©Lisa Wiseman (2)

Name: Lisa Wiseman
Age: 27
Location: San Francisco
Full-time job: Photographer

Personal project name and short description
The New Polaroid — This project is shot completely with my iPhone and is an exploration of iPhone as the new Polaroid. As the iPhone is becoming a ubiquitous and trendy accessory, on-the-go picture taking is now the norm. I see people using their iPhones to take spontaneous photos in the same carefree way that cheap Polaroid has been used in the past. In concept and ideology, the iPhone mimics Polaroid; however, it pushes the aesthetic forward by utilizing a new non-film (but technologically infantile) medium. Just like traditional Polaroids had a specific size and unique look, iPhone photos are unmistakable because the technology limits them to a fixed size and resolution and imbues them with a unique chromatic aberration that says “iPhone” and nothing else.

©Lisa Wiseman (2)

When and why did you start it?
I have been shooting with my iPhone since I got it approximately two years ago. I started showing The New Polaroid alongside my portraiture portfolios on my website and in my book in June, 2008, along with other personal work including a project shot on traditional Polaroid film. It was important to me to show my potential clients another side of my shooting personality — I wanted creatives to have a feel for what the world looks like to me and what I photograph when I’m not shooting portraits. With a wider breadth of work encompassing still lifes and interiors, I wanted to show that my vision carries through everything I shoot. Showing personal work has directly led to jobs, and when I show my work in person my work seems to resonate more with the viewer because it includes the iPhone images and traditional Polaroids.

©Lisa Wiseman (2)

Do you have a particular image you are especially drawn to so far?
There are always a handful of images that I’m partial to at any given time but it changes frequently! I am drawn to shooting windows, lamps, and empty beds, so there’s often one of those in there. (My favorites right now are the photos included with this blog post)

What has been the most challenging thing about the project?
Because this project is about showing the work that I see and shoot all the time, it’s more inspiring and exciting than challenging. Of course there are snags here and there, but the excitement of showing work that I love overwhelms any challenges I would face.

©Lisa Wiseman (2)

What has been the most rewarding thing about it?
To have other people resonate with my personal intimate work is lovely and very rewarding. I also really enjoy that The New Polaroid has sparked a lot of conversation and interest around my work, including people sending me their own projects or iPhone photos or telling me stories about what my images evoke for them. I love to know when one of my photos causes someone to remember or feel something from their own history. When there is a link between past and present through my images, that’s my favorite thing.

In your ideal world, where would this project end up?
Currently I include iPhone images and traditional Polaroids in my fine art work and gallery exhibits and I would be thrilled to be assigned to shoot a job on my iPhone.

Do you recommend personal projects to other photographers, and why?
Absolutely yes! Shooting what I love makes me feel driven and in love with my career. It also keeps my work fresh and complex and prevents me from becoming stale. I couldn’t imagine not doing it.

“One of the things I do to keep myself balanced is I teach.”

A Photo Editor pointed us to some hopeful news about the future of the media industry. Maggwire.com is planning to charge readers a subscription fee to access a channel where they can get content from a large number of top magazines. On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco-based McSweeney’s announced that they’re releasing a single-issue “21st-Century newspaper prototype” called San Francisco Panorama in December. It’s big and beautiful and nothing like a website — that’s the point.

The judge in the ongoing Google book settlement case ruled this week that photographers are not authors and therefore cannot be included as part of the settlement, according to TechCrunch. The motion to join the current settlement between Google and the Author’s Guild was brought earlier by ASMP, the Picture Archive Council of America, the Graphic Artists Guild, and several individual photographers.

Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, Brigette, confirmed with The Guardian that from 2010 on, it will be banning professional models from its pages and use only women with normal figures. Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief of the magazine, said that he is tired of having to retouch pictures of underweight models to “fatten” them up. Conscientious has more on the story.

Last Wednesday, Toyota posted an apology on the Flickr forum admitting that they have been using pictures from Flickr without photographer permission. They have since removed the Flickr photos from their 4Runner website. PDN reported that Toyota USA’s ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, has reached out to at least one of the Flickr photographers involved.

You’ve probably noticed that the liveBooks RESOLVE blog has gotten a facelift. If you click through the rest of our site, you’ll see even bigger changes that are way beyond cosmetic.

Those of you who read RESOLVE regularly know that we rarely talk about liveBooks here. Our posts are designed to provide photo professional with the information and inspiration they need to run successful, fulfilling businesses. Today, liveBooks is doing just that — so we are excited to share our news with you here.

With the help of $5 million in funding, we are now making our websites available to all photo professionals and visually driven businesses for just $39 a month.

Our award-winning design team (that’s them above) has created a huge selection of pre-designed sites endowed with the same powerful search engine optimization and business management tools that have convinced industry leaders like Harry Benson and National Geographic to choose us as their website solution. With our new flexible pricing and subscription offering, these solutions are available immediately without a big up-front investment.

Of course, we’re still offering the custom-designed websites that we’re known for, and we’re continuing to serve our customers’ expanding business needs by working in innovative ways with our long list of partners.

Here at RESOLVE, you’ll continue to find helpful business advice, important industry news, inspiring new work, and a renewed focus on the innovators who are forging the path through this new media wilderness. As always, we welcome your input about how RESOLVE can serve you better and look forward to hearing from you soon.

~Miki Johnson
Editor, RESOLVE Blog

“Photographers get busy and don’t always come to the blog for news.”

Kodak’s new brand campaign named “It’s Time to Smile,” focuses on strengthening relationships by sharing important life moments, in pictures of course. Behind the happy message, though, is a not-so-cheery outlook. After thousands of layoffs and salary cuts earlier this year, the company reported yesterday its fourth quarterly loss in a row, PDN reported.

Jorge Colberg at Conscientious alerted us to an interesting interview with William Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google and author of a number of books on copyright law, including his recent Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. The interview covers topics from the AP-Fairey lawsuit to the moral imperative of copyright.

Popular news site The Daily Beast, in partnership with Global Philanthropy Group, has launched a philanthropy and photography site, The Giving Beast. Be sure to check out the galleries, featuring works of Sarah Elliot, Elizabeth Gilbert, Suzy Allman and other note-worthy photographers.

Despite some questions about its longevity, the New York Photo Festival will launch its third year in 2010, as Andrew Hetherington reported this morning on What’s the Jackanory? Lou Reed will be one of the lead curators this year, but Andrew tips his hat to Erik Kessels, whose 2008 NYPH conversation with Martin Parr was a highlight. We’re stoked about photo thought leaders Vince Aletti and Fred Ritchin (check out this excerpt from Ritchin’s recent book, too).

Today, I am a changed person. What I previously deemed to be adequate, if not savvy, security precautions for my quotidian web use, I learned was the same as leaving a full camera bag with the top flipped open on the front seat of my parked car. Sure, the doors are locked, but it would take only the slightest initiative and about six seconds for someone to break the window and walk away with tens of thousands of dollars in gear. I know what you’re thinking. You would never do that. Okay, then take the quiz below. If you answer yes to any of these questions, I’ve got news for you: You’re way more vulnerable than you think.

• Do any of your passwords contain a word that can be found in an English language dictionary or in a dictionary covering pop-culture references from the last 100 years?
• Do you ever close a web window that is signed into an account of some kind without logging out of the account first?
• Ever log in to your bank or credit card account without first checking if the lock symbol is active on your browser window?
• Ever log in to your bank account or 401(k) from a free WiFi access point?
• Ever open an email when you’re unsure where it came from?
• Ever log in to a secure site from a borrowed computer?

Why we are the way we are
In spite of the news stories that circulate daily about online security breaches, we are surprisingly apathetic about the threats they pose to us personally. It’s like backing up your computer — it’s a secondary concern until you’re hit with disaster. Then, suddenly, you’re a convert to the church of redundancy.

Unfortunately recovering from a security breach is nowhere near as easy as recovering from a lost hard drive. With the latter you at least have an idea of what you’ve lost. You can lament it over a glass of wine and move on with your life. A security breach places the control of your social, financial, and photographic life in the hands of someone else. And the ramifications will potentially haunt you long after the initial breach.

Consider the following. A friend of mine had a huge falling out with a close friend, who guessed her email password and sent an inflammatory email to her entire address book. Most of the recipients realized her email address book had been compromised, but those who didn’t know her well were shocked. Ultimately she was able to contact everyone and inform them what happened — but you can imagine how things could have gone worse.

My friend, like many of us, never thought twice about the weak password on her email account. The convenience of an easy-to-type, easy-to-remember password took priority over other considerations. She could not fathom anyone using her email account maliciously.

This is what gets us into trouble. We’re good people and have an inherent problem thinking like criminals. It’s hard for us to see our online assets through criminal eyes and predict how to protect ourselves.

Squatting
A while back I was uploading images to the FTP directory of my web site when I was hit with a disk space error. An examination of my FTP server revealed dozens of unidentified folders, most filled with illicit pornography. My head spun. Given the nature of the material, I contacted my internet service provider, filed an official support ticket, and had them remove the files in case there were any legal protocols involved. A hacker had broken my FTP directory password and was serving up an entire website from my FTP directories for months without my knowledge. Oh man, I was pissed.

Unfortunately there was no way to trace the hacker. Moreover, and frightening to consider, if the authorities had found the illegal site before I did, I could have been arrested. An investigation would have revealed I had been hacked, but who needs that kind of grief?

If you’re utilizing a portfolio service like liveBooks that is monitored by a professional IT staff, you’re safer, but only if your password is strong. Weak passwords are the easiest way for a hacker to access to your account. If you do get hacked, liveBooks keeps a backup of your online portfolio going back a week onsite, and going back a month at a secure offsite facility. Recovery usually takes an hour. But don’t depend on those protocols unless you absolutely have to. Adopting safe practices is a lot easier and less expensive.

Good habits
So here we are at the basic security primer for photographers, or anyone else who spends most of their time online. This is by no means a definitive list, but it will help you think more carefully about your online habits. The information here was gathered from Black Hat, Craig Butterworth at the National White Collar Crime Center, and Carl Slawinski from Agile Web Solutions.

NEW HABIT 1 — Free WiFi: Never, ever, ever log in to your bank account or credit card account when you’re on a free WiFi access point. The reason you have to use a password to access most WiFi networks, especially your own, is because that password encrypts the information floating through the air between your computer and the WiFi hub. If the network is open, so is the information your sending over it.

NEW HABIT 2 — Passwords: The days of passwords drawn from kid’s birthdays, dog names, and Star Wars characters are over. I have seen a brute-force attack crack a weak password in minutes. With today’s powerful computers and free cracking dictionaries and rainbow tables available online, hackers can let computers run for days while they sort out passwords.

One of the most effective ways to keep your passwords strong, like ox, is to invest in a product like the highly regraded 1Password from Agile Web Solutions. I have been using the product for years, but only after my discussion with folks who make 1Password did I take my security to the next level.

1Password generates strong passwords, which it stores for you. When you need the password, the application will enter it for you with an easy key stroke. The generated passwords are so convoluted that you’d never be able to remember them, but that’s the point. 1Password is also on the iPhone so you can take your passwords with you. The file that they use to store your passwords is heavily encrypted and would take a supercomputer 128 years to crack it.

NEW HABIT 3 — Bluetooth: A friend at Black Hat showed me his iPhone. The interface didn’t look like any iPhone I’d ever seen. He had hacked the operating system and installed a host of applications that you won’t find in the iTunes app store. He activated one of them as we were sitting in a Las Vegas bar and a list of every iPhone and Blackberry in our immediate vicinity appeared on his screen. Accessing their phonebooks was a button push away.

Bluetooth is a useful communication protocol for headsets and other devices. It has a limited range of about 30 feet, so there’s no reason to get too paranoid. But if you’re in a crowded public place and you’re not using your headset, turn it off.

NEW HABIT 4 — Email, certificates, and secure login: If you’ve ever noticed your web browser address bar, you’ll notice that it sometimes starts with “https” instead of “http.” HTTPS is a secure, encrypted protocol that also activates the lock symbol in your web browser. You’ll see this typically when you make any credit card transaction.

What you probably didn’t know is that some banks will ask you for your login and password on a regular HTTP page and then pass that information to the secure login screen. The problem is, when you enter your login and password in the fields of an unsecured page, it is getting transferred from your computer to the bank’s computer in the clear.

The best way to handle that is to look for the lock symbol and the HTTPS before entering any sensitive information. If the bank home page is not secure, navigate to the dedicated, secure HTTPS login page and then bookmark it. Gmail and other web-based email services are the same way. There are two ways to log in to Gmail — secure and nonsecure.

Have you ever seen a warning in from your web browser telling you that a site has an expired, unknown or invalid security (SSL) certificate? Have you ever said, I trust this site and continued on past the warning? That’s just dumb.

SSL certificate protocols exist to for a reason. If a nefarious hacker sets up what’s called a man-in-the-middle attack, they are presenting you with what looks like the web site you’re supposed to log into, but it’s not. It’s their page, and it’s just waiting to grab your login information when you type it in. If you come across a secure certificate warning DO NOT CONTINUE. I don’t care how inconvenient it is. Sometimes companies let their certificates lapse and an expired warning pops up. Let them know; they can fix it in a matter of minutes.

On the email front, most of us are pretty savvy about not opening attachments from people we don’t know. This includes MS Word documents, which can run macros that play havoc with your computer. Some of the people at the hackers conference told me that they go as far as never accepting Microsoft documents, making their friends save any documents in RTF format.

Lastly, if you get a message from your bank or credit card asking you to log in and update something, navigate to the site manually, never via the link provided in the email.

NEW HABIT 5 — Close the door and update your blog: This is a mistake everyone makes. After watching hours of your life get sucked down the Facebook black hole, many people forget to log out. It’s the same for other portals and networks that are mostly for fun. ALWAYS log out. If you walk in, walk out the same way, and close the door.

If you have a Wordpress blog that you are self-hosting, keep up to date with the latest release. Two weeks ago there was a vulnerability discovered and worm was released that affected old versions of Wordpress. The worm played havoc with thousands of blogs. If you’re not the type to maintain your Wordpress or Moveable Type software, utilize a Wordpress.com, Typepad, or Posterous account — they’ll make sure you’ve got the latest security patches installed automatically.

Hackers are misunderstood
There is a fundamental misunderstanding about who is a hacker. In the days before the media’s adoption and re-branding of the word “hacker,” a hacker was considered a righteous person. They were coders and application creators that shared their creations with the internet community. In fact the Macintosh computer that I’m typing on now was born from a hacker named Steve Wozniak. Since the media’s appropriation of the word, it has come to have a pejorative connotation. So a distinction has evolved to separate the good guys from the bad. White-hat hackers, being the good guys, and black-hat hackers being the criminals.

I mention this because not all hackers are criminals. Many of the people who call themselves hackers are of the original ilk. Curiosity about systems is not a crime, crimes are crimes. As nefarious as the Black Hat hackers conference sounds, there are a lot of good people there finding exploits and reporting them so they can be fixed. If it wasn’t for these dedicated folks, the internet would be in a lot worse shape.

Don’t be lazy
Most of the vulnerabilities that we are open to exist because we are lazy. We can’t afford to be anymore. Adopting simple good practices can truly protect your identity and wallet. So if doing anything I suggest here seems like a pain in the ass, it probably is. So is carrying my camera bag into restaurants and other inappropriate places, but at least then I can be absolutely sure I didn’t leave it on the front seat of my car.

“We want to make sure we are as specific as possible to keep our business safe.”

Prix Pictet announced yesterday that the winner of this year’s photography prize for environmental sustainability goes to British based Israeli photographer Nadav Kander, whose project Yangtze, The Long River Series documents the changing landscape along China’s Yangtze River. Pictet also awarded a photography commission to RESOLVE contributor Ed Kashi, who will fulfill Pictet’s annual commission this year in Madagascar.

Vincent Laforet released his latest short film, Nocturne, shot with a prototype Canon 1D MKIV on Monday, but was asked by Canon to take it down the following day, he explained on his blog. Photo Business News and Fake Chuck Westfall both took Canon Japan to task for the move. If you didn’t catch Nocturne before it was taken down, it’s on YouTube, of course.

And the drama goes on. After Shepard Fairey admitted last week that he had lied about his source of his Obama image, the Associated Press released a statement on Tuesday that they are challenging Fairey’s account in court as “purposely deceiving.” Excerpts of AP’s most recent court filings and the letter Fairey’s attorneys sent to the AP are available at PDN.

Jen Bekman Projects, the innovative creator of the 20×200 prints store and the Hey, Hot Shot! photo competition, received $800K+ in venture capital funding. The series A funding was led by California-based venture capitalist True Ventures, along with a other angel investors.