ABOUT

Unbelievable CGI

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

|

Hybridization of Beauty, Thanks to Photoshop

Beauty Hybrids
|

Another Digital Manipulation Controversy

EM-originalEM2
Left, the “original”; right, the “altered” as it appeared in print.

Since my weekend NYT subscription is on hold, I missed this brouhaha at the Times Magazine over a series of digitally altered photographs. The photographer in question, Edgar Martins, presented his photos for a story called “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” as actual documentary, unretouched images to his editors. The story ran on July 5th, then the pixel peepers started deconstructing the images, pointing out perfect symmetries and cloned pipes and staircases that went to nowhere. The Times retracted the story, apologized to readers, and banished Martins from practicing journalism at its paper. On July 31st, since the controversy ignited a great debate in imaging circles, Martins was generously invited to defend himself on Lens, the Times’ photography blog. Not much of what he says elucidates anything about why he did what he did, nor does he seem to understand the contract with viewers of documentary photography. The problem stems from Martins being an artist rather than a journalist, however much he seems to lie that his photographs are an actual depiction of reality. He is clearly more interested in aesthetics and theory than in pure documentation, something which I tend to share. The Times photography manipulation policy is very general:

Images in our pages, in the paper or on the Web, that purport to depict reality must be genuine in every way. No people or objects may be added, rearranged, reversed, distorted or removed from a scene (except for the recognized practice of cropping to omit extraneous outer portions).


It does not take into account selective sharpening, blurring, color balancing, dodging and burning, high dynamic range photography, and the dozens of other techniques, aside from cloning and montaging, which photographers use to enhance their images everyday. I’m sure we will be revisiting this issue many more times as technology matures. Very soon digital still and movie cameras will be able to montage and manipulate on the fly, further blurring the definitions of reality and beauty.
|

Just in Time for the 4th!

uchiage-hanabi-sega-1
Worried about a summer thunderstorm? Hate the buggy grass? Then Sega has some innovation for you: indoor fireworks! Available in the U.S. at japan trend shop.
|

25,600 ISO Test

20090508_ISO25K6_Test-1820090508_ISO25K6_Test-06
The performance is pretty remarkable for 25,600 ISO on the D700. I’m going to experiment with shooting in broad daylight with high shutter speeds and lots of depth of field (f16 @ 1/8000th).
|

Park Slope Rabbi Slaughters Nazis in "Call of Duty"

Pasted Graphic
The Forward has a piece by a rabbi on the therapeutic benefit of playing the uber-violent videogame World at War: Call of Duty. He found the game a “safe place” to relive the horrors wrought by the Nazis because he could be victorious--after all, you get unlimited lives. Still, he concludes that the multiplayer game lacks complexity and reality, calling its realism “an aesthetic in the service of entertainment.” Makes me wonder how many cronies of Mengele are playing from the jungles of the Amazon. Hmm... This might make a good story...
|

Photoshop Grafitti

pshopad
High tech grafitti invades Berlin. In an effort to demystify the photoshopification of beauty, somebody has been applying large photoshop palette posters on top of ads in Berlin. More pix are here.
|

ISO 12,500 on the Highway

A few shots while driving home from DC at 65 mph after dark. The grain is strong, but the pictures have a kind of filmic, Ed Ruscha feel.
20081230_I295_HighISO_blurs-8120081230_I295_HighISO_blurs-5420081230_I295_HighISO_blurs-7420081230_I295_HighISO_blurs-23
|

Speaking of Books...

Virtual books, that is. This Japanese recycling and “ecology zoo” promotion website has some very cool 3D popup books which you can view at any angle. It’s something that would really scare W.
Eco Zoo
|

Sensor Noise

20081202_PS_ShoesFlare-5
Shooting into the sun with my D40, I can force a weird kind of sensor flare which exaggerates chromatic abberation and causes purple and green fringing. Looks kind of cool, perhaps analogous to a light leak in a film body.
|

Walk and Talk (Chelsea)

20081008_ Chelsea-2220081008_ Chelsea-2320081008_ Chelsea-3020081008_ Chelsea-1820081008_ Chelsea-31
|

Musicians and Royalties

How can an artist make a living in a digital world, especially a musician? With the RIAA like the Catholic Church, spending vast amounts of resources on litigation, and even hinting that they may have to decrease royalties to artists to cover their costs, musicians should be thinking about viable alternatives to the big media company model of trickledown economics. David Byrne has a thoughtful piece called Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists—and Megastars over at Wired. There's also an interesting sidebar conversation between DB and Radiohead's Thom Yorke on how RH is marketing In Rainbows, first as a pay what you wish download, then as a packaged CD in January.
|