Maybe I am too old for the new web (with Photokina report).

A few things happened lately.

First, my mother gave me back an old iPad mini she does not use. I don't need it either and will probably sell it but in the mean time I decided to try it as a new user. So, I reset it, enter a bogus name and try to do what I suppose the average person does when they start: take a few pictures, try tweeter, a google and a facebook account, etc... Nothing illegal or bad in any way, just trying to get the experience of the web as a fresh, inexperienced user. And since I am an "inexperienced user", I am not concerned about privacy or safety, so I live everything at default: GPS localisation, notifications, everything synchronised to the cloud, the works.

As a side note, please realise that today the majority of the users of the web experience it through a cell phone and not through a computer. A tablet being basically a cell phone with a larger screen, that is a good approximation. That iPad even has an active sim card (my mother cancelled the account, but it is still running for a month), so everything is linked to that number. Of course, more recent tablets come with a sim card welded to the motherboard, so they are linked to you for life.

As another side note my experience lacks an important element: I am not able to actually buy things. I could get a prepaid card, but I don't want to bother. That limits the experience considerably, I suppose. Also: that tablet is an iPad and does not come preloaded with a collection of "free" applications (free for the first month and only 9.99/month afterwards...), as some Android tablets do. For these reasons, I gather that the average user experience is even worse that mine. More expensive as well.

So how is the experience? Frankly, I really wonder how to make sense of it. It is a bit like watching TV, except that a hyperactive kid would operate the remote control continuously and the only available programs are adverts. Within minutes, I was faced with more posts I could ever read (and they would continue to fill), my inbox email was receiving messages and the silly tablet was beeping continuously. I could only hold it so long before turning some of the notifications off.

But the average user does not even know that there is a setting for notifications, so you should not wonder that they walk glued to their screen.

On a more positive yet strangely weird note, I posted a single sentence on tweeter and I already have 10 followers. I did not realise I was that witty.

(In the following post, the promised Photokina report).

Now about Photokina. I had the pleasure to visit the show this year. It is actually my first time, I never took the occasion before.

Photokina is big. Really, really big. There are a lot more things than camera announcements. Sure, there are the classic large boots of the big players and a crowd touching the latest iteration of whatever their camera of choice happens to be. But there are a lot more than cameras to be seen: printing, photofinishing, accessories, etc... One large part was devoted to video.

But before I go into details, I should tell you one thing: I learned that Germany is world leader in trade shows. Really. Trade shows are declining everywhere on this planet but in Germany. Everywhere else, manufacturers think that keeping a web site current and paying for adverts is sufficient to sell cameras (or anything else: computers, kitchen appliances, toys, etc...), so why is Germany different? Make no mistake: Germans are well organised and do not run trade shows as a charity, so they would have found a way to finance the whole show, wouldn't they?

And why did I start this thread about my experience as a new iPad user?

Photokina makes big efforts to have you report on the web. They have their own free wifi. They display the correct hashtag to use everywhere. They have a special blogger section, with a team to help you and charging stations for your equipment.

And then, there was another thing I noticed when at Photokina. But I'll tell you tomorrow. It's more fun that way.



(As a side note, I would not mind more "friends" on these fake accounts of mine. But, of course, I can't request anything like that on a forum which prides itself on a "real name" policy, so you'll have to contact me privately. Your account needs not be any more real than mine, of course.)

You sound like my old man looking for 'inches' on my metric rule, Jerome.

Privacy is always an issue. I see privacy as something I seek in preference to a given. When at home I keep my doors closed and only respond to a knock when I'm happy to be disturbed. I have a private number for my phone and only answer my mobile when I recognize the number. My iPad, which is with me constantly, is rigorously scrutinized for preventing people from accessing me. I get no feeds on FB and my email address is only provided to those I am willing to talk to. Gps is off, notifications are off.

Now you might think why I have one. Reading OPF of course.
I read the news a couple of times a day.
It's full of apps for my great grand daughter. Maths, books to read, games, interactive stuff.
I shop. I hate going to the local shopping mall.
I read. Kindle and iBooks is brilliant.
I write. I have word and one drive installed.
I take photos.
I send photos to people, like OPF
It's my alarm, reminder, calculator, translator, currency exchanger, bank, map, wife finder, bus timetable, ............

I can manage without it. I can also manage with it.
It took a while. Then again, it took a while to get used to my new cameras.

I know I haven't covered all the privacy options and there is always someone watching me.
What I can't understand is WHY?
I'm not a threat, I have little money, I don't do illegal stuff, what I have is not worth knowing about.
What they find out they can have. I'm not paranoid, or important, just rude to intruders who knock on my door.

I don't look for inches on a metric rule. I am more like my great grand father who drove a horse cart, when he realised that more and more people drove automobiles. So he tried one to see whether it fitted him.

As to privacy, the real issue is big data. I don't really care whether the NSA knows what I am doing, but I do care when google and facebook restrict my view of the web to what they decide is best for me. Being another person for a couple of weeks is enlightening: it is a completely different web I am suddenly experiencing: not the same sites, not the same people, not the same adverts. I don't even get the same prices on the same products. Are you still asking why people are watching what you are doing? Maybe we all need to have a handful of alternate web personalities to dodge big data?

Coming back to photography: what I am doing on that tablet is what the majority of photographers are doing today. More images are taken and experienced on cellphones and tablets than anywhere else. Phone-only apps like instagram draw a larger audience than all computer accessible web forums combined. By using this forum only, we are a bit in the situation of my great grand father driving a horse carriage in the time of automobiles.

Last but not least, somebody has to produce all the content for the new web sites. If the tablet needs to beep every second minute because a new notification came in, somebody needs to write something to be notified. Now, that is what I experienced at Photokina because Photokina is not about cameras, Photokina is about producing images, hence producing "content".

But first, time for breakfast (as Doug would say).

You should try working for an education institution.
Some jerk off decides what has education value and what doesn't. Based on a range of biassed opinions the classroom teacher is reduced to a mere glimmer of what is available. YouTube is out. Most photo sites are restricted.

If we had just one choice people wouldn't annoy us to look at their option.

Can we go back to posting a letter, having one phone in the street that never worked, visiting the neighbor to watch My Three Sons, listening to Bellbird on the radio and talking to your neighbor over the fence., being slapped by the policeman for being cheeky, sent to bed without dinner for coming home late and told to get a haircut.

Oh, for the good old days, Jerome, when you could guarantee your parents to be one male, one female, married to each other and live in the same house at the same time.

What ever happened in the last 70 years?

In the past 70 years, we had something like 20 different wars, famines, the rise of refugees camps, depletion of fossil fuels, rise and fall of antibiotics, a steady stream of improvements in electronics, availability of contraceptives and the social changes that came with it, the aids epidemic and the social changes that came with the need to inform the general population what sex was really like, the fall and re-rise of religious intolerance, generalisation of cheap travel and cheap telecoms, man on the moon and robots past Pluto and probably many more things I do not recall at the moment.

I don't long for the "good old times". If you have read that in my post, you have misread me.

Also: I know how the Internet looks like from an education institution. I am not asking for that.

Back to Photokina. I already noted that somebody has to produce all the content for the new web sites. I also noted that Photokina makes big efforts to have you report on the web.

What I saw at Photokina and did not expect were people conducting selfie interviews. Basically, they would just put a camera on a tripod, take a microphone in their hand and film themselves "reporting from Photokina". I saw that repetitively in the limited time I spent.

On the flip side of that coin, there is a whole industry devoted to "selfie interviews" exhibiting at Photokina. The "in" thing this year were drones with face recognition: you throw the thing in the air and it circles around you, recognising your face to make sure it always films you from the right angle. There were also simpler solutions. like the "ENG pole" (ENG stands for "electronic news gathering", what a TV crew normally does), a selfie stick attached to a harness so that your go-pro camera (TM) always films you when you walk around. Pro-mounts.eu even tried to convince the assistance that the "cool dude" would have a dozen such cameras attached to a helmet, wrist , vehicle, etc...

Apparently, there is a huge market for that: people filming themselves as if they were a reporter and, presumably, putting the edited footage on the Internet. Obviously, this should solve the "content creation" problem.

Now, anybody who has actually tried to shoot video should realise that there is something very, very wrong in putting a camera on a tripod and running a "selfie interview". What is it?

I'll give you a hint: all this people were male, while the assistance was more evenly mixed.

What is wrong with putting a camera on a tripod and running a "selfie interview" is that it is not really possible to do video alone. Anybody who has tried to shoot video and edit it to something viewable knows that much. We are used to a very high level of quality from movies and TV, we are used to many talents to contribute to the experience (from music to set building, special effects, make-up, light, etc...) that simply letting a camera run on a tripod will not make it. There is only so much which can be done in post.

So any sensible person would simply ask a friend to run the camera and maybe another friend to do the sound. As a side note, there are film students who practice from time to time near my place of employment and they usually run a team of 5-10 people. That is how video is done. At the very least, if one wants to do a Photokina report on the cheap, you get a friend to run the camera and microphone.

They don't do that. How much effort would it be to take a friend along to operate the camera?

I guess that they don't have friends. They don't have a life. They are just trying to pretend to be something on the Internet.

Yes, I know it is a very hard thing to say.

There were other bloggers at Photokina. Bloggers who were successful enough to be actually invited to hold a talk. None of them was working alone. Each one of them had a team to support them, even the ones who pretend to be a "lone photographer" on their blog. One of them was even doing copter work. He would not use an automatic, artificial intelligence machine to follow him. He would do it the right way: one person as a pilot, another person operating the camera (remotely). From a question in the audience, I understood he also used someone with good contacts with the authorities to get the necessary authorisations. A team.

Jerome Marot said:

...One of them was even doing copter work. He would not use an automatic, artificial intelligence machine to follow him. He would do it the right way: one person as a pilot, another person operating the camera (remotely). From a question in the audience, I understood he also used someone with good contacts with the authorities to get the necessary authorisations. A team.

Click to expand...

To be with a team this way, you must have... money !

Thank you for writing this quick report on iPad.

I do not have one. Just a MacBook Pro.

Antonio Correia said:

To be with a team this way, you must have... money !

Click to expand...

Yes and no. If you want to produce content with a team on a regular basis, you need a budget: it needs to pay off in some respect or it will not be permanent. And indeed the bloggers who were successful enough to be invited for a talk had all found a way to get financed.

To get a friend to hold the camera for an interview, you don't really need money. You just need to have a friend. Maybe you'll need to offer him a beer or so, but beer is pretty cheap in Germany.

That is an essential difference. Besides, the new copters that automatically follow you do not come for free either. It may even be considerably cheaper to get a simpler copter and have a friend operate the remote control.

Jerome,

This is fascinating. You cover the experience of being a newbie with an unsecured iPad and then the auteur behind a well thought out but ad hoc team of friends to produce admirable video "content" and then become worthy of speaking of one's ideas and analysis of the phenomenon.

I am keen to hear what next you will devulfe from your investigation!

Perhaps I still have a chance to be famous without "offing" someone!

Asher

Asher Kelman said:

This is fascinating.

Click to expand...

Indeed. Maybe you have an old unused iPad laying around and would join the investigation team?

Jerome Marot said:

What is wrong with putting a camera on a tripod and running a "selfie interview" is that it is not really possible to do video alone. Anybody who has tried to shoot video and edit it to something viewable knows that much. We are used to a very high level of quality from movies and TV, we are used to many talents to contribute to the experience (from music to set building, special effects, make-up, light, etc...) that simply letting a camera run on a tripod will not make it. There is only so much which can be done in post.

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. I know of one national TV network that recently chose to assign the writing, interviewing, videoing and editing responsibilities of news broadcasts to single individuals rather than to teams of three or more. So it is possible for suitably trained and competent individuals to produce video of national TV quality. Cheers, Mike.

Michael_Stones said:

... I know of one national TV network that recently chose to assign the writing, interviewing, videoing and editing responsibilities of news broadcasts to single individuals rather than to teams of three or more. So it is possible for suitably trained and competent individuals to produce video of national TV quality.

Click to expand...

Quality or better 'quality'? The last few years I saw a rise of complaints about the quality of journalism including TV. Do we have an explanation here?

Best regards,
Michael

Michael Nagel said:

Quality or better 'quality'? The last few years I saw a rise of complaints about the quality of journalism including TV. Do we have an explanation here?

Best regards,
Michael

Click to expand...

Could be, Michael. I don't know about practices in networks other the one mentioned. My informant considered that quality there remained high but had shown loss. Cheers, Mike

Jerome Marot said:

As to privacy, the real issue is big data. I don't really care whether the NSA knows what I am doing, but I do care when google and facebook restrict my view of the web to what they decide is best for me. Being another person for a couple of weeks is enlightening: it is a completely different web I am suddenly experiencing: not the same sites, not the same people, not the same adverts. I don't even get the same prices on the same products. Are you still asking why people are watching what you are doing? Maybe we all need to have a handful of alternate web personalities to dodge big data?

Click to expand...

I wrote that last September. Recent political events have shown that indeed the web is different depending on who the network thinks you are.

When I was young, having a peek at the views of the opposites of the political spectrum was comparatively simple: you just needed to buy the newspapers. A simple trip to the newspapers stand would allow one to sample the ideas of all parties there were. The stand attendant could be surprised if one bought "Le Figaro" and "L'humanité" at the same time (I lived in France in these years), but he would not complain.

Today's is a little bit more complicated. We still have the papers, but if one wants to sample the really active extremes, it happens on the web. And the web will only serve you what you already believe (laced with adverts). How can I solve that problem?