6 posts tagged “photography”
Reasons I've been told not to take photographs since work moved to the edge of the City of London three weeks ago:
- They were of the back of a police station
- There were children (five to ten metres away, in a nursery just south of Christ Church, which is what I was actually interested in)
- I was standing on the art
- I was on private property
However, in each of these cases, I wasn't asked to delete any photographs (which is, I know, something you can work around, but not if you only have one card). Be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.
What's the best photo you took this year? Show and tell!
Two other photos got a bit of attention. My shot of Brick Lane, at the Truman Brewery, was used by my employers for an internal brochure, which is nice, but again it's just a question of good light and good support. I'm more happy about the timing of Smile, which was very lucky indeed. It's also the only of the photos I mention to be taken with a compact, which just goes to show. Anyway, it's not as crisp as the others, but I'm still fond of it, and I hope to be able to take more photos like it as time goes on.
However, although not towards the top of the popularity chart, I think the photograph I'm happiest with this year is this portrait of Matt Biddulph, taken during a dinner at Etech at San Diego. I never did get around to processing many of the shots from the conference, but this one turned out really nicely and I'm glad I did at least get it onto Flickr before the conference was done.
There have been a couple of posts since Apple's press event on Tuesday, which saw the launch of the new .Mac Galleries - an online, read-only version of iPhoto, kind of - that state that "Apple doesn't get the web". Jeremy Keith says
in the fast-moving, messy world of online services I don’t think the genius-led design of Apple can compete with the truckloads of nimble young upstarts making snazzily addictive products on the Web
and Chris Heathcote writes
Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.
I think there's a slight qualification to be made here. I think Apple are great at web publishing. Their site is one of the best product sites I've seen (despite the fact I dislike the new bigger-than-800-pixel width). I've been going on about the elegance of URLs - it's possible to guess that there's something at apple.com/keyboard, for example - since 2001 or something, and even when they drop in AJAX their pages still have usable permanent links.
When designing for consumers, Apple takes the same approach. They produce tools for publishing, using a one-to-many, one-direction mode of thinking. As James Duncan Davidson notes as he writes about the .Mac galleries, "It’s not Flickr, and comparing it to Flickr is probably pointless." Well, no. Flickr is the archetypal Web 2.0 application, being almost as much about community as about photographs themselves. The .Mac gallery, on the other hand, is all about putting your work online. There's no comments, no notes, no tags, but the people who it's aimed at don't want that. They're about publishing, not interaction, and while they pages are undoubtedly heavy, and probably scale badly, they're also slick enough that a lot of people will like them.
Similarly, iWeb-generated blogs have no comments, but well-designed templates (from which it's hard to stray.)* Again, it's designed for publishing. The problem for Apple is that it's not 1999 any more. People expect more from their sites now, and thankfully more and more of the sites I use are applications, not brochureware. So perhaps the statement needs to be refined, because despite the JavaScript libraries and slick visuals, Apple doesn't get Web 2.0.
* One point where iWeb fails is that it doesn't preserve Apple's nice URLs; the ones it generates are distinctly ugly. At least, they were in the first version.
Ironically, after going to the London Vox meet and saying that I used it because I felt more able to write here than elsewhere - something that's still true, but that I'm also still not able to explain - I seem to have run into the buffers here as well. So this is kind of filler. Sorry about that.
Speaking of the Vox meet, it was good. The bar wasn't the nicest in the world, but there were lots of goodies and plenty of people to talk to. I made a beeline for "the photo table", where the 350D owners seemed to have congregated, but later actually did reasonably well at the "mingling" thing (which is usually a problem for me: at London.pm I always talk to the same people, for example). Eventually I might post photos, but this week's been busy. Thanks to the organisers, and the 6A entourage who made it there.
At least it's nearly the weekend.
Two consoles, two ads. I have a general problem with the whole concept of pink-is-for-girls consumer products, but obviously nobody else does.
However, I have to say, the PSP advert is much, much worse than the DS one. What on earth were Sony's graphic designers thinking?
(some time later) after having this languish as a draft for a while, Kate Bevan wrote a "technobile" piece in the Guardian entitled The only woman who would buy pink gadgets is Paris Hilton, so I think that's a good point at which to publish this and move on.
I'm not feeling incredibly verbose right now, so instead here's a hope spelled out pretentiously with a couple of photos I took on the way home from work.
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