By the Docks

I recently had the opportunity to photograph a couple with my colleague, Evgenia (Eve). Eve has studied under the tutelage of the master photographer Jerry Ghionis, whose 5-day Boston seminar I will be attending next week. You can expect more thoughts on that after its over, but in the meantime, here are some photos from our shoot:

What was awesome about this shoot was that I shot using artificial light almost exclusively, while Eve shot using natural light. I’ll update this post with some of her photos when they’re ready, but they have an distinctly different feel to them.

Once again, I am indebted to the work of David Hobby, without whose blog these photos would simply not be possible.

Stephen Colbert’s Jack White Interviews

Stephen Colbert’s Jack White interviews are the funniest thing I have seen all year (and I include all the comedic films I’ve seen, although I exclude Bill Maher and Jane Lynch’s performance of Anthony Weiner’s sexting). White is the perfect foil for Colbert, with his deadpan, catatonic, and totally unimpressed demeanor. Together, they create comedic, musical gold.

Here’s part one of the three-part interview:

Be sure to check out part two and part three as well.

To Catch a Plagiarizer

A fascinating dialogue between a professor who’s caught students plagiarizing and a person who gets paid to write papers for students (via Maud):

[In the case of grammatical errors,] I was alerted to plagiarism by the sudden appearance, in a paper that is otherwise a morass of grammatical errors, of a series of flawless sentences with complicated structures. The correct use of a semicolon is a big red flag for me. As is the use—and often misuse—of specialized jargon or technical language that I’ve not discussed with them in class. Then I type those sentences into Google, and they all wind up being smoking-gun cases of plagiarism. My favorite case this semester was plagiarism within plagiarism. When I informed this student that I suspected her paper was plagiarized, she said to me, “I got my paper from one of the students who was in your class last semester. How was I to know that she had plagiarized?” Which indicated to me, along with a number of the other email responses I got from students, that many of them don’t even know what plagiarism is.

Did Apple Just Walk Away From the Professional Video Editing Market?

I have never edited any video professionally, but with the recent purchase of my Canon 7D, I was really excited that Apple would be releasing a new version of Final Cut Pro that not only simplified and expedited the video editing process, but also only cost $300 in the Mac App store. However, the recent firestorm surrounding the release of Final Cut Pro X has given even me pause about clicking that “Buy” button.

Professional video editors all over the web have been howling about how the new software resembles and functions more like “iMovie Pro” than “Final Cut Pro.” Many of the crucial features from Final Cut Pro 7 have been excised or hidden, and Final Cut Pro X appears to be extremely buggy to boot (based on reviews from the Mac App Store). More damningly, Apple is no longer selling Final Cut Pro 7 and is discontinuing support for it. This means that millions of people who have spent years building their livelihoods around learning and using Final Cut Pro can no longer have confidence that they will be able to depend on this software for the foreseeable future.

Read the rest of this post at /Film.

Not All Calories Are Created Equal

It turns out that a pound of potatoes weighs more than a pound of nuts (via Kevin):

“The conventional wisdom is simply, ‘Eat everything in moderation and just reduce total calories’ without paying attention to what those calories are made of,” said Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study published in Thursday’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. “All foods are not equal, and just eating in moderation is not enough.”

Anti-Immigration Law Works As Planned, With Disastrous Results

Georgia recently passed House Bill 87, a bill aimed at driving out the state’s 425,000 illegal immigrants (similar to Arizona’s controversial measures last year).

As with most sweeping measures passed with only a modicum of thought and research, the effects have been disastrous (via Kyle Baxter):

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia. It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Why I (Probably) Won’t Buy an Engagement Ring

Meghan O’Rourke wrote this piece about the shady origins of diamond engagement rings a few years back, but Slate is re-running it this week for their wedding-themed issue. It’s as relevant today as it was back then:

[T]here’s a powerful case to be made that in an age of equitable marriage the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity—starting with the obvious fact that only the woman gets one. The diamond ring is the site of retrograde fantasies about gender roles. What makes it pernicious—as opposed to tackily fun—is its cost (these days you don’t need just a diamond; you need a good diamond), its dubious origins, and the cynical blandishments of TV and print ads designed to suggest a ring’s allure through the crassest of stereotypes.