Coraline shoots a Leica, how cool is that?

Utterly terrifying… Found on Post Secret… http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Written by Dave D’Esposito, found on no-spec.com. Please pass this along, and help spread the word, we will not to be bought for peanuts.

Every day, there are more and more CL posts seeking “artists” for everything from auto graphics to comic books to corporate logo designs. More people are finding themselves in need of some form of illustrative service.

But what they’re NOT doing, unfortunately, is realizing how rare someone with these particular talents can be.

To those who are “seeking artists”, let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? …none?

More than likely, you don’t know any. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting on craigslist to find them.

And this is not really a surprise.

In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?

If you answered “yes” to ANY of the above, you’re obviously insane. If you answered “no”, then kudos to you for living in the real world.

But then tell me… why would you think it is okay to live out the same, delusional, ridiculous fantasy when seeking someone whose abilities are even less in supply than these folks?
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One more dead soldier, Kodak has announced that Kodachrome, arguably the most iconic film ever produced, will be discontinued after 74 years on the market due to declining demand.

Kodachrome was expensive, incredibly difficult to process, only one lab left in the United States was even doing it. It was slow, it took time to shoot, time to process. The fact is, Kodachrome never stood a chance in a world where immediacy is the driving force.

A shame that a new generation will never know what it was like to shoot such an amazing film. There is simply no substitute for the color and quality of Kodachrome 64.

From Kodak’s Website:

“They say all good things in life come to an end. Today we announced that Kodak will retire KODACHROME Film, concluding its 74-year run.

It was a difficult decision, given its rich history. At the end of the day, photographers have told us and showed us they’ve moved on to newer other Kodak films and/or digital. KODACHROME Film currently represents a fraction of one percent of our film sales.”

Read the rest at: http://homepage.1000words.kodak.com/

Chillin’ Productions 11th Anniversary Party in San Francisco…

Featuring 180 Painters/Photographers, 80 fashion Designers, and
two pieces by yours truly…

Live Painting by:
Steve Javiel ( www.stevejaviel.blogspot.com)
Daniel J. Valadez (www.danieljvaladez.com)
Ian Ross (www.ianrossart.com)

June 13, 2009 – 8:00pm-2:00am
Mezzanine – 444 Jessie Street, SF CA 94103
http://www.mezzaninesf.com
$7 at the door – 21 with ID

The BESSA III is a highly portable, folding bellows camera that allows extremely high-quality images to be taken using a high-performance lens unit. The camera is equipped with an unique mechanism for switching between to film formats.
Camera to be released in May 2009 »

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Photography is the only art form whose technology has become its Frankenstein monster. The very ease offered by improved processes and automated, hight-tech cameras and equipment has created an avalanche of trash unequaled in the history of art. Anyone with an index finger and a good right eye can claim to be a photographer. Speed, quantity and convenience are the elements controlling this madness. Press the shutter, and presto, the magic takes over- auto exposure, auto focus, and then, whether done by others or at home, or in school, the mad frenzy for quantity, and the faster the better.

The results: Mediocre at best, poor is the average, trash not far behind.

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Danny Gregory’s new book will be released next month… An Illustrated Life: Drawing Inspiration From The Private Sketchbooks Of Artists, Illustrators And Designers

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

“This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people…”

“Yes We Can.”

When did it become cool to be a “Joe Six Pack”? My name happens to be Joe, I like six-packs just as much as the next guy. If somebody ever referred to me as “Joe Six Pack” I would not only be offended, I would probably tell them to go to hell.

Why is intellectualism scoffed at? When did ignorance and intolerance become the status quo? Why are Americans so eager to be just another soldier in the six-pack army that has given this country such a bad reputation?

Our schools should be palaces, our teachers should be paid six figures. Education is not a privilege, it’s a birth right. In a country that boasts such superiority, we fall terribly short in the very thing that would allow us all to change the world.

Now we hear that “Joe Plumber” is pissed that his taxes may be raised whopping 3% for owning a business that makes more than a quarter million dollars a year.

Yes Joe Plumber, you’ve got it tough.

What happened to the idea of the greater good?

We should all be really pissed off, each and everyone of us. We’ve all gotten a raw deal in recent years, and there is no end in sight. Why? Because we have no leaders.

You don’t have to take my word for it, just ask 82 year old millionaire Lee Iacocca. He’s pissed, and chances are he’s not going to need a loan to pay for health care or fill up the gas tank. I have mixed feelings about Lee Iacocca, being from Detroit doesn’t help, but you can’t deny that his question deserves an answer, “Where have all the leaders Gone?”

Excerpts from Lee Iacocca’s new book:

“Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, stay the course.”

“Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: Throw all the bums out!”

“You might think I’m getting senile, that I’ve gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore.”

“The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we’re fiddling in Iraq , the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving ‘pom-poms’ instead of asking hard questions. That’s not the promise of the America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for.”

“Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It’s easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else’s kids off to war when you’ve never seen a battlefield yourself. It’s another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.”

“On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. A hell of a mess, so here’s where we stand. We’re immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We’re running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We’re losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.” (more…)

It’s long overdue. Time for a house clearing and some major reorganization of presence on the web.

The openorigins.com site will continue to function as is for the time being. I will continue to post in a somewhat regular fashion, but there will be significantly less new content being published. The new site, www.josephszymanski.com, will now host all of my personal work, while gradually the origins site will be phased out and re-vamped into something completely different. What that is I’m not quite sure, but I have a few ideas cooking.

The feed address is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MostlyPhotography. The origins feed forward here from now on. I encourage everyone who is subscribe to update to the new address. I’ll send out some more reminders on this over the next few weeks. If you wish to subscribe via email, visit the Subscribe page.

A good deal of the static content here is the same, with a few updates, additions and minor changes. The fine art prints section has been completely overhauled. Check out the print sets page for custom image sets.

Some notes on code. I have done very little debugging for Internet Explorer and make no promises that it will function perfectly, or even properly. If it doesn’t work, download a real browser instead of an over inflated piece of bloat-ware like IE.

As always, enjoy…

Mayhem through the medium of photography and the terrorizing of tourists. Brilliant…

“The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.”

Julius von Bismarck’s ‘Image Fulgurator’ projects an image into the photographs of random people on the street. The image projected is invisible to human eyes. This of course is almost never good or incredibly hysterical, depending on your point of view.

Rigging up a flash unit to project through an old SLR and hooking it up to an optical slave trigger, whenever someone takes a picture, the flash on their own camera trips the slave and fires the “Fulgurator”, projecting an image into the scene undetected.

Both Pop Photo and Wired did a writeup on this. Check out www.juliusvonbismarck.com for a more in depth explanation on this tool of terror.

After much deliberation and several rounds of voting, the members of the Fine Art Photoblog are please to announce the addition of three new photographers to the group.

Mathias Pastwa

With a flair for the industrial and an obvious technical command of the medium, Mathias brings a refined yet gritty edge to the group, with clean compositions and saturation of color giving his work a modern but nonetheless unique style.

View Mathias Pastwa’s Portfolio »

Dawn LeBlanc

A simple balance of light and shadow, coupled with her eye for crisp lines, Dawn brings her observations of smaller worlds into our group, a welcome addition to a circle of predominately outdoor shooters.

View Dawn LeBlanc’s Portfolio »

William Fawcett

Exhibiting both urban and natural landscape panoramas of an epic quality, William has strengthened our existing range of landscape photography. He shows a personal touch to wide format compositions that is all too rare in this medium.

View William Fawcett’s Portfolio »

Thank you once again to everyone who submitted work. The decision process was not easy, 44 submissions were made, the vast majority of which were outstanding. However in the end, we could only pick three.

I’d also like to thank Elizabeth Cecil, a fellow photographer, for helping us with the selection process.

Don’t forget to watch for posts from our newest members on fineartphotoblog.com in the very near future.