An African Photoblog

David Rizzi's anafricanphotoblog is a once-daily photoblog with an African theme. All of Rizzi's photos are set somewhere on the African continent. Some photos feature people or animals as subjects, while others focus on landscapes and cityscapes. I follow this site because I love photography and I love Africa (or at least the small corner of it that I once occupied). Rizzi is a talented photographer in his own right; that he has chosen my favorite continent as his subject makes him even better for me.

Photoblogs have a variety of designs, but one design in particular is most popular--the one that Rizzi uses. The day's photo is typically centered, loading right in front of the user, with no need for scrolling. To advance to the previous day's picture, the user simply clicks on the current picture. This design allows the user to quickly (though spending time on each shot is my preferred viewing habit) click through the site's photos.

GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is an open-source image editor modeled on Adobe's Photoshop suite. While GIMP lacks a few of Photoshop's most advanced features, it acts as a Photoshop replacement program (and it's totally free, compared to CS4's $699 price tag). The GIMP website also offers an extensive community of users and programmers who answer user questions, troubleshoot errors, and publish tutorials.

Arts & Letters Daily

Arts & Letters Daily is a news and commentary aggregator owned by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  ALD's editors trawl the Internet for links related to the ALD theme, which is pretty broad.  The masthead describes the site's breadth: "philosophy, aesthetics, literature, language, ideas, criticism, culture, history, music, art, trends, breakthroughs, disputes, gossip."  It's pretty wide, and it's right up my alley (and very similar that of 3QuarksDaily).  I love this stuff, and I spend an inappropriate amount of time reading a lot of it. 

Which is why I'm up this late cramming out Assemblage posts.

Lightstalkers

Lightstalkers is an online community for photojournalists around the world.  The main section of the site is the discussion board, on which registered photogs discuss seemingly any PJ-related topic under the sun.  The board is a clearinghouse for job opportunities, gear talk, industry news, new photography, and much more (I remember some older posts: a freelance photog inquiring about the best place to purchase body armor in Baghdad, another freelancer asking how to get tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment through airport security, and an art show organizer advertising a call for work).  The site also features a prominent alert system (for breaking news and opportunities), a twitter-esque photographer-tracker called On the Move (for which all users can broadcast their current location), and an upcoming events board.  The greatest asset of the site, though, is the users.  They are energetic, knowledgeable, and--even in the ultra-competitive world of photojournalism--more than happy to help.

Getty Images

The Getty Images daylife photoblog is the image house's public image wire (I imagine the private wire is much better, but also quite costly).  I click it a few times a day, for two reasons.  First, the nonstop flow of fresh images from around the world is helpful in trying to understand the news of the day because the pictures and their small captions allow for quick and intuitive consumption of the news.  Second, I love photography.  International photojournalist is my dream job; York Daily Record photog, not so much.

3quarksdaily

3quarksdaily is a blog, similar to Boing Boing and Fark, in which an editor (or a group of editors) trawls the Internet for interesting links, articles, etc. 3QD is different, though, in that its content is rather high-minded and interdisciplinary. As its masthead proclaims, the blog features articles related to science, arts, literature, politics, gossip, and philosophy. In my experience, the articles that the editors feature are usually complex and detailed--this is certainly not a place for mainstream media consumers. Some recent highlights (which were hard to select because I love most of what 3QD publishes): We Cannot Live By Skepticism Alone, Philosophy's Great Experiment, Is Time An Illusion?, and Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie. Goooood stuff.

3QD is my favorite blog, but I do have one complaint. Often, the titles the editors choose for their posts are not clear and/or descriptive, so I am forced to read much of the entry just to see what the related article is about. I already have enough trouble with RSS addiction; Now that 3QD's ambiguous headlines have joined my flow of articles, I've had to cut out some other--less amazing--subscriptions.

The Big Picture

The Boston Globe's Alan Taylor runs a great photo blog called The Big Picture, which is published on Boston.com, the newspaper's Internet gateway.  The blog features a new photo essay every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.  Taylor picks the theme of each essay, usually choosing something relevant to recent news and events.  He scours the photowires for the best shots, and then publishes them in high resolution.  Unlike daily photo blogs which publish one photo per page, TBP publishes each essay (which usually includes between 25 and 40 photographs) as one long, vertically-scrollable web page.  In my opinion, TBP has been the web's best photo blog for a long time, so I am happy that it has recently gained an enormous following and that it was recently nominated for a Weblog Award.

flickr's Geotagging Milestone

Photo-sharing website flickr recently reached a milestone. Over the weekend, the amount of the site's photos that has been geotagged passed the 100,000,000 mark. This is an opportunity to discuss geotagging.

Geotagging is a feature that flickr developed almost three years ago. Like flickr's text tags, geotags aid other users in finding photos of a specific kind; geotags allow users to find photos taken at a particular place. Unlike conventional tags, however, geotags are not text-based. Instead, users can use a map app similar to Google Maps to pinpoint exactly where one of their uploaded photos was taken. The popularity of geotagging (as the post indicates, almost 3.5% of flickr's three billion photos have been geotagged) actually affected the digital camera industry. Nikon recently released a camera attachment that automatically inserts geotag data into a photograph's metadata (like EXIF and IPTC).