Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

Six degrees of reading

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
six-degrees-of-reading

Want to see books similar to the ones you’re reading? Head over to Yasiv, a site that uses Amazon data to create a flowchart of recommendations. Created by Andrei Kashcha, the site serves up a web of book covers that, when clicked, lead to information about those titles. There’s also a box on the left that lists the volumes by title.

Kashcha describes Yasiv as “a visual recommendation service that helps people to choose the right product from Amazon’s catalog.” In addition to books Yasiv can web other products carried by Amazon including video games, music and movies, although a search for broad clothing categories such as skirts and pants yields only a single image. Good for Grand Theft Auto. Not so good for Vera Bradley.

Yasiv recommendation web for 'House of Silk' by Anthony Horowitz

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Posted in Authors, Books, Business, Commerce, Culture, Fiction, Internet, Nonfiction, Novel, Photography, poetry, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Piquing your interest with Pinterest

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
piquing-your-interest-with-pinterest

What do you get when you cross Facebook with Flickr? Pinterest, the hot new social networking site that lets users collect and share photos across the Internet.

Mashable, the source of all things digital, describes Pinterest as a “digital pinboard,” a place where users can connect to others through shared tastes and the images that fascinate them. Users create category-based boards and then pin images to them. They can populate those boards by finding media online or uploading their own artwork. The boards are visible to all users, who can repin images on their own boards, “like” those images and follow other users.

So what does an image-based social site look like? Let’s take a look at my boards. I started by collecting images in some of the preset categories such as “Favorite Places & Spaces.” After that I created a few categories like “Design” and populated them with Pinterest user images I thought were worth sharing. Finally, as a bruising cold spell swept across the Northeast, I uploaded a few original photos I’d taken last winter after a snowstorm. (I’m trying to go beyond the share-the-misery idea and find something positive about a foot or more of snow.)

A few hours after the photo went live Cassandra Gouws from Pretoria, South Africa repinned it for one of her collections labeled “Travel.” I’m returning the favor and following that board and one more called “Amazing Photography.”

What impact Pinterest will have on the social and business community is anyone’s guess. Mashable only started covering it last October. And at this point participation is by invitation only. But as of late last year some 30,000 people had downloaded the Pinterest app from iTunes. And Mashable has written a primer on its use.

Participating takes more work than Tweeting and yields a smaller audience than Facebook but the site may appeal to people who prefer visuals to text. And since one of the default categories involves favorite products, Pinterest is positioning itself for companies in the fashion and design industries.

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Posted in Art, Business, Commerce, Culture, Facebook, Mobile, Photography, Social media | No Comments »

The Fog

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Slowly the fog,
Hunch-shouldered with a grey face,
Arms wide, advances,
Finger-tips touching the way
Past the dark houses
And dark gardens of roses.
Up the short street from the harbour,
Slowly the fog,
Seeking, seeking;
Arms wide, shoulders hunched,
Searching, searching,
Out through the streets to the fields,
Slowly the fog –
A blind man hunting the moon.

– F.R McCreary

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Posted in Art, Culture, Nature, Nonfiction, Photography, poetry | No Comments »

For print titles, the ‘e’ in e-books stands for envy

Friday, May 20th, 2011
for-print-titles-the-%e2%80%98e%e2%80%99-in-e-books-stands-for-envy

The move to e-books is looking like a stampede.

Online retailer Amazon.com said today that it’s selling more electronic books than printed versions. The company says it sells 105 e-books for every 100 physical copies it sells.

Next Tuesday rival Barnes & Noble will ratchet up the competition when it introduces a new generation Nook e-reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.

barnes-noble-nookB&N chief executive William Lynch told the Wall Street Journal that despite a late start his company has captured 25% of the digital books market. It has also grabbed a good chunk of the market for electronic magazine subscriptions. “We’ve also sold more than 1.5 million magazine subscription orders and single copy sales on the Nook newsstand.”

The irony of Tuesday’s announcement (or maybe the marketing strategy) is that it happens during the week of BookExpo America (BEA), which bills itself as the largest publishing event in North America. It has traditionally promoted paper copies. This year BEA will co-host a session on electronic publications with the IDPF Digital Book Conference 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.

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Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, e-books, Fiction, Marketing, Mobile, Nonfiction, Novel, Photography, Social media, Uncategorized, Web 2.0, Writers, Writing | No Comments »

Dear John

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010
dear-john

Dear John Serrao,

It was great to finally meet you Saturday. Your walking tours of the Pocono Mountains are legend and the weekend hike around the rim of Big Pocono State Park was no exception. You identified every tree in sight, from leaves to bark to acorns. Fellow hikers pointed to shrubs and moss and ground cover and asked “What’s that?” and you answered them all. The stories of snakes and bears and getting lost in thickets lent a gentle levity to the walk. Viewing nature is a pleasure but having a knowledgeable person explain the sights makes the journey that much more enjoyable.

Your followers were as interesting as the talk. I hadn’t seen the painter Peter Salmon since I’d interviewed him for an article more than 20 years ago and yet he remembered the piece, and my grandfather, Arthur A. “Shorty” Widmer.

The view from Big Pocono State Park

The view from Big Pocono State Park

I’m sorry Saturday’s hike was the next-to-the-last walk you’ll conduct in your adopted home but glad to hear you’re relocating to a place of calm inspiration, near forests and springs in the interior of Florida. As a native of Queens you must have been thrilled to see the abundant plant and wildlife in the Poconos, to savor the quietness of unspoiled game lands, the grand vistas of the Delaware Water Gap, the stillness of Promised Land Lake. Like many transplants you learned to appreciate the land without the need to improve it.

Thanks for encouraging others to protect the open spaces many assume will always remain. This slice of Eastern Pennsylvania isn’t metro Jersey or even Dallas, both of which make every attempt to cover nature with a concrete shroud. But the influx of city-dwellers and their appetite for asphalt, fast food and nail salons is slowly choking the region, where cars and houses stretch to the horizon like Sherman’s march on Atlanta.

Thank you for your books and your weekly column and, most of all, your enthusiasm for a quieter, inquisitive life. In our market-based economy, nature needs all the friends it can get.

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Posted in Commerce, Culture, Nature, Photography | No Comments »

TinEye not picture-perfect but it’s a bright start

Thursday, April 8th, 2010
tineye-not-picture-perfect-but-it%e2%80%99s-a-bright-start

Ever find a photo and wonder about its origin? There’s a search engine for that. It’s called TinEye, billed as a reverse image engine that uses image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. According to the company, “You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist or to find higher resolution versions.”

How does the beta site work in the real world? Well, with some limitations.

TinEye

I tried it with a representative sample of images—people, objects and logos—with mixed results.

The first search, using a portrait of John F. Kennedy, yielded 81 results, including partisan blogs, poster suppliers and dating-gossip sites. (The link to the Slate online magazine did correctly identify the former president.) The search engine also led to the correct identification of singer Lady Gaga (through mtv.com), novelist John D. MacDonald (through blogs in the U.S. and Russia) and Dilbert, even though the comic strip contained three frames and multiple images. TinEye showed no results for personalities such as magazine finance writer Dyan Machan.

A search using the Leaning Tower of Pisa turned up 31 results, including several postings on the photo-sharing site Flickr. A search using the image of a bottle of Coca-Cola yielded a 2009 blog post about one of the company’s marketing campaigns, along with 19 other results.

For the final search I used the logo from one of my agency’s business-to-business clients, GGB. TinEye found the image on a French industry-directory site, correctly identifying the company as the manufacturer of metal-polymer plain bearings.

The conclusion? TinEye is good at finding images of popular people, objects and brands. In my limited sample it did not lead to official sources, so if you need to annotate research reports, the service may lose some value. I also could not consistently find information about image location, use or version, but that may apply only to certain types of images.

As an image search engine, TinEye isn’t picture-perfect but it could have a bright future, especially as it enlarges its database. On the whole, the service is a fast way to identify common images, and a fun way to view the Web.

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After the storm

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Winter woods charcoal graphic pen 72

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Above the frost line

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
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I’ve always heard it’s another world in Tobyhanna, Pa. Now I know why.

It felt cold Saturday morning but the sun was shining for the first time in a while. It lit the snow in the woods, the trees like hands raised toward heaven for that life-sustaining glow. The house had started to feel small and airless, fairly typical after the holidays. We like to hike the state parks with our cameras, and since the plows had long since scraped the roads clean, we bundled up and drove the 40 minutes north to Tobyhanna State Park.

Tobyhanna State Park snowbank 72Route 611 was bare all the way through Mount Pocono. We crunched over an inch of cinders on Main Street in Tobyhanna, twisting past the Church of St. Ann on the corner with its white statues and turreted stone wall, but the roads were still clear. It was when we passed the entrance to the Tobyhanna Army Depot on Route 423 that we noticed the snow. Near the park entrance it had drifted across an otherwise barren road. Picnic benches straddled heaps of white that used to be green. The boat dock, the rental shack, the lake itself—all were deserted. Trails and roads, blocked by metal gates, were swollen with snow.

With hats and hoods in place, we got out of the car and walked to the lake. A hard wind, the kind you feel along Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, blew ice crystals sideways in clouds so thick we couldn’t see clearly. The snow on the lake bore the waffled tracks of vehicles and, in places where the wind had cleared its surface, the ice glowed, its color plunging from frosty white to blue-gray the deeper it went.

After a few photos we headed back, watching the temperature gauge on the dashboard rise a degree for every mile we drove, amazed at the contrast in weather between the southern part of the county and the Pocono Plateau.

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Posted in Nature, Photography | No Comments »

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

For those who like nature I’ve mounted a new photostream at Flickr. Most of the photos were taken in state parks in Pennsylvania during the fall.  This one came from my driveway during the recent snowstorm. It reminds me of Pink Floyd’s fat old sun, shining down on us like a crazy diamond.

Snowrise dry brush 72

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