A blog about a blog…
Well, the weeks fly by. It’s been approx. 6 of them since I’ve written on this blog and I can’t believe it. Suffice it to say, it’s been a particularly busy time.
My friend Susan Davens sent me a note about LENS, the photographs blog for the NY Times. I know I live on another planet here in Belfast, Maine, but I had never heard of it. I figure that’s what friends are for – to expand my horizons.
Here is the description copied from the LENS web homepage:
“Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web. And it will draw on The Times’s own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century.”
I was pretty impressed when I got on there this morning to find several postings from yesterday – quite a different attitude than my slack approach to this blog lately! But… that’s what journalism is about, these days more than ever – instant news. Instant photographs. It’s terrific. When I read last month that journalists are under tremendous pressure to provide fresh news every four hours to feed an impatient public, I scoffed. Then I realized that I check Google News 3-4 times each day and never read any article that is more than two hours old. I’m a perp.
Read the posting about the hundreds of Polaroid images sent in at the editor’s request, after the recent article in the Times about the Dutch group trying to reproduce polaroid film. The editor was so astounded at the quality of the almost 1000 pictures he rec’d he had to put 406 of them online. There’s a portrait of Walker Evans included, and that’s really good. Evans was a huge fan of Polaroid cameras.
As a highly rewarding “it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep” exercise, click on the “Photos that are worth more than a thousand words” feature and then see the PICTURE PERFECT feature inthe NYT store. Immediately you can start wading through endless iconic images categorized by subject, more or less.
The big question is: How to find time for anything else WITHOUT staying up all night? Well, pick and choose, I guess. LENS is definitely worth bookmarking and checking in on weekly- at least.
