50,000

Hit 50,000 hits today on Flickr for digitalbites and not much else happened so I thought it was worth a post. Good times.

digital bites

I like making pictures. And anything to do with digital. So I married the two together in a Flickr group.

It started off as just a personal stash of interestingness for someone entering the world of digital to get their head around things.

Then I wondered if (and how) it would spread on the Internet without me promoting it at all. It was an interesting wee experiment just watching various links organically popping up all over the place, the odd twitter/friendfeed/blog mentioning it.

Anyway, people seem to like it. So now I'm moving onto the second part of the experiment: promoting it, which starts with this, a playful little app where all the 'digital bites' can be explored:

www.will-lion.com/digitalbites

Let's see what happens now.

Gliding about Earth

I commented on Photosynth - the very cool little app swallowed by Microsoft - a while back. Viewfinder is similar except it tacks on to Google Earth, adding an elegant new dimension.

I think if it takes on the multi-shot nature of Photosynth (as opposed to single shot shown in the vid above), it will be better.

The software clearly has a slew of uses but I think simply being beautiful is one. Software becomes art.

Photoslop

Photoshop Disasters is a fun little blog with a keen eye for sloppy Photoshop. Some recent ones:

Either the model met with a nasty accident or someone forgot to digitally reattach her index finger

Warping tiles - she's been Liquified. Her little line of gab about confidence takes on an errie meaning after the glitch too.

The freaky severed hand

Phillip Toledano

Car salesmen, people's faces whilst they play video games, recently occupied offices, the anonymous, marks left on skin from objects and clothes, the artic and the internal desires and paranoia floating about in American life (pictured here) are just a few places Mr Toledano has pointed his lens. His often bleak compositions are quick to grab you visually (he was an art director in advertising for ten years) and force all sorts of questions on you. See more on his slick site.

Photo Tapestries

I saw a very nifty piece of software being taken for a spin the other day. It’s called Photosynth and one of its features is the ability view an entire array of images and then seamlessly dive into it with exquisite detail. The other thing it can do is build relationships between photos creating interactive three-dimensional spaces. Well worth a look if you haven’t seen it already. Here's the vid. Here's the webpage.

Capturing China

Having spent a month travelling around China last year, I was thrilled to find these photos by photographer Michael Roulier. They capture something wonderful about the mood of modern China much more acutely than I have been trying to do in conversations with people.

His lens has soaked up the character of the architecture and people; the ubiquity and mess of modern construction against the backdrop of classical architecture, the new shoots of economic prosperity crumbling the barren Maoist cityscapes, all embellished with the mossy green tinge of vegetation and humidity. Brilliant.

Roulier also has an engagingly beautiful nonlinear film on his site called Sub-memory Check. Turn off the lights and turn up the volume...

Ordinary Night London

Just came across this on Flickr and thought it was great. Made all the more so because there is a nice story behind it. One of those ones that makes a little incision into the ordinary, lets you take a peek in and closes up when you're done. I love little things like that, events that don't change anything but are nonetheless thoroughly interesting.

I read a book like that last month, which starts with a crisp London nightscape. A neurosurgeon, unable to sleep, peers out into the night to see a plane with an engine on fire gliding across the cool night's sky, with the BT tower in the foreground. The book is Saturday by Ian McEwan.

The plotlessness of it - whilst being the primary cause of dislike among many Amazon reviewers - was the gateway to an exquisite celebration of the ordinary, which manages to capture something about what it is like to live in London right now.

I recommend this book with caution because people are clearly split between viewing this as boring, smug drivel and a work of majestic literary observation. In a geekier moment, I noticed this is supported by the soft u-shaped function that has emerged from the review graph on Amazon.

If you love the rich details of ordinary life then this is unmissable; if not, it's not.

Fotographics

Came across a great photographer/digital artist whose photos use the small (food, material etc) to portray the big. See his brilliant work here.