Moving Stationery

The Lytro advertises itself as the first true breakthrough in photography since the invention of photography. They have a point.

It’s a camera that allows you to change where the focus is after the photo has been taken. You can literally shift the focus from near to far, in a computer program.

However, it has its drawbacks. This is one of the first reviews of the finished product.

Food tragics are often more lost than the rest of us in foreign places. Serious Eats recounts Singapore-resident Anthony Bourdain’s tried-and-true technique for finding good eateries.

Everyone has their own method. I usually take to our own Talk boards, my Twitter account, or my Facebook account, appealing to the community to lead me right. It’s worked pretty well thus far.

Bourdain’s slightly more rascally approach? Invoke “nerd fury.” Hit up any message board with an active international or travel community, and rather than simply asking them for advice, outright lie to them.

Get online and write something along the lines of, “hey guys, I just had the absolute best chicken rice at [restaurant x] in Singapore, no questions asked, hands down, everything else pales in comparison,” then sit back and enjoy the show as the internet foodie elite each jump into the fray to defend their own picks to the death. You’ll get a much bigger response, more passionate praise, and it’ll probably end up being a little fun to boot.

Seems applicable to everything, really. Buying a camera? Go to a photography board. Tell ‘em “Guys I just bought a Canon 1000D*. It’s ace. You guys can stick your fancy full-frames up your ass.”

Boom. You’ll know what’s good about Nikon, you’ll know the advantages of DSLRs versus interchangeable compacts, you’ll know the qualities of full-frame versus crop sensor. You’ll learn everything you need to and quite a bit you don’t.

(*I’ve been using my 1000D for a year now, so no hatin’.)

Lenin is said to have sneered that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him. The quote may be spurious, but it contains a grain of truth. Capitalists quite often invent the technology that destroys their own business.

Eastman Kodak is a picture-perfect example. It built one of the first digital cameras in 1975. That technology, followed by the development of smartphones that double as cameras, has battered Kodak’s old film- and camera-making business almost to death.

Kodak is tumbling. It’s done a shoddy job of transitioning into the digital market and boy, is it suffering for it. Its profit of $2.5 billion just 12 years ago is now a loss of $225 million; its workforce has shrunk from 145,000 worldwide to less than 15,000.

But on the other hand, Fujifilm — a long-time rival that made a business being a slightly crappier, slightly cheaper clone of Kodak — has boomed. 

Both companies saw the change to digital coming from 40 years off. So what went wrong? Why has Kodak failed so badly?

Sue Bryce converts normal-looking women (of any age and level of attractiveness) into supermodels and celebrities.

A good deal of it is the right sort of lighting and the right post-processing. Essentially, she cheats. But you can’t deny the results are stunning.

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