Author: Alesh Houdek

Weekendly clickables XIII

  • For the first time in the history of humanity, there are more people living in cities than in the countryside. Fact! And of those many billions of city-dwellers, every 1 in 3 is living in a slum. The Places We Live is an immersive online series of audio slideshows and environments that document several slums around the world.
  • Ze Frank does the news. Update: Ze Frank wonders what you think of him doing the news.
  • “Children taking part in a study to measure how much exercise they do fooled researchers by attaching their pedometers to their pet dogs.” (via)
  • WARRUG.com, traditional hand-woven rugs from Afghanistan with some contemporary imagery, for your purchasing pleasure. #buymethis
  • Here is a very very high-resolution picture of Prague you can have fun zooming around in.
  • Europa Film Treasures, an impressive archive of early films. Check out the Gordon Highlanders (from 1899), Ki Ri Ki – Japanese Acrobats (fake!), Nocturno, The Saucy Chambermaid (porn!), The Cuckolded Pierrot, and The Airship Destroyer (awesome music), and Farfale (a colorized film from 1907).
  • Turning the corner, a neat-0 infographic on the business cycle since 1969.
  • Apology calling card.
  • “He may love [Scarlett Johansson], but up til now, Woody Allen has misused her. Here, she plays her age and, for the first time I can think of, a character whose inner and outer lives both seem organically compatible with the unconscious carnality the actress herself exudes. And someday entire grad school thesis will be written about the way Allen shoots every sex scene that she’s in, in extreme, soft focus closeup on her head, letting the camera drift to concentrate on her blonde hair spilling out of control to consume the frame.” Yeah, something like that!
  • The Google Chrome OS is a bad idea, will probably fail, and suggests an unsettling trend for Google.
  • An now, a little bit of internet art to soothe your frazzled nerves.

Photography and editing

Prague abbey Ken Rockwell drops another article on “ow to make good photographs,” this one emphasizing composition and urging you to carefully study your image before taking a picture. He has a particularly formalist bent, but the basic idea of thinking and experimenting before shooting is important.

The only way to ensure strong composition is to look through your finder and make it that way before you press the shutter. Move yourself around to change perspective, which moves elements around in your frame. You can change the relative sizes of elements by moving in and zooming out to maintain the same framing. When you do, closer elements just got bigger while distant ones just got smaller.

This is all true, but there’s another phase of thinking and work that takes place after the picture’s been taken that often gets under-appreciated, which is editing. Editing is looking at your photos after they’ve been taken to figure out which ones are the good ones. What happens during editing is just as important as what happens while shooting. Photographers who post 50 photos from a single day just don’t get it, or they’re not trying to make art. You need to do the hard work of finding the one or two images that rise above the rest by a confluence of factors. Forget what you were thinking while you shot the pictures, and forget which ones you thought would turn out the best; invariably, the best pictures are the ones you didn’t give a second thought to while shooting.

My photoblog isn’t really about taking pictures. Most of the photos I’ve posted so far are years old — it’s about looking at old collections of photos with a new perspective. Editing. Take today’s picture, from a trip to Prague in 2002. I enjoyed this photo at the time, but only years later does it stand far above most of the others. Mastering technique and composition is critical to becoming a good photographer, but so is the ability to look at a hundred photos and realize that the best way to represent the whole group is to just show one.