Rip Off the Filters – We Need a Naked Instagram. @Wired Opinion

...we’re suffering from filter fatigue. The adjustments have become rote. Our eyes and brains no longer get that neural tingle when they see “Earlybird.” It’s the “naked” photos that stand out in a filter-happy environment. Just because we can make anything look arty doesn’t mean everything is art, or even interesting.

When everything is filtered, the absence of a filter is what becomes interesting.

This democratization of photography has, predictably, also lowered the taste floor for the medium, and it’s now time to grow upward instead of outward. It’s time for everyone who has caught the bug and made it over the initial photography hump to start thinking about what they’re photographing … and why.

It’s time to raise our standards and re-introduce risk into photography, so that taking good photos feels like an achievement instead of a built-in feature. Let’s take all the fledgling photographers created by apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic, and others and lead them to the next frontier.

Read on here.....http://wtr.mn/QX0txR

Kickstarter and the lost art of letter writing

When was the last time you opened your mail box to find something that was truly hand written? In a day that finds my daily mail full of catalogs that I don't want, monthly statements that I don't read, and that God-awful transpromo personalized drivel, seeing pen-on-envelope is an immediate pleasure.  So I was really intrigued when I saw a Kickstarter project that would deliver the lost art of letter writing--for a small fee.

The project is called "Letters from to you from me: entertaining, handwritten, unique" and is the brainchild of Bay Area reader, writer, and tech veteran Laura Zander, founder of subMissionSF.

Laura, who has been writing "what have been dubbed by others as 'hilarious and entertaining' letters for a long time", spends the day as member of Blurb where she can get her ink-on-paper fix with regularity.  But while many of us still interact and prefer physical books to digital versions, a personal letter is something that has become so rare that her project is something really valuable to get behind.

Laura says this is "part art project and part forced writing exercise". For $20 you can get "a single guffaw" all the way up to a full subscription in book form with all of the letters created for the project for $300.  I can't wait for my first installment and when Zander gets her first bestseller I'll have a real, physical artifact to prove I knew her when.

How Ebooks Shapes Publishing (INFOGRAPHIC). From @HuffPostBooks

Aptaracorp has released its annual survey of ebook production trends, and to mark the event (and to get more publicity) they've come up with a dramatic infographic summarizing how the industry is increasingly turning to ebooks as part of its inventory.

One of the more dramatic statistics states that 31% of ebook publishers produce enhanced ebooks, though only 12% correlate the enhancements with a positive impact on sales. The market for more than simple text remains uncertain.

See below for the graphic, which was created in association with Publishers Weekly.

Barnes & Noble, Microsoft Close Deal, Unveil Nook Media. From @PCMag

Barnes & Noble and Microsoft are now officially partners; the two firms closed a deal first announced in April and announced that their newly formed venture will be known as Nook Media.
Nook Media includes Barnes & Noble's digital and college businesses and a $300 million investment from Microsoft.

"As demand for digital content continues to increase, we are focused on bringing ground-breaking reading and learning content and technologies to more people in more formats than ever before, including the imminent launch of our exceptional Nook reading application for Windows 8," William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble, said in a statement. "We look forward to working closely with our new partner Microsoft to add value to their innovative new platform by bringing great reading experiences and one of the world's preeminent digital bookstores to millions of Windows 8 users."

Read on here....http://wtr.mn/R3j3TJ

Lifeless e-books no replacement for paper and ink. From @TheLamron.

"Let’s be clear that arguing about e-readers versus paper books is not vainglorious quibbling on the part of affected intellectuals or the crotchety pedantry on the part of neo-Luddites.."

With a sentence like that you want to read on, right? Do so here....http://wtr.mn/QUKDW9

Photography Pros Review the iPhone 5's Camera. From @MacRumors

Photography site dpreview.com has published a lengthy review of the iPhone 5's camera. Last year, famed photographer Annie Leibovitz called the iPhone "the snapshot camera of today", and the iPhone has been the most popular camera on Flickr for years.

The full review is worth a read, but this excerpt looks at interesting questions about the future of casual photography and how the simple "camera phone" has revolutionized both the mobile phone and camera industries.

This is great news for people like us who write about digital photography, because it signals a paradigm shift. This doesn't happen often, and it's very exciting when it does. Already, we're seeing mainstream camera manufacturers scrabbling to add connectivity to their products, and it's not just desperation that's making them do it. If the iPhone, and devices like it, have had a transformative effect on the industry it's because they've had a transformative effect on peoples' expectations of cameras, and photography. And the industry is doing what it always does - moving to fulfill a need.

The iPhone 5 is a fine mobile device, with an excellent camera. In qualititative terms it's not the best camera out there, and nor is it the best camera on a smartphone (the Nokia 808 has that honor, for now) but it offers satisfying image quality, some neat functions like auto panorama and HDR mode, and - crucially - it is supremely easy to use. It isn't much better than the iPhone 4S, as far as its photographic performance is concerned, but it isn't any worse (notwithstanding a somewhat more noticeable propensity towards lens flare). When manufacturers employ pixel-binning to achieve higher ISO settings we don't normally celebrate the fact, but in the case of the iPhone 5, it gives you greater flexibility in poor light (i.e., you might actually get a picture now, where you just wouldn't with the iPhone 4S) and the drop in quality is unnoticeable when the images are used for sharing/web display.

Blurb: Make money from your blog by turning it into an eBook. From @pocketlint

Bloggers, amateur photographers and would-be storytellers are being given the opportunity to correlate their work into interactive eBooks available on the iOS platform. What's more, they might be able to make money from their endeavours.

Blurb, a San Francisco-based creative publishing and marketing platform, has introduced the new eBook capabilities which it hopes will enable users to get their work seen by a bigger audience as well as earning a few bucks in the process.


Pocket-lint sat down for a chat with Eileen Gittins, CEO and Founder of Blurb.

“It’s a new outlet for bloggers,” enthuses Gittins. “If you want to make a book, you should be able to make a book, in whatever medium is appropriate to your audience. Blurb makes that possible”.

Read on here....http://wtr.mn/SY1Vn4