Shooting digital in Iraq: Ben Lowy

Here’s what started out to be a dry story that listed the equipment Ben Lowy uses in the field, but later he opens up and give an account of a terrifying but challenging time for him. Great photos too, and not all what you’d expect from Iraq.

“There is a certain attraction to doing conflict photography,” he says. “I think anybody who says there isn’t, doesn’t really look at themselves. You’re your own personal Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get to run headlong into danger. And there’s something really attractive about that. But you also have a tremendous priviledge to be witnessing history for everyone else in the world.”

Do your pictures tell a story?

Photofocus Magazine has a thoughtful article here. Tell a story with your photos.

Why tell stories with your camera? Well, for one thing, people who look at pictures will enjoy looking at a story over a snapshot any day. Telling stories with your camera forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing. What is it about this scene that makes you want to make a photograph? What moves you or attracts your eye? Is there a theme, a phrase or a point of view that you want to capture and preserve?

Asking these types of questions will almost always lead to a better photograph.

Foundphotos – peek into their lives

Foundphotos is kinda strange. It states that, “these were found by doing a search using p2p programs. people share their own personal digital photos in their shared folders, i guess they put them there for friends or family to download or just select their whole my documents folder as shared.”
After scrolling down through the first few photos I got this feeling that I was getting a look into the lives of strangers and other cultures. People from all walks of life are featured here in all kinds of situations – snashots of family, personal encounters, public events and down right silly goings on at times.
Mostly safe for work but no guarantees!

Now we can all download the Internet!

Prompted by a question asked by Keith on ,

“ok well tell me a few good linux ditros that you can get everything for?”

I went searching and found a way that everyone can download the Internet themselves! It’s quite amazing that they’ve managed to do this but if you’re new to computers and you’re bored of trying to delete the Internet this is for you!

MP3 Blogs, wget and curling audio and images

Jeffrey Veen shows a simple usage of the wget command that’ll retrieve media from remote sites. If you’ve used wget at all you’ll be familiar with the options he uses.
What’s more interesting is the wget-curl blog that lists recipies for downloading images and audio. Good news for all you hungry media consumers out there!
I found 3hive.com via Jeffrey’s post above. I’m enjoying a few tunes by The Hold Steady right now. Go listen!
Much Later… And this page will be very handy for ripping mp3s from web pages!

So much to do, so much to read, consume, take in, absorb

I’m hopeless, I’m utterly behind in my reading. There’s a copy of the Sunday Times at home that’s hardly touched, I bought the National Geographic 2 weeks ago and it lies unread in a paper bag, books take longer to read now it seems. So much to do. I mentioned last month that The Digital Journalist would have a tribute to Ronald Reagan in their next issue. It’s out now, go read! I’ll eventually get around to reading it, sometime.
I won’t be reading it tonight however, Jacinta got 2 tickets to go see Julian Marley & The Uprising in the Cork Opera House. Looks like a good gig!

Most Popular Posts

I’ve just added a new plugin to the site that lists the most popular posts on your blog.
The command is {popularposts} which creates an array, $pposts, containing the list of posts. Unfortunately it’ll only work if you use the newer $blogid/archives/p/1/ type url, not the old $blogid/archives/m/200407/#1
Thank you Nargler for the MySQL substring_index code. Helped a lot!

Here’s an example usage:

{popularposts}
{if $pposts != ''}
  <b>Most Popular Posts</b><br />
  {foreach from=$pposts key=key item=hits}
    <nobr><a href="{$siteurl}/archives/p/{$hits.postID}/c/1/more/1" title='{$hits.title}'>{$hits.title|truncate:30:"..."}</a>: {$key}</nobr><br />
  {/foreach}
{/if}