Mark's Blog

Wow 5% is great, that's how professionals do it: take tons of pictures and sort later. The close up face has something that looks like Man Ray to it.

I always wonder with kids: should you let them shoot away and discover for themselves or do you try to teach them composition and visual awareness. Maybe just helping them react to the photos they take will help them develop that awareness without interfering with their playfulness and natural exploration. What is Tim's involvement in the selection?

I also wonder how this world will be changing as generations of digital photographers grow up. To them, film will be as quaint and quirky as vinyl records are to us. Just as gadgets such as the iPod let people interact with music differently (some might say more fully) than with a record, so too will our culture's relationship to images evolve.

I'm looking forward to it, there will certainly be a lot more visual noise, but good things will come out of the "cacophony." Through the ages, it's been easy to make sound and noise, but not images. They say sound is "only" 10% of a person's sensory imput, so with digital photography and video, everyone can now create and communicate in images to stimulate the 80% that is visual input. Plus images have always been a privelege of the rich and powerful (think Hollywood and advertising), and now that power will shift down to regular people (think Michael Moore and photo blogs).

Tim didn't select anything for my blog. He looks through them afterwards. Maybe he should select his own for a blog entry tomorrow.

He has the best time of any photographer I've met yet, laughing the whole time at his own silliness.

He wanted to do some filming as well. I didn't have time to show him how today. (Not that I know how, but there's more to it than point and shoot.) Photos are so much quicker to edit than video. Video's coming to everybody. There are good explanations of how to do it such as Michael Rubin's Little Digital Video Book, and camcorders are relatively easy to come by, but good, cheap editing software may be lagging behind. What do you use?