Things To Think About

Hello all,

was hoping to find an image of a pinhole camera made from a turkey since it is close to Thanksgiving, but no such luck (I'm sure there is some form of turkey in Spam). Anyway, had a couple of ideas I figured you all could think about. Maybe we could do something where we all brought weird objects in class and worked on making pinhole cameras out of them. Then after we made the cameras we could take photos and show off what we came up with. Just a thought.

I know we talked about doing something with Polaroid in mind (which would be awesome!) since they are discontinuing the production of their instant film, but what about thinking about doing something for the whole digital to analog thing since we are making the change after next semester. Still trying to come up with a plan but if you all have any ideas feel free to share.

Hope you all have a great turkey or tofurky day

Polapremium????

Hey guys, found this site pretty randomly and I must say I am intrigued. The page only says "Polapremium -- The new home of instant photography" but that is enough to keep me interested. There is not much else there yet except for a countdown in seconds that seems to end around next Thursday or Friday (my math is not all that reliable). So keep your eyes peeled and hopefully this will be something worthwhile.

What do you guys think?

Google and Flickr and Smithsonian, oh my!

One of the great things about the Smithsonian being public domain is that eventually, it all winds up on the internet.  And it has.  

The Smithsonian Flickr Account has over 1200 images from the collection of the world's largest museum, or "a sample of the more than 13 million images in some seven hundred collections in our museums, archives, and research centers." This is some seriously cool public domain stuff, also available in High-def, ripe for both research and appropriation.

Because we do that.

Like Marchel Duchamp did.

LIFE Photo Archive To Be Made Available On Google

This may be more exciting to some of you than others.

Access to LIFE's Photo Archive -- over 10 million images in total -- will soon be available on a new hosted image service from Google, Time Inc. Ninety-seven percent of the photographs have never been seen by the public. The collection contains some of the most iconic images of the 20th century, including works from great photojournalists Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks, and W. Eugene Smith.

These images can be found when conducting a search on Google.com or on Google Image Search. Users can also search through the LIFE Collection directly by visiting http://images.google.com/hosted/life.

The LIFE Photo Archive featured on Google will be among the largest professional photography collections on the Web and one of the largest scanning projects ever undertaken. Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search today with all 10 million images to be available in the coming months.

Geostationary Banana over Texas

Although this may not have anything to do with photography I found it quite humorous none the less.

The Geostationary Banana Over Texas project hopes to put a giant banana over Texas.

The artist behind the Banana Over Texas work is César Saez. Saez plans to put the banana between the high atmosphere and earth's lower orbit for about one month. It will be visible to Texans with the naked eye, day and night.

As stated on the website: the banana will be constructed like a blimp. Filled with helium, it will float between 30 and 50 km up in the sky. I will have a semi-rigid structure made of bamboo and a skin made with synthetic paper. Thanks to an extra load in gas and a valve system, it will keep its shape at all times. The final size of the piece will be 300 meters in length.

They were suppose to launch this thing in August 2008 but sounds like they ran into issues with funding of course.

Everything is bigger in Texas.. even the giant bananas floating in the sky.

Grand Rapids Redux

Well, for the like... six of us... that went [plus Jan and Crew, and Fred] it was interesting.  Between seeing The Beatles and Chaplin well larger than life size, to stumbling down the stairs and onto the hoovercraft;  to a Deitmar retrospective... to shiney things... thanks to all of us that went.

Grand Rapids - Image Transfers - Cool Art

So for all that do NOT know. We are going to Grand Rapids on Saturday to hit up some art Galleries. If you want to go and have not talked to anyone you can email me or just show up at Wightman 153 at 11:30 saturday morning. It should be a pretty cheap trip, seeing as at least one of the galleries is free.

Next week we are going to have a demo by Kelly P. She is going to show anyone who is interested how to do direct image transfers. Also bring ideas for work that we can do, any cool artists you have seen in your travels through the world of art that you think we would be interested in, and any work that you would like some feed back on.

As for cool art, I found this the other day and thought it was pretty creative. The guys who make photoshop have been busy getting CS4 ready for us to make pretty pictures with, but in their spare time they created an amazing ad campaign.
Check it out here.

Hope to see you all saturday!

Mike

New Generation of Polaroid

Hey all,

check this out! As some of you may know Polaroid has worked with ZINK (zero ink) to put out an ipod sized printer that instead of using actual ink cartridges uses this special paper that is embedded with colored dye crystals that get heated up by the printer to make a photograph. Now of course the next step is to put this printer into a digital camera and voila...a digital Polaroid (kinda)! They will be marketing a version of this camera that spits out 2x3 prints hopefully this winter, but they also are in works to be producing a camera that will do the standard polaroid size of 4x3(sometime in 2009). It's not the same as a nice solid polaroid that develops before your eyes...but awesome none the less. If you are itching for this technology then there is a camera coming out in Japan starting November 28 (in America by April or May 2009)for around $320, the TOMY xiao TIP-521 Digital Camera. The neat thing about this camera is not only can you print within the camera but it also features an IrDA receiver so that you can print images sent to the xiao wirelessly from other IrDA devices (other cameras, phones). Pretty awesome stuff!

Marios