I’m taking issue with photo instructor “Guru’s” who insist that not looking at your images on the LCD screen is the proper shooting technique. They pejoratively call the action of tilting your camera forward to see the image you just shot “Chimping”. I argue that not looking at your images is “Chumping”. You are a Chump if you don’t take advantage the the modern miracle that is instant feedback in the digital age.
I just got back from a trip to Connecticut where I made a pilgrimage to the Mark Twain house. It was a semi religious experience for me to see the desk that Twain sat at to write three of his most famous novels.
Today I have come to read that being a fan of literature makes me an elitist in Tim O’Reilly’s eyes.
But I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.
Much of contemporary entertainment can find its roots in novels. O’Reilly’s glib dismissal of the genre is extraordinarily vacuous. Sort of what you’d expect from a narrow minded elitist who hasn’t read a whole lot in his life.
Beware ye photographer that hath not forked over your life savings for overpriced iterative updates of Photoshop, you’re about to get the fist from Adobe. And if thou hath decided to heed this ominous financial warning from the great Adobe in San Jose, your odyssey to find your upgrade price will be long and tortuous as you navigate the useless, turgid pages of the Adobe web site. … Continue Reading
Digital Photography Review launched a site named Connect which is all about mobile photography technology.
With billions of images being shared by millions of smart phone photographers around the globe, the world of photography is experiencing an explosion of creativity and engagement that hasn’t been seen since the first consumer digital cameras arrived almost two decades ago. This time it’s different though. It’s about the power of the snapshot to tell a story, to build a community, to record the mundane as well as the remarkable. It’s about people who don’t even think of themselves as photographers never stepping out of the door without a camera. It’s about photography’s power to connect. And that’s why we’re here.
Looks like all the nay sayers of Dan Chung using his iPhone at the Olympics were wrong. You don’t need a $7000.00 camera to be a “real” photographer.
Michael Britt thinks that the DP Review site had to spin off the mobile reviews into its own separate entity lest they alienate their hard core, big gear loving fan base. I’d say he was right about that.
Evan Luzi from The Black & Blue, guesting at Fresh DV:
For cinematographers and directors, skills that enable you to light, to compose, and to translate the ethos of a story into the visual medium of film are far more useful than the ability to dive into the minutiae of sensor size. For producers, your ability to go beyond specs and learn more about the tone of the project, the budget of a project, and the practicality of a camera in the reality of a production is paramount.
I couldn’t agree more.
But Luzi forgets one extraordinarily important by-product of Spec Obsessive Disorder (SOD).
An Ex-TSA agent is telling his story after he spent 3 years in prison for stealing $800,000 worth of goods from passengers. What slays me is that he speaks of the thievery as if it’s part of the job description. The criminal TSA agents are using the X-Ray scanners as a tool to locate what gear to steal.
Pythias Brown, a former Transportation Security Administration officer at Newark Liberty International Airport, spent four years stealing everything he could from luggage and security checkpoints, including clothing, laptops, cameras, Nintendo Wiis, video games and cash.
Speaking publicly for the first time after being released after three years in prison, Brown told ABC News that he used the X-ray scanners to locate the most valuable items to snatch.
I feel bad for the good TSA agents for whom this is just a job. They are going to be in the shadow of this ugly cloud. Which is why I urge you to keep your cool when you go to the airport. Not everyone in a TSA uniform is a criminal. Assuming such is not the answer.
