Recently in Photography Category

I'm a sucker for time-lapse sequences. Maybe it's my inner historian, but I love seeing the effects of time without taking a lot of it. I can still remember the day when I first encountered Noah Kalina's pioneering 6-year daily photo montage: I contemplated starting down that road myself but I quickly realized that I didn't particularly care to put forth the effort. I forgot about the genre until about an hour ago.

It was then that I caught Andy Baio link to Dan Hanna's Photo Aging Project wherein he took two photos a day for 17 years:

HOLY CRAP! That's some forethought and work. I was impressed. And so I started looking for similar, though less-formidable, videos. Boy did I find them!

[Programming note: I'm really torn between just providing links to the videos and actually embedding them inline. If I put them inline, then this is going to be one slow loading and long-ass entry. But if I just link to the video, then you're going to be a-clicking all day. I wonder which one I'll choose.]

• Ines Everyday: this is the one that got me interested in looking further into this. I guess it had seemed previously like a male thing and this made me realize that there was probably a bunch of interesting characters doing these videos. Main takeaways: she changes her hairstyle a lot and seems to enjoy covering her neck.
• Girl takes pic of herself every day for three years: a solid entry by an Asian lady. Main takeaway: she went through a lot of glasses in three years.
• She takes a photo every day: the 200-day entry in an ongoing project. Main takeaways: she really changes her hairstyle a lot, has a lot of earrings, and was that mime makeup? Yes, it was.
• Growing a beard: well-done piece. Main takeaway: he's a slow beard grower. My friend Larry could have made that video in a week tops.
• Ellora Daily Photo reaches 1282: photos from birth on of a little girl. Main takeaway: I wonder what happened that required her head to be shaved on day 915.
• 9 months of gestation in 20 seconds: it's like watching a bell curve form. Main takeaway: the guy behind it is quite a goober.
• Madeline, Five Years - Photo a Day: nice try, but 198 photos is not "Photo a Day." Still, pretty adorable.
• Lee takes a photo of himself every day for three years: nothing special until 50 seconds in. Yowza!
• Michael takes a photo of himself every day for 1 year: teenage boy going from 16 to 17. Main takeaways: lots of hairstyles and why would anyone have that clown picture on their wall.
• Puppy Photo Everyday: Labrador going from 7 weeks to 6 months and completely busting the "Everyday" claim. Still, it's a puppy. Come on!
• Amanda takes a photo of herself every day for 2 years: watch the transformation from 14 to 16. She's going to really appreciate this when she's older.
• Ryan takes a photo of himself every day for 400 days: a black guy takes on the project. Main takeaway: what's the deal with the purple hair at 23 seconds in?!
• Sven takes a picture of himself everyday for 3 years and Tobias takes a picture of himself everyday for 3 years: twin brothers from 27 to 30. Is it wrong that I only watched one?
• Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK's Daily Photo Project: high quality with much better stabilization. He's also got the pictures if the video wasn't enough.

I left off the countless parodies, which were often funny. I think they're strangely compelling because the subjects are real people—not a seedling, for example—and they have the nostalgic appeal of a yearbook with the intervening, gradual tweening that's normally missing.

In other news, I received my brand new digital camera, the Casio Exilim EX-Z750, and I couldn't be more excited. (Side note: what the hell is with that name? I am going to have to Google it whenever I need to refer to it. Geesh.) I ordered it based solely on this exhaustive review; I actually hadn't even seen one until it was already shipping. I love taking pictures and, to me, the most important thing about taking good pictures is having a camera handy. In that vein, the smaller the better.

Previously, I had the Canon PowerShot S200 and I loved it. It was the smallest thing going at the time, but it's really aged since I bought it. The two batteries I had stopped holding a charge; it was far larger than my cell phone and thus cramped in my pockets; it lacked the sophistication of newer models; and the shutter speed was lethargic. I could start to take a picture of my daughters doing something and completely miss the action once the picture was actually taken. We bought the Fuji FinePix S-5000 for precisely this reason: it has a fast release and it feels solid. But it clearly isn't pocketable and so we often don't have a camera handy for life's special moments.

I'll give a better report after I've used it awhile, but I've already noticed some serious pluses. (I also ordered this super fast 1 GB SD card for only $58.99, which seems like a great deal. Would have been better had I ordered before 1/30/2006 and gotten the $20 mail-in rebate. Darn.)

[UPDATE (2/16/2006): Oh yeah, I also found this review helpful.]

[UPDATE (2/26/2006): Darn. Amazon's got it on sale for $298.99, a full $20 off what I paid. At the time, Amazon had a price of $349 so BuyDig.com's $319 was a steal. Darn.]

For my future reference: Photoshop Elements Tutorials and Photoshop Elements for the Web.

For my future reference (perhaps more immediate than that implies), digital photography composition tips or "How to Take Better Pictures."

[UPDATE (6/24/04): More good references: Photography Composition Article Library, Photographing on Federal Lands, and The Photographer's Right (PDF {via}).]

[UPDATE (7/19/04): Here's a very promising blog that seeks to help digital photographers move past the automatic settings.]

I love the idea behind Seamless City. I'm big into taking pictures; I especially love panoramics because they capture what is visible to a person rather than one particular scene that might encompass 45° of the 360° of life.

The idea is very simple: take a continuous (and seamless) series of pictures of a city along a route. The execution is much, much more complex because a) the scope is ambitious—to the tune of a 30-mile route—and b) the presentation is difficult—luckily, the designers decided on a linear route and will probably not allow hypertextual non-linearity. I have half a mind to do this for Phoenix but three problems spring immediately to mind:

1. What 30 miles of Phoenix is particularly interesting?


2. I'd have to get out of my car to take these pictures.


3. I have a full-time job already and enough sideline ideas to occupy the rest of my life.

So there you have it: enjoy San Francisco's treatment since you won't be seeing it in this town (at least from me, let me know if you are doing it on your own).