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So much digital photomanipulation out there can be garish, heavyhanded, or just plain boring. Which makes it even more exciting when you come across someone creative and discerning like nou, who has recently been experimenting with filters and textures to wonderful effect. Her faux-vintage and distressed portraits and landscapes are finely realized, pleasingly restrained, and gorgeously poetic.
Well, the people have chosen. Last night at 11pm EST, as polls closed in the West, American news organizations announced that Barack Hussein Obama had been elected the 44th President of the United States. Pandemonium erupted across the country, and across the globe, from Chicago to San Francisco to St. Louis to Miami to Washington, D.C. to London, Berlin, Sydney, Rio, New Delhi, and Kogelo, Kenya. Today, Fotolog members are posting pictures of the incredible headlines of their hometown newspapers that are recording this historic moment. Here are a handful. You can post your own at the Fotolog page uselection2008. And you can see hundreds of front page scans at Newseum.org.
In the very unlikely case you haven’t heard, Tuesday, November 4, is Election Day in the United States. It’s one of the most overlooked qualities of representative Democracy: we keep getting more chances to get it right. Not surprisingly (as you can see from the photo distribution here), on today’s choice the Fotolog population is in complete accordance with the world population, as measured by the Gallup organization (see map below). But I will be glad to post more original McCain pics (and Obama pics too) if you have them. Keep America in your thoughts today. And for all you Yanks: GO VOTE! Late Update: Post your Election Day photos here on Fotolog at uselection2008!
World Citizens Prefer Obama to McCain by More Than 3-to-1 (Gallup)
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Ghouls & goblins & witches & warlocks & princesses & firemen & black cats & devils & foxes & cowboys & smiles & candy & smiles. Happy Halloween from Fotologland!
Bubble gum, almost accidentally invented by a young accountant named Walter E. Diemer at the Fleer Company, in Philadelphia, turns 80 years old this December. The small pink chunks of goo became an instant hit, and Fleer sold over a million and a half dollars worth of bubble gum in the first year. That was at less than 1¢ a piece! Sadly, Diemer never patented his invention. As you can see, Fotolog lovers love their bubble gum too. Happy early birthday Dubble Bubble!
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With the demise of Polaroid film just months away, if you want to keep enjoying this iconic genre, either you’ll have to go on a wild shopping spree immediately, or just resign yourself to faking it. Presuming you can’t spare the cash right now, there are a bunch of ways to make fake Polaroids out of all your ho-hum, soulless jpegs, but a beta app we just came across on Buzz Feed looks to be the simplest, coolest, and most fun way to do it (if you have a Mac; Windows functionality coming soon).
Download the free app from Poladroid, drag and drop your photo onto the Polaroid camera icon, and wait. After a few moments you hear the trademark click-bzzzz-whrrrrr and a Polaroid print pops out of the camera, slowly “developing” before your eyes. When it’s done a bell goes off and the new, medium-res “Polaroid print” opens up on screen. The differences from jpeg to Pola are striking: the colors are more saturated, shadows are deeper, focus is softer, vignetting might appear around the edges, and there’s even lots of dust, scratches, and stray fingerprints! And the most authentic touch is the perfectly reproduced texture of the white border frame. Click the photos here to check out the larger versions up close. Nothing will ever replace the tactile and beautiful essence of a real Polaroid, but Poladroid lets you recapture some of the whimsy of instant photography. If only they could figure out a way to let you shake it.
The Empire Strikes Box? Sorry, sometimes the cheesiest choice is best. That’s one fantastic Darth Vader lair, Ishmael, and one great photo linearclassifier!
One of the most delightful, and important, things Fotolog lets us do is share our local cultures with the world. For several years now, acravo98 has been documenting the lives and work of the fishermen and women in his native vila of Torreira, Portugal. From launching the moliceiro Maria de Fatima in choppy surf, to hauling in the day’s nets full of sardines or mackerel, to waiting onshore endless hours for the barco’s return, acravo keenly captures the arduous, sun-baked reality of this slowly dwindling but still vibrant merchant class. Outside of the occasional book or magazine profile on a subject like this, there aren’t many other places where you can enjoy such unfiltered, lyrical photo-reporting. And thanks to the three Fotolog pages acravo has maintained over the years—acravo98, xavega, and poemas_xavega—we can follow the seasonal eddies of these spartan, seafaring lives in near daily detail. A short poem that acravo has posted a few times perfectly illuminates the mixed emotions his full body of work conveys:
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And speaking of Canada, here’s some spectacular backyard trompe-l’oeil perspectivey goodness from a couple of Autumns ago by Greater Toronto’s own spinlab.
October 12 is Thanksgiving Day in Canada, although it’s always celebrated on the second Monday in October (tomorrow). Many Canucks consider the whole weekend one long feast. Happy Thanksgiving Canada!
If you have a digital camera with a manual shutter function, you know what a borrisco is. Set the shutter to longer than 1/4 of a second, point at a light source—preferably several, preferably at night—click, and wave your camera around in front of you. Voila: you’ve created a borrisco, a term that has come to mean “light scrawl” or “scribble”. This description of long-exposure light paintings could very well have been invented by a Fotolog member way back in 2003, when the borriscos group log was founded. Now, there are great borriscos and pretty lame borriscos. It all depends on your level of creativity. The best light scrawls can resemble abstract paintings, or make trails and loops of colored lights look like ribbons or candy or encounters of the third kind. The borriscos admins welcome all sorts of shots: “These blurs can be caused by the lights moving, the camera moving, or both lights AND camera moving.” But above all, they want your best experimentation: “BE CREATIVE!” That’s good advice, and here are a dozen notable borriscos that fit the bill.
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If you admire William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, or Martin Parr for their seminal contributions to the art of color photography, then you must also acquaint yourself with the work of Luigi Ghirri. Ghirri died in 1992, at the age of 49; his vision has since been well-celebrated and documented in Europe, but he’s virtually unknown to the rest of the world. That’s a shame, because his early poetic explorations of his native Reggio Emilia and the places he studied in and visited, like Modena, Bologna, Capri, Venice, and Paris, as well as his later, more structured projects on architecture and the Italian countryside are gloriously infused at once with wit, buoyancy, and a stealthy seriousness. But we can stop worrying, because we now finally have the first comprehensive Ghirri collection, published this summer by Aperture: It’s Beautiful Here, Isn’t It… is a gorgeous, well-curated, and long-overdue tribute to an influential shaper of the modern photographic sensibility.
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Please join me in welcoming Bruno Belcastro—you know him better as argen—as a contributor to The Daily F’log! Bruno is a longtime member from the Recoleta barrio of Buenos Aires, and well-versed in all things Fotolog. We’re delighted to have him on board. —along Por favor, únanse a mí, para darle la bienvenida a Bruno Belcastro—probablemente lo conozcan mejor como argen—como colaborador del Daily F’log! Bruno es un antiguo miembro del barrio de Recoleta, Buenos Aires, y experto en todo lo relacionado a Fotolog. Estamos encantados de tenerlo a bordo. —along Si todavía no lo has notado día a día, Fotolog es enorme en Argentina: con cerca de 4,5 millones de miembros, es la red social número dos en el país (luego de Blogger). No es una sorpresa que muchos de estos miembros se identifiquen con Fotolog y con amigos que han hecho en el sitio. Jóvenes Argentinos Fotologgers, particularmente adolescentes, desarrollaron una especie de estilo –usando ropa colorida y hasta peinados coloridos- se han convertido en un fenómeno subcultural: ellos son “Los Floggers”. Algunas personas, tanto jóvenes como adultos, critican la forma en que ellos se visten (especialmente los hombres jóvenes), pero muchos otros solo piensan que está bien.
A comienzos de este año, el miembro cumbio organizó un encuentro de Floggers en el shopping Abasto, en Buenos Aires. El Abasto es ahora su lugar no oficial de reunión. Más Bailemos Read More »
Heh heh. Now that’s some top-notch surveillance work, jar. Excellent job.
Well that may be overstating it a bit, but just for fun, we did a Google Fotolog search of the phrase “best photo ever”, and these (mostly) worthy pics came up. Sadly, nothing much appeared for “nunca mejor foto” or “cada vez melhor fotografia.”
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