Wonkers Digest

Here's a couple of items that caught my eye in the last week while wonking out on all things photography:

- The League of Creative Infrared Photographers (there should be more leagues out there, don't you think?) looks to bring together infrared photography enthusiasts from all around to share their images, tips, techniques and experiences. This comes as a response to Kodak's discontinuation of their HIE-135 film, as well as the increased availability of cheaper and used DSLRs on the market that can be converted for use in infrared photography. Full disclosure – I've never shot in any kind of infrared format, and probably don't care to see any more of the same clichéd "white fuzzy trees" shots, but I'm curious to see more of their members' work.

- The New York Times has a cool little piece up about O. Winston Link, famous for photographing the giant locomotives on the Norfolk and Western line during it's completion in the late 50s. Many of Link's images were carefully constructed and lighted compositions, relying little on chance and more on lots of flash bulbs and rapport with the train engineers (who would occasionally back up and come back through the frame again so he could catch the perfect shot). This great interactive graphic goes into detail about how the image was put together. I think there's probably a lot of folks out there that would decry the "staged" nature of this and other photos in Link's portfolio, but I love thinking about all the technical hoops he had to jump through to get this image. That photography can be about both capturing a fleeting, natural moment and assembling an elaborate scene in front of the camera is what fascinates me so much about the medium.

- Deleted Images requests all of the photos you would normally delete from your digital camera for being too darlk/blurry/whatever. The site calls itself "The Junkyard of Art," but I don't think that's necessarily correct. I don't see much here that's art in that it was a conscientious exercise in imagemaking. That doesn't mean that I think it's a junkyard though – there are a lot of intriguing, happy accidents here that are oddly compelling. And in the future when we'll no longer have old shoe boxes of negatives to look through, and are instead trying to figure out how in the hell folks in the early 21st century got images on these weird, shiny discs, these may be the only images we have left.