photography – Media Matters

June 25, 2017

Selfies: Not just an American thing

I just returned from a vacation in Italy where we saw many wonderful sites. Seeing Saint Peter’s Basilica in person was truly amazing. The Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, and the cathedrals in Sienna and Florence were highlights of the trip. Seeing these sites up close and personal was a reminder that a picture seldom does justice to the real thing. However, as the modern expression goes, “if there’s not a picture, it didn’t happen” …which leads me to the point of this post.

Present everywhere we looked was the ubiquitous selfie stick. And for those traveling with friends, lots and lots of cell phone cameras being used to document every step of the way. I didn’t take my cell phone but I did carry a camera…so I’m not above criticism.

But what surprised me a bit was the posing that seemed to accompany the act of documentation. Watching people paste on their smile or pouty lips just before pushing the button was a reminder that what we see on social media is a carefully curated version of our lives. We take multiple pictures until we’re satisfied with the shot that will be uploaded to Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.

To the right is a picture of a gal and her friend in the baptistry at the cathedral in Florence. Please forgive me if it appears that I’m judging her personal piety, but it did seem odd that she folded her hands just long enough for her friend in the dark blue dress to capture the shot.

Elsewhere I saw plenty of folks taking pictures of themselves or their companions in poses that shouted, “I’m having the time of my life in this very famous place!”

Something that has been a real game-changer is the low cost and instant publishing made possible by digital photography’s marriage to the mobile phone.

The irony of this struck me as I took a photo of a young girl having her photo taken with a Kodak sign visible nearby. Just a decade or two ago photographic film and processing required made photography a fairly expensive hobby that required delayed gratification (waiting for the film to be processed and printed) before you could even think about sharing the experience with others. Now the picture is taken, reviewed, and uploaded to a global audience in seconds, without any consideration of cost.

But it is not just digital photography that has changed the way we live our lives.

Video games are a constant distraction for young and old. I watched children and adults playing games on their portable devices even while on vacation in amazing locations. My wife calls it “playing Gameboy in the middle of the Grand Canyon” syndrome. This little guy may have been a local so perhaps he was just killing time the way youngsters do in nearly every developed country.

Digital media that connects us instantly to our friends across the room or around the world has changed us…whether for the better or worse is up for discussion. As we explore mass media this summer let’s remember to think critically about how our experiences creating and consuming media change us and those around us. Only then will we be “smart” users of our smart devices.

October 4, 2015

The Magic of Motion Pictures

Movies, aka films, aka motion pictures, are actually optical illusions. To capture motion on film, or as digital bits, simply involves capturing still images in quick succession. How quickly depends on how much temporal resolution you want to capture…but for the illusion to be believable it should probably be, at a minimum, in the neighborhood of 18-24 frames each second. That’s it…just a new picture every 18th to 24th of a second and our eye/brain thinks it is seeing motion. Persistence of vision is the technical phrase used to explain the illusion that makes motion pictures possible.

So when you see TV or film images flicker on the screen just realize that you’re really seeing a bunch of still pictures displayed at a rate that is fooling your brain into thinking that you’re seeing motion. Animation is based on the same principle. There are many forms of animation, but if you remember Gumby, or the California Raisins, you can thank stop-motion animators for this technique that involves taking a photograph, then moving a real object in front of the camera, then taking another photograph…repeat until you’ve made a short movie. I once shot a claymation TV commercial for a local cable TV company and I can tell you that it is a very tedious process.

Equally tedious is a process of animating drawings to create a fluid appearance of motion. Check out this ad from Honda…

According to Ad Age,

The spot, called “Paper,” weaves together roughly 3,000 hand-drawn illustrations using stop-motion filming that takes viewers through a paper-flipping, historical journey of Honda products.

So if motion is an illusion, what do you call a short film made up of many very short motion clips? Move.

August 9, 2014June 2, 2020

Copyright Monkeybusiness

Perhaps you’ve seen this picture of a female Celebes crested macaque. The picture is unusual in several ways. First, the expression is priceless. To peer into the soul of a subject and capture it on film in such a powerful way is truly amazing.

But that brings us to the second way in which this photo is unusual. It is a selfie. That’s right, the photo was taken by the subject. According to an article on the Mashable website, the photographer David Slater was on a trip through the jungles of the Indonesian island Sulawesi in 2011 when he had his camera swiped by the macaque who then turned the camera on herself.

Okay, pretty interesting story so far, but it gets better. Several years later someone uploaded the photo to Wikimedia Commons. Slater, who claims copyright on the photo, asked Wikimedia to remove the photo. Wikimedia denied Slater’s request claiming that Slater did not own the photo since he didn’t take it.

Alex Magdaleno, writing for Mashable, continues…

according to Wikimedia’s licensing report, it remains in the public domain “because as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.”

There you have it. Once the courts settle this case we’ll know whether animal selfies enjoy the protection of copyright. And what if the courts say that the copyright belongs to the critter who pressed the shutter? In the US, copyright is awarded for the life of the author plus 70 years. If a Giant Galapagos tortoises snaps a selfie it could remain under copyright for upwards of 250 years!

UPDATE, April 24, 2018: The court has ruled, and the monkey cannot make a copyright claim. Okay, you can go back to your monkey-business as usual.

December 12, 2012

Someone’s about to die

Two photos, taken within a few days of one another in NYC, of men about to die.

In the period of a week these two photos were taken and published in newspapers and online. In each photo you can see the final moment before a life is snuffed out. In the first photo the victim is about to be hit by a New York subway train. In the second, the victim is about to be shot point-blank by the man approaching from behind. The first image was taken by R. Umar Abbasi, a freelance photographer for The New York Post. The second was a still from a surveillance camera.

The ethics of shooting, publishing, and captioning photos such as these are complex and difficult. You can find plenty of blogs and essays that attempt to dissect the issues involved (here’s one and here’s another) and they make many excellent points. It can be argued that I’m just as guilty by posting the pix on my blog and using the power of these very compelling images to draw you into a conversation about their appropriateness.

I hope that you will be prepared, if and when the day comes, to make the difficult choices that may be facing you. Do you take the picture? And if the picture is taken, do you print it? Which picture do you print? Which caption do you run? When does the public’s right to know trump the family’s right to privacy?

The best that we can hope for is that our choices come from ethical foundations that understands and appreciates the complicated, and often conflicting, values at play.