NYC photoblogger exhibition

I went and checked out the NYC photoblogger event at the Apple Store in Soho last night. A huge crowd assembled to watch presentations by seven NYC photobloggers. Among the highlights:

- Khoi’s presentation of Infrangible. A man after my own heart, he still hand-codes his site for each entry, nesting tables within tables and thumbing his nose at structured data. Databases are for suckers! He also does not resize large photos (like this one) to fit on the screen all at once, the idea being that the photo won’t have the same impact at 400x600 that it does at 740 x 1113.

- Mike’s photos of abandoned subway stations. I loved hearing Mike’s story: he’s got a cheapo camera and is a self-professed bad photographer, but he loves to shoot, is striving to improve, and, judging from the audience’s delighted reaction to some of his photos, his approach to photography is definitely interesting.

- The topic of retouching photos in Photoshop came up several times. Most of the presenters adjust their photos in Photoshop for brightness, contrast, color correction, etc. Purists would argue that this is cheating. I liken the Photoshop retouching stage of the digital photography process to the darkroom stage in analog photography. Ansel Adams performed extensive manipulations of his photographs in the darkroom and few consider Adams a cheater. Khoi had an interesting comment along those lines, saying that the photo out of the camera has to have “it” regardless of any correction done after the fact in Photoshop. In my experience, good photos can be made great in Photoshop, but no amount of manipulation can turn a poor photo into a good one.

- Adam and Scott’s description of the simplicity of fotolog.net. You upload photos, your friends upload photos, and the interface allows you to quickly jump from the photos of one friend to the next, keeping up with their visual lives. No need to call it social software or justify how useful the social network is. fotolog.net is elegant in its simplicity and it works. End of story.

- A tantalizingly short look at Eliot’s photo management system.

- And across it all, the *barest* of impressions that photologging is an art form unto itself, that it’s not just photography + blogging. I’m not sure yet what makes it a unique thing, but the combination of the relative inexpensiveness of producing digital images in mass quantities (with a digital camera, it costs as much to take and store 1000 photos as it does to take 1 photo) and cheap, easy methods of publishing them to the Web has a lot to do with it.

Most of the crowd stayed the whole two hours…which is amazing. After it was over, some of us moved along to a nearby bar to socialize which, according to Jake’s introduction to the event, was the real reason for the whole thing in the first place. I only stayed for a bit before hunger and tiredness got the best of me, but it was nice to briefly meet and chat with some of the presenters before racing off to dinner.