Speed of Life

This is an image from a street scenes series I took a couple of years ago tentatively titled "Speed of Life". Although I obviously have used photoshop here, as I do in all my images to some extent or another, the blurred effect is from a long exposure time made possible by heavy ND filters on the lens and was not created through photoshop.

But what makes the image particularly special to me is that it was chosen to be included in the fotolog.book.

The project "fotolog.book-a global snapshot for the digital age" which I am very proud to be part of, is the culmination of a lot of very hard work by Johanna Neurath and her tireless collaborators who did a tremendous job putting this book together. Although I haven't seen the book yet, I know it captures a vital slice of the wonderful world of Fotolog as it was in its prime. A big "thank you" to Johanna and all the people who worked so hard to make this book become a reality.

I was absolutely nuts for fotolog for the spring and summer of 2003. Photo sites were new and exciting and fotolog was a definite cut above the rest. I hadn't done any photography for well over 15 years and having recently bought a first digital camera it was a perfect place to play and experiment. It was tremendous fun, I met a lot of people both virtually and in person here in Tokyo, and I was exposed to a lot of very interesting and sometimes out and out brilliant photography. When I joined in May 2003 there were less than 5000 members. That Summer it grew exponentially and by the Fall the system couldn't handle it--hundreds of thousands (now millions) of teenagers with their snapshots precipitated performance issues that eventually crippled the site and to make a long, painful story short, I eventually took refuge in Flickr. The people who run Fotolog eventually fixed the problems (about a year and a half after they started), lots of great photographers and dedicated "old-timers" continue to post their work there, and I still have a special place in my heart for Fotolog, as I always will.