W. Eugene Smith, famed street/documentary photographer gave a rare interview in 1956. Excerpt here. More of Smith’s work here at Magnum. From the perspective of an historian, they may be none better than Smith for his ability to capture a narrative in film format.
Street Photography
I’ve never been one for the practice of street photography until lately. I read somewhere that street photography is the art of being in the right time, and the right place, with a camera. I laughed when I ran across this article with an almost identical title. Some excellent examples of right time, right place here.
Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier has a new book out, Who Owns The Future arguing, among other things, that the internet killed the middle class. Salon has a great interview here.
Lanier is a deep thinker about the role of information technology, capital intensive labour, and the fate of democracy. Seeing integrated communications technology as a key driver in the alignment of social forces, Lanier’s thoughts normally make the tours through global history by connecting seemingly disparate forces such as the Facebook and increasing wealth inequality. His main argument throughout his work has been that society gives up much to satisfy efficiency.
This time, Hitchcock!
I have decided to jump into another filmography, this time with Director Alfred Hitchcock! Hitchcock was a rather prolific director so the list is long. I will start with him films from 1925-1934. The list is as follows:
1925 The Pleasure Gardens
1927 Downhill
1927 The Lodger
1927 The Ring
1928 Champagne
1928 Easy Virtue
1928 The Farmer’s Wife
1929 Blackmail
1929 The Manxman
1929 Juno and the Paycock
1930 Murder
1931 Rich and Strange – East of Shanghai
1931 The Skin Game
1932 Number Seventeen
1933 Waltzes From Vienna
1934 The Man Who Knew Too Much
Phew! This will take me a while!
A few more flowers….
More macro with my 60mm. I think that I am getting a better handle on using this lens but the focus issue remains. I think next time I will take multiple shots (I can get a burst of 6 RAW shots before the buffer clogs) and then use Photoshop to stack the images and then blend the focal points together. I will put together (or link to) a good tutorial soon.
For now, enjoy!
.dot location
Outside of Hong Kong, Singapore, the Vatican and other city states, the internet dot extension for everyone else is either .com or .country code (not to mention .edu or .org etc.).
This story is quite interesting though. ICANN, the people who regulate these sorts of things, gave authorization to allow .bzh and .paris for those in either Breton or Paris, respectively. While more extensions do lead to more confusion (and problems for marketers abound!), there is some sense to using more micro level geographic extensions. Expect a .nyc and .london soon!
Success with Zucchini cake!
So while there are no clean dishes left in my apartment, dinner with my friend RP was awesome! Here are some crappy drunken iPhone pictures that I took, I wanted to document the entire evening but it was too much work! I’m not sure if the steak or the fennel or the dessert was my favorite but I do know that a good time was had by all!
So this is the appetizers, note the goat cheese that was amazing!
And here is the cake preparation with the final results!
And this is where I got the recipe from: link
Lazy Sunday
The power was off since I returned from laundry this morning with a scheduled replacement of hydro poles down my street. I took this as an opportunity to go out with my camera, again. The weather is really nice here; however, the sun was quite harsh. And with all the pavement, it was hot. Dare I say too hot?
Moving right along.
Here are some images from the walk through the neighbourhood with my Olympus 60mm. I love the macro capability of this lens. It has truly given me a new perspective on the world around me. The 1:1 is really exciting, seeing the individual parts of the flowers is amazing! I’m still a novice with macro though. I have stopped down to f8.0 and even with the bright sunlight, the challenge is the wind and general camera steadiness! Probably better with a tripod and shutter release but I’m pleased with my handheld results thus far. I’ll keep working on it! Enjoy these as much as I did taking them!
Finally, it looks like summer.
So today and the next week look great, weather-wise! So this morning I decided to take my camera with me to work with my Olympus 60mm. Spring means flowers! So here are a quick few from today. I found the macro work to be challenging! The very sharp plane of focus meant that it was difficult with the wind. I stopped down to 5.6, alas, it was still tricky trying to find focus! I found the macro focus knob on the lens easier to adjust for 1:1 than I thought it would be, once I located it with my finger I could concentrate on the viewfinder and trying to deal with the wicked wind. All in all, a great lunch hour!
This photo is a close-up from a model close to Confederation Park, the second is a tiny Nepali buddha statue that my colleague gave me. Then it’s just flowers. 🙂
Finally, a website that sucks more than mine
CERN, the high energy particle physics folks,have re-upped the first original webpage ever on the intertube here. The first line reads: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”
Stay tuned! I think this internet, sorry, this wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative, is going to catch on.