Hands on With the Sony NEX 6

I stood there looking at 10 pounds of camera gear, contemplating what I should take with me on a trail run that I’d never attempted in Joshua Tree National Park. I almost turned and started up the trail with nothing, but at the last second remembered the Sony NEX-6 that …

Girls Just Want to Have School A Review: “Girl Rising”

“Girl Rising” is less like a movie than an extended commercial for girls’ education around the globe. Through a hybrid style combining dramatization and documentary, girls act out stories adapted from their life by acclaimed writers from their country, while famous actresses like Meryl Streep and Selma Hayek serve as …

A Little Nudity Durring to Illustrate Lens Comparison

An epic comparison of the Canon Cinema Primes and the L Series. Like my friend Greg Watermann said when he sent this to me; why can’t all gear tests be this creative.

Why Don’t You Go to the Cinema? Reflections on Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

Diana Vreeland’s living room is red. Red sofa, red walls, red flowers. Red patterned wallpaper mimics the red flowered upholstery. Fondly, Diana refers to the room as a “garden in hell.” In a photo in the film, Diana, also wearing red, doesn’t just recline, but floats on the sofa evoking …

The Articles

How Reading Novels Makes You an Elitist

January 1, 2013 by Opinion, Publishing

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.

Reads Just Like Paper

January 1, 2013 by Publishing

Nicholas Carr with a great piece on the demise of the e-reader.

Displacing the e-reader is, of course, the multipurpose tablet. As e-reader sales have fallen, tablet sales have exploded. About 140 million tablets will be sold this year, and the number is projected to approach 200 million in 2013.

He’s absolutely right. Which means Apple has impeccable timing with the release of the iPad mini.

Using Dropbox for my iPhone Photos

December 30, 2012 by Photography

I just had one of those rare experiences with technology in which everything worked flawlessly. I’m still in a mild shock.

Two weeks ago upon opening the Dropbox App on my iPhone there was a message that told me how to use Dropbox for the photos on my phone. I don’t need this, I thought to myself, my photos are syncing to Apple’s iCloud.

I turned on the feature anyway. After using for two weeks, I can only say that it is nothing short of awesome.

… Continue Reading

Smart TV Internet Sucks

December 27, 2012 by News, Television

I never understood the allure of accessing the internet on your TV. Well, according to Mat Honan, neither does anyone else on the planet.

People aren’t using their internet-connected smart TVs for anything beyond, well, watching TV. It turns out, nobody wants to tweet from their TV. Or read books. Or do whatever it is people do on LinkedIn. Worse, more than 40 percent of the people who buy a connected TV aren’t even using it for its ostensible primary purpose: getting online video onto the biggest screen in your home. What gives?

Kathryn Bigelow: On Filmmaking

December 19, 2012 by News

As Zero Dark Thirty opens across the country, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time researching and talking about the director, Kathryn Bigelow. I tell friends she’s the first female director to win an Oscar ever, in eighty-two years of the Academy’s existence. “Ever, ever?” “Ever, ever.” But she’s also an intriguing character. Before she made her way to film, Bigelow was a painter. A recent New Yorker article describes her struggles in New York City before her fame.

… Continue Reading

The Abner Ravenwood Notebook Mystery Solved

December 19, 2012 by Off Topic Yet Fascinating

It’s kind of sweet how the whole Indiana Jones mystery ended up. The details are here at the the University of Chicago blog.

The Folks That Pay The Bills

The Screening Room

  • Sellebrity: A Fantastic Doc About the Paparazzi

    $ellebrity is a documentary about paparazzi culture and its origins. The movie was produced and directed Kevin Mazur who is himself a celebrity photographer.

  • More Mesmerizing Instagram Work: Instantáneas

    This video came to me with the following note:

    Hola les dejo este video que hice con imágenes de instagram que viendo el contenido de su página seguro les puede interesar para publicar.

    I stuck it into Google Translate but I think there’s probably a better translation out there. If …

  • F***IN Cruise Ship Tour

    This video is not to be f***in missed.

  • A Great Short: Eric Goes West

    Ryan Nelson is a designer who works for screenwriter John August. Ryan and his wife Amy produced a short that I just found on the John August blog that, according to August, played at Slamdance last year. It is the epitome of working with you’ve got available to you like …

  • My 2012 End-of-Year List of One

    Maybe you, like me, have a tendency to get stressed by all the top-ten lists that emerge at the end of the year. The lists are usually filled with books you must read, dishes you must try, restaurants you must visit, movies you must see. Rather than inciting enthusiasm for …

  • “Crash” My Victim

    Local San Francisco heavy metal band, My Victim just released a new music video. The visuals are saturated with dark hues as the subject matter cuts between out-of-focus shots of the band and its story line, which references the title of the song, “Crash.” We are quickly informed as to …

  • David Byrne & St. Vincent ‘Who’

    The director of the music video, Martin de Thurah, knows how to draw a viewer in. What I find immediately fascinating about his music video is how he chooses to match the visuals to the music. The video begins with a wide angle shot of a person biking down a …

  • Skyfall

    For as long as I can remember my older brother influenced my film education. He taught me which actors and directors to watch, which to avoid, how to appreciate a clean, simple shot. My brother also taught me to love Bond. Under his tutelage, I watched the films and like …

  • Invasión – A Music Video Made With Instagram

    Instagram’s taking over. It’s now commonplace to see every moment of our lives documented by its photographs, including one that made Time’s cover, but now Perez, Faust and team have put Instagram in motion. I know this is the first of many similar films.

  • Plurality Review

    Set in New York City in 2023, Plurality raises surveillance and privacy issues. We are offered a city without soul, overrun with data and information. In an effort to fight crime, authorities can track a citizen’s every move using the Grid, a city-wide system that links one’s social security number, …

  • Argo

    Argo is on my Oscar list for 2012.

    The Iran Hostage Crisis took place in during my freshman year of high school. I was just coming into a vague awareness of news events as I started crossing that bridge from snot nosed kid to snot nosed teenager. The whole affair …

  • Frankenanswers

    If you haven’t had a chance to see Frankenweenie yet, please do. It encompasses all the wonderful things, good writing, good directing, black and white, and stop motion. It’s fabulous.

    And if my praise isn’t enough, you can have an opportunity to peer into the mind of the writer.

  • Arbitrage

    Arbitrage is one of those astounding, just under the radar films that you should not miss. The acting by all the players is exceptional and the writing and directing are a knock out. I’ve always been a fan of Richard Gere’s acting, but he really brings it home in this …

  • Sleep Walk With Me

    If you’re wondering which movie is going to be the sleeper hit this year, run out and see Mike Birbiglia’s Sleep Walk With Me. It is one of the most original, funny, sweet movies I have ever seen.

    I predict that this is going to have a slow consistent rise …