April 26, 2009
I’ve noticed that the majority of users on flickr do not watermark their images.
They may add contact information into the exif data when they edit their images in photoshop but I’ve noticed that this usually does not carry over with an actual watermark on the image itself. As you’ve seen in my blog and on my flickr stream I typically add the grumpymonk.com URL at the bottom right corner of every photo. Some professional photographers add a much larger watermark across the bottom and in some cases across the middle of the image itself. This is especially true of anyone who works with women wearing a limited amount of clothing.
I’ve been posting my work online nearly as long as I’ve been taking photos. Its been a great way to learn, get feedback, show off, meet other photographers, and watch other people repost your pictures for a variety of reasons without your permission.
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April 21, 2009
Brooklyn Botanical Garden
Now we’ll turn out attention to how the Holga 120WPC performs in the field.
I took the Holga out into the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and Prospect Park, two areas which I’m very familiar with. I brought a couple of rolls of Fuji Acros 100 and a single roll of Fuji Astia 100F, a slide film which I have used a few times in the past. Its the start of cherry blossom season so I wanted to see how the pinhole would render color (and we’ll have to wait on the lab for the answer to that question I’m afraid).
For this review I’ll cover:
- How to compose with the Holga 120WPC
- Exposure and Considerations
- Problems
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April 20, 2009
I love panoramic photography but I’m unable to afford a “decent” camera. My previous review of the Horizon Perfekt covered a highly functional but still lomotastic 35mm panoramic camera. Despite its odd optical characteristics (due to the rotating lens) I’ve been generally very happy with the camera and am saving up for a film holder so I can scan my perfekt images using my Nikon 8000 (which has a segmented 35mm film holder).
I became aware of the Holga 120WPC camera through a Freestyle Photo flyer. I’ve never done any pinhole photography and for $50 it undercut the Zero Image line of beautiful pinhole cameras by at least $150 so the cost of entering the field seemed very reasonable. This review will cover the physical build of the holga and provide some background information on what’s needed to get up and running with pinhole photography. As this was my first run with pinholes I’ll walk you through the steps needed to turn out a successful roll of negatives for yourself.
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April 14, 2009
As a web developer I’ve been keenly following what has been termed #amazonfail using twitter parlance. After giving it some thought I feel its instructive to talk about what happened as it directly affects photographers who use digital media.
The core issue behind Amazon Fail is that a large number of items in the amazon.com catalog were removed from their product ranking system and partially obscured from their search engine. These products appeared to have all been tagged using amazon’s internal metadata as belonging to any number of queer categories. These works were marked in the system as “adult” which removed them from amazon’s ranking system (which tracks the popularity of any title) and partially obscures them from amazon’s search engine. Products associated with gay and lesbian catagories were being blacklisted by amazon’s own internal mechanisms. These books included Virgina Woolf’s Orlando (oddly enough not all editions) and a popular piece of non-fiction on gays serving in the military. The blacklisting was limited to marking queer content catagories as adult themed works such as Playboy collections or the biography of porn star Ron Jeremy were not removed from rankings as they lacked any gay or lesbian catagory tags.
(NB: I tend to use the term queer as an inclusive term as Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered/Intrasexual is a bit of a mouthful.)
Without getting into the back and forth speculation of how this situation came to be, especially as amazon.com has yet to release an official statement, let’s talk about metadata.
Without getting into a technical discussion metadata is like sticking a post-it on a piece of information so you have an idea of what it is. This post has a title. It has tags and a catagory associated with it. These pieces of metadata help describe what this specific piece of content is. Its extraordinarily difficult to parse meaning out of human language algorithmically so we have to rely on this additional information to inform any interested parties what it is I’m talking about. I have metadata associated with the blog in general as well. It helps search engines and other automated systems describe what I’m talking about here so that people can find this blog if it meets their needs.
Now let’s consider a photograph
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April 7, 2009
Anonymous Scientology Protest, 2007
Following up on my previous post questioning the tendency of press photographers to focus on violent protestors I’ll present my own work around protests I’ve photographed over the years. I don’t have the dedication that Fred Askew (his site is well worth spending some time paging through) has shown in covering protest in NYC but I have a small stack of negatives to draw images from.
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April 6, 2009
Speak out at Union Square, 2005
Saturday marked two events on Wall Street. One was the March On Wall Street and the other was World Pillow Fight Day. I’m somewhat sorry that after shooting the political event I didn’t stick around for the cultural one. It was a brutally windy day and my cheap $10 East German coat wasn’t up to the task of keeping the chill off.
One of the questions any photographer taking their gear out to a protest is how they’re going to depict what’s going down. There are a number of elements to consider. People will dress funny. There’s a ton of cops. Banners. Signs. Puppets. There might be arrests especially if the organizers have promised civil disobedience.
The vast majority of people will be very ordinary. They might have signs. They might be wearing a t-shirt with a logo on them. They’re not likely to get into fights with the police. They’re just there to be there and then they’re going home. These people are not going to give you an exciting photo. They’re not exciting. They’re not trying to fuck things up. They’re not going to clash with the police. No broken windows, fire, spray paint, or rude gestures.
Not very interesting. These are not people who will make a stunning addition to your portfolio. There’s nothing about them that wants to be on the front page of the paper. So they’re largely ignored by the press in favor of the, to steal a term from biker culture, 1 percenters. The 1 percent of the crowd that is out to do something that will look great on the front page of the paper. Something really stupid.
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March 31, 2009
OMFG, Crown Heights Brooklyn
I haven’t been updating this blog very much as I’ve been incredibly busy at work.
It surprising how much effort producing the death throes of a company requires. This is to say that my employer will be shutting its doors tomorrow afternoon and I will be joining millions of other Americans in solidarity on the public dole. Its been six and a half years since the last time I got laid off and circumstances have changed considerably. This time its a real estate bubble while my previous experience with unemployment was due to a tech bubble. Either way, the unbridled greed of the few was involved and a lot of innocent people got the shaft.
So yes, OMFG is in effect.
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March 26, 2009
A common trait among photographers is the tendency towards being a complete gear whore. I stole that term from a friend who does electronic music and uses it to describe people who tend to accumulate a bunch of expensive gizmos which they may or may not need with the excuse that they can do wonderful things with their new toys.
I think we’re all guilty of thinking that we could get a little something extra out of our photography with a new lens or the latest body. If we had the professional body we’d have faster autofocus and could shoot at a higher ISO so we would have caught that beautiful, perfect moment we saw in the viewfinder instead of looking at an out of focus motion blurred shot worthy of the delete function. To a certain extent its true, especially for digital. A better body will give you the option to shoot at higher ISO with acceptable levels of noise, faster autofocus, and better metering. It gives you more control but it won’t make you take a good picture.
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March 26, 2009
Doorbell, California
One of the things that photography allows you to do is discover details from events and objects that you stuck onto a negative or a harddrive somewhere and haven’t thought about for a while. Once you open up the negative onto a print or pop your file into photoshop you have a second chance to see a scene for the first time.
The doorbell belongs, or rather belonged to my grandfather. I took this picture shortly after his death last year as we were staying at his house for the funeral. Before everything was put into boxes I went through the house and took pictures of details that I remembered. Paintings. Lamps. Radios. The television. I should have taken a shot of the scotch bottles he always kept on top of the refrigerator.
After scanning this negative I got a closer look at the doorbell and noticed that there was a seal (you’ll have to click on the image to see it larger) which read in part, “live better electrically”.
I found this an especially apt sentiment for a chemical engineer who was born in 1915 and did see his profession change the world. When he was 18 and on his second year at UCLA the Tennessee Valley Authority was formed to economically develop a (still) impoverished area of the country.
My grandfather did believe this was the best of all possible worlds and had a great deal of faith in people. I’m not sure if he ever noticed the seal, who ever bothers to look at their own doorbell after all but I think he would have seen himself as part of that milieu which would have written things like that.
I come from a far more cynical time even as I continue to see technology cause radical economic and cultural change. Perhaps its my own jaded nature but I tend to see innovation driven largely by profit rather than any real desire to improve the world. Its difficult to assign any ethical motivation to a drug company that refuses to reduce the price of HIV medication for the third world until India threatens to reverse engineer their patented medications and release their own generic versions.
I was surprised that such a small and previously missed detail would have given me pause. I’m planning on going through the rest of my negatives and pulling out further objects. I don’t have any photos of my grandfather that I took myself. All I can do is show you fragments and talk about them. The fragments don’t speak for themselves but they speak to me and I hope I can tell you what they say to me.
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March 17, 2009
Street Art blog Wooster Collective posted some brief thoughts on galleries cutting prices on the work of the artists they represent.
There are a number of interesting responses on their facebook profile but what this brought to mind was those damn tulips that always get dragged out of the 17th century every time a commodity market gets hyper inflated. I know that everyone wants to talk about the Tulip Craze every time you see a market start to collapse but I think there isn’t any other readily available model for a commodity which is traded but lacks intrinsic value. You can’t eat art, build a shelter with it, or melt it down (unless you’re Damian Hirsh) to extra valuable materials from it. Its a very strange commodity which like “Brand Awareness” has a value but there’s “nothing” behind it except for a willingness of a culture to agree that it does have value. Brands cause things to happen but they don’t do anything on their own. Yet they enjoy strong legal protection in the form of trademarks because they do have that economic power.
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