Last week I watched Michael Mann's Manhunter. It's a real gem of a movie starring William Peterson ( CSI Las Vegas ). Manhunter is essentially the prequel to Silence of the Lambs and was remade and titled Red Dragon in 2002. Although I really like Anthony Hopkins as the venerable Dr. Lecter, I have to say, Mann's highly stylized version from 1986 is still my favorite. All this Michael Mann business of course lead me to watching a few episodes of Miami Vice ( which I posted about here ) and so naturally I have been taking a few screen captures. Not really sure where I'm going with this, but I really liked this one which was only on screen for a second and is fitting with yesterday's post about surveillance.

It's interesting how these things all tie themselves together. Last semester at MICA, we had a few visiting artists who sort of hit the nail on the head. Flickr searches, surveillance in cinema, photo archives--it's all beginning to meld together. The above image was captured on my laptop screen at 1440 x 900 pixels. As you can see the actual image area is cropped to TV format, and additionally cropped by the original editor for the in-camera surveillance effect. Not too may pixels to work with!

Backing up your digital media, documents, and other important files is a hot topic. Personally I try to follow a pretty simple concept called "The Rule of Three." This rule is easy to remember, and fairly simple to implement. You can customize it however you see fit, so long as you are still following the rule.

• Keep your files in three locations
• Backup your files following three different schedules
• Utilize three types of media

I just ran into this music video on the web. The band ran around to different locations where they knew they would be recorded on surveillance video cameras and performed. Then, because of England's version of the US Freedom of Information Act, they were entitled to the footage. Pretty cool idea I guess!

Here is some more info at The Future of Media blog.

One of my all-time favorite films, Kodachrome is officially dead. Announced this morning, Kodak will cease to produce the legendary film, which has been around for some 74 years! I guess those “nice bright colors” just aren’t nice enough anymore.

Kodachrome was certainly one of the first films I really fell in love with. It had such a specific characteristic about it that made it really appealing to me as a budding photographer. At one point I remember reading about a new checmical process that was aimed at bringing Kodachrome back to the fore, but I guess it never panned out--too bad. I will really miss you, Kodachrome.

The gallery at right was created by searching the term “kodachrome” at flickr.com.

I just saw this over at www.lx3-photography.com/ and had to post it! So good! Nikki Waller from the Wall Street Journal has some fun insights into why she loves her Panasonic LX3. She also has a full review article here. I love how she thinks the lens cap makes it "retro" but also kinda hard to use. Oh boy.... Enjoy!