Tag Archives: Photography

Outside My Front Door

This is the view straight outside the front door of my building. Soon I’ll be going a lot further than this – I’ll be visiting my brother, who is living in China now. I’ve always had a knack for language, but I’ll be in a place where I can’t read the signs, and can’t understand the chatter around me, and the thought is frightening.

I hate to be rushed – you know, like I am now, getting ready to leave – so I won’t be trying to cover great swaths of that enormous country, but I will try to truly see whatever I look at. And come back with some good pictures.

Mount

… to dismount.

How about That Weekly Shot?

Mr Bun is so tired of my lame excuses, but I have been taking pictures, I swear. I am suffering from two problems: not doing the processing and not doing the writing about what I learned. Also, not doing the planning for the next shot. OK, three problems.

I’ll be doing some traveling from the end of next week, and I’m a little frantic while I get ready. I’ll still do shots there, though – in fact, maybe particularly good ones (we’ll see), because I’ll be seeing my brother, and he’s much more creative than I am.

In the meantime, I’ll be the object of plenty of eye rolling and weary yawns from the little emperor.

Soulful Window

Catnip Saturday

Redecorating

Hi

Weekly Shot #2: Cop Out

This week was a bit of a cop out, but I wanted to show some discipline and produce something anyway. So I baked some cookies and took pictures of those. I was not very organized when I went ingredients shopping, though, so the icing is white instead of yellow. Sorry.

I did try to do something more elaborate, and in fact I spent a couple of hours trying to set up a self-portrait. The results were terrible. I’m a terrible subject, for one thing, and I didn’t really have a pose thought through. I tried to get my cat involved, and he was having absolutely none of it. And I don’t have a wide-enough angle lens to get any really fun shots of him leaping out of the frame.

I had been meaning to do some baking, and I figured that taking pictures of food I’d made would qualify for a deliberately posed shot in which I’d given some thought to props. I’m glad I did this, because it reminded me of some simple things that I forget in observational photography but that are key when trying to control the contents of the frame.

One is the way light bounces, picking up color on the way. Compare the overall color of the ducks on the plate to that of the plate full of stars. The temperature is actually higher on the duck photo, but it still looks cooler just because of the blue background with the very different density of warm-colored cookies. This is something I “know” but didn’t think about until I looked at the EXIF data on these shots. It’s something I’d rather incorporate deliberately than fret over when color-correcting. Another is that it makes a huge difference if you wait a half hour or 45 minutes between shots when you are using natural light. Again, this is something I know and would rather use actively than “remember” when I’m selecting shots I’ve just pulled of a CF card.

Also, if I’m serious about doing some nice, clean shots for this project, I really have to get an iron.

Remix Culture

The very basis of creativity is the recombination of existing elements into something new. No, it’s deeper than that – it’s the basis of a nuanced communication, the most exceptional and essential distinguishing human trait. Recombination and adaptation trace ideas through time and can offer a cutaway view of the mind. They delight and instruct.

I wouldn’t normally consider any of this controversial or even necessarily interesting to discuss. It seems obvious, especially if you study history or literature. It’s very difficult to comprehend these fields without context, and literature in particular is enriched immeasurably by a web of allusions, references, and borrowings. Even originality is praised for its new perspective, rather than its utterly novel content. And particularly where narrative is concerned, there are no new stories, only new combinations of circumstances and personalities and approaches. Life is remix culture.

Today we’re grappling with a new threat to this essential aspect of human interaction: corporate exploitation of intellectual property. Because consumerist, corporate culture is so interested in generating revenue, and because revenue opportunities are optimized where traffic is controlled, we now live in a matrix of labels of what belongs to whom and how it may be transferred, copied, or licensed. This can work well in a particular environment – as when statutes provided a method for publishers to obtain rights to make copies of written works in at a time when printing was expensive and uncommon, or in the case of the US Patent Office, which grants inventors a term of exclusive commercial opportunity in exchange for prompt publication of their inventions.

Intellectual-property claims can also be used as a cudgel, as when corporations acquire patents for the purpose of bringing legal action against other entities that they claim infringe on those patents. Or when corporations use technological means of control to limit fair use (under cover of protection of property) of copies of content sold into the marketplace. These strategies carry the risk of if not outright limiting creativity, at least skewing it toward the best capitalized entities in the culture, something we might understand here today as Disneyfication.

This issue populates thousands of articles, books, blogs, court cases, legal letters, and conversations around the world. If you don’t know much about it, you might be interested if you like being able to listen to the music you buy on any playing device you own. Or like lively teaching that uses clever and memorable examples from works in the culture to help students more rapidly understand their subjects. Or just enjoy art.

Ads of the World

I love advertising. I work in the advertising industry, and one of my favorite parts of what we do is concepting for new campaigns. That’s when the big gorgeous work – that will inevitably be cut down to size by our clients – comes out with abandon. Still, we’re in a highly specialized segment, and in a pretty nichey part of it at that, so most of what we do won’t mean very much to normal people, which is good in a way, because the really fun stuff can’t be shared around anyway.

Partly because of this, and partly because my love of advertising goes all the way back to my childhood, I watch consumer advertising somewhat closely. Luckily for me, some of the shops making the best ads also have pretty good websites, so if I find a shop whose work I really like, I have somewhere to go for high-quality examples of it. I don’t watch a lot of network television or read a lot of high-circulation magazines, though, so I’ve really come to rely on the Internet – especially blogs and services like YouTube – to aggregate ads for me.

My current favorite is Ads of the World, which aggregates ads in most media from markets all over the world. A friend says he thinks some shops just maintain an office in places like Djakarta solely so they can get hilarious ads clients won’t buy out into the world, and if that’s true, those ads will probably end up here. But the above ad isn’t in that category – it’s just a wonderful, eye-catching sell offering a solution to a real problem. (No idea whether it’s a good solution; my own skin is so sensitive to wool I’d never consider trying it.)