Recently in Blog - Links to other blogs Category

A Color Blindness Simulator (via my pal JL): http://www.etre.com/tools/colourblindsimulator/

Seeing such an expensive lens being demolished like this is so painful to bare. According to the article, a woman was "trying to change lenses while standing at the edge of the enclosure, and accidentally let the 70-200mm slip out of her grasp and into Felix's territory."

"Her depression controlled her life for the next 40 years -- until she decided to volunteer for an experimental treatment. A neurosurgeon would drill two holes in Guyton's skull and implant a pair of battery-powered electrodes deep inside her brain.

The procedure -- called deep brain stimulation, or DBS -- targets a small brain structure known as Area 25, the "ringleader" for the brain circuits that control our moods, according to neurologist Dr. Helen Mayberg.

Mayberg's groundbreaking research on this part of the brain showed that Area 25 is relatively overactive in depressed patients. So, Mayberg hypothesized that in patients who do not improve with other treatments, Area 25 was somehow stuck in overdrive."

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/14/health/battery-powered-brain/index.html?hpt=hp_c1

Yesung Lee sent me this wonderful short animation, titled Out of Sight, made by three students who graduated from the National Taiwan University of Arts.

out of sight from kynight on Vimeo.

Watch it until the end.

Like the author, I too am in love with the Southern accent: http://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_southern.html

Yay! Using the info here, I finally liberated myself from that incessant LinkedIn spam:

LinkedIn Customer Support Message

 

Subject: Add My Email To Do Not Contact List

Hi Karen,


I truly apologize for the delay in my response.

Per your request, I've added your karen.nakamura@yale.edu email address to 

our "do not contact" list. 

You will no longer receive any email from LinkedIn or our members on this 

email address. If you decide at a later date that you want to set up a 

LinkedIn account, you will need to first contact 

us to have your email address removed from the “do not contact” list.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.

Regards,

Jevgenia

LinkedIn Customer Service

Original Contact:

Member Comment: Karen Nakamura	01/17/2012 01:33

Please add my e-mail to your do not contact list. I have no wish to ever use linkedin. 

Thank you.

Karen Nakamura

From my mailbox:

Jean Rouch International Film Festival
CALL FOR ENTRIES

Please, pass this on to your colleagues, friends and students

Dear Friends,

We are very pleased to announce that the 2012 Jean Rouch International Film Festival is now open for entries. We remind you that the deadline to submit a film is 15th April 2012.
This deadline is for all films completed after 1st January 2011 .
You will find the online entry form on our website via:
http://www.comite-film-ethno.net/festival-international-jean-rouch/2012/entry-form.html
We are looking forward to receiving your film submissions.
With our very best regards.

The Organizing Committee
Barberine Feinberg, Françoise Foucault, Laurent Pellé.

The Festival Jean Rouch, previously known as Bilan du FIlm Ethnographique, was created in March 1982 by anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch.
Over the past thirty years, the Festival’s aim has been to showcase the most innovative and relevant trends in ethnographic filmmaking and visual anthropology, and to promote dialogue between cultures.
Organized by the Comité du Film Ethnographique, this international film festival is held in Paris (France). Each year, it brings together filmmakers, academics, students and producers, in an attempt to promote discussions and debates amongst ethnographic film practitioners and their many public, and to favour the diffusion and the distribution of the films.
We welcome documentary films without restriction to theme and length.

Comité du Film Ethnographique
Festival International Jean Rouch
Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle
36 rue Geoffroy Saint Hilaire - CP 22
75005 Paris
festivaljeanrouch@gmail.com
http://www.comite-film-ethno.net

___________________________________________________________________________________

While we're on the topic of fictional skits, my pal Nana sent me this one. It's in Japanese only. It depicts some fathers who are having trouble communicating with their teenage daughters using their keitai cell phones.

http://www.nhk.or.jp/neo/contents/catalogue/movie/ct_mv_003.html

(Right now, I'm watching the first season of Louie, so it's particularly amusing to me).

I'm not sure how I feel about this mix of static and motion image that Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg are calling cinemagraphs. Some are quite beautiful like this one below, others are a bit more meh.

See more at: Jamie Beck e Kevin Burg – Cinemagraphs

I'm (JCR) exploring web design and a new life lately, and/so these sky pictures touched a nerve. Beautiful, simple, and well designed. Click here to see some of the photographer's other beauties.

Via Minimalissimo.

One of the graduates of our PhD program (hi Nana!) turned me on to Karen Kelsky's blog and website, TheProfessorIsIn. Kelsky used to be a tenured professor in the field of Japan Anthropology, then dropped out to become a paid academic consultant. The advice she gives on her site is cogent and insightful:

My position is, rather: go in not just with “your eyes open” (as so many Ph.D. program apologists insist) but with a strategy and a game plan. Calculate your chances from start to finish, and maximize them with strategic choices about *which* program, *how much* funding, *what* topic, *which* advisor, *how much* TA-ing, *how* to cut corners, *when* to be selfish, *where* to network, *how* to schmooze, *where* and *when* and *how often* to publish. And so on. Find the job ad for the type of position you want and make every decision based on reaching that goal. Get out quickly. Don’t count on your advisor. Don’t fixate on the dissertation. Protect yourself. Collect your own set of transferrable professional skills.

People wanting to go to graduate school as well as those in grad school should definitely check her site out. Here's the direct link to her blog: http://theprofessorisin.com/pearlsofwisdom

Thought the 1/2000 second shutter on your camera was fast? The NY Times reports on a new generation of scientific cameras with shutter speeds in the femtoseconds -- two-trillionths of a second -- fast enough to catch light moving as a wave: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/science/speed-of-light-lingers-in-face-of-mit-media-lab-camera.html

I want to know if I can retrofit it to my Leica III. :-)

Dear Karen,

I have been following your site for may many years now and thought I would send you a link to a project I am working on.

Although I am now working in the legal industry, my AB is in Anthropology and I have been a photographer for many years, working closely with the Silverlens Gallery in Manila until now. I have had two shows with them in the past, but this next one really brings in may background as an anthropologist much more than the previous two.

The project can be viewed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yophoto/sets/72157627205877902/with/6303608714/

Just wanted to share that. I have enjoyed your website, and continue to read it over and over. If ever you are in Manila, pleas let me know!

Cheers,

Johann

Fascinating! Be sure to look at the flickr feed! - Karen

My (Jason) photography knowledge is pretty thin, so I was happy to see this article on NPR titled "A Woman Of Photos And Firsts, Ruth Gruber At 100." As the article explains:

At the age of 100, Ruth Gruber is responsible for a lot of firsts. When she was just 20, she became the youngest Ph.D. ever at the University of Cologne in Germany. She was the first photojournalist, much less female journalist, to travel to and cover both the Soviet Arctic and Siberian gulag. She documented Holocaust survivors and the plight of the ship, the Exodus 1947.

In other words, "She was just a badass -- no other way describe it," as Maya Benton is quoted in the article.

The short article also touches very clearly on some of the ethnographic issues of positionality anthropologists often face, for good or for bad. As the article says "being a woman gave her an advantage in getting sources to reveal themselves" and includes this exchange as an example of this advantage in action:

In 1944, she spent two weeks on the Henry Gibbins, a ship of 1,000 Jewish refugees, many of them clad in striped concentration camp uniforms, on a voyage from Italy to America.

She recalls: "Some of the men said, 'We can't tell you what we went through, it's too obscene. You're a young woman!' I said, 'Forget I'm a woman, you are the first witnesses coming to America.' So they talked. Nobody refused to talk."

Just kidding. Sort of. Apparently you can buy a kit that lets you attach SLR lenses to your iPhone. The "catch" is that the kit is pretty pricey at around $200.

When I first saw the picture I just thought, Why?!, though a small part of me did squeal, FUN! Then I saw the prime bokeh in some of their photos and drooled.

But still...

Via Cult of Mac.

This is just for people running Mac OSX server. If your secure.log is full of spam like this:

Jun  8 23:02:40 media-lab com.apple.SecurityServer[55]: Succeeded authorizing ri
ght com.apple.server.admin.streaming by client /usr/sbin/QuickTimeStreamingServe
r for authorization created by /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerManagerDaemon.
bundle.
Jun  8 23:03:40 media-lab com.apple.SecurityServer[55]: Succeeded authorizing ri
ght com.apple.server.admin.streaming by client /System/Library/CoreServices/Serv
erManagerDaemon.bundle for authorization created by /System/Library/CoreServices
/ServerManagerDaemon.bundle.
Jun  8 23:03:40 media-lab com.apple.SecurityServer[55]: Succeeded authorizing ri
ght com.apple.server.admin.streaming by client /usr/sbin/QuickTimeStreamingServe
r for authorization created by /System/Library/CoreServices/ServerManagerDaemon.
bundle.
Jun  8 23:04:40 media-lab com.apple.SecurityServer[55]: Succeeded authorizing ri
ght com.apple.server.admin.streaming by client /System/Library/CoreServices/Serv
erManagerDaemon.bundle for authorization created by /System/Library/CoreServices
/ServerManagerDaemon.bundle.

Then the problem is an overzealous servermgrd (server manager daemon). You can throttle it back by editing its preferences at:

/Library/Preferences/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

Change the idlePeriod from 60 to 300 (the max). This will at least put 5 minutes between the spam messages.

Thanks to: macenterprise

My students in my Queer Ethnographies course are wild:

EOSHD has a stellar comparison review of the Canon EOS 60D and the Panasonic Lumix GH2: http://www.eoshd.com/content/460-Canon-60D-versus-Panasonic-GH2-Full-Review-Part-1

... Then the surprise hits you just how far ahead in technological and image quality terms the GH2 is. Virtually the only thing better on the 60D for video is the high resolution LCD with fantastic colour reproduction....

Read more...

NikonRumors.com has an interesting post where they suggest that the D7000 licensing agreement says that the AVC codec used in video-recording can only be used for "personal and non-commercial use." Tons of discussion on the post by contributors.

I am not a lawyer but it seems that the "personal and non-commercial use" applies only to the second part of the restrictive clause ("decoding") and not to the first part ("encoding"). But if you use the camera to play back part of a clip that you recorded as a professional (i.e., during a for-profit film shoot), then you're in violation of the decoding restriction on playing for-profit material, even if the for-profit encoding was kosher. Right?

Can other people check the fine print / licensing agreements of their digicams or DSLRs to see if there are similar restrictions? What do you think of such end-runs around free use of our equipment?

One of my students told me about Jes Sachse:

and check out her collaboration with photographer Holly Noris in "American Able" - a spoof of American Apparel: http://hollynorris.ca/americanable#h39067524

Well, this picture of an exploded Pentax Spotmatic F is not quite the opposite, but you know what I mean (blowing up the camera instead of objects in front of the camera).

There's something about looking at this image that makes me feel both exhilarated and terrified at the same time. Exhilarated by the thought of all these pieces having been constructed, assembled, and working together to produce an image. And terrified by the incredible complexity of something that seems so simple, which is the closest I've come to a personal understanding of Kant's sublime. I can't imagine how it would feel if I had any intimate knowledge of this camera, rather than just a vague sense of its importance.

Very randomly, I was checking a link of someone who wrote me, they had this link on their blog: The Manic Thrift Store Shopper.

An easy way to spend hours of your life that you'll never get baack.

Over on Pixiq.com there's a great article on the mechanics of the human optic system and analyzes the eye as if it were a high-end camera system, including an answer to the age old question: What is the ISO (aka ASA) of the human eye?








[Via Gizmodo]

Frequent contributor Nate sent me a link about Vivian Maier - a Chicago nanny who took over 100,000 photographs over her lifetime. Her material is breathtaking. Her photos were discovered in an abandoned storage unit by John Maloof, who is now curating her material. His blog is here: http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/ A nice newsclip from WTTW is here: http://fstoppers.com/street-photographer-discovered-a-few-days-after-her-death/

Yes, this is just another chapter in my obsession with time-lapse photography, among other things. But seeing these videos together - time-lapse, mirror vision, and slow motion - made me think about the superhuman way in which they augment our senses. It's a little sad that these mysterious visions have become so banal to us, but I suppose that some things have to lose their magic for us to be able to move on and get by.

Via @jtzl.

Via Reddit.

Via Reddit.

Just when I thought I had seen it all (aka bamboo bikes), Nate sends me a link to a craftsman in Japan who makes wooden bicycles out of mahogany. Cute, you think. Toy wood bikes..... only these are high-end, custom racing bikes. Real bikes.

The maker, Suehiro Sano, is a 9th generation craftsman. Apparently he made high end wooden boats before going into bicycles.

Sano's website is here: http://sanomagic.world.coocan.jp/englishindex.html

My home network is based around Windows 7. Shocking, yes, I know -- but Win7 media center has a much better 10 foot interface than FrontRow and I can build each HTPC for around $300.... as compared to $600 for a MacMini which isn't expandable.

In any case, my Win7 machines were having a problem forgetting their login credentials for file sharing. Found the fix here: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itpronetworking/thread/ef9b42b2-5695-4ac4-8aea-745aa532b981

My pal Nate sent me this short clip about blackberries and technology from the BBC...

Another doc film recommended to me by Ana Lara:

The Aggressives. Can't find much info about the distributor - looks like it might have gone out of business. Amazon sells used copies of it, though.

Of Men and Gods (des hommes et dieux) is a film about sexuality in Haiti. Sold by DER. A preview is on Youtube.

Video recommendation by Ana Lara.

Here's a wonderful youtube video about the founding of Schizophrenics Anonymous (SA):

This is from the website SARDAA (Schizophrenia and Related Disorders Alliance of America).

I'm in the final stages of setting up the Withoutabox entry for the 2011 SVA Media Festival in Montreal. I've populated most of the entries and am just waiting on my steering committee to give the go ahead to make it live.

I just read a very interesting article in the Anthropology News titled "Listening to Kamagasaki" by ethnomusicologist David Novak (UCSB). He talks about the soundscape of Kamagasaki, an area near Osaka that has a large population of day laborers and homeless individuals. You can read it online here: http://www.aaanet.org/publications/upload/51-9-David-Novak-In-Focus.pdf

The 2011 UBC festival will honour innovation in ethnographic film. Submissions are now being accepted for jury selection. For more information: http://anthfilm.anth.ubc.ca/events.html

Seems kind of random, but I had to draw a fancy arrow in Illustrator the other day. As I'm not normally an Illustrator user, I wasn't sure how to go about it. This page give great step by step instructions: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/2007/07/inkscape-shiny-button-redundant.html

My friend BB sent me a link to this article, which analyzes unconscious gender bias in job candidate letter of recommendations.

Recommendation letters could cost women jobs, promotions

A recommendation letter could be the chute in a woman's career ladder, according to ongoing research at Rice University. The comprehensive study shows that qualities mentioned in recommendation letters for women differ sharply from those for men, and those differences may be costing women jobs and promotions in academia and medicine.

....

The research team also noted that letter writers included more doubt raisers when recommending women, using phrases such as "She might make an excellent leader" versus what they used for male candidates, "He is already an established leader."

"Subtle gender discrimination continues to be rampant," Hebl said. "And it’s important to acknowledge this because you cannot remediate discrimination until you are first aware of it. Our and other research shows that even small differences -- and in our study, the seemingly innocuous choice of words -- can act to create disparity over time and experiences."

Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-11-letters-women-jobs.html

Right now, I'm writing several letters for students and so it makes me pause to think if I might not be reproducing any of these tropes in my own recommendations:

Not sure how useful this is in terms of actually deciding to buy a camera, especially since some of these models have been updated, but I did find it to be an interesting way to visualize the arrangement of digital cameras that exist. Click on the link below to see the comments on Reddit if you are so inclined, with the standard caveat that they are sometimes helpful, sometimes entertaining, and sometimes neither. Hope you love puns!

Via Reddit via Make the Photo!.

OkCupid, a dating site, does occasional analyses of site data to see what trends they can observe. Their latest analysis, published in a post titled "Don't Be Ugly By Accident!," had to do with which pictures on the site get the best reactions, and they found that the photos that perform best have a shallow depth of field (which, of course, typically requires an SLR with a lens that has a wide aperture), use natural light instead of flash, and are taken at the golden hour.

I just thought it was interesting for these aspects, which are ones that I had gravitated to "naturally" before I knew much about photography, to make themselves known even in this context. In turn, I suppose it is a little nudge to consider when taking our own photographs, whether or not they are for a dating site.

Be sure to take a look at the whole article for some other whiz bang comparisons and findings, such as comparing how attractive photos are on the basis of their depth of field, as shown above.

I was browsing the web for Japanese funeral sites when I came across this Youtube video made by a foreigner (he sounds British) who went to a Japanese funeral:

It's interesting to compare his experiences with mine in a Japanese Funeral. In particular, he really focuses in on the funeral donation which is a common at Japanese funerals, but rarer in most Western traditions. I didn't include the donation table in my film, which I now regret. Maybe a future cut will include this.

As the video indicates, shooting video with DSLRs is on the rise. In fact, "the House (great show, btw) season finale was shot entirely on a Canon 5D Mark II."

I'm very much an amateur as these things are concerned, but I was thinking about this with respect to Karen's thoughts on choosing a digital camcorder. Specifically, I've wondered how suitable it would be to use a DSLR to both record video and capture stills for ethnographic work.

With my limited knowledge, this seems very attractive to me, especially after getting a 50mm lens has changed my life, but the video does point to some very important caveats.

Via Digital Photography School.

Wow, just, wow.

Most activities require the use of both hands, which unfortunately makes filming these experiences impossible ... UNTIL NOW! Our patent pending Hatcam Mounting System allows you to capture everything you hear and see, all while having both hands free. With our Hatcam Kit, experiences that would be just a memory can now be captured forever.

Via Gizmodo.

I've been following the development of the micro four-thirds system a little, just because of how nice it would be to take DSLR quality photos in a point-and-shoot size frame, but here is another option — a DSLR size APS-C sensor in a point-and-shoot size frame. So pretty. PopPhoto.com has a review here as well as some sample pictures.

 

You'll never believe where this beautiful picture came from — it was compiled and extracted from some dirty shaky hazy video. Gizmodo says it is from a technique developed by Microsoft where they "can take a small percentage of these 900 images—80 in this case—and combine their sharpest, most detailed parts." The write up also has a great example of a panorama they created from similar quality video.

Alright, so maybe I am a little obsessed with time lapse photos. But still, I think this is pretty cool. It's a cheap but not so cheap ($139.95 on Amazon) waterproof camera that you stick in the ground and leave to gather time lapse photos. Seems there would be a number of uses for something like this, and they do have a sample video of someone using it to make a video out of some people putting up a Habitat for Humanity house.

Via Cool Tools.

This was done with a real person using paint. Unbelievable.

Via Gizmodo.

Reminds me of an exhibit I saw at the Art Institute in Chicago that consisted of what was written on the backs of photographs. The exhibit was in dialogue with the move to digital and the fact that these physical artifacts are harder to come by these days.

Lady Gaga to become Polaroid's creative director

"I am so proud to announce my new partnership with Polaroid as the creative director and inventor of speciality projects," said the pop star. "The Haus of Gaga has been developing prototypes in the vein of fashion/technology/photography innovation, blending the iconic history of Polaroid and instant film with the digital era. Lifestyle, music, art, fashion: I am so excited to extend myself behind the scenes as a designer, and as my father puts it, finally have a real job."

Tumblr has a very interesting camera breakdown, with the Apple Photo Booth built in webcam and picture taking program taking the first slot, and entry level Canon DSLRs rounding out the top.

Via Crunch Gear.

Gizmodo's latest Shooting Challenge was on slow shutter shots, and they had some amazing results.

74 Mesmerizing Slow Shutter Shots

Honesty: I never, in my wildest dreams, expected your slow shutter photography to be this crazy-awesome. But 74 of you turned in some humbling shots for this week's Shooting Challenge.

What an incredible set of photographs. This is one out of twenty-five photos selected by Alan Taylor for The Big Picture, "a photo blog for the Boston Globe/boston.com."

National Geographic's International Photography Contest 2009

National Geographic's International Photography Contest attracts thousands of entries from photographers of all skill levels around the world every year. While this year's entry deadline has passed, there is still time to view and vote for your favorites in the Viewer's Choice competition. National Geographic was kind enough to let me choose a few of their entries from 2009 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 25 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers. (25 photos total)