Calling Tim Powers. iPhone photos of a prop:
Tag Archives: photo
Old pix
under digital, government, media, standards
LAT:
NASA was so preoccupied with getting an astronaut to the moon ahead of the Soviets that little attention was paid to the mountains of scientific data that flowed back to Earth from its early space missions. The data, stored on miles of fragile tapes, grew into mountains that were packed up and sent to a government warehouse with crates of other stuff. And so they eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense woman with flaming red hair that fit her sometimes-impatient nature. She had been trained as a biologist, but within the sprawling space agency she had found her niche as an archivist. Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage.
“What do you usually do with things like that?” she asked.
“We usually destroy them,” he replied.
Near miss:
“Unlike the picture that the public had seen, this version had twice the resolution and four times the dynamic range.”
(s-t)
“Layer of ash separates the morning and evening snow”
under rural
“Alternating ash and snow fall over several days create layers in this examination of tephra-fall deposits (volcanic ash) from the initial explosions from Redoubt volcano on March 22 and 23, 2009. Picture Date: March 31, 2009. (Kristi Wallace / Alaska Volcano Observatory),” from the Big Picture:
Source notes that (amidst all the toney, pseudo-historical historical debates about journalism) perks like the Big Pic will likely fall to budget cuts.
(keith dawson; the title’s from his venerable .sig)
yourpreciousfluids.google.com
under digital, neighborhood, network, privacy, trend
“Watch out Broughton! Street View fans plan to descend on ‘privacy’ village for photo fest” (Dolan+Wrenn, MailOnline, 3 Apr ’09):
The impromptu protest started on Wednesday when Resident Paul Jacobs spotted the Google car—which was unmarked but featured the tell-tale 360-degree rotating camera fixed on a pole on its roof—cruising slowly down his lane in the Buckinghamshire village. He dashed outside, confronted the driver and told him that he was not allowed to continue, before alerting police. Mr Jacobs, 43, then knocked on his neighbours' doors and a crowd of angry residents surrounded the black Opel Astra, forcing it to make a U-turn and quickly leave. Mr Jacobs, who works for a global entertainment company, described Street View as a 'burglar's dream'. He said of the moment he spotted the car in London Road: 'My immediate reaction was anger—how dare anyone take a photograph of my home without my consent?
‘I ran outside to flag the car down and told the driver he was not only invading our privacy but also facilitating crime. This is an affluent area.
‘If our houses are plastered all over Goodgle it’s an invitation for burglars to strike.’
‘I don’t mind estate agents taking pictures but this shows people how to get in and how to get out. I was determined to make a stand so I called the police.’
See also: “gEverything,” “If we showed you, we’d have to pixelate you,” “performance.google.com,” “You’re not allowed to take pictures here.”
The Rag content of digital paper
The LoC Flickr stream has several new pix of Lincoln, including Alexander Gardner’s 9 Aug 1863 “seated portrait, holding glasses and newspaper”:
The very private Flickr user gbvico notes:
From the way the newspaper drapes, I would guess it is a copy of the New York Tribune, or one like it. Greeley’s paper was printed on a huge broadsheet—as large as a baby blanket—then folded into its eight pages. And it had more rag content than most papers of the era.
This observation neatly demonstrates why most debates about “digitization” amount to little more than ideological posturing: this analog photograph conveys enough tactile sense that the digitized version allows a well-informed viewer to infer implicit facts.
Bonus: Prokudin-Gorskii’s color photographs of Tsarist Russia.
Last days of disco
under art, government
!["[G W] Bush and his inner circle," vanity fair, 12/2001](http://b1ff.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/bush-oral-history-0902-01.jpg)
Exhumed as counterpoint for Murphy+Purdum+Sands, “Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House,” VF (Feb ’09).
Leibovitz carries a whiff of Riefenstahl, doesn’t she?
You’re not allowed to take pictures here
under law
Google Maps streetview driver pulled over by police. “But, Officer, I was helping to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
