There’s an intimacy in this that so resonates with me. I mean, it’s impossible to imagine that I wouldn’t be charmed by the subject matter alone — a President I greatly admire, plus two NBA players. But this moment is especially great, because I love Derrick Rose’s game and I will always appreciate that he OD’d on candy before the 2008 NCAA Final with Kansas. And I admire Joakim Noah’s gritty post play and his serious media game. And I love that there’s genuine emotion in this shot. It has got a little bit of stagey-ness, but it also feels, like I said, intimate, like the photographer took this photo and emailed it to me, and said: “You’d appreciate this.”

Dang, that Grain Belt sweater in the upper right corner is HOT. via AJ Fosik

I really geek out out on glimpses of the marked-up copy of other writers, so I was pretty fascinated to see a page of a Presidential speech-in-progress. If you click through to the zoomed-in page, you’ll see that all of Obama’s notes are all copy-edits; there are no developmental “what I’m trying to say here”-style edits. Not sure what that means, but I thought it was interesting. The Flickr caption indicates that the photo was taken “in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress.” Cool.

Perched among the tall buildings in downtown San Francisco, my office can feel like a nest in a tall tree. Yesterday evening, the birds that live atop the Transbay terminal swirled up to, and around, the windows of our conference room, and the aerie-like feeling was stronger than ever. One bird even landed, briefly, on the ledge of the window. I have no idea what kind of birds they are, what brought them to us, or what they hope to achieve. But I am in awe of them.

Great design hits you on many levels. During our staff meeting today, Nick gave a nice example of the way it can hit the subconscious: When you shut the door of a luxury car, like a BMW, it feels different. And this feeling may not even register in the conscious mind, but I think it matters. The feeling of solidity and integrity during that action is unique and lasting, even though it occupies a tiny sliver around the experience of driving. It reinforces quality, security, class — critical elements of luxury.

I hesitate to admit this in a public forum, but I don’t think I’ve ever purchased a new piece of silverware. Our silverware drawer is a hodgepodge of airline spoons, thrift store forks, garage sale knives, odds and ends of various shapes and sizes. But you’ve got to wonder whether the experience of eating wouldn’t be greatly enhanced — even unconsciously — by great silverware, like the set above by craftsman David Mellor. I saw it yesterday at Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, and even a philistine like me could tell that it’s got something going on. For $160, you can find out for yourself.

If you do, listen to your subconscious, and let me know what it says.

Okay, one last political thing. In the wee hours before yesterday’s inauguration, a genius prankster named Alex Zecca reportedly covered every “Bush” street sign from downtown to the Marina with a sticker that said “Obama.” I heard about it when I got into work, but missed the chance to see it for myself. Luckily, Vanessa Naylon saw it happen. Awesome.

They call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition.

What we have here is both a failure to communicate and an ingenious workaround. To Kristen & Rob: Kudos.

See, I criticize Flickr, and then this thing comes along to demonstrate once and for all its inherent goodness. No Flickr stylez or post-processing necessary. Via Sorry I Missed Your Party and BuzzFeed.

This was in Sunday’s interesting pool, and it’s a pretty strong example of the “Flickr style,” i.e. heavy-handed, post-processed and much-adored by like-minded members of the community. Photo: James Neely

I don’t patently dislike post-processing, but I find that the photos deemed “interesting” frequently have a creepy unreality about them, a flatness, an obsessive visual “perfection.” The result is that many of these photos seem like scenes from Dune, or Lewis Carroll, or a Bjork video, or a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Everything is in focus, perfectly lit, tightly composed. In short, I dislike “interestingness” because it feels like a sort of Pixar-ization of photography. (I love Pixar). But I don’t like that CG-esque feel creeping into a medium that, for me, derives its essence from its simplicity and imperfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with post-processing and unreality

I just appreciate when post-processing supports the natural aspects of the photo, when it adds layers to the scene. The photo below is called “The Flooded Grave,” and the photographer is Jeff Wall. It’s a montage of 75 separate photographs from two separate graveyards and Wall’s studio. Why all the cutting, pasting and blending? Well, If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s actually a small coral reef growing at the bottom of the grave.

Wall says, “I worked with oceanographers to create a momentary fragment of a real undersea corner. I didn’t want an aquarium display, a cross-section of sea-life from the area, or anything like that. I wanted it to be a snapshot of everyday life at a certain depth of sea water.” Read more at the Tate Modern’s online catalog.

So where does the Flickr style come from?

I’ve been excited to talk about Virginia Heffernan’s article in last week’s New York Times, Sepia No More. She addresses the disconcerting popularity of high-dynamic range cheesiness in the Flickr style, and she strikes at the heart of what is emerging as a formula for popularity on Flickr. She discusses Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir, one of the Flickr style’s “leading proponents:”

[Gudleifsdóttir] discovered ... how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Gudleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Creating images that look good shrunk

I’m intrigued by the interpretation of the UI’s effect on the Flickr style, i.e. that the Flickr interface for browsing thumbnails informs the way in which people compose and upload photos. It makes sense to me. The browsing mechanism is tightly-tiled matrix, so photographers are going to want to craft individual elements that look good when they’re (a) cropped to be square, (b) shrunk down small, and © snugly packed together.

Here’s an example from a photographer I like, a nicely differentiated matrix with some intriguing juxtapositions. Photos: Feedbacklove.

Is “Flickr style” a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Maybe the early users and founders were graphic designers? Maybe they really liked glossy, vivid stuff that often looks like the background of beer billboards? Whatever it is, I feel like the “Flickr style” is much less free-form than most may think. The formula behind “interestingness,” as stated on the site: “Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” Interestingness as a function of the community actions makes sense. Tagging, assigning photos to groups, favoriting, commenting — all of these things seem like useful vehicles. But my sense is that everything that’s being folded into “interestingness” is coming from a fairly closed system, a group of like-minded people with similar tastes promoting the same stuff again and again. Back and forth, forever. ))<>((

Un-interestingness

I’ve got a list of my own “un-interesting” photographers, mostly gleaned from the group I Shoot Film. I also follow the feeds of a few Flickr photographers — This Is a Wakeup Call, Feedbacklove, and Last Leaf, to name a few.

Still, it seems like most interesting stuff still lives outside of Flickr. I look at SUCKAPANTS and The Constant Siege pretty often, both of which can be NSFW, by the way.

It’s kinda strange (and thrilling) to browse through the many alleyways and avenues of Flickr and suddenly unearth a photo of ... yourself. Just now I came across this picture of myself and a shadowy figure, who I suspect is UX it-guy Jan Chipchase taken last summer during UX Week. My hazy recollection: We met and hung out during a late-night trek through the Mall to the Washington Monument, a epic walk that included UX Week speakers, the entire event staff, and the multi-talented Maggie Mason of Mighty Goods (and, more recently it seems, Mighty Junior), who recorded the journey here. We left late, got back *really* late, and somehow Jan looked none the worse for wear during his keynote the next morning; epic, indeed.

News flash: Air travel really sucks right now (Washington Post). A couple of weeks ago, I too was touched by this national nightmare. On a Friday evening, I planned to fly from Dulles to SFO, but got slapped with an SSSS on my boarding pass (expired driver’s license) and a long security line and figured I would miss my flight. Good thing it was delayed. For three hours, initially. The gate agents reported that there was bad weather in New York, and this seemed reasonable to me because there were lots of people at the other gates who appeared to be pissed off and tired. Also, the storm was all over the hundreds of TVs that blast CNN at you. I got comfortable and watched an excellent movie (Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well) on my computer, fully believing what the gate agents were saying: The flight would not be canceled. They emphasized this: It would not be canceled.

After two more delays, at 2:30am, the gate agents delivered the obvious: The flight would be canceled. Within milliseconds, an entire plane-load of people freaked out, fumed, growled, shouted insults and then scrambled to get re-booked. Lines at the desks: 45 minutes. Hold time on the phone: 45 minutes. Likelihood of getting out of DC in the next 24 hours: Zero. Compensation for our trouble: Zero. Our flight appeared to be the only suckers left at Dulles, but of course the airline blamed the cancellation on acts of God and air traffic control and, on those grounds, they refused to give us even a voucher for a soda. (A recent Washington Post article examines traditional airline excuses).

But wait, there’s good news: The current issue of Popular Mechanics has an article about the FAA’s work on a GPS-based air traffic control system, which will be up and running by ... 2025. Ugh.

I won’t name the airline (because I am a gentleman), but I encourage you to look for clues in the title of this post. (Specifically in the first letter of each word. Thx, Khoi Vinh for the inspiration.)

I could go on and on here, but my pictures on Flickr really tell the story better than I can.

I’m a shameless sucker for gear, so here’s some shout-outs:

• Bridgedale socks. They were really wet, really often. But they stayed warm and they maintained some spring, even when soaked.
• Tarptent. I visited Tarptent designer Henry Shires at his house on the Peninsula, and I bought the Squall [PDF] last spring. Since then, I’ve put it to the test in the Gila Wilderness, Yosemite, and the Yuba River. I was still skeptical about its ability to really keep me warm and dry, but I must testify that, even when it rains hard all afternoon (and even when the rain really comes down), the Tarptent abides. Everything people say is true: It’s a really good, reasonably light backpacking shelter, and it’s got everything you need to anchor and adjust it to respond to changing weather and wind.
• Blistoban. Part of the reason for the shout-out to Bridgedale was that, halfway through, I switched to thinner Smartwool socks, and they absolutely killed my feet in the matter of a couple of hours. Nick loaned me some Blistoban strips, though, and they ruled. How does Blistoban compare to my old backpacking blister-control remedy: antibiotic ointment covered by bandaid which is then covered by duct tape which is then smeared with Vaseline? Jury’s still out here.
• Patagonia Dragonfly. They call it the Houdini now, and it’s a little different, but I bought one of the early models in 2003, and it still impresses me. I wore it almost everyday, and it admirably repelled rain without ever becoming oppressively warm.

Yes, I appreciate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my photos online, share them with others, and display them on my website. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frustrates me daily. Here’s why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pictures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they’ll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST photo uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr homepage, and in that position of prominence it says something about me. It annoys me that I can’t control this more.¹

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can’t control the order of uploading, can I control what’s displayed on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I display only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has introduced new layouts, but all of them are simply ways of arranging the most recent stuff. Not helpful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I’m thinking of my grandparents here. Wouldn’t it be nice if a meta-set (or something) was created of stuff that’s new to the viewer? I could just create a bookmark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has totally solved this yet, but here’s something that would work for me: I usually upload multiple related pictures at a time, and these pictures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I’d like to create small groups of tags for a groups of pictures, and then quickly drag and drop, or multi-select and apply, a tag to a subset of those pictures. del.icio.us’s tagging interface is rudimentary, but it’s vastly more helpful than Flickr’s:

The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Collections? Sets? Archives? What’s the diff? As my mom once asked me, “Where are the albums?” At the risk of sounding irretrievably old-school, this particular set of grouping concepts is a frustration to cognition. (Also, if the distinction is made in this navigation area, why aren’t the things (sets) in the right column labeled as such?)

No record of blogged pictures?

When I create a blog entry from a picture, why isn’t there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me.

¹ Interesting side note: I bumped into some Flickr people at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their rationale: The photostream is what Flickr is all about, and the strictness of the sequence is a useful governing principle. Umm, yeah. Flickr people may think of uploading as a continual stream, but I upload photos in clumps — I don’t always think about my photos in the terms of the last photo uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have control over the way those clumps are displayed. If you force me to always show the most recently uploaded individual photo, shouldn’t you also give me some control over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

We had nice weather, went to popular places (North Dome, Yosemite Falls — which has its own Wikipedia page), and yet saw very few other people. Maybe it’s the time of year, or the fact that it was a low-snow year, or both? Or our route? We hiked down to North Dome on the Porcupine Creek Trail, and then got back to 120 via the Yosemite Creek trail (where, incidentally, we took some excellent swims). Whatever contributed to it, I’ve now seen the good side of Yosemite.

Yosemite Valley from North Dome, rendered via the magic of Autostitch. It assembled 25 or so photos from my Motorola SLVR into a pretty complete panorama, and even the artifacts — moving clouds and ghosted edges — seem to make the result more compelling, I think.

Yosemite Valley is an incredible place, especially when seen from a place above the Valley, like North Dome or the outcropping above Yosemite Falls. If you want a glimpse at the Valley was like when people were putting up the first routes on El Cap, check out Glen Denny’s photo book, Yosemite in the Sixties. It’s really nicely produced and filled with amazing black-and-white images of simpler times and the legends who started it all — Yvon Chouinard, Warren Harding, Royal Robbins, Galen Rowell, and many more.

A few years ago, it would have been surprising to see a San Francisco indie crowd move its feet around in a dance-style motion at a live show. Last week, Lightning Bolt got people moving at 12 Galaxies; it wasn’t exactly “dancing” but (from my vantage point in the balcony), it appeared kinetic — lots of mass moving back and forth, a little crowd-surfing, a little flailing around. I took a lot of pictures from my perch above the drums.

The weather has been getting nicer, so I’ve been jumping at any chance to ride my bike. Last Thursday morning, I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the Marin Headlands as the sun was coming up, and I stopped to take some photos as it was peeking above the horizon.

When I was going through the results, I realized that the individual pictures didn’t really do justice to the moment, so I poked around the Internet looking for something better than Photoshop’s stitching utility. Autostitch to the rescue! It’s simple, straightforward, and it instantaneously produces panoramas without discernible seams even with just a few pictures.

(I was so intrigued by the above results that I decided to try it with cellphone pictures). Last Saturday, we had a picnic at Kirby Cove, a little valley on the Marin side of the bridge. It was foggy and cold for the first hour or so, but then it started to burn off and I took some photos with my little cell phone camera. Once again, Autostich worked magic on it. Here’s to technology!

Earlier this week, I noticed that there had been a lot of activity on my Flickr photos. Someone named “furgurl” had commented roughly 50 times, and the comments themselves were pretty unusual. Most were lengthy, not the standard “OMG!” or “nice shot!” or whatever. They were also all lower-case, filled with misspellings and weird punctuation, and in almost every instance, pretty cruel. Cruel comments! On Flickr photos! Weird, huh?

The examples above are the only halfway clever comments, and they were the only ones I kept. (Apologies to Nathaniel, Adlai, and my mom’s sausage fondue).

The rest focussed on just a few themes: the absence of make-up (“try wearing eye-liner!” was a common refrain when women were in the picture), out-of-date clothing (“was this picture taken in the 70’s?” or “who wears THAT?”), beards (“that one is clearly a member of the Taliban”), receding hairlines (“take some of the hair from your face and put it on your head!” appeared in a few places), hair in general (people with curly hair were criticized for curling their hair too much; I was often advised to wash my hair) and the overall perception that no one in any of the pictures had ever been on a date. Lots of them were unintentionally funny in that (a) no rational person would have ever noticed whatever “furgurl” was pointing out, (b) the criticism often betrayed, let’s say, a misplaced fixation on superficial stuff, and © each included all the makings for a sarcastic comment except the sarcastic tone, which actually kind of made it even more funny.

I didn’t really want to delete “furgurl’s” comments. On the other hand, I didn’t want the heckling to go unanswered. But the problem was that “furgurl” had no Flickr profile, no public photos, and didn’t respond to the Flickrmail that I sent. I could handle anonymous public cruelty, really, but only if the playing field was level. She never responded to my message, so I took them down.

Here’s where it gets weird, though. When I Googled “furgurl,” many of the results involved the same person, one Anne Bartee. (Behold, she has a website). When I clicked around the site, I found this, a letter she wrote to a hypnotherapist/advice columnist in the Tolucan Times. In it, she describes herself as an “international pop artist,” and asks some provocative questions:

I’ve been on TV and radio all over the world, and also in “Billboard” magazine. Can you tell me if there is a link between “bad culture” and public misperception of what is truly good? Rap and hip hop and simplistic drum and bass beats have dominated music for far too long, encouraging the public to embrace yet lower standards. But surely the public cannot believe that this is good music. I wonder; is this an example of the saying, “You can sell them garbage if you paint it gold?”

The tone, not to mention the reasoning, sounds familiar. Here’s a tip for all you hip-hop stars: Wash your hair! Try some eyeliner! And wear some fashionable clothes once in a while, for crying out loud! Anne, if you ever read and comment on this, I’m expecting your A-game. Don’t pull any punches.