Cathie Toshach

Prints and Paper

cathie — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:58:58 +0000

Months ago I signed up to participate in SoFoBoMo, a photography project in which you create 35 images and arrange them in a PDF book at the end of 30 days. My project officially began on Saturday, April 12th, when I was visiting a client in Chicago and had the opportunity to do some photography in her studio. She’s a bookbinder and with my subject being paper, it was a perfect match. I’ve got a ways to go before the book is complete, but so far it’s been a fun excuse to take hold of my camera and make some new discoveries.

Weekly Inspiration #2

cathie — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:07:01 +0000

Lee LeFever of CommonCraft does a great job explaining the value of Twitter using paper cut-outs in this two-minute video. Being new to Twitter myself, I initially didn’t get what it was all about and then when I tried converting a friend recently, I found it all the more difficult to explain it’s value. The video simplifies the message just as the tagline suggests, “in plain English.”

(Source: CommonCraft on YouTube.)

Can a bubble car cure my road rage?

cathie — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:33:27 +0000

I love my car, her name is Sophie and she’s a VW station wagon. But even Sophie can’t tame my road rage, or more accurately, road irritation. When it comes to driving, I find everything—from scraping the windshield to poky drivers to cracked bumpers—irritating. Beyond moving to a more pedestrian-friendly city, I fear there is little to calm my angst.

If anything could soothe my commute-induced bad mood, it would be an adorable bubble car like the Honda Puyo (pictured below.) It’s infectiously cute, so much so that it’d be hard to be in it’s presence and feel a funk. Other equally cute cars are featured on OObject, a website dedicated to all things gadgety, including an entire collection devoted to bubble cars.

(Source: Jalopnik.)

Reuters has an article on foldable cars, a design intended to alleviate parking woes. It’s a pretty cool concept and if it’s any more affordable than the pricey VW Mini Clubman (one of my favorites from this year’s Detroit Auto Show, despite it’s name and price), it might just be enough to shift my outlook on the daily commute.

Berenice Abbott Revisited

cathie — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:56:30 +0000

Back in July 2007, I spent a day touring lower Manhattan in an attempt to recapture some of the cityscape photographed by Berenice Abbott in the 1930s. The landscape has changed so much that many of the original buildings no longer exist. On top of that, I had hoped to photograph it from the same perspective as Abbott for easy comparison but various obstacles made it nearly impossible. Still, it was a fun excuse to get out and explore the city and I gained an appreciation for just how dynamic New York City is. In a relatively short period of time, it can become completely unrecognizable from its former self, as evidenced in the few images below. The following images are of Broome Street, starting with Abbott’s image and followed by my image of the same address more than 70 years later.

To begin with, you can see from the image below, how Broome Street appears today. The photograph shows both addresses that Abbott photographed in the 1930s. While neither of the original structures for these addresses remain, the mid-rise building in the middle does still exist.

This image by Berenice Abbott is of 512-514 Broome Street, Manhattan. It was photographed between 1935-1939. (Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.)

This image is of the same address, 512-514 Broome Street, Manhattan. It was photographed in July 2007.

This image by Berenice Abbott is of 504-506 Broome Street, Manhattan. It was photographed between 1935-1939. (Source: NYPL Digital Gallery.)

This image is of the same address, 504-506 Broome Street, Manhattan. It was photographed in July 2007.

Weekly Inspiration #1 (Debut)

cathie — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 03:21:29 +0000

Taking my daily stroll through the World Wide Web, I came across the website for Schematic, an interactive agency (via Communication Arts). Using Flex and Flash, the whole of the website is featured as one big page, which you can navigate using a traditional menu or by using controls to zoom in and out of the site’s content. It reminds me of the project by Jeff Raskin wherein you can, theoretically, zoom infinitely into the website’s content in order to view the minute details of a map or image while still remaining within the original spatial context of the web page. Similarly, this past summer at the TED conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas of Microsoft Live Labs demonstrated Photosynth, which, putting it simply, reconstructs three-dimensional space by compiling images into a highly mutable, scalable, and navigable visual representation of a physical location. These technologies seem to be breaking away from conventional hierarchies and silos of information. Instead, by flattening the virtual landscape and creating new interactions and relationships between documents and data, users can begin to experience more personalization and control in how they choose to navigate a website or system.