Kaley at Work Everyday

I often whine at the noise and distraction of working in a home office in what could easily be called one of the most distracting households in Mountain View, CA — the truth is, I really like having a chance to interact with Sandra, Kaley and Jake every day.

More on TYDTWD at Sandra’s SanSan’s Pups.

Trying to work on the couch Photo credit: Sandra Chow

Helpful productivity hint — always work in a quiet place where it is easy to concentrate.

Is it an age thing?  Films very much affects me.  Does it you?

“I’m shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here”

“Your winnings, sir”

“Oh, thank you, very much”

Do you like the experience of going to photo galleries but don’t have time or browsing images on Flickr, but don’t want to look at snapshots?  Get the gallery experience by browsing these three image sites.

The reviews below are from the NY Times.

Vi.sualize.us: Victor Espigares, a software engineer in Spain, was flipping through a photographer’s portfolio on the Web when he was struck by a particular image. “I was thinking about bookmarking the picture — but not the site — and found that I had no choice,” said Mr. Espigares. “So I started to think about filling that need. Later, I started to think a little bigger and realized that others might have a similar need.”

Vi.sualize.us features more variety than the other sites: anything from T-shirt designs to artsy studio shots and illustrations are likely to pop up. Since the site began in September 2007, the community has expanded to roughly 10,000 members with a collection of nearly 300,000 images.

We Heart It: Unable to land an invitation to FFFFound (see below), Fabio Giolito, a Brazilian Web developer, created We Heart It in March partially as an alternative to the exclusive site.

“As a designer, I keep an inspiration folder on my computer where I throw all the cool images and links I find,” said Mr.Giolito. “I created the site to organize things that I like. People liked it, so I opened it to everyone.”

With its wealth of portrait and fashion photography, the site is similar to Flickr but with a more risqué and avant-garde feel. Unlike the other two visual-bookmarking sites, We Heart It also allows its 16,000 registered users to tag favorite videos from Vimeo and YouTube. The site currently has more than 200,000 submissions, and Mr. Giolito estimates a new selection is added each minute.

FFFFound: Tokyo-based design firm Tha started FFFFound as a side project in June 2007. “We just genuinely wanted to share images that are considered good by a community of people,” said Erica Sakai, a spokesperson for the company. “At the time, there were no Web sites that offered this kind of service.”

As members add fresh fodder to the site, images appear and drift down the homepage, forming a steady stream of album covers, typographical posters, experimental photography and snapshots of street graffiti.

Unlike the other sites, FFFFound is a closed to new contributors. Ms. Sakai said the team elected to cap the community’s size for fear FFFFound would become overly cluttered and unmanageable. But any visitor is free to browse the catalog of 500,000 images.

I’ve enjoyed browsing these sites, be warned that We Heart It does contain images that are NSFW – I’m warning not necessarily complaining.

Read the NY Times posting.

Google is in the process of digitizing and hosting the entire Life magazine photo and engravings archive, that’s about ten million photos.  Ten million images and they’re all  wonderful.

I love photography and am old enough to remember the real years of weekly Life magazine.  For me, this will not be a productivity booster since I expect to spend plenty of time digging through the images.

So far about 20% of the collection that dates back to the 1750s has been digitized, all will eventually be available.  The photographs are being incorporated into Google Image Search and can be isolated in your search by including source:life in your query.

See the Life magazine search page.

Read about the collection on the Google blog.

I spent time yesterday browsing through the images, the photographs of Picasso particularly fascinated me.  Give them a look.

The picture Google chose to feature in their blog post announcement is also one of my favorites, shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Alfred snapped this in 1963, at the climax of Guignol’s “Saint George and the Dragon” in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. Just as the dragon is slain, some children cry out in a combination of horror and delight, while others are taken aback in shock. Every child is consumed with emotion, masterfully captured by Eisenstaedt’s camera. These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.

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