I think there is two obvious answers.  1) To make people, who are unacquainted with the art of picture taking,  buy more things and spend more money. 2) To help photographers take better pictures.

Everyone learns how to write in school, and photography is an art of writing with light.  Therefore, as it takes time to learn writing beautifully it also takes time to learn photography. In the kindergarten kids use pencils – the most primitive and useful tool for writing. It is fun to play with and easy to erase. Once person grows up he or she has to sign thousand of documents. And one is supposed to use a pen for this particular reason. Pen is more advanced and complicated in design and it is impossible to erase.  Once one moves even higher in rank the person changes the normal pen to a fancy one.

Almost the same things happen with photography. One starts learning professional photography with a basic film camera and slowly moves on to advanced versions of photographic equipement.

However in the age of digital technologies things are slightly different. The majority of people has the ability to take pictures with a single click on their digital point and shoot cameras, or even with cell phones. All the settings are preset and camera is ready to capture. An equivalent of an erasable pen, perhaps, if we compare to writing.

But once  decided to move from a point and shoot to professional SLR camera,  many people think that the quality of their pictures will increase dramatically. Doesn’t alvays happen this way. Practice and patience make it happen.

These days

Even walls have ears

A gossip can lead

TO TREASON

DO NOT CHIT-CHAT!

“Russian government is going to censor internet” -read the line from an e-mail that one of my Ukrainian friends sent me today. So what does it mean, are we going back to communism?

A lot of criticism has been brought upon Soviet Union and the centralized system after the fall of the country. Entire world expected the people of Russia to start building democratic state and enjoy new opportunities. However it is impossible to build a democracy in 10 years, therefore instead of industrial boom, free speech and trade Russians had to face chaos. No wonder that Vladimir Putin, who came and with an iron fist brought stability and order gained so much popularity and support.

Older generations of people in the countries of former Soviet Union are still used to obey to the higher authority. On the other hand government did not play such a big role in the lives of young Russians, Ukrainians, Kyrgyz and others. Therefore the situation is tricky.

Starting form January 2008 Russian politicians started talking about a new piece of legislature that has to be created in the future, regulating materials on World Wide Web. In the recent years internet gained huge popularity all over the world and many cannot imagine their daily lives without it. However internet can be very dangerous since it is completely uncensored. Everybody can post literally anything they want. But this is the main concept off the internet – complete freedom of speech. Hoverer in the process of posting free many users do not follow common rules. Terrorist organizations use internet to gain popularity and attract more members, hackers steal information and rob other users, a problem that is especially dear to Russia. Therefore in Russia, a country with one of the worst internet security fields this idea is actually reasonable.

However what else can it bring? Censorship, violation of free speech, pro-government internet? Just for fun I created this sound piece to see how internet would operate in a totalitarian regime:

LiveJournal gained a lot of popularity and first was purchased by the company Six Apart that managed it till December of 2007. And on December 2, 2007 Six Apart announced that it is selling LJ to Russian company SUP.

SUP is a new Russian multimedia magnate that is developing online multimedia application and services in Russian Federation. Many questions have risen since then. The biggest concern that bloggers have, especially in the countries of former Soviet Union is censorship. And even though SUP claimed that no censorship practices are going to take place, people are slightly worried since SUP is a pro government organization.

Unfortunately many people will be less inclined to express certain thoughts and post some controversial materials. At least for a while, since it has been only 3 month since the purchase and users did not have a lot of feedback from the SUP.

Nonetheless one link caught my attention. “Putin’s Secret” screamed the headline. Everything that has to do with my president is especially interesting these days for many Russians, since Putin serves his last weeks as a president of the country. The majority of people does not want him to leave, as little is known about his successor Dmitri Medvedev. The outcome of the elections that will take place on March 2 is pretty clear at this point, and Medvedev shortly will become the head of the country. Medvedev never was a prominent political figure and appeared on Russian political stage fairly recently, as Putin pronounced him the successor. For many people it became a surprise, however since Medvedev was the only candidate from the party Edinaya Rossia that has the majority in the parlament, people supported his candidature.

However the author of the article argues that the appointment of Medvedev was not a surprise. He analyzes a video Putin’s Secret shown by Russian internet video site Russia.ru

Unfortunately WordPress does not allow to embed videos from Russian sites however you can watch the video here.

The movie that was created by the prominent Russian director Aleksey Vishnya shows video fragments from parliament’s sessions of different times and individual footage of Putin. Graphically enhanced and well edited the video does not lack humor, which is aimed particularly at the younger audience. At the very end of the video there is a sentence in Russian: “Вперед МЕДВЕД”. Translated to English it says: Go Medved.

There is a very interesting play of words that is understandable only to young Russian viewers. Several years ago Russian online community on LiveJournal picked up and gave a whole new interpretation to John Lurie’s painting “Bear Surprise” and adopted a Russian version of it “Preved Medved”, which means “Hi Bear” in broken Russian. The phrase quickly spread through Russian internet nd gave birth to a new form of slang that is used in blogs and online conversations. Also the image of the bear became extremely popular. Below is the image of Medved shouting: “Hi!”

The video plays on the name of the bear Medved, which as I mentioned above means “bear” in broken Russian, and the last name of the future Russian president Dmitri Medvedev. Do you notice the root? Medved – Medvedev!

The author of the video jokingly claims that bear’s popularity was secretly cultivated in the minds of young Russians by Vladimir Putin in order to give more votes to Dmitri Mededev long before he was pronounced Putin’s successor.

The movie is professionally made and is very attractive to young Russians. Good use of multimedia and internet resources!

If you want to see the original John Lurie’s painting look for “Bear Surprise”in Google. However, the painting contains nudity and might offend some people so be careful!

Students working on research papers, journalists writing articles, filmmakers editing trailers and many other people felt this urge to quit working on the task, simply because creativity left them for the day.

Mozilla Firefox developed an add-on specifically for this kind of situations.   StumbleUpon is a great source of creativity on the internet.  This add-on suggests web sites, videos and photos based on user’s preferences. Moreover it is very important that StumbleUpon does not direct one to a random website that is going to populate computer with viruses. The program lets people go through pages that have been stumbled upon by other users.  People get to choose if specific website is worth going to and vote for or against it. This is a technique that is in a way similar to Amazon, which is famous for suggesting additional items.

A point against it is that oine needs to install an additional tool bar into the browser and not many people like it.

With several quick clicks I was able to find great web sites that were not showing up in any of the main search engines.

Try it!

Today music is highly available to everyone. People have radios, stereo systems, boom boxes, portable MP3 players and other kinds of electronic devices that can play music. However not all the time one can listen to a particular style of music. It is hard to carry all those CDs everywhere or transfer electronic music libraries from one place to another.

A group of musicians and music loving technicians resolved this problem in the year of 2000. They assembled hundreds of musical attributes or “genes” as they called it into what became known as a Music Genome Project. It was the biggest attempt to analyze music ever taken.

Pandora is an internet radio that hosts the Music Genome Project and it is unique in many ways. The most important thing is that Pandora is a music station with no annoying DJs and advertisement. Moreover every single user chooses the content of the radio. After registering on the web site users choose the content by telling Pandora what artists or even songs they want to listen and the automated system creates  play lists.

An important thing to note is that Pandora claims to be the internet radio that increases users musical experiences. And it is true. Even though as mentioned above users choose artists and songs they want to listen, Pandora will  look up the “genes” of the artists and songs in the Music Genome Project and will include artists with similar musical attributes into the play list.

I found many new artists that I want to listen to on a daily basis, since Pandora also gives a detailed information on every single song.

Enjoy!

Cooliris developed a very interesting application called PicLens. This add-on transforms the browser into a 3D platform for viewing images on the web. By pressing a small button on the screen user will turn the current web page into a wall of images that the he or she can drag, click and zoom through the pictures.

Of course the application requires decent internet speed and works only with web sites that support RSS feed. PicLens currently works with Flickr, DevianArt, Photobucket, Facebook, MySpace, Google Images, Yahoo Images and others.

For more information visit PicLens website

However since I am in Alaska right now, it is important to mention northern lights, or aurora as it is known here. Many tourists visit Alaska each year hoping to see this miraculous play of light in the frozen sky. Unfortunately aurora does not appear everyday and it is easy to miss it.

Auroras depend on Sun activity. Explosions on the sun create solar win that is traveling through the Universe. Solar wind that consists of charged particles, mostly electrons , reaches the Earth and collides with atoms and molecules in the upper parts of the atmosphere creating auroras.

However scientists learned to predict auroras and even measure their activity. In the web one can find many helpful websites that talk about northern lights and show current activity. Below are several helpful links to different sites that offer this kind of service:

UAF Geophysical Institute Magnetometer Chain (If searching for the aurora in the Fairbanks area look for the Fort Yukon chart in the link)

UAF Geophysical Institute Aurora Forecast

Aurora forecast for the Yukon region

Space weather – a very good recourse for aurora.

If one had experienced the same sorts of problems, the person can understand the excitement over the new Microsoft invention. In May 2007, Microsoft announced table top computers. The interesting thing about this that the new machine, according to MSNBC.com, is “a coffee-table shaped computer that responds to touch and to special bar codes attached to everyday objects.”

All one needs to do is to wash hands before playing with the computer, no mouse or a touch pad required!

Look, son – the father points at the artist – this guy really needs to buy a Polaroid!

Nowadays one does not need to learn to draw or paint in order to preserve wonderful images. People do not even need to learn anything about things as Exposure, Shutter Speed, Depth of the Field. The electronics inside modern digital cameras does all the calculations for humans. The only thing left to do is point and shoot, unless one wants to become a professional photographer and simply has to learn all the technical details.

One of the interesting things I noticed is that majority people believes that the possession of a professional digital camera can drastically improve their picture taking skills. For some people that might be true, however professionals suggest to start taking pictures with basic cameras and eventually move up.

Here is a very helpful site for those who interested in digital cameras and wants to find something special:

www.dpreview.com – a very good technical website comparing and contrasting different types of cameras by brand names.