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Digital Masters by Nancy Brown
Digital Masters: People Photography: Capturing Lifestyle for Art & Stock (A Lark Photography Book) by Nancy Brown is perfect for the Mom With A Camera crowd, who own a digital SLR and want to get into the portrait business. The tone of the book isn’t overly technical, and what technical aspects are mentioned are basic so that one can have a working understanding of equipment. Her tip of having a reflector for outdoor, sunny portraits will help a lot of people. For the most part, she focuses on the process and how to approach the shoots. The sample shots look like stock photos (which is one area she specializes in) of children or people in their 50s, 60s or 70s.
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Catfish
Catfisha movie about the Facebook age and tells a story about identity, truth, love, art and perhaps mental illness. It’s shot in a documentary style and works best if you know nothing of the plot. The suspense builds, peaking on a horse farm in Michigan, and then the twist arrives, bringing a cautionary and emotional denouement too soon. Too soon because, depending on your point of view, it’s either a pitiful story or cynical fable or plain stupid hoax.
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A Day in the Future
As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all.
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Curation is the new search
Google has been much maligned of late, due to its increasingly spammy and gamed results. Paul Kedrosky makes a point that curation of web content will be on the rise.
The answer, of course, is that we won’t — do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.).
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Risk Everything
A user, riskeverything, on Reddit, responded to a thread, entitled “What small decision did you make that altered the entire course of your life?” with the story of his handle. It spans three continents and involves London’s Big Ben clock tower.
I go to London and on first day I went to big ben. I want to get the standard tourist shot – me and BB (cheezy but I am an australian and it is the other side of the world!). Was about to ask this guy to take my photo and he lay down on the grass and shut his eyes.
I turned to the nearest person. It was a girl reading a paper and asked her to take my photo.
That was the easy part.
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Dan Wells – Mr. Monster
The second book of the I Am Not a Serial Killer series, Mr. Monster, begins shortly after the first. John Wayne Clever still harbors feelings of a sociopath after killing the demon, Mr. Crowley. John’s life seems to be copacetic for the moment, and improving with the growth of his relationship with Brooke as a high school girlfriend. Yet, mysterious bodies begin to appear in random, public places, and John believes a second killer is amongst the town. The last third of the book is between John and the killer with a unique twist that provides believable, psychological suspense. There, John also battles his own inner demons. The books subplots of John’s sister’s boyfriend, and Brooke tie in very well in the book’s final act.
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Disney, masters of theme park operations
Disney has theme park logistics down to a nimble operation that monitors all aspects of a park. They use a combination of weather reports, historical records, airline and hotel reservations to predict park capacity, but once the Magic Kindom opens, ride queues, cash registers at in park restaurants, foot traffic in particular areas are all monitored from a command center. From central command, more boats can be deployed if the queue reaches a certain thresh hold. Or:
Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ †said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.
And sometimes, they even throw parades.
What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!†into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction.
It seems like a fun way to earn more dollars.
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Joe McNally knows sugar plums
Ballerinas are all the rage at the moment. Black Swan, New York Times critic Alastair Maccaulay stating that one dancer, Jenifer Ringer, “eaten one sugar plum too many” for a recent production of the Nutcracker. And now Joe McNally, famed photographer, comes to her defense.
Joe took portraits of Jenifer with a giant, 40×80 Polaroid camera on his own dime. He knew she possessed the poise and grace to keep her composure for the length of time needed to get a decent shot.
You also could not focus the camera. You had to focus your subject. Small shuffles back and forth would place them in that tiny zone of critical sharpness. Then they had to hold that position for about 30 seconds while the interior workings of the camera got spooled up, the lights got shut, and the flash fired. Not easy to do. Especially on point.
But Joe recognizes an artist whose body is their art.
It’s been equally wonderful to watch from afar as she has fought through personal struggles, dropped out of dance for a while, and then returned to the stage as a principal dancer. She has always talked straight up about the life of a ballerina, and her struggles with her weight. Her talent and candor, I feel, make her a beacon in the dance world, which prefers to keep the pain, the anorexia, the sweat and the tears behind the curtain. Ballerinas look amazing on stage. Offstage, their bodies can be just as beat up as an NFL offensive lineman.
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True Grit (2010)
True Grit, as remade by the Coen Brothers, is ok. It’s less hokey than the original with John Wayne, but plods along with a series of events strung together. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn works well as he fully embraces the character, and Hailee Steinfeld plays the spunky Mattie Ross with conviction.
I think the issue is that the movie is made to be a serious western but the incongruity of a 14 year old girl marching a one-eyed, drunken federal marshal is anything but serious. Further, the snake pit scene still feels tacked on for the sole purpose to completely redeem the Cogburn character.
The visuals and cinematography are well done and evoke a western feel.
