Month: June 2009

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Cooliris Just Became The Coolest New Way to Browse Flickr

Cooliris Just Became The Coolest New Way to Browse Flickr

I’ve been watching Cooliris over the past few years and have been super excited about the technology that they’ve been developing. If you haven’t seen Cooliris yet, let me just say it is the most stunning way to browse photos available on the web today hands down. I have seen no other browsing tool that is as beautiful as Cooliris. When you view a page in Cooliris the photos from the page just float by. You easily move the mouse to browse in a wave like motion across the sea photos and use your scroll wheel or trackpad to zoom in and out seeing photos in their full high res glory.

It’s sort of like coverflow for the Mac, but only 100x better.

But as much as I’ve enjoyed *browsing* photos with Cooliris in the past, in the end I found that experience to be lacking. I want to do a lot more with photos than just browse. I want to interact. And in the past there was no easy way to interact with photos on Cooliris except in Cooliris’ own proprietary playground. That was until this past weekend. This past weekend Cooliris released Cooliris v. 1.11 and with this release they’ve moved the Cooliris experience into a browser tab. What does this mean? This means that rather than having Cooliris take over your whole computer screen and computer, you can now browse using it and fully utilize all the power of your browser.

More specifically, this means that as I browse photos using Cooliris that I can cmd-click (or ctl-click for those of you on PCs) on an image’s link page and Firefox (or IE if you’re on a PC — joking, folks, joking) will open that photo’s page in a background tab. This means that you can use the power of Cooliris to browse, and then select photos as you go that you’d like to fave, comment on, etc. and once you are done browsing they’ll already be opened in new tabs for you where you can go interact with them directly.

This is exactly the feature that I was waiting for from CoolIris to begin using it full time as my primary way to browse photos. No more crappy little thumbnail pages from flickr, or even their small photo sized alternative, now simply load up your favorite photostream or search term or group pool or set and browse with full high res large sized glory while still being able to easily load images you’d like to interact with in background tabs. The Cooliris view for sets even looks far better than Flickr’s own slideshow view.

Once you find a page on Flickr that you want to browse, simply click on the little CoolIris icon as you hover over a photo and it will launch a Cooliris version in a new tab.

Cooliris has also made some additional enhancements for Flickr including giving you the ability to make a hyperlink of a Cooliris view of a particular set/stream/pool etc. and then share that with others. To see what I’m talking about feel free to click on this Cooliris view of my 10 faves or more set on Flickr. Pretty damn slick huh? Want to fave a few of these? You know you do 😉 Just cmd-click on the go to photo page when you select a photo and it will load it in a background tab for you.

You can get and install Cooliris here.

A video of how Cooliris works here. Cooliris’ blog post announcing the new version here.

Nice work Cooliris. Congrats on the release!

Oh and once you install Cooliris definitely go fave diving in some of your favorite Flickr user’s streams. Emma’s favorites knock my socks off. Go see them here.

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365 Portraits, The Book

365 Portraits The Book

In 2007 Photographer Bill Wadman traveled around the United States and Europe with a single mission. Each day he photographed, edited and posted online a different portrait of a different person. It was a mammoth effort meticulously followed that resulted in one of the most authentic collection of portraits I’ve ever seen. The result, entitled simply 365 Portraits is a significant and beautiful collection of images. I was honored to have been included as a subject in Bill’s Project and think the photo that he took of me is one of the best I’ve ever seen. While Bill shot some famous people in his book (like Astronaut Buzz Aldrin) I found some of his most compelling portraits to be those of everyday people as part of their everyday lives. Here are some of my favorites:

Land Surveyor A.J. MacBrien
A nude of Sarah Lizbet
Teacher Barrie Mann
Writer/Poet Sarah Herrington
Lover and Contrast of Graph Paper Regina Sampels
Racer Beth O’Brien
Photographer Smoothdude
Baby Jonah Max
Octogenarian Hiker Betty New
Singer Songwriter Jocelyn Ryder
Overthinker Alexis Levinson
Video Blogger Ze Frank
Editor of Poz Magazine Regan Hoffman
Workaholic Amy Prole

Bill has now finally released his book of these portraits. The book will be an initial limited edition run of 500 numbered and signed copies. The book is hard cover with about 250 pages showcasing these amazing portraits and Bill is selling them for $120 each. There is a July 20th pre-order deadline. Here is your opportunity to own a unique and interesting early edition work of art from an emerging American photographer and to support an artist directly as well. I just ordered mine 30 minutes ago. Congrats on your project Bill and congrats now on the book — a remarkable work and a labor of love for sure.

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w00t! The New York Times Finally Advocates Stealing Intellectual Property

Sonia Zjawinski has an interesting article out over at the NY Times’ Gadgetwise blog entitled “Flickr as an Interior Decorating Tool,” where she basically advocates stealing other people’s photographs off of Flickr.

From Zjawinski:

“And if you’re wondering about copyright issues (after all, these aren’t my photos), the photos are being used by me for my own, private, noncommercial use. I’m not selling these things and not charging admission to my apartment, so I think I’m in the clear.

Obviously, photographers and others may feel quite differently about this, but it’s a thorny issue: If printing out an image on Flickr isn’t ok, what about Wi-Fi picture frames that stream images from Flickr and display them in your living room? What about Tivoing an episode of Lost and watching it later with friends? (I’ll be following up this post with another post, chock full of answers from legal experts, in the coming days.)

Of all the artwork I have in my studio apartment (there isn’t a bare wall in the house), my Flickr finds get the most attention. Best of all, they were practically free! I use a Kodak ESP7 AIO printer to ink my finds on various sizes of photo paper and frame them in inexpensive frames found at Urban Outfitters or Ikea. The only thing I pay for is ink, paper and frames — peanuts, in my opinion.”

Heh heh. It’s nice to see the NY Times *finally* come out advocating a moral position that intellectual property theft is alright as long as you don’t get caught. Zajawinski gets beat up pretty hard in the comments section of her post from a bunch of photographers who think she is stealing their work. Typical cry babies.

Do I personally have a problem with what Zajawinski’s advocating here? No way. I think it’s great. And I guarantee you that most of the photographers crying about “image theft,” in the comments section of the post have all illegally copied music themselves. That’s the hypocrisy with too many photographers these days. I used to have a friend who was constantly pulling down tracks off of Hype Machine and saving them for their own use (and resending them to me) and then bitching all the time about people stealing images. It’s like it’s ok to rip off music, but God forbid someone dare download my precious photograph that I took of a seal last month — even though in both cases the material is being used purely for personal use.

I’m sure I’ll take a lot of heat for sticking up for Zajawinski here. But I say if you want to rip off Thomas Hawk images and print them out for yourself go for it. I put high res photos up on Flickr and feel free to help yourself, just click on the magnifying glass above any of my images and you can get a large high res version. I hope it makes your new kitchen or den a more interesting place.

And to the photographers who are bitching about this sort of personal use. If you don’t like it, take this little bit of advice. Don’t put your photos on the internet. Nobody is forcing you to put your images up on the internet. Maybe the best thing for you to do is to keep them only to yourself. Make prints and lock them in a little safe in your house where only you have the key. Late at night you can pull down the shades so that nobody can see in and take them out and look at them all you want, privately, securely. It’s a beautiful thing.

As for the photographers who don’t like this that *still* put your photos up on the internet, well, my advice to you is to simply get over what the NY Times is advocating here. Seriously. Life is too short. Stressing about internet thieves stealing your work will get you nothing. It will bring you no joy in the end. It only leads to bitterness. Learn to let it go. Forget about it and go take more pictures. Trust me on this one. In the end you’ll be dead and it won’t matter one iota who printed out one of your photos to hang above their kitchen sink.

I’ve said this before and I’ll reprint it here again. I look at my photography like this. When I make an image it belongs to me. It belongs to me while I take the photo. It belongs to me while it sits in my camera. It belongs to me while I process it on my Mac. It belongs to me while I let it sit in an archive folder waiting to be uploaded to the internet. Then I upload it to the internet and it’s like I’m taking a bird and opening my window and letting it go. Off she goes. Her song to be enjoyed by the entire world — certainly no longer mine.

It’s a liberating thing.

Thanks for the heads up, Roger!

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eBay’s Hypocritical Censorship

PayPal, eBay and SkypeA number of years back I used to collect Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs CDs. I’m not sure why, but they seemed to be valuable on eBay and so whenever I’d go shopping at Amoeba or someplace and I saw one for sale for cheap in the used CD bin I’d just buy it knowing that it was collectible and worth more money than they were selling it for. I got tired of collecting them after a while and so they sat in the attic for years. Recently my wife and I decided to clean house a bit, get rid of the clutter and start selling off crap that we just don’t need any more and so she’s been putting these old CDs up on eBay and selling them off. They usually go for anywhere from $20 or so to $150 per disc.

Earlier this week she tried to list one of the CDs, Blind Faith’s self titled CD. It’s a pretty famous album but on the cover there’s a photo of a young girl holding a silver space ship without a top on. I certainly wouldn’t consider it child porn. You can see the album cover if you want simply doing a Google Image Search for “Blind Faith” “self titled.”

After listing the CD along with an image of it eBay pulled the listing. She figured it was because of the album cover and so she relisted it, only this time without a photo of the cover and eBay pulled the listing again sending her the following email explanation:

To protect our users, recognizing that images of nude children often raise legal concerns, eBay has made a policy decision that it will not permit the listing of any item that depicts images of nude minors (under 18 years of age).

Now it feels kind of crappy to have eBay calling you a child pornographer. Especially when listing a mainstream rock CD that I’m pretty sure any court in America would rule is not child porn. I think eBay is also entirely hypocritical in their rejection of this item. eBay says that they “will not permit the listing of any item that depicts images of nude minors (under 18 years of age),” and yet if you do a search on eBay for Nirvana’s most famous CD “Nevermind,” you’ll find tons of listings. Isn’t that a naked baby on the album cover? Isn’t that naked baby nude and under the age of 18? What about nativity collectible with a naked baby Jesus in the manger? Isn’t that also depiction of a minor under the age of 18 naked?

eBay needs to learn to relax their censorship here. Not allowing someone to sell Blind Faith’s classic self titled album is just stupid. What’s next? Is eBay going to stop allowing breast pumps to be sold because someone might take a photo of a mother using one that ends up on Facebook?

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Aaron Draplin on the Death of the American Neon Sign

America Is F*cked…….(Graphically at least) from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.

Warning: The above video contains graphic language. If you are offended by profanity you might want to skip it.

My Motel America set was featured on Digg over the weekend. In the comments someone linked to this great video (above) about the death of a neon motel sign.

The video is a short interview with Aaron Draplin talking about a 28 foot motel neon sign that he recently purchased on eBay while he was drunk for $300. In his rant he cringes at the crappy $15,000 ugly plastic sign that the new motel owners put up in it’s place.

So much of American neon is disappearing every single day. Over the past few years I’ve literally watched dozens of signs disappear before my eyes. Personally I’m trying to photograph as much neon as I possibly can. My Neon Days and Neon Nights set currently has 2,656 images of neon in it. I’ve been trying to get out on the road as much as I can and travel to as many new American cities as I can to try and photograph as much neon as possible.

When I was in Chicago earlier this month I shot a ton of the neon in and around Chicago. I shot this one motel sign on a vacant lot. The entire motel had been razed and the only thing left standing was simply it’s old sign. The highlight of my trip was stopping by The Neon Shop, AKA Fishtail Neon, and spending time there with it’s owner Tom Brickler. Tom had some great signs in his store and invited me in to the back room of his shop as well and showed me some fantastic old signs that he had there. It was really a treat.

I’ve created a collection of my neon images as well that tries to break down neon signs by geographical areas. I’ve still got so much work to do in adding more neon images to my library, and unfortunately every day it seems like more and more signs are snuffed out of existence.

Earlier today I joked when I wrote about Hunch that the first question I wanted to ask Hunch was what City should I visit next to shoot neon signs in America? Tom Spaulding, a prolific neon photographer himself said Wildwood, NJ.

What do you think? Where’s the next City I should visit in America to shoot neon?