| IMAX is the anti-YouTube ★ |
On the IMAX[1. Refers to the video camera system used to make 3D feature films]:
IMAX is the anti-YouTube, a quality-obsessed celebration of overstimulation. The screen is too big, the speakers are too loud. Yet in 2009, it’s the quintessential antibody to all those viral videos that fill our days, rotting our taste. That’s why it survived—it had the guts to stake its turf knowing that it could continually wow an audience.
via Gizmodo
| Nature is our muse ★ |
Frans Lanting’s lyrical nature photos:
So who are we? Brothers of masculine chimps. Sisters of feminine bonobos. We are all of them, and more. We’re molded by the same life force. The blood veins in our hands echoed a course of water traces on the Earth. And our brains — our celebrated brains — reflect a drainage of a tidal marsh.
via TED.com.
| How photography connects us ★ |
David Griffin,[1. Director of Photography for National Geographic] on how photography connects us:
I believe that photography can make a real connection to people, and can be employed as a positive agent for understanding the challenges and opportunities facing our world today.
via TED.com.
We received a lot of feedback asking about what to shoot or photograph? Some even went to the state of complaints where one simply don’t have enough time or ideas for subjects to choose for. So we’re gonna post some weekly photo theme from this point on.
Everyday objects seems like a suitable topic to start with, and nothing is more ubiquitous, and challenging than a mobile phone. It’s reflective surface can teach us how to deal with light & shadow, dark, non reflective color can let us understand exposure better, and it’s proximity can teach us depth, perspective, focus & framing!
So grab your gear, loose your phone for a while and scout for an interesting angle around the house to shoot! Good hunting!
Flickr Photo by Sultan Alsuwaidi.
| Fumbling toward the great shot ★ |
There are two kinds of childhood heroes, one that portrayed as a superhero in the comics that you read, and one that inspired and continued to do so throughout your life. As a boy dreaming up to be a photographer, Art Wolfe was one of my hero. His book on nature & wildlife photography taught me composition, his vision extends beyond what the world can offer, and most importantly, he brought photography from a distant dream to a close reality for me. He was one of the reason, why I’m doing what I do now.
His latest column at one of my favorite blog The Luminous Landscape shares with us how he made the great shot, and he made it look so easy, just like how he wrote his book 20 years ago, it’s a special treat for me to read about his work up-close, here’s an excerpt:
People may imagine great photographs are composed in a flash of inspiration, arriving in the world fully formed. While that can happen, most of the time we fumble toward a great shot, refining the composition with each exposure. This was certainly the case with my image, The Night Fishermen.
The Night Fisherman by Art Wolfe
also visit Art’s homepage: www.artwolfe.com
‘Depth’ will always appeal to the audience, no matter how raw your subject or object is, the balance of the opposites brings the whole picture up and alive.
Photographer Jorge Silva, embedded with the Canadian Army on an operation in Sanjaray, Afghanistan.
Showing the Taliban from Reuters Photo Blog
If you are one of those who prefer a clean strictly-updates-only facebook news-feed, you’re wish is granted.
Enter Greasemonkey.
Excerpt from It’s Wikipedia Entry:
Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allows users to install scripts that make on-the-fly changes to most HTML-based web pages. As Greasemonkey scripts are persistent, the changes made to the web pages are executed every time the page is opened, making them effectively permanent for the user running the script.
For those who uses Safari, GreaseKit enables this browser for the Mac to utilize and retain most–if not all–extendibility that Greasemonkey offers.
Step 1: download the files & install
Installation manual is here: http://8-p.info/greasekit/
Step 2: go to userscripts.org install the following scripts
You’ll see the GreaseKit menu on your Safari as follow upon successful installation
There are hundreds of useful scripts that helps us browse better, among the collection, I found that AdSweep and Keep Tube useful for me. With 32,785 scripts as of this writing, the sky is your limit!
Happy Browsing!
| The Next Web ★ |
Inspiring talk by the inventor of the Internet Sir Tim Berners-Lee:
So, going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. But, 18 months later — this is how innovation happens – 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we’d got. And so he gave me the time to code it up. So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like,hypertext protocol — HTTP – the idea of URLs — these names for things which started with HTTP. I wrote the code and put it out there.
Watch the video Tim Berners-Lee on the next Web | Video on TED.com.
