Not your ordinary cat pictures
At the risk of revealing myself as a crazy cat lady, I would like to share two alternatives to traditional cat photography.
Stuff On My Cat is a site where you can submit pictures of... well... stuff on your cat. To demonstrate, I took a picture of Stewie, uploaded it to my Kodak Picture Viewer, then put it on Stewie and took another picture.
If that is not enough "cat picture within a cat picture" content for you, check out Infinite Cat.
The idea is to take a picture of your cat looking at the site on a computer screen and then submiting the picture for another cat to gaze at and have it's picture taken... and so on, and so forth... forever and ever... infinitely.
There is also My Cat Hates You, a collection of "sour faced, indignant felines"... but I don't have any pictures of Stewie illustrating it because Stewie loves EVERYONE.
I have now posted twice about pictures of my cat.
I am sure my dog is going to be ticked about this.
He is probably at home chewing up my favorite shoes right this very minute.
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The Mind of a Designer . . .
Ever wonder how a designer thinks or how they see the world? Is it different or not? There's a large community of creative individuals here who work on the look and feel- the user experience - for products and services at Kodak. So I wanted to tap into their world for you with a series of short interviews and include pictures they've taken. Dragging them away from their work for a minute wasn't easy, but I can start by introducing you to Stiven, a lead designer in the Innovation group. The following is the first part of our discussion as Stiven talked about photography.
Laura: Tell me a bit about photography in your life and what it means to you.
Stiven: Basically photography is a way of capturing a moment . . . being able to capture a second and freezing it in time. Being able at any given moment later on in your life to sort of transplant yourself and go back to that moment . . . so it's almost like time travel.
Photography a lot of times is like how you might be walking down the street and you smell something . . . and it sort of triggers a reaction in your brain and that smell can transplant you back in time. It's sort of like, "wow, that's the same smell that I smelled when I walked into my grandma's house and she was making cookies or whatever". Photography can do the same thing, but visually.
So, you might have completely forgotten about an experience and you're just flipping through photographs and suddenly you remember there's a friend or someone you had a relationship with or there's a special place or special coffee shop or store you really liked or one afternoon or sunset or picnic or barbeque that you had with friends . . . the photography will be that trigger, right?
If you remember the picture, you remember the name, you might recall the smell, then you might even remember the music that you heard during that time. It sort of brings back all these things.
It's like something that happens when you drive in your car and you listen to a song that has an emotional connection with your friends from high school or college and it sort of changes your attitude. You might be in a bad mood and the song reminds you of a happier time. It changes you and all of a sudden you have a happier day. I think photography can do that . . .
It's a visual way to access that information that's stored somewhere in the back of your brain. You live your life everyday and you just don't think about it . . . and it get's overlapped with other information. Photography is almost like this tag that takes you back specifically there and can revive it in a really full way . . . So that's what it is for me.
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Vietnam. The next picture.
In August I enjoyed a great holiday trip to Vietnam with four people, two with digital cameras and two shooting analog (film). Vietnam is a great place for taking pictures. There are rivers everywhere, rice fields of incredible brilliant green, Mekong Delta, Sapa Mountains, Halong Bay (Unesco World Heritage), great portraits of people working, smiling, on boats, at the market, driving scooters (there are millions of scooters!), exercising alongside the lake in the center of Hanoi. But it was surprisingly a great place to enjoy photography.
At the "War Remnants Museum" in Ho Chi Minh City, there is an exhibit called "Requiem" that contains a collection of pictures taken by 134 war reporters killed or listed as missing between 1950 and 1975 in Vietnam and Indochina. It is really moving. They are from all nationalities. One picture shows three journalists just before boarding a helicopter that would be shot down soon after. Robert Capa died here as did Larry Burrows famous for many Life Magazine covers. And what about this picture?
This shrapnel pierced camera was that of a Japanese reporter, Taizo Ichinose. Unfortunately, all these great pictures are not available online. I think that they should publish them. At the entrance of the room, there is this epitaph: "Each came for a reason and died taking a chance. All lived for the next picture; it could be the best one of all. It is for their photographs, not their dying that the world remembers them."
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Forever Wild
I'm on a quest to find an easy way to capture and share experiences of nature. One "big" nature space is the Adirondacks. It's about 6 million acres.
In the "old'n days", I would often take several pictures with my film camera and overlap the prints at home to attempt to recreate the scene...I then moved to digital where I've taken multiple digital pictures and attempted to recreate these in software...but that was getting tricky. This required creative cropping and the lighting/colors of each picture were also inconsistent and almost impossible to "sync" up.
Our family has vacationed several times over the last couple years in the Adirondacks. Each time, I get a better understanding of the role nature plays in our world. In my quest to capture a location, I recently used the Kodak V570 and the "panoramic" feature (aka scene mode). This worked out GREAT. This solved my cropping and lighting issues automatically. Here is a picture that I took at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondack Mountains, NY:
In addition to the "visual" element, I wanted to capture some of the sights and sounds of this location. We had a couple loons swim past our cabin each morning and evening and the presence is unmistakable. I truly enjoyed this encounter with nature and attempted to capture this experience. One night while sitting out on the porch, I heard the loons. I wanted to bottle this up somehow...So I grabbed my V570, switched to video mode and recorded the audio. Being nighttime, I knew the visual portion was going to be useless, since I only wanted the audio portion. Before playing the "audio" portion of this blog, imagine that you've spent the day hiking in the wilderness, through the pines, brushed alongside the ferns, over rocks and past the ponds and lakes. You've returned to the cabin, had a nice dinner, played a couple family games and then you decide to relax on the porch and just soak in the darkness [Press Play and close your eyes]
Here you can listen to the loons and some crickets . . . One of the interesting side-effects of this video clip was the audio portion. The all black video clip of the night scene helped to set the mood of the experience. Whenever I close my eyes and hear this, I am transported back to Big Moose Lake, back to the cabin sitting on the porch, relaxing, enjoying and getting in touch with the Adirondacks and nature. Enjoy!
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Off the Beaten Path
As director of PR in Greater Asia in the Kodak consumer digital group I need to travel frequently in Asia and the USA. For someone who lives a long way from the rest of the world (Australia), I have been lucky to spread my wings. I started traveling with my family when I was ten, when I spent six months in Asia and Europe and I haven't really stopped. When I travel I always take one camera sometimes more. But no matter where, I just love making pictures.
You know, as many photographers discover, often the best photos are captured in remote and less developed places. I have also found this to be true. So today I'd like to open a window into my travels, to some far-flung places.
Here are some photos that I took in LiJiang, China, which is at the foothills of the Himalayas. I used a Kodak SLRn (14MP pro digital camera) and my telephoto Nikon lens. LiJiang is known as the "oriental Venice" because it's an ancient canalled city.
The lady carrying a basket is Naxi (pronounced Nasi). The Naxi are the traditional inhaitants of LiJiang. I was told in their culture the women do the backbreaking work while the men cultivate their inner poet, musician, writer, etc.
I just love the shot of the little boy because I feel like I have entered his special world and also because the skin tones are beautiful.
Next is a fortuneteller. His outfit was so ornate and beautiful. So was the yak's in the next shot!
While in Mexico I took this picture at a very tranquil and unpopulated place (on holiday) with the LS663. It's a snapshot, but I Iike the way the balcony rail and tree trunk frame the view. It would be nice to be there now.
These are some of my many, many photos. I hope that you enjoy them. Tell me about some of your photo adventures! Buzz: In Oz, we are working with the SocialSeen website, which launches tonight in Sydney. Everyone in the "scene" wants to be snapped. Here's a link to the site and the Sydney scene. www.SocialSeen.com.au
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