Herzog in Antarctica: An easy place to make a film
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PEGASUS ICE RUNWAY, Antarctica  - Werner Herzog, who has made movies about grizzly bears in Alaska and a downed fighter pilot in Laos, just finished filming in Antarctica and one thing he wants to make clear: it was easy.
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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan. First a little background... My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.  Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.  If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.  This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more. Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.  So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.  So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating. So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens. 1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.) 2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.
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The final countdown: a bumper final edition of Cozzacam.
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These days, anyone with a digital camera and a laptop can make a movie. Which may be why it's harder than ever to actually get that movie seen.
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The collapse of two Antarctic ice shelves is offering scientists a glimpse of rarely seen species&#8212;and at how pristine ocean ecosystems respond to sudden change.&#149; See photos >>
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Scientists find four big lakes under the ice of Antarctica which may help explain how ice flows into the sea.
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Most directors strive  for control. Werner Herzog thrives on chaos.
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âThe Linguists,â a film focused on studying the worldâs vanishing languages,  has its premiere this week at the Sundance Film Festival.
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A pleasant, colorful travelogue directed by the Bhutanese lama Khyentse Norbu.
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Science & environment: If your photos fail to impress a simple online photo-editing program could bring them up to scratch
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For the first time, a drumlin - a mound of sediment and rock - has been observed mid-formation, in Antarctica.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Together with his intrepid film crew, documentary filmmaker Drew Wharton often found himself within feet of enormous bellowing 4,500 pound alpha males clashing mightily over females in estrus. It is A Sealâs Life, after all. The film (which debuted at the Monterey Bay Aquarium) tells the story of the worldâs largest seal speciesâthe northern Elephant Sealâbehemoths that come ashore once a year to give birth, molt, and mate. âApple technology saves me a ton of time and money,â notes Wharton, who edited the film in Final Cut Studio. âOur whole workflow is based on Macs, from field acquisition to post production. A Sealâs Life was made on a Mac from start to finishâfor me, it didnât make sense to do it any other way.â
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PHILADELPHIA _ A submersible, robotic glider that took on the frigid waters of the Antarctic has wowed oceanographers by collecting in 24 days almost as much data as research vessels had gathered in 12 years.
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An interview with the master filmmaker about his new films.
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Bethesda, MD -- March of the Penguins, the OscarÂ® winning documentary, showed how the emperor penguins endure their incubation and fast for four dark and bitterly cold months each year.
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A new research station at the bottom of the world may give future Antarctica researchers some special treats, like the ability to live above ground and look out a window.