I recently picked up the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 USM II lens. This thing is a beast. It is long and heavy, and looks like you could shoot a small cannonball out of it. That being said, it’s also one of the best lenses in existence today. With an extremely wide aperture and a image stabilization (thus allowing for fast shutter speed in low-light situations), this lens is considered by many wedding, portrait, and event photographers to be absolutely essential.
One of the biggest difficulties of using this lens is that it’s so conspicuous. You can’t carry this around a public place without looking like either a photographer on a job or a stalker. As a result, I only feel comfortable using it for specific events.
I was thrilled that my local church, Highrock, allowed me to shoot its Easter Service, which was held at Arlington Town Hall in Arlington, MA. It was an awesome celebration, and while the service itself was moving and powerful, the meal afterwards was pretty awesome, resembling a town fair more than a church luncheon. Here are some of the photos I was able to produce:
I’m still getting the hang of using this thing, and I am particularly curious about the use of image stabilization, and trying to optimize it in certain settings.
James Fallows from The Atlantic has written up a nice summary of what you can do to protect your Gmail account from getting hacked, as well as how to protect your data. The biggest obstacle people face to implementing these protections? A false sense of security:
I’ve made this point before, but I stress it again for this simple reason: I believe that most “normal” users do not imagine that this can be so. They don’t think it’s really possible that everything they’ve archived for years and years might be vaporized. But indeed it is possible, and online life should be conducted with appropriate “tragic imagination” of that fact.
As a result of reading this article, I just signed up for Google’s two-step authentication, which dramatically reduces your likelihood of getting hacked. Basically, you download an authenticator app to your phone, then use it to login to your Gmail account along with your password. It’s a super-cool feature that, bizarrely, banks don’t even have yet.
My biggest fear is forgetting about the whole thing if/when I get a new/replacement iPhone, and the authenticator forgets all my previous settings. Then I’d be right screwed. But maybe just the act of blogging about this fear will prevent that from happening. Only time will tell…
Michael Eisen has an interesting story about how sellers on Amazon’s marketplace have deployed algorithmically-based pricing, with absurd results:
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
Few people make a more convincing case for the decline of The Office than television writer Myles McNutt. I’ve known and respected Myles since before he was rich and famous (and we’ve had him on the /Filmcast a number of times to talk TV), and I’ve particularly been impressed by his work at The AV Club, as he does weekly Office recaps.
McNutt approaches the show and each episode as though it has the potential to be something transcendent, informative, and/or moving. And why shouldn’t he? At its best, that’s what The Office was, a celebration of the foibles of American working life. Lately, though, the show has been uneven and mired with inconsistent characterizations. The penultimate Michael Scott episode, “Michael’s Last Dundies,” exemplifies this. Myles writes:
I know some of you don’t care if an episode of The Office means anything and that you just want it to be funny. I also know that wanting the show to have a sense of meaning or purpose renders me pretentious for some of you. However, “Michael’s Last Dundies” obviously wants to take on a particular meaning given that final song, to be about “the best in every one of us” that Michael believes the Dundies should represent. As a result, I think it is perfectly fair to hold the show accountable for the fact that the rest of it was built around a transparent set of bits being played by two actors, not two characters, and to wish that the big picture was more than just a musical afterthought in Carell’s next-to-last episode.
As Steve Carrell wraps up his time on the show, it’s instructive to look back and see how the show has changed. Be sure to check out Myles’ other recaps of the show.
Drew Grant from Salon has a different take on this week’s episode, though it doesn’t necessarily conflict with McNutt’s. She argues that The Office can recapture its spirit if it “could go all the way back to its Schadenfreude roots and get mean.”
With the sheer volume of media I produce, I have to offload files on a regular basis for the purposes of backup. Between the podcasts and photos, I’ve probably already consumed several terabytes in the past year alone, far exceeding the measly 1 TB allowance of my 2009 iMac.
Today, I had to offload some large files that could only be copied onto an NTFS hard drive. So I dug an old Western Digital MyBook out of my closet and tried to move the files on. In doing so, I discovered some old photos that I’d taken, but never uploaded onto Flickr:
The above is the first photoset that I ever put together. It was my final project for my Introductory Photography class in college. These photographs were taken at a UMass-Amherst fraternity over 7 years ago. They were taken with a film camera (Canon Rebel) on Kodak Tri-X black and white film, developed and printed by yours truly, then scanned into a computer in JPG form. I remember physically printing these photos out by hand in a dark room with all those delicious chemicals. Ahh, the good ol’ days.
It’s fascinating for me to look back into the past like this. Not only do the photos represent people who have undoubtedly moved on in their lives, but they also reveal my own technical and compositional limitations at the time. I’d like to think I’ve grown as a photographer, but I still think a few of these shots are pretty awesome.
A high school student who faked her pregnancy for six months as a social experiment stunned a student assembly this week by taking off the belly bundle. Only a handful of people knew that 17-year-old Gaby Rodriguez wasn’t really pregnant, including her mother, boyfriend and the principal, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic. They helped keep the secret from some of her siblings and her boyfriend’s family and students and teachers, all as part of a senior project on stereotyping.
[Update: The creators of FilmPulse have responded to the tidal wave of criticism leveled at them]
Yesterday, I started seeing a few isolated tweets about a new online show named “FilmPulse” pop up on my Twitter feed. Most of them were incredibly derogatory in nature, so I sought out more information on Google. I couldn’t easily find anything, but this morning my colleague Devindra informed me of the details: FilmPulse is ComingSoon’s attempt at a new video film talk show “focused entirely around today’s hottest and most interesting topics.” ComingSoon is a pretty big, heavily-trafficked website, so any attempt that they made into the film commentary/media space was going to be closely watched. In this case, I think the amount of attention went far beyond their expectations.
The first episode just debuted on Tuesday, April 19th, and people had some pretty strong opinions about it. Legendary blogger Anne Thompson was no fan, and Quint from Ain’t It Cool News declared that if AICN had launched a similar show, he would have quit. Even the commenters at ComingSoon didn’t seem to enjoy it. One of them wrote, “This is the worst thing I have ever seen on the internet, and I saw a video of that American hostage being decapitated in Iraq.”
Let me preface the following by saying that I pretty much never write about other podcasts/shows unless it’s to praise them (look through the archives of this blog and you’ll hopefully see that I’ve consistently held to this). I believe that as professionals, it does us no good to tear each other down. That being said, the intense interest and hatred for this show leads me to make an exception, and to try to critically evaluate what is it about this show that inspired such a strong reaction.
I’ve watched the entire 15-minute episode, which consists of a 3-minute discussion between two unnamed hosts about film ranking service Flickchart, followed by a 12-minute interview with Morgan Spurlock with one of the hosts (Update: As Will Goss points out in the comments below, they are actually named with a quick lower-third at around 3 minutes into the show. Their names are Vic and Julian). Let’s take these segments one by one, starting with the latter:
The Spurlock Interview – This is a fairly boiler-plate interview with Spurlock, who is almost always a dynamic speaker. I found nothing particularly offensive about the interview and it seemed as though the interviewer actually took the time to do a little research into Spurlock’s career and tried to ask some probing questions. It’s not the best interview I’ve ever watched with Spurlock, but there is very little that makes this interview worse than what dozens of film/entertainment journalism outlets put out on a weekly basis (except maybe for the host’s egregious mispronunciation of the word “meta”).
The Flickchart segment – This is really what seems to be generating much of the controversy for the show. FilmPulse begins with a rambling 3-minute discussion of how films are ranked, leading to an endorsement of FlickChart. One tweeter remarked that “according to FilmPulse, pre-90s films have no cultural relevancy/artistic merit. I’d have a joke about that but it makes me too fuckin angry.” So what did they say that was so offensive? Here’s a rough transcript of how it opens:
***
Host #1: When someone recommends a movie, there’s a few things you can do to avoid wasting an hour and a half of your time. First point is, is that film privileged as a classic? Is that the context in which the recommender heard of the film? If so, they may be privileging it because it would be politically correct to do otherwise.
Host #2: I think the problem is that we were born at a time when films were getting really interesting. I think there was a lot of really interesting independent filmmaking going on in the early ’90s and we were around for that. Before that, if you actually watch some movies from the ’70s that are considered classics like Bullitt or The French Connection, they’re incredibly boring to people our age because we saw The Matrix when we were 10.
Host #1: And IMDB reflects the trends of those ’70s films particularly strongly. Those were very likely rated by people who saw it when it came out. If I saw a black-and-white film today, it would knock my socks if that’s all I had to compare it against.
Later on…
Host #2: …it’s a new generation. It’s time for the next generation of voices.
Host #1: That leaves room for a tool that actually does a better job of ranking, leaving out the cultural aspect. And that would be Flickchart…
***
There are a couple of things in this exchange that are worth noting. First of all, the hosts never actually say that they subscribe to the views of this “new generation.” But they do strongly imply it. It’s this kind of tone deafness that I think internet film writers are lashing out against. From a presentational standpoint, you only have one chance to make a good first impression. If you devote the first two minutes of your first episode to explaining why the knuckle-dragging yahoos from your generation (which you heavily hint that you are a part of) think some of the sacred cows of film history are “boring,” you are probably going to catch a lot of crap from it.
What’s sad is this: the hosts kind of had a point! The generation of today DOES view films differently. They do expect more flash, more action, quicker edits, better special effects, and so on. But rather than delving into the root causes of this, or evaluating this from a normative perspective, the hosts focus on how to give people what they want, i.e. how to use a service (Flickchart) to circumvent conventional wisdom about classic films. That’s what people find so galling about this opening salvo.
More broadly, I believe the hate against these guys highlights a number of trends. Online film critics are constantly fighting an uphill battle in the realm of legitimacy and credibility. Can quality film criticism still survive in the internet age? Several prominent film critics have decried the democratizing power of the internet, how it gives a megaphone to anyone with an opinion, and how it financially rewards those with attention rather than those with quality. The sight of these two hosts discussing the datedness of black and white films was a direct provocation for these people. After their brutal criticisms were out in the open, the bandwagon-hopping was swift and brutal.
Beyond that, FilmPulse’s first episode, and the furor surrounding it, is instructive in terms of how difficult it is to make a good show as a general matter. From the outset, one needs to be able to answer the question: why should the audience care about what you are about to say? The most unequivocal thing I can say about this show is that the hosts failed to adequately answer that question. That being said, I speak from experience when I say that starting a show is a tricky, difficult, harrowing proposition. If you heard my first podcasts, you’d probably opt never to listen to me again. But that’s what is so great about content-creation: it’s always a process of refinement, of bettering oneself and one’s product. It’s this learning experience that makes the whole enterprise so exciting. And it’s why I can forgive even the crappiest of first episodes, so long as you learn from your mistakes and try to move on.
Will these guys get a second chance to do the same? Only time will tell. Here’s their initial episode. Judge for yourself.
