This post from a while back on a flash hack for the Nikon D40 has been one of my most popular pieces here, but sadly the original images it linked to are long since gone. Today I found this article over at Instructables which is just as good – in fact, because it uses the foil of a cigarette packet to act as the flash difuser, instead of just cardboard, it’s probably even better. Read the full how to here.
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Tagged: flash, hack, how to
Not a place many people visit, but I’d agree with Rough Guide when they call Taipei Asia’s most under-rated city. It’s where the IT press go every year for Computex; I’ve been there three years (2006, 2007, and this year). Here’s some photos not of motherboards or netbooks, but of the place where they’re born.
Close-up detail of a painted door, temple, Taipei.
Businessmen praying before work. Incense burns, and people rub the smoke into their clothes for good luck. This was taken at Longshan temple, one of Taipei’s busiest.
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Tagged: taipei, taiwan
I was in the Far East all last week, first to Taiwan to report on the Computex trade show. We filed tons of stories on bit-tech (full list) and I also contributed a quick, more mainstream write-up for the BBC website. On the way back, I went via Hong Kong to visit an old friend, and rather serendipitously, arrived on the 4th of June, the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. I took plenty of photos, which I’ll post up once I’m over the jetlag.
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Tagged: computex 2009, taipei, taiwan
A post on the Flickr blog got me thinking about my 12 ‘Flickr Superstars’. As I made my notes, several themes emerged:
i. The Far East, specifically Japan. Having visited the Far East specifically, and having a Japanese fiancee, it’s no surprise that I’m fascinated by Japan, and I think there’s also a sense of me trying to understand it – culture, people, places, feelings – through images.
ii. Fast lenses. Quite a few of my favourite Flickr images rely on fast lenses (f1.8 and below).
iii. Simple, strong, compositions. If you look in the group devoted to these lists of 12, a lot of the photographers suggested are ‘high concept’. Lots of PhotoShop, and self-consciously arty compositions. Not for me – as with film, music (where I’m a big fan of 80s and early 90s alternative US groups such as The Replacements, Pixies, Nirvana), I tend towards images which are more strongly rooted in reality.
My favourite 12 are after the jump.
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Tagged: flickr, high church low church
Despite/because/completely independently of me writing a long and reasonably thought-out blog post about how Six Days in Fallujah might have the chance to address some of the long-running issues with war games making killing fun, its publisher has dropped it.
Too controversial, it seems:
‘”We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there,” said a Konami spokesperson in a comment to Asahi.com. “[But] after seeing the reaction to the videogame in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and email, we decided several days ago not to sell it.”‘
Of course, the developer might still carry on coding the game, but with a big publisher such as Konami dropping it so publicly, I wouldn’t put a huge bet on it actually getting a release.
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Tagged: world war 2
In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched. The real world would simply be a home for the VR equipment: Star Trek imagines it holodeck as a big empty room, for instance. Moreover, since VR ran inside the computer, it only worked when you turned it on – and in movies such as The Lawnmower Man, the nightmare scenario was not being able to get out.
Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality. The video below shows 100 dancers in central London recreating the dance from Beyonce’s music video for her song ‘Single Ladies’ (which Peter Sagal called ‘a wonderful, brilliantly performed dance number set to an irresistably catchy pop tune’). As a piece of PR in reality, it holds very little value – few people would have the chance to actually see it, as it the dancers and organisers take pains for it to appear to happen spontaneously on the street. It’s over in three minutes, and few of the people who happened to be walking by would actually be able to make sense of it because it only works if you’ve seen the original music video. Indeed, the behaviour of the dancers only really works if it’s watched as a video, passed around virally on the web. It is, essentially, VR: actions in reality that are targeted at, and only make sense when experienced virtually.
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Tagged: beyonce, viral video, virtual reality
[I wrote this for the blog I contribute to for work, over on bit-tech. I don't generally cross-post stuff I write for work here, but the idea for it grew out of writing the Peleliu post, so I think there's a good case to be made that it belongs here, too.]
Konami’s recently announced Six Days in Fallujah game rolls into town at the head of a of convoy of outrage over the fact it’s based on a very real and very contemporary battle of an ongoing war. In a well-weighted editorial on Eurogamer, Rob Fahey nails why this outrage is nonsensical, and why it’s particularly unpalatable when it comes from the tabloid press:
“It’s not just the fact that the [Daily] Mail and others are essentially calling for the worst form of censorship, the blocking off of an entire event and saying ‘this is off limits, and may not be portrayed’ – something which would stab to the very heart of the freedom of expression our media should be championing… the thing that rankles most about this situation is the fact that this is a tabloid newspaper telling another medium that the way in which it’s handling current events is insensitive. I won’t need to remind any reader who walks past a news stand on the way to work, or flicks on Sky News or CNN in the evening, just how ‘sensitive’ the news media is in its coverage of war.”
The whole piece is worth a read as it eloquently defends the right of games to portray reality. Fahey’s defence of games isn’t totally blind though – indeed, he challenges those making games such as Six Days in Fallujah to engage more fully with their subject material:
“If a game like Six Days in Fallujah is to have any value, it must come from adding something to that discussion [of the war]. This isn’t about taking a pro-war or an anti-war stance – although both are valid starting points, there are countless others. It’s about making people think, informing them through their entertainment experiences, and commenting, as creators, on the media we create and the events we portray.”
Games based on real combat aren’t uncommon – the Call of Duty series has been at it for longer than the duration of World War 2 – and Call of Duty 4 is the most notable depiction of combat in Iraq gaming has seen so far (although, bless its little corporate socks, Activision has decided to tell players it was actually set it in unnamed MiddleEastistan). What makes Six Days in Fallujah interesting is that unlike other ‘real war’ games, it’s not an FPS, or an RTS. Instead, it’s a third person ‘action’ game.
The problem previous ‘real war’ games have had is that none has managed to rise to Rob Fahey’s challenge. This is because of the problem of fun, namely that war games – and FPS war games in particular – make killing people fun. This is because killing is the central mechanic of the game. If there was no killing in CoD 4, for instance, there wouldn’t really be any game left. You’d be able to run, reload, crouch and open doors, but really, those actions are solely there to support you killing people.
Keep reading →
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Tagged: call of duty, fun, world war 2
Another excellent set of photos on The Big Picture today, focussing this time on animals in the zoo. As always with The Big Picture, there’s a real (if subtle) sense of a narrative running through the post, thanks to the ordering of the shots. I couldn’t help but be grabbed by this one of a six-week-old North Chinese Leopard from Hagenbeck Zoo in Hamburg, Germany.
It makes a very strong impact thanks to the strength of the subject. At first it’s funny and cute, thanks to the disparity between the dinky little cub, doing his best to snarl, and the photographers. The wicker basket makes him appear all the sweeter, as if he’s a pet on a picnic or something.
Look at it longer though and there’s a toughness to it – there’s a predator’s cruelty in the leopard’s eyes. Cub or not, there’s no mistaking the fact he’s (supposed to be) a hunter and a killer, which makes the way he’s trapped quite poignant. Increasing this sense are the partially obscured faces of the photographers leering out of the blown, smudgy white highlight on the right. The super-saturated light gives a feeling, I think, of the outside forces shaping the cub’s life.
Other highlights from the post include shot 23, which features some very clever use of shadows and picture 26 which is a flat out super composition – the human hand makes it a much more interesting shot than 27, despite the fact that 27 is, on the surface, more action packed.
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Tagged: animals
When is too much in Photoshop? This article (translated from Danish) tells the story of a photographer who entered a competition, and was then asked to send unedited samples of his images. The article reproduces the pictures – before and after – so you can judge for yourself if there’s too much editing going on.
Those images are mostly landscapes; Photoshopping on humans is much more widely discussed (both behind the scenes, and in front of camera, as in the Dove ‘real beauty’ adverts), but Shakesville’s series, ‘Impossibly Beautiful‘ does a good job of showcasing what, post-software, is considered beautiful.
Update: Co-incidentially, this month’s French Elle is not only Photoshop free, it’s also dispensed with make-up for its female cover stars, who include Eva Herzigova, Monica Bellucci, Sophie Marceau, and Charlotte Rampling.
→ 2 CommentsCategories: On Journalism and Media · Photography
Tagged: magazines, photoshop
I ended up on Peleliu more by accident than design; I have family living on Palau, so my partner and I went to visit, and Peleliu seemed like an interesting day trip. I took the photos, wrote up the guide’s stories and did some Googling when I got back. One of the nice things about a blog post getting wider circulation, as mine on the Battle of Peleliu did thanks to Boing Boing, is that you get input from a huge variety of people.
Firstly, from the (very kind) comments here and over at BB, one book recommendation comes through very clearly – With The Old Breed by Eugene Sledge, so I’ve added that to my Amazon wishlist. First published in 1981, Sledge fought on Peleliu and in numerous other battles in the Pacific war. It’s very highly thought of, and it doesn’t flinch from depicting the brutality of the war. Paul Fussell, who himself wrote a brilliant book called ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’, praised it as ‘one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war,’ which is about as good a recommendation as you can get.
With The Old Breed is, together, with another WW2 memoir, Helmet For My Pillow, being used as the source material for an HBO series about the battles across the Pacific. Called ‘The Pacific,’ it’s being produced by the same team (Spielberg, Tom Hanks etc) as the brilliant Band of Brothers, and will be on TV at some point this year. This site has a few YouTube snippets.
Also recommended was Ken Burns’ The War – I suspect this is fairly famous in the US, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. It’s easy to get on DVD though, so I’ll hopefully get a chance to watch it.
One commenter on Boing Boing wanted to know about the Japanese tank I photographed; another identified it as a Type 95 Ha-Go, and Wikipedia does indeed claim 15 were deployed on Peleliu.
Another added a link to a Flickr user with some shots of cleaning up unexploded WW2 ordinance in the Marshall Islands – this set in particular is well annotated.
A search on Metafilter revealed a post about American photographer James Fee. His father fought on Peleliu, and in 1998 James went back to the island to take photos. The exhibition he created combined his own images with shots is father had taken. You can see 18 of the images here and the book is available on Amazon. The picture of the Zero at the top of the post is his. It’s always interesting to see the approach other photographers take to the same subject matter. I’m definitely jealous of his Zero shot; it’s terrifically moody. I’m surprised by how different his images seem to mine; they’re hazier, more lyrical – he seems more wary of the colours, of the brightness of the sunlight that I was.
Finally, someone asked what I used on Peleliu – it was a Nikon D40 with the 18-55 kit lens, and for some of the shots, an 85mm f1.8 prime. It doesn’t auto-focus on the D40, but it really isn’t a problem when you’ve got such bright sunlight, and such still scenes to shoot. I’ve written about my love for this camera quite a bit; honestly, some of the best money I ever spent. I’m glad people appreciated the pictures.
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Tagged: palau, peleliu, world war 2
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