Microphone Fire :: Social Media

Senchu!

Photographs, for me, are on a trajectory that’s essentially the opposite of petrol (or oil, depending on which crazy country you come from). When gas was cheap we would just drive around with our friends, and enjoy nothing more than the freedom. But then the price went up somewhat significantly (compared to 200, not so much compared to recently) and driving is more of a practical thing now, to get from A to B. With the advent of digital cameras photography is now the opposite.

The old fashioned type of photography is what most people associate with photographers. Back when you had to pay for film, and it was a finite resource, the activity was all about using this film to be all it could be. Rather than sending it off to the army, though, you would just be very focused on the end result. Taking the photo had one aim: to create the best photo possible.

The other, more modern type of photographer has been set free from this traditional use. Taking a photo is no longer about the photo. It’s now more akin to Jackson Pollock’s idea about art. Sometimes the art isn’t the end result, but the process; The act of gathering your friends together, getting them all close, and saying “three, two, one, CHEESE!” Or when you’re out with a friend at a concert and you two squish your faces together and point a camera back at yourself and grin like a drunken sailor that just visited the red light district. The social action is what is important. The resulting photograph is a nice thing to have, but it often get buried under the deluge of media that we create and consume nowadays.

The phony smile plays a part in the transition too. There was a psych study which got subject to put pencils horizontaly between their teeth without letting it touch their lips. Another group held onto one end of the pencil with just their lips. Then they rated jokes. The ones who didn’t let the pencil touch their lips rated jokes as more funny. Why? because holding a pencil like this forces your face into a smile-of-sorts, which tells your brain that you’re happy. So the point of this long winded tangent is that the phony smiles in group photographs are also part of the fun.

This whole social photography thing took me a while to figure out, I wasn’t much interested in the process, I’m more the old style; I just wanted to get a good photo. So I would get frustrated thinking “Grumble, why am I getting pushed in with everyone, and having a cheesy fake smile that will turn out to be a crappy photo anyways.” But now I get it, and am more than happy to oblige.

p.s. if you’re curious about how to tell if a smile is real to fake it’s all in the eyes. We have control over the muscles that make our lips move, but not that give us proper crows feet.

p.p.s. if you want to check out my old style photos just click on photo gallery up the top rightish.

Have you met my friend?

Introductions are one of those uncomfortable things that often make you have to think fast on your feet and come up with nice things to say about people. In the case of introducing a written piece I have the benefit of time, and an ability to edit. It follows, then, that I use the most excellent rhetoric I know to talk about my blog, which will be marvelous, stupendous, fascinating, witty, insightful, wide ranging and specialized. It will be so good that it makes you stop and think “I can’t believe I just read something so incredible” after each and every post. Wow. Just writing that description almost made me want to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Now that I’m done lying I can start at the beginning, with my motives for creating a blog. The first is to practice my writing, which has always been one of my weak points. The second, and strongest, is to learn something. I hope to use this blog to find interesting topics, research them, and report back you. In saying that I can’t promise that every post will be interesting to everyone, or even anyone. But I do have a few goals; Post at least once a week; Make any technical posts understandable to someone who doesn’t know anything about the field; Be as interesting as possible. Of course, this is a blog so it will have the requisite stories about my weekend and photographs of cats with ungrammatical statements.

I would like to encourage as many of you as possible to comment. When it comes to user generated content there is a Pyramid. Generally about one percent of the population creates the content, ten percent interacts with it and the rest observe. For example, with Facebook one person might upload a photo, and then a few people will comment on it and many more people will look at the photo and read the comments. These comments add a tremendous amount of extra information, and context to the original content, and are as valuable and useful as the initial piece of content.

Social Media

Senchu!

2008 12 11

Have you met my friend?

2008 07 20