digitaldust

A while back I stumbled on this site by an italian doing some machinima stylee war photography. It’s all part of some bigger thing that he calls Internet Reportage. He’s trying to take pictures of presences online. Or at least that’s my take, I have to say I was a little confused by the direction.

Even though the pictures evoke some feel of war documentary photography there is something really missing. There is no emotion, no feeling or connection with the figures. Now this might be something to do with the composition, but it is more in the inanimate nature of the models. The Capa’s and McCullin’s of this world capture people in situations, not the situations.

I had an idea for a project to capture something like this though coming from a different angle. It could broadly be described as online situational portraits. From my experience people who are playing online games are really enjoying it… or getting expressively frustrated, but definitly getting involved in the highs and lows of the experience. On screen though none of the models or avatars express this. I wanted (or still want to if I get around to it) capture a portrait of the gamer and a screen shot of the action when they’re fully in the game and being moved by the experience. Ideally it would be two portraits at once, but controlling two cameras (one in game and one in the hand) would be an achievement, let alone just something like synching a screen shot to a camera shot, or vice versa.

I want those pictures of people grinning furiously while their character/model is flying across the screen from a rocket blast, whooping in triumph as they ding/level/whatever, seeing the blissful relief after finally getting through that tough instance, that kind of thing. And all in full colour because that is what these experiences are like, not black and white.

I’ve made it official today - handed in my notice at the Beeb. It’s been unofficial for nearly a month and a reasonably well kept secret, but now the cat is out of the bag. I’ve hated having to stay quiet about it for this long.

I’m off to join social software wonks headshift to do some serious socialising with software. It’s a positive and exciting move, it’s a role I will enjoy, it sounds challenging and stimulating and a nice bunch of people I can learn from.

It’s been one of those sorts of days where things come together, quiting my job and getting a Mac.

My new playmate
Originally uploaded by digitaldust.

Two exciting and life changing things have happened today. The first was my new iMac turning up.

(More accurately it turned up at Heather’s work and she had to bring it home in a taxi and lug it up to the flat… thank you xx)

Life is already looking better through the crisp clear 20″ LCD screen and it’s beautiful white box… maybe not all life, but the bits of life you have to access through a screen certainly look better.

So yes, I’ve Switched, and I’m very happy about it.

The weirdest things happen. I was just checking my search referrers and saw I had picked up some hits for “how to clean door knobs” and lo and behold I’m number one on google for clean door knobs. All for one post on dirty door handles… I love the web, brings Andy Warhol’s prophecy to life, 15 mins of fame, but in little snippets about the flotsam of your life. There is always something funny/tragic/enlightening enough about one’s life worth some eyeball time from someone else on the other side of the planet.

And if not fame, at least you get 15 minutes of processor time on google’s servers.

UPDATE: 12/04/07. The nice guys at Architectural Classics just skyped in and they DO know how to clean door knobs.

Funny when you get echos back from the blogosphere. Nothing is ever dead and forgotten, not even meta-blogging about minor life observations. It’s not even my original door knob post that google seems to like it’s the even more trivial one.

I put this tag cloud thing from, very imaginatively named company/site, called tagcloud.com.

I have to say it looks very very non-useful. Mostly it seems to pick up stylesheet stuff. So my tags are full of arial, helvetica, 666666. Very informative.