Digital video Holga...

Apropos the "digital Holga", it occurs to me that we have something like it for video now, in the iPod Nano. A creative medium hardly gets smaller or simpler than that. (For all it's base on highly complex technology.)
I'm watching a small film called Haru - The Island of the Solitary. (Recommended me by TTL.) (So rare that it's not even in IMDb.com! I've never seen that before.) It was filmed all in super-8, and the quality is not much better than you'd get from an iPod Nano, I'll bet. The speech/text was written by Tove Jansson, the author of the Moomins, and filmed by her girlfriend Tuulikki Pietilä.
There's a special charm about the really basic.

Update:
emptyspaces points to this. I like the sample art video more than I'd have expected.

TTL expands:
Thanks for mentioning the Haru film. It's a powerful piece of footage. I'm not exactly sure what gives it its impact. But analyzing it feels somehow sacrilegious.

BTW, I did find it in IMDb, under its original Finnish title Haru, yksinäisten saari. Someone also posted a nice review there (in English).

(The DVD I have have two options: Finnish audio, or Swedish with English subtitles.)

No puns please

I've always had mixed feelings about puns. Generally, if I make them, I love them, and if others make them, I don't. :-)
I refuse to take responsibility for the one below, and I'm sure Tommy who sent it does too.

There was a man who entered the local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

---
Update: A few years ago I gave my friend Laurie a birthday present, I guess a book or a film, and I said to him: "I considered giving you one of those new Apple Cinema 30-inch monitors. But then I thought you'd probably be embarrassed by such a display."

Make The Girl Dance: Baby Baby Baby

[Thanks to Joe R.]

Three bare chicks in a Paris street, music video. (I don't know if the girls are the band.)
These chicks will go places, ya hear.
Dang censorship strips, they are offensive to me. :-)

Update thanks to Aniko: lyrics here.

Interesting how the video picture is mirrored (laterally reversed), I think it's to obscure the text in the signs on the street, to avoid distraction (as if), and possibly copyright offense or whatever. (A comment on youtube sez it is so certain tv stations can show it without advertising for anything.)

It just occurs to me: probably the girls wore patches on nipples and pubic areas. They would be covered by the blackout strips anyway, and your imagination helps out.

Use "Postage Paid" Envelopes to mail a brick to junk mailer

"Use "Postage Paid" Envelopes to mail a brick to junk mailer", article.

Maybe a little too vindictive for my taste. But that may be because I don't get very much junk mail... if I could do something like this to spammers, that would be another story!

Pup comic

A wonderful web comic (from the domain name, it seems the author's name is Drew Weing), showing a little of the potential of the medium.
Works best with a good Net connection and a large monitor.

Killer whales vs penguin vs little boat

[Thanks to TC Girl.]

Oooh, tricky. Could have been dicey. The penguin had nothing to lose, but the humans is another kettle of fish as it were.

Kids vids fun

Keep 'em coming, Aunt Lidya.

Icons about ideologies

More on advertising

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. -- Stephen Leacock

This is interesting.

I always felt odd about advertising. Isn't it almost dishonest by definition? You make people buy by appealing to emotions, almost exclusively.

Panasonic GF1 review

Panasonic GF1 review.
Despite lack of tiltable screen and, with the little lens, lack of stabilization, both regretable, this is a very interesting camera. One of the best contenders at the moment in the area of combining compactness with good image quality. You need a large pocket for it, admittedly, but then you get image quality comparable to cameras twice the size and weight.

Retro Digicam...Digital Holga?

Retro Digicam...Digital Holga?, article.
Sometimes I feel like going super-simple. It can be creatively freeing. I once photographed during a vacation only with disposable cameras.
I think the future will feature more cheap and simple digicams.
BTW, the Holga, like the Diana, is a super-cheap film camera, gawd-awful image quality, but some artists use that to their advantage.

Scott Campbell money art

Scott Campbell money art, laser etched, article/pics.

Actually I'd heard it's a federal crime to destroy money (typically).

Video winners

I watched the first couple of winning videos here. Is it just me, or are they really noisy and irritating and pointless? Like MTV the next generation, only without the talent and sensibilities.

Carell's Daughter Profits From Paparazzi

Carell's Daughter Profits From Paparazzi, article.
"Steve Carell's 8-year-old daughter is learning how to profit from her dad's celebrity status by selling lemonade to paparazzi lurking around their Los Angeles home."

Hey, here's a new web site trick I have not seen before. When you copy a piece of text from that web site and paste it somewhere else, the text is followed by the URL of the article!
I'm sure it can be an important promotional tool if many people casually copy/pastes text into emails.
The web is not what I learned about it the nineties. Back then web code was just a simple text page with a few simple codes to format text, links, or images. Now it's so complex I don't think I could learn it if my life depended on it.

Ukrainian Feminists Against Porn

Ukrainian Femenists [sic] Against Porn, post. Hmmm.

Nadin

(Upcoming model on Domai.)

(I don't post full nudes here on my personal blog, because it has a different mission and audience from Domai, but occasionally I'm especially charmed by the face of a new model and will show that here.)

Frostie dancing

OK, so maybe we are anthropomorphizing, and maybe this is the kind of thing your aunt Lidya sends you, but well, it's just funny.

Do you own what you buy?

It’s Still A Duck: Court Re-Affirms That First Sale Doctrine Can Apply to “Licensed” Software, article.
"Building on a prior ruling, a federal court has re-affirmed that a Seattle man was not infringing copyright law by re-selling software he obtained from an Autodesk customer.
The ruling is bound to frustrate the copyright industries, which have struggled for years to convince courts and their customers that the only thing you “buy” when you buy software is a limited and temporary right to use that software under certain conditions. In other words, they claim buyers aren't owners.
The distinction is no mere technicality. Under the Copyright Act, owners of copyrighted material are given substantial rights in the particular copies they purchase. One of the most important of these protections is the "first sale" doctrine, which says that once you've acquired a lawfully-made CD or book or DVD, you can lend, sell, or give it away without having to get permission from the copyright owner. Without the first sale doctrine, libraries would be illegal, as would used bookstores [...]"
-
Aha! I've always wondered about libraries, how it worked legally and financially.

Girl on phone

Murphy's law

Murphy, an Irishman, was applying for an engineering position at an Irish firm based in Dublin. Jones, an American was applying for the same job. Both applicants, having the same qualifications, were asked to take a test by the department manager.

Upon completion of the test, both men only missed one of the questions.

The manager went to Murphy and said, "Thank you for your interest, but we've decided to give Jones the job."

"Why?" Murphy protested. "We both got nine questions correct! This being Ireland and me being Irish, I should get the job!"

The manager replied, "We have made our decision not on the correct answers, but on the question you both missed."

"And just how would one incorrect answer be better than the other?" Murphy asked.

"Simple," the manager replied. "The answer Jones put down for question number 5 was, 'I don't know.' You put down, 'Neither do I.' "

Shirley clowns (updated)

[Thanks to Igor.]

American beauty queen of 1975, Shirley Cothran, clowns around.
When you can do like that and still be cute, you're really cute.

Bob R said:

She is now married and used her winnings from Miss America to get her PhD in education. Here's her site.

Gals on bikes

[Thanks to Ron.]

You can say what you will about China, but they got some MoFo acrobats!
And some well-built bikes!

Ole pics, D100

I suddenly felt like digging up some old photos which I'd never published before. No sooner said than done. Well, a little sooner.
I think they are all from a Nikon D100, my first DSLR*. And one of the earliest really good digital cameras you could get at a reasonable price. I still have good-sized prints framed on my wall taken with that camera.
(My good friend, pro photog Laurie, had the Nikon D1, which he'd bought a year or two before. He got well hot in the top when he saw that the D100 took much better pictures than the D1, at under a third of the price.)






*Update: no, I lie. I had a Canon 30D before that. Or was it called D30? Damn their naming games. Anyway, it was the first affordable (relatively, at about $3000) DSLR at three megapixels. Then Nikon leap-frogged them to six megapixels with the D100. At six megapixels is when the cameras stopped being toys for real.

Zanger Rinus - Hey Marlous

Peach and Denny

I wish it was text instead of this awfully formatted graphic, but it's a cute little story anyway.
update: DF simply googled it, here it is. (Duh, I could have done that, I've even blogged about how to do that. Must have been wee hours.)

Talking about cool stories, this is a good one, about Van Halen and brown M&Ms.

Follow-up on British coppers

New article re the ongoing debacle of the British police sometimes harassing photographers for no good reason.
What sounds nice is this...
Featured Comment by David Miller: "Getting well into my grey panther years, I summoned up a bit of long-languishing young revolutionary spirit on a recent five week walking holiday around England—I thought it would be a bit of a lark to get myself arrested for photographing a policeman, and set out to snap everything in uniform from Southampton to Carlisle. Complete waste of time: none of the coppers so much as raised an eyebrow, and when I began to ask them about the law I couldn't find a single one who had heard of it. 'Sounds a bit daft to me,' was the usual response. And during our stay we saw several televised news items which displayed the constabulary in a far-from-flattering light. When it comes down to it, this may be a bit of a tempest in a teapot."
-

M9 review (updated)

Mike Reichman reviews Leica M9.
"Using a digital M Leica also means not being able to shoot more than 2 FPS, having limited high ISO capability, needing to remove the camera's bottom plate to get at the battery and even the SD card, not having dust shake removal or image stabilization.... In other words, a digital M Leica is in many ways a limited camera from the perspective of the all-singing, all-dancing polycarbonate wonders that are available for a tenth the price from any of the major Japanese camera makers. Get over it! Why?" ...

Michael has been a major Leica user and fan, even professionally, for many decades, so he knows whereof he talks. He sez Leica has now made the Digital M Leica which is worthy of the name.

Me, I have never used a Leica, so I could be wrong, but I'm not sure I could live without exact framing and autofocus. But then there's the mysterious newly announced Leica X1 which seems to have both, not being a rangefinder. But then, is it really better than for example the Micro-Four-Thirds cameras? I'm sure it has an outstanding lens, but Panasonic's lenses are excellent also, and I doubt the difference will be such that you'll notice it if you're not really looking for it.
Ah, it's a tough job being a connoisseur, but somebody's gotta do it. I think. Maybe. Well, let's not go there.

Update: I'm a bit shocked to see that the 18MP Leica is clearly sharper than both a Canon 21MP camera, and a Sony 24MP camera. I'd like to know more about how much of this is due to the lens, and how much is due to Leica being, so far as I know, the only maker of a 35mm-sized camera who has chosen not to put a "low-pass" (or "AA") filter in it. That filter is a solution to the colored sheen (like oil on water) one can sometimes get when photographing fabrics, due to interference patterns. However, this is not a common problem, it can be solved later in software if it occurs, and worst, the filter lowers the sharpness of the pictures. I hope more makers will choose to do without it in the future. Why work so hard to put more and more megapixels in the things, and then put in a blurring filter?

Another quote:
"In the case of the M9 I have no doubt that the combination of the sensor and Leica M lenses is producing image quality that is easily equal to the best that I've ever seen for any camera with the exception of 39MP and 60MP medium format backs, which are also CCD based devices without AA filters. And yes, this includes the Canon 1Ds MKIII and Nikon D3x."
[...] "A Nikon D3x or a Canon 1Ds MKIII can be used as a point and shoot. For all of their sophistication and complexity, with these and similar cameras one can completely remove oneself from the process and just press the shutter. With an M9 that is not the case. Because it is resolutely manual focus the camera demands that you become involved in the photographic process. This is another aspect of the Zen of Leica M Photography. There's no slacking off. There's no fully auto-everything mode. You must at least manually choose an aperture and you must always focus by eye."
-

They laugh at Letterman

David Letterman was blackmailed for having had sex with employees.
A reader wrote to me regarding how it went when David went public with this problem:
Poor dude: he's trying to be completely vulnerable and candid w/his STUPID audience about a very serious matter that happened to him, a few days ago, and they just will NOT STOP laughing! :-(

Good point. You'd think people should be able to tell when he is joking and when he is not.
On the other hand he is making a very good living at making people laugh at other people all the time. Also, they hand-pick these audiences specifically to get the people who laugh at everything, to make the host seem very witty. So he's hung by his own noose, I guess.

I also think it's a problem comedians have often: they have people geared up to expect jokes from them all the time. So when they are serious, often people either think they are still joking, or are bored with them because they want the comedy.
One of the greatest Danish comedians of all time, Dirch Passer, had to give up playing in serious plays, because he could not walk on stage without people start to laugh before he even opened his mouth! True story.

Jung und Frei

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. -- Carl Jung

Apple tablet?

Is the looooong-rumored (at least seven years) Apple tablet device finally coming?
One article is talking about an 11-inch screen. I would have preferred something larger, even if the resolution is iPod-like rather than laptop-like. Some web pages are fucking complex, scuse my francais. Also if the device is meant to really threaten newspapers with their big pages of easily-scanned information, you need a big page.

Nine years ago I told a friend, a newspaper-store owner, that he needed to consider the future of his trade. Look ten years ahead, I told him, you'll see. It seems that was a wee bit optimistic, but it'll happen.

Olga's eyes

Write to me

So I had a great (working) vacation, most of the week's work is done early, and I feel great. But for some reason my inbox is unusually quiet today, and I'm a little bored. So if there's something you've thought of saying to me at some point, now is the time. Post it here, or e-mail me, your choice.

Hasselblad focus invention

You gotta say it for the Swedish/Danish camera maker: they do work very, very hard. This is the fourth major generation of their medium format digital system in what, eight years or so. For medium format, that is very fast indeed. And it's not like it's crap they churn out either. :-)

The new H4D camera contains a surprise: invention in autofocus. Who saw that coming from Scandinavia, or in medium format? The autofocus actually takes the motion of the camera into consideration, via a mechanism like the one in the Wii handset. How much of a difference it makes is up to reviewers and history to decide, but it's a very cool idea.

You remember my comment about Europeans tending to be more understated? Well, Danish Hasselblad CEO Christian Poulsen has not heard of it. Here's a quote: "We believe it's the most important innovation in at least 10 years." (Within autofocus? Or in everything on planet Earth?)

-----
Talking about high-end cameras, Michael Reichman has field-tested the brand-new Leica M9.

Sightings of less than optimal observation

[Thanks to David. Orginal source unknown.]

Sightings of less than optimal observation powers

We had to have the garage door repaired. The Sears repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a large enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute, and said that we had the largest one Sears made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, 'Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower.' I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, 'NO, it's not. Four is larger than two.'

My daughter and I went through the McDonald's take-out windowand I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter. She said, 'you gave me too much money.' I said, 'Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back.' She sighed and went to get the manager who asked me to repeat my request. I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said 'We're sorry but they could not do that kind of thing.' The clerk then proceeded to give me back$1 and 75 cents in change.

I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. The reason: 'Too many deer are being hit by cars out here! I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore'

My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for 'minimal lettuce.' He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.

I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked, Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge? To which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?' He smiled knowingly and nodded, 'That's why we ask.'

The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the street. I was crossing with an coworker of mine. She asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, What one arth are blind people doing driving?

I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her life, couldn't understand why her computer would not turn on.

When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership topick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver's side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. Hey,' I announced to the technician, 'its open!' His reply, 'I know. I already got that side.

Interspecies harmony