Category: Media

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Flickr a Day 226: ‘White Flint Mall’

My daughter grew up going to the enclosed shopping center in Kensington, Md, where we lived for nearly a decade. There once was a kid’s play place on the third floor that was affordable and fun. Gone. We bought manga books, calendars, and tasty treats from the Borders. Gone. Molly trick-or-treated store to store on Halloween. No more, kiddies. My wife and I bought our wedding rings in a jewelry store that also is gone. The 850,000 square-foot upscale consumer cathedral closed earlier this year. Demolition is underway, and a court case brought by Lord & Taylor against the center’s management went before a jury earlier this week. Our memories, and those of others, are all that remain.

I chose self-titled “White Flint Mall”, which Mike Kalasnik shot on June 30, 2012, for its timeliness to current events. He used iPhone 4s, and for the first time in this series I slightly cropped a photo (to remove yellow road lines). Vitals: f/2.4, ISO 64, 1/2404 sec, 4.3mm. Mike, who joined Flickr in July 2007, runs the “Dead and Dying Retail” website, which offers startling look at urban decay. 

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The Paywall Problem

This week the long-dreaded Washington Post renewal email plunked into my inbox. So ends a glorious year of reading the digital newspaper on PC and tablet. My cheap thrill ride is over: “Your subscription will be renewed for a year on Aug. 26, 2015, at the rate of $149/year. As you’ve requested, payments for your subscription to the Post are automatically charged to your credit card”. I requested nothing. The Post imposed auto-renewal, which I cancelled the next day. My sub now ends on August 26.

Twelve months ago, the Post made an amazing email offer, good for just 24 hours: “Get a Full Year of Unlimited Digital Access FOR AS LOW AS JUST $19!” Wow, what a deal. We splurged and went digital on any device for another ten bucks. Washington Post is worth $29 a year—and it’s a good value for $149, too. But all the paywall news sites want that kind of cash or more from me. I’m willing to pay for good journalism, but my budget can’t accommodate them all. 

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Flickr a Day 224: ‘Piercing’

Our selection is so odd, or my ability to process the elements so lame, only the photographer’s explanation can make sense of it. “I went to the Institute for Contemporary Art today”, Nicholas “Nic” McPhee says of self-titled “Piercing”, captured on June 30, 2105. “As we passed through the Boston Financial District on our way there, we stumbled across ‘As if it were already there‘ by Janet Echeman. This is a big, glorious public art sculpture installation in the sky above a park—the Rose Kennedy Greenway”.

The suspended structure went up in May and goes down in October. So don’t delay getting to Bean Town if you want to see it. “This is actually a brightly colored—if the light catches it correctly—net/mesh of high strength fibers and LEDs that actually lights up in quite brilliant color at night”, Nic says. “I highly recommend the wonderful pictures on her website, which include some cool night shots”. 

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Flickr a Day 220: Chat

For some people, photography is a way of life. For shooter Erik Hagström, it is a way of living—of expressing himself in ways his body otherwise limits. There is a cool, somber ambiance to his art I could see, before learning his story, that captures more than just images in around the French Alps, but essence.

About himself, Erik explains: “After two cerebral accidents vascular in 2007, making me lose most of the control of my members, reconquered gradually, not being able more to play of musical instruments, or use pencils to draw and paint, I turned to the photograph”.