Some NYC Instagrams
I took a quick business trip to New York City yesterday, and I had some wander time in the middle of the day. I was at the edge of SOHO and the Village and I took a few pictures with my iPhone. I was in an Instagram mood, so I shot the photos with Instragram cropping in mind. Here are few of the photos. Follow this link to Flickr to see more.
The Real Reason Bands Request No Flash Photography at Shows
According Jason Isbell, former member of Drive-by Truckers, the real reason performers don’t like flash photography is not because it freaks them out, but because it makes them look like they’re performing in cousin Stevie’s basement.
Sony: Around The World In 80 Seconds
from Creativity
Photographer Alex Profit and Rapp Collins creative Romain Pergeaux created this stop-motion tour of the world in three weeks using the Sony Cyber-shot HX5V camera.
Here’s Profit on the making of the Around the World in 80 Seconds:
How did the project come about?
Romain Pergeaux, creative with Rapp Collins Paris had the idea for this project, he told me about it and we decided to direct it together.
What was Sony’s involvement?
(Pergeaux) proposed it to Sony, who loved the project. They therefore financed the operation. We were very free in creative production of the film.
What were the technical challenges of doing the video?
Only three weeks to realize this project, 2 persons, without locating points. Released into 8 frames per second, the tour lasts exactly 80 seconds between the GO and the FINISH (640 images), 11.5 seconds per country (92 images). The globe (shot in real life) turned all the 32 images. We had to make a very precise tracking to estimate the distance of entry and exit. Another challenge was to build the bridges between the different cities without knowing what we would find later to continue.
Go to their site tourdumonde80.fr for more information.
Happy New Year from Durham NC
Here’s a picture from the American Tobacco District from earlier this evening, before the security guards asked me to leave. Here are some other pictures I took this evening at American Tobacco and at Durham’s Bus Station.
Fallen Princesses
Photographer Dina Goldstein has created a series of photographs called Fallen Princesses where she looks at the next chapter in the lives of fairy tale princesses, but set in the modern world.
Cereal Killer
Terry Border recently published a book called Bent Objects: The Secret Life of Everyday Things. It is three years of work and nearly 400 blog posts of attaching wires to food to personify them and illustrate a phrase or bad pun. Even Rhett and Link thought he was cool, as they interviewed him below.
Shimmer Wall Photo Backdrop at Press Conference
Photo by Ginny Skalski
My friend Ginny recently started a new job as the Social Media Strategist for Cree, the RTP-based LED lighting company. In her second week on the job, she was involved in the planning of a major company press conference when they announced the addition of 575 jobs. The governor of NC was in attendance for the announcement.
Ginny wanted an interesting backdrop for the announcement, so she asked me if she could use my photo of the Raleigh Shimmer Wall. Cree was a major sponsor of this downtown public art installation, as it is lit at night with Cree LEDs (scroll down for a night view). I was happy to oblige. Ginny posted several pictures online listing me as the photographer, like the one above of Cree CEO, Chuck Swoboda. Below is my photo, which clearly shows the Cree sponsorship banner.
From the News & Observer Editors’ Blog: Here are 5 things you may or may not have known about the company:
1. Cree chips lit up the Beijing Olympics, with 750,000 red, blue and green LEDs made by Cree helping to light up the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube buildings.
2. The company donated the $1 million LED system backlighting the shimmer wall at the Raleigh Convention Center.
3. Cree was founded in 1987 by brothers Neal and Eric Hunter, N.C. State engineering grads.
4. The company went public in February 1993. We covered it with a paragraph in our Feb. 10, 1993, edition. Market value of the company was less than $100 million.
5. Friday afternoon, Cree’s market value, as measured by the value of its stock, was nearly $4 billion.
The Best Camera
Photographer Chase Jarvis has taken loads of photographs with his iphone, and rather than continue to use a variety of post-processing apps, he developed his own. It is $2.99 from the itunes store and it has lots of positive ratings. This is first prong of his three-prong approach, which also includes a book and a photo sharing site, thebestcamera.com.
The Bain Project
The Bain Project was a site specific artwork created in the deserted and decommissioned waterworks plant south of downtown Raleigh. In the late 1930s, as Raleigh was growing, the city built a new plant to handle the water needs of the area. Here’s a link to historic information about the Bain Waterworks. This artwork project combined found objects in the plant, organic materials like branches and grass with a deteriorating industrial building. I was more interested in photographing the aging machinery and peeling paint than in the artwork, but some it made interesting photographs.
Here are the rest of my photos on Flickr and here are photos from other local photographers.
One of the most creative endeavors was a musical piece played by creating sounds on the building itself. A plant buzzer sounded, and a corps of white-coated employees marched down the main aisle and took their positions in the water holding tanks. They proceeded to shake, shudder and pound out the sounds of a working plant. Here’s some video of the piece.
100 Abandoned Houses
I found this great site, one of the handful of interesting things I have found using StumbleUpon, called 100 Abandoned Houses. It is a collection of photographs by Kevin Bauman of abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan.
The abandoned houses project began innocently enough roughly ten years ago. I actually began photographing abandonment in Detroit in the mid 90’s as a creative outlet, and as a way of satisfying my curiosity with the state of my home town. I had always found it to be amazing, depressing, and perplexing that a once great city could find itself in such great distress, all the while surrounded by such affluence.