I hear...
Podcasts are a great thing to occupy your mind with while driving to work, driving to a shooting location, or simply doing work around your house. (That is when not listening to NPR.) It is listening on demand to virtually any subject you can think of. I think this will be the way any type of all broadcast media will be delivered in the future, where you have a choice of exactly what you want to listen to.
I have listed links to a few of them that are photography related here on this page. It is pretty darn cool that you can access information and inspiration about photography in any media form you want now, from books to video and audio. I tend to gravitate towards those that focus on the creative side of photography, philosophical discussions, and interviews with other photographers.
Two new ones I have added are The Candid Frame by Ibarionex Perello and Jeff Curto’s Camera Position. I have only started to make my way through past episodes of both of these, and like what I hear so far. The Candid Frame #4 has an excellent interview with Vincent Versace, a photographer who I have respected for quite awhile now, ever since taking my first Epson seminar with him a few years back. He has an excellent approach and attitude towards imagery, photography, and the process of seeing an image from start to finish. You might recognize Ibarionex’s name from many articles published in Outdoor Photographer – it is a pretty hard name to forget.
Jeff Curto’s Camera position is about the creative side of photography, similar to content found at the Radiant Vista. Of the casts I have listened to so far, much of his discussion is typically about an image that is posted with the podcast or in his blog. This makes them a bit hard to relate to while on the road, but you can go back and revisit the images later on, or listen to it through Itunes where the images are supposed to display in parallel. I haven’t tried this yet.
Lastly, some things are just meant to happen by chance, which is somewhat how the site Stumbleupon works. This site has a lot of tags or categories in which you can ’stumble’ through and it picks sites for you at random. If you happen to like a site, you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down, recommend it to others, or stumble on to the next one. It is an interesting concept, and there is so much to see on the net, you can spend hours just stumbling around. You may not see a lot of these sites by normal search engine queries otherwise. But you can create your own interests in a toolbar like guitars, wine, or photography and go exploring. In turn, it creates a whole network of similar stumblers, so you can see what sites they came across as well. If you download their toolbars for Firefox, it provides a very easy way to jump from site to site, change categories, and rate sites by a simple click of a button in your browser toolbar. If you like this site, you can give me a thumbs up here.
