Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Wow, she looks a lot older than 14
14 years, 9 months old in this photo.
Her aunt, Dawn, was in my class in elementary school and intermediate school in Staten Island.
Racist American Museum of Natural History, part 2
The Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda is the first thing you see if you walk up the big steps through the main entrance (past the security guard checking your bag who was never there before 2001).
This big room is like a huge love-fest for the racist white-supremacist Teddy Roosevelt. The only way to cleanse it is to take down all of the Teddy Roosevelt quotations and murals, and rename it the Barrack Obama Rotunda.
* * *
The white-supremacists would be much better off carrying around pictures of Teddy Roosevelt than Adolf Hitler. Teddy is still loved, by many, as a great American president. Although I suppose that would quickly change if white supremacists adopted him as their mascot. But still better to have a former U.S. president as a mascot than a totalitarian ruler of Germany who started World War II and killed millions of Jews.
Williamsburg flea market
There was a request for photos. Here’s one.
In 2009 I was looking at condos in this neighborhood. Big mistake not following through on that. I would have had substantial price appreciation, and had a nicer place to live for the previous six years.
iPhone 6 camera review
Photos lack fine detail because of heavy noise reduction. Very poor dynamic range causes the sky to be white. If you put the camera into HDR mode, this helps the sky problem quite a bit, but then I see a lot of weird artifacts in the HDR photo. And the photo I took this afternoon has lots of purple fringing and a weird color balance.
I’m not impressed. Definitely not a replacement for my Olympus E-P5.
In fact, I think the iPhone 5 has better image quality. The iPhone 6 is a step backwards.
A camera especially for women
You have to love the 1950s-style advertising at the Olympus UK site.
“A shopping tour in Paris or Milan is my favourite treat. I just love it. I’m addicted to elegant clothes, gold and high quality accessories as they show off my feminine side. That is just what I had in mind when I bought my PEN E-PL7. It suits my chic style. The camera’s slim silhouette, white glossy body and lovely hand grip complete my elegant look. It becomes the centre of attraction whenever I wear it”
“When I go out, my look has to be perfect – in an elegant style all my own. The PEN E-PL7 is made of premium metal enhanced with a leather-look finish that underlines my personal sophistication. The camera fits perfectly in my handbag even with all my other treasured accessories, thanks to its slim design. Every detail – the attractive grip, the placement of the dials – keeps me looking fabulous.”
“I never know who I might meet while shopping or enjoying the best seat in a café so I make sure I’m always prepared with my PEN E-PL7. It lets me take great selfies and is a cinch to use – take the LCD, which folds down and makes sure my hands don’t get in the way of the shot. A whole host of other bits and pieces mean my pictures come out crisp and beautiful.”
I love how Olympus stereotypes women as primarily interested in being the “centre of attraction,” “looking fabulous,” “shopping,” and having the “best seat in a café.” And being disinterested in any technical features of the camera such as its high-ISO ability or the ability to assign custom modes to the mode dial.
I predict that Olympus will get a lot of flak for this promotion and will take down the web page pretty soon. The politically correct way to market to women is to not be so obvious that you are marketing to them.
Photo of Hylan Boulevard
There was recently a request to show some photos of seldom-seen prole areas of New York City. This is a view of Hylan Boulevard, a major north-south thoroughfare on Staten Island. Normally there’s a lot more traffic.
NPR says that photography is racist
According to NPR, photography is racist.
When Syreeta McFadden was a child, she dreaded taking pictures after a family photo made her skin appear dulled and darkened.
“In some pictures, I am a mud brown, in others I’m a blue black. Some of the pictures were taken within moments of one another,” she , digging into an “inherited bias” in photography against dark skin.
No wonder why blacks do so poorly on the SAT. The racism of Kodak and other big corporations must have lowered their self-esteem and prevent them from correctly answering math and reading questions.
A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.
Some of you are wondering whether or not this matters? The author of the article says it does:
I think it matters because we’re talking about a saturation of images of darker skinned people that somehow we’ve accepted in our popular culture that kind of diminishes our humanity, and we’re in an era where we’re seeing a wider representation of black and brown life, particularly in American life.
How to get paid $15,000 to self-actualize
There’s an article in Forbes about how some broke hipster-type from Brooklyn made a $15,000 one-day haul when he pleaded on Instagram for followers to buy 4 x 6” prints of his photos for $150 each.
And the hipster-photographer in question does only street photography. That’s something I sort of gave up on because I got a lot of flak about how the genre is akin to voyeurism and violates the rights of the unknowingly photographed (although, theoretically, it doesn’t violate anyone’s legal rights). And I didn’t think there could be any profit in it.
Of course $15,000 isn’t a large amount of money. Not in New York where a decent apartment costs more than a million dollars. But to someone who makes minimum wage toiling away at a crappy job like cooking food at McDonalds are cleaning toilets, getting a whole year’s worth of 40-hour-per-week salary for just selling a few photos probably seems like a really great deal.
Even more importantly, this story demonstrates that even the minor fame of having 20,000 online followers can translate into real money and probably a middle-class income if that guy can repeat his sales haul about three times a year. 20,000 is a relatively small number of people considering that there are 7 billion people living in the world, meaning that only one person in 350,000 follows his Instagram feed. Although his number of followers have doubled since the Forbes article was written, which demonstrates how fame generates its own publicity which in turn generates more fame.
Monitors: 16:9 is the new 4:3
Remember when all computer monitors had a 4:3 aspect ratio? I was always an early adopter when it came to computer monitors. I bought a 1280 x 1024 LCD monitor in 2001, and a 1600 x 1200 monitor in 2006.
But today, you can’t even find a 1600 x 1200 monitor anymore. The most common monitor resolution today is 1920 x 1080, exactly identical to the resolution of 1080p televisions. The 16:10 aspect ratio is also disappearing fast. There used to be a lot of 1920 x 1200 monitors, but now they too have become uncommon and are a lot more expensive than 1920 x 1080 monitors for only a little extra horizontal space. It doesn’t make sense to buy 1920 x 1200, because for only a little more you can buy 2560 x 1440 which are now selling for less than $600 for name brands like Samsung and Dell. But if you want to step up from 2560 x 1440 to 2560 x 1600 you’re looking at spending twice as much money, which doesn’t seem worth it for only a few more pixels.
When 4K monitors become affordable and supported by most video cards (perhaps another year), I strongly suspect that the aspect ratio situation will be the same. 3840 x 2160 will be the affordable resolution, and if you want to step up to a 16:10 aspect ratio of 3840 x 2400, it will be significantly more expensive for only a few extra pixels.
Nearly all windows laptops, including laptops from Dell and Asus, have 16:9 screens. Only Apple is the holdout here, providing you with a much more practical 16:10 screen in their MacBooks. (Practical, that is, for doing computer stuff. 16:9 is more practical for watching Netflix on your laptop).
No doubt, the aspect ratio for computer monitors is being influenced by the aspect ratio for televisions. When televisions were 4:3, so were computer monitors. But when all televisions became 16:9, computer monitors started falling in line behind that.
I agree with the masses that 16:9 is a better ratio for watching video. But does it make sense as a computer monitor? More than a year ago I bought a 16:9 2560 x 1440 monitor, and I am still freaked out by how wide the thing is. A lot of stuff just looks awkward at 16:9 on a 27” monitor. Most websites look bad if you maximize the web browser. Even Microsoft Word can be awkward if you’re not used to seeing two pages side-by-side. (On the other hand, this size monitor is great for Excel spreadsheets.)
Another problem I have with the monitor, but one that has nothing to do with the aspect ratio, is backlight bleed, or in other words, the bottom corners, especially the bottom right corner, has noticeable ghosting when there is something dark on the screen and the room is dimly lit (which is how my room usually is after dark). This is not noticeable when surfing the web or editing Word documents, but it’s annoying as hell when watching a movie in full screen. This seems to be a pretty common complaint about LED edgelit monitors, which have become the norm. The LEDs have to be aligned perfectly otherwise you get backlight bleed. The older monitors that used fluorescent lighting may have been thicker, heavier, and used more electricity, but they never had this problem. Here is a case in which newer technology is inferior to the older technology. At least that’s my opinion.
16:9 and Photography
Traditionally, people thought that the best way to view photos were to make prints from them. This was true even for several years after cameras went digital. But today, the best way to view photos is on an LCD screen. You’d have to make an impractically large print to equal the quality of viewing a photo on my 2560 x 1440 monitor (except for the damn backlight bleeding in the corners). Today nearly every house has a big-screen 16:9 television, and in the not-too-distant future (maybe only three or four years), those 1080p televisions will become 4K television. Viewing a photo on a big 4K screen will blow away viewing a print, and that will be the end of photographic prints.
It seems to in order to be ready for the future, one should shoot photos so that they will look good on 4K monitors. This means framing your composition for 16:9 and using cameras that have enough resolution so that they will truly rock when viewed on a 4K screen. You will need a sharp lens at a high megapixel count. I think that my 16MP Micro-Four-Thirds cameras are barely competent to rock 4K.
