A Bit More Detail

• Van Waffle wrote late last year about the ways we see with and without cameras.


• This article in The Atlantic noting how iPhone selfies do not actually accurately represent one's face is disturbing in a few ways.


• CityLab noted the importance of the shuttered Village Voice in promoting photojournalism in New York City.


• Apparently hundreds of people have died around the world as a result of misadventures while taking selfies, VICE reported.


• This Slate article is entirely right in noting, with Flickr's conversion to a paid model and the mass deletion of photos of non-paying users, that counting on the online world to back up photos (or other data) is a mistake.

• Gizmodo has a perhaps unduly pessimistic take on the purchase of Flickr by SmugMug. I use Flickr regularly; I wish it luck.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly talks about her use of Instagram, and about what she sees as the site's good and bad sides.


• CityLab considers the impact of Instagram, and social networking-driven photography, on the identities and representations of cities.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at the photography of Tom Saint Clair. (NSFW.)


• Towleroad highlights a showing of the photography of Peter Hujar in New York City that I wish I could attend.

Just shy of a year ago, Flickr started offering 1,000 gigs of free storage to every user, along with an automatic uploader tool that would help you take every photo from your computer, your external drives, and SD cards, and dump them into one place. Flickr’s search engine was good, the new universal Camera Roll interface was great, and Flickr suddenly seemed to have a chance as a permanent archive of all of our photos. But then, this morning, Flickr announced that once again its best tools will only be available to paying users. It’s time to call it: Flickr is dead. Over. Kaput. In the search for a few more people willing to fork over $35 a year to fund more purple offices, Yahoo has killed its photo service.

Today’s announcements really only include one change of consequence: The desktop Auto-Uploadr tool is now reserved only for Pro users. That means there’s no easy way to upload big batches of photos all at once, into the same place, unless you’re a Pro member. The move feels a bit like ransomware, Yahoo forcing people who’ve already bought into the idea of Flickr as a permanent backup to start paying for the privilege. And it kills the notion that Flickr can be a useful, simple, automatic way to keep all your photos backed up in one place.

Where to go next? Well, I had always championed Flickr above Google Photos because of its ease of use, Magic View and search functionalities but now the latter seems like the next best option.

My colleague, Owen Williams, has said he is “totally and irrationally in love with Google Photos,” so now is definitely the right time to check it out.

Google Photos offers everything you can get from Flickr and it’s free, so that’s a bonus. It also has some quirky features, like automatically making GIFs from your images, as well as slideshows set to music from groups of photos around specific events, like New Year’s Eve or weddings.

Its search function is up to scratch as well, allowing you to search for pretty much anything, like ‘dogs’ or ‘beach’ and providing you with accurate results. There’s one caveat though, Google Photos only offers facial recognition in the US yet, so you’ll need to use a VPN to enable that right now. It is something that I’d expect to see rolled out globally in the near future.

Photography as a slow, analogue art-form is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute—that’s six billion each month—and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital products anyone can be a Photoshop hack, selfie whore or filter junkie. We see with our smartphones, not our eyes. What need do we have for old-fashioned specialists using toxic chemicals to make a physical print that can be neither insta-shared nor “liked”?

A case is point in Anton Corbijn, the Dutch artist who in a 40-year career has shot thousands of celebrities, everyone from the Rolling Stones to Björk, and whose iconic album-cover shots include U2’s “Joshua Tree” and Morrissey’s “Viva Hate”. A retrospective of his work at the C/O Berlin gallery feels like a fond farewell to his big-buck career: from now on photography will only be Mr Corbijn's hobby.

The two-floor exhibition features 600 prints from 1972 to 2012, including his famed music photography from the 1990s. A travelling show from The Hague Museum of Photography, Mr Corbijn’s work represents a bygone era of analogue masterworks. Each of the prints on the wall was first seen by Mr Corbijn only as he dipped them into chemical baths in a dark room—as different as possible from the modern digital shoot, where hundreds of shots can be compared and even retouched on the spot with the band and creative director peering over the photographer's shoulder.

Known for melancholic, black-and-white photos with a raw, anti-glamour aesthetic, Mr Corbijn’s work feels timeless. Some images intentionally include motion-blur, like his portrait (above) of Luciano Pavarotti, growling like a death metal star in Turin back in 1996. Even though Mr Corbijn has steady hands, something he credits to his non-coffee, non-smoking lifestyle, he believes sharpness is overrated. It remains the photographer’s technical preference to shoot slow shutter speeds, which allows movement in the frame.

Yahoo! Inc. is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date.

Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs. Yahoo also says that “per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business” with David Karp staying on as CEO.

Mayer, CEO of the biggest U.S. Web portal since July, is betting that Tumblr will help transform Yahoo into a hip destination in the era of social networking as she challenges Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. in the US$17.7-billion display ad market. The price she’s paying — about a fifth of Yahoo’s US$5.4-billion in cash — underscores the deal’s importance to Mayer’s turnaround effort, according to Zachary Reiss-Davis, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“It’s an aggressive move,” Reiss-Davis said in an interview. “They are saying, ‘where is our next group of people who are going to spend many hours per week on Yahoo properties?’ It’s big bet that the answer is going to be Tumblr users.”

The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2013, Yahoo said in the statement.

Founded by Karp in 2007, Tumblr grew to log more than 13 billion global page views in the past month. The site offers a free service for publishing blogs on the Web and mobile devices, and tools for sharing photos and other content across social networks.

[T]he big news is the free space — "we want all of your images," said Cahan. He said it was 70 times bigger than what other sites offer, and said it could store 537,731 photos in "full quality." Yahoo directly mentioned the 15GB of storage space "other" companies offer, and it was a pretty direct shot at Google — a company that has made no secret recently about making photos a key part of its services.

Yahoo also announced a new Android Flickr app, which matches the capabilities of the recently-updated iOS app. "Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, any follower, on any service, and make it absolutely beautiful," said Cahan. Along with this new service, Flickr is revamping its Flickr Pro service. Previously, free Flickr users could only display 200 photos at a time, while paid users had unlimited storage and display capabilities as well as analytical data about your photos. However, Yahoo introduced a few new paid options — for $49.99 a year, all ads on the site will be removed, and you'll get access to the standard set of Flickr analytics. For $499.99, you can double your storage space to 2TB. All in all, it looks like a long overdue and hugely-needed update — but now Flickr has an arsenal of new tools to take on sites like Facebook and Google.

In May last year, photographer Guek Hock Ping took photos of a lacewing in Malaysia and posted them on photo-sharing site Flickr. Entomologist Shaun Winterton stumbled upon the gallery, and didn't recognize the distinct blue and black markings found on the insect's wings. After sending the link to colleagues, who were also unable to identify the insect, Winterton became convinced that the photographed specimen was from a species unknown to science. Winterton reached out to Guek but was dismayed to discover that the photographer had no more information on the species — he'd simply shot the photographs and allowed the insect to fly away.

A year later, Guek contacted Winterton — after returning to the same area where the original images were shot, he'd managed to find the elusive creature again and had captured one, which sat in a container in his kitchen. Winterton arranged for the insect to be sent to Steve Brooks, an entomologist from the Natural History Museum in London, who confirmed that it belonged to a new species. Brooks also found a matching specimen in the museum's collection that had remained unclassified for decades. The species was named 'Semachrysa jade,' after Winterton's daughter, and the discovery was featured in scientific journal ZooKeys this month. Fittingly, the paper detailing the 'online' discovery was co-authored remotely via GoogleDocs by Winterton, Guek, and Brooks.

Cat vs. Maneki neko a photo by yorksranter on Flickr.

I found an unusual followup to Wednesday's Maneki neko photo posting over on Flickr, with the Yorkshire Ranter's photograph of his neighbour's cat looking at the Maneki neko posting on the Ranter's own laptop. (The left part of the Tarantula Nebula picture I posted later that morning is just visible to the right of the screen.)

This was such a meta picture that I had to share it.

If you're curious, the picture that started off this spiral is below.

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half; now 14 percent of children those ages who use the Internet have blogs. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

A number of news and commentary sites started as blogs before growing into mini-media empires, like The Huffington Post or Silicon Alley Insider, that are virtually indistinguishable from more traditional news sources.

Blogs went largely unchallenged until Facebook reshaped consumer behavior with its all-purpose hub for posting everything social. Twitter, which allows messages of no longer than 140 characters, also contributed to the upheaval.

No longer did Internet users need a blog to connect with the world. They could instead post quick updates to complain about the weather, link to articles that infuriated them, comment on news events, share photos or promote some cause — all the things a blog was intended to do.

Indeed, small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.

[A]s soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)

Blogging has legs — it’s been growing now for more than a decade, but it’s not a “new thing” anymore. Underneath the data in the article there’s an interesting super-trend that the Times misses: people of all ages are becoming more and more comfortable publishing online. If you’re reading this blog you probably know the thrill of posting and getting feedback is addictive, and once you have a taste of that it’s hard to go back. You rode a bike before you drove a car, and both opened up your horizons in a way you hadn’t imagined before. That’s why blogging just won’t quit no matter how many times it’s declared dead.

Fourteen percent of online adults are making some effort to write regularly in public! That remains a phenomenal fact; if you’d predicted it a decade ago, as only a handful of visionaries did, you’d have been dismissed as a nut (or maybe a “cyber-utopian”).

So the actual story — which, to be fair, the Times’ article mostly hews to (it’s the headline and lead that skew it more sensationally) — is that blogging keeps growing, but it’s losing popularity among teens.

Social networking is changing blogging. [. . .] More of us are using Facebook and Twitter for casual sharing and personal updates. That has helped clarify the place of blogging as the medium for personal writing of a more substantial nature. Keeping a blog is more work than posting to Facebook and Twitter. So I wouldn’t be surprised if, long-term, the percentage of the population blogging plateaus or even declines.

Maybe we’ll end up with roughly ten percent of the online population (Pew’s consistent finding) keeping a blog. As the online population becomes closer to universal, that is an extraordinary thing: One in ten people writing in public.