Vision Slightly Blurred

On December 19, 2019, Flickr (and Smugmug) CEO Don MacAskill posted a letter entitled “The world’s most-beloved, money-losing business needs your help.” MacAskill described how Smugmug saved Flickr from an imminent demise at the hands of Verizon, and how the company needed the photo community to step up to staunch the money-losing operation.

Was the plea an honest and transparent message, or an admission that MacAskill made a critical mistake in acquiring the company. Online reaction was swift, but not necessarily fair. In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, PhotoShelter co-founder Allen Murabayashi shares his thoughts from his experience as an entrepreneur within the photo space, and his hopes for Flickr moving forward.

As with fashion, the camera bag has moved from a purely utilitarian tool to something that expresses your personality, fashion sense, and indecisiveness. The boxy camera bag of the 70s and 80s has been supplanted by sleek backpacks constructed from ballistic nylon, designs that target women, and rolling suitcases for the airborne photographer. No longer the domain of just a few bag manufacturers, the modern camera bag is as likely to be launched on Kickstarter as it is to be found in your local camera store.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen discuss the psychology of photographers and their bags. And they play show-and-tell with the bags they personally use and explain why they continue to use them.

In the world of appropriation art, there are few that can hold a candle to the notoriety that Richard Prince has built over the past five decades. From cowboys to Rastafarians, his use of other people's photos as source material for his art has led to numerous lawsuits and a frenzy of conversation around whether what he's doing is "art" or not.

For the past few years, Prince has looked to Instagram for source material and has created his newest work by inserting a fake comment and selling the work for $90,000. A recent show at Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art stirred up more controversy because one of the images he appropriated was taken by childhood sexual assault survivor and sex educator Zoë Ligon. 

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen compare Prince's work to that of Andy Warhol, build an argument against appropriation art, discuss how celebrities like Emily Ratajkowski complicate matters, and counter argue the value of Prince's work. 

The holiday season is upon us, and it's the perfect time to start dropping hints about all the wonderful gear and experience that you covet as a photographer. In conjunction with Feature Shoot, PhotoShelter has also released "The Photographer's Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide" with practical and inspiring suggestions from working professionals.

While you're downloading the guide, listen to the dulcet tones of Sarah and Allen's voices while they subtly tell you what you ought to gift them this holiday season. It's a fun stocking stuffer of an episode. Have some spiked eggnog until your vision gets slightly blurred.

You might expect sophisticated use of imagery by the U.S. Presidential candidates in the Instagram age. But the capture and use of imagery runs the gamut from good to bad. And with cash poor campaigns struggling to stay afloat, they often use whatever image is available to them.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen take a look at the websites and Instagram accounts of some of the major Democratic candidates, as well as the incumbent President Donald Trump. What they find isn't always pretty, but that's politics for ya.

Google tapped Annie Leibovitz to help launch the Pixel 4 smartphone with a series of diptychs and videos (shot on Pixel) of social activists around the U.S. According to TIME magazine, Google essentially gave Leibovitz carte blanche to select and shoot the subjects as she saw fit. But are the results compelling? 

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen recount their visceral reaction to the project (e.g. "sellout"), whether tech brands should keep pushing the "Shot on Pixel/iPhone" narrative, and feeling nostalgia for Leibovitz's earlier work. 

Photographers rely on a certain level of trust with their clients to provide a service often before payment is rendered. And for freelance photographers living from paycheck to paycheck, desperation can lead to less than critical thinking skills. This lack of scrutiny creates fertile ground for con men to take advantage of photographers using tricks like the "overpayment scam" to steal hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. 

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen recount their personal experiences with scams, and describe the increasingly sophisticated methods that scammers employ to take advantage of unwitting photographers.

Biologist and Canon Europe Ambassador Audun Rikardsen creates stunning images on land and in the sea – often employing strobes, underwater housings with dome ports, and other specialized gear to give his images a level of eye-popping polish.

Recently, Rikardsen took top honors in the "Behavior: Birds" category in the UK's Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest for his incredible image of a golden eagle just inches away from landing on a branch. The contest prohibits "live baiting" or other activity that "adversely affect [the animal's] behaviour, either directly or through irresponsible habituation," but Rikardsen used roadkill to help attract the eagle.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen discuss wildlife ethics (and how they can vary by locale), contest culture, and how every wildlife photo doesn't need a conservation story. 

The Information Age helped usher in a culture of intellectual property theft that extends from photos to music – even jokes. Some of the most popular Instagram accounts have built huge followings around stolen content, then leveraged those audiences to launch new products and services. 

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen take a deep dive into accounts like @fuckjerry, @historycoolkids, @officialseanpenn and more, and discuss the role of curation, theft, and monetization on Instagram – a Facebook-owned content sharing platform that boasts over 1 billion active users per month.

On October 17, 2019, The White House released an image from a contentious meeting between Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump. Trump quickly tweeted the image with the caption "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown!" and Pelosi responded by using the same photo as her Twitter cover art, writing, "Thanks for the new cover photo realDonaldTrump!"

The image quickly went viral – not only because of the use and subsequent appropriation – but because it fell into the category of #accidentalrenaissance, a designation for images that evoke renaissance-style paintings.

In this episode of Vision Slightly Blurred, Sarah and Allen delve into the ambiguity raised by the dual use of the photos, and talk about other political images that have been even more successful in evoking the #accidentalrenaissance like David Butow's incredible 2018 image of Senators Jeff Flake and Chris Coons during the Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS confirmation hearings.