Categories
Photography

Vivian Maier Photographs

Vivian Maier Self Portrait
Vivian Maier Self Portrait

I first heard about Vivian Maier on the This American Life special The Invisible Made Visible. Aside from all the other wonderful stories and performances on the special, was the work of a photographer I had never encountered before. If you haven’t heard the story about Vivian Maier’s photographs, I won’t ruin it here. I would urge you to download the special ($5 digitally) and watch the amazing story unfold.

Issues of Vivian’s posthumous privacy aside.

Needless to say, I was blown away. I have known of many photographers’ work that is arresting, but Vivian’s raw output is incredible. Over the course of her life, Vivian generated 100,000 to 150,000 negatives and over 3,000 prints. That she was never known when she was alive and that we were almost robbed of one of the greatest American photographers, is a frightening thought. While I have selected a few of her photographs I would urge you to take a look at vivianmaier.com for an even greater collection.

I, myself, shall be saving my pennies to hopefully one day afford one of her prints. She has served as an inspiration to my work lately and has shown me how much can be accomplished by just taking a moment to see the world.

Categories
Photographs Photography

Flickr gives 1TB of Storage and I Purchase a Cannon T3i

Flickr has announced that all users will be getting 1TB of free photo hosting. That is pretty sizable free storage! Add to that, they have also announced that all images will be available at full-size and the deal gets even sweeter!

I used to use Flickr way back before Yahoo bought them and for the most part, I really enjoyed the service. I even paid for it at one point, before I realized that I don’t like renting where I put my precious images.

This news is a game changer in terms of photo storage and hopefully realigns Flickr as the serious photographer’s web storage option. Even their home page allows you to calculate how many photographs 1TB holds (The answer is, it is always a lot of photographs!). I was so jazzed, I quickly picked up a refurbished Cannon Rebel T3i Body (for $351.99) to replace my ailing Rebel XT now almost 10 years old.

So, my advice is to dust off your Yahoo account and get snapping!


Update: Flickr was sold and the first thing they did was back out of the 1 TB of storage. They didn’t keep it for existing users. Unfortunately, the profit model of a ton of storage for free is unsustainable. Google Photos did the same thing, however, I trust Google will be around in ten years. I’m not so sure about Flickr at this point.

Personally, I now keep my photos backed up locally. Maybe something to explore on a self-hosted basis in the future. Contact me if you have any recommendations!

Categories
Design

PlaceIt by Breezi

PlaceIt by Breezi allows you to put anything into an iPhone window super-convincingly. SWANK!

Categories
Design Web Design

The Great Discontent

The Great Discontent may be one of the best designed magazine websites ever.

Categories
Photographs Photography

Things Come Apart

TypewriterApartL

Things Come Apart is a fascinating series Todd McLellan of taking things… apart. You really can’t describe it without saying the name.

Categories
Web Design

iCheck

iCheck is a jQuery and Zepto plugin, that makes pretty customized checkboxes for your swanky websites. Very nice.

Categories
Web Design

Unheap jQuery Library

unheap

Unheap is a wonderfully curated collection of jQuery plugins with charming explanatory illustrations.

Categories
Everyday

The New Daft Punk Album makes me want to slowdance with a graphing calculator

That is all.

Categories
Everyday

Server Woes

So I’ve been a pretty happy Dreamhost customer for some time, but recently my service has been a little rocky. Outages, restarts, and general sluggishness have made my site and all the sites I host professionally almost unusable. So today, I upgraded to a Dreamhost VPS server, and somewhere along the line… all my WordPress images got deleted.

Fuuuuuu…

Not sure what happened, but as you can guess – I’m not very happy right now. I will try to rebuild them, but I don’t know if I will ever have the time to rebuild all of the images in my posts.

Hopefully, Dreamhost support can locate the missing files. Otherwise, I’ve lost ten years of images.

Insert unhappy face here.

UPDATE! (2013-05-15 15:06)

Dreamhost has restored my images folder! Very happy. Now to back that crap up!!!