- Accessibility within Photography Multimedia
- March 1st, 2010
For the past few months, I have come across high quality multimedia (video) photography work that comes with such unique storytelling that invites the viewers into their own work. This has a 50/50 reaction coming from myself because I believe they have left out one important element that will make their work even more accessible to the global audience.
And that is subtitles.
While I have a lifetime hearing impairment and thanks to today’s standards of subtitling, I am a strong believer that subtitles is for everyone and that is the international audience. For a long time, it was widely understood that it was for the deaf people and for world cinema. People forget the misconception that not all of us can understand the language spoken in their videos.
I would like to demonstrate 2 websites that shows off the idea of having subtitles or transcript to accompany their videos. First, TED. This website offers online video talks about technology, entertainment and design and offering english and other languages as possible, thanks to their own Open Translation Project.
And for the second website, it is MediaStorm. Each work is immensely thought provoking with stunning photography work with a transcript for you to read alongside the video. The screenshot below is an example how I am following the video.
The left window contains the video and the right contains the transcript. This can cause a few headaches since you would be tracking the transcript in a separate while trying to watch the video. I naturally developed to cope with this quite easily, although, there are other ways that this can be much easier to ‘read’.
Another thing on the web at the moment are podcasts and interview audios that contain no transcript to accompany it. I find that reading the transcript alongside the audio has a profound effect on myself along with looking at photographs. I came across Ciara Leeming’s post who interviewed Elijah Debnam about himself living in Derker. The picture struck me quickly and the tone of the audio made this more compelling. With a quick tweet to Ciara if she could provide a transcript and she provided it straightaway with an update on her site.
The story has now gained a ‘full voice’ for me to understand completely what is going on. If you feel that you haven’t got an understanding from my point of view, think of a film with foreign language where you can detect the tone of spoken words and no translation. That is what it is like for me. There is always frustration for many people who can’t understand by what is going on and eventually gives up. Although, I have a huge curiosity and would want a transcript to help what was being spoken.
When you provide a multimedia slideshow, podcast, voice over on still photos, spare a thought for the rest of the international web audience. Would you like to tell the rest of the world what you have to say by providing transcripts/subtitles or to cater for a limited audience with barriers to languages?
- Aperture 3.0.1
- February 25th, 2010
If you are having issues installing Aperture 3.0.1, follow the quick steps below:
Open up Finder and go to /Library/Preferences and delete “com.apple.AECT.plist”
Run the updater and it should install.
If that fails, there is another way round this and it is to get the trial version 3.0.1 from Apple’s Aperture page.
- Brilliant photography links to read.
- February 21st, 2010
I thought I share some web links within the photography community.
- From the New York Times, “A Camera and an Eye, Both One of a Kind“. Louis Mendes is “Shaft with a camera”.
- I recommend you to read up on Johnny Stiletto, as I like his capture flow with the use of natural light wherever he goes and his writing complements each photos. Brilliant.
- Ever wonder what it would be like to take photos in a war zone? Check out Ask a Pro: How to Shoot (and Not Get Shot) In a War Zone.
- What photographer categories are you in? You do want to know… (Warning: satire humour)
- 100 Eyes has amazing photography to look at. My favourites? Check out ‘Mother Russia’ and ‘The American Dream’.
- Celine Clanet photography of Máze, a village located in Lapland contains such shar, enjoyable and colourful photos that I keep coming back to this site for inspiration.
- Tom Palumbo early work has been discovered on flickr and this is my favourite from his batch.
- Photographer Bryce Duffy shoots brilliant sharp colourful photos. Take a look at his people and personal collection for inspiration.
- Aperture 3, was the wait worth it?
- February 12th, 2010
Poor Aperture, it has been in limbo for a couple of years with RAW updates nearly every months and some sparse updates here and there. When Aperture 2 came out at the 1st quarter of 2008, it felt like the next major release will be due a year later. As the months went by, Adobe Lightroom was getting all the attention and rightly so it deserves.
Suddenly, Aperture 3 came flying in unexpectly, what did we get?
It seems that the developers at Apple decided to borrow features from iPhoto and iMovie into Aperture. The layout remains the same along with new features such as Faces, Places, brushes, adjustment presets, full screen browser, oh, audio and video support, and advanced slideshows. Now those seems great on paper and the application is now 64-bit app which means things should chug along faster.
Looking at the world of Apple and their secretive motives, the company has selected a batch of pro photographers to show off Aperture on their website about how wonderful it is. It is the status quo of Apple marketing once again until we stumble back in the real world.
It is a different mixture here as I found out that the responsive of modifying levels, curves, brushes, cleaning up the photos has mid range performance hits. It is acceptable at most times if you can bear it, else you are going to have quite a frustrating time. Word of advice, make sure you have well over 2GB of RAM to deal with this beast. It is, after all, a Pro app.
The most dreadful part of this software is ‘Faces’ because it is enabled by default. A quick uncheck in preferences quickly brings back the performance that Aperture deserves. I never got the idea of ‘Faces’ as it seems so time consuming and can cause disarray. I have far too many photos of people and having to deal with this function takes up my time. The clear aim of a software is to use it straightaway without delay.
Aperture is buggy. Extremely buggy that it is quite shocking that it has become a major release. This brings back the days of when OS X was first released in 2001 with serious performances issues and bugs forcing Apple to fix the issues asap.
My issues? I have converted my current library to Aperture 3 and found many of my photos refusing to be displayed. All I was left was a nice cutout of a grey background. Wonderful. To resolve this issue, I have to refresh reprocess the photos, this could take a long time and ran into more frustration that ‘it just doesn’t work’.
Another one was where I edited a photo using a plugin, it doesn’t show up in the preview where it appears in full screen, I keep running into this bug far too many times with Aperture 3 that I wish I never put the software on in the first place.
Remember the word of advice earlier about the RAM? Just watch Aperture eat it all up after editing a couple of photos. This thing leaks memory like no tomorrow!
Aperture 3 has got so much going for it with the new features, brushes and great number of plugins on standby. It has a huge potential to chase after Adobe Lightroom and perhaps Photoshop as that still remain supreme, it is let down hugely on their quality build and for that explanation, I recommend reading Daniel’s post Keeping up with the Joneses.
Note: It is a good idea to back up your current library before upgrading. You’ll fall back to Aperture 2 in a hurry.
- Scanning
- February 8th, 2010
Scanning and editing photographs, particularly black and white, are easy to do until having to deal with colour. I cannot tell you how much frustration I have to deal with when it comes to getting the right look to the photos I have taken. Before, it was scanning in the negatives with Vuescan, then take the scanned raw file to Photoshop, inverse, colour levels, etc. It got too much and I am suddenly reading the complicated documents on VueScan website.
After some search online, I have found a spot on guide written back in 2008 by Ben Anderson. With this newly discovered knowledge, I am currently updating a batch of colour photographs on Vision with the new scan. Results: Up We Go and Goalie.
- The Places We Live
- January 25th, 2010
Jonas Bendiksen displayed his documentary on about The Places We Live. He does an exceptional job as I was absolutely awestruck by story telling of this documentary about life in the slums around the world. The sound of people talking, background noises and well craft photography work set the tone beautifully and certainly has an impact on myself wanting to know more what happened to those people.
Go and check it out.
- So long 2009
- December 30th, 2009
Hey 2009,
I thought I write you an open letter before you disappear onto the pages of history from tomorrow and I just would like to say thanks for bringing on the highs, the mediums and the lows. See, I didn’t expect quite a number of things to happen this year.
You brought on huge changes to everyone this year. A year that people would probably go ‘ugh, that was just plain shit’ without a thought how things has turned out. What they don’t know is that the negatives brings the positives. When people recognise this, they can make the inroads in their lives.
For me, it has been such an interesting year as I continued the ‘Yes Man’ fiasco into 2009 and ended it on my 30th birthday. Saying ‘yes’ made me learnt a whole new batch of things as I learnt that confidence is a thing that drives us to do many things. I featured in a short film for a friend of mine and that led me on to do a short film of my own. Popularity brings about more opportunities, an increase in the social circle and delivered me one unexpected thing in my life.
Other things such as jobs, changes of locations, self awareness, design, self esteem… ah.. self esteem is one huge thing that got me going places.
The lows? Gee, I’m going to keep this short and simple. I left a job that I felt was hampering my abilities to do ‘work’. An appreciation for what I am doing. I found out the hard, cold way that people doesn’t do this often and it left me wondering whether people are blind to this kind of thing. You learn about the crap that gets thrown at you and you get toughen up from it.
My depression kicked in during those awkward time and thanks to the love of my life, friends and family for propping me up the wall to make sure that I don’t go down that road. You know who you are and thank you for that.
Now, let’s look on the medium. I moved around a couple of times with my future wife, decided to go freelance doing website design with the name (you’ll like this!) “Blue Pants”, went and bought a scanner to finally scan in the huge batch of developed negatives to put onto my newly redesigned photography website, applied for various jobs, started writing a batch of posts… the list goes on.
It’s the mediums that keep me sane in between the highs and lows.
See 2009, you aren’t going to win this time around because I’m going to take all those experience and make 2010 a brilliant place to be.
Let me tell you how I am going to do this.
I’m not going to fear failure any more. I’m going to face it head on. If I didn’t get something right, I get 10 times the experience than the next person who haven’t done it. Granted it is going to be a kick in the teeth and the end game is that you learn from it.
I’m going to ask people for guidance when needed. I have survived for so long without help and now I need some experience first hand how to get this right over time.
I’m going to write posts, I’m going to make brilliant websites, I will make photographs that speak volumes, I will make good inroads in my life and how am I going to do it?
I got to start somewhere and that is from the foundations I have built in 2009.
So long 2009.
Mind the door on the way out will you?
- Amazing photos – Travel Photographer of the Year 2009
- December 16th, 2009
The winner has amazing photos and each photo are thought provoking in ways of story telling, providing you with raw emotions, sense of being there and offering you a small piece of history captured by the photographer. Those are evidences of what is happening in our world today and continue to be.
If you want to be inspired, I strongly recommend you to check out the rest of the photographs captured by other winners and runner ups. Being a photographer doesn’t mean you have to point the camera and be done by that. It’s the subject that each photos portray to us, the viewer, by the photographer by giving us a sense of meaning.
The next time you pick up a camera, feel what you want to take and trust me, the results are captured in a heartbeat.
- Tokyo Camera Style
- December 6th, 2009
Tokyo Camera Style is a photographer haven. Looking through those photos are amazing to see what collection there are in Japan.