Michael Wolf’s incredible collection at The New York Times’ Lens photoblog: Life Behind Glass.
These images were made with a medium format camera in downtown Chicago.
The comments section gets interesting because as you’ll see in the collection, Wolf is shooting with a long lens into the lives of people in buildings a long way off. How this jives with discomfort with street photography in general will be discussed for years to come.
That aside, the images are stunning in both their geometry and starkness but also in how they portray the human activity going on in these enormous honeycombs of buildings.
On June 24th Sonia Zjawinski posted a piece for The New York Times’ Personal Tech section: Flickr as an Interior Decorating Tool. In it she both celebrated the number of excellent photographers that can be found in the flickr community but also seemed to advocate using those photographers’ images to decorate one’s home. No mention was made of permissions, copyright or fair use policies both within flickr and on the internet in general.
As you can see from the number of letters that post got, Sonia hit a nerve although I can say from years of experience with flickr, there are various interpretations of flickr’s fair use policies and tools for sharing photographs.
Sonia and The Times printed a followup post to back off a bit on the “flickr is a great place to get free stuff” meme that was explicit in her first post: Are Flickr Photos Fair Game for Home Printing?.
This post is getting plenty of comments as well, some of them, like in the first comments section incredibly rude. I think Sonia and The Times have handled this perfectly.
What many in both comment threads fail to acknowledge is the responsibility of the creator of the content to understand the terms of the flickr universe and correctly set up their flickr account to control access. Of course, flickr members need to consider whether they want a copyright or maybe a creative commons license on their images and then, whether or not they want to allow searches from outside of flickr to include their images (public access).
All of this being done, flickr is a photo sharing site, the key word being “sharing.” Sharing doesn’t mean stealing but having one’s work online runs the risk of the wrong people finding and taking it.
A short video showing an old offset press and a large collection of shots of posters on walls in Bangalore, India. Oh man, I love this stuff, what a great taste of both Bollywood and Indian graphic design.
From the first time he saw Emmett “Doc” Brown fire up the Mr. Fusion home energy reactor in the “Back to the Future” movies, Dave Nichols has always wanted to make a vehicle run on garbage.
Two decades after the trilogy, the 42-year-old home builder and auto shop owner from eastern Connecticut isn’t traveling through time in a DeLorean, yet. But he’s modified his 1989 Ford F150 pickup truck to run on wood, leaves, cardboard and other “biomass” with a fuel system that he says expels virtually no pollution.
This is quite amazing. I must get over to Killingly to check this out.
I just found this post and watched the first four of seven youTube segments of this first lecture and it’s fantastic. Richard Feynman was a character who enjoyed giving lectures on the history of science in his thick New York accent, telling amusing anecdotes along the way. This lecture series is on gravity and if you just watch the videos posted at the Atheist Media Blog above you’ll have a good idea of why Feynman was so popular among his students and among lay people.
Bravo to Bill Gates for purchasing the lectures from Cornell so that they could be made available to the public.
If you want to have some fun, watch these youTube videos.
This is a fascinating piece and as more comes out about the complex mess that was Michael Jackson’s life this piece of it will become messier. However, as this piece states, Michael Jackson was a shrewd businessman even as his personal life was out of control.
An incredible collection of aerial images of earth from the International Space Station. My fav is #24, the tidal channels near Iran’s Qeshm Island. Wow.
Great discussion of what a serious “road warrior” takes on the road. His “kit” is a lot simpler than what I used to carry and he makes no mention of a hard disk backup of his MacBook Air which I would never leave home without if I were presenting. Still, it’s interesting to see what Pogue carries.
I sold one thing on eBay, for a friend, we did very well and that’s the only thing I’ve ever tried to sell. During that sale we had bites from hacked accounts and all kinds of phishing expeditions to get me to ship the thing we sold before payment.
I have to say, I’ve bought a few things successfully from eBay but to me, the UI of eBay is the worst of any large, successful commerce site on the web. It looks like hell, the process of buying and selling is cumbersome and using it is just not a very satisfying experience.
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