Categories
Photography

More on purist/straight photography

In an uncanny bit of serendipity, I was out looking for baby squirrel images (now why is she looking for images of baby squirrels, her reader’s ask), when I found before and after images of a baby squirrel that shows how Photoshop can be used to salvage a photo.

The before photo isn’t all that great – the background is noisy, the image is muddy, and you can barely see the baby squirrel.

But look at the after photo. Now, if that doesn’t have you going ‘ahhh’, then you don’t like baby squirrels. (Hush, qB–focus on fish.)

How far is too far in Photoshop? And do we think less of a photo that has been repaired or enhanced by Photoshop, than a photo that’s ’straight from the camera’?

Categories
Weblogging

TypeKey: The Patriot Act of Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart has posted a page describing their TypeKey installation, and it is a centralized authentication system. Only one word can describe this design idea: bad.

With a centralized authentication system for comments, a person can be tracked by their comments wherever they go, even if they don’t want to be so tracked. Six Apart says they would never share this information with anyone. I don’t care – the potential for abuse is there.

Now, just imagine someone cracking into the TypeKey system – what kind of information about you can be found? What kind of havoc can occur when comments are managed in such a centralized way? Especially when this system transcends weblogging tools?

From a performance standpoint, how many times do you get a failure when you ping weblogs.com or blo.gs or even movabletype.org? Blogspot or TypePad users, have any problems accessing your service? Have you all tried to ping two Trackback-enabled TypePad weblog posts with the same entry, and found it has failed? How about you folks that link to Amazon or Google or Sitemeter or blogrolling.com on your pages – ever notice how slow your page loads?

All of these are dependent on centralized systems, and as we have found in every single instance of centralization and weblogs, they don’t scale. Every single instance.

Now imagine trying to comment at someone’s page, and you can’t because TypeKey is currently overloaded. What is the reason for having your own weblog installation if you clutter it up with all these centralized bits?

And who asked for authentication? We asked for better management of comment spam, and a better method to delete comment spam. We were willing to tolerate a comment registration system for this, but no one asked for a centralized authentication system.

No one.

Authentication is not a solution for comment spam – it’s a way of cutting out those individuals who might be more comfortable commenting anonymously, or without attaching a URL or email address. And sometimes it is these people who provide the most honest feedback, even though the feedback may be ‘negative’, disagreeing with what we say.

The page at TypeKey says that the identity can be protected, but what happens if someone complains about a person and their comments – is Ben and Mena going to set up behavior standards for every one to follow with what they write? This is a private service: they can set up any standard they want, and once you’re tied into the service, you’re stuck. What if they define you as an ‘abuser’?

Yo! All you Howard Stern fans! Ding, ding, ding! Ring any bells?

If we’re so afraid of openness, why have comments? Why not just turn comments off? Better yet, put your weblog behind a firewall and only give the key to entry to those friends who have sworn a blood oath with you.

And less we think only Movable Type weblogs or TypePad weblogs will be tied into this vendor controlled solution, think again: Six Apart will be kind enough to provide this for everyone to use with their weblogs, regardless of software. Though the service is free, it does tie the weblogging community tightly into dependency on Six Apart, and this is not a good thing. Want me to enumerate other problems that have occurred because of dependency on a single entity?

Well, I have a hint for you: I will never register with a centralized authentication system. So if you want comments from me, forget it. Know something else? There’s going to be a whole lot of people right there with me.

I’ve been told that, supposedly, civilized people only use positive means to criticize each other. And after all, TypeKey is from Ben and Mena – we all know Ben and Mena. They’re part of us.

Well, sorry, this doesn’t wash anymore. Six Apart is no longer the baby squirrels; it’s a growing VC-funded company that just opened offices in Japan. And there is no ‘positive’ way to say this – TypeKey is a bad idea.

And when I published this, Movable Type gave me the following error:

Ping ‘http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2′ failed: Ping error: Can’t accept the ping because the weblog hasn’t changed.

Update

A second essay on TypeKey can be read here based on newer information. My response to the release of the TypeKey FAQ can be read here.

Categories
Photography

Purist photography

Simon St. Laurent has a new essay online about digital photography compared to film photography, and the discipline to not use Photoshop to enhance our photos. He wrote this in response to Tim Bray’s Photointegrity essay.

Tim writes about the cult of photographic puritanism and minimalism, and taking the …bits the camera gives you and push ’em out on the Web, even though the end result could be less work published online:

If I took that vow there’d be a lot fewer pictures here, but each would, I think, somehow mean more, because you’d know that nobody, however well-intentioned, had pissed in the pipeline from the camera to your screen.

Or is such an ethic inherently foolish given the vast amount of software that runs in the camera when you push the little silver button? Probably; so what I’m going to do is strive to balance Truth and Beauty.

Simon talks about his new digital camera’s effects on his own photographic discipline:

The pictures I’m taking now, even when I’m shooting similar subjects in similar conditions, just aren’t as good. I can feel ten years’ worth of rust that needs removal, but I also feel myself resisting the kind of discipline I used to have. When I can go from original to good enough with a few minutes in Photoshop, it’s tough to convince myself to put in the extra effort when I’m taking the shots.

He also makes the point, though, that professional photographers have rarely been purists, most making use of darkroom tools to enhance their work. Cropping, dodging, and burning have always been key tools on the path from film to print, Simon writes.

I have no hesitation about using Photoshop to ensure that my photos are the best they can be before I publish them online. This is true regardless of whether I take film or digital photos, though my film shots usually require less effort. That’s primarily due to the higher resolution and color saturation I can achieve with my film camera, as compared to my non-SLR digital camera.

To me, creating a photo doesn’t end when I release the shutter; the process continues until the photo is published. This included darkroom techniques, and even the use of photo retouching before digital enhancement; it continues now with tools like Photoshop.

However, you have to have relatively good material to start. For instance. my orchid photos were almost directly published from camera to web, with some minor cropping or sharpening, and some enhanced contrast (my digital camera tends to wash out colors much more than my film). In the case of my window shots posted recently, there’s little I can do with Photoshop to remove the window glare – a polarizing filter attached to the camera would have eliminated this effect, but I didn’t have it with me the day the photos were taken.

And many of my photos are taken to form a story rather than to be accepted as is for themselves. In these cases, I rarely touch the photos, and I don’t expect them to be appreciated separate from the story they’re published in.

In fact, the process to create a photo can occur before the shutter is released. When I’m interested in specific images, I’ll plan a photo or series of photos out long before I grab my camera; sometimes months ahead of time, as with photos I’ll be taking this next week of dogwood trees in bloom along a trail I hiked almost a year ago.

Regardless of camera or medium used, or purpose for photo, until it is published, the act of creating the photo continues: fueled by need and inspiration, with camera in hand, and in front of my computer.

Categories
Specs

Entering our manyth year of syndication discontent

Ben Hammersley has a new article at the Guardian on the syndication format wars, as they enter their too manyth year anniversary.

As he sees it, don’t hold your breath for a united RSS/Atom syndication effort. However, unless you’re specifically coding an application that generates syndication feeds, or consumes them, most people could care less which syndication format is used:

And so, as it stands, the content syndication world has two competing specification “brands”: RSS in its many flavours, and Atom. The Atom project has been very successful, with the two biggest weblogging firms, Blogger (run by Google) and Six Apart (the people behind Movable Type and Typepad) adopting the standard. This produced more than half a million users alone.

This switching effect, where one or two developers can move thousands of users between different specifications, highlights a valid point: for the end users, the argument is close to meaningless. As long as their RSS reader software can read Atom as well, they will never notice the difference – and most of the contemporary RSS readers have been, or are being, upgraded by their authors to support both specifications.

The only quibble I have is that Ben has lumped RSS 1.0 into the ‘RSS’ specifications, and the two really are separate specs, with a shared name. Other than that, I agree with Ben – the end user could care less. The only requests I’ve had in regards to my feeds is the type of material included, such as full content compared to excerpts; and providing more information about the source, such as my name in addition to the weblog’s name.

There! I’ve had my RSS and Atom syndication post for the year. Now that I have that out of the way, I can move on to other things.

Categories
Weblogging

Centralized authentication

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I just got home, and still unpacking. However, I decided to take a quick break and while I was catching up with my weblog reading, I discovered that more information about Movable Type 3.0 has been released, including some info about the comment registration process:

With a suite of comment management features and versatile comment registration–utilizing a centralized authentication service we’re calling TypeKey–Movable Type 3.0 will give you more control than ever before over the public face of your website. We’ve spent a lot of time planning a comment registration system that will fit the needs of different types of webloggers, and we have focused our attention on a system that will encourage registration and open communication.

In addition to providing authentication for comment registration, TypeKey’s open nature will enable developers to build applications upon the infrastructure, utilizing its authentication hooks. Since TypeKey and comment registration are such a significant addition to Movable Type 3.0, we’ll be going into more detail about these features later this week.

Did I read this wrong? I must have read this wrong. I thought it said that Movable Type was creating some form of a centralized authentication system, which was then going to form the basis of the new comment registration system, with built-in authentication hooks ready to be used by other developers.

I must have read this wrong. I can’t believe that Six Apart would centralize authentication–something that’s been fought for years with other like schemes–and then plunk hooks for external access on top of it.

Nah, my eyes must be tired from the trip. Time to finish unpacking.

Weird how your mind can play tricks on you like that.

I was cryptic from being tired when I posted, so I thought I would expound on my earlier writing.

Authentication of commenters, and prevention of automated tools from spamming – that’s two different things.

I don’t care if I know the real identity of people who comment at my site; I just want to keep automated tools from hitting my site, and be able to clean up comments easily for the individual spammers.

One solution is comment registration. Registration will stop automated comment spams – or at least, it should. But that just means that we have more control over who can comment; it doesn’t mean that we have to know a person’s true identity. That’s not a requirement for me.

Personally, I don’t even want registration, if there are good throttles on comments and trackbacks to keep my system from being overloaded. And if there’s a good mechanism to clean up.

Why authentication?

I guess we stay tuned…