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aisle photos

I really like Bryan Boyer's Aisle of Averages...

Perspective shots of grocery store aisles are distorted back out of perspective so that the shelf forms a rectangle in the picture plane instead of trapezoid. Then four passes of motion blur @ 999 to arrive at a kind of loose average or wash of the shelf's chromatic contents.

...even though I'd rather imagine Bryan mounting his camera on a shopping cart, setting the exposure time to 10 seconds and then hurtling the cart down the aisle shouting "Fore!"

hammer, nail, plank.

Henri Cartier-Bresson has died, at the age of 95. From the Times' obit, these two fantastic paragraphs...

He insisted that his works not be cropped, but otherwise disdained the technical side of photography; the Leica was all he ever wanted to use; he was not interested in developing his own pictures.

"My contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail in a plank," he said. "First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in."

(Hammer, nail, plank. I can't wait to see how Kenneth Baker turns such a simple philosophy into 1500 words of inscrutable Art Speak.)

feedburner, flickr and feed splicing

If you subscribe to my feed, you may have noticed the today's appearance of a few photos. These are the result of a very interesting partnership between Flickr and Feedburner. Feedburner now supports Flickr photo feed splicing: all I had to do was give Feedburner my Flickr username, and since Flickr outputs my public photos in Atom and several flavors of RSS, Feedburner grabs it, and merges it into my blog feed based on pubdate. Chocolate, meet peanut butter.

As FeedBurner CEO Dick Costolo points out in his post on the Burn This blog, the new feature points the way towards a much richer future for XML content delivery; one where the notions of syndication and aggregation begin to blur...

This new capability begins to expose part of the real vision for FeedBurner. There are many publishing/media/communication channels that make up an organization or individual's digital personality. Currently, when we want to communicate our images, thoughts, bookmarks, favorite music, etc., we must find the appropriate publishing mechanism, and then separately find an appropriate sharing and communication mechanism.

This is why the content syndication space is so interesting. As I ranted about in a post on the Supernova conference blog, if you're out to use RSS to replace email, you've got a long road ahead of you. But if you can use it to start to change the way that "publishers" and "subscribers" produce, distribute and consume information, then you're on to something. Flickr and Feedburner are on to something.

(And for the three or four people who don't know this already, and care about things like transparency and full disclosure, I'm an advisor to Feedburner, and a friend of Flickr.)

google + picasa

Had to see this one coming: Google Acquires Picasa.

Picasa was founded in October 2001. In May 2004, Picasa announced a technology partnership with Google's Blogger service to make publishing digital photos with Blogger faster and easier. Further product integration plans have not been announced. Picasa users will not experience any interruption in service.

daily zeitgeist

The Flickr folks are just knocking the cover off the ball lately. Their newest invention: the daily zeitgeist. Seen here on the right (but most likely not available via RSS, so if you're reading this in your aggregator be sure to clickthrough to see the full effect), it's a badge that displays an animated tile of community photos, your photos, your contacts' photos or yours and your contacts' photos. The one at the right are photos from my contacts.