seeing & being seen

Photoshop Express (currently in Beta version) is online and free and full of snazzy interface. A limited implementation of the full software package, but still… is this Adobe reaching out to the masses? Or trying to addict us?

Cautionary Tale 1: Yikes. Read the fine print:

8 Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Cautionary Tale 2: Photoshop Disasters.

Just back from LA. Photo highlights include several exhibits at the indomitable Getty, particularly (and predictably for me) Graciela Iturbide’s birds.

one to tide you over, as I dart off to yet another coast.

Target practice.

Just back from FotoFest in Houston - thus the posting lapse. Obsessive documentation of one of skyscrapers outside my window:

Or I could if I had my super-duper “Thru-Vision” terahertz camera handy.

Sony Alpha A300

A new camera from Sony: A Camera that Frees your Face, as per David Pogue reviewing for the NYTimes. The new Sony is an SLR that functions much as a compact camera in that it it also held at arm’s length from the body - no one eye/lens association needed, thanks to a 2nd sensor that feeds the LCD panel directly. I wrote much of my thesis about this eye/body/camera association, and how our understanding of sight itself is informed by & leads to technological shifts such as this.

…when it works properly, Live View can contribute mightily to your photographic success — especially when the entire screen tilts up or down, as it does on the A300.

For example, you can now shoot a parade over the heads of the crowd in front of you. You can shoot pets and babies at their eye level without having to squat or kneel. And you get infinitely better photos of young or camera-shy subjects when you’re smiling and making eye contact than when you’re hiding your face behind a piece of Darth Vader equipment.

Hmmm. And, photographic ethics invoked:

(Last weekend, my adorable but camera-shy 3-year-old proved this point emphatically. About the only decent photos I got of him were the ones in which I held the camera at waist level with the screen tilted up.)

Yikes. Troubling “anti-terror” campaign.

I’d say that a)many more than thousands of people take photos every day, and b)more than a few of them are quite likely indeed to be odd.

Boing Boing links to some remixed versions of the offensive poster.