The Digital Media Photography Community is talking about the future of photography. http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:59:30 -0500 120 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5610
Our contemporary culture of digitization and image-glut may actually shrivel the ethical force of photographs of atrocity, violence and trauma, so argues this leading commentator on American culture in my time. Sontag argues that there is “a suspicion of Anything that seems literary.” Whether in an age in which spectacle has usurped the place of reality, photographic images still have the power to evoke shock and sentiment is a complex question, too complex to deal with here. Nor is it my intention to provide even a short summary of Sontag’s ideas here. Photographs are the fragmentary emanations of reality, the punctual and discrete renderings of truth, rather than the uniform grammar of a consistently unfolding tale. I'm not sure that this matters much; indeed, it is difficult to know exactly what does matter in life. We each must choose our agenda of what matters.

The photographic frame is not just a visual image awaiting its interpretation; it is itself interpreting, actively, even forcibly. Sontag most famously writes that where "narratives make us understand: photographs do something else. They haunt us." In an age in which she herself says "to remember is more and more not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture." Given the sheer sweep of the visual image in contemporary culture and politics, I struggle to come to terms with the nature of memorialization in all its forms, that is the memorialization effected by photographs. I ponder as to what is the kind of affect relayed by photographic images as discrete and punctual fragments of reality. Beauty can reside, says Sontag, in any photo, however banal, however random; photography conflates the notion of the beautiful and the interesting. Photography aestheticizes the whole world; perhaps this is true, a fortiori, of other print and electronic media.

The culture of 'image-glut' is a harried and, in fact, beleaguered document that swims across the surface of our world and is often little more than a frustrated rant against the inhuman multiplication not just of images, but of the sacrilegious settings in which we see them. The place of the image in an era of information-overload and the capacity of the image in such a landscape to infinitely and perhaps irrationally multiply its significations is indeed a complex one. These words, these ideas I have put on paper here in the introduction to this photo album, are simply suggestive of a world of analysis of photographs, a world I explore to some extent in other places.

To photograph is to frame and to frame is to exclude. So wrote Manisha Basu in his Review of Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, NY, 2003 in Postmodern Culture, 2006. Much is excluded here in this album; indeed most of my life. But some of it has been captured for readers who might enjoy some of the delights herein; some of my life has been captured for others who would normally not have experienced what I experienced. For each of us has a unique experience even if we share much in common. Fragments of reality are elevated to privileged positions, Sontag says. I like that idea. It seems at least partly true. And there is poignancy here and a kind of pathos—and I trust not a little joy.

Ron Price
27 May 2007
(draft # 3)


]]> Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:43:14 -0500 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5610 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5609
Time would tell just how I would respond to this change, this diversification, this amplification, in the technology of photography that had insensibly altered the rationale for the very existence of the old photo album. Photo albums had been delighting the eye, had been part of my memorabilia, for well nigh 60 years. As I write these words, fifteen months short of my 65th birthday, I have decided to continue to put digitals photo in this and future albums on the same basis as those photos from cameras that I and my family have been doing since early in the 20th century.-Ron Price, 18 April 2008. (1one rarely sees this word, declasse--acute accent on the last e--in literature these days, but it seems applicable here; it means lowered in social significance, relevance and standing.)
]]> Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:40:38 -0500 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5609 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5604
My Aperture library has my images referenced with my master images on an external drive 'A' with a copy of everything on external drive 'B' and 'C'.

I discovered when I left on a trip and grabbed my laptop and drive 'B' instead of 'A', Aperture would not recognize the images on that drive as 'Master images' and was unable to work on them. Which got me thinking about what happens when drive 'A' eventually fails and Aperture won't 'see' the images on drives 'B' and 'C'?

Is there a way for aperture to recognize a master image no matter which hard drive it is on?
As my library grows, I'd like to be able to just take copies of master images on a smaller drive with me on trips. This will enable me to work on them while reducing my risk by not bringing my entire library with me.

Any help is greatly appreciated

]]> Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:27:45 -0500 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5604 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5592
I have been using Aperture's PDF contact sheets. It has a nifty way of showing metadata like caption underneath the photo. My problem is i do not want to display "Caption : TreeStump" I only want to display "TreeStump"



Is there a way of doing this in aperture, or is there a plugin that can do this for me?

Many thanks in advance.

Jay.]]> Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:57:45 -0500 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5592 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5555 new to aperture and already blocked when creating albums.
I imported pics into a newly created project, then an album in this project and tried to drag a few pic into it. when selecting the album no pics show, even though when mousing over the album name in the inspector, the information bubble reads "3 Versions".
similarly, i tried to drag 1 pic from one album to the other in the project samples provided with the documentation : same result, only 8 pics show in the browser although the info bubble insists on counting 9 versions.
Any idea?

thanks in advance
francois]]> Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:18:17 -0500 http://forums.oreilly.com/index.php?showtopic=5555