Alex Prager
His The Big Valley series is fascinating; wonderfully retro and yet startling. Desiree, Nancy and also Christine from his Polyester series are among my faves.

Animalia: Photographs by Henry Horenstein
Amazing animal photography, very moody, close, and abstract.

Catherine's Animals
On the other end of the spectrum from Horenstein, these well-lit studio shots with kitchy backgrounds are absolutely colorful and fun and yum how I want these on my wall. The sheep is delish.

David Burdeny
Had the opportunity to see his amazing arctic landscapes in person last month during Contact, and I can tell you they're even more breathtaking in person. Amazing.

Marina Cano
Wonderful animal photography. Her work reminds me of a shooter friend of mine who specializes in animal photography as well.

Mark Rubenstein
I can't tell you why his Once Was series haunts me, but it does. Particularly the last shot in the series.

Phone Sex by Philip Toledano
A new book featuring a series of portraits and mini-interviews with phone sex workers. This was really fascinating stuff, but then I love Toledano. Brilliant photog.

Sarah Wilmer
Haunting and surreal and I totally want her Spiderchest book.

The Fallen
This has been posted everywhere, but in case you missed it: fabulous photos. Bobby Kennedy's funeral train. Folks watching. You'll get the idea; make sure to turn the speakers up to hear the commentary. I can't get a few of these photos (the family all in a line) out of my mind.

Tony Duran: Celebrity
I'm not overly fond of his fashion work, but Duran's celebrity portraits are wonderful.

I could point you to thread after thread after thread after thread for example. And continue for the next three hours.

But even though I shoot lots of photos of my stepkids, my "nephew" and other friends' kids, I'd managed to avoid joining the debate until today, when a very sweet and well-meaning contact on Flickr emailed me to warn me that one of my shots had been favorited by "someone bad" - in Flickr parlance, that's someone who doesn't have a single image in their stream and a whole bunch of kid photos in their favorites.

She implored me to block the user and told me she had personally set her images to be seen only by friends and family as a result of this; the user had favorited one of hers as well. In her words:

"Maybe I"m just over-reacting ... But it just didn't seem right."

Sigh.

While I can avoid getting into these discussions in Flickr groups, I can't not respond to a contact who took the time to so kindly "warn" me about this. I responded. When my fiance read my response, he urged me to post it here.

I'm doing so for one main reason: to help fight irrational fear, folks. Art and beauty and inspiration and all the things that make us human and a great society are important, and I refuse to be a part of erasing those things from our culture because of a few folks who, in the balance, affect my life and the lives of my children very little.

Hi,

Take care,
Angie

Did I hear a response? Nope; I didn't really expect to, since my opinion runs so counter to the fear-driven moms, pops and photogs who talk about this online, but I hope it made her pause a moment to consider, anyway.

Care to comment? Share it below, but please... play nice, folks.

Adam Rankin Photography
Particularly love the pm (birth) and the pm (greeting) sets. Gorgeous.

Bernd Preiml
Wonderfully surreal photography. His Sisters and Zingling projects are so gorgeous; if they were candy, I'd eat them right up.

Clay Stang
Gorgeous commercial work. Incredible lighting and mood and quirky fun. And a local! Woo, Torontonians. :)

Diana Kingsley
Love the rueful imperfections. Experimental Gene would look SO awesome on my wall.

Liu Bolin: Camouflage
This incredible exhibition at Galerie Bertin-Toublanc is haunting. I can't get it out of my mind. Be sure to read the artist's statement at the bottom.

Joshua Hoffine Photography
Surreal and disturbing and fabulous and wonderful and I cannot say enough good things about his After Dark, My Sweet series. I'd give anything for a couple of 22"x22" limited edition prints but I think the 13" ones are more to my budget. :(

Juliane Eirich
Her Schools project is just gorgeous.

Kim Keever on Shoot the Blog
This guy's work is just... amazing. He creates these surreal (yeah, I know, that's a theme of mine this week) landscapes inside a 200 gallon fish tank. They're so mysterious and evocative they make me ache. I know I couldn't afford one, but I'd fall over happy if I could just see some in person. :)

And all things being equal, these questions are almost always the same. So much so that I've come up with a standard "rap" of sorts that I use to answer these questions.

But I'm looking to compile a list of these questions so that I can come up with a rap for ALL of them, thereby saving myself work in the future. :)

Here's the list I've got so far:

1. What's a domain?
2. How do I get a domain?
3. Is .com best?
4. What's a hosting company?
5. How do I find a hosting company?
6. What do I look for / what features do I need?
7. How much does a hosting company cost?
8. Do I have to learn how to "HTML" or can I get someone else to do it for me?
9. If I want to learn how to do it myself, what are my options?
10. How much will this cost me?
11. How do I make changes to my web site?
12. How do I show up on the first page of a search engine?
13. What's a blog?
14. Do I need one?
15. Can I take images from anywhere to put on my web site?
16. How do I make money from my web site?
17. Is my (insert money making scheme here) any good?

Got more? Share 'em in the comments below. And thanks for your help!

cityshrinker
Fabulous tilt-shift photography.

Deceptive Media
Loved his photography, but particularly loved his archvies, which is why I've linked there. Great way to show a photographic archive.

Julia Fullterton-Batten
I loved so many of her projects - In Between is gorgeous, and School Play is a series I found myself returning to again and again.

Kent Rogowski
LOVED the inside-out bears, but the Promise Me Forever series hooked me for good. That's just awesome.

Michael "Nick" Nichols
One of the few staff NatGeo photographers. His site is great - not just eye candy, but lots of good tips for photographing wildlife. I love seeing photographers "give back".

Michael Chelbin
Can't say enough about The Chapels series. I want all of them on my wall. I want to bathe in them. Gorgeous.

Olaf Blecker
His portraits are just gorgeous. Talk about inspiring, particularly the lighting.

Ryan Robinson
One of my new all-time favorites. I am so in love with both his Superheroes and Snowbirds series, it's insane.

Tim Flach
His Equus project is absolutely breathtaking (reminds me of a favorite of mine that Jim Norton took in Iceland last year), and there's a book for it due out this fall! I can't wait.

I've harped endlessly to my past employers, to employees or contractors working for Pampered Puppy, and to the thousands of pet-based businesses I deal with on a daily and weekly basis about these things:

1. Keeping it simple.
2. Using conventions when possible, where it makes sense to do so.
3. Don't confuse the user.

But the one thing I haven't spent enough time explaining is why I harp on this so.

There's one simple fact: YOUR visitor may visit ten or a hundred or a thousand other web sites in a single day.

Each of those web sites use different colors. Different typefaces and logos. Some of them place their important information on the left, the less important information on the right. Other web sites switch that around entirely and do the exact opposite.

Some companies call their shopping cart button "Add to Cart", "Add to Bag", "Buy Now" or one of a dozen other phrases. Most sites usually use a completely different size, shape, color and placement for those buttons.

In other words: the visitor, YOUR visitor, has already been assaulted by millions of different pieces of information in each design they've worked through before finding your site. Frankly it's amazing, with such a shifting landscape of user interaction, that anything ever gets purchased.

So here's what you want to do: you want to make it as easy as possible for the user to reach their goal.

You don't want to throw so many options at them, so many whirlygigs and marketingese and distractions, that they'll never get to where they want to go. Every human brain on the planet has a saturation point, and what's critical for business owners, programmers, marketers and UX designers alike to realize is that the brain coming to you is already saturated near the breaking point.

So next time you find yourself debating the difference between two options for your web site, think about this:

1. Which way is it most clear? Simplest is almost always best.

2. Which option best serves the main goal of the site, and what we want the user to do on the site?

3. Are we doing this because it's cool (or cute or fun or amusing or classy or elegant or "official sounding" or playful or "important to our investors"), or are we doing this to make the user's experience easier?

Would you rather have a cool web site, or one that makes sales?

That's what I thought you'd say.

Heather Morton chats a bit about a new site, WhatIsn'tArt, and more specifically a quote from Thomas Kinkade (arguing that "art", as the "art world" knows it, is elitist and anything that's popular with the masses can't possibly be art, or so "they" say).

She asks: "I'm not sure Kinkade's democratization of Art serves any real benefit, do you?"

I've been thinking a lot about this the last few years, particularly since my love affair with (and beginning collection of) pop surrealism much of which is either popular with the masses or an artistic rendering of something even more accessible to the masses (advertising and pop culture). But it's something I also think about now that I'm darned addicted to photography and would like to progress at some point past interesting one-step-above-snapshots to real honest to goodness art, even if it's just mostly for my own consumption.

Here's the thing. Arguing about what art is or isn't has always seemed to me a fruitless endeavour - not unlike fleas arguing over who owns the dog.

I think art needs to stir up some kind of emotional response in the viewer. But beyond that, even if that emotional response is just "pleasure at looking at a pretty thing", why can't that be art? Does the eye need to be trained? Can anyone determine art?

I say hellsurewhynot. I'm not sure what benefit Heather's looking for - a benefit to the artists? To the "art world"? To humanity's or even just North America's culture as a whole?

Put another way: for artists, creating art is an expression of something they need/want to express. But for we folks who look at it and admire it, isn't the admiring the point? Does it matter what I admire? If a few thousand folks have a Kinkade hanging in their homes and get in a little better mood for looking at it, then I'd say as a people we're probably better off (certainly, my day may be more pleasant from dealing with them) - culturally, I don't think art been diluted in the slightest. Certainly there is still art that is considered "elite", and there will always be people who think that hanging a Kinkade in your house is just one step above hanging an IKEA print. Do these two poles - the masses and the elite - ever really change?

On a related topic, I had a great chat a few weeks ago with a photographer friend of mine who insisted that the quality of photography has gone away with the advent of digital and the low barrier to entry. With the flood of "photographers" into a field previously populated with the "photographic elite", and with the flood and ubiquity of photographs now that digital is so cheap (taking hundreds of shots in a day rather than carefully choosing 36 perfect moments), the total quality was going down.

I had to argue with him, using a different kind of "art" as example. Back before mass literacy and affordable writing materials, writing was certainly more carefully thought out and certainly, many stories written back then were "rock stars" of writing.

But with mass literacy and cheap binder paper and pens (not to mention computers!), suddenly the "barrier to entry" was tiny and writing was no longer for the elite, but for the masses. And while certainly pounds and pounds of dreck are generated every single day, haven't we, as a culture, actually produced more incredible written works of art today than ever before? The ratio of wheat to chaff may have changed, but the overall volume of great work has expanded exponentially.

And that's my point about photography. Sure, more dreck - but I bet we'll see more "rock stars" (in fact, I already see it) than a higher barrier to entry would have ever allowed for.

Maybe we masses aren't such a bad lot, after all. :)

I have more to say - to tie this into web design and web culture in general - but that will have to wait for a later post.

What's new around here:

* The design, obviously. Yes, I loved the bunny too and the sweet sexy boots. But it was time for simplification in my life and in my blog, and that's where I ended up. Plus I've always wanted a site with these colors (I also have them in my home and I think they're yummy, always reminds me of chocolate-covered strawberries) and your personal site should be the place to do that, don't you think? So, welcome to the choc-strawberry edition of angiemckaig.com.

* For those of you who loved Assorted Sweets, you'll be glad to know my found links have their very own feed now. They're also rotating constantly on the home page and you can also view the archived links by month, or by tag. Yes, I've embraced the world of tagging.

* Posts will actually begin to happen again on a semi-regular basis, on all matters geeky, business, design and 'net culture - but if you like your doses of Angie more regularly, I'd suggest you pick up the Found Links feed, because that will get updated pretty much daily.

* Comments are back! Woo! Yeah, I finally found a good solution that doesn't fill my comments box with spamfromhell but also doesn't require the user to, you know, read upside down letters with purple polka dots (a pet peeve). It's a brilliant little solution and works like a charm, I've been using it for a year on my pooch's photo blog. So for all three of you who are still reading the blog, feel free to share your comments.

* I have given up on fixing a number of ancient never-updated areas of this site and have lumped them instead where you can find them in varying degrees of horrifying design-ness in Ancient History. Plus, noodling around in there will also let you see my first attempts at HTML and my very first official(tm) web site, complete with Netscape Now buttons and LinkExchange banners.

* The FlickrFeed. Yes, I'm officially obsessed with photography and have a rapidly-expanding list of gear (and wallet bruises) to show for it. I post something nearly every day so if you'd like to watch the mad skillz develop, then keep your eye glued to that little grid. (Not literally. That'd hurt.)

Of all the areas of the site, the thing that's still driving me most bonkers is how to organize the Post Archives, which is just the ubiquitous reverse-date deal right now while I try to figure out a better way to organize it. I tried categorization before but even that didn't work - I think maybe something along the lines of categorization with maybe 5 most recent posts, and then a link to the actual category archives, might be more useful. If you have suggestions on how you'd like to see it/something fun to try, feel free to leave 'em in the comments.

And for the two of you who not only still read this blog but also read all the way to the end of this post (hi Mom!), thanks for sticking with me even though I abandoned you. I'll try not to let it happen again. :)

But for now, in case you didn't know, I've set up a separate blog just for links (got tired of del.icio.us). It's constantly updated on the home page, tagged just like delicious, but also has its own RSS feed - and I'm posting new stuff there almost every day. Check it out - and bear with me while I finish the brand new angiemckaig.com.

Thanks!

Bear with me, folks, as I try to sweep up the mess and get this site in working order again. (Hide your eyes - there may be large fragments mixed in with the dust.)

A brand new shiny angiemckaig.com is coming.

i am not happy about this, © angie mckaig

I still have lots to learn about how to do portraits of kids, and how to process them to help them to look optimal, but I am finding Heather's actions very helpful.

What, you didn't think my mad Photoshop skillz had developed THAT well overnight, did you?

More posts soon, folks. I promise.

chapel, Necropolis, © angie mckaig

Taken this weekend. What a gorgeous little chapel this was. You know you're in a weird mental place when you find yourself turning to your boyfriend and saying, "If I died, this would be a cool place for a funeral."

I am nothing if not odd.

More photos from our visit to the Necropolis.

this is april?, © angie mckaig

Freaky flurries from my office window. April showers may bring May flowers, but April snows really blows. Click through to see large version.