29
Oct 11

Vivian Maier: Unknown Photographer

Vivian Maier was a street photographer from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. But nobody saw her amazing work until recently.

Her works are some of the most stunning street photos I’ve ever seen. They were recently discovered in a Chicago auction; the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. In the collection, there were over 100,000 negatives, thousands of prints, and an untold number of undeveloped film rolls.

Unfortunately she passed away before the buyer tracked her down. Her life is obscure, but her photography is anything but. I’m thrilled that the buyer, John Maloof, has chosen to curate and share her works.

Good street photography is a difficult art… but great street photography takes an innate talent that few of us have. Many of us strive to catch those wonderful moments, but fall short of the mark. Vivian Maier possessed the magic and the talent to harness it.

A huge part of the difficulty is simply aiming a camera at someone. For one thing, it raises suspicion. Also, there is a hesitance to invade someone’s privacy. After those are overcome, snapping the shutter at the right moment is the magic.

Vivian had the ability to see the art in her subject matter. Her photographs are beautiful examples of otherwise mundane life. They implore one to look into and absorb the scene, so as to become a part of it.


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29
Oct 11

iPad Memory Card Readers

One of the pet peeves about the iPad is the absence of a memory card slot.

Why Apple chose to not include one is puzzling, but becoming more apparent as we learn about Steve Jobs’ extreme obsessive propensity to keep things clean and simple.

Well, a company called PhotoJoJo is offering an answer to our (well, “your”… I don’t own an iPad) memory card slot envy.

Priced at $30 for the CF Card version and $15 for the SD Card reader, they are an inexpensive way to load your photos to your iPad on-the-go.


29
Oct 11

Math Humor


29
Oct 11

Hmmm…


29
Oct 11

Roll On Columbia…

Aerial View of the Bonneville Dam Complex.

More Power!
I live in the Pacific Northwest and have seen or visited several of the hydroelectric power dams along the mighty Columbia River.

Hydroelectric power accounts for nearly three-fourths of the northwest’s electricity generation, the most in the nation. For years, Pacific Northwesterners enjoyed relatively low electricity costs. I can remember our boasting about a penny a kilowatt when the rest of the nation was paying five times that.

Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my understanding, we are now paying our “fair share” and more in alignment with the rest of the nation. And we’ve even experienced so-called power shortages; never totally understood that either.

All that aside, the dams along the Columbia River are an engineering wonder. The very well-written article below does an excellent job of describing just what a wonder the system is. It’s quite long, so I’ve only posted a portion of it. But please click the link to read the complete article. It’s well worth the time.

The High-Stakes Math Behind the West’s Greatest River

Jon Bruner, Forbes Staff

In the generator room at the Bonneville Dam. From left: Rick Pendergrass, Jim Duffus, Witt Anderson, Jerry Carroll, Harold H. Opitz. Photo by Robbie McClaran for Forbes.

In a darkened, ultra-secure room on the fifth floor of an unassuming office tower in Portland, Ore., Bob Neal sits before a panel of ten computer screens and plays Moses. It’s 8:45 in the morning on a sunny late-August day and electricity demand is rising as office workers across the West switch on their computers. Neal points to a dense blue-and-white display whose flickering numbers show power output at each of 31 dams in the Columbia basin. With a few keystrokes he orders the Grand Coulee Dam, the continent’s largest power plant, to ramp up its output by 870 megawatts in the next hour—an increase enough to light 15 million light bulbs at 60 watts apiece.

240 miles away, the Grand Coulee’s 24 giant turbines ease open, sending a surge of water toward the Pacific Ocean. Just below the dam, the river quadruples in volume and rises by 13 feet over a period of nine hours. By 2 P.M., one and a half million gallons of water—enough to flood a football field three feet deep—moves through the dam’s turbines every second.

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29
Oct 11

iPhone Blog Entry

Nothing important. I’ve just never used this iPhone app to produce a blog entry before.
Seems to work pretty well for an on-the-fly post. Maybe I’ll start using it more often.
Adding a photo of my chair collection. I’ll be using them for photo props.

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