Will Amazon Save Newspapers and Magazines?

Amazon has now officially announced the launch of its Kindle DX, a larger and more expensive version of its Kindle 2 e-reader. It is big enough, says the company, to display text books, but there is also much anticipation that new larger-size devices like this will be delivery systems for newspapers and magazines. It doesn't look to me like the new Kindle will be up to that particular task--it seems more geared to the text-book market.
    That seems logical--e-readers like this could cut the very high price of college test books, and college students are comfortable with technology like this. But if publishers can't make a profit on these books--and college texts can be gold mines--they will probably be cool to the whole thing.)
    Other devices are on the way, and they will cater more to newspaper and magazine formats and production quality. What would it take to get you to buy one? Size? Portability? Price? The image quality will certainly have to improve to make the experience of seeing pictures worthwhile.--David Schonauer

More Photo Fun: Star Trek Yourself!

Just found this fantastically fun site, which allows you to turn yourself into your favorite Star Trek character. That's me as Mr. Spock! Wasting time at the workplace is quite logical. You have to stand for some advertising from Cheez-It, but it's worth it for the hour or so you can spend do this and uploading your image to Facebook. (If you still have a job.) Oh yeah, that new Star Trek movie is looking just awesome. Live long and prsper!--David Schonauer

Back to the Future: Life.com Goes Live

Life magazine published as a weekly from 1936 to 1972. From the early '80s until 2000 if was published as a weekly. Now it is back, in a new form, on the web. Life.com went live today, after about three years of planning and development. The new site features about 7 million images from the Life archive, many never seen before, along with contemporary photos from Getty Images, which is a partner in the new venture. (Getty also brought its considerable technological resources to the project, which is one reason the site is so fast and easy to use.) For me, this is a fantastic resource for exploring the history of the greatest photo magazine of all. You can search the archive in a number of ways: searching for a particular celebrity (Marilyn Monroe, for instance, seen above in a a famous 1953 portrait by Alfred Eisenstaedt), or for sports images.
It's great to see Life get another chance at life. CEO Andy Blau and editor Bill Shapiro have really put together a splendid site--they tell me it's the biggest photography website on the Internet, which seems pretty accurate, considering the archival depth of Life.com. Here's some insider info: American Photo will be featuring a portfolio of some unknown treasures from the Life.com collection in its July/August issue. --David Schonauer

Create Your Own Magazine, One Copy At a Time

The New York Times has an article today about a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud, which lets you publish your own magazine. As if old media didn't face enough competition already! Here how it works: You do the writing, photography, and design, create PDFs, upload them to the site, and your work is printed on HP Indigo digital printers. All that costs you nothing. If you want to actually buy issues of your magazine, MagCloud will sell them to you for 20 cents each. If you wish to resell them, you can charge whatever you like.
     It's a new angle on vanity publishing. And why not? There are plenty of companies now that let you print your own books. I haven't seen the quality of MagCloud printing, so I can't vouch for it. But this is another indication of just how personalized mass communication is becoming. Let's take a poll: If you were to create your own magazine, what would it be about?--David Schonauer

What Lies Beneath: The Naked People Project

German photographer Sebastian Kempa has an interesting work in progress. He's been photographing people in their clothes, and out of their clothes. "Clothes are our second skin," he writes. Clothes also send powerful messages to others about who we are. By showing ordinary people naked, Kempe challenges those perceptions.
    This has been done before by lots of other photographers, who usually show their clothed and unclothed subjects in side-by-side images. But what Kempe has added is some neat technology on the project website. You see his subject clothed, you click on the picture, and the clothes fade away until the nude person beneath is revealed. I loved it.-David Schonauer

Fabulous Music Video Made From Still Photos

Have you seen this music video? According to reports I've seen, the director, Cesar Kuriyama, constructed it from  45,000 still photographs over a period of 14 months. Do you like it?--David Schonauer

The Election and the Future of News Images

I watched the election returns last night, and I saw the future...not the future of politics or policy, but the future of pictures. Forget video...I want holograms.
    I happened to spend most of the evening tuned into CNN, and I was prepared for more of those spectacular touch-screen maps that the correspondents now use. (By the way, I don't think those maps are just gimmicks. Last night they were skillfully used to drill down into the voting results in ways that I've never seen before.)
    Then Wolf Blitzer cranked up CNN's latest tech marvel--hologram interviews. Anderson Cooper also did it later on. As you see in this clip, the subject of the interview appears in the newsroom in 3D. My first reaction to my wife was, "Hey, it's like Princess Leia in Star Wars!" My second reaction was, "How do I get one of these?"
    I imaging this technology doesn't come cheaply. (Go here to see how they did it.) But like CNN's touch-screen maps, this hologram stuff will be used by all the news networks pretty soon. It's just too awesome.
    And how soon will it be before we get to have to hologram beamed into our own living rooms? I'd like to have Wolf or Anderson or Katie or Brian standing right in front of me reading the news. (Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olberman? Not so much.)
     I've been hearing about the coming 3D revolution in photography for a while. Perhaps that future isn't as far away as I'd imagined.--David Schonauer

    

No Picture, No Title

Blogging from a government-owned computer while waiting around at a lower-Manhattan courthouse on jury duty, I don't have the usual browser options to post a picture or story links (nor the usual time -- I've already been booted off once) ... but I'm compelled to comment on a story in the Style section of today's New York Times -- The Sum of Your Facial Parts -- that begs the question: What's so funny 'bout peace, love and natural beauty?

The story describes a new computer software that "enhances" photos by conforming faces to a scientific algorithm of beauty -- altering such factors as symmetry, distance between facial parts, and other geometric things. Though designed mainly for cosmetic uses such as advertising photography, the implications are downright scary. Among the sample photos shown with the story, one set demonstrates that a beauty like Brigette Bardot loses her "individuality" in the process. One commentator in the piece says, "There is a whole generation of girls growing up who think it's normal not to look the way they really look." We would have more to say, but ... we're about to get booted off this computer again! Check out the piece.  -- Jack Crager

Eye Candy

In the category of Goofy But Fun Things to Do with Your Photos, we came across a site by M&M Candylab that lets you upload a picture of your favorite face and have it animated. In preparation for Halloween, you can direct your face to sing either Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" or Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science."

We chose the former tune for a picture of our six-year-old daughter, with mixed results. Be sure to choose a picture with a nice likeness that lends itself to being stretched in animation. For our first attempt we used an image that was a bit dark, and the animated result had our blond-blue-eyed girl looking shadowy and sinister — sort of like a scene from The Exorcist. Then we loaded a cheerier pumpkin shot (at right) and got a nicer result, though still a bit spooky (at top).

Naturally, the site includes options for sending your creation to a friend or posting it on Facebook. Oh, you can also put your pix on a personalized package of M&Ms for about $15 — at those prices, and in these times, maybe more apt for Christmas. — Jack Crager

Time Inc. and Getty Revive Life Brand Again

Time Inc. announced today that it has partnered with Getty Images to jointly launch a new website called Life.com. The website will offer free, downloadable images from current and past photographers. It is scheduled to go live early in 2009.
         The images will be available only to consumers for non-commercial usage. In a press release, Time Inc. senior vice president Andy Blau promised that consumers would be able to "interact intimately" with the available imagery. Apparently that means printing photos for personal use, sharing photos with others, and "purchasing photo albums of user-made collections."
         The imagery will include Life's entire collection, including previously unseen images. That's cool. Getty will be contributing archived content as well as current imagery. The new site essentially represents Getty's effort to spread its business beyond  publishing and advertising and get into the consumer area. I'm not sure the Life reputation has much left to offer to the kinds of people who search the internet for imagery, but it probably won't hurt. --David Schonauer