Photo contest entry flowchart – Janna Dotschkal

If you’ve been following along with our deadline calendar, you know it’s photo contest season. This photo contest flowchart (above) is worth a revisit when you’re taking a break from getting all your files prepped for submission. Good luck!

(flow chart credited to Janna Dotschkal)

Another video in the vein of Shit ___ Say…, Shtuff People Say to Photographers is the natural companion to Shit Photographers Say. This video was produced by the Outward Bound Collective. It’s geared a bit more toward wedding and portrait photographers, but if you’ve ever taken pictures in a public place, I’m sure you’ve heard half of these.

Devastating satire.

Journalism Warning Labels - Tom Scott

I love these. Tom Scott has been surreptitiously placing homemade warning labels on newspapers where he sees problematic reporting. It’s a great reminder that everything printed in newspapers and magazines should be read with a skeptical mind. The stickers are available in a ready-to-print A4-sized pdf for Europe and a letter-sized pdf for the US.

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.

“Reopening of the South Fork Bridge after flood in Nov. 1940. 1941 (?)”

This has been around for a couple of days, but I just saw it today. While poking around the photo galleries at a Canadian museum’s website, somebody noticed a man whose clothing and camera look conspicuously out of place for a scene from the 1940s. A time traveler! Look at his shirt, which looks like a modern logo stamped on a t-shirt; look at his jacket, which looks like a hoodie; look at his camera, which doesn’t look like a big bulky press camera (nevermind the Brownie or early Leicas); look at how everyone else is dressed so differently; look at the glasses, which look like our current styles! Likely not a time traveler, of course. The sweater seems to be pretty standard (see the guy on the right here), the glasses are protective gear, the camera could easily be any of the compact cameras available at the time, etc. If nothing else, it’s a great exercise in historical forensic analysis of photographs (PDF).

Everyone’s a photographer now:

Angry People in Local Newspapers - Comic Relief Pupils Sent Home

ProbablyBadNews.com

I spent a year working for medium-sized community newspapers in the midwestern US. Maybe that’s why I like Angry People in Local Newspapers, Glum Councilors, and Probably Bad News (part of the Cheezburger empire), and Media Relations’ Funny Headlines, so much. Angry People in Local Newspapers especially hits home with me, because it was such a common assignment. Maybe the city wasn’t properly clearing snow, or maybe a nearby business put up some garish new signs; somehow, I was supposed to come out of the assignment with a publishable picture communicating local dissatisfaction with something difficult to photograph (or impossible to photograph, in the case of complaints about noise). Ironically, this Angry Citizen of the Week sort of story is one of the great powers of the local newspaper. Once a problem is made known in such a public way, the problem usually gets solved pretty quickly.

(via Metafilter here and here)

Google’s Android phone operating system hopes to become an open-source alternative to the likes of the iPhone and the Blackberry. Android’s rise in popularity hasn’t come without a few hitches. First, early phones ran all text input to the phone’s computer as a superuser. Writing “reboot” alone in a text message, for instance, would reboot the phone. Writing “rm -r” would completely erase everything on the phone.

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….

After a recent entry in the neverending debate on the death of journalism and how to save newspapers, Metafilter user fightorflight took a page from an old antispam email forward (which in turn might well be based off of sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein’s solution to fan mail) and developed this standard response letter. A shortened version:

Check as many as apply:

Your [idea] advocates a

	( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

	( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working 
	    journalist
	( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council 
	    meeting to do it
	( ) Users of the web will not put up with it
	( ) Print readers will not put up with it
	( ) Good journalists will not put up with it

[...]

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

	( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
	( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
	( ) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too 
	    small to do real reporting
	( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to 
	    account by two guys with a blog
	( ) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for 
	    small sites

[...]

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

	( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none 
	    have ever been shown practical
	( ) Society depends on journalists producing news that few 
	    readers are actually all that interested in, quite 
	    honestly
	( ) Having a free online "printing press" doesn't turn you 
	    into a journalist any more than your laser printer did
	( ) Citizen journalists are almost as good as citizen dentists
	( ) You are Jeff Jarvis

[...]

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

	( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
	( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person 
	    for suggesting it.
	( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and 
	    burn your house down!

- posted by fightorflight on Metafilter

Read on »