cameraphones as personal storytelling media

In his latest post for The Future, the painted shoes guy writes, "It looks like this newly ubiquitous device could be more about flows of moments than stocks of images, more about sharing presence than transporting messages, and ultimately, more about personal narrative than factual communication."

Hey, I resemble that remark.

Howard also points to a new user studies paper by Daisuke Okabe (seen here with Mimi Ito in 2003) which has amusing anecdotes, useful insights, and is well worth a read.

casual impressionism

A bunch of impressionist cameraphone pictures from my recent trip to Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taipei, starting here. Looking at these things is not like seeing reality, it's more like the odd flashes that stay with you after you've been...experienced. Wish I had the energy to caption them, but I'm fresh out of metadata.

impressions of bloggercon

Cheap fuzzy cameraphone picture pastiche from yesterday's fine blogger's holiday. A good time was had, apparently.

where's a moblogger when you need one?

An unusual newsstand headline caught my eye this morning: "Rodin sculptures used in protest of treatment of Iraqi prisoners". Some of the life-sized groupings including "Adam and Eve" and "The Burghers of Calais" at Stanford were behooded ala the images from Abu Ghraib:

Hoods were found on a combined total of four sculptures at Cantor, including Adam and Eve, on Thursday and Friday mornings. The sculptures had black plastic bags placed on the heads and rope tied around the necks. In addition, chalk graffiti stating “Rumsfeld was here” was written on cement in front of the Gates of Hell and the Adam and Eve sculptures on Wednesday.

Unfortunately the Daily doesn't seem to have gotten any pictures of the scene. Surely someone out there must have seen this and snapped a few choice images? Don't the perpetrators have a blog?

cameraphone lomography

Apparently there's a name for those impressionistic phone collages I've been making. Of course I'm using a nokia, not a real lomo camera, so maybe I should call it 'nokiography' instead.

Lomography emphasizes a casual 'shoot from the hip' attitude. Never mind when a picture is out of focus or the framing is odd. Shoot first, judge later. Others use the technique to document everyday life, not by a well composed picture, taken at exactly the right moment, but rather by producing a series of undirected pictures that together tell a story.

[via Joi]

shoot what you love?

dave, you big stud

DAVE, YOU BIG STUD. I hope you still love your car. Never lose babes. Warren.

impressionistic cameraphone stories

When I’m out walking or skating in the urban landscape, I find my wandering attention being drawn to striking or amusing visual details. Lately, I’ve been capturing some of these little moments with my cameraphone. Taken individually, the images may be mildly interesting but not “picture-worthy”; that is, I wouldn’t think of them as particularly good or important or aesthetically pleasing. Collectively and in sufficient quantity, they become a montage that tells a story about the place, the time, and the way that I experienced it. These collections are definitely impressionistic, highly subjective, hardly a complete record of places or events. But they speak to me quite clearly, bringing me back to thoughts and feelings and experiences that I had at the time.

I started making these for skatelog, and there are a few different examples from the same physical territory in and around Stanford. Here the timeframe was typically an hour.

We were in Maui for a week recently. These started to look a bit more like vacation pictures, I think. But I also had my “real” camera and used it for the “real” photos. Sometimes I took pictures of the same thing with both cameras, conscious that I would use them in different ways.

Last week I walked around Porto Alegre, Brazil one morning.

This week I was in Bristol, UK for several days. The trail led from San Francisco to Heathrow, through Windsor, and then into Bristol proper.

Hmm, now I remember doing something like this more than 20 years ago, tripping through the crazily twisted streets of Boston and San Francisco, capturing moments that seemed appealingly, unnaturally funny. I’ll have to try to find some of those old trips and scan them up.

Bazaar Campers start a moblog

The quite cool Bazaar Camp Silicon Valley is going on now, and they have started a moblog on textamerica.

"A Bazaar Camp is the ultimate doing-focused event for real developers: those who "do" and code. We call it a discontinuity event because the idea is for you to bring your application with you, work on it 60 hours straight in the best environment imaginable, turbocharging your creativity and productivity – and to come out with discontinuous improvements in your apps."

Unfortunately it isn't happening in the Valley after all, they up and moved it to Finland:

"...the majority of the delegates for the Camp USA are from Europe. It seems the level of interest from Americas-based developers for doing mobile entertainment solutions was not yet quite where we hoped it to be. Therefore we decided it would just make more sense to have this event in Europe so everyone will not need to travel to the other side of the globe."

I was disappointed to miss Trip Hawkins' keynote, although he probably won't be spilling any serious beans about his stealth wireless gaming venture Digital Chocolate. If anyone out there is blogging this event, leave links in the comments please!

location-aware moblog

My moblog now has location-tagged photos. Look for the pictures that have "Where was this taken?" in the text field. Locations are based on cell tower lat/long, so it isn't entirely accurate.

cameraphones on CNN

CNN is running a story right now on cameraphones; the story angle is *gasp* the potential for invasion of privacy. Bill Hemmer is interviewing a moblogger named Gary Dann, trying to pin him down on whether his picture of an overweight woman buying Weight Watchers is in fact an intrusion. Gary seems unrepentant, and disappointed that he didn't get to talk to Paula Zahn.

Here's the transcript of the show. It starts near the bottom of the (long) page.

DANN: Why did I start documenting with pictures? I just thought it was a really interesting idea. Camera phones, they've only been out for about a year. It's a new technology. Basically has the potential to change the face of modern photography, just the same way color photography did, and digital cameras did. It's gone from your typical person taking a roll of film at their cousin's birthday party, for instance, and putting it in some drawers, you know, after they develop it, to people taking pictures throughout their day and making a daily journal of precious moments of their life.

And hey, here's Gary's fotolog, courtesy of the omnipotent Google...

underground moblogger party

The 1IMC mobloggers afterparty in full swing at the underground club Super-Deluxe in Roppongi. Yes, I know 1IMC was over a month ago. I just got around to making this panorama, and yes, I know it's not even that good a job. People kept moving around, what can I say?

I tried to imagemap people to their sites where I knew them, so mouse around a bit. If you know who some of the other folks are, leave a comment.

If you are a glutton for punishment, you can see the high res image here. At 4.23MB over my 256Kb/s uplink, you can expect it will be somewhat slow ;-)

Some red bridge

More silly cameraphone widescreenishness. Bad resolution, bad exposure control, bad dynamic range, all in all, an enormous amount of fun.

Howard Rheingold's garden

Is it weird to make panoramas from cameraphone pictures?

I had the great fortune to spend time in Howard's garden. It's a lush and evocative space, and the succulents are, well, succulent ;-)

shinjuku station