“In this period there was no electricity. It was before electricity was invented and consequently there was less light. Period movies should have less light. In a period movie the light should come from the windows because that is how people lived.” -Nestor Almendros, on filming Days of Heaven by natural light, as quoted on Wikipedia.

Rachel Hulin has a great post showcasing the cinematography in Days of Heaven. If you haven’t seen the film, you must. Terence Malick and Nestor Almendros, director and cinematographer, wanted to achieve a more natural look to the film, to approximate a look accurate with the period of the movie’s setting.

Hulin’s post reminded me of the technology behind Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon.” Kubrick, a photographer before he made movies, wanted to film scenes in the movie by candlelight. Existing motion picture lenses weren’t fast enough, so he worked with camera technicians and suppliers to develop a 36.5mm f/0.7 lens. The lenses, originally developed for NASA, were retrofitted to work with movie cameras, and allowed the director to film many scenes in “Barry Lyndon” by unaided candlelight, such as in the scene above.

This also reminded how strange movie trailers can be, especially old ones, since they rely on a cultural currency that is recognizable but so far removed from what we are used to; Barry Lyndon’s is weird, and A Clockwork Orange’s is brilliant (not safe for work or people suffering from epilepsy).

The collection of photos at flickr provides invaluable statistical data about a host of cultural behaviors and norms. Previously, we wrote about using flickr’s geotagging as a measure of cultural buzz. Now, a new project called Locals and Tourists by Eric Fischer analyzes the differences between where (and, presumably, what) locals and tourists take photos in cities around the world. There’s New York and London, Amsterdam and Paris, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and many more. Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more). Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

(via kottke)

NYT scan via Geekosystem

A dirty Unix joke made it into a photo in the May 11 New York Times story about a group of programmers working to compete against facebook with an eye toward privacy and openness. Let this be a reminder to photographers to always check their backgrounds. Admittedly, this is hard to notice for the untrained eye.

The seemingly ordinary Unix operating system commands down the left side of the photo: “TOUCH GREP UNZIP MOUNT FSCK FSCK FSCK UMOUNT.” Each is a command that will work on most Unix operating systems, including OSX, but most users have no familiarity with them; taken in this order and without operators and files to make the commands valid, the sequence vaguely resembles the order of a sexual encounter. The photo is still visible on the website accompanying the article, albeit with the joke cropped out.

“I cringe when I realize the price I must pay and I falter at the doorsteps of magazine editors, stutter during discussions of ‘hot’ and ‘popular’ stories that I think will sell, remain silent about the personally exciting ones that I know will be met with derision, trip over purchasing technical toys that can transport me into the world of the modern digital photographer. People see me as old-fashioned, somehow out of touch and intentionally difficult. But they are wrong. I crave not the trappings of modern possessions, but the possession of modern thoughts and ideas. The latter I can’t reveal on the slide show option of the iPad.” -Asim Rafiqui in “Condemned To Obscurity Or A Personal Perspective On The iPad“

Asim Rafiqui has a nice perspective on the hubbub surrounding the media’s adoption of the iPad platform.

Maybe you’ve already seen this, but it was new to me today. The reviewer takes a look at how Time (likely the issue featuring Daryl Peveto’s Tea Party coverage), GQ, and Popular Science, are using the iPad to showcase their content. Looks beautiful to my eyes, but I can only imagine that creating both pretty horizontal and vertical versions of content will increase design time and money. Even in the poorly shot video above, though, the photos look beautiful. Will it save the world? Journalism? Photography? The jury is still out. Photoshelter has corralled a few opinions about what the device means for photography, the New York Times has a wide-ranging set of opinion pieces, and there are many other reviews available.

Futurephotography.com - Large Light Field Camera Array

We’re a ways off from hand-held cameras that can do it, but the future of photography will involve pictures in which the depth-of-field and focus and camera position each can be adjusted reliably and with quality in post-production. It’s a complex mathematical and computational problem, but the power is within reach.

So you want to influence the future of photography? Well, you gotta build a camera, ’cause this future isn’t for sale, yet.” -FuturePicture.com

Futurepicture.com - Demonstration of modifiable depth of field achieved by DIY light field array

Two enterprising photography enthusiasts have taken a page from MIT’s and Columbia’s and Stanford’s computational photography research labs, and have built their own light field camera arrays, and they’re posting instructions on how to build your own, including a method for achieving the effect with just one camera. Check out much more information and some of the science behind the project at FuturePicture.com.

(via MetaFilter Projects)

I lost everything during that blaze. My Apple Mac Pro desktop and laptop computers, external hard drive, Canon printer, Lacie DVD duplicator and all my camera and studio equipment. Everything. Gone in a blink of an eye. Almost $50,000.00 in gear. Luckily I have insurance and the equipment is replaceable, but the lost images are not – especially the years of family photos I had stored on my computer.” -Kort Duce

Ideally, you’ll have two sets of backups or more in addition to your harddrive archive. One backup should be easily accessible where you are should you suffer working harddrive failure and the other should be at your parents’ house or your friend’s house, in case of fire, flood, and other freak of nature. In Duce’s account, he mentions RAID as a possible backup solution, in addition to other strategies. That’s advice I hear a lot in photo communites, and I’d advise against using RAID as a backup. RAID is not a backup. A RAID array is useful for maintaining uptime when a harddrive fails. However, RAID will also duplicate any bad data you put in. If you accidentally delete a file or directory, the RAID array will go ahead and delete that file or directory on each of the discs in the RAID array.

Remember these 3 things: Always backup. Backup in multiple locations. RAID is not a backup.

(update 12/28: Kort Duce wrote in to clarify some details in this post. He does not advocate RAID as a backup and he did not lose “everything” in the fire. Duce maintains separate backups in his home office.)

OpenGoo

Pictures are the easy part. A great deal of success as a freelancer is figuring out how to efficiently run one’s business. It’s a constant struggle keeping track of clients and leads and deadlines and tasks and invoices and estimates and late payments. A number of fee-based websites can do this, and Google has Calendars and Docs and Wave.

I’ve just found out about OpenGoo, and it seems like an extremely useful tool, especially for photo collectives, independent one-off festivals and exhibitions, and other endeavors lacking considerable financial backing. It installs on a webserver using the same technology as an average blog, supports multiple users, and handles calendars, tasks, contacts, and documents, among other features. It’s still actively being developed, but it’s already a pretty robust office management system. Definitely worth a test-drive.

None of this solves the problem of invoicing. A simple wordprocessor only works for so long. Blinkbid’s great, but tough to use if you need to access invoices on the road and it’s on another computer. I like SideJobTrack, which unfortunately no longer allows new signups. Here’s a decent survey of online invoicing systems. Invoice Journal is one free online invoice system, and a few open-source installable invoicing systems exist, as well: MyClientBase, Simple Invoices, and Bamboo Invoice all seem promising.

Now, Engadget reports that users of Android users recently began complaining about not being able to focus the phone’s camera. Then one day, suddenly, everyone was able to focus again. Turns out it’s a date-related software glitch. Every 24.5 days, the phones will switch between being able to focus and not being able to focus. An Android developer confirmed the bug and suggests a patch will be available before Dec. 11, the next date when all of the cameraphones will stop focusing again.

I miss the days when I turned part of my lens to adjust the focus….

Jaron Lanier - Cockroach DNA time capsule

One of my favorite things to think about is the difficulty of communicating with humans generations from now, or even tens of thousands of years from now. An example: The Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management overseeing Yucca Mountain, the proposed Nevada site for disposal of nuclear waste, has been working with artists to develop a warning system that would alert future visitors to the area of the dangers buried in the mountain. From the website, “The monumental challenge is to address how warnings can be coherently conveyed for thousands of years into the future when human society and languages could change radically.” The purpose of the warning sign is “to deter intentional or inadvertent human intrusion or interference at the site and to effectively communicate over the course of the next 10,000 years that the integrity of the site must not be compromised in any way in order to prevent the release of the radiation contained within.” It’s an interesting visual challenge that must not rely on our own cultural biases. Here’s one artist’s response to the challenge, though perhaps it’s too reliant on the 20th century “Radioactive Danger” symbol.

In 1999, the New York Times Magazine ran a six-issue Millenium special, one part of which was an invitation to artists, scientist, and other thinkers, to develop a way of communicating with the future. Jaron Lanier, researcher and scientist, proposed genetically engineering a DNA-coded archive of a year’s worth of the New York Times Magazine and inserting it into the common cockroach’s genome (and the New York Times’ discussion of the idea). Owing to the millions-of-years-long stability of the cockroach genome and the species tenacious ability to survive ice ages, floods, and other earth-altering natural disasters, the cockroach proves to be a perfect candidate. With careful gene splicing techniques, coded DNA could be inserted into unused areas of the cockroach genome, providing a carrier for what could be, if the encoded information expanded beyond the scope of the New York Times Magazine, a living, breathing, self-replicating, everywhere Library of Alexandria (the burning of which illustrates the importance of millenia-long preservation of our academic and cultural knowledge). Under Lanier’s proposal, cockroach reproduction would spread the DNA-coded archive into the every cockroach in New York City in just 14 years. Future humans or other visiting species would hopefully decode this time capsule upon study of the species and human knowledge will have survived across the millenia, regardless of extinction or other disasters.

Weird and ingenious.

(via Metafilter)