eclecticism

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?

Because it’s a movie-plot threat.

…is perfectly legal. Not that this should be a big surprise, but after the City of Seattle settled a lawsuit with a photographer last year to the tune of $8,000, the Seattle Police Department is clarifying its policies.

The Seattle Police Department this week plans to issue a new policy clarifying when bystanders are within their rights to observe and document officer conduct and when they’re interfering with officers’ law enforcement duties, a department official told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee during a briefing Tuesday.

The new policy clearly reminds officers that bystanders have a right to watch or film officers making an arrest, as long as they don’t interfere or threaten their safety….

It also emphasizes that police can’t simply seize someone’s camera for video evidence without cause or court order and suggests alternative means of negotiating with the witness.

(via Seattlest)

I’m experimenting with the Aperture free trial right now for photoshoots with my D70s, but I still wanted to use iPhoto for my Casio point and shoot. Apple allows you to set either iPhoto or Aperture to automatically launch when the Finder mounts a memory card, but by choosing either one, I’d have to quit and manually launch the other application depending on which camera I was importing shots from.

However, Aperture also gives you the ability to set any application to launch when a memory card is inserted. I set up this simple little Applescript (saved as a launchable app) to be the app launched on memory card insertion:

tell application "Finder"
    if exists disk "CASIO-DSC" then
        launch application "iPhoto"
    else if exists disk "NIKON D70S" then
        launch application "Aperture"
    end if
end tell

Now, whenever a memory card is inserted, the Applescript launches, checks the volume name of the memory card (which is set by the camera when you format the card), launches the appropriate photo application, and then quits.

Pretty simple for a lot of experienced Applescripters, I’m sure, but I’m pretty happy that I got it figured out.

Those who follow me on Flickr will have noticed this already, but I’ve been spending some time digging through my old archive CDs and uploading a bunch of old photos from years (and digital cameras) past. At this point, I’ve made it through all my digital photos up to the last few days before I bailed out of Anchorage and migrated south to Seattle. As such, the two sets that have received the most attention are those for Gig’s Music Theater and Old Stuff: Life Before Seattle. Those who’ve met me (physically or virtually) more recently will find these of limited interest, but for those few of you who’ve known me for a while, you might get a kick out of some of these…and you might even find yourself in there a time or two!

I was beginning to doubt that I’d ever find the time to finish this project, but I’m finally done with the pictures from our trip to Hawaii last summer!

Four-month turnaround really isn’t my preferred methodology, but at least I have good excuses for the delay (sudden unplanned moves, a busy school quarter and so on). If I can get the Thanksgiving photos taken care of in the next week and a half, that’ll bring me down to about one-month turnaround…

Sunbathing Sea Turtle, Punalu’u Black Sand Beach Park, originally uploaded by djwudi.

One of my favorite shots from this summer.

Pana’ewa Rainforest Zoo, originally uploaded by djwudi.

I actually had a day off today. No school, no work, nothing. So, I spent the day working on getting caught up on some of my photographic backlog. I started by processing a set of shots of Club V that I’d been asked to take, then dove back into the vacation photos from this summer. Lots of photos of the Pana’ewa Rainforest Zoo just outside of Hilo (one of which ended up being my 11,000th photo uploaded to Flickr!), plus some more snorkeling.

I’m still not quite done with the vacation photos, but the end is in sight. Yay!

I don’t guess that I’ll be going — Prairie and I, over the past few years, have found that New Years Eve out and about is often just a bit too much — but it’s nice to see one of my photos in use on the flyer for Monsignior and Roxy’s New Years Eve’ bash!

Flyer under the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Sea Turtle, originally uploaded by djwudi.

In lieu of actually posting anything truly interesting, I give you one of my favorite shots from our trip to Hawaii this summer (no, I’m still not done working my way through all of them). Prairie and I were snorkeling early in the morning at Carlsmith Beach Park in Hilo, and had brought along a little disposable film waterproof camera. As we floated along, we were joined by a couple of sea turtles, cruising their way through the coral reef and finding their breakfast.

Nice to know this one didn’t slip under the radar: a local man just received an $8,000 settlement after being unlawfully detained for photographing a police bust last year.

During a news conference Thursday, Mohora, 26, said he was walking on Pike Street near Second Avenue on Nov. 2 when he saw two Seattle police officers arresting a man.

Mohora said he snapped a few shots of the arrest from a distance of more than 10 feet and was walking away when he was approached by a female friend of the man being arrested.

Mohora said the woman told him she believed the arrest of her friend was wrong, and that he was being arrested on a warrant that had been quashed. She asked Mohora about obtaining copies of the photos, he said.

Two officers, James Pitts and David Toner, then ordered Mohora to hand over his camera, according to ACLU staff attorney Aaron Caplan, who handled the case. Mohora said that when he asked what he had done wrong, the officers handcuffed him and took his camera, wallet and satchel. They then drove him to a holding cell at the Seattle Police Department’s West Precinct, Mohora said.

When he was released about an hour later, he said, he was told that he could be charged with disturbing the peace, provoking a riot or endangering a police officer.

Mohora was not charged and, in violation of department policy, police did not write up an incident report on the arrest, according to ACLU Legal Director Sarah Dunne.

(via Flickr Seattle)

Why We Had to Move, originally uploaded by djwudi.

After returning home from Hawaii (no, those pictures aren’t done yet, I’m just busy with work and school), Prairie and I found out we had to move (here’s my post and here’s Prairie’s on the debacle).

This shot is of what used to be our cute little apartment.

We’ve got a new cute little apartment now, sure, but…(sigh)…this one was our first. Not so cute now, is it?

Peter and Hope, originally uploaded by djwudi.

I’ve still got a ways to go on the rest of the vacation pictures, but I finished the set for Peter and Hope’s wedding this morning. I’ll fill in the rest of the vacation as soon as I can (we’re in the midst of moving uproar at the moment, with boxes all over the apartment as we wait for the apartment we’re moving into to get its finishing touches).

Update: PI staffer Mike Thompson let me know that they’ve just enabled RSS feeds for each individual category within the Big Blog. Each category page (like this one for Seattle Outtakes, for instance) now has an RSS link right at the top of the page. Thanks, Mike!

For some time now, I’ve been following the Seattle Outtakes blog from the PI, where PI photographers would post and discuss images that didn’t make the final cut into the paper for one reason or another (and some photos that were published), along with how they got the shot, techniques, and so on. Really good stuff for a photo bug.

Sadly, Outtakes has now been absorbed into The Big Blog, the PI’s latest addition to their ever-growing linup of weblogs. I’m not sure quite why they made this decision, but I found it rather annoying. As I posted in a comment on their announcement post:

One more vote for keeping Outtakes separate — I watch this one precisely because of my interest in photography, and have really enjoyed the insights into what the PI photographers do. The Big Blog feels too unfocused in tone and too similar to too many other local ‘catchall’ blogs, and it not something I’m likely to check in with regularly…which ends up meaning no Outtakes for me. Pity.

While you can manually check the Outtakes category on The Big Blog, there’s no category-specific RSS feed provided, and there’s just way too much traffic that I’m not terribly interested in for me to bother subscribing to the RSS feed (and even if I did feel like subscribing, it appears to be an excerpts-only feed instead of a full-text feed — one more reason for me not to subscribe).

So…Yahoo Pipes to the (theoretical) rescue. I’ve not actually played with Yahoo Pipes before, but given that it allows you to perform various operations on web data, it seemed like it might be a good potential tool for attempting to regain my Outtakes fix. In theory, if I’ve done this correctly, this pipe should be a Seattle Outtakes RSS feed.

However: I don’t actually know if it’s working correctly yet, and I’m not sure how soon I will…and there’s some potential down-the-road issues with the pipe. Geeky details under the cut… Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday morning found me heading out of the house sometime not too long after 8am — horridly early for a Sunday morning — so that I could head down to the Crocodile to hang out with the Dance Off Seattle crew and shoot the dress rehearsal. With roughly a half-dozen teams to get through, we got started at 9am, and spent the next five and a half hours or so letting each team run through their routine a few times while I ran around the floor snapping off shots.

Y’know, it’s amazing how heavy a D70s can get after a few hours! I’d picked up a flash sync cable to allow me to run my flash tethered to the camera (while the D70s/SB-800 combination allows wireless flash syncing, the pre-flash trigger sequence introduces a bit of delay that using the sync cable removes), so I ended up shooting nearly everything with the camera in one hand and the flash in the other. It doesn’t take long at all for that to turn into quite a workout!

While I’m going to be one of two photographers for the actual show, the second photographer couldn’t make it to the rehearsal shoot. Since the organizers of the Dance Off are also contestants, they made sure to stay out of the rehearsal space while the other teams were practicing, so that none of the teams know what the others are doing. This has put me in the rather interesting position of being the only person in Seattle who’s gotten at least a hint as to what each of the different teams are doing, and let me tell you…

…this year’s Dance Off is going to be awesome.

(All photos, of course, will on embargo until after the show — no spoilers from me, kids!)

If you didn’t make it to last year’s Dance Off, I’d suggest hitting the videos page on their site, or checking out Propadata Films’ video podcasts of all of last year’s performers, available either as an RSS feed or through iTunes, and there’s also my photoset from last year. Some of the same teams are returning, some new teams have signed on, and all of them…well, they knew that they were going to have to bring it. And oh, it has been broughten!

And as I mentioned before, last year was sold out and people had to be turned away at the door. The Crocodile looks to have a larger capacity, but don’t delay too long — tickets are only $7, and you can snag them online now. The show’s this Thursday evening, Aug. 2nd at the Crocodile. Be there!