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Boing Boing: Satellite photography alphabet

Cory Doctorow

POSTED AT 9:32 PM November 3, 2009

Art and Design • Photo • Space

Satellite photography alphabet

The Google Earth Alphabet has upper and lower case and numbers and punctuation formed inadvertently by geographic features visible from space.

Upper case

Lower case

Numbers and punctuation

(via Making Light)

FT: This year's Prix Pictet winner

This year’s Prix Pictet winner

By Peter Aspden

Published: October 23 2009 16:52 | Last updated: October 23 2009 16:52

‘Chongqinq IV (Sunday Picnic)’, 2006, by prizewinner Nadav Kander

A Chinese family sits at a table, chatting and drinking tea. Its members seem relatively well-off – there is a tablecloth on the table and they are sitting on smart wicker chairs – and quietly relaxed. Their picnic spot is not particularly appealing, yet rich in symbolism: they are sitting next to the Yangtze River and underneath a concrete-pillared flyover.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Arts - Nov-24

It is the conjunction of the two Chinas, the ancient society that relied on its 4,000-mile-long waterway, and the newly emerging economic powerhouse that is springing to life all around. The flyover provides some shelter from what looks like an indifferent day; the river looks filthy. The family, and millions of their fellow Chinese, are at a crossroads. Will the country’s new orientation bring them the prosperity and happiness that they wish for?

The powerful image is by the Israeli-born, British-based photographer Nadav Kander, who is the latest winner of the Prix Pictet, the international photography prize dedicated to the theme of sustainable development and the environment. Kander received the award from Kofi Annan, former secretary-general of the United Nations, at a ceremony in Paris on Thursday night for his series of works on the Yangtze.

The works in Kander’s portfolio speak eloquently of a society in transition, and show some of the small tragedies that remain at the margins of China’s breakneck embracing of modernity. More than 3m people have been displaced along a 400-mile stretch of the river in the name of progress. “Common man has little say in China’s progression,” said Kander in his artist’s statement to the judges. It is this attention to the “smallness of the individual” that has powered his award-winning series.

Pictet Prize

Slideshow of artists shortlisted for 2009

This is the second year of the Prix Pictet, founded by the Swiss private bank Pictet & Cie and co-sponsored by the Financial Times. The theme for this year’s prize was “Earth”, following last year’s subject of “Water”. The 2008 winner, Benoit Aquin, was a member of the jury for this year’s prize.

The choice of 47-year-old Kander to receive the SFr100,000 award was a bold one, considering the presence of much better-established “art” photographers such as the German Andreas Gursky and the Canadian Edward Burtynsky on the shortlist of 12. But Francis Hodgson, chair of the judges and the FT photography critic, says the award is “not influenced by traditional career trajectories”.

Kander is best known for his commercial work, which includes advertising campaigns for Nike, Levi’s, Mercedes and John Lewis, and album covers for Placebo and Snow Patrol. He is also one of the world’s top magazine photographers: The New York Times magazine devoted an entire issue to “Obama’s People”, his 52 portraits of President Obama’s inaugural administration.

“He has been a brilliantly successful commercial photographer because he has eschewed having a voice of his own,” says Hodgson. “When he has had art directors, he has been able to do anything for anybody. Now he has had to find his own style, and he has found it consummately well.”

Hodgson admits that some observers may be surprised by the judges’ decision. “But one of the strengths of the Prix Pictet is that we are not much bothered over whether [the candidates] think of themselves as artists, or journalists, or commercial photographers. What is important is their ability to put their message across. Kander has astonishing, virtuoso skills. He is a communicator.”

The photographs shortlisted for the prize are currently on display at the Passage de Retz gallery in Paris. They include Gursky’s giant untitled work that turns a landfill site in Mexico City into a seemingly abstract landscape: “a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional world landscape”, in the artist’s words, “in which the world’s waste assumes the position of the former landscape ideal”.

The images of the Chinese photographer Yao Lu also trick the eye: what seem to be traditional Chinese landscape paintings are in fact composed of green-netted rubbish dumps.

These works capture the art-versus-journalism dilemma that photographers working in this field must resolve. Even the most grotesque sins against the environment can be made to look beautiful; but while the spectator may relish the irony, there is always the danger that the message is diluted.

On the other hand, we are in danger of becoming immune to the hard-hitting messages that bombard us regularly via the news media, each clunky image serving to make us that little less sensitive to the issues at hand.

These are the challenges that face the Prix Pictet jury, which this year included the architect Zaha Hadid and Sir David King, director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford University and former chief scientific adviser to the UK government. What remains constant is the moral imperative behind the award.

Sir David says that the tools of science and technology are not enough in themselves to effect the change in attitude that is required to combat the perils of climate change. He called for a new cultural “renaissance” that would effectively chronicle the dangers posed to the environment.

As part of the award’s remit, the shortlisted American photographer Ed Kashi has been commissioned to work in Madagascar, where Pictet & Cie is supporting a sustainability project. Kashi’s portfolio, “Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta” examined the costs of oil exploitation in west Africa.

Consistency demands that next year’s Prix Pictet be based on the theme of fire or air, the other two elements that have posed an increasing threat to the planet as the effects of climate change make themselves felt. Yet, as the organisers acknowledge, so intertwined are all the elements that there is the danger of repetition of subjects covered in the first two years of the prize.

They may need to think more laterally, to ensure that the world’s best takers of pictures retain their ability to shock us into overdue action.

‘Prix Pictet 2009: Earth’ is at the Passage de Retz gallery until November 23. Tel: +33 (0)1 48 04 37 99; www.passagederetz.com, www.prixpictet.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

ST: Picture perfect landing wins a top Cannes prize

Picture perfect landing wins a top Cannes prize

April 17, 2009

By Irene Tham

A PICTURE of a stork making a perfect landing has made 67-year-old Vincent Foong (above) the Amateur Photographer Of The Year at the Sony World Photography Awards. First, he topped the competition's natural history section - which was reported last month. Then he beat seven other amateur category winners to the top prize of US$5,000 (S$7,500). The first Asian to win, he received the award at a gala dinner at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, France, last night. The Professional Photographer Of The Year was American David Zimmerman, for a picture of a desert scene. The contest, in its second year, drew 60,000 entries from around the world. All 12 judges were won over by Mr Foong's picture, which captured how storks survive an inherent design flaw - their spindly legs - which often leaves them with broken limbs. Judge Jurgen Schadeberg, a German photographer, said the image 'showed humour, pathos and good timing'. British judge Zelda Cheatle was charmed by the photo's simplicity and said: 'I love the expression on the bird's face.' Mr Foong, who helps at his family's interior design firm, took up photography in the 1970s. He photographed people and buildings until he switched to birds five years ago. This has meant making solo trips to remote corners of Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. His winning shot was taken on a trip near Muar, in Johor. For more than a year, he drove there at 3am every other Saturday to spend the whole day photographing birds. In a telephone interview, he said: 'The family time I missed during the last five years has finally paid off.' He is planning a book of his work from the past. Making the trip to France meant missing elder daughter Alena's 16th birthday, but she said: 'Of course I don't mind him not being here. I'm so proud of him. His winning the award is like a birthday present to me.'

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Economist: Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Helen Levitt, photographer of New York, died on March 29th, aged 95

Estate of Helen Levitt

OVER the course of her long life, many people wanted to ask Helen Levitt about her photographs. She always refused, at least as far as public pronouncements were concerned. “I’m inarticulate,” she would say. “I express myself with images.” Or, “If I could say that, I wouldn’t have to take pictures.”

The result was that few people knew her, outside professional photographers and her poker circle. And that was fine with her. She lived defiantly alone except for Binky, her tabby cat. The only photograph released of her after her death showed a not-unpretty face, crop-haired and heavily lipsticked, about to scowl. She was in her 50s then, and looked as though the camera had outraged her.

More determined interviewers tracked her to the fourth floor of the walk-up brownstone on East 13th Street where she lived for most of her life. The stairs didn’t deter her, despite her sciatica and a strange, lifelong inner-ear disorder that made her feel “wobbly” all the time. But in her last decade she found her old Leica was getting too heavy to carry about, and switched to a Contax automatic. It was a poignant moment. She had been inspired to use a 35mm Leica by Henri Cartier-Bresson, no less, after trailing him one day in 1935 as he took photographs round the wharves of Brooklyn. He became a great admirer of her work. She thought any comparison of herself with him was ridiculous.

Her pictures were mostly of Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. She shot them in black and white, as silver gelatin prints, in the 1930s and 1940s and in colour dye-transfer prints in the 1960s and 1970s. In between, she got into movie-making for a while. Her theme was the same, the streets of New York. Apart from a trip in 1941 to Mexico City, she never found a better subject in her life.

The grittier parts were her particular joy. Her world was run-down streets, rubble-filled building sites, warehouses and litter-strewn front steps. This was urban photography with a vengeance: small scraps of sky, no trees. When she was going with Walker Evans in 1938, borrowing his camera as well (“of course”) as sleeping with him, he used to be afraid of going as far uptown as she did. Some of her young male subjects, lounging around in their zoot suits and fedoras, had an unmistakable air of menace. But mostly she brought back images of gossiping women and her favourite, scrambling children. A right-angle viewfinder allowed her to take the picture without them knowing, even, as Evans showed her, when riding right beside them in the subway.

Here and there

Her birthplace was in Brooklyn, where her father was in the wholesale knitwear business. She aspired to something more artistic, but found she couldn’t draw. For a time she trained in ballet, which taught her to appreciate the musculature of posing bodies and the spontaneous grace of her child subjects. After dropping out of high school she went to work in the darkroom of Florian Mitchell’s commercial portrait-photography studio on $6 a week. There she was hooked.

A good image, she thought, was just lucky. But her New Yorker’s instinct seemed to tell her exactly where to wait for one. A broken-down car would soon attract people to lie under it, peer under the hood or try to push it. A cane chair, put out on the sidewalk, would draw an elderly man with cigar and newspaper, or a plump young woman in a housecoat wilting in the heat. With luck dogs would come out too, rough-haired mutts or poodles with fresh-shampooed coats. The open back of a truck would reveal delivery men moping on piles of sacks, or dozing among pink and blue bales of cloth. Any abandoned thing—a tea-chest, a mirror frame, the pillared entry of an empty building—would soon sport knots of children diving in, climbing up, fighting and contorting their small bodies in every kind of way.

Her pictures did not have names. “New York”, and the year, was the label on most of them. They did not need explaining; they were “just what you see”. Many had a backdrop of posters, graffiti or billboards, which gave a commentary of sorts. “Special Spaghetti 25 cents.” “Post No Bills.” “Nuts roasted daily.” “Buttons and Notions, One Flight Up.” “Bill Jones Mother is a Hore.” Her earliest project with her first, secondhand camera was to photograph children’s chalk drawings on the pavements. She never tried to speculate on them. What mattered was the patterns they made.

In the 1960s, when she got two Guggenheim grants, she began to shoot the streets in colour. The tricky developing ultimately frustrated her, and the streets, too, had changed. The children had retreated indoors to watch television. But where she had found grace and texture in black and white, colour now provided beauty in correspondences. The multicoloured balls in bubble-gum machines could be picked up in a girl’s dress, or the red of a stiletto shoe matched with the frame of a shop window. Her broken-down cars were now lurid beasts against the stucco walls. And out of her peeling, greenish doorways could come women in furs, or pink hair-curlers, or orange-striped socks.

She did not rate her own work highly. Though her original prints eventually sold for tens of thousands of dollars, she let them pile up in her apartment in boxes labelled “Nothing good” or “Here and there”. Her hopes when she started were for photographs that would make a socialist statement of some sort, but she abandoned that on Cartier-Bresson’s advice. A “nice picture”, as she reluctantly admitted some of hers were, was a work of art that had value in itself, as well as a celebration of the random, teeming work of art that is the city of New York.

Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

Smashing Magazine: Tilt-shift Photography

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/11/16/beautiful-examples-of-tilt-shift-photography/

 

Tilt-shift photography is a creative and unique type of photography in which the camera is manipulated so that a life-sized location or subject looks like a miniature-scale model. 

ST: Don't eat, let me shoot

Home > Lifestyle > Taste > Story

Don't eat, let me shoot

 

While more and more camera-wielding diners snap photos of food before eating, not all eateries allow it

By Huang Lijie
		Amatuer food photographer such as (from far left) Jason Koh, Benjamni Yeo, Martin Goh, Dr Leslie Tay, Chua Wee Kiat and Gregory Yeo take pictures of memorable dishes and some of them post the pictures on their food blogs. -- LIM WUI LIANG/THE STRAITS TIMES

Some say grace, others chime 'Bon Appetit' and yet others, in an increasingly popular meal-time ritual here, exclaim: 'Don't eat, I need a picture of that dish first', before snapping photos of it.

The popularity of food blogging and the proliferation of pocket digital cameras and camera phones have spawned a rash of amateur food photography here.

'She should've just ordered a pizza if she wanted a picture of it.' STEFANIE CHAO, a university student, on a diner at the next table who asked to photograph her vegetarian pizza Don't just point and shoot Sunday Times senior executive photographer Alan Lim gives five tips on how to shoot a good food picture in restaurants using a pocket digital camera. 1. NOTE LIGHTING To shoot in dim lighting without flash, sit near a window, where it is brighter. The natural light coming through it is softer than that from the flash and will make the food look more appetising. If shooting at night, place the dish in a spot that catches as much light as possible and place two white cards on both sides of the dish. This allows more light to bounce off the cards and onto the dish. Use the menu if it has a hard cover and is white on the inside. Simply open it and stand it with the dish between the white facing pages. 2. OFFSET FLUORESCENT LIGHTING To shoot in fluorescent lighting, set the white balance mode to fluorescent - indicated by a fluorescent light bulb icon - and again, place two white cards on both sides of the dish, as mentioned above. 3. FIND BEST ANGLE Unless a dish has an artistic presentation, the best angle to shoot a dish is from a 45-degree angle instead of top-down, so that the composition is not too cluttered. 4. FOCUS ON DETAIL Photograph only a portion of the dish, and pick a visually attractive detail to focus on, for example, a rosy-hued prawn topping the dish. Photographing the entire plate of food will result in a picture that has too many distracting details. 5. BE NEAT When photographing hawker food, remember to clean the sides of the plate for a neater image.

Those with the habit capture everything from an exquisitely plated entree in a fine-dining restaurant to char kway teow slapped on a plate at the hawker centre.

The reasons they cite for such behaviour run the gamut from offering eye candy on food blogs to capturing a rapturous gastronomic moment, to be re-lived by looking at the pictures.

Camera-wielding diners have become such a force that some restaurants, including Shunjuu, a Japanese eatery in Robertson Quay, have had to scrap their no photo-taking policy.

Mrs Tan-Wee Chen Yen, 36, owner of Shunjuu, which opened in 2003, says its no-photography rule was abolished last month to 'keep up with the times'.

She says: 'Photography wasn't allowed because the food doesn't look as appetising when shot under the restaurant's dim lighting and we didn't want people to see those misleading images on blogs.

'But now, there are so many pictures taken by diners circulating online, including pictures of food from Shunjuu, that we have realised there is no stopping them.'

Of the 25 restaurants LifeStyle interviewed, 19 allow diners to take pictures. These include swanky eateries such as Les Amis in Shaw Centre and Iggy's at the Regent hotel.

After all, it is hard to begrudge enthusiastic diners keepsakes of a cherished meal, says Mr Michel Lu, 37, executive director of fine-dining restaurant Prive on Keppel Island, which permits photo-taking.

He adds: 'We allow it at our restaurant as long as it's not intrusive to the other diners and bright flash isn't used.'

The restaurateur also says that he snaps pictures of memorable dishes with his pocket digital camera when dining out and he shares those images via e-mail with a group of gastronome friends.

Indeed, some have grown so passionate in their pursuit of the perfect tableside Kodak-moment that a recent workshop for 20 people on how to take better food pictures received more than 40 applications. It was co-hosted by food blogger Dr Leslie Tay of ieatishootipost.sg and a major camera brand.

Restaurants that forbid photo-taking of food within their premises do so mostly because they are wary of copycats.

Contemporary Chinese restaurant Bosses in VivoCity and Hong Kong-style cafe chain Central Restaurant do not permit phototaking.

Owner Jun Low, 40, says: 'We appreciate the positive publicity that comes from bloggers who post pictures of their enjoyable dining experience at our outlets.

'But we can't be sure that those who take photos aren't competitors looking to copy ideas. We've seen many of our unique creations appear in other restaurants.'

One such example is its kai lan on ice, where the boiled vegetable is served on a bed of ice shavings with a soya sauce and wasabi dip on the side.

So while it can be tough trying to catch diners who sneak in a few pictures when the wait staff have their backs turned, some restaurants continue to impose a no photo-taking rule.

Ms Carolyn Tan, 38, vice-president of marketing and corporate communications for the Tung Lok group of restaurants, which includes My Humble House at the Esplanade, explains: 'We come up with new and innovative dishes regularly and while you might find pictures of them in certain publications, the no photo-taking rule in our restaurants helps us keep the culinary creations exclusive for a little while longer.'

Not all with the habit, however, are food bloggers or contributors to food review websites.

Some, like Ms Adeline Wu, who is between jobs, do not post the pictures she takes online. The 24-year-old, who has an interest in cooking, stores them on her computer and refers to them when she wants to replicate the presentation of a dish when cooking for guests.

Likewise, businessman Martin Goh, 60, who does not keep a food blog, has a detailed archive of food pictures on his computer to help him recall good dining places and dishes to recommend to friends.

Ms Gwen Lee, 32, director of photography gallery 2902 Gallery in Mount Sophia, does not find this habit surprising, given Singaporeans' love for food.

She says: 'The foodie nation that Singapore is means that when people snap pictures to document their lives for the purposes of amusement, entertainment or personal sharing, it would likely involve taking photos of food.'

Dr Tay of ieatishootipost.sg, 39, says his friends and family used to be a little impatient when he started his food photography hobby in 2006.

He says: 'When the food gets to the table, people just want to eat.'

But they have since grown accustomed to his habit, although his wife does sometimes ask him to stop snapping if he gets carried away, so that his two children, aged six and nine, can eat.

University student Stefanie Chao, 24, who does not photograph food, finds this habit annoying.

The avid foodie recalls being at a swish Italian restaurant last year when a diner sitting at the next table asked to photograph her vegetarian pizza.

She says: 'There should be a proper etiquette for this. I don't mind if people photograph food at their table but what that diner did crossed the line. She should've just ordered a pizza if she wanted a picture of it.'

lijie@sph.com.sg

BusinessWeek: Online Sharing with Creative Commons

Intellectual Property August 15, 2008, 9:27AM EST text size: TT

Online Sharing with Creative Commons

The Japanese Net entrepreneur Joichi Ito makes a case for free-content distribution on the Internet. Nine Inch Nails is an early adopter

by Kenji Hall

Not long after Joichi Ito uploaded a photo he had taken of Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia last year, he noticed something odd. Most of the Internet luminaries and technology gurus who had write-ups on Wikipedia had poor-quality photos or none at all. It wasn't just that. "I realized that some famous people have no free photos online," says Ito, a U.S.-educated Japanese venture capitalist and co-founder of Digital Garage, a Tokyo Net startup incubator.

Ito decided to do something about it. Last May he started turning his Leica and medium-format cameras on practically anyone he met on his travels. Ito spent half the year crisscrossing the globe for meetings and conferences, and within months he had a trove of thousands of images: from O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, to film directors George Lucas and J.J. Abrams (of Cloverfield and Mission: Impossible III fame). There were even shots of Ito's own sister Mizuko and other family members.

Now he plans to publish them in a book, titled Freesoul. But Ito doesn't expect to profit. In September, when the book goes on sale on Amazon (AMZN), Ito will give away the photos online. Anyone will be able to download, re-use, republish, or remix the photos for free; Ito only asks that they credit him for the originals. He thinks more people will download the photos than buy the book. "If we sell a couple thousand copies [to recoup the costs], that's fine," says the boyish 42-year-old Ito.

Giving it Away on the Internet

Ito isn't just some amateur shutterbug with an altruistic streak. In April he took over as the head of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers copyright licenses for creative works. Creative Commons is the brainchild of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig. He started it in 2001 because he felt that traditional copyright laws might hamper sharing over the Internet. Typically, Creative Commons licenses let creators give their works away online. But they can choose to let others use the work for commercial purposes, as Ito's book will, or restrict their work to noncommercial uses.

The handover from Lessig to Ito marks a new phase. Lessig was the visionary whose credentials as a legal expert and former Supreme Court clerk gave the organization credibility with lawyers. Ito is cut from different cloth. He created one of the first Web pages, experimented with hacking, started Japan's first commercial Internet service provider before the Net caught on, and has kept an online diary about his exploits since the mid-1990s, before "blogging" became a household term. Many hope Ito will recruit more entrepreneurs, businesses, and ordinary Net users. "Joi brings a set of applied experiences from the unavoidably rough-and-tumble world of business," says Reuben Steiger, former chief evangelist of Linden Labs and CEO of San Francisco consulting firm Millions of Us.

Ito has set himself an ambitious goal: to turn Creative Commons into a global mass-market brand. "The mission is to simplify licensing to make it easier for normal people to use copyright without hiring fancy lawyers," he says. That goal is a long way off. Creative Commons estimates that just 140 million online works sport its logo. Its critics say the licenses add legal complexity to copyright disputes.

Even so, the movement has influential backers. Microsoft's (MSFT) Word, Excel, and Powerpoint software now come with tools to set up Creative Commons licenses, and Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) allow users to search for Creative Commons-licensed films, photos, and books. More than 200 universities worldwide have joined OpenCourseWare, a group that distributes Creative Commons-licensed course materials for free. (Through OpenCourseWare, Japan's Shinsei Bank said in April it would let the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur teach students about the intricacies of the bank's computer network.)

Making Money by Being Free

In March rock band Nine Inch Nails released songs using the license. And on Aug. 13 a Washington federal appeals court ruled on a case that lets artists and programmers use contracts to distribute free software and digital works for the public good.

By publishing Freesouls, Ito puts himself at the center of the debate over Creative Commons. It's one way to find out where the organization's shortcomings lie. That's important as the free-content-distribution model continues to evolve. "I believe a lot of people will make money on it," he says. "I want to prove that by writing books and investing in companies that will make money on it. Hopefully, a lot of people will replicate that."

But Ito also frets about the possible conflicts of interest in his dual role of businessman and Creative Commons chief executive. To keep his critics at bay, he regularly discloses details about his $40-million fund's investments and his appointments to corporate boards.

Credit Where It's Due

Ideally, artists who give away some of their works to advertise their talents might later receive paying jobs. But not everyone who uses Creative Commons-licensed content knows the rules. For example: Last July, BusinessWeek included in an online slide show Ito's photo of eBay (EBAY) founder Pierre Omidyar from photo-sharing site Flickr (YHOO) but didn't credit him for it. After someone saw the photo and alerted him, he sent an e-mail asking for attribution. The next day, BusinessWeek added his name in the photo's caption.

The same could happen with Freesouls. To avoid privacy disputes, he asked every person who appears in the book to sign a waiver ("which was a pain," he says). He also had to explain that they weren't just granting him permission to use their images. The Creative Commons license will let anyone download the photos for free and publish them—and keep all the profits.

Hall is BusinessWeek's technology correspondent in Tokyo .