Joanne Carter, Author at TheAppWhisperer

Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 19 May 2019

19/05/201919/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” ―E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops and the first book that I immediately reread thrice, when I was thirteen. It was the first book that interrupted my thought processes enough to relieve me of outside pressures. It was transient, like a mediation. Today, several new books have been released along an albeit more modern but similar vein. I am thinking of Frankisstein by Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. As well as Ian McEwan’s ‘Machines Like Me’ new release, set in 1982. This counterfactual novel sees Argentinian end the war abruptly with the Falklands becoming Las Malvinas. McEwan introduces an £86k male robot designed by Alan Turing, who in this book, has not been hounded to death for his homosexuality but instead, lauded for his technological breakthroughs. Of course it’s speculative fiction but the complexity is as disturbing as it is intelligent.

During an interview with Lisa Allardice for The Guardian, in a smart London restaurant last week, Winterson concedes, (in response to the Allardice’s statement that creating this novel (Frankisstein) would have taken her down some unlikely digital paths).“I did worry about that. Watching guys have sex with bots, female sex dolls start at around $2,000 for a really crap one”, she said, and it was no surprise to learn that they are “entirely fantasy. They’ve got huge tits and small waists and long legs, but of course what they haven’t got, and never will have, is a clitoris. They don’t have to worry about that!”

It’s interesting to me how the current crop of writing that is very much in vogue is AI based, much like mobile photography and art. Both arts mirror the trends. While the Machine Stops, represented a sci fi fantasy and immense treasured escape from my living reality, now at 50, Winterson and McEwan, along with the AI of smartphone visualisation represent, our new reality, and are the forces driving the process. Today, this mutual cultural presence is the next revolution, it is not just present within photography, it is reaching all arts. In 2015 Taylor Davidson, for Time magazine, described the camera of the future as an app, “a software rather than a device that compiles data from multiple sensors. The smartphone’s microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, thermometer and other sensors all contribute data as needed by whatever app calls on it and combines it with the visual data”. Stephen Mayes, went on to contribute “and still that’s not the limit on what is already bundled with our digital imagery. Our instruments are connected to satellites that contribute GPS data while connecting us to the Internet that links our data to all the publicly available information of Wikipedia, Google and countless other resources that know where we are, who was there before us and the associated economic, social and political activity”.

This is the life we now live, we need to ensure we flesh out, some of the moral dilemmas within the drama of everyday life and remember what makes us human. We need no one to write us an algorithm for how to treat others and how to live well, although some humans, may be all the better for it.

Thank you to all the talented artists for submitting your works to our showcase this week. If you would like your work to be considered for entry in to our weekly Mobile Photography and Art Flickr Group, please submit it to our dedicated group, here. You can also submit images to our Instagram tag for this section #mobilephotographyandimagery.

Poetic Medium, Jun Yamaguchi, David DeNagel, Caren Drysdale, Deborah McMillion, Art Noonan, Lydia Cassatt, Laila, Karen Axelrad, Eduardo Llerandi, jilllian2 – Jill Lian, Chris Montcalmo, Vladislav Niko, Paul Toussaint, Nick Kenrick, Rita Colantonio, Vadim Demjianov, Allyson Marie, before.1st.light – Jane Schultz, borsbschulz2009, Kat McClelland, Susan Detroy, Amo Passicos, Kerry Mitchell, Will Reyes, Susan Rennie, Gianluca Ricoveri, Kate Zari Roberts, Debara Splendorio, Ralf Mauvog, Peter Wilkin, Rob Pearson-Wright, Clint Cline, TheiPhoneArtGirl – Meri Walker, Rita Colantonio, Catherine Caddigan, p.a.hamel, Jormain Cady.

Music this week is ‘As the Mist Clears’©Salt of the Sound

Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,028) via Instagram

16/05/201916/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

Here’s day one thousand and twenty eight of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

Today, we congratulate @mariette_schrijver – Mariette Schrijver with this image untitled.

To ensure your image receives our attention, please upload it to Instagram with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

To view more of her work, please go here

Photo London 2019 Interview with William A Ewing, Mary McCartney and Stephen Shore

17/05/201915/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

This morning I was invited to the Press Conference of Photo London 2019, now in its fifth year (and despite Brexit) continuing to grow at a brisk rate.

Over 100 exhibitors including many of the world’s leading galleries are on display. Stephen Shore presents a special exhibition of new and unseen works as Master of Photography. There’s a new curatorial focus resulting in the strongest fair to date with 25 solo presentations. There is also a strong support for emerging galleries and artists via the Discovery section. The Public Programme includes special exhibitions featuring Roger Fenton, Vivian Maier, Gavin Turk, Eamonn Doyle and Josh Haner.

Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, the Founding Directors of Photo London, said “We are delighted to annouce such an outstanding line-up of exhibitors and special projects for our fifth edition and deeply honoured to present Stephen Shore as our 2019 Master of Photography. As his recent retrospective at MOMA admirably demonstrated, Shore is a truly pioneering photographer who has consistently pushed the boundaries of image making throughout a long and successful career. His Photo London show continues that process presenting work made since his MOMA retrospective.

In its first five years, Photo London has firmly established itself as a world-class photography fair and an important destination for everyone who is curious about he past, present and especially the future of photography: the great democratic art form of our age. Surveying this superb group of artists and exhibitors we are particularly delighted to have strengthened the Fair through an insistence on quality and to have retained our strong international focus with photography from Iran, South Africa, Scandinavia, Latin America, Taiwan and Japan. We very much look forward to welcoming visitors to Somerset House this week.”

There are a host of talks throughout the work at Photo London, with photographers including Martin Parr, Mitch Epstein, Susan Meiselas, Nick Brandt, Gavin Turk, Erwin Olaf and many more. There really is so much to see and to do. I highly recommend you pay a visit if you’re able to. I will most likely pop back over the weekend, so let me know if you’re attending too.

For me, personally, it was a wonderful opportunity to catch up with my friend Mary McCartney, we used to work together a while ago and following our conversation this morning, we’ll be working together again very soon. I filmed her interview with William A Ewing and Stephen Shore during the conference and you can watch that below.

Adobe Lightroom Updates: Become a Better Photographer, Collaborate and Edit

17/05/201914/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

Today, Adobe has announced extensive updates to the Lightroom ecosystem, including new features that help you become a better photographer, collaborate and take your editing to the next level.

This release introduces a new Home view in Lightroom for iOS and Android (coming soon to Mac and Windows) that contains your most recent images; interactive tutorials that are viewable directly within Lightroom; and inspirational photos with behind-the-scenes access to how each image was edited. Photography educators including Matt Kloskowski, Katrin Eismann, Kristina Sherk and Nicole Young have contributed tutorials and photos for today’s release, and more content will be added regularly.

Additional new features introduced in this release include:

You can now invite others to view and add photos to your albums through email or a shared link. When someone contributes, you’ll have access to their full resolution photo in the format that was added to your album, including raw files.
A new Texture slider designed to help either accentuate or smooth medium-sized details such as skin, bark and hair.
Batch editing in Lightroom for Android, Flat-Field Correction in Lightroom Classic and Defringe for Lightroom on Mac and Windows have also been introduced.

Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,027) via Instagram

14/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

Here’s day one thousand and twenty seven of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

To ensure your image receives our attention, please upload it to Instagram with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

Today, we congratulate @ja__graham – Jennifer with this image entitled “No one is more sentimentalised …than mothers on Mother’s Day…but Mother’s Day celebrates a huge lie about the value of women: that mothers are superior beings, that they have done more with their lives and chosen a more difficult path. Ha! Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is, sadly, true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering.

The illusion is that mothers are automatically happier, more fulfilled and complete. But some of the craziest, grimmest people this Sunday will be the mothers themselves, stuck herding their own mothers and weeping children and husbands’ mothers into seats at restaurants.

I hate the way the holiday makes all non-mothers, and the daughters of dead mothers, and the mothers of dead or severely damaged children, feel the deepest kind of grief and failure. The non-mothers must sit in their churches, temples, mosques, recovery rooms and pretend to feel good about the day while they are excluded from a holiday that benefits no one but Hallmark and See’s. There is no refuge — not at the horse races, movies, malls, museums. Even the turn-off-your-cellphone announcer is going to open by saying, “Happy Mother’s Day!” You could always hide in a nice seedy bar, I suppose…

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother’s Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents. Meanwhile, we know the worst, skeeviest, most evil people in the world are CEOs and politicians who are proud parents.” ~ Anne Lamott, Why I hate Mother’s Day

To view more of her work, please go here

Huawei Presents the First Ever AI Driven Fashion Collection

13/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

Huawei, the global technology leader, has today launched “Fashion Flair”, a new smartphone based approach to fashion design that combines the power of smartphone Artificial Intelligence (AI) with creative human flair to generate unique fashion designs of any style. To support the launch of “Fashion Flair”, Huawei partnered with Anna Yang, Creative Director and founder of fashion label ANNAKIKI, to undertake and complete the world’s first 20 piece fashion collection. The collection was unveiled at the iconic superStudio+ in Milan ^{on 9th May 2019.}

TheAppWhisperer Site Optimisation

13/05/201913/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

On Saturday (just gone), I spent considerable time ensuring TheAppWhisperer.com is fully operational and optimised for all of our readers to view our content, with greater efficiency.

When you log into TheAppWhisperer.com now, you will notice that the site is totally secure (I purchased an SSL certificate and installed it). If you sell from a website, it’s imperative that you have one of these, we do not sell directly from our website (and our online gallery already has an SSL certificate). This certificate offers additional levels of security, so if a customer is supplying confidential sales information, it’s protected. The reason I purchased this for TheAppWhisperer.com is because many readers were disappointed to see the ‘not secure’ that Google levies to sites without one. Having now made the purchase, Google will also rank us even higher, so there’s plenty of good reason to justify this purchase.

In addition, I have redirected all our DNS servers back to our host site in California, US. They were previously directed to an advertising site and I wasn’t happy with their service. They were monopolising the content and placing ads over our well written and photographed content. More importantly, our readers were dissatisfied with this too. So, I’ve removed any trace of them, you’ll not see them again. Visit your favourite pages, posts and all future content, now without any sign of an ad.

The site loads at lightening speed (dependent obviously on your connection), there’s a lot of important new functionality added and this will continue to roll out as we strive on with our very encouraging plans.

Thank you for your patience.

Mobile Photography/Art Pic of the Day (1,026) via Instagram

13/05/201913/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

Here’s day one thousand and twenty six of our mobile photography/art Pic of the Day section via Instagram. Each day we select one image a day for our Pic of the Day section on Instagram, with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

To ensure your image receives our attention, please upload it to Instagram with this hashtag #theappwhisperer.

Today, we congratulate @emilio.nadales with this image entitled ‘Light at Dawn, Bolivia, 2019’.

To view more of his work, please go here

Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 12 May 2019

13/05/201912/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

My daughter’s school prom this week manifested into the creation of a taut, magnificently controlled week, with smidgen’s, in my case, of personal survival. The entire week was one of lucid reflection as the period of her school days came to an end with an almost surrealist picture of her leavers celebration. The limpid clarity as an observer and witness to the life changes as she transgresses can only be compared to Claude Cahun’s photomontages, it looks like life, but it’s not life, exactly. Only art can achieve this degree of realism.

I end this week, with a juddering heart, strangely close to tears, knowing that the true emotional nature of this week, gloriously ramps up next week, as her exams commence…

Take heart, view this weeks mobile photography and art lancing showcase, as more and more mobile photographers and artists find us, we are privileged to share their work.

Louise Whiting, Pascale G, Debbie Sutherland, G Billion, Poetic Medium, Kat McClelland, Jun Yamaguchi, Deborah McMillion, Clint Cline, Paul Yan, Arko Rayhan, Prodromos, Vako Darispanashvili, Laila, Peter Wilkin, klimtt – cecilia Sao Thiago, woltarise, Rita Colantonio, Andreas Komodromos, Clare Pickett, Ian Horne, Vadim Demjianov, Tomaso Belloni, Kerry Mitchell, Montse Abad, Kristin, Nick Kenrick, Amo Passicos, Eduardo Llerandi, before.1st.light – Jane Schultz, Catherine Caddigan, Linda Hollier, Lorenka Campos, Barbara Braman, Sarah Kuhn, Judy Wahlberg, Lake MacIntosh, Anthony Madigan, p.a. hamel, TheiPhoneArtGirl – Meri Walker, Charlaleeo, Robin Robertis, Tuba Korhan, Karen Axelrad.

Music this week is ‘You’re own kind of Beautiful’ by Alih-Jey Depena

Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – ‘It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You’ with

13/05/201911/05/2019 by Joanne Carter

I am very excited about this weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art, precisely because I am so delighted that Simon Armitage has been named the UK’s poet laureate this week. He is such a scintillating choice, born very much without a silver spoon, Amitage was born in West Yorkshire and is a former probation officer. He received a phone call from Prime Minster Theresa May on Thursday, just gone, offering him the position. The office of laureate is Britain’s highest literally honour and has its roots in the 17th century. This is not a lifetime post anymore, but a mere ten years, during which he will receive an annual stipend of £5,750 along with the traditional butt of sack: 600 bottles of sherry. I am so looking forward to following his work in this role.

I have included a screen grab of one of my favourite poems of Armitage’s and there are many. It is called ‘It Ain’t What You Do, It’s What It Does To You’ and I feel I have matched highly accomplished street photographer, Tim Bingham’s image ‘Shadows of Colour’ perfectly with this poetry.

You can view and follow Tim Bingham on Instagram here.

If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.

To view the others we have published in this section, go here.