Update your bookmarks and RSS feeds!
The redesign of Found Photography has launched and that requires me to do some maintenance and ask you to update your links. All you really need to know is to update your rss feed to this: http://www.foundphotography.com/feed/
and you can continue to follow this blog here:
www.foundphotography.com
As added motivation to check out the new site design, I have a free copy of Tom Ang’s new book, Fundamentals of Photography to give away. Click here to read my review of the book and add a comment to be entered to win the book!
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I am keeping an archive of this site live for a while, just to maintain my visibility to Google, but this is the last post I will make at the /photothoughts address.
Posted by Adrian on November 19, 07:52 PM
The Future of Found Photography
I have a birthday and Christmas coming up so I have been saving my pennies to purchase a new camera. Believe it or not, I actually have my eye on a digital camera, not an antique. My old Nikon just doesn’t do the trick anymore. I have enough giant SLR’s in my collection so I want a small point-and-shoot that also has gives me plenty of manual control. I have narrowed it down to the new Canon Powershot G10 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3. If you have a recommendation or preference between those two please add your thoughts in the comments.
You may have noticed a slow down in the postings here over the last year or so. I have been putting the time that used to go into camera experiments into creating a book of my photography as well as an assortment of other projects. If I am lucky, the book will be available in January, but I can’t promise anything. The tentative name of it is going to be “Isolation and Repetition,” but that may change.
The other reason for this post is to announce a redesign of this site. I am in the beginning stages of rebuilding this site from the ground up. As a result, the site will probably go down for some time while I am working on it. In the meantime, keep track of me on Flickr or my personal blog. Watch for the new Found Photography along with the book launch early next year.
Posted by Adrian on November 9, 08:45 PM
The World's Largest Camera?
I really enjoyed this YouTube clip showing a really large camera. He has it on a trailer that he can pull from location to location. Yes, I am already trying to figure out if I could build one myself. Enjoy...Posted by Adrian on October 6, 01:45 PM
The Lomo: Perfection is Overrated
I can think of nothing more boring than a photo that looks exactly like I planned. Some photographers have the ability to perfectly craft a photo by manipulating an environment until things fall into beautiful alignment. I definitely respect that, but I have no wish to work that way. For me the beauty is in the chaos, not the organization. Lucky for me I don’t have to make a living from working that way because leaving a photo to chance is literally a shot in the dark. You point your film in the direction of something interesting and hope for the best. That mentality puts me in the company of the Lomography fans. Here is a video documenting the rise of the Lomo camera:
Posted by Adrian on August 10, 10:44 PM
For the Love of Film
In preparation for my camping trip last week I stopped at Sam's Club to stock up on 35mm film. Not finding the film aisle, I asked the person at the photo counter. My suspicions were confirmed when he explained that two weeks earlier Sam's stopped stocking 35mm film. My heart sank. I know that eventually digital will completely replace film. It's just a matter of time. I have nothing against digital, and I would actually love to have a really nice digital camera. Still, it is sad to see the decline of film.
I was reminded how much I love film this week as I watched a slideshow of family photos. The slides were projected onto a white sheet taped to the side of a cabin. The colors were so warm and the photos were so beautiful. The aged slides were a living document, showing the effects of time. The dust, the color shifts, the less than perfect exposures, the scratches, all the imperfections made the images more than just pictures. These were actual artifacts of something real. I think that is what is really lost with the transition to digital. When you look at your digital pictures in 50 years they will look exactly the same - pixel for pixel - as the day you took the picture.
Posted by Adrian on July 27, 04:22 PM
Ashton Kutcher's Nikon Commercials
I thought it might be fun to make a somewhat off-topic post that dives into advertising and pop culture. You probably have seen the Nikon commercials where girls steal Ashton’s camera and take flirtatious pictures with it:
Frankly, I find the commercials annoying, but does that mean it is a bad advertisement? Nikon needs to sell cameras and the money isn’t coming from geeks like me who take apart broken antique cameras in their spare time. The money comes with selling tons of cameras to the vast majority of people who aren’t particularly interested in photography as an art form. The truth is that cameras serve a different purpose in modern society than it does for people like me. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, it just isn’t me.
Today the camera is a status symbol. The camera is a fashion accessory. The camera is a social toy. To the average person it is just a way to document your life and have some fun. So perhaps the Nikon spots are brilliant. With a market flooded with affordable digital cameras what do you do to stand apart from the pack? More megapixels? New technology? People expect a camera to take good photos and have the latest features. To sell more product camera makers have to find another way to differentiate themselves.
Nikon’s answer is to sell a lifestyle. The Nikon commercial appeals to the average person not because it is pushing “speed and a Nikon lens,” but because it is selling a lifestyle. Girls like the idea of using a camera to flirt with that cute guy. Guys like the idea of taking advantage of clueless babes. And this all happens in the context of some kind of party that you wish you were invited to. Sex, status, and a party lifestlye. The formula works for beer and deoderant, why not cameras? I guess all that is left to do is smile and say cheese.
Posted by Adrian on May 15, 10:19 PM
Pinhole Camera Made From Juice Box
Dennis from Captured Starlight has a nice pinhole camera made out of a juice box. A big part of my fascination with pinhole photography is the ingenuity of the photographers that build there own cameras. Anyone can drop a couple hundred dollars on the latest camera, but it takes a special motivation to build a picture taking machine out of the scraps you find in the garbage.
Posted by Adrian on May 11, 10:56 PM
Digital Photography Tip: Renaming Hundreds of Files
If you have a digital camera you most likely have a bunch of folders containing files with names like “DSC01442.JPG” or some similar naming structure. The ideal practice would be to rename each file with a descriptive title. If you took 300 photos on your vacation that can be a huge job. renaming the whole bunch would take forever so must of us just rename the folder and let the files keep the cryptic name. Luckly there are some utilities that allow you to rename large batches of files quickly.
The utility that I like is called “A Better Finder Rename.” It is available for both Mac and PCs and it lets you do complex renaming quickly and easily. The program costs $24.95 so I looked at some free alternatives but I couldn’t really find anything as good as A Better Finder Rename. Name Mangler (Mac only) is worth a look, but it is limited in what it can do. One extra feature that I couldn’t find anywhere else was its ability to rename files with names from a separate list. I have needed that ability once or twice and it is really handy. Check out their website to learn more about it.
There is one other situations that I use “A Better Finder Rename” that is worth mentioning. With my timelapse photography setup I endup with thousands of images. It is nice to be able to change the names of a large batch of jpgs with a few clicks.
I know I am not the only person looking for ways to rename large batches of photos, so if you have a solution that works for you, please share it in the comments.
Posted by Adrian on March 22, 12:39 PM
Argus Pinhole Modification
I don’t have a tutorial for this one, but I thought I would share with you the pinhole modification I made to my Argus. I already had the lens stripped away from my homemade tilt-shift lens experiment and realized that the small leftover body would make a nice pinhole camera. All I really had to do was attach my homemade pinhole shutter (remember the one made out of a floppy disk and a ballpoint pen?) which I modded to work with a cable release. Now I have a pretty decent pinhole camera that I can trigger with the cable rather than adding camera shake with a more traditional shutter mechanism (black tape). It isn’t my most beautiful camera, but it is small and it works! Here are some pictures of it:
Front of the camera with the shutter release cable:
The back with the film loaded:
The back of the camera opened up:
Posted by Adrian on March 2, 02:30 PM
Photo Skepticism: Friend or Foe?
The latest news photo hoax has me thinking about authenticity in photography again. In the most recent case, a chinese man doctors an image of a train and a bunch of antelopes. You can read the article to get the full story, but the image they show explaining how the fake was spotted is pretty interesting. I expected evidence such as cloned animals or something much more obvious. For example, one explanation depends on an antelope that kind of looks pregnant. Another says that the antelope would be more scattered if they were running from a train. One explanation is just flat wrong. It says that the train should be blurred and the antelope should be more in focus because the train is going 60 mph and the antelope are running slower. This explanation doesn’t hold up because the train is several hundred meters away. The antelope may not be going 60 mph but I bet their legs are and they are closer to the camera. I am not saying that the photo is real, but can’t we get an explanation that holds up to scrutiny?
Luckly, there are real professionals working to scientifically disprove the authenticity of photographs. There is an interesting article on wired.com that talks about methods that companies like Adobe are developing to spot altered photos. Adobe seems like the last company you would turn to lead the hunt for photo hoaxers considering they have made a fortune off of convincing everybody how easy/safe/fun it is to enhance and manipulate our photographs. Nevertheless, as the industry leader in photo manipulation they have to address a growing concern about the authenticity of photography. So Adobe finds itself in an interesting conundrum. How do you use a technology that is meant to alter photography to identify the people who are creating hoaxes? Where does harmless photo enhancement end and illegal photo manipulation begin? How do you convince a skeptical population to trust photography as the truth? They have a quote from Kevin Connor, who is senior director of product management at Adobe. He says,
“There’s much more awareness and much more skepticism when (people) are looking at images. That’s why we think that’s something we need to get involved in. It’s not healthy to have people be too skeptical about what they saw.”
Not healthy to question what you see? That is a shocking statement when you consider what he is implying, that it is healthy to accept what you see as real without questioning. Yikes! The article closes without really giving much hope that there will ever be a trustworthy way of telling whether or not a photo has been altered. While that may seem like a tragedy, it is a side effect of an advancing civilization. Think about the past when photos represented the “truth.” That was a more dangerous time because it ignored the editorial nature of photography. Think of all the manipulation that happens to an image in camera. Somebody has to pick the subject matter. The photographer isn’t an emotionless bystander. He composes his shot with an agenda. He choses the exposure and controls the focus. These are editorial decisions. You can make the same old lady look like a saint or a witch just by how you choose to take her picture. To accept an image as “truth” regardless of how it was originated is dangerous. Defense attorneys, law enforcement, news organizations, protective governments, conspiracy theorists, traditionalists and photography purists will continue to find ways authenticate and de-authenticate photos. I can’t blame them, but I firmly believe that a skeptical population is a better alternative to blind unquestioning masses.
Posted by Adrian on February 26, 09:31 PM
