Been a long time since I put anything up here…as usual it comes in a deluge.

First is a website update. I streamlined the logo and have separated out galleries. There will be some new galleries added in the coming week. Piece of advice; don’t bother creating your own custom website. Just get some service to do do it like aphotofolio or livebooks. It is not worth the effort. I had to migrate to a new server and have lost days to that. And I sort of know what I am doing, just enough to be dangerous. Massive PITA. If you are interested, I have used slideshowpro.com to provide the functionality, also their Director software to manage the backend. It is well integrated with Lightroom so I can export images and they appear instantly, formatted.

New also is iPhone and iPad compatibility via HTML5- ok so you don’t care- but the website works and formats for whatever iOS or Android device you are on. Check it out.

You might notice some new faces in there- tomorrow I will post about recent work.

When you are in it and someone says something great, you think to yourself, yes, remember that advice, then when you get home and try to remember all that sage wisdom, somehow it has faded…

The experience itself has not faded- Look3 is a tremendous festival, very well organized, just to mention a few things:

The location could not be better on a pedestrian boulevard with great food all around, tables in the center to meet and eat, even AC outlets on the lampposts! There were signs and banners everywhere, you could find your way around, and all the volunteers and staff were super motivated and excited.

Charlottesville is well integrated in the festival, all the merchants love the business, even cab drivers have opinions on film vs. digital. They must be reading photoblogs…

The curation and direction of the festival is firm: they are not about workshops altho they have them- what they are about is education, and the “image”. It is the festival of “the photograph”, and they are dedicated to enriching the experience of making and sharing work. They want to get young photographers next to the experienced veterans, and they want to put experienced artists next to each other on stage to see what happens- the pairing of Sally Mann to interview Nan Goldin was a masterstroke- it completely changed my idea of Nan’s work. As she says, she has no relation to “NanGoldin”, whoever she was.  That person is gone. And Nan even turned the tables on Mann, interviewing the interviewer, in a conversation on a couch on stage where it felt like we were listening in on a private conversation, you wanted it to continue to see just where it was going to end up.

The pairing of Massimo Vitali with NPR’s Alex Chadwick was another great idea- a professional interviewer who does his homework, and that voice- if you closed your eyes you could imagine it was Sunday afternoon and you were listening to a great radio interview, and Massimo spoke very intelligently about his work and the realities of the contemporary art world- about how Marianne Boesky challenged him early on in his development to consider presentation as central to what it was he was doing- he realized he was making objects- large scale plexi mounted images, not images- and to concentrate on showing a small body of work over an extended period of time to cement in the viewer or buyers mind who he was and exactly what he did. And it ran counter to the advice he was getting and his own ideas that he had formed over a 30 year commercial career, he was told the beach was not interesting, the pictures were not interesting, and he should drop it and move on. That has since been proven wrong, altho Massimo himself acknowledges he does not exactly understand the contemporary art world and its values, but at last he is getting to make the work he wants to make. A very illuminating interview.

Scott Thode curated what seemed like two-thirds of the work in the evening slideshows- and did a superb job. He must be nearly blind by now. There were several standouts for me- Gillian Laub’s Four Generations, Tim Davis’s Dollar General Drive By, Jeff Jacobsens completely amazing From the Catskills,  on night two, and on the final night, Donald Weber’s Interrogations, Erin Trieb’s The Homecoming, and Robert van deer Hilst’s Chinese Interiors stood out for me. Crowd favorites were Yuri Kozyrev’s The Arab Spring got a huge applause, and the festival ending video from Jacob Krupnick- Girl Walk//All Day Shot which you can see heregot everyone to their feet when the featured improv dancers from the video magically turned up live and performed. A great way to end the evening.

I could probably write more, all the interactions and conversations, how everyone is faced with similar challenges and as David Alan Harvey says, we are one big tribe and this is a gathering of the tribe. The festival is also about community, and is one of the few places I know where photographers and editors feel like they are standing on the same side of the line, all trying daily to get to the image.

If you can go next year, go. I’ll be there.

Look3 in brief so far:

Excellent organization, staff, signage, location-(C’ville) theatre, food.

iPhone rig (owle bubo) turns heads even more than highly expensive german rangefinders or affordable japanese rangefinders.

Videolicious app making all possible- see WtJ…

Hot, humid, friendly.

Next year- absolutely.

A New Year and a New Website…well, another update.

What’s that Crazy Font you say! – Well Sir, Madam, it’s “Eloquent Regular” by Jason Walcott after the long lost Pistilli Roman. Just the perfect Tonic to Pick You Up I say! Peppy? And How! Well, where can I get some? Veer!

There is some confusion on the intertubes about who created it first-either John Pistilli or some other blogs say Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman-I am sure some typophile can correct me. Depending on how it is deployed it can either look playful or ‘eloquent’ or classic like Bodoni/Didot.

It gets a little funky small so I am not sure about the blog header, but I wanted consistency.

And yes, designed by me. The function parts come as before from Slideshowpro and Director, it is based on their layered thumbgrid demo for those that care, with some custom ActionScript thrown in. I posted before about it here.

The site coding is from Freeway Pro. I don’t know of any other web design software that allows a total idiot like me to make a decent website.

Every site is a trade off, for me my goals are to get people to see a lot of work quickly and big if they want to. So the update saw me redo every image for the site at 900 px wide-This is about as large as I want to go.

Also performed an upgrade on the portfolio-

Went for a couple portfolio meetings yesterday and one editor was surprised by the physical porfolio-she was seeing a lot of laptops. Really? Talk about No Plastic Sleeves! Speaking of, yes those are acetate sleeves, the International House of Portfolios kind (iHOP). I’ve read a lot kvetching over there about the practice-but Really? You want to change the order of your book or one image and you can end up reprinting most of the book? And what if you don’t want to print on any of the double side offerings- or on matt paper? I love Harman Gloss. It is what I print on Period. And it ain’t two-sided. You think I’m gonna glue that sh– together? Really? You think acetate is going to lose you work? Really?…I think bringing a laptop in is gonna lose you work. You have no idea what it really looks like.

Another editor said they were seeing a lot of Blurb books. For the price it might be cheaper even. But then you give away control of colour I would expect, and what you can print in CMYK is nothing like what you can print on inkjet or c-print. Which brings me to my final point; minilab develop and scan. I had a roll done recently just to see what was up, what was out there. Picked the wrong lab. L&I on 22nd. Can you say rip-off? 18$ for dev+scan-get this a whopping 15mb scan. Do you know what that really is? 2 Megapixels. Yes, your iPhone has 2mp resolution. But they call it 15mb-which is a to confuse the point, 1700px x 1100 px is ~5mb per channel RGB- there’s you double digit file size-15mb! Thanks a lot! And colour-don’t get me started! But it did make me think about what I am seeing from the gang rediscovering film-

wonky purple shadows, no detail, stained highlights. Excuse me while I book an ad shoot. Off to look for another lab.

Whatever Apple has up it’s sleeves today, remember the Newton.

Everyone likes to say it was ahead of its time, and even when that time came, it was still ahead. Yes the date there is 2006, when I ebay’d it. I was not the first owner either. Who knows how many had put data into it’s “soup”. That was how the Newton stored information, in one giant archive. You could search anything for anything and every application has access to the entire soup. The only reason I post about it on the eve of Apple’s announcement of the iWhatever is that it bears mentioning that this idea of a tablet really points backwards to a paper-society. All the metaphor were there, the handwriting recognition, pen input, you could fax from it, you could even email from it but that was not around really when the Newton was new. It was a digital paper pusher. The iWhatever will be very different I am sure.

Does not matter any more…

“This panoramic view of Citi Field consists of many individual photographs stitched together into a single image”

“My name is Kylie and I took a picture of my fish Dorothy and I’m going to send it to my family…I plug this thingy in here and click this…I’m going to make this picture much better…I click…It’s Better. I’m going to send it to my mom and dad. Say Cheese! I’m a PC and I’m four and a half!”

Kylie will appear next in a Crispin Porter and Bogusky ad where she explains RAW conversion and HDR to the newspaper industry. In other news Errol Morris drones on for 10,000 words telling us that photographs are not reality, as recently as the civil war.

Kylie doesn’t care and neither should you.

Print is ready to go. Don’t want to hear no guff about the ancient TV, the Steely Dan album or the turntable. Check out the show details here.

Mr Obama, a couple things you need to know about Canada.

You are a person of colour, not color. 

Do yourself a favour and don’t ask about Canadian bacon. No one eats it. 

You can have a donut however. Tim Horton played for the Toronto Maple Leafs. They haven’t won a Stanley Cup since before I was born. I gave up on them durning the reign of Captain Video. 

We are America’s feisty little brother. You’re all grown up and like to ignore us, but we really just want and need your approval. Otherwise, why would Toronto continue to harp that it is a “world class city”? It just wants to be New York for some reason.

America wants heroes. Heroes heroes heroes. Canada has anti-heroes. Losers, goofballs, misfits. I know, it makes no sense. We’re screwed up. Blame it on the weather.

The American myth is east-west. The Canadian myth is north-south. Americans escape from the self and head west to purify themselves through violence.  Canadians go north and retreat into themselves and dissolve like the snow falling on cedars while ice fishing and getting drunk on beer. It is more the cycle of seasons, nothing changes. Barfly was a Canadian movie.

Canadian beer is not stronger than American beer. We just measure alcohol by mass and you by volume. Or the other way around. Hic…

That bit in the Michael Moore film about how Canadians don’t lock their doors in the city was bunk.

We have inherited a good deal of British snobbery. Your aloofness will play well here. Canadians despise their leaders.

You are like one of our most controversial prime ministers, Pierre Trudeau. Loved and hated equally, he was young, slim, sexy. His wife palled around with Jagger, Warhol, probably a few terrorists. You would seem downright folksy next to his famous insouciance.

Don’t talk to us about change. We have too much of it with loonies and toonies in our pockets.

The english french thing. Qu’est ce que c’est? It was our civil war, except that there was no emancipation principle involved, just two colonial powers engaged in a pissing contest. 

Americans have Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Canadians can look forward to Law, Order and Good Government. We are a nation of civil servants. Ouch.

Canadians don’t say eh? anymore. We say ‘hey? This has happened in the last 10 years or so to my ear. And we all sound like a Minnesota librarian. Or Sarah Palin. Dontcha know…

Wayne Gretzky never took steroids. 

Treat us with respect, and we will be your loyal friend. Canadians are nothing if not loyal.

Here are a few different concepts for ebook readers, mine on the lower left, essentially a larger iPhone, Classicapp, available now for the iPhone, Greg Raiz’s concept for a resdesign of Kindle (via daringfireball.net) with less clutter, and Plastic logic, currently vapourwear but who knows.

It is interesting to read the comments on Greg’s redesign and what is argued over, colour vs. not colour, keyboard vs. not keyboard. etc. We are all very concerned with how the object is the make or break aspect of reading books and magazines on an electronic device. My last post also focused on the importance of the feel of the object, how Apple gets form factor right. (sometimes)

The more I look in to this however, (being a blog I have spent, oh, probably 10 minutes but who is counting?) the more I see a glaring issue that is probably the single biggest obstacle-format wars. Consider how many different formats and ways we have of representing text and images on screen, html, pdf, text, Word, ePub, eReader format, whatever form of DRM Amazon is using, etc. We haven’t even begun to develop the marketplace for electronic reading and already it is balkanized. 

You thought it was hard for Apple to get some sort of consensus from the music labels for the iTunes music store, this is more of the same. Amazon perhaps has the headstart now with two versions of the Kindle and their massive catalogue behind them. But don’t be fooled by the device. The device is critical, but the format is where the real money is. 

You will probably see the entire magazine and newspaper publishing industry go down in flames before you will see a consensus on how to deliver the product to a handheld device. A magazine publisher would do well to throw in with someone soon, although there is no real competition (Apple, where are you?-SJ famously said he was not interested in the market because no one reads anymore. I hope he was being disingenuous). 

You could envision a bundle where the reader is subsidized by the publisher, buy a Kindle and get to select from a few magazine subscriptions to get you started. Here is Popular Mechanics and oh, by the way, the entire archive going back to 1945 is there too. Vogue back to 1935. I think the obstacles are probably not what we think they are. All of this eInk technology hubbub is a tempest in a teapot. We already read more from LCD’s than paper. I believe the eInk thing is a canard. “Market Research” said that people don’t like reading online but the question is more about typography, presentation, and screen resolution. We now have small hi resolution devices that are more than adequate for reading. It will get better. This is not the issue. Bandwidth, there is a real issue, 3G is the bare minimum and laughable that North America is still stumbling along with this. Blame your phone, cable and internet provider. Detect a pattern here from my last post?

There is a great opportunity here that is going a begging and we are  not arguing over the right issues. Format, DRM, Service.

Publishers, get on board while you still have staff left to publish…