hawktrainer's bookmarks tagged Flickr

Sepia No More: The Medium, on Flickr’s often-overprocessed style.

As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. …

Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, one of Flickr’s most popular photographers, is the leading exponent of the site’s style. An art student from Iceland who turned to social networking to acquire commissions for her drawings, she came to photography relatively late. Tellingly, she learned to work Flickr before she became proficient with a camera. She discovered how to create the minicollections called “photostreams”; how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Guoleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

First Wedding - my strobist experience: Advice for photographing a wedding.

Build a Solar Power Generator for Under $300

One of these “will run radios, fans, and small wattage lights all night, or give you about 5 hours of continuous use at 115 volt AC, or about an hour boiling water.” That’s great, but I’m more interested in this design’s ability to scale-up with the addition of larger components; I’m guessing the price grows exponentially as you increase capacity.

(Originally posted to rain.org.)

Naomi Wolf, on civil disobedience done right

It’s worth opening in a background tab and half-listening-to while you check whatever else is so damn important this morning.

The kind of mass protest that always works is illegal just about everywhere in the United States today. Why is that? For a protest to be effective, you have to stop traffic. You have to stop traffic. What keeps you from getting a permit in the United States? Stepping a foot into the street. Now why do you have to stop traffic? Because for a protest to do anything, it has to disrupt business as usual.

I should also note that hawktrainer shared the link via Treehugger via Chelsea Green via After Downing Street.

Enlarged polaroids, elongated exposures, extended minds

Jennifer Trausch
[via hawktrainer]
Trausch uses a 235 lb. polaroid camera to capture her amazingly clear images. Hawktrainer recommends the Skateland series; so do I. Especially the shot named Larry. There’s an interview with her from 2007 on The Daily F’log (along with a picture of her using the camera).

The Sky in Motion
[via migurski]
It’s a particularly striking example of a timelapse capture of the night sky, taken on Eagle Island, Maine.

View Larger Map

Supersize mind
[via blackbeltjones]

the Extended Mind Thesis . . . fits my life intuitively. I feel that both technology and media extend my mind, and mingle it with other minds. This is why I do what I do; I like that promiscuity, that cultural reproduction.

Pseudoscientific submission slips into science journal, Swedish stealth ships not suspected

Creationism Slips Into a Peer-Reviewed Journal
[via nielsen]
The submission was a review paper of some of the recent literature on mitochondrial interactions but the paragraph that gave it away was just a hodgepodge of lyrics from DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album.

Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World

[via hawktrainer]
The ship looks really, really cool. Except for that protrusion at the top. It’s probably called a radar cone but I can’t help but think of a dunce cap, which might be a good thing. Dunce caps are named for John Duns Scotus, a 13th-century Scottish philosopher, who accepted

the wearing of conical hats to increase learning. He noted that wizards supposedly wore such things; an apex was considered a symbol of knowledge and the hats were thought to “funnel” knowledge to the wearer.

The ships are also said to be equipped with a particularly sharp version of Occam’s razor.

Charles Avery’s altermodern island
[via rodcorp]

8. When The Guardian wrote about Avery they put one of their little Bluffer’s Guide quizzes at the end, which said: “Move over YBA: He is part of a new generation of artists practicing under the banner of Altermodern. Alter what?: A term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.” (The Altermodern was covered on Click Opera here.)

I carried over the links in the original post; both are worth a visit.

Preoccupations
[via jbushnell]

A blog, just added to my NetNewsWire. See also: delicious.com/Preoccupations.

Historical superimposition

‘Untouched’ East German flat discovered
[via hawktrainer]

It appears the inhabitant of the humble flat fled in a rush.

Grocery brands from the Socialist state filled the kitchen and old bread rolls still lay in a string bag.

A wall calendar showed August 1988 and an empty bottle of Vita Cola, Marella margarine, Juwel cigarettes and a bottle of Kristall vodka were in the kitchen.

The only foreign product to be found was a West German bottle of deodorant.

See also the most popular bookmarks tagged ‘abandoned’ on delicious.com.

The Siege of Leningrad ended 65-years ago today
[via bldgblog]
Old photographs from the Siege of Leningrad superimposed over photographs from the city as it is today. (English translation of the original page.)

“rising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed”
[via mtchl]
In order to minimize the carcinogenic dust storms off of barren Owens Lake, the City of Los Angeles built a series of over 5,000 irrigation bubblers on the lakebed at a cost of $425 million. Pruned compares these bubblers—sad, broken sprinklers, really—to fountains:

since time immemorial, fountains have been creating micro-climates, cooling gardens, palaces and sartorially bedecked aristocrats. The array of bubblers, you could say, is also a type of weather modification system: an anti-dust storm.

Looking toward EveryBlock’s future
[via migurski]
Adrian Holovaty announces the EveryBlock publishing system will go open-source when their grant ends five months from today. With so many smart people able to get their hands on that code, I wonder how long until we have the beginnings of a Craigslist for location-based local news.

I also wonder if this decision by EveryBlock will force Sufjan Stevens into open-sourcing his album-writing formula so the rest of us can release material based on the other states.