Uba Kontrovasie

BBC moves to embrace remix culture

I discovered today that the BBC are behind a project called Masher. Masher essentially enables people to splice and mash their own video’s with content from the BBC Motion gallery.

This is the second move the BBC have made to recognise how people want to view and use content.

The launch of the iPlayer was monumental because it enabled people to watch BBC content when and wherever they liked. The BBC recognised that they couldn’t beat pirate culture so instead they launched a service, which enabled people to watch their content on demand at their own pace.

The launch of masher I believe symbolises the BBC’s recognition of remix culture. There are so many people on youtube using illegally ripped video content to make their own remixed and mashed videos, like piracy, remixing is a movement that the BBC or any other broadcaster will not be able to stop. The BBC offering their archive for this project symbolises a degree of acceptance towards the remix movement.

I am sure this will be the first of many UK broadcaster’s stepping up to accept the movement and I hope in time they make the embed codes for the mashed videos available and allow users to download mashed videos and distribute them however they like.

Let’s watch, wait and see what happens next.

Tags: bbc masher, masher, pirate culture, remix culture, Video Content, VJ

Night Photography

Smashing today produced a nice post with 60 examples of really good night time photography, a couple of weeks ago I did a little experiment of my own.

My recent investment, I mean bankruptcy, sorry investment into a new DSLR body has got me experimenting again.

Heres how I took that shot:

- Wide angle lens, set the focus to infinity
- Set white balance to shade
- Aperture f11 or higher (you can play with this, you’re aiming for a fuller focus)
- Balance the shutter speed
- Use a tripod
- Set ISO to 100 (don’t worry…no bluring if you’re using a tripod)

I know the M4 off the Ford Bridge isn’t exactly the highway’s of Tokyo but like I said, just me playing.

Tags: Digital photo, low light photography, night photo

Hieronymus Bosch

The piece above was inspired by his work, and it was compiled with a wait for it…a 3.2ghz quad core intel Power Mac with 32gigs of RAM! Yes that’s 32 large slabs of random accessing.

Reminds me of the beast machines air traffic controllers use, madness!

What’s even more insane is that the artists Simmons and Burke managed to crash their machine several times a day, I mean dudes….come on! Could you have anymore more RAM?

Tech specs aside I love this piece because it’s a digital collage, which epitomises remix culture. If you guys have read The Pirates Dilemma by Matt Mason you’ll know all about Remix culture and its importance.

Truly amazing works and I get lost in them for hours. The collage above is one of four by Simmons and Burke, more about the rest of the exhibition can found on its official website.

Tags: digital collage, Hieronymus Bosch, knight gallery, remix culture, Simmons and Burke

The power of tagging

A seasonal post from me today…

People often ask me why the hell they should bother tagging content? Lot’s of reasons for this and I could sit here and yammer on about tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies etc etc.

Instead of me giving you guys a drawn out explanation I’ll let you do the reading into the theories in your own time, instead I will lend you my real life example of the benefits of tagging in effect.

I’m celebrating Diwali with my family at the moment, Diwali is the festival of light and the celebration of the Hindu new year.

Most of my friends know I love taking pictures or “freezing time” as I call it, anything to sound cool don’t you know :p Anyway Diwali has provided a whole host of Kodak moments and I have been busy snapping away in between meals, eating + snapping! It’s a great way to live, “try it you might like it”.

Yesterday (if I’m not mistaken) I uploaded some photo’s of tea lights on to my flickr account. Tea lights are lit in the morning and in the evening as part of the rituals/celebrations.

I tagged my photos on flickr with a single tag “Diwali”, this was me being lazy as I am appalling at tagging my pics. Today I got an email from a content editor/journo asking if my pics could be used in an article about Diwali along with other pics from around the world.

Naturally I was happy to let them use my snaps and the article can be found here

The website is called Now Public “crowd powered media”, Now Public pulls together public generated content around topics and asks asset owners to add their own commentary.

The comments all work together to form a nice collaborative article, whilst the assets (video & photo) are all mashed together using some kind of ajax thingamabob to form a really slick slide show.

I’m really liking the concept of Now Public, it is a good example of a website that is utilising public collaboration, social media and UGC. Rock on!

Now where did I leave those spring rolls and the rest of those Indian sweets

Tags: collaboration, diwali, flickr, folksonomies, now public, photography, social media, tagging, taxonomies, UGC

35mm over Digital

I recently took pictures at a friends birthday using a 35mm lomo fish-eye camera, it cost about £40 off the lomo website and it gave some quite quirky results.

To be honest it doesn’t manage light very well and some pictures were quite over or under exposed, however the low-light B&W pictures came out reasonably well.

I’d like to test my DSLR in the same condition’s (a dark bar), digtal has never been good in low light conditions therefore I’m keen to see how they match up.

Having always been a fan of the true old skool 35mm film, I’m seriously considering spending a few bob on 35mm SLR body, which my EOS lenses and flash can clip straight into.

Above all else getting back true black and white print photos is like Christmas, beats looking at photos on a screen as you appreciate things like tone and light gradients so much more.

After foolishly selling my 35mm EOS 500n last year I think I’ll have to invest in the EOS 3000V - the next best thing or punt around for a second hand 35mm SLR body.

I promise, promise to get familiar with manual shutter speeds etc first.

Tags: 35mm, Christmas, EOS 3000V, Fish Eye, GBP, Lomo

Street and Studio exhibition

It’s been a while since I picked up my SLR, and put it to worthy use. The Tate Modern has the Street and Studio exhibition on at moment and I cannot wait to go and see it.

I hope it will drum up some inspiration and motivation.

Go go check it out!

Tags: photography, tate modern, urban photography