December 30, 2009
December 28, 2009
Ken Photographing Two Men in the Rain in a Tree
Ken Photographing Two Men in the Rain in a Tree, originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.
Key: R20091219-144047
December 26, 2009
Kindle 2 impressions
Santa brought my wife a Kindle (v2) for Christmas this year. It’s been in her hands almost constantly, but in a brief moment I got a chance to play with it for a few minutes. Bear that in mind when you read my following initial impressions…
My first and overriding impression, as someone who owns an iPhone with the Kindle app installed on it, was how rudimentary the user interface is. Tiny plastic buttons and a rather fragile looking toggle are what you have to work with. No sliding, swiping, finger gestures for you! This alone seems like such a throwback and non-efficient UI. If the Kindle just had a simple touchpad it would make a large difference in usability.
The e-ink screen, which is highly touted, also struck me as fairly primitive. It is grayscale, with only 16 levels of gray. I bought a copy of the New York Times to give it a test drive. My overriding impression was that my netbook was in the same ballpark in terms of size (but not thickness) and it was an order of magnitude more pleasurable to read the Times online on the color LCD display. Even the Times on the iPhone is better than this. And the Times on those devices shows video clips, color photos, etc. I’m not sure what the resolution of the Kindle is, but the layout of the Times was quite basic. While less cluttered sounds good in principle, I found that I did quite a bit more toggling and spending time navigating the stories on the Kindle UI than with the simple mouse click navigation on the web version.
The “WhisperSync” technology (essentially 3G) does not seem all that fast. Furthermore, on the Kindle you have to pay for the Times.
So the bottom line, as far as my electronic Times experience goes, is that it is faster, more colorful, more featureful, more easily navigated and free on the web. I’m certainly not above paying for online content, don’t get me wrong. But when the free experience seems so much nicer than the paid one there is something not quite right in Smallville.
Ditto everything I’ve just said for blog reading.
Now to be fair, I have not spent any time doing the main activity on the device that it was designed for–reading chapter books. I suspect that for that purpose it may be superior due to the low contrast screen (for long reading periods), the excellent battery life and the lack of pictures in the material.
It is interesting to see where this is going. I could see that with a higher-res color screen and a better UI this kind of device could explode in popularity way beyond the early adopter crowd. Let’s see what Apple throws out next year for v1.0. I’m sure Apple’s new tablet will turn the market on its ear if they manage to strike a deal with publishers for this kind of e-reader functionality (through iTunes, of course–man is that getting bloated, but that’s another story). I hear their stock is soaring right now…
Using “social media” to share/promote photography
Key: R20091219-164956
I ran across two interesting posts from photographers about Facebook yesterday: Doug Plummer is embracing the use of FB and Twitter to drive traffic to his blog, while Elizabeth Fleming is breaking an addiction to FB to use precious time in more productive ways. These are not opposing viewpoints, per se, but they raised a question that has been bubbling in the back of my mind to the forefront: what is utility, if any, of the new “social media” sites in sharing or promoting your work as a photographer (“professional” or otherwise) vs. how thinly can you spread yourself?
I’ve eschewed Twitter so far because, like Elizabeth, time is so very precious right now and I can’t see the utility of multitasking online activity so frequently so as to dilute any blocks that I may manage to put together. It took me a while to “get” Facebook, and, insofar as I get it, mostly I am using it sparingly to keep in touch with old friends, dispersed friends, family, etc. But what I am noticing about FB is that there is a very different demographic and much bigger audience there than I see on the blogosphere. What is clear is that there are an awful lot of people who “get” FB and have evolved their online lives to where that is the central focus, radiating outwards. I do not doubt that Twitter is similar.
I’m not about to start populating lots of alternative sites with my photographs and longer thoughts–the blog is perfect for that and I have concerns about rights issues that have been raised regarding FB. What I am doing, like Doug, is starting to post links to my blog postings on FB. This is a quick operation, and essentially plants a convenient link with a thumbnail and some preview text right in the middle of a large alternative audience to that of the blogosphere. These aren’t the same sort of folks reading my posts out of a RSS reader. I’ll see over time how it affects traffic to the site, but I know there are a lot of folks there that I can share my photography with that wouldn’t otherwise even be aware of it–they don’t have the time or inclination to check my site otherwise and by in large, I’m guessing most of them don’t even know what an RSS reader is. This seems to be a reasonable compromise to spreading yourself too thinly by posting the same stuff to a lot of different sites. I’m going to try to keep an objective eye on my online time as well. If I start to feel too thinly stretched, I (like Elizabeth) may end up pulling the plug on Facebook.
