Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

September 26 - Save Your Photos Day

 




 
Posted on September 26, 2020

(Last Saturday of September)

One thing I have been thinking about this month is organizing and saving my photos. I have been considering printing some and making scrapbooks, OR creating special Shutterfly books, OR maybe even signing up for an automated book-creation app like Chatbook.




And this whole time, I didn't even realize that September is Save Your Photos Month!


At the official website, there are short classes on offer to help us organize, back up, display, and share our photos. Photo printing is a complex topic, because the chemistry of the paper and developing chemicals used will affect the photo: Will it fade? Will it yellow? And of course, printed photos could be torn, burned, lost entirely by any number of accidents or disasters. But photos that are kept in a digital form may be lost, as well - a stolen phone, a hard drive crash, even a change in software! Even photo albums on social media sites need to be backed up - I know someone who lost YEARS of photos when his Facebook and Instagram accounts vanished - and the company couldn't help him recover his accounts! Yikes!


Another really tricky thing: what to do about old family photos that came to you already faded or worn or ...? How can you restore them? Well, maybe the folks at the Save Your Photos Day link can help?



Make time today to learn about saving your photos!! 


Photos can be among our most treasured possessions - things that are often difficult or impossible to replace - and if I had time, photos and important documents would be the top two things I'd grab if I had to evacuate my house.



Photo by the amazing photographer Dorthea
Lange (1895 - 1965). She said: 
"Photography takes an instant out of time,
altering life by holding it still."




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June 29 - National Camera Day

Posted on June 29, 2020



Now that so many humans are walking around with amazingly excellent cameras in their hand, pocket, or bag at all times, and now that so many of us can share our photos so easily and so far and so wide...

Well, our lives have changed in some amazing and scary and beautiful and important ways!

Let's think about a few of them:

Many of us enjoy "traveling" vicariously. I am super-duper unlikely to ever see China's Rainbow Mountains or Turkey's Pamukkale Terraces in person, but I love seeing photos of these amazing places!




Because so many of us have our phones-with-cameras with us at all times, we are ready to take pictures and videos of the unexpected moments of life, the teensy beauties of nature, and the adorable reactions of kids.






I mentioned that we, the people, have so many cameras ready at hand (via our cell phones), but businesses and governments also have a lot more cameras. From street cams to body cams on police, security cameras on everything from residential houses to bank ATMs to stores and corporate office buildings and and and...

So those of us who live in cities are all being filmed, all the time, and that can lead to preventing crime, finding and punishing criminals, holding accountable people who run red lights, and providing evidence about police interactions that went bad.


BUT there are also all kinds of scary things about so many cameras being trained on us. With facial recognition software and loads of street cams, security cams, all-sorts-of cams everywhere, our privacy has been eroded, and organizations that have bad intentions can much more easily target us or even frame us. Facial recognition sometimes identifies the WRONG person, and yet the supposedly objective information might persuade police and judges and juries and make innocent people face imprisonment. (And that already happens far too often!)

Not only does facial recognition sometimes identify the
WRONG person, it fails with women and people of color
way more often than it does with white men. So wrongful
arrests and other incorrect identifications are much more
likely to happen to people who already have less power
 in society - and injustices will lead to MORE injustices.
On the other hand, all of our phone cameras really, really help to capture photos and videos of those in power abusing their power. A white person who wastes taxpayer dollars and police officers' time by calling 911 because a black person is doing such nefarious activities as bird watching, barbecuing, or sleeping - well, we can film the racist harassment and use that film to protect the innocent and hopefully shame the racist. Even more important, victims and bystanders filming officers who are using too much force or actually murdering citizens has turned out to be very important to start the movement toward policing the police!

As Will Smith tweeted, racism is not getting worse, it's getting filmed!









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November 12 - Plastic Bag Birds = Art???

Posted on November 12, 2019

Have you ever seen scads and scads of starlings flying in the sky, swooping and turning as if the huge flock shares one brain? 

Thousands of starlings gathered together are called a murmuration. And there's this thing that happens as the murmuration fly toward their nests as the day draws to a close, or if a hawk approaches the edge of the flock.







It's as if the starlings are artists, performing mesmerizing dances for us. Be sure to check out the video at the link above, and maybe this video as well...

Well, artist Alaine Delorme used plastic bags to represent birds and produced murmuration art that explores our feelings about natural environments and human-made pollution:




Today is the anniversary of these glorious photos being shown to the public, in 2013, after years of work to create them.

This series of photographs is called Ephemeral Plastic Sculptures. It's a curious name, because "ephemeral" means lasting just a short amount of time...and plastic, as we all know, lasts a very loooooong time. 

Plastic in landfills doesn't break down at all rapidly (some kinds take a thousand years to decompose!), and unfortunately, plastic in the rough-and-tumble ocean does breaks down - but not into atoms that can be safely used by living creatures. Instead, plastic in the ocean breaks down into teeny pieces of...plastic! These microplastics are ingested by sea life, and they can be toxic and probably cause problems we don't even know about yet.

So plastic isn't ephemeral, but Delorme's "sculptures" are, right? 

Well, except...they aren't really sculptures!
Delorme takes photographs of individual plastic bags and then uses those photos to digitally create these amazing murmuration pictures. Check out his methods in this video.

 







(Second Tuesday of November)
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