photography

theguardian.com theguardian.com
image from theguardian.com
Some amazing architecture and portrait photography of NYC in the 60's and 70's. [via Tecznts] There are a few more photographs by Hofer at Galerie m Bochum.
The Atlantic The Atlantic
image from The Atlantic
Alan Taylor at In Focus (no relation) focuses on photographs taken in and around libraries.

Resizing Images with Node.js

My fun with Node.js continues. Yesterday I put together a script to resize jpegs on-the-fly: imageSize.

As part of my c2bk program I've been revisiting this site and cleaning up pieces that have broken over the years. One of those pieces is a few dozen galleries of photos I posted here between 1999-2005. Before photo-sharing sites existed you had to do it yourself. The photos are small and not very good, but they are part of my history.

I added thumbnails for each gallery to my archive page. The images are small, but they're not thumbnail-sized which made that archive page inefficient to load. Picking those images out one by one and creating thumbnails seemed like a hassle. Even writing a script to do it seemed like it wasn't worth the time involved.

Then I thought, what if I could just specify the image size in the URL and have them automatically be the correct size? That sounded like a job for node.js and CloudFront. Resizing the image was quick work with sharp. It took a bit to get the URL path-parsing working correctly and to add some caching headers to the response, but then it was all set.

By putting this behind CloudFront, the images are generated on-demand when needed but should be served from Amazon's servers most of the time. Might be overkill for some thumbnails on my archive page, but it's a handy thing to have in my toolbox for future blog/photography experimentation.

False Depth, JavaScript, and Surrealism

I didn't want an iPhone 7. I mean, I don't want one. The improvements are incremental at best. And that fake depth of field!? That's gimmicky, right? You can't simulate beautiful bokeh. You need heavy glass. Then I read this take: iPhone 7 Plus Depth Effect is Legit. Hmph.

Ah, front end JavaScript frameworks. Let your heart soar as you read how they've been rated in The State of JavaScript 2016. Then cry tears of knowing sorrow as you read How it feels to learn Javascript in 2016.

Speaking of surrealism, Salvador Dalí keeps appearing in my news. Taschen is republishing Dalí's 1973 cookbook. A cookbook? What's next? Finding out he had a long lost collaboration with Walt Disney at some point in 1945? And that it has been reconstructed for viewing on our personal screens? Yes:

And and?! He illustrated a version of Alice in Wonderland? Yes. Or is it all Mirage?

What dark magic is this? Manual for iOS 10 just added the ability to shoot RAW photos.
  • A certain minimalist/latte art/feet/egg/volkswagen/ice cream cone/wood/American flag aesthetic appears on Instagram and somehow a Portland lifestyle magazine called Kinfolk is the unifying force? This is just weirdly fascinating to me.
  • oooh, neat. William Wilkinson (who takes great photos) made an iPhone App for taking great photos.
  • Wired's take on the best gadgets. Just in time for gadget season.
  • Application recommendations for iOS and OSX. Just in time for app season.
  • Beautiful giant photo essays. Like Medium for pictures.
  • Free service that creates full-page photo galleries and deletes it after 14 days on inactivity.
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