Month: January 2009

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U.S. Rep Pete King Wants Your Cell Phone Camera to Go “Beep”

U.S. Rep Pete King Wants Your Camera Phone to Go "Beep"

U.S. New York Representative Pete King (Republican, Long Island) introduced a new bill in Congress this month H.R.414: “To require mobile phones containing digital cameras to make a sound when a photograph is taken. ” The short title of the bill is simply, “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act.”

From the bill:

” (a) Requirement- Beginning 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, any mobile phone containing a digital camera that is manufactured for sale in the United States shall sound a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone. A mobile phone manufactured after such date shall not be equipped with a means of disabling or silencing such tone or sound.

(b) Enforcement by Consumer Product Safety Commission- The requirement in subsection (a) shall be treated as a consumer product safety standard promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission under section 7 of the Consumer Product Safety Act (15 U.S.C. 2056). A violation of subsection (a) shall be enforced by the Commission under section 19 of such Act (15 U.S.C. 2068).”

Now I’m a father of four young children, and nobody wants to protect their children from predators more than I do, but this is just plain stupid.

First off there are many times that you don’t want your camera to make audible noises. Let’s say your shooting your own kid in the school play. Having a bunch of disruptive beeps going off every time someone takes a photo is annoying. There are many times when you want to shoot something being less disruptive not being more disruptive. There are certainly plenty of times and places where it is perfectly appropriate to try and be as quiet as you can while shooting.

Secondly, this bill only applies to cell phones. So if some predator wants to try to sneak photos of kids in the locker room all they would have to do is use a regular old point and shoot camera which this bill doesn’t apply to. In fact, spy type cameras have been around for years and if someone really wants to try to take stealthy photos, they certainly can without the need to use their cell phone camera. The law also does nothing to address video.

Then of course there is the part of the bill that this would only apply to new phones. So let’s see, a predator then could, theoretically, still use any old cell phone that they want to take silent phones while millions of law abiding users have to put up with noisy beeps going off whenever they shoot.

I have no idea what the cost of implementing this technology would be, but I’m sure AT&T would figure out some way to make the “enhancement” a reoccurable fee every month on your cell phone bill.

It seems to me like this bill is yet another example of really bad ideas coming from government. It would seem that this is not the first boneheaded idea that Rep. King has come up with by the way. Another of his winner ideas was responsible for funneling $3 million in taxpayer money to a campaign donor for custom manhole covers that Con Ed said could be dangerous in — order to fight those pesky terrorists. At least that’s the way the Daily News reported it. I thought Republicans were supposed to be for less government not for more.

ArsTechnica has more on this new bill here. Thanks, Geoff!

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Los Angeles’ Museum of Neon Art

Curves

Museum of Neon Art (MONA)
136 W. 4th Street
Los Angeles, CA
213-489-9918

Last month while I was down in Los Angeles I had an opportunity to stop by the Museum of Neon Art, or the MONA as those familiar with the museum call it. Those of you who follow my photography know that my Neon Days and Neon Nights set is one of my most worked on collection of images. I’ve got almost 2,000 photographs of neon in my collection so far and so I was very excited to be able to visit this interesting museum devoted to neon signs in Los Angeles.

The MONA is easy to miss. It’s on 4th Street in Downtown L.A in a fairly nondescript space with three big letters in it’s storefront window, A-R-T. But if like me you admire neon, you will definitely want to stop by and check it out.

The museum was founded in 1991 and the space it’s in now is its temporary space from what I understand. I don’t think that a permanent space has been identified for the museum but I think that they are working on finding one. The current space that houses the MONA is a little on the small side for a museum, but they make up for their smaller size by having some of the most amazing vintage neon signs I’ve ever seen. Included in their collection are a giant Jantzen neon diver, a great vintage Pep Boys sign, a Van de Kamp’s bakery sign, a Fun Land side with moving neon, and lots of other great vintage signs.

Big Big LoveChaos of My Neon Heart, Plate 3Neon IndianLanz

In addition to the museum’s vintage neon signs, most of which were restored and in perfect working order, there were a number of other interesting group exhibits by contemporary artists focusing on neon. In the lobby of the museum they also had several fantastic neon photographs by photographer Rob Carter. They also had some great historical neon photographs, including a photograph of the first neon sign in the United States, a Packard sign that people used to drive from miles around to come see and visit.

I spent a half an hour or so talking to the guy who was working the door at the museum and he gave me a lot of great background on the museum. Apparently, in addition to the museum itself they also have a giant warehouse with even more signs downtown somewhere that is not open to the public. Apparently the warehouse doesn’t have electricity so you have to visit it with flashlights. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to check out that place as well.

My favorite thing about the museum? It was such a relaxing place to take photographs of their signs. It’s refreshing to me that the museum is so open with it’s photo policy and had no problem with me spending a few hours shooting their collection. I pretty much had the entire place to myself and had all the room I needed to work and photograph the amazing collection. I was able to get down on the floor to shoot and really had the run of the place. My only warning from the guy working there was to watch out for the suitcase that moves around on the floor, it’s an exhibit and sometimes people forget that it’s there.

In addition to the neon museum itself, the MONA also runs a number of different double decker bus neon tours. I didn’t get a chance to go on any of those but I’ve heard from other people who have that they are great.

It seems like every other day another neon sign is coming down. I worry that, especially with the bad economy, more and more places are going to go out of business and that we are likely to lose more and more historic signs going forward. Having a museum devoted to salvaging these signs and restoring them is a great thing. Hats off to the people behind this museum for doing the important work that they do.

Admission to the MONA is $7. There is metered street parking, but bring lots of coins because the parking meters downtown are pretty expensive (fortunately I found a broken meter when I visited). The museum is open Thursday-Saturday noon-7PM; Sunday noon-5PM.

I put together a set of about 15 images from the museum that you can view here. I’ve got lots more images of the museum that I still need to upload that I’ll be adding in the days ahead.

Update: Interestingly enough there is an article today over at the Environmental Capital blog at the Wall Street Journal that talks about the recent decision by ConnocoPhillips to try and save some of the Union 76 service station balls that have been coming down. It looks like the MONA has in fact recieved on of these iconic balls from ConnocoPhillips. Thanks, Russell!

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Adobe Releases Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 Release Candidates

adobe-lightroomYesterday Adobe released the latest version of Lightroom, Lightroom 2.3, as well as Camera Raw 5.3.

From Adobe:

“The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all customers. The Lightroom and Camera Raw teams would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a wide variety of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

Both release candidates provide additional raw file support for the Nikon D3X and Olympus E-30 cameras. In addition, the Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate provides a solution to a memory leak that affected some customers of the Lightroom 2.2 release.

Adobe is also pleased to announce the availability of Lightroom in eight new languages, including Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Korean, Chinese (simplified) and Chinese (traditional). The Lightroom 2.3 Release Candidate available on Adobe Labs includes these additional languages, and Adobe greatly appreciates any feedback the community can provide the Lightroom team.”

You can download both Lightroom 2.3 and Camera Raw 5.3 from Adobe Labs here.

You can submit feedback on the new version of Lightroom here.

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Aaron Brazell on How Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection Was Moved to WordPress

DSC00504.JPGAaron Brazell is the WordPress king as far as I’m concerned.

After three years of thinking about moving from the Blogger Platform to WordPress I finally took the plunge last week. I’d always wanted to make the switch but it just seemed too technically difficult for me to do myself. I’d heard about a bug that wouldn’t allow blogs with lots of comments (I had over 20,000) to transfer all of the comments over from Blogger to WordPress.

It turns out that there was in fact a 5,000 comment limit, but a huge thanks to Rick Klau, the Blogger Product Manager, who worked with us to change that (not just for me, but for everyone going forward) so that I could move my blog over to WordPress. Usually helping a customer move to a competitor is not high on anyone’s development list, but I’m really pleased that Blogger helped us with this and I think it goes a long way to show a very positive front from Google with regards to data portability.

Aaron has a more detailed post out today about how he moved my blog from Blogger to WordPress here including more of the technical details involved.

What I will say is that I was *tremendously* pleased with the job that Aaron did in the migration of my blog. He is an amazing professional and made the entire transfer seamless and easy for me. And I’d really encourage anyone who is thinking about doing any work with the WordPress platform to consider hiring him to do the work for you. In hindsight, moving the blog over is something that I never could have done on my own. I would have spent many hours on the project and been extremely frustrated. If you are on another blogging platform and are thinking of making a change or need any sort of WordPress work done, Aaron is definitely the guy to do it.

Since I transferred my blog to WordPress last week it has lit a fire under me with a greater desire than ever to blog. I think I’ve blogged more posts in the past week than any week since I’ve been blogging. I can’t say enough good things about the WordPress platform. I love the way my new layout looks and feels and I feel like I have so much better control over my blog now and so many great tools from the WordPress Community to use. I only wish that I’d moved my blog over years ago instead of waiting as long as I did.

Aaron has a consulting page up on his own site here. He actually really needs consulting work right now and things are getting sort of dire for him in this bad economy. If you or your company are considering any WordPress work it would be fantastic if you could take a look at his services. Consider this a ringing endorsement from a very satisfied customer. 🙂 Oh, how did I find Aaron by the way? On FriendFeed, where else 🙂 He’s on FriendFeed here.

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Was the Iconic Shepherd Fairey Obama Hope Image Taken by Freelance Photographer Mannie Garcia?

Was the Iconic Shepherd Fairey Obama Hope Image Taken by Freelance Photographer Mannie Garcia?I shot the above photo of the HOPE posters back when Shepherd Fairey had a show in town late last year and plastered San Francisco with various images of his.

Tom Gralish over at the Philadelphia Inquirer has a blog post out today where he claims that the iconic and famous Obama HOPE Image, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and is credited as being created by artist Shepherd Fairey, may have actually been taken directly from a photograph taken by Freelance Photographer Mannie Garcia. Although I’m not aware of Garcia ever being attributed as the source of this image, Gralish did a great bit of his own detective work to come up with this conclusion. I have not seen any comments anywhere yet from Garcia on the image which will likely go down as one of the greatest and historical works of art of the past century.

Interestingly enough, it also appears that the original photo was not taken at some philosophical moment where Obama was contemplating the future of our great nation or delivering some great speech, but rather when he was probably listening to either Republican Senator Sam Brownback or possibly actor George Clooney.

From Gralish:

“The photo was made by freelance photographer Mannie Garcia who was on assignment for the AP in April of 2006, where a National Press Club news advisory alerted the media that, Academy Award Winner George Clooney will address National Press Club on hisrecent visit to war-torn Darfur and will release video footage from his trip to Sudan. Clooney will be joined by U.S. Senators Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), co-sponsors of S. 1462, The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, and co-sponsors of amendments to increase funding? for peacekeeping operations in Sudan.”

So, it looks like the image that poster artist Shepard Fairey said looked presidential, telling the Washington Post: “He is gazing off into the future, saying, ‘I can guide you,’ ” actually showed our new president listening to George Clooney. Or, probably more likely, fellow Senator Brownback.”

Richard Prince would be proud.

In related news today, it was also uncovered that the famous “Joebama” poster, created by artist Joe Reifer, interestingly enough, also was lifted from a photograph of Reifer taken by yours truly in 2007 at the Lucky JuJu Pinball Gallery. 😉 (If you’d like to create your own Obama Hopeish poster from your own image you can do that here).

Update: It seems, from Garcia’s website, that representatives of Fairey’s yesterday confirmed that the original image did in fact come from one of Garcia’s photographs:

The Danziger Gallery which represents the artistic works of Mr. Fairey contacted me on the 21st of January 2009 to inform me that my photograph was in fact the basis for the artwork that has become better know now as the “HOPE” and “PROGRESS” posters., thanks Claytonia!

Update 2: NPR has a podcast audio interview with Fairey where he discusses this image from yesterday here. Thanks, David!

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Zoom In Online Launching New Photography Video Show Viewfinders

The video above is a sneak preview clip of a new photography video series being produced by Zoom In Online. Zoom In Online is an excellent photography news and resource site and I’m excited to learn today about the new video series that they will be launching.

For their first video episode, Zoom In Online interviews photojournalist Keith Bedford. Bedford covered the Obama campaign from its beginning all the way through to election night as a professional photojournalist. Some of the images of the campaign in the sneak preview video above are fantastic, really strong reportage.

The new show officially premieres on February 1st. Congrats Sophia on the new series!

I love seeing more professionally created photography video series showing up online. My Pal Marc Silbur also recently just launched his new video series Photoshow as well. I blogged about that a few weeks ago. I did an interview with Marc while shooting the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco that you will be able to see there in the near future.

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10 Reasons Why You Should Sign Up for FriendFeed

10 Reasons Why You Should Sign Up for FriendFeed

I haven’t blogged a post specifically about FriendFeed recently, even though it is probably the number one place where I spend time on the web these days, and thought I’d take a moment to put together a quick list of 10 reasons why you should sign up for FriendFeed.

Many of you are already on FriendFeed, but I’m surprised that so many of my photography friends especially still have not signed up for the service yet. Why do I want you to sign up for FriendFeed? Because I want to make sure that I’m seeing all of your great photographs, blog posts, tweets, etc.

On with the list.

1. Because it’s easy to sign up for FriendFeed and even if you don’t use the service, signing up for it allows your work better exposure on one of the fastest growing communities on the web. Signing up for FriendFeed takes less than 5 minutes and very quickly you can link your Flickrstream, Zooomrstream, Facebook account, Twitter account, blog, etc. and have all of this information aggregated for your friends in one place.

Even if *you* don’t use FriendFeed, building a FriendFeed profile allows other people who do the ability to see your stuff. I used to go to Flickr/Zooomr etc. to see my friends/contacts/etc. photos. Now I browse them through FriendFeed. If you are not on FriendFeed, there is a good chance that I and lots of others are not seeing your work. Even if FriendFeed is not for you, sign up for it any way so that people can see your stuff.

2. Because by signing up for FriendFeed, your work will get better exposure across the internet. FriendFeed was built by a bunch of ex-Google guys — some of the very early Google guys. These guys know how Google works. They know how to make sure that FriendFeed content is indexed for search engines.

When you search for "Thomas Hawk" on the Googler what comes up? My blog, my flickr account and then my FriendFeed account. My FriendFeed account is indexed above my Zooomr account, my digg account, my Twitter account, my Facebook profile, Linked In, etc. It’s ahead of everything except my blog and Flickr. Same goes for individual posts that I have linked at FriendFeed. By having a FriendFeed account you make sure that your content is better indexed into search engines.

3. Because FriendFeed is a superior platform for monitoring your Flickr and Zooomr contact photos. When you watch your friends/contacts photos on FriendFeed instead of Flickr/Zooomr you see *all* of the photos that they upload, not just the last five. You can also create custom lists. You can, for instance, create a list of only your friends who are neon photographers, or graffiti photographs, or San Francisco photographers, or… well you get the idea. You can customize your friends/contacts into more categories letting you better watch their photography by your own custom photography channels.

What’s more, FriendFeed not only includes all of your contacts photos in their photostream, it also includes their faves as well. Over the past six months, some of the best photography I’ve seen has come from other photos that my friends are faving. Your friends have great taste. This is a better way to monitor both their photography and the photography that they love and like.

4. Because FriendFeed is going to be big and when you sign up for it 6 months from now or a year from now you might not be able to get the domain there you want.

Remember when gmail first came out (hint, some of the guys that built Gmail for Google are behind FriendFeed). And remember when everybody rushed there to get the best email address. I sure wish I would have. Because then I might have been able to get thomashawk(at)gmail.com. Instead, by the time I got around to signing up for gmail, thomashawk(at)gmail.com was already taken — so now I’ve got the pain in the ass gmail address of thomashawk22(at)gmail.com. I wish I had signed up for gmail earlier and secured my email address. Fortunately I signed up for both Twitter and FriendFeed early and was able to secure both http://twitter.com/thomashawk at Twitter and http://friendfeed.com/thomashawk at FriendFeed.

Even if you don’t want to use FriendFeed today, you might want to in the future and you’ll be happy you got your custom url. Since signing up for FriendFeed is free and easy, at a bare minimum you should try to secure the best domain name you can for yourself there here and now today.

5. Because if you like Twitter, you’ll love FriendFeed. With FriendFeed you can follow your Twitter Friends and even filter to only see your Twitter friends if you want. What’s more if your friends have a particular good tweet, it will get promoted to the top of your screen. If you are tired of seeing a Twitter you can hide it. Earlier this week FriendFeed even built a tool that will automatically import all of your Twitter friends directly into your FriendFeed account. Using the FriendFeed settings you can also have your FriendFeed posts automatically post back to your Twitter account.

Earlier last week when Apple announced that Steve Jobs was stepping down for medical leave, I was one of the first people on the internet to post this on Twitter. But guess what, I didn’t post it on Twitter at all. I posted it on FriendFeed and instantaneously it was posted to my Twitter account. Look at the time stamps on both posts, 1:37pm, the exact same.

6. Because FriendFeed is a *kick ass* search engine. Want to see a bunch of interesting articles about photography? Just search for "photography" on FriendFeed. What a great bunch of interesting stories and articles on photography. Try a search on anything else that you’re interested in. Apple, Microsoft, Obama, TiVo, whatever. Search is really good on FriendFeed today (remember it was built by ex-Google guys).

But search is going to get even better down the road at FriendFeed. Social Search is the future of search and being able to filter your search results by your friends/family as well as community consensus using "best of day" sort of features will make FriendFeed one of the best search engines on the internet. More and more I’m finding great stories to blog about using search on FriendFeed.

7. Because you can hide anything that you don’t want to see on the site. Have you ever been on a site and wished that you didn’t have to see a thread anymore. I know in some Flickr Groups there are threads that I wish I could hide. Especially threads that get bumped over and over and over again. If I don’t care about the latest debate, or the latest silly thread I have to just keep ignoring it. Not at FriendFeed. A simple hide will ensure that you never see that thread again. You can not only hide individual threads, you can hide threads by person, by source, etc.

A lot of people that are not used to FriendFeed tell me that they like it but that it’s too noisy or busy. That they see too much stuff that they don’t want to see. Learn to manage this by hiding content. Very quickly you’ll have a stream customized exactly to what you want to see.

8. Because FriendFeed lets you get rid of your RSS reader. Are you using an RSS reader? Is it clogged full of uninteresting content? At FriendFeed the most liked/commented/interesting stories get bumped to the top. If you follow a feed by someone who is not on FriendFeed yet? No problem. Just make an "imaginary" friend for them and you’ll see that stuff too.

Having your RSS feed filtered by human editors makes for a far more interesting experience. I abandoned my Google Reader account about 8 months ago and haven’t looked back since.

I think FriendFeed still needs to build a tool to let you import your OPML file directly into FriendFeed and match it up with existing accounts and imaginary friends to make this even better, but at least for me FriendFeed has completely replaced my RSS reader and I consistently get to read and consume better and more interesting content filtered by my social network.

9. Because the site is technically excellent, very rarely has downtime and loads very fast. There’s something about a fast loading consistent site that I love. I’ve clicked on FriendFeed pages tens of thousands of times and have rarely had any trouble at all. I find the site technically to be faster and more consistent than Flickr, or Twitter, or really any of the other sites where I spend a fair amount of time.

10. Because there is a *great* community of interesting people on FriendFeed. Community on any social network is important. And FriendFeed has one of the best communities around. I’m not going to name names, but there are so many interesting people doing interesting things on FriendFeed engaging in conversations every day. Jump right in and get to know them. They are a friendly and welcoming bunch… well, for the most part. They are funny, interesting, unique people. Sometimes conversations can get heated. Sometimes people say things that they shouldn’t have. But I find it always engaging. The developers behind the site are also very active in the community.

So there you go. I want to see your work on FriendFeed. If you sign up to FriendFeed, or if you’re already on FriendFeed and I’m not already following you, your photos, etc. there, please leave me a comment on this post with your FriendFeed link so that I can add you as a contact there. If you want to add me as a contact on FriendFeed you can do that here.

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Video Footage of US Bank Tower Security Guards Harassing and Threatening Photographers

The video above is an interesting one. You can read more of the backstory at Discarted, but basically a group of photographers headed out on a photowalk in Downtown L.A. only to run afoul of six security guards:

From Discarted:

“As we began photographing the US Bank Tower at 633 W. 5th Street, managed by Maguire Properties, we were approached almost immediately by a United Protective Services (UPS) security guard, and soon there were six (6!). We were told they would call the police and we would be arrested, that no pictures were allowed from their “private sidewalk,” that they actually owned the sidewalk, and that we were idiots and jerks who should quit asking questions.

The kicker is that, when Angelo of Hollywood politely explained photographers’ rights to one of the UPS guards, he responded that that was just “differing points of view.” Yeah … except that one viewpoint is about the law, and one is not.”

During the altercation, as is usually the case, the Holy Name of “9/11” was brought up yet again, as rationale for not allowing the photography. Seems like nothing ever changes. Be careful out there folks and remember, even under the new Obama administration, photography is still not a crime.

Thanks, David!

Update: an update on this incident from discarted here.