“I’m a photographer. I’m also a web geek. And those two sides of my brain sometimes fight with each other.
As a photographer, I’m outraged when people grab photos off the web and use them without consideration of copyright. I’ve been fighting this “It’s on the internet, so it must be free!” ignorance for more than a decade.
As a web geek, I love the freedom of the web. I love that I can share my work with the whole world, for free. This is the great gift of the internet.
So what to do?”
“These days, we love our digital cameras. They give us the freedom to explore photography as never before. We get instant feedback on our photographic experiments and find out what works and what doesn’t; we can easily manipulate the results and correct our blunders; and to ensure we don’t miss a shot, we shoot all the pictures our memory cards will hold. When we are done, we pack our hard drives with gigabytes of images and flood the web with our work.
But this ease of use and surfeit of images comes with a price. In the analog era, when we had to pay to see what we shot, we were more careful when we took photographs. This forced a discipline that is hard to imagine today. In the words of Stephen Shore, “[Today] there seems to be a greater freedom and lack of restraint…as one considers one’s pictures less, one produces fewer truly considered pictures.”
This is where our 36 Exposures Challenge — brought to you by FILE and our friends at Coudal Partners and Flak Photo — comes in. In it, we are asking you to use a film camera to explore Shore’s concept of “conscious intentionality.” Broadly speaking, we are challenging you to do two things: articulate a concept, project, or theme and then use a film camera to photograph the images to accompany it. There are, then, two parts: creating the idea and then acting on it. Sound interesting? Well, there is a catch (or two), and if you are interested, here are the rules…”
“A while back we had a roundabout discussion about the term illustration and its limitations. Bob Flynn and Jaleen Grove both pushed back a little against my impatience with the term, and the supposed tyranny of the word which I decried… Frustrated by the lack of a larger narrative in which to locate genres, careers, and achievements, I have been working on visualizations of the development of commerical images. This week I have blundered into print with one such attempt: Commercial Images: An Evolutionary Scheme, a two-page infographic that occupies a central spread in the new Modern Graphic History Library catalogue, out this week. It posits two basic strands in commercial image history: illustration and cartooning, increasingly intermingled but distinct.”
“Use a Nikon?
Or at least that appears to be the message.
I opened my copy of Outside Magazine’s companion piece of fluff, Go, this morning and was greeted by an ad for Sony’s A700 DSLR with the tagline ‘In Photography, Timing is Everything.’ The accompanying photograph was spectacular and showed a leopard about to dispatch a baboon. Dust is flying and, clearly, timing has a lot to do with the impact of this photo.
It was also very familiar.
In fact, it’s a 1965 photograph taken by John Dominis for the late, lamented Life Magazine.”
Hey folks: I’m a judge in Crestock’s annual contest this year. You can win some nice Mac stuff — check it out.
Compete for free in the biggest Photoshop contest of the year to win amazing prizes for four whole weeks ranging from iPods and MacBooks to the designers’ Holy Grail – The Quad Core Mac Pro with dual 30″ LCDs!
Here’s how it works: There are four rounds with different themes, and you can contribute one image for each round. Sign-up and submission is completely free and without commitment.
For each round we will supply a set of source photos from our image library. Your entry must be based on one or several of these photos, but you are free to do with them whatever you like. You may also use other elements in your design, as long as one or more of the source images can be recognised as a central part of your design.
“I’m a Photography Director based in New York City. While I don’t care if you know who I am or what magazine I work for, I would like to remain anonymous so I can keep my job and blog.”
“Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. The images / book covers contained in our database may be accessed via a number of categories including by Photographer, Author, Publisher, Publication Date and Designer.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)
“An experiment to exploit the single frames that make up an animated film and explore the emotions of the creative process. Created with 987 Polaroids and no computer compositing. By Jordan C Greenhalgh.”
“…if you are working on an engraving, you will probably find there are a lot of grey areas where the lines were close together. Assuming you used at least 1200dpi for the scan, and preferably 1600 or 2400, there should be at least four or five pixels between the lines, which should be at least two or three pixels wide…”
“Maybe someone can explain this to me. On the one hand, there are frequent complaints in the fine-art photo community about the (perceived) poor quality of the photography over at Flickr. On the other hand, ‘vernacular photography’ (the kind of stuff that people would have put up on Flickr — had it existed fifty years ago) is becoming ever more popular. I must be missing something.”
Check out this video we made for Kronos to help celebrate International Women's Day, 2011. Learn more in this xBlog post or jump over to YouTube and watch it there.
XPLANE | Dachis Group developed a A vibrant, engaging poster showing how Microsoft Azure enables developers to run applications and store data on Microsoft servers. The poster recently took top honors in the American Business Awards.
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