Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

The Angry Whopper, Flavor You’ll Burn For.

Saw this advert in the BART stations and on BART trains this morning. Something tells me this might not be the most appropriate advert campaign for Burger King to be running in the BART system right now given the rioting that’s been going on in Oakland and the anger that people have directed at BART.

Ironically, in the riots from the night before last, the McDonalds in downtown Oakland got trashed and had their windows broken while the Burger King on Broadway seemed to get by unscathed.

I spent a bit of yesterday afternoon shooting around Downtown Oakland and stayed down there until about 6pm or so. Things seemed much more peaceful, but there was still a lot of tension in the air. The above photo was taken from a group of peaceful protesters near the corner of Broadway and 14th Street.

A lot of police where still out and stores were boarding up their storefronts with plywood in anticipation of another night of violence when I left downtown. KTVU reports that later another smaller protest was out with people throwing some trash cans into Broadway and more arrests were made, but that last night was not near as violent as the night before.

From KTVU on last night:

“Police in riot gear shut down Broadway and other surrounding streets for a time after about 50 protesters tried to stop cars, threw trash cans into the street and lit several small fires while protesting the fatal New Year’s Day shooting of 22-year-old Oscar Grant by transit officer Johannes Mehserle at the Fruitvale BART station.

Officers in riot gear moved in to disperse the crowd and detained or arrested several people.

But the protests were calmer than the previous night when some 120 people were arrested following a rampage that damaged about 300 businesses and numerous cars.”

I suspect things may quiet down a bit for a while on the streets of Oakland, but I do worry that once former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle is brought to trial for the killing of Oscar Grant, that far more violent riots will erupt if he is acquitted of murder. I think the verdict of a trial like that will be watched very closely like the Rodney King verdict was, with people ready to take to the streets again if they don’t get the outcome that they want. I also think convicting an on duty cop of murder will be a very difficult thing for prosecutors to do.

Photographer Marc Silber has a new photography related video series out called Photo Show. The show’s tagline is: “Interviews, Tips and Insight from the World’s Best Photographers,” and he’s got an interview up today with Seattle based pro photographer Chase Jarvis that is well worth watching. You might remember Chase from the promo video that Nikon did with him last Fall showcasing their D90 camera, one of the first digital SLRs to shoot video.

I’m really excited to see Marc out there doing a photography video show because I don’t think that there are enough photography related video shows on the web. The quality of his show is very professional and he’s getting some great guests.

Marc and his crew recently filmed an interview with me on San Francisco’s Baker Beach shooting the Golden Gate Bridge that should be up at some point in the future as well. Marc, Robert Scoble, and I also went up to Yosemite last year and got to spend some time with Ansel Adams’ son Michael. Marc also has a video of his interview with Michael Adams about his dad’s photography here.

Congrats on the great interview Marc and looking forward to many great episodes of Photo Show in the month ahead.

If you want to subscribe to Marc’s new video show and blog on photography via RSS you can do that here.

Oakland protester holds bottle. Many bottles were thrown at the police tonight.

I just came back from a few hours walking around downtown Oakland and taking photographs of the riots tonight. The rioting started after a planned protest earlier today over the recent shooting of Oscar Grant by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle.

Most of the rioting activity took place around downtown Oakland, near 14th and Broadway. I was also out back in 1992 during the Rodney King riots in San Francisco and these riots felt a lot like those but with what seemed like less looting. Mostly the rioters were vandalizing automobiles and storefronts. There were quite a few cars burned out. The Oakland PD was trying to get the burnt out cars off the streets as soon as they could. Many retail stores also had their windows broken and smashed. Many of the stores in downtown Oakland have metal bars on the windows and I didn’t see anyone going into stores and looting.

After assembling around 14th Street and Jackson Street, the rioters headed back towards Broadway and City Hall. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums came out and the rioters gathered around him on the City Hall steps as he pleaded for people not to be violent and tried to assure the crowd that he would do everything he could to ensure that justice would prevail in the case of the shooting. After speaking to the crowd for a while Dellums went back into City Hall and the rioters moved up towards Broadway. Police were in force surrounding the rioters in riot gear. When the crowd started throwing bottles at the police, some from balconies overhead, the police fired tear gas into the crowd. My eyes are still burning a bit from the tear gas, but it definitely dispersed that crowd.

Man posing in front of a burnt out car who wanted me to take a photograph of him.

But from there the crowd would seem to just keep moving down one street, up another. Smashing things as they went on their way. There were also smaller groups of 5 or 10 people at a time apart from the main crowd vandalizing things.

Photograph of police helicopter shining spotlight on rioters over the City of Oakland, photo by my brother.

The people in the crowd were very angry. They were definitely taunting the police. Using expletives with them. Yelling at them. Calling them pigs.

Police helicopters are still and have been flying over the City of Oakland all night. I suspect that the rioting will continue on into the night and that these riots are not over yet.

Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums Tries to Calm the Crowd.

BART suspended service at many of the BART stations as the crowd moved around Oakland.

I spent about two hours shooting the riots tonight downtown with my brother. Stupidly I parked my car near downtown. I thought I was far enough away from the riots, but the crowd was moving a lot and when I came back to my car I found that the car parked immediately behind mine had been burned out. Fortunately my car wasn’t damaged, but I feel bad for all of the people who had their property damaged or destroyed in tonight’s riots.

I fear that this is only the beginning of the rioting we may have in store for Oakland. Eventually this officer will be brought to trial and it may be very difficult to get a murder conviction for an on duty shooting. Anything short of a murder conviction however may result in even more devastating violence in Oakland.

I took my 10D out shooting tonight instead of my new 5D Mark II so the photos I took are a bit grainy, but I have a set up here on Flickr if you’d like to see them. My brother also has the set of photos he took tonight uploaded here.

Update: poppimple got a pretty good video showing the rioting here.

Update 2: The SF Chronicle has a pretty good wrap up on the rioting.

MP stopped by police on suspicion of being a terrorist – for taking photos of a cycle path | Mail Online

“A Tory MP was stopped and searched by police on suspicion of being a terrorist after taking photos of a cycle path, he revealed yesterday.

Andrew Pelling was taking the pictures to highlight a ‘long-neglected bicycle and pedestrian route’ in his Central Croydon constituency to Parliamentary colleagues.

But as the cycle path was near the town’s main train station, two police officers stopped him on suspicion of planning a terrorist attack.

Even when Mr Pelling, 48, showed the officers his House of Commons pass and explained what he was doing, they insisted on searching his bag.

After finding nothing of interest they sent the MP on his way. A police spokesman confirmed the December 30 incident, saying: ‘The officer conducted a stop-and-search – taking into account the current terror threat – as he (Mr Pelling) was taking pictures in the vicinity of a major transport hub.’ “

Thanks, David!

The Mechanics Institute Library, located at 57 Post Street in San Francisco, is the oldest library on the West Coast. It was started in 1854. Inside this spectacular library is a stunning spiral staircase definitely worth exploring.

I spent yesterday afternoon out shooting with my new Canon 5D Mark II and these are my earliest thoughts. I’ll probably do a series of short posts like this on the camera from time to time rather than any sort of formal review. I haven’t even processed any photos from the new camera yet or played with it’s video functionality so certainly more to come later.

The first thing I noticed about the new 5D is that it feels quieter to me. The sound of the shutter is very different than the old 5D, it sounds less mechanical and more muted. I like that.

The large LCD screen on the back of the camera is pretty cool. The photos feel really large as they display for the 2 seconds after you take a shot.

It is sooooooooo nice not to have to keep resetting my date/time over and over and over and over again. The internal battery on my old 5D died a while back and so every time I’d change batteries I’d have to reset the date and time. I tried taking the camera to a camera battery store but they didn’t seem to have a battery that would work with my old 5D and I was too lazy to do the research to find the actual replacement.

I find that I’m taking less shots when I’m out shooting. I think it’s more mental at this point but something about seeing only 250 or so shots on an 8 gig card makes me pause more when I decide whether or not to take a shot or how many to take. It’s not just about the room on the card, in the back of my mind I’m also thinking about the fact that larger file sizes will just be all around more difficult to work with. They’ll take longer to transfer to my Mac. They’ll take up more space on my Mac’s hard drive. Eventually they’ll consume more space on my Drobo. Bigger files are likely going to be slower to work with in Lightroom, etc. I think that this is still mostly just an early mental thing going on in my head that should resolve itself in time. I did notice yesterday though that I took less photographs in four hours than I usually do and I seemed to think more about my shots. Who knows, maybe this is a good thing too.

I like the new menu on the Mark II better than the old 5D. It seems more intuitive and you scroll through the screens easier.

A few times while working with the camera I accidentally pushed the delete button when I meant to push the play button. The play and delete buttons are pretty close to each other. I’m not too worried about this because you have to confirm photo deletion but it seemed like maybe these two buttons should be further away from each other.

That’s all for now. No real opinion on the image quality yet because I haven’t processed any images from it. I’m heading out to shoot a bit more this afternoon with it and will continue to post thoughts on the camera as I think about them.

Flickr, Smugmug And Others Bidding To Buy JPG Magazine

TechCrunch is reporting that Flickr, Smugmug, Alexander Muse, WordPress and apparently others (TechCrunch says 20 potential buyerys) have all been involved in a bidding war over JPG Magazine and reports that it looks like a transaction will close shortly.

Matt Mullenweg denies that WordPress has ever had any conversations about anything like this in the comments of the post.

Don MacAskill seems to suggest on Twitter that SmugMug was at least interested but that they’re now unlikely to bid:

From Don:

“JPG Magazine may be saved! The other bidders have much deeper pockets, so we’re unlikely to bid afterall, but if something happens.

We were going to turn JPG Magazine back over the community, try to run it at a small loss, and mostly do our best to keep it from extinction.”

For what it’s worth, I doubt that you’ll see anyone acquire JPG Magazine for any serious money at all. JPG was a money losing proposition (unfortunately) and not very many people are going to be interested in a money losing magazine at this juncture in a recession.

Although JPG had an online presence, the online part of the business was pretty weak to start with. It really was the idea that you’d get published in a very polished magazine and get $100 that interested contributors more than the online side of the site.

Mike Arrington suggests that fans are going to want to see JPG go to Flickr. But I seriously doubt Flickr would buy JPG. First off, why would Yahoo want to part with cash?

Secondly, even if Flickr ran the print magazine JPG at a loss in order to enhance the cachet of Flickr, it could very seriously backfire on them. You can only print so many photographs in a magazine a month and everyone who submitted photos that got rejected would feel bad. There’s enough bitching already around Flickr about who gets photos in “Explore” and who doesn’t that I can’t imagine an even more exclusive magazine distinction would do much for the competitive esprit de corps at the site.

Finally, if Flickr really wanted to do a magazine, well, they’d probably just do one and call it something like, well, Flickr. It’s a better brand name and it’s not like the JPG name carries some sort of magical cachet with photographers that a Flickr title wouldn’t.

I just don’t see it happening with Flickr.

Speaking of Halsey Minor, JPG’s major investor, JPG employee Jason Defilippo didn’t have very kind words for him according to one commenter Jack McGuire in the comments of the TechCrunch article. McGuire quotes Defilippo as twittering: “I loathe Halsey Minor. Billionaire douchebag. He killed 8020 along with Ron Palmeri. Brothers in douche.”

Update #1: Alexander Muse adds a blog post about his offer to buy JPG here.

Update #2: In the comments section to this post JPG investor Ron Palmeri responds to Alexander Muse’s offer as well as the comments made on Twitter by Jason Defilippo. He also reprints portions from an email where he says that JPG has 20 interested parties in the venture.

Update #3: Heather Champ (who works for Flickr/Yahoo) writes that “we (Flickr) are not and never have been interested in bidding on JPG. One shouldn’t believe everything one reads on the internets.”

Amtrak photo contestant arrested by Amtrak police in NYC’s Penn Station

More absurdity from the anti-photography brigade via Carlos Miller. This time reportedly photographer Duane Kerzic was shooting in Penn Station and ended up getting arrested by Amtrak Police, handcuffed in a holding cell and accused of criminal trespassing… in a public train station?

Apparently Kerzic was trying to take photos specifically to win Amtrak’s annual photo contest this week:

““The only reason they arrested me was because I refused to delete my images,” Kerzic said in a phone interview with Photography is Not a Crime on Friday.

“They never asked me to leave, they never mentioned anything about trespassing until after I was handcuffed in the holding cell.”

In fact, he said, the only thing they told him before handcuffing him was that “it was illegal to take photos of the trains.””

Another example of more rogue cops who think that photography is some sort of crime.

Kerzic has photographs he took of his wrists after being handcuffed here. Personally I’m not sure why cops should be allowed to handcuff photographers or any other law abiding citizen at all.

Thanks, Brad!