This link dropped in my inbox recently.
From Gary Hall, Professor of Media. Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
Month: June 2024
ProCamera
IPhone & ProCamera
The defualt phone on the iPhone is execellent. And as I look at the pictures made in the first few iterations of the phone I can see big diffrences in quality of the images. How much of this is software, and hardware it’s hard to tell. For example my current iPhone will produce a file between 75 to 100+ MegaBytes in Apple ProRaw. I have been using my iPhone in conjuction with the default Camera, and an app called ProCamera, since at least 2016. The feature that sets these two apps apart is the abilty to apply exposure and focus separately, with ProCamera. As well as a slew of features from White Balance to exposure to both over and under and shutter speed choices. I have over the years come to rely on the CameraPro app for tricky exposure situations in particluar. One of those situatons is my Weekly photo taken on Saturdays at 17:17:00. This idea has a dedicated tumblr. The app icon sits proudly on my home screen, where I can reach it quickly and easily.
Software Bug?
Last Saturday when I opened the app in readiness to take my weekly picture, after taking the shot I was presented with a screen that touted the benefits of puchasing the app. I had bought this app sometime prior to 2016! What the hell? Even by scrolling down the huge screen of which only the top portion is shown, there was no option to buy the app? I was perplexed. I immediately jumped online and started looking for clues or help. In the end I ended up in the support section of the company’s website. I dashed off a support request and attached the screengrab. As it was Saturday here and the company is in Europe, making it early Saturday morning there, I wasn’t holding out much hope for the next few days. So I contemplated deleting the app entirely and readjusting my home screen on my Phone to replace the missing icon.
Prompt & Efficient Service
Fast forward to Monday and I had received an email aknowledgement, that problem seemed to be a bug, their developement team were looking into it. Could I offer more detail? This I did. The NEXT day I was emailed a promo code for the app. This I promptly redemeed and hey presto I had my favourite camera app back. Fully funtional.
This is top notch cusotmer service. I cannot recommend this app enough both for its usefulness and for the company’s customer service.
Thank you Cocologic, and thank you to your support team as well.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photographs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr | leave a tip, or buy a print
☚
Online tip jar and shop
I recently, as a small experiment, setup shop using the Ko-fi platform, you can tip me $5.00 and it will go towards my hosting costs. If I get enough tips they will contribute to purchasing more silver gelatin paper and film both 120 and 5×4 inches and my server costs. I chose Ko-Fi because their setup was easy and fast and they only take 5% on sales, they take nothing on tips. Sadly the lowest I could set the tip jar to was $5.00.
I also have at this stage a single members tier, for those who want to purchase a silver gelatin print from this album on flickr.
There is an easy button on the bottom left of the screen that helps, too I hope?
Altfotonet?
Many years ago, I registered the domain name, altfotonet.org. It was an attempt to build a community of like minded folks who were creatives using cameras but who weren’t entrenched in the commercial art scene or the academic world of art theory and criticism. I even went out and registered an ISSX number for it, ISSN 1836-845X.
It was intended to be an online Zine kind of publication. I pubished 3 issues and they are archived at the National Library of Australia’s site trove. The archived summary reads:-
Welcome to altfotonet.org, we feel a unique idea, possibly the net’s first, peer based art review magazine/gallery, focusing on lens based practices, [no pun intended]. A kind of artist’s run cyber-gallery for image makers, using lenses in conjunction with light sensitive materials.
From the about page:-
This site sits somewhere between the democratic cacophony of sites like flickr and corporate styles of many commercial galleries, without the formality of state run institutions.
After those 3 issues the site lay farliy dormant. I did relaunch and rebuild the site at one point when I switched my hosting service. But after a couple of blog entries it again remained dormant. This year I decide not to renew the domain registration. So now other than Trove and the Way Back Machine, Altfotonet does not exist.
I did however set up a group on flickr to source images for it. That group still exists and ticks away quietly. Named obviously altfotonet.org.
This week I discovered I could run mulitple wordpress intallations on my website. And seeing as the internet is pushing back and trying to get weird again, I thought I would add a wordpress blog to try and keep the idea alive and running. I’m also really behind the idea of the small web too, and this seems a perfect use case. Because Silicon Valley is getting less and less popular, thanks to Sam Altman Meta, and AI and the enshitification of the web amongst other things.
The address is http://stunik.com/alfotonet/ . My plans at this point are loose, treat it as another blog albeit a bit more focussed than this one. Perhaps I may have guest editors, interview photographers, we shall see.
On the to do list is a plan resurrect as much as I can in terms of text, at the minimum. So an about page is in order and perhaps a submission page too. If you want a body of work submitted contact me. Already in place a links page, contact me if you want your site added.
The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age
In my inbox recently, from Jorg Colbert came a link to an article by a panel of experts at the New York Times who decided what the 25 most infulential images since 1955 are.
Definitely an arbitary date to choose from and some obscure images which I had not heard of and a couple of insigtful texts to accompany some of them.
It begins by lisitng the obvious omissions, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn.
A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.
They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas, 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê, 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, 75; the American photographer Shikeith, 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director.
Sadly behind a paywall. A definite add to my bookmarks.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photographs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚
iPhone 14 Hardware & Software at night
Ever wondered how an iPhone 14 Hardware & Software will perform at night?
My current iPhone, a 14 Pro, has been performing spectacularly since I bought it. This is an example of what it allows me to photograph. A situation where film would be almost impossible without a ton of pre-planning, and a healthy does of luck. And even with a DSLR some extra equipment. As it is, I stood in the one spot held the camera steady enough and the hardware and software took care of everything else. Three snaps later we moved on and got in the car to go home.
This images forms part of another project hosted on Tumblr
I couldn’t be happier with how my iPhone 14 Pro performs at night.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photographs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚
Technobabble
Google recently advised me of over 100 pages on my site that were returning 404 error messages. After a bit of digging I discovered a small snippet of code had malformed quotation marks, curly (“) instead of straight (″) . It took many hours of work to fix this. As my career draws to a close I’m hoping to set up shop on somewhere online to try and garner some small level of income. So Google ranking may be important for me moving forward, even if I object to the enshitification of the web. I am also trying to contribute the the small web too.
Anyway during the process I noticed that Safari was hogging a lot of resources. So I switched to iCab an excellent alternative. And it turns out far less resource hungry. As I’m currenlty relying on my 2015 work issued laptop having tools slow is a nuisance. To be expected, but bothersome none the less. Moving forward if this helps generally in my day to day work flow and can keep using this older laptop; great. The alternative is to splash out on a new desktop while not impossible not quite that high in my priorites right now.
Arc is another alternative, but I doubt it will offer the benfits that I’ve noticed in iCab. Vivladi is also a good browser.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photographs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚
Flickr as archive?
Recently on flickr, the above imge that I had uploaded nineteen years ago resurfaced. Thanks to a coment from a stranger. On the day I was using flickr’s excellent iPhone app to monitor my feed. One drawback of the mobile app is it is difficult to determine the context of any interactions and the image itself in this situatiuon. Once I was able to acces flickr on a desktop I was able to see that the image is in an album called concrete canvas.
I also was able to see if I had origianlly captered it as a raw file by using Neofinder to search all my drives. If I had it would enable me to reprocess the file and perhaps present it in a better way. Afterall digital editing software has come along way in the last ten years never mind nineteen. So I found the file opened it an pocessed it again even though all I had was a jpeg.. This is the outcome.
What still perplexes me though, is that the image somehow surfaced in a strangers stream all these years later? I can see they added it to their favourites so I’m grateful for that.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photogrpahs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚
Wordless Wednesday 20240612
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs. And of course the act of making and taking photographs in the 21st century.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚
TYAT 2014-06-02
Ten years ago today, I was photographing this scene at least once a day at 8:30. Eventually the tree was cut down so I stopped making this picture.
I created a special tumblr for the idea too.
This is something that draws me to digital photography, and in particular, Smart Phone photography. Other ideas revolving around iPhones as cameras and the metadata they produce interest me as well. Lastly having tools that enable me to quckly and meaningfully search my digital archive are equally important to my creative practice.
About the author.
Stuart Murdoch is an Artist and Part time Photo Educator, with over 30 years of teaching experience. He contemplates many things photographic. His ruminations include his own work as well other’s and the aspects of technology that impact on the sharing and consumption of Photographs.
☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr
☚