July 2007 Archives

I'm amazed by the way digital tools -- hardware and software -- have blurred the line between the pros and the amateurs. On the music side I've seen it first hand, as it's astonishing the sound quality you can get out of very affordable equipment. As a result, people who are not part of the traditional "music business" are now able to make professional level music. The same thing is happening in stock photography. When I worked on the Tourism Toronto account, one of our designers pointed out that the best photography he could find of the city was actually in Flickr, not on Getty or Firstlight. We'd email the photographers, most of whom were just hobbyists, and ask if we could license the image. Cheaper for us than Getty, but a great deal for the hobbyists who got money for something they were doing anyway.

Ah, but you say, there's the talent issue. All the equipment in the world doesn't replace talent. Indeed, a quick look at the pop charts confirms this is true. And the recent Porktrashers shoot with Raina and Wilson confirms that having a great eye and an instinct for the right shot will never be replaced.

But I see this recent side-by-side comparison of shots from stock houses iStock and Corbis; the quality difference between the user-uploaded iStock and the stock behemoth Corbis -- both technically and creatively -- is far from cut and dried.

Interesting. It's like in the creative world, there's a mass street vendors offering high quality goods at a better price, right outside of the big department store. I wonder how this will play out?

I'm not sure how this "product" will have practical use except as something pretty cool. But pretty cool it is. I'm just fascinated by the idea that the web can take all these individually captured images and compile them into one 3 dimensional image that represents an aggregate of all the separate viewpoints. Like each one of us contributes a pixel to a larger image.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

As well, the lecture starts with another product - or "foundational work" – called Sea Dragon, which in many respects redefines the concept of screen depth or resolution. Interesting to see how as the technology gets more sophisticated, it tends to recreate a version of a hyper-manipulatable physical world rather than a whole new interface. The Microsoft Table concept has gone the same way.