May 19, 2009
Last night Mrs. Obama was in NYC for the ballet and for the reopening of the MET’s American wing which I have missed rather sorely in my time of unemployment. She paid the usual lipservice to the arts using a phrase we’ve all heard 1000 times before, that arts “define who we are as a people.”
In past articles in the Times there have been signals that the NEA is being taken more seriously as an organization by being moved out of the first lady’s office into the west wing. Not to demean past first ladies which include the current Secretary of State and Eleanor Roosevelt but especially with the last administration being confined to that section of the white house does paint the arts as a bit of classy frivolity. If nothing else I personally feel a little better knowing that the current administration’s chief of staff has a background in dance. There is some hope that the new director of the NEA, Rocco Landesman can breathe some revelence into the agency but I don’t suggest holding your breath.
In some ways I almost hope for a Piss Christ or Self Portrait With Bullwhip scale meltdown over the NEA. If nothing else people were talking about public funding for culture and what that should entail. Its easy to say that art defines us and is one of the few things our brief time on this earth will leave to history. What’s not easy is to ask someone to pay for something that will never pay for itself. At least not while the people who make it draw breath.
Its hard enough to justify basic scientific research which doesn’t have an immediate economic or practical application. Even if you’re reading this on the entity that came out of one of the more far fetched ideas DARPA sponsored.
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May 14, 2009
I have a nice tripod. Its not a really nice tripod but its nice enough. For $100 at Adorama its the kind of nice my budget approves of. This is aimed at an audience that either can’t afford a carbon fiber tripod with ball head or can but haven’t been able to justify spending more on their tripod than they may have spent on their camera.
As a backdrop, I’d like to discuss the following photo:
Boating, Central Park
Using the qualities of this photograph I hope to explain why you must carefully choose your equipment when shopping on the lower end of the price scale for equipment. I am the owner of two tripods, one useful and one which has proven itself absolutely useless. Read the rest of this entry »
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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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