photography

Fun fun fun til Twitter took the t-bird away

Posted by hil

Twitter has now developed and then taken away three functions that made it exciting for me to use.

1. Track was taken away a year ago. Only some of us tasted it, but it was da bomb. Twitter knows.

2. SMS notification was taken away from Australians (and some other non-US countries) about 9 months ago. It was a buzz to receive tweets from a couple of good friends via phone. It was the whole rationale behind Twitter in the first place.

3. The @reply brouhaha that erupted yesterday is still unfolding, but it looks as if the underlying desire is to limit following through to conversations one’s friends are having with people you are not following. As many people have said, serendipitous discovery is one of the richer aspects of Twitter.

When I went overseas last year I took lots of photos for my own record and pleasure. People always say they are interested in seeing photos from trips, but more often than not they don’t really engage with them. But I did try to make a short photoset to show to people who said they were interested. The paradox I discovered was that the more I culled, the less interesting the photos became: you are drawn to choose the more iconic rather than the idiosyncratic. For instance, if you have to choose one photo to represent your time in Paris, you are more likely to pick the Eiffel Tower, rather than the funny alleyway litter bin that you could imagine becoming a puppet character. However, it is the layering of the unexpected and unusual like the latter, which sets up rich memories and stories of a place for the person who experienced them. In the same way, Twitter and it’s users might find themselves operating within a similar paradox.

In the meantime we wait for Friendfeed or others to do what Twitter has so far reneged on.

Cutflat photography exhibition

Posted by hil

Tim Raupach’s first photography exhibition is now at The God’s Cafe at ANU. It opened last Thursday and runs until mid July. Tim is my son. He takes both urban and country scenes and landscapes, with a finely observed sense of colour and composition. Walls, bicycles, mountains, grasses and pattern are some of the recurring themes; take a look at his photoblog, Cutflat.

That’s the dispassionate report…! The truth is that it’s wonderfully exciting to see my kids stepping out into the artistic world, expressing themselves in such different ways, and I am so wildly proud of what they are doing!

Breakfast reading 5.10

Posted by hil

Murdoch turning his empire green: ‘Although some of his newspapers were once sceptical about global warming, he said that although he was no scientist, he knew how to assess a risk. “This one is clear. Climate change poses clear,
catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but we certainly can’t afford the risk of inaction,” he said.’

Diggers speak about Iraq ambush: Did anyone else see this last night? Its been covered in the papers too. It seemed like something new to me, interviewing soldiers giving accounts of their activities as if they were policeman, sportsmen or celebrity. I can’t quite work out why I found it so disquieting – anyone else feel it was inappropriate or different?

The fine print in the university endowment scheme: The Howard government proposes centralised control of universities with a view to privatisation. It has wedge politics written all over it, too. Chilling.

Blogging Was Just the Beginning: Women’s Voices are Louder Online: Chris Nolan on political commentary and feminism online. (via Doc). I hope to get to other articles in S&F Online’s Blogging Feminism issue, too.

The SMH ran true to bumbling form (when it comes to its coverage of new media) the other day with this ‘lesson’ about blogging, which conflated the opening question “Isn’t blogging just for people who are stupid and lonely?” with women bloggers, gender inequity and ambivalence in Australia! “Of the 8000 women’s blogs listed at BlogHer.org, just 96 are of Australian or New Zealand origin. By comparison Canada, a country with 36 per cent more people, lists 82 per cent more women’s blogs.” I think its silly to take membership of BlogHer as a real statistic on the ratio in Australia. I’m not listed at Blogher, for instance.

Doc, who always gets a real buzz out of flying and seeing whats below, has some wonderful photos of Greenland from the air. Check out his other sets for Scotland, the Hebrides, England and others, too.

Now don’t you worry about that

Posted by hil

Now don't you worry about that

An action shot of Joh Bjelke-Peterson welcoming guests to the launch of the Campaign – Federal Elections exhibition at Old Parliament House yesterday! Here is a slightly clearer one of him with Malcolm Fraser. Old Parliament House had a collection of the photographic masks of politicians, but I was asked to make the cartoon Joh last week.

The exhibition itself consists of photos by Andrew Chapman; you can see some of them here. They are wonderful ‘fly on the wall’ glimpses of electioneering politicians and political events from the Fraser years onwards. I was most amused by the ones of Beazley, because he so often looked like a jovial dag, but others were arresting.

Cutflat: Tim Raupach’s photographs

Posted by hil

omarama

This wonderful photo of a hill somewhere near Omarama, South Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand is from Cutflat, Tim Raupach’s new photoblog site. His photos were previously here.

Tim takes some breathtakingly beautiful shots, as well as looking at things from unusual angles and with a humorous eye. He is also a rockclimber, and – a disclaimer! – my son.

Uopdated links 2015