway to an ideal Republic of pure creativity and form based on freedom and love where everyone with a laptop and a wifi connect can be their very own personalized Philosopher King. And get rich.
No, the concept can't be flawed, it makes perfect sense to create copyrights where there's no control over the copying rights. Instead, there must be some conspiracy, some very bad people who have been using it without having their hearts pre-aligned according to our approved rules. So no, let's not look at the fundamentally pig-dumb notions of Creative Commons: let's make a right turn and find a new set of different problems that won't make us look bad.
Is the potential for corruption in government and enterprise a deep one, and one that causes plenty of real problems for people every day? Yes. And it's one that I too care deeply about. But... what? This will get fixed by the wiki/CC crowd? It's their very ignorance (or deliberate glossing-over) of the ability of people to be guided by their own self-interest (particularly in this case, the self-interest of people who realize that it's cheaper to steal images and ideas than it is to create them) that has made Creative Commons such a social disaster. And now the same people claim that they're out to somehow fix the general problem of corruption?
Just give them ten years before requiring any further statements. Yeah, that's the idea. Should land all the CC culprits right into tenured retirement without having to have any further pesky demands for a "pre-baked" "revolution."
As the Schmap folks wrote in response to outrage at their broad appropriation of images and further use of them as a means for advertising Schmap's products right back at and through the hoodwinked flickrites: "We'll do our best to stay the right side of the line throughout all this."
Which line is that? I suspect the bottom one.
How to handle portrait-format images in an ongoing weblog? is the question that's been dogging me since switching PhotoRant to its current, 807-pixels-across form (why 807 pixels? I genuinely don't remember).
As Michael pointed out in a recent 2point8 post, there's an appeal to the idea of giving all photos "equal time" — that is, giving them all equal area on-screen (in his case, 375,000 pixels), distributed according to whatever aspect ratio they have.
The troubles are in the tall ones. The 16x9 pictures I make regularly are 897x454 when put into this format . If I turn it those same pixels on their sides, the 807 pixels is just, well, too tall. It doesn't fit most web browsers, and scrolls off the top. Ungh. Making a photo 512 high (as this one is) fits most browsers, but leaves the picture only 40% as big as the horizontal version. And the horizontal one is minimized enough as it is (then again, the version here is still a tiny big bigger than a flicker standard or "medium" picture).
I've come pretty well to the conclusion that there is no good answer. I could reduce the size of the webpage header, but I can't control how many extra bars of lins and navigation tools are in each user's browser. I hate the idea of pictures appearing so tall that you can't see them all at once.
The relentless landscape format of web presentation is one of those attributes that have probably had more influence than we realize, and will continue to do so. Compare it to books, whose pages are usually portrait format but that can be any aspect at all. Is it any surprise that the default formats for internet-based book printers like iPhoto and Lulu are landscape-format books?
I've been reluctant to engage in the five things meme — mostly because when I thought about answering it, my mind would transform into clear gelatin, leaving me unable to think of a doggoned thing. And my usual excitement about web memes is surpassed only by the suggestion of a stirring round of the Minister's Cat. Still, Todd finally got me going.
I've noticed that most people answer at least some of the questions with anecdotes about their irresponsibly wastrel childhoods. This game is, of course, all about scandal! I guess time gives obscurity (and these days, for those who blog every last dumb thing, what else is there that people don't know already?). I'll toss out one old and four current. I'll leave out the part about how I used to introduce myself at L.A. parties as "Sven Skarnasdag."
As for the nominating end-game:
will all keep any curious reader busy, even if they've been tagged before.
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Tarot Therapy
I have been shovelling the spam. Not so much here, but over at PhotoPermit.Org.
The spam comes in multiple flavors. The most common are spurious forum posts; unrelated trackback pings to old, obscure posts from the main news feed; and the creation of fake user accounts, sometimes with and sometimes without a 'home page' link to some often non-existant URL selling levitra and auto insurance ringtones teen grandma+sex of come sort or another.
Some of it — like the 1300 pings that I deleted this morning, including about fifty that had been added to a single year-old news item over the course of twenty minutes — are surely placed there by robots. The robots appear to be increasingly sophisticated, able to recognize and bypass shifting command tag titles, php file names, and handily confirming passwords.
I've been regularly hacking-in counter-measures, adding non-standard features to my local WordPress and phpbb in attemps to thwart the 'bots. And have come to the conclusion that it's not just bots, but also live humans who are adding a great deal of the spam.
For even the poorest wage slave in some remote (but wired) corner of the world, how can this be profitable? Who do they expect will come to farm-up the information contained in the user profile of "Y67chick" and follow it to buy videos and warez? Even if in the hopes of having some Google spider raise a page ranking, what's the point of attempting to raise the ranking of a page that's not even there? And for every successful attempt to register a new false user and use that account to post a list of discount office supply links, how many more attempts fail?
Though the web is large, and the margins narrow: even then, how can anyone expect all this effort to be profitable?
It was when I was deleting pings that it came to me. Deleting them in careful steps, 15 at a time, in a stready ritual and repetitive motion of scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... scroll-down/click 'invert selection'/click 'delete selected'/click 'Okay'... as my head swayed rhythmically over the keyboard and my hand twitched predictably at the mouse I felt at one with the universe of data and the voice of the One True Spam sang clear in my heart. I realized in that moment that spam is not a business proposition.
Spam is a form of prayer, and needs no sensible rationale. Spamming the world is an act of faith, and the realities of the spamming, its effectiveness, its purpose are unneeded details.
We beseech you:
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