The people of Blikkiesdorp

Posted by Celia Walter | 25 Jul, 2011

For at least 3 years now South African photographer Lizane Louw have chronicled the lives of the people of Blikkiesdorp (translation: Tin Town), a temporary relocation camp in Delft–not to be confused with the Dutch town and one of the poorest townships in Cape Town, located about 30 km from the city center.

Life there consists of daily humiliation for the camp’s residents who face no, or little, protection from violent crimes, rape and robberies. (Some residents, though, have organized themselves.) For city officials, run by the Democratic Alliance, the camp is at once a temporary and permanent solution to housing problems. Lizanne speaks of  the city planning to erect another 200 structures in Blikkiesdorp.

Lizanne decided first photographed residents of Blikkiesdorp 2 years ago. In February this year she wanted to publish some of the pictures, including one of a 92 year old grandmother, Ouma Magdalena. When she went back to ask Ouma Magdalena for permission to publish the image, she found the old woman had passed away. She had TB. “Ouma is a big inspiration for this project that I am currently doing. I would like to use her story to make a change in this community. I don’t think it is ethically and morally acceptable that people that are poor must live in such challenging and substandard living conditions. Something needs to be done and we need to seriously reflect on ourselves as a society, when these things happen in your backyard without us attempting to do anything about it.”

All the photos are available on the project’s Facebook page...

From: Africa is a country blog

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LIFE Launches Its Own Photo Archive

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Apr, 2009

LIFE.com launched early last week, a joint venture between Time Inc and Getty Images. At launch the site had over seven million images available from the LIFE and Getty Images archives, with the plan to add about 3,000 new photos a day. It’s in beta, and if you hadn’t guessed yet the URL of the site is http://www.life.com.

The front page of the site has a search box and basic categories to browse but also a variety of features including notes about this day in history, a guest editor, a list of the most popular photo sets, and a set of editor’s picks.

It’s a bit chilly here this morning so to reassure myself that spring was really underway, I did a search for cherry blossoms (the festival is going on right now in Washington DC.) I got two sets of results, one for photos in general (289) and another for purchasable photos (16.) A nav on the left lets you narrow down by time, location, and ostensibly by person pictured; however if in this case you choose George Washington, you don’t get a picture of George Washington. You get a picture of the George Washington monument. (In some search results there are also links to sets of images; do a search for tropical as an example.)

Search results include a thumbnail and a brief caption; click on either and you’ll get a somewhat larger picture and a sometimes extended caption. You can rate the pictures, link to them, or share them across a variety of social networks, but I was a little surprised there wasn’t more information on the photos themselves.

You’ll note that in this result there are photos and then there are purchasable photos — when I looked at these they tended to be in black and white, were somewhat older, and had better captions. (But there’s nothing wrong with your monitor — that picture with the horse doesn’t appear to be complete.) Beyond that when I picked a picture I liked (”Sogho festival”) I found out that the “Purchase” button took me to QOOP, where I was invited to buy a framed version of said photo for $99.99. Gah.

I like the size of this archive, and I like the fact that there’s a commitment to add so many photos to it. But it feels a bit scarce on photo information. The news release for the photos mentioned that there will be more features coming soon; maybe I’ll like it better after those launch.

From The ResearchBuzz

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LIFE magazine photo archive

Posted by Celia Walter | 4 Dec, 2008
Life Photo Archive
"Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google." Searchable by keyword, or browse by decade (1860s to 1970s) or featured people, places, events, sports, and culture. From Google.
URL: http://images.google.com/hosted/life
LII Item: http://lii.org/cs/lii/view/item/27240

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Paint.NET 3.2

Posted by Celia Walter | 21 Jan, 2008
Paint.NET 3.2

http://www.getpaint.net/

If you have left over holiday photos that need editing and a bit of retouching, you may want to consider looking over the latest version of Paint.NET. This open source photo editing program comes with support for layers, special effects and essential tools that include a cropping feature and a resizing option. This version is compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer. [KMG]
From The Scout Report 

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Online Photo Sharing in Plain English

Posted by Celia Walter | 15 Jan, 2008

Online Photo Sharing in Plain English January 9th, 2008. From iLibrarian Blog

Common Craft has produced a new video, Online Photo Sharing in Plain English which explains new photo-sharing websites in simple, straightforward terms. For more explanatory videos from their “In Plain English” series, see the Common Craft Show.

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