All I want for xmas

Following yesterdays visit to the NG (see below) I realised what I am looking for in a new mousemat (which I need). I want a GretagMacbeth colour chart mousemat. Of course, they dont exist, and with good reason, as the colours printed out would be no use for colour benchmarking - but conceptually, it will be very amusing.

The RGB values are available online, so I'll probably make up an image and get it sent off to photobox for printing out mousematty wise, for my xmas present to self. I'm easy pleased, eh?

Alternatives would be this hexagonal web safe colour mousemat (although web safe colours? meh!) from Visibone. I am of course obsessed with the rug which is available from John Lewis at the moment of the different sample colours that their rugs can be made in - which has become a surprise best seller for them. Beautiful. We'll have to measure up at home...

Out and About

One of the drawbacks of teaching something like digitisation at University level, is that although you tend to be able to keep up with the theory and the recommendations, you dont really have time to get involved with projects yourself, or to see how things are still progressing in the real world very often. I suspect this is a problem common to most lecturers, and its important to, now and then, see how "those who can do" are doing things.

Yesterday, I was really lucky to be given a behind the scenes tour of the digitisation workflow at the National Gallery, London. Colin White, from the photography department, spent some time showing me around the various studios, archive, offices, and talking through the process of capturing and disseminating digital images of the collection.

Interesting insights? The emphasis on consistency of the images - rigourously benchmarked and checked - and the close relationships between the digitisation team, the print on demand service, and those developing new and novel ways to explore and examine the collection. It was also interesting to see how many dedicated staff there were looking after the relatively concise collection - making sure things were done properly, for posterity. I have to say, of all the projects I've seen round, they are really taking on board issues of workflow and quality and grappling with the issues of image veracity that we all are in this digital age. It was a really useful day for me, and thanks to the team for showing me round.

Now I'm looking forward to the redesign of their webpage, which should be happening later next year!

Santa putting children's information at risk

From the Register -

Kriss Kringle failing to comply with data protection laws

Enjoy. [link]

Is Photography Dead?

Thought provoking article in Newsweek about the rise of the digital and the demise of the medium

We live in a culture dominated by pixels, increasingly unmoored from corpor-eal reality. Movies are stuffed with CGI and, in such "performance animation" films as "Beowulf," overwhelmed by them. Some big pop-music hits are so cyberized the singer might as well be telling you to press 1 if you know your party's exten-sion. Even sculpture has adopted digital "rapid prototyping" technology that allows whatever a programmer can imagine to be translated into 3-D objects in plastic. Why should photography be any different? Why shouldn't it give in to the digital temptation to make every landscape shot look like the most absolutely beautiful scenery in the whole history of the universe, or turn every urban view into a high-rise fantasy?

[link]

Oh Dear

According to the Blog Readability Test, you have to have a somewhat high IQ to make sense of my rantings:




Is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe I should make it my new years resolution to dumb down...

tagging images, and museums

I've just come across a short but sweet article about the use of image tagging in memory institutes, with links to interesting projects, in the New York Times. Worth a peek.

Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we’re hiding the content away from nonspecialists,” said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. “We’ve got to provide access on the same level as visual memory.”

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it’s called.

Interestingness

There are a lot of images out there on the 'net these days. Some good, some bad, some family snapshots, some really artistic creations. It can be hard to sort through the dross and find the good ones.

For a few years, flickr has been tagging some photos as interesting, calculated in a variety of ways including

Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

The most interesting photos from the last 7 days are up in a seperate section, which changes on every load.

But those are just photos selected from the millions uploaded every... day? to flickr now. An alternative venue to view beautiful, arresting, or just plain interesting digital material can be found at www.ffffound.com an image bookmarking site that allows the blogosphere to pull together all that is best in interverse imagery. It changes from minute to minute. A great place to view, wonder, and explore.