As an amateur photographer, I found this infographic to be immensely enlightening as to how cameras work and the terminology that goes along with camera mechanics.
It seems that exposure is the usually the first lesson learned when it comes to understanding photography. The shutter speed or exposure time is the amount of time that the camera’s shutter is open letting light reach the film or image sensor on your camera. As the graph shows, the longer the shutter speed, the more likely you are to get motion blur in your photo.
The aperture of lense affects the image as well. The larger the opening, the more light will be exposed. So if you want a more ‘in focus’ picture in daylight, reduce the aperture size so that the image will become darkened as less light enters.
Finally, there is film speed. This is the measure of a photographic film’s sensitivity to light, determined by sensitometry and measured on various numerical scales. The ISO system is used to measure the sensitivity of digital imaging systems. Insensitive film requires more light exposure to produce a similar image density that you would get from more sensitive film. This is referred to as ‘slow film’. The other end of the spectrum, ‘fast films’ are highly sensitive. This reduction of exposure in higher sensitivities, in both digital and film photography, generally leads to reduced image quality. Thus, the higher sensitivity creates a ‘grainier’ image.
Paine's Furniture Store Tour with Bucky Beeman of RGI commercial real estate. Bucky takes us on a visual tour of the former furniture store which is now up for sale or lease. Video directed by Ben Wehlage. Produced by Wehlage Pictures. www.wehlage.com
Anthony George Owner of Liberation Clothing & Gifts
Liberation Gifts at the Juneteenth Celebration in Soldiers Field Park Rochester MN. Liberation Gifts is an online retailer that specializes in products that promote black culture.
Niels Diffrient, photograph by Dorothy Kresz, 1999
Niels Diffrient spent the last decades of his life working, largely on his own, in a restored barn in Ridgefield, Connecticut. In 1999, photographer Dorothy Kresz visited him there to take pictures for a brochure that would introduce the Freedom Chair, a revolutionary piece of office furniture that Diffrient designed when he was just past 70. The photographs in this slideshow form a double portrait of a man and the environment he had created in which do the work that he loved. Below, journalist Phil Patton remembers what made Diffrient so unique.
Niels Diffrient died June 8, age 84. This pioneer of human factors and ergonomics brought optimal dimensions not just to products he designed, but to many others that relied on his templates of the body.
I had communicated with him just a few weeks before, trying to set up an appearance for him this fall. We discussed the design of infotainment systems in automobiles, a problematic area of design, to say the least. Interface, interaction, user experience, ergonomics, human factors: we can’t even neatly name it but it was all in his terrain.
Diffrient will be seen as a pioneer of design’s shift from thinking about shaping objects to shaping the experience of the person who uses them. He may have worked with numbers and templates, but his overriding desire was to make the world better for living human beings.
He wore an air of cosmopolitan wisdom. It was a surprise, then, to hear he had been born in rural Star, Mississippi. The family migrated north to seek jobs in the factories of Detroit. His father worked on the line at General Motors; Niels ended up at Cranbrook and entered the circle of Eero Saarinen, Charles Eames and Harry Bertoia. Then, thanks to a Fulbright scholarship, he arrived in Italy in time for the high period of Italian modern design. He worked with Marco Zanuso.
Back in the States, he found a job with Henry Dreyfuss, where he continued the firm’s pioneering efforts in ergonomics in the Humanscale standards. Later, for the company also called Humanscale, he put these principles into practice in office chairs. Most notable among these was the Freedom Chair, introduced in 1999.
His autobiography, Confessions of a Generalist, published last year, reveals a life with adventures far beyond lab research. While designing aircraft interiors for TWA he met Howard Hughes, the mad billionaire.
He watched technology change. He had defined the proper angle of the keyboard and the relationship of chair-to-desk. But now computers were laptops and used on laps, wherever bodies bent or lounged. Keyboards were flat — even the finger-friendly scoops of keyboard keys have been abandoned in the desire for abstract beauty.
I remember attending a party a few years ago with Diffrient. The music was loud and the crowd jammed tight. Twentysomethings held drinks in one hand and texted with the other — communicating in a mode that was eons from the proper ergonomic angle of chair or back. But Diffrient simply shook his head in bemusement. His interest was not in devices but in people and their constantly unfolding nature. That is the real human factor.
In the first major U.S. retrospective of the modernist architect’s work, the ruler of right angles goes rustic, comes with curves.
Walk into the entrance gallery of the MoMA’s long-anticipated Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes and you might think you’ve stumbled into the wrong exhibition. The room contains a smattering of watercolor impressions and sketches of the Jura mountainscape, the westerly region of Switzerland where Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier-to-be, was born and lived through young adulthood.
Neither modern nor signed, the works suggest a rustic Art Nouveau, called “style sapin, in which fir trees and mountain slopes are rendered as ornamental geometric patterns--by an incredibly perceptive talent, perhaps already seduced by rules and order as much as by the unruly appeal of nature. “In Le Corbusier’s oeuvre, landscape is both a manifest and a latent preoccupation,“ co-curator and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen tells Co.Design. The young Jeanneret painted and sketched during hikes, crossing valleys and exploring the organic forms of his bucolic country and the mysteries they might contain. The swirl of a river jetty and the conical silhouettes of pines would catch his eye. This is neither the despotic architect of the right angle nor the totalitarian urbanist--those associations came later for Le Corbusier--but the artist and Renaissance man behind the roundest of glasses, producer of beautiful objects and buildings.
The show soon moves onto the clean-lined architecture, though smartly not before the early organic Le Corbusier landscape--the one with a few rough edges--has been established. As the first expansive retrospective of Le Corbusier’s work in the U.S., the exhibition serves the important function of firmly grounding a fresh, relatively novel reading of the architect’s built and unbuilt projects through “the field of landscape.” While persistent criticism has condemned Le Corbusier for some of the worst catastrophes (and none of the triumphs) of post-war city planning, the impressive and impression-changing exhibition, four years in the making, presents a convincing case for the architect’s sensitive, experiential approach to landscape. It challenges us to see, or wonder, how this fascination with nature informed his later work, of the most designed and manufactured kind.
And by landscape, of course, co-curator Cohen does not exclusively refer to the rolling hills and green pastures of Jeanneret in Jura. As the future architect left Switzerland for Paris, the continent, and the world at large, nature would be transmuted to “urban landscapes,” a term, Cohen says, likely coined by Le Corbusier. The exhibition’s second trajectory charts this geographical turn using the architect’s travel notes, sketchbooks and photographs, including hastily drawn impressions of Rome, Rio, Istanbul and New York, in graphite and watercolors, that document a telling shift in subject, into more analytical compositions that featured buildings and the manmade. The third and last leg of the exhibition, by far the largest, picks up with the architect’s early Purist phase in the 1920s and tracks his work through the thirties, when unsolicited or canceled projects piled up, then onto the post-war period, with the building of the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, and finally, his expedition to Chandigarh, India, in the 1950s, where Le Corbusier was at last able to realize, if only partially, his utopian vision Radiant City.
At times, particularly in the earlier phases of the exhibition, the landscape thesis comes across elegantly. But as the show progresses, the connection of Le Corbusier’s work with the idea of landscape, however modern, loses focus. The taut planes and the filmstrip windows of the Purist villas were conceived as machines for viewing the surrounding terrain. House of the machine age, such as the Villa Savoye near Paris or the Villa Le Lac in Switzerland (the house Le Corbusier designed for his mother), were attuned to the places in which they were set. Is it fair to consider architecture that looks outside as design driven by the landscape?
A collection of the architect’s smallest-scale designs, which Le Corbusier called "objects of poetic reaction" and frequently used as the subjects of his paintings, are also on display. So we get the full tour of small, large, and extra-large industrial, architectural and urban designs, most ambitiously and arrestingly so in the first masterplan for Algiers, drafted in 1930, in which Le Corbusier envisioned a continuous megastructure that mimics the city’s coast, to be outfitted with plug-in housing modules and topped with a highway. A typical apartment of the Unité, which Le Corbusier lifted onto thick, trunk-like blocks to give residents a view of the Marseilles harbor, is reproduced here to scale, offering a sense of the surprisingly generous proportions (and limitations) of the architect’s Modulor system. Another particularly well represented project is the geometric plan for Chandigarh’s government complex, which is monumentalized in a heavy wood-carved sculpture.
The sheer number of items on display--and the eclectic tastes and motivations they reveal--are a testament to Le Corbusier’s powers of polemic. They also reveal his commitment to engaging promiscuously with movements, ideas, and things, often in ways that belie the straightforward timeline.
Unless you pay faithful attention to the wall cards, which unspool the curator’s narrative, the landscape motif quickly recedes into the background. But perhaps that’s exactly what it’s intended to do--as it did for Le Corbusier. His vast panorama of work is best examined slowly and deliberately, which means pausing to bend over an architectural model to inspect its proportions and liberating spaces. It means enjoying the landscape, and this one is surely among the most far-reaching bodies of work produced by an architect and one of the finest architectural exhibitions produced by the MoMA.
Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes runs through September 23 at the MoMA.
What is the best time to share content on social networks for maximum exposure? Should you post first thing in the morning? During lunch? At the end of the workday when people are getting ready to head home? And how do you account for the fact that you may have potential customers living in different time zones? A new infographic from KISSmetrics answers these questions and more with a new infographic called ‘The Science of Social Timing.’
The infographic, which was released late last week on theKISSmetrics blog, is Part 1 of a series of infographics related to timing on the social web. According to the blog, this week they’ll be releasing a second part, discussing timing and email marketing.
Here are a few key takeaways from the Science of Social Timing infographic:
The best time to tweet is 5PM ET
1 to 4 tweets per hour is ideal
The best days to tweet are midweek and on the weekends
The best day to share on Facebook is Saturday
The best time to share on Facebook is Noon ET
Check out the full infographic below and let us know what you think! Do you think you’ll start paying more attention to the timing of your social networking as a result of these findings?
Guitar Player. This is a photograph I took at the 8th Annual Juneteenth Freedom Day at Soldiers Field in Rochester MN. Photograph by Ben Wehlage of Wehlage Pictures.
From the Event Listing: "This event is part of Rochester's Juneteenth Celebration. The event is designed to showcase the history of slavery in America and to commemorate slavery's ending. The major intent of the celebration is to examine the cultural heritage of slaves and their descendants through art, education, and research. It's an opportunity to celebrate a community wide family- oriented event." Additional information if you are not familiar with Juneteenth from Juneteenth.com
Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States
From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond.
Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics and family gatherings. It is a time for reflection and rejoicing. It is a time for assessment, self-improvement and for planning the future. Its growing popularity signifies a level of maturity and dignity in America long over due. In cities across the country, people of all races, nationalities and religions are joining hands to truthfully acknowledge a period in our history that shaped and continues to influence our society today. Sensitized to the conditions and experiences of others, only then can we make significant and lasting improvements in our society.
Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation - which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance.
Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All of which, or neither of these version could be true. Certainly, for some, President Lincoln's authority over the rebellious states was in question For whatever the reasons, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.
General Order Number 3
One of General Granger’s first orders of business was to read to the people of Texas, General Order Number 3 which began most significantly with:
"The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer."
The reactions to this profound news ranged from pure shock to immediate jubilation. While many lingered to learn of this new employer to employee relationship, many left before these offers were completely off the lips of their former 'masters' - attesting to the varying conditions on the plantations and the realization of freedom. Even with nowhere to go, many felt that leaving the plantation would be their first grasp of freedom. North was a logical destination and for many it represented true freedom, while the desire to reach family members in neighboring states drove the some into Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Settling into these new areas as free men and women brought on new realities and the challenges of establishing a heretofore non-existent status for black people in America. Recounting the memories of that great day in June of 1865 and its festivities would serve as motivation as well as a release from the growing pressures encountered in their new territory. The celebration of June 19th was coined "Juneteenth" and grew with more participation from descendants. The Juneteenth celebration was a time for reassuring each other, for praying and for gathering remaining family members. Juneteenth continued to be highly revered in Texas decades later, with many former slaves and descendants making an annual pilgrimage back to Galveston on this date.
Juneteenth Festivities and Food
A range of activities were provided to entertain the masses, many of which continue in tradition today. Rodeos, fishing, barbecuing and baseball are just a few of the typical Juneteenth activities you may witness today. Juneteenthalmost always focused on education and self improvement. Thus, oftenguest speakers are brought in and the elders are called upon to recount the events of the past. Prayer services were also a major part of these celebrations.
Certain foods became popular and subsequently synonymous with Juneteenth celebrations such as strawberry soda-pop. More traditional and just as popular was the barbecuing, through which Juneteenth participants could share in the spirit and aromas that their ancestors - the newly emancipated African Americans, would have experienced during their ceremonies. Hence, the barbecue pit is often established as the center of attention at Juneteenth celebrations.
Food was abundant because everyone prepared a special dish. Meats such as lamb, pork and beef which not available everyday were brought on this special occasion. A true Juneteenth celebrations left visitors well satisfied and with enough conversation to last until the next.
Dress was also an important elementin early Juneteenth customs and is often still taken seriously, particularly by the direct descendants who can make the connection to this tradition's roots. During slavery there were laws on the books in many areas that prohibited or limited the dressing of the enslaved. During the initial days of the emancipation celebrations, there are accounts of former slaves tossing their ragged garments into the creeks and rivers to adorn clothing taken from the plantations belonging to their former 'masters'.
Juneteenth and Society
In the early years, little interest existed outside the African American community in participation in the celebrations. In some cases, there was outwardly exhibited resistance by barring the use of public propertyfor the festivities. Most of the festivities found themselves out in rural areasaround rivers and creeks that could provide for additional activities such asfishing, horseback riding and barbecues. Often the church grounds was the site for such activities.
Eventually, as African Americans became land owners, land was donated and dedicated for these festivities. One of the earliest documented land purchases in the name of Juneteenth was organized by Rev. Jack Yates. This fund-raising effort yielded $1000 and the purchase of Emancipation Park in Houston, Texas. In Mexia, the local Juneteenth organization purchased Booker T. Washington Park, which had become the Juneteenth celebration site in 1898. There are accounts of Juneteenth activities being interrupted and halted by white landowners demanding that their laborers return to work. However, it seems most allowed their workers the day off and some even made donations of food and money. For decades these annual celebrations flourished, growing continuously with each passing year. In Booker T. Washington Park, as many as 20,000 African Americans once flowed through during the course of a week, making the celebration one of the state’s largest.
Juneteenth Celebrations Decline
Economic and cultural forces provided for a decline in Juneteenth activities and participants beginning in the early 1900’s. Classroom and textbook education in lieu of traditional home and family-taught practices stifled the interest of the youth due to less emphasis and detail on the activities of former slaves. Classroom text books proclaimed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 as the date signaling the ending of slavery - andlittle or nothing on the impact of General Granger’s arrival on June 19th.
The Depression forced many people off the farms and into the cities to find work. In these urban environments, employers were less eager to grant leaves to celebrate this date. Thus, unless June 19th fell on a weekendor holiday, there were very few participants available. July 4th was the already established Independence holiday and a rise in patriotism steered more toward this celebration.
Resurgence
The Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s yielded both positive and negative results for the Juneteenth celebrations. While it pulled many of the African American youth away and into the struggle for racial equality, many linked these struggles to the historical struggles of their ancestors. This was evidenced by student demonstrators involved in the Atlanta civil rights campaign in the early 1960’s, whom wore Juneteenth freedom buttons. Again in 1968, Juneteenth received another strong resurgence through Poor Peoples March to Washington D.C.. Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s call for people of all races, creeds, economic levels and professions to come to Washington to show support for the poor. Many of these attendees returned home and initiated Juneteenth celebrations in areas previously absent of such activity. In fact, two of the largest Juneteenth celebrations founded after this March are now held in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
Texas Blazes the Trail
On January 1, 1980, Juneteenth became an official state holiday through the efforts of Al Edwards, an African American state legislator. The successful passage of this bill marked Juneteenth as the first emancipation celebration granted official state recognition. Edwards has since actively sought to spread the observance of Juneteenth all across America.
Juneteenth In Modern Times
Today, Juneteenth is enjoying a phenomenal growth rate within communities and organizations throughout the country. Institutions such as the Smithsonian, the Henry Ford Museum and others have begun sponsoring Juneteenth-centered activities. In recent years, a number of local and national Juneteenth organizations have arisen to take their place along side older organizations - all with the mission to promote and cultivate knowledge and appreciation of African American history and culture.
Juneteenth today, celebrates African American freedom and achievement,while encouraging continuous self-development and respect for all cultures. As it takes on a more national, symbolic and even global perspective, the events of 1865 in Texas are not forgotten, for all of the roots tie back to this fertile soil from which a national day of pride is growing.
The future of Juneteenth looks bright as the number of cities and states creating Juneteenth committees continues to increase. Respect and appreciation for all of our differences grow out of exposure and working together. Getting involved and supporting Juneteenth celebrations creates new bonds of friendship and understanding among us. This indeed, brightens our future - and that is the Spirit of Juneteenth.
What is the best time to share content on social networks for maximum exposure? Should you post first thing in the morning? During lunch? At the end of the workday when people are getting ready to head home? And how do you account for the fact that you may have potential customers living in different time zones? A new infographic from KISSmetrics answers these questions and more with a new infographic called ‘The Science of Social Timing.’
