Photography / Philosophy

Photography became an essential tool for composition studies after I bought my first digital camera in 1997. The zero cost/time factor in development allows me to explore relationships of lines and space to refine my visual development very effectively, and it is really from these studies that I began to understand and appreciate Bauhaus.

I did not, however, work with photography seriously as an "end-product" until a few years ago, when a couple of my long-exposure shots of the Manhattan Bridge (shot with a Canon G2 at the time) caught the eye of a semi-professional photographer. He urged me to pursue it seriously and after a year convinced me to buy my first DSLR, the Canon 10D. Getting back to a Canon SLR was like reuniting a long-lost friend, as my first real camera also happened to be a Canon EOS when I grew up as a teenager.

When it comes to photography, I'm a purist. I like to use the camera to express how I see, and as such studio photography and any forms of setups is close-to-absent in my photography work. I see the natural surroundings as a never-ending source of visual challenges, which explains why I am thoroughly impressed with Lucien Samaha's urban mundane still metropolis series.

Projects

There are a few ongoing (and perhaps never-ending) projects in my pursuit for photography:

1. Manhattan Bridge

This subject is of historic importance to my affair with photography, and as such remains to be an active focus. One of the reason that I picked it is because I live right next to it, and I am terribly sick of all the attention that Brooklyn Bridge tends to get. Another reason has to do with my passion with its utilitarian attribute, which I blogged about many moons back. The experience with working on many long-exposure shots of Manhattan Bridge also leads me to become interested in HDR photography.

2. Dead Yard

This is a fun one. I always thought that it is a very unreal experience when photographers present portfolios with perfect bodies, flowers, settings. It also disturbs me when it is often the subject and not the photography that people tend to respond to. Since i believe that photography is about composition and visual relationships, I started taking photographs of subjects that will otherwise be considered repulsive outside of its context. The response I receive is interesting. People tend to have a mixed feeling about them--they appear to be drawn to the composition, but at the same time do not wish to hang dead things on their walls. This fulfills my intention and as such has driven me for more.

3. Numbers in a city

This was my first photography project. It started out as a project for a typography class while I was in college. Like most graphic design assignments at Yale, it was very open ended. We were asked to show the experience of a city through the language of typography. I have always been interested in numbers, and I as such I decided to run around New Haven and photograph numbers which represent the city, from 1 to 100. The series is to be projected on the wall as slideshow. The numbers are recognizably New Haven, and most who have been in New Haven can recognize the sense of time and space as they go through the series. Some commented that it reminded them of Sesame Street. It was so successful that I thought of extended this to different neighborhoods in New York, but I never had the time to work on more of them after college, and as such I have only completed the first and only one...

Technical

On the technical front, I am exploring flash photography and macro photography, which have both been very challenging and expensive, but the results are often surprising and inspiring, and I plan on continuing them whenever I have the time, and little experiments often result in the form of studies.

Series

My public photography series are available on Flickr.

Range

I have also created a set to allow reviewers to look at my range:

Related SML Pro Blog entries

Functional = Beautiful
HDR: Manhattan Bridge in Black and White
Manhattan Bridge HDR
Photography = Composition
SML Collection
Theorizing aesthetics

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Copyright 1976-2007 See-ming Lee. All rights reserved.

Synergy of Business = Design + Technology + Marketing Strategy

You have seen many PowerPoint presentations that speak of the power of the successful business treo: design, technology and strategy. It usually goes like this:

1. A circle appears, representing design.
2. Another circle appears, representing technology.
3. Yet another circle appears, representing strategy.
4. These circle overlaps one another, looking like an RGB mixing diagram.
5. Drum rolls... and the presenter talks about the importance of being at the center where all three circles overlap.

This presentation bores so many to tears that it doesn't see the light of day very often these days. It also neglects the reality that being at the dead center is not really what matters (the result), rather, it is the constant balance among the three groups that matters most (the process by which to achieve equilibrium):

• design + technology / strategy
  
• technology + strategy / design
  
• strategy + design / technology
  

It is an important business idea, however, and I propose that the wordings be changed from the What to the Why. When you show the ROI first, people generally listen more intently:

• Usability = Design
  
• Longevity = Technology
  
• Commercial Value = Strategy
  

When you wish to back it up with examples, instead of picking a single product to demonstrate the effect, pick all of them. Show your audience how the same formula applies to all products and services that wish to be successful in the market place. It is especially true if you wish to reap the benefits from the power of cult branding: from Apple to Linux, from Harley-Davidson to Volkswagen, from the World Wrestling Entertainment to Oprah Winfrey.

Know thy enemies = the art of competitive analysis

If you are working on the consumer strategy for Poland Spring, besides getting your water delivered from Nestle Waters, also subscribe from Wissahickon Mountain Spring Water, DS Waters of America, Voss Artesian, Silver Springs, Eden Springs. Find out what kind of special offers you are getting while you are a customer. Figure out what kind of landing pages make you tick and stick.

If you are working on the consumer strategy for AOL, subscribe to services from Google, MSN and Yahoo, note the pros and cons of these services, their unique features, and their user experience models.

If you are working on the consumer strategy for MasterCard, learn the business model of American Express, find your client's differentiation from VISA, and digg up brand management for the Discover Card.

Know the strengths and weaknesses of yourself as well as your competitors and you will succeed. This is one of the fundamental ideas from Sun Tzu's The Art of War (孫子兵法).

You can read the full text of The Art of War in English, Español, Français, Nederlands and 中文 on WikiSource.

From closed to open

If Web 1.0 is about information authoring, then Web 2.0 is about information sharing (1).

This change is evidential when we look at the climate of information representation: from FAQs to forum discussion, from personal homepages to personal blogging, from closed-development to open-source movement, from categorizing to tagging, from trees to wikis.

In other words, from closed to open.

Being open is a good thing. A prime example is opensource development. You initiate an idea and concept, and a whole world of developers is available to improve and improvise on it (2). IBM reaps the benefits of open-developing their Eclipse platform as a successor to their VisualAge family of products.

In the world of knowledge, Wikipedia became statistically evaluated to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Brittanica, eclipsing Brittanica’s once dominant sovereign in the world of knowledge (3).

In the world of business, corporations open up their communication channels and invite the whole world for discourse. Blogs like the Google Blog, Adobe blog and Microsoft’s Channel 9 created two-way communication channels, and thus benefits, with the users. Web users learn the insider tips on different companies’ products and services, and the companies in turn gain tremendous amount of user feedback on their betaware with very little upfront investment.

Interactive agencies see blogging as a free PR device to influence the industry. Organic has Three Minds, Frog Design has the Frog Blog. I find myself reading these quite a bit to learn where the industry is going and how different companies are utilizing upcoming technology to do amazing things.

In turn, I noted that while I took note of Razorfish in the early days (~1997) via the RSub–the Razorfish lab that sells company merchandise and all kinds of ‘experimental’ ideas that their employees create–it appears that the same business model of social marketing has now transformed to corporate blogging.

References / Citations

1. Inspired via discourse with Tom Nicholson.
2. Via discourse with Adam S. Kirschner.
3. CNet | Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica by Daniel Terdiman, 2005-12-15

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, a must-have for coders.

Bitstream Vera Sans Mono is the best font for coding, period.


(source: Wikipedia)

The advantages of using Vera Sans Mono--the monospaced variant from the Vera family--are:

• It comes with normal, bold, oblique and bold oblique. Great for syntax highlighting.


• Unlike Courier, changing weights from normal to bold do not change the mono-text-width. In other words, if you wish to highlight your keywords in bold, your code won't all of a sudden break your indent formatting


• Unlike Courier, it carries a Gnome license and thus free. Courier comes with most Microsoft products, but is not freeware. While you are unlikely to be sued by Microsoft for your use of Courier if you do not own any Microsoft products and thus the license that comes with it, that is an illegal activity.


• It is Unicode aware and comes with the full latin set of Unicode characters so coding on your internationalization projects would always be a breeze.


• It is highly legible down to 8pt on a 96dpi monitor so you can get as many lines on Eclipse without suffering from legibility issues.


• It is highly legible when printed. Great for code documentation.

I have been using this for a few years now round-tripping from ActionScript to Python, Java to C# using IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio or the almighty Notepad and it never lets me down. Highly recommended.

Download the latest revision of Vera.