Blinky's Camera?

From China (Where else?). I want one, but in theory, I can't use it because I only have two eyes and would be incapable of viewing anything in three dimensions. Via Neatorama.

Landscapes

From today's New York Times, I got a look at the otherworldly landscapes of photographer Sze Tsung Leong, a Chinese American.


Of note in his works is that in each photograph the horizon line falls at the same point, allowing his photos to be lined up end-to-end, and viewed as a constant panorama, despite the fact that each photograph is of a far-off destination. Some examples of locations include Germany, Egypt, and Inner Mongolia (Chinese). Many of his photos are slightly overexposed, giving a ghostly feel to some thriving metropolitan areas, but by taking such wide photographs and maintaining the ratio of earth to sky, Sze Tsung Leong has compiled a body of work that will be fascinating to any and all interested in travel and/or photography. I look forward to applying the horizon line technique to some of my photographs. You can check out the article and the interactive presentation at the New York Times' Website.

Flickr in Seoul

There's a fantastic photography group in Seoul called, appropriately, Flickr in Seoul. We meet every two weeks on Sunday and take photographs at locations around Seoul. If anyone is interested, you can join the group (which is free, of course) or just check out our collective photos online at Flickr.com. Also, feel free to click through to see my pictures by clicking the one below or on the slide show in the upper-right-hand corner.

Awesome

Catherine Chalmers is my hero. She raises animals and feeds them to each other while photographing the entire process. This is a concept with many facets ranging from intriguing to gross to natural to contrived, and any of her photos can bring out any of these things at any time, sometimes all at once. These pictures are intended to bring about consideration of the food chain, and it works. She also has a series of photographs starring American cockroaches and houseflies, among other creatures.

You can check out her photographs at her CatherineChalmers.com. You can listen to a great interview with Catherine on This American Life from 2005, which you can listen to for free here.

Rachel Papo Photography

Rachel Papo, an fellow Ohioan and Israeli, has created a fascinating photo documentary of life for Israeli girls in the military. The photos document a stark contrast between femininity, adolescence, and militarism. I don't really know that much about being in the military-and I don't want to-but these pictures are eye-opening and yet sad. I can't imagine being ripped away from home during the most free years of my life and forced to run around in the desert with a gun preparing for the inevitable conflict resulting from a centuries-old fight for land. (Oh, and the women are beautiful in a heavily armed way.)

Link: Rachel Papo: Serial No. 3817131

Archiving Digital Photography

My day began as it often does, with reading the New York Times. The Times had an excellent article on the lost-and-now-found negatives of Robert Capa. Their long journey from Spain to Mexico and now to New York for archiving led me to consider the future of digital photography and how the images of today will be preserved for the future.

With film, distribution and reproduction could be accomplished without the negatives, though until digital retouching, the quality and perhaps the intricacies of the image would erode, leaving an image diminished and false.

With digital photography, however, a series of 1s and 0s can be reproduced forever with no loss of quality. 1s and 0s do not degrade, do not become brittled and yellowed with passing time. Posting one's photographs to the Internet, either to Flickr or a blog, in some ways archives the images for all eternity. The rights of ownership may transfer, perhaps leading to future
precedent- setting court battles concerning publishing rights and residuals, but the photos will not be lost. It will be interesting, and somewhat disheartening, to see different inheriting factions fighting over advertising revenues from blogs and the rights to post and remove photos from Flickr and other media. But from any Website, we can copy files, strings of 1s and 0s that represent artistic vision, and keep them for ourselves. The rights may have been pulled and the photos dropped onto a portable hard drive and stuck in a safe deposit box by their legal guardian, but the images will still exist and will be available should they ever be needed again.

The rise of digital photography has resulted in a surge of amateur photographers. Perhaps, however, this popularity has lead to a dilution of the power of a single photograph or photographer. Today's world-class photographers must exceed the levels of what has been done before in order to capture our increasingly valuable attention. Is photography obsolete in the era of Photoshop and YouTube? I doubt it, but I think the nature of its importance is changing; in some ways becoming more obscure, but in others bringing it to the forefront of our awareness of the world and global interactions.

Our online presences are forever, for right now, and only time will tell how our stories and our images will be presented henceforth.