8 free desktop wallpaper photos from Paris

My quest to keep my desktop fresh continues. After combing through my most recent Paris photos, here are eight that might end up on my screen, and yours if you like. They aren't meant to be crowd pleasers. There's no Eiffel Tower or child holding a baguette. Instead, these are a few of my own idiosyncratic choices (you can download any of them from my gallery). I think the size should work on most laptops and will probably still look good on a monitor around 20 inches, but I'm guessing here. And I don't mean the size of the photos in this post. If you want one of the images, you'll need to click on the link to my gallery, view at full size, and then right-click to download from there.


1. graffiti and a camera—two of my favorite things


2. I like to imagine the person who has all of this stuff crammed behind the front windshield of their truck. I'm sure they won't mind if I add to the clutter with a few stray folders.

3. What could be more French than this? It just makes me laugh.

4. The creepy ambiance of this photo pleases my morbid side.

5. From a window display at the Bon Marché during the holidays. I have a thing for letters and typography.

6. From the Vanves flea market. I love flea markets and my son is a cellist, so this is a good one for me.

7. These crates of oh-so-French beverages were sitting at the end of one of the passages that the flâneurs loved so much. I like the graphic nature of the image, but the cigarette butt in the foreground is the cherry on top.

8. I find this scene from the Tuileries gardens both enchanting and creepy, like a good old fashioned children's tale.

That dodge and burn post is coming up very very soon, and after that, the complete portrait retouch workflow, so stay tuned.

A list of 10 ways to help the Haiti relief effort

If you want to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, here is a list (including many other lists) of ways you can help:

1. Text the Red Cross (text "Haiti" to 90999) and automatically make a $10 donation.
2. LDS relief and Islamic relief USA have been working in concert to help with amazing speed. As I write this, the LDS site seems to be having difficulties.
3. Haiti relief fund has a list of at least 23 charitable organizations where you can donate. The FBI is warning people to beware of fraud. It makes me sick that some people take advantage of tragedy to make themselves rich. Make sure you donate to an organization you can trust.
   
4. Here is a post with 10 ways to help
5. Another site with 9 ways to help.
6. A list of six ways to help. I like that it includes the suggestion to learn about the culture. It might sound like that doesn't help, but the more you know the more you will feel connected to the culture.
   
7. Put a little friendly pressure on local businesses. This list of corporations already helping out might help inspire smaller businesses to do somethingl. When you shop, you might consider asking the business if they are doing anything to help. If they get asked often enough, they will probably take action.
8. Pray, meditate, do whatever you do on a spiritual level, keeping in mind that "faith without works is dead." (James 2:20)
9. Put "help Haiti" on your calendar in March or later. This doesn't replace helping out now, but they are going to need help for a long time. By March, there will be less news coverage fewer people donating, but still plenty of need.
10. Post any other ideas in a comment. Maybe you will inspire a reader.
    

10 things scrawled on wood in Paris parks

I was walking through the Jardin du Luxembourg less than two months ago (*sigh*) when I noticed some graffiti written on a bench. It read (and I'm editing here): F--- Lavoisier! F--- Montaigne! I burst out laughing as I imagined some French high school kid studying for the bac exams. Then I thought about graffiti and how much it has (and hasn't) changed over time. Today, I usually think of spray cans, subways, and city walls when I hear the word. With the ubiquity of tags, stencils, space invader tiles, collage, stickers, and all forms of elaborate graffiti, things written on park benches or carved into trees had fallen off my radar.

I know that the etymology of "graffiti" links the term to scribbling, and yet I don't think park bench scribbles are really in the same class as what we now call graffiti. So I decided to rename things carved into wood "scrawlings." And thus begins a personal project to collect examples of things scrawled on wood.

Since my focus is on lists this month, here is a very specific list:
Things scrawled on wood in Paris parks

When you use a list to create a photo essay, the more specific the better. In fact, I could be more precise and use five photos specifically of trees as the beginning of a project...






or five photos of benches...





My point is that a prompt that might sound like something from Family Feud ("Name something you might find carved into a tree trunk.") can become the start of a fun photo project. Try it. Be specific. Post your results and link back to share for the "monthly special."

Sorting through chaos (and then adding it back in)

I snapped this photo standing outside a used bookstore in Paris. I didn't dare step inside. I wouldn't hesitate to take photos of riots, but this...this chaos was intimidating. There wasn't a person in sight, but I was sure that this was the lair of some terrifying creature—perhaps Shelob, that giant spider in Lord of the Rings, or maybe just some troll-like bibliophile ready to snap in two anyone "just browsing." Only the bravest dare enter. Sure, there appears to be organization off in the distance, but before you reach that promised land you have to cross mountains of chaos, books piled upon books like so many unredeemed souls.

I guess this image makes me think about the problem of ordering knowledge. Denis Diderot is my intellectual hero because he walked the line between order and chaos so well. He co-edited the most ambitious encyclopedia Europe had ever seen—72,000 articles penned by more than 140 of the greatest minds of his day, all 18,000 pages alphabetically ordered and preceded by an impressive forward and a "tree of knowledge" tastefully pruned to 18th-century philosophical standards—and then he subverted the entire structure by weaving what we would now call "hyperlinks" into all of the authors' writings. One minute you are reading about convents and suddenly Diderot (cheeky devil) might point you to an article on prisons, and so on. Diderot believed in the interconnectedness of knowledge way before the world had a "wide web." And although he was not lacking in self-esteem, his own collection of links within articles were not even meant to be the final word, but rather an example of how we ought to read. He would love Wikipedia and its ever-mutating content. He tried to invent it.

I could go on (don't get me started on taxonomy), but let's get to how this applies to photography. Remember the quote I used from Lewis Baltz in my last post about how the real difficulty in photography is in organizing photos to create meaning? I agree. But I also like what Stephen Shore says about the moment we take the photo:

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene—simplifies the jumble by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus. (The Nature of Photographs, 37)

That may come off as a bit too cerebral to someone taking snapshots of their kid's birthday party, but we're all making those choices every time we take a picture. In fact, we may be working from a list. Somewhere, in the back of our mind a list (created by looking at scrapbooks? by family tradition?) lurks...Photo of child blowing out candles? Check. Photo of each present being opened? Check.

A good reason to get a little intellectual about our systems of organizing (our conscious and subconscious lists) is to weave a little chaos back into the mix. Add a little Diderot to your structure. Try cross-pollinating your lists. This is what happened (quite a while ago now) to wedding photography when "journalistic" coverage became the big thing. The standard poses were suddenly in the company of (if not displaced by) a photo vérité style that in turn produced enough candid moments to inspire its own set of (less than spontaneous) lists. It sounds like I'm suggesting that lists inevitably lead to stagnation and cliché, but what I am really suggesting is that we need to be aware of the lists that we already use and see if they have anything to say to each other.

Thoughts? Comments? How do you organize chaos? How much chaos do you let in?

January Monthly Special: Lists

Really? Lists? Yeah, I know. By now, every magazine, blog, and newspaper you've read has probably done some sort of "2009" list. I know I did. And why is that? Why this obsession with lists? According to Umberto Eco, that question merits a book and an exhibit at the Louvre. Here at Take-out Photo, the rest of January will have to suffice.

I am not proposing that we all take photos of our to-do lists (like the one of my ipod above). Instead, I want to look at lists as an organizing principle. "Workflow," a big part of a photographer's life, is basically a list of steps. At some point in this month, once I finish the dodge and burn post (look in the photo, it's on my list), I want to give you my portrait retouch workflow from start to finish.

As for lists and our creative process, I like the following quote from Lewis Baltz (from the "Contacts" dvd that I find very inspiring):

"Anyone can take pictures. What's difficult is thinking about them, organizing them, trying to use them, montage them in some way so that meaning can be made out of them. That's where the work begins."

If you're at a loss for inspiration, try a list. Umberto Eco claims that the phone book would be his pick for a desert island because he could make up so many stories from such a long list of possible characters. I question his sincerity, but I like the idea of it: the most boring, banal list as a source of creativity. It's a good challenge. Look at your "to do" list and imagine that it needed to be the basis for a photo essay. What other lists do you have? How would they manifest themselves in a photographic form? As with the desert island phone book, a list won't tell a story on its own. However, we don't need to be writers to make a list come to life. A careful reader can pull meaning from a list. Help someone else see that meaning, and you have created a story. If I were to "read" our local phone book (and I won't, but still...), I might begin to notice all of those hybrid names (mix and match all of your beloved ancestors) that Utah spawns (check out this hilarious site for examples). Or maybe I would notice clusters of certain family names grouped together in the same part of town—all except one. You get the point.

I'm bringing back the links this month, so I hope to see some participation from you (participating in Take-out Photo was at the top of your New Year's resolution list, right?). Do a list post of some sort, and come back here to add a link. Maybe when we're done we'll have a nice list (fingers crossed!).