Visual Journalism

Yep, if you’re on an iPhone or iPod Touch head to the app store and get the NPPA app. All the news headlines as well as some member services stuff.

This is brilliant – I think everybody should get one.

(Thanks to Michael Posey for the link.)

This has to be the clearest explanation I’ve ever read about why some lenses are awesome and some are just miserable. I’ve seen this myself – I had a 35-70 mm f/2.8 lens that was soft on every camera I owned at the time. I hated it, told numerous people to avoid it like the plague. But everyone else who had one loved it … whoops, my bad.

I do it as much as anyone else. There’s a camera with me all the time and, much to my family’s dismay, I use it. I shoot short videos to embarrass them with later. My phone has a little program called Evernote that lets me store snippets of information for later retrieval, and it’s synched to my home and work machines. Lecture ideas, quotes, links – they’re all in there. There’s a Flickr account with tens of thousands of photos in it. I have a searchable database of images for the home life AND the work life. Don’t have a printed calendar, don’t know anyone’s phone number. And all of my instantaneous thoughts go into Twitter, which feeds Facebook and my personal blog in the end.

I have no tangible memory, it would seem And I’m not alone. John Sutter at CNN.com tried to record everything for a week with mixed results.

This is something I haven’t worried about yet, to be honest. All I tend to need are a few cues and my memories come back, but I wonder if that’s an ability that will atrophy over time. I think about my computer and the two things it really does – store information and process information. If my brain works in a similar way, and I stop storing information, what’s it going to process? Or will relieving it of storage responsibilities allow it to spend more time on processing?

Or maybe I did worry about it once and typed it somewhere, but now can’t remember where …

Slaid Cleaves sings that, “Everything you love will be taken away.” Do you love your online life? Robert Scoble is afraid it may all rot away on you.

Have you backed up enough today?

Okay, I admit I haven’t read this as a whole, but I read all of the pieces as Mindy McAdams, Flash Goddess, posted them over the last year or so. She’s now compiled a 42 page PDF of her advice on stepping up your online journalism game. Given the thoroughness and inventiveness of her past work, this is a Must Read.

And it’s FREE. Yes, all that knowledge, FOR FREE. Because she cares about journalism, that’s why.

Because your grandkids may want to know …

If you know me, you know I’m paranoid. I am constantly afraid of losing stuff – either stuff I’ve created or stuff that’s happening in front of me. I take pictures of everything I can and then do everything I can to not lose those photos.

Andy Ihnatko has a great post up today talking about preserving memories – it’s not about how, it’s about why. What treasures from your past do you cherish?

Wired magazine has a listing of things in the photo world they believe need to be dumped down a black hole. I agree with most of them, though, as I wrote to Tommy McGahee who sent me the link, watermarks – if done reasonably – don’t bother me much.

And I’m getting tired of HDR, too … and the megapixel war is just stupid at this point. I’d been shooting with the Canon 5D for about a year and a half and really loved the files coming out of it. After a few months with the 5D Mark II, the files – though nearly twice the size – just aren’t the same.

At least Canon (and some others) are getting the picture – the newly-announced G11 is a lower resolution than the G10 it’s replacing. Smart.

It’s official – Kodak has announced it will no longer produce Kodachrome. After 74 years of production, the last batch is the last batch. (Sales had declined to where they were only making it once a year.)

Having grown up on Kodachrome 25 and 64, I’m pretty saddened by this. Though I’m part of its demise – I haven’t shot a roll in over a decade …

Also first seen on the New York Times‘ Lens blog … a marvelously simple and effective documentary piece on the conversion of the abandoned High Line railway into a park. The framing of the two interviews is bordering on exquisite and there are some artsy camera movements that work amazingly well to help the viewer get s sense of place and scale.

For those who think about online compression, around 2:30 into the piece is a massive pan – and the compression is just about killing it, wiping out most of the detail. The smaller movements work, but that big one – while it would look fine at full resolution – really suffers here.