Greg took this. Cheered me up no end.
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attributing a scenius
Dan asked a great question after his dConstruct talk:
He asked around it the same time The Oberver got me to write something about smart watches and I asked for help on twitter. Lots of people responded with brilliant, helpful answers. I knew what he meant. I wished there was a way to acknowledge everyone in that piece.
The Observer asked again last night, about 3D printing, with a deadline of lunchtime today. Once again m'twitter colleagues responded with fantastic stuff. The jokes and ideas everyone came up with in a few tweets are for more interesting than the 1000 words I stitched together. When I work out how to do a storify of it I'll try and do that.
But I do want to say thanks to everyone. You're all kind and clever. I know scenius is a terrible, terrible word but you are one, whether you like it or not.
My stupid project for November is to try and write a 'network essay'. I don't know what that means but this experience seems relevant.
detached lens
The other side of this story is that the Sony DSC-QX10 is slightly fascinating.
I'm not a big photographer. I take a lot of photographs but not with any skill or knowledge and those DSLRs always seem too big and expensive. But I am envious of that depth of field your proper photographers get, so this seemed like it might be a cheapish way to do it.
It turns out to be more interesting than that.
It's not perfect AT ALL. The software is typically, oddly, bad, the support we've discussed. But the physical thing seems like proper old-school Sony, well-made, well thought about and at its heart there's a Walkman-like idea about removing something that once seemed essential.
It's a camera without a viewfinder, or a lens for a smart phone. However you think of it, it feels like something new.
It depends on the smart phone, it assumes its existence, it uses that existence to enable new behaviour.
Because having the lens and the viewfinder in different hands makes for different kinds of pictures. Not that I can show you many examples because those ones are mostly of my friends and I've not asked if they mind appearing on here. But you can imagine.
It seems a bit like the Sony Rolly, an object spat out of Sony's mad spiraling search for purpose that's actually a bit of the future. It's a companion object. And, one day, once they've fixed all the laggy, buggy connectivity and software it'll just be the way cameras are.
"extreme and sustained amiable weirdness"
Whatever can he mean?
