CAOS Living Book: QR codes + database = book

Miki Johnson showed us this video at her Future of Photo Books lecture. See more about that on the APA SF Blog The thing I thought was most exciting is this project by Editoras Online from Brazil - the C.A.O.S. living book. I can imagine endless possibilities of tying print and search together. Maybe the QR code won't be the gateway but expect to see some technology shake out to provide a link between static and real-time media.

Watch this and you'll get it:

-Michael

Safari West

We just got back from an overnight trip to Africa. Well, actually we drove up to Santa Rosa to visit Safari West, a little bit of Africa right in Cali's wine country. Check them out here.

 

White Cockatoo

Dozer a 1-year-old Reticulated Giraffe born at Safari West

Dozer's goatee

 

Demoiselle Crane

Wild Conveyor Toaster and a herd of cheescake

Flamingos via flashlight cam. 

Zebra mom with newborn

Damara Zebra

Grant's Gazelle

Giraffe's eat constantly

 

 

Dozer working the crowd

Skeptical Reticulated Giraffe

Speedbird 72 heavy you are clear for final approach on runway 7 right.

Its sadly true that all the romance of commercial air travel was wrung from flying years ago. Even without the recent humiliations at the hands of TSA, airline travel has all the sex appeal of taking a Greyhound bus to Bridgeport. If you want a sense of occasion, take a train. Better yet take a train in Europe. Still I've never lost my boyhood sense of wonder at watching planes. If you want to enjoy flying again I strongly recommend a trip to Vancouver Island where you can fly from one inlet to the next via seaplane. In the meantime the next time you hear the whine of a turbofan look up and take a second to think about this: A 747 taking off can weigh up to 255,000 lbs.

 

 

Editing Freckles

I am working on an ongoing portrait series featuring Freckled people. When I moved into the new studio space in October I had a couple shoots here before we'd even unpacked. Then there was some down-time over the holidays. I wanted to get busy shooting in my new studio. So I invited my friend Zara over, I knew she would be a great portrait subject (she is in the bottom row 4th and 5th from the right, just to the left of the pen). After her the idea of photographing freckled people took on a life of its own. I'll be posting more about this as we edit and print.

- Michael

p.s. Know someone with fantastic freckles, send them my way.

Change of Address

I've been so busy getting the APA/SF Blog going. I've neglected posting the biggest news from Winokur Photography. We moved. I'm very happy to tell you about The Foundry Studio, Winokur Photography's new home. This building, erected around 1907, as the home of Pelton Water Wheel's foundry. It has also been a studio space for a succession of talented photographers and other artists. Read about Pelton on Wikipedia, it's fascinating. I'm proud to work in a place which was once the home of a company combining craftsmanship and engineering to make a cutting edge product. After all, photography is a juncture of art and science. 

We're located in what has been called Media Gultch, a part of San Francisco's Mission neighborhood. We have great resturants as wells as Calumet, Left Space, Figureplant and JCX Expendables as neighbors. It's pretty convenient.

That barber's chair (left) has traveled with me from Philadelphia to San Diego to Palo Alto to San Francisco. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be doing any more traveling for some time. This is the first time I've had a studio of my own. Even though my work is very location oriented, this studio is a great HQ. It will be an environment to experiment in, build sets, fine tune lighting setups and otherwise make a big mess.

Just because its an old warehouse doesn't mean it can't be homey. Come and visit sometime.

-Michael

Shopping for a bit of photo history

I'm on the lookout for a pair of 8" Petzval portrait lenses. If you know of a source for these please send me a message. These lenses were made starting in 1840. They are characterized by extremely sharp center of focus with a quick falloff to a swirly bokeh. My plan is to try to adapt them to fit on the Gowlandflex, so if you have any experience with this also please let me know.

-Michael

Plainview - Use Macs, you need this.

I was at an AIGA SF studio tour at The Barbarian Group last night. More about that in another post. They showed off their work using a browser they created - just because they needed it for their own presentations. Now they are giving it away for free. If you use a Mac and do any kind of presentation you need Plainview. It's just a browser but it hides all the controls and headers so your HTML or Flash preso takes up the whole screen. So, photographers, designers, sales peeps ... throw away Power Point and use your own website in your presentation. You can download it here: Plainview dowload. Of course if you are on a PC and you use Firefox just hit F11.