Something that could easily be over looked about the IMA’s web presence is the amount of social media the museum is creating on a weekly basis.

So in the process of the redesign, the IMA Stream was invented.  What is the IMA Stream? You might ask.  Well the idea behind the stream was to create a single consolidated “stream” of all the content that is being produced by the museum.  The stream contains up to the minute updates from Flickr, Twitter, the IMA Blog, press releases, YouTube, Del.icio.us, and Artbabble.  This allows visitors to quickly browse thru the latest internet offerings from the museum in one convenient spot.

The system was made possible utilizing a common internet standard known as RSS.  In a nutshell, RSS is a standard for sharing and syndicating content across the internet. Leveraging the power of RSS feeds we are able to programmatically aggregate all of our content from multiple sites into a single feed which is what you see when you visit the IMA website.

Recently, I ran across this CG (Computer Generated) video entitled “The Third & The Seventh”.  The scenes in this short film by Alex Roman are absolutely breath taking.  From the authors post “The Third & The Seventh is a FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.”

I highly recommend watching this in fullscreen mode.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

I <3 panoramics.  It’s a great way to bring a much larger perspective to a single photograph.  One thing that has caught my eye for some time is the Polar Panoramic.  How fun, turn our nice little 360 panoramic into a planet shaped oddity.

The snow came down this weekend, and the grounds of the museum made perfect conditions for doing such a panoramic.   So I grabbed my tripod and headed out to the grounds to finally work on my shot.  I wanted to do something slightly different, so instead of using a single 360 degree shot, I took 2 and put one inside the other.  And this is the tutorial on how I did that so that you can make your own panoramic as well.

Step 1.  Take a series of shots for your panoramic

Grab your trusty tripod and find a good spot.  Pan across the scene taking a shot every 15 degrees or so.   Make sure your photos will merge together well on the left and right sides.  And you also want to pick something with a neutral top and bottom portion of the scene.  This will make cleaning up areas later on much easier.  Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, NPR ran a story about an Iranian art exhibit that debuted at the Crewest Gallery in Los Angeles, California.  I find it interesting to see how the recent turmoil in Iran affects the artists of the country.

In the interview, curator Shervin Shahbazi speaks of the many pieces that should have made it to the exhibition but where stopped by Iranian customs agents.  And most were held because they contained the color green and/or other political statements about the current regime in Iran.

Green happens to be the color of the opposition party that was lead by presidential hopeful Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the heavily debated election of 2009.  This election lead to rioting in the streets of Tehran and conspiracies that the election was rigged by the ruling party.  So it goes with out saying why the Iranian government would have a problem with the world at large getting their hands on these pieces.

The censorship of Iran is so strong, that none of the artists where able to even give their real names out of fear of retaliation by the government.

But despite the difficulties presented to these artists, many of their works still made it to LA, and are being snatched up at a very fast pace.

All images provided by the Crewest Gallery’s Flickr Page

Scream-FRZ

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Well, this is my first blog post here. So I guess an introduction is necessary. My name is Kris Arnold, and I just started working here as a web developer. I came here from NUVO Newsweekly as their web developer and photographer.

Given that I don’t consider myself much of a writer, it seems practical that the rest of my blog contain photos, as this is a little more up my alley. Photography is a great passion of mine, and I’m sure as time goes on, I will share many more pictures on this blog.

photo by Rumi Sakuraeda

During my time at NUVO I had a few opportunities to take photos of some familiar faces here at the museum. I also took some time to get some snapshots of our little neck of the woods, quaintly nestled behind the library.

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