Sculptures from Meaningful Play
Greetings from the the Meaningful Play conference at MSU. This morning, Leigh Anne Cappello from Hasbro spoke about toy design. Hasbro brought packages of Play Doh for every table, and Leigh encouraged us to make things during the talk. So, I made a Play Doh Sarah Palin. It’s not nearly as nice as the Katamari Prince that my neighbor made… read more
How games can be informal and personal. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
In the late 19th century, photographs were primarily made on huge plate-film cameras with bellows and expensive hand-ground lenses. Their operation was nontrivial, and required professional expertise. The relative youth of photography as a medium made that expertise much more scarce than it is today. All that changed when Kodak introduced the Brownie Camera in 1900. The Brownie was different.… read more
Things people do with videogames
Think of all the things you can do with a photograph. You can document the atrocities of war, as photojournalists sometimes do. You can record fleeting moments in time, as did documentarians like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. You can capture the ordinary moments of family life, as many people do at birthday parties or holidays for an album or… read more
My experience with Make My Own Monster
I received a Make My Own Monster kit for Christmas last year. It’s a service offered by the North American Bear Company, which has the distinction of having the worst shopping site I’ve seen in some time. Anyway, the Make My Own Monster concept is great: kids (of all ages, in my case) draw a monster, send in the drawing,… read more
Photography, Flickr, and Me
As regular readers may have noticed, I have an interest in photography. I’ve started a photography section on this website, where you can view some of the photographs I have taken. Right now I’ve added galleries for Objects, Places, and People, as well as a photo project I’m slowly working on called Street Portraits. Over the last year I’ve gone… read more
Using the collapsible Elmar-M 50mm f/2.8 on the Leica M8
As I’ve discussed before, one of the main ideas behind the 35mm rangefinder camera was its small size and subsequent portability. Since their beginning 80 years ago, Leica cameras have often been coupled to collapsible lenses. The early production Leicas in the 20s and 30s were all designed for a lens that collapsed into the body of the device, making… read more
The vices and virtues of selective color shift at high ISO in the Sigma DP1
One of the problems with digital SLRs is their large footprint. Not only the size and weight of the camera, but also that of the lens attached to it, especially for serious photographers interested in large apertures and high-quality glass. This is an issue that affects professionals and amateurs alike, since both groups might want to have a smaller, more… read more
The Transportation Security Administration's new blog
As an airport obsessive, I was interested to learn that the TSA has a blog now. It’s a curious thing. For example, they’ve gone to some significant lengths to humanize the bloggers: Hi, I’m Bob, and I started with the TSA in September 2002. … I live in Southwest Ohio with my wife, 3-year-old daughter, and a 100 pound German… read more
In order to mature properly, videogaming not only needs a Citizen Kane moment; it needs a little humdrum too
Think of any media form – say writing, photography or film. Now think of all of the things you can imagine doing with it. I like to think of this as the “possibility space” – a spectrum running between so-called high art at one end, to tools at the other. High art doesn’t have to be hoity-toity snobbery, and it… read more
Free software to make Aperture understand your M8, and to automate imports
Download for Mac OS X 152 kb – Mac OS X 10.4+ Apple Aperture is a digital photography post-production tool for Mac. Apple bills it as a professional-grade product on par with Final Cut for video or Logic Pro for audio. Digital camera technology advances quickly, espeically at the high end of the market where Aperture is supposed to complete.… read more