addicted to gadgets and technology - my latest series in alamy

© Joselito Briones

same guy from the previous post. this is just a play on how in the old times men carried their cigarette packs folded in their t-shirt sleeves.  rebel-bad-boy sort of stuff - and also wearing one's addiction on one's sleeve - only this time it's addiction to gadgets and technology.  i submitted this concept to stocksy, but the editor said he didn't get the context, so i did a reshoot of the same thing and submitted it to alamy.  it's part of my latest series there.

© Joselito Briones

image above is part of the series.

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stock imitating life imitating stock

© Joselito Briones

© Joselito Briones

on top is a photo from a recent shoot in the east village in new york for stocksy, inspired by the photo below it, taken spring of 2009 in the peak district in the uk (taken to look like a stock photo) with friends, in a really, really old cottage we rented for the weekend.

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adobe photoshop will soon let you unblur photos

how cool is that?

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tûranor planet solar in hong kong

not sure what this was but it sure was more interesting than the light show yesterday. i googled it and turns out it's some solar-powered german-built yacht that intends to go around the world, currently in its hong kong stop.  tûranor planet solar. here's their own website.

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facebook's desperate measures

for such a big company that boasts of gazillion-dollar value, facebook's latest barrage of feature impositions really come off as desperate.

there was facebook mail - which just turns itself on if you try to go to your messages (as in site messages, not facebook mail). what's up with that?  they introduced a feature that they know no one will like so they have to make it default?  there's also automatically the "archived" folder. excuse me, but i don't remember archiving my old messages. i deleted them. yes i did. and now they show up in the archive folder. WTF???  is this the privacy that facebook has promised? that if you delete content it's gone?  i deleted my old messages long time ago and now they're in my archived folder???  they were supposed to be gone, why were they holding on to these personal messages?  oh yeah and from the archive folders it takes 3 not-so-obvious steps to delete them again.  that is, if they really actually delete them.

then there was the chat thing.  i turned it off last year.  it was supposed to remember that it's off.  suddenly yesterday it was on again.  automatically. so i say no thank you and turned it off again.  then i thought i'd change the setting just to be sure.  turns out when you click on the chat status (where you access your setting) you automatically turn your availability on again.  whatever happened to announcing in the log-in page that they now have these "cool" features?  my guess is that either they know that these features aren't cool enough for account members to actively turn them on, or that they really are, indeed, desperate for member activities. (new york time's "tech talk" podcasted that millions of north american members are no longer active users)

it may not be just deleted messages that facebook "archives" for future use.  i once deleted an old account - email addresses, friends associated with that account, etc. and created a new one with a different email address.  after about a year i created yet another account, using the email address of the account i've deleted, to anchor a (professional) profile page to.  i still have my usual networking profile, so this one was an extra. i didn't "friend" anyone with this,  i made the privacy setting so that no one can send me friend request, nor find this account thru search.  so tell me -  how come facebook had been suggesting me to "friend" all these people that were associated with this email before?

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shoot and then focus?

in case you haven't read about this, there's supposedly a new camera called lytro that lets you focus the photo after taking it (in the example above, from their website, click anywhere on the photo to see how focus shifts). i said supposedly because they're keeping mum on the details. there isn't even a physical description or photo of the camera (surely if they're just protecting the technology, it's not something that can be stolen from showing what the camera looks like?).

what do you think? i'm doing the wait-and-see.

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revit rendering study

one of the main advantages of revit over autocad is instant visualization.  basically you can work with the visuals at the same time you're doing the planning.  this one was a preliminary "look" study of a boutique hotel, rendered natively in revit.  i read somewhere that there's a (3rd party?) rendering function that uses cloud-accessed files, but i don't think that's a particularly good idea for now, because basically it means you'd be limited by your internet connection.  it's bad enough that so many things can go wrong with windows while doing a complex rendering, and the occasional power failure, with cloud computing you'll also have to worry about internet connection.  soon maybe, but not tomorrow, and definitely not today.

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get your own ewan mcgregor now! cheap!

who knew he's for sale? and for cheap, supposedly.  but then what's cheap for them is probably still not affordable for me.  and anyway i don't think i'd want to own ewan. i mean he looks good and charming and all, but i wouldn't know what to feed him, really.  tho from the persona he projects onscreen he looks like a very good-natured low-maintenance guy, so maybe it isn't so bad. nah. i can't even keep cacti alive for a long time, much less an ewan.

the screen shot above was from an ad in sfgate.com.  clearly the advertiser just scans keywords in the article (the article was about a new ewan mcgregor movie) and tempts reader to buy it from its website for cheap.  stupid bot. 

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the gayest usb hub of all

© Joselito Briones

i bought this one last weekend, made by LaCIE, because i can imagine the effort that the designer must have gone through. ha!. it also comes with a usb lamp and propeller at the end of those stiff cables. seems to work, if a bit difficult to set up. i can return it within two weeks if it turns out it doesn't do its job, so i thought I'd show you now, just in case. ah who am i kidding, i'll prolly keep it.


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drobo

© Joselito Briones

i'm drobotomized! finally got to buy this data storage/protection system. i can't really afford it, but since i find myself buying external hard drives more and more, i'm hoping this will be the ultimate solution. i bought the standard 4-slot thingy, together with 2 of 2-tb hard drives. the thing's been absorbing my data since this afternoon, so i don't know yet how good it is. will report later.


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image search technology

© Joselito Briones

thanks to tineye's ubercool search technology, i've recently found more of my imges in use, including the front page of msn.com's swiss site (unfortunately already changed to a different photo):

cosmogirl.com
zigonet.com
openroad.tv
healthtalk.coom
hubpages.com
hoax-slayer.com
real-restaurant-recipes.com

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An Old Portrait

© Joselito Briones

This one was taken in Hong Kong, about 10 years ago, and worth showing you only because of the fact that this was my first ever portrait commission work.

Blogger.com, the medium with which I've been communicating with you, has decided a couple of months back to move all the photos I've been showing you to Picasa. It's an online photo storage system not very much different from Flickr. It's rather convenient that it's integrated with Blogger, you can clean up your files by visiting your Picasa account. The BIG problem is, I noticed, starting today (or maybe I just noticed today), that they decided to compress uploaded jpeg-format photos. The image quality has noticeably deteriorated, and any photo I upload looks very much different from the original. So if you're looking for a place to upload and share your photos, look somewhere else. (The photo above was uploaded before I noticed the compression artefacts on uploaded files)


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Green Apples

© Joselito Briones

My iMac's back. After half a year. Yep, it took that long for the Nürnberg shop to repair it. And it's not even completely repaired yet. This is one of those ocassions when I absolutely miss living in Hong Kong. Everything there goes instantly. You need something fixed? They'll do it for you the next day, if not later the same day. Anyways, it turned out that the power supply was faulty, and the extra memory card - which I now have to replace, was also causing it to malfunction. Am not sure though if it's worth getting an extra memory replacement, as this is very old (it's the first generation of the iMac with the swivel screen on a half-round CPU. I've been using a CPU-in-the-monitor iMac for more than a year now.

Photo, above, is the Apple store in 5th Av. in Manhattan, taken last month.


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Rescued

© Joselito Briones

Remember Hon? Yep it's been a year since that dinner party. I like these birthdays, it gives me an excuse to show you pictures from my archives. This particular one was a surprise because it was too dark (or too bright) for any printer and scanner available at the time I took the picture to make anything of it. It tempts me to see if there's anymore such pics that can now be made use of with the latest film scanning technology.


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Reformat

© Joselito Briones

So... blogger.com, the medium with which I'm sending you these letters, decided to upgrade their system. What it means for me is that all my customized modifications are screwed up. I had to tweak my module back to what it was, although it's not all done yet. I also took the chance, since I was gonna do a lot of modifications anyway, escpecially in adding keywords to all the previous entries, to enlarge some of the photos. So if you're using an RSS reader to view these, you might notice old letters getting reposted.


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Gray Day in Berlin

© Joselito Briones

Nothing's quite right today. I woke up with a headache. It started before I went to bed last night, there was no place I could go to to buy some paracetamol. Or maybe I just didn't know where, but sure enough I asked several places. I went out after shower, hungry for breakfast, determined to go to the first place I see that serves anything digestible. The sky's gray. My only full day here in Berlin and the sun decided to play hide and seek. Bleh.

© Joselito Briones

First thing I saw was KaDeWe. Sure, those Dior clothes look yummy, but not in a nourishing way, the opposite actually, it made me want to not eat ever again so I'll fit in them. I'm sure though that if the store was already open I'd have gotten in and procastinated on getting headache relief. Thankfully, the KaDeWe apotheke around the corner was already open, so I got myself some painkillers.

© Joselito Briones

I wasn't so lucky food-wise. The first place I saw was McDonald's. I had mcMuffins. It did the job. It didn't stop me though from stopping at several wurst vending places while walking and talking pictures all day.

© Joselito Briones

These are all taken with a digital camera, the one I got as a present on my birthday. As you can see, in all the pictures, the sky is consistently gray.

© Joselito Briones

First two pictures, left and above, are of the same building, in the Museum island, something something dome, my map said. The first one was taken while I was walking along the river bank, just before it rained. I let the rain pass while having espresso in a sand bank (made to look like a beach) cafe, then continued on to the island itself, the next picture.

© Joselito Briones

I went around the island, until I got to where I started, the east tip of it, and took this picture (left), which I'm sure so many others have taken before, a visual gag trying to make the TV tower look like it's on top of the dome of another museum. I think this is going to be the theme for today: taking cliche' pictures. Only doing worse version... one with gray sky on every picture. Hmmm... come to think of it, this had always been the theme of all my pictures. Oh well...

© Joselito Briones

The digital camera actually adjusts the brightness, so that instead of dark gray which I see in reality, the images have a very bright gray sky.

© Joselito Briones

It's all museums basically, this area, so I decided to go somewhere else, and headed towards the Reichtag (left). Last time I was here in Berlin was 1999, and the only two places I remember from then is Liebskind's Jewish Museum and this, the Reichtag. The rest are all a jumble of cranes. This city was full of promise. And if anyone's to gauge its fulfillment, now's the best time.

© Joselito Briones

The next few pictures were taken in the same area. Except for the last one and the one before that, taken in Mitte, and the third one from the last picture, taken in Galleries Lafayette (designed by Jean Nouvel), close to Unter den Linden, where I bought a couple of socks.


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2006.12.01
As you may well know by now, i've reformatted my blog, and some pictures are too big (and I now deem unnecessary) to put here, so if the text refers to a picture that isn't shown here, that's because I've taken it off.


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Spice Store (This is a test)

© Joselito Briones

I was looking at Erwin Olaf's works yesterday, and, as is usual when I see something I like, I try to see if I can do it myself. (Remember when I did a sorta kinda Pierre et Gille somewhatta?)

This time I deliberated on how to achieve his signature desaturated colors, digitally. It's his colors, after all, that he is most famous for.

The photo on top is the finished product. I guess it wouldn't be worth showing anyway if I thought I didn't succeed in emulating his colors. It's not exactly perfect yet, but I think I've got the principle.

© Joselito Briones

I guess I'll just have to make it a little bit less reddish, and still a bit less saturated. Oh well.

The photo below is the original. The photo was taken using my Canon powershot digital camera. Boring picture. It's a spice shop, close to the center of city, in the pedestrian zone.

Next step: How do I achieve the same effect using film and traditional darkroom printing? I have an idea, of course, but whether or not I'll have enough interest to actually test that idea remains to be seen.

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P.S.
I started storing some of my blog photos in Flickr. Here's the link.

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