This Summer has brought me many unexpected opportunities and I have not been writing in this space as often as I wanted. Just like it is not really possible to catch up on sleep, I will not be able to really catch up on blogging but the entry below was worth sharing.

During the last two weeks of June I lead a small class for teens on digital photography for The Mainline Art Center in Haverford. The Art Center runs Summer programs aimed at different ages with classes targeting a specific medium and they were looking for someone to teach digital photography for their first Teen Studio session for this Summer.

The first session started on June 20 and unfortunately some of the local schools had not yet let out for the Summer. Because we had a smaller class I was able to spend more time individually with each of the students and our group got close and had a lot of fun.

Check out the class’ Flickr Group.

Digital Photography Class Portrait

This was their first photography class so we concentrated on having fun finding interesting photographs and using photoshop to manipulate the images afterwards in the computer.

Manipulated Photograph of Traffic Cones

Aged Photograph Effect - Shot with Nexus One Android Phone

The saying goes “the best camera is the one you have with you.” I showed the class many images I had made using my cellphone. I wanted them to see that good photographs are not made by the camera, they are made by the photographer.

Opposites

I shot all the assignments along with the class. It was a lot of fun to allow myself to play with my compact digital camera without over-thinking technique or gear.

Looks Like: A Sugar Wafer!

Photographic Scavenger Hunt: ____ Flies

Geometric Shapes

Sometimes we can drown in the deep end of the technical pool of photography. I hope my students had as much fun as I did, and that they never forget the joy of making images.

There will be another session of Digital Photography for The Mainline Art Center’s Teen Studio. It starts August 1st and it will be taught by Ed Marco.

Even Apple’s own shroud of secrecy was officially lifted and they have officially announced that iCloud WILL be announced tomorrow. Perhaps they’re beginning to realize that total secrecy is impossible?

iCloud has been anticipated for a long time, and most of the details seem to be already known (even the pricing, which seems to be possibly set to $25 a year). Amazon and Google have both already launched their cloud music services. Google is of course calling their’s a Beta, but we all know that to Google every service has the potential to be in Beta for years.

Google Music Player on a Nexus One

Google has been obviously anticipating Apple’s announcement as well. During last week I received my email invitation to join the Google Music Beta, which will be free for however long the Beta period turns out to be. After downloading the small required app on my mac, it started to pump my iTunes library up to Google’s massive servers.

Browsing Albums on Google Music

Well, 2/3rds of my iTunes Library. I have been using the iTumes Music Store from launch and none of the tracks I purchased at the beginning are compatible with Google Music. Newer tracks are fine, and I suspect that if I had paid Apple for the premium to upgrade my older track to DRM free when things transitioned some time ago that all my content would be compatible today.

Google Music on Safari

I’ve been exclusively using ipods since the first generation 5GB device and DRM never got in my way until this week. All of a sudden I find myself with a fairly good cloud service running on my Android phone that can only see 2/3rds of my music and wondering if Apple’s service is much of an alternative considering that I would have to move using an iPhone to take full advantage of that option. Going to an iPhone isn’t even really an option for me since I am still enjoying TMobile’s amazing data plan prices.

Amidst all this pre-WWDC media frenzy, I noticed a very interesting video clip. MacRumors posted a short piece this morning about what the potential new functionality of TimeCapsules will mean to Apple’s Cloud service. The small network appliances might actually end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting for Apple’s iCloud synching.

Interesting enough, but at the end of the post is a video that was even more interesting to me.

As noted by MyService, Apple’s idea of a local cloud network dates back twenty years, with Steve Jobs having detailed some of the advantages of such a setup during a Q&A session at WWDC in 1997. (Discussion begins at around 13:10 mark.)

The video is Steve Jobs from the 1997 WWDC Q&A answering questions from the developers (something that has completely disappeared from his keynote). It is interesting to see him describe the basic idea for iCloud at such an early date, but if you hang around past that question there is a few more interesting bits.

• Jobs is asked if Apple could ever compete against the giants that were Microsoft and Intel at the time (Apple is now worth more than Microsoft AND Intel COMBINED)
• Steve had a T1 connection at home — suitably impressive
• Steve is pitching the concept that small developers should embrace Apple tools to easily develop apps. This low cost to market and exposure to a loyal audience could make small developers a very good living. — Hello iOS and Mac App Stores.
• Steve says that Apple should license everything, but a get a fair price from the mac clone makers. — Too bad that he would make the decision to end the clone program the very next year.

Gnocchi

A bit more than a week ago, with the 29th of May looming ahead in the calendar, I had absolutely nutty idea that I should make gnocchi and observe a tradition from my childhood in Argentina: eating gnocchi on the 29th of the month.

Depending on who you ask, the tradition either stems from stretching grocery money as far as possible the day before payday or from an even older Italian tradition having to do with a saint. The way I remember it, you eat gnocchi on the 29th, put money under your dish, and prosperity will come to you. I am not much for superstition, but the tradition is a good excuse for spending a few hours cooking with family and then enjoying the fruits of your labor together.

So, how about making this an ongoing tradition? I think I might do this again next month. All it really requires is a few hours and a handful of cheap ingredients. I looked through a few of my cookbooks and found most recipes call for eggs. My copy of the CIA cookbook (Culinary Institute of America, not the intelligence agency) had an even sillier recipe that called for eggs, extra egg yolks, nutmeg, etc. My attitude is to keep things simple and basic. The most basic recipe is below:

Gnocchi Recipe

makes enough for 4

• 1lb russet potatoes
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup of all purpose flour

I did say keep it simple, but ideally you need one semi special tool: a potato ricer. A sort of overgrown garlic press that mashes potatoes a nice even soft texture that will make for nicer dough.

Potato Ricer

Boil your pealed potatoes until they are just tender, pass them through the ricer while they are still hot (if you let them cool you will have a heck of a time doing this, as they’ll get harder).

Riced Potatoes

Go ahead and pour out your mound of (now warm) riced potatoes onto your clean kitchen table. Knead the salt and the flour into the potatoes. More or less flour might be needed depending on the moisture of the potatoes, add the flour in slowly until the dough no longer sticks to your hands.

Cutting the gnocchi

Take a little bit of dough and roll it into a snake shape and then cut it into pieces about an inch long. A little bit of flour can be used to keep it from sticking to your hand, table, knife, etc.

Rolling the gnocchi

Now take the small pieces of dough and roll them with your thumb against a fork. This will give the gnocchi a curved, shell shape and a ridge decoration on the outside. Flour helps here also to keep the dough from sticking. I used a wooden tool that I believe is actually meant for grating ginger, but worked for my purposes really well.

Lay out your gnocchi on a clean towel directly on your table or on a cookie sheet. It helps to enlist help for the cutting and rolling steps, this is where most of the preparation time goes.

Drop the gnocchi into salted boiling water. When the pasta rises to the top the gnocchi are fully cooked. Scoop them up with a slotted spoon and into your favorite serving dish, add the sauce of your choice, toss together, and enjoy.

Oh. . . and don’t forget to put some money under your dish!

Gnocchi in Rosa Sauce

Some things about the city I identified and missed immediately. Not the least of which being able to run out at almost any hour of any day and find a shop open that sold that one thing I needed. Where I live now, if you find yourself needing anything you can not buy at a grocery store on a Sunday after 9PM. . . you will wait until Monday morning to get it. The biggest bonus of living and working in the city by far was being in walking distance and of and having the ability to stop at Reading Terminal Market on the way home from work and buy any type of meat, fix, produce, cheese, charcuterie, etc.

I was recently in the city to hear a talk at University of the Arts and found myself actually thankful that I had mistakenly parked at a garage farther away than I should have. The night had already mellowed the city’s heat, and the electric light had transformed daylight spaces to romantic nighttime ones.

I was annoyed that I opted to leave my camera kit at home in the interest of convenience. The best camera is the one you have with you, and suddenly my terribly deficient cellphone camera got an undeserved promotion.

I had accidentally stumbled over another thing about the city that I had forgotten I missed: the random little oddities.

Detail of Robot at Broad and Spruce

Just outside the Kimmel Center, looking up at me from the asphalt was a small (about a foot tall) figure of a robot .

Robot at Broad and Spruce

Suddenly a memory of the Toynbee Plaques rushed into my mind. How could I have ever forgotten those quirky, and mysterious artifacts?

The Toynbee Plaques (or Toynbee Tiles if you prefer) sprang up in the 1980s in numerous US cities and some South American ones (including Buenos Aires coincidentally) and cryptically denounced some possible shadowy governmental conspiracy. Whatever they were really meant to be, they were fascinating. By the time I became aware of them, most of the ones still left in Philadelphia were either wearing away or had been paved over. I was able to photograph a couple of them.

Detail of Toynbee plaque on the West side of City Hall, Philadelphia, PA

Toynbee plaque on the West side of City Hall, Philadelphia, PA

Detail of Toynbee plaque near Love Park, Philadelphia, PA

Toynbee plaque near Love Park, Philadelphia, PA

Is Mr Robot a Toynbee Plaque copycat, a tribute, totally unrelated? Either way, I hope I see more of him.

The basic idea is that it is a landing page for everything about yourself. With the service it is possible to set up a single page site that can link to all the feeds and pages about you.

Anyway, I recently set up Inwardlens.com for myself using Flavors.me. This blog’s feed, as well as my Flickr and Twitter feeds are accessible there.

Inwardlens.com on iPad

I have several entries half cooked up in my head where they don’t do anyone a lick of good. I promise to sent them down in the coming weeks.

In the meantime I might as well link to a blog entry about creating and following a routine for getting content out in a constant basis. A few days ago I discovered the blog of a certain Paul Ford, FTrain.com; he recently had a short entry about the self-prescribed regimen he set for himself so he can create content for his blog in a regular basis. It is also very obviously a window into a day when the entry must have been hard coming.

1. Portraits
2. Environmental Portraits
3. Digital Photo Illustrations

It was taken as a given that Apple would be showing off their next phone and the accompanying software upgrade at their developer’s conference this June. Those announcements have been coming at predictable intervals, which is remarkable for a company that seems to value secrecy more than the KGB. Ars Technica reports the schedule for previous years as follows:

Also at WWDC, Apple would announce the new version of the iPhone hardware—iPhone 3G in 2008, iPhone 3GS in 2009, and iPhone 4 in 2010. The new hardware typically came with the newest iOS and usually shipped within a month of the announcement. Previous iPhone (and iPod touch) users have been able to download the update about the same time as the new iPhone hardware shipped.
WWDC 2011 may be all software, signaling change in iPhone strategy – Ars Technica

Apple has yet to be able to deliver the white version of the iPhone4 they promised when the standard, black phone was announced last year. (Now they are semi-officially promising it by the Spring) Perhaps Apple recognizes how embarrassing it would be to release iPhone5 before they have worked out the manufacturing kinks of producing a white version for the previous model?

A larger business issue I think is that the ink has not yet dried on all the new iPhone4 contracts on Verizon. The backlash from that customer base would be pretty severe. To wait all these years to be able to have an iPhone without an AT&T contract only to come to the product less than six months before the end of its life? Apple depends on their customers feverishly upgrading their devices every time there is a bump up in features or spec, but that might be too much to ask in this case.

Also, as the Ars Technica article mentions, Apple may just want to delay things so that they can get all the idevices on the same software upgrade cycle. IPad users had to wait for iOS 4.2 to be able to get in the door for the fast-app-switching party (don’t call it multitasking).

I have managed to control my own upgrade fever re:iPad2. All that I needed was a short cool off period without where I promised myself not to use my credit card for any large, unplanned purchases. I can make it another year without a new iPad, the world might managed a bit longer without the new iPhone.

Now that the thesis has been identified, it is time for the antithesis. Ads without retouching, that want you to know they haven’t been retouched.

Sephora's Unretouched Advertising

Sephora claims to be the first to go to print without the aid of photoshop, but not so many years ago Dove ran a campaign that drew attention to how beauty is manufactured. The television ad drew a lot of attention, it was well made and made its point loudly.

The Dove ad can be seen on YouTube.

One thing that keeps drawing my attention on the Sephora ad: she is holding the camera upside down. Funny, I am not bothered by the lack of retouching, I am not bothered by the shape of her locked elbow. But that camera. . .

Thanks to Greg for drawing my attention to the Sephora ad.

White fence in Valley Forge Park

The light and foliage has changed little in the lat week, but the warmer temperature was far more welcoming.

Wooden fence in Valley Forge Park

For these images I chose to concentrate on the fences themselves as barriers. The landscape beyond the fence is allowed to fall out of focus.

"Valley Forge" fence in Valley Forge Park