Busy week, spent in a prison out of state on an assignment to be named later.

.:.

Leica announced their $8,000 black and white only M Monochrom today. Of course I want it desperately.

I remember the feeling I had watching Schindler’s List back in, what, 1993? The black and white was so well done and so powerful that I walked out of the theater promising myself to never shoot color film again.

Fast forward to now, I’m looking up at my best ten photographs from 2011 and seven are color. Only three black and whites. I look to the right at my best ten so far this year. Same thing, seven color and three black and white.

Looking at the sample photographs on Leica’s M Monochrom page, I’m really feeling the desire to ditch color for good. There’s never been a better time for it.

Add the new 50mm Leica Summicron lens and I’m only out $16,000.

I love the Leica world. It’s a commitment. In the Leica world it’s not enough to max out one credit card for your dream. You need to max out three or more to get one camera and one lens. Am I saying that if I didn’t have a wife and kids, I would slaughter my financial future for a camera that only shot black and white and a 50mm lens? Hell yes I would.

.:.

Amazing book about the war in Afghanistan… Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan

This book is so good, hitting just about every important point of the Afghanistan experience through one platoon’s experiences. Highly recommended.

Also re-watched Generation Kill. No one can savage poor leadership/management better than David Simon. It all rings so very true.

.:.

Starting to see articles detailing that apps for news outlets are lame. Anyone else sick of pulling up a news website on your ipad and getting a pop-up telling you to download their stupid app? Rather than helping me consume your product, this practice prevents me from reading the article that I’m trying to get to. Readers aren’t going to click a link for an article, hit the pop up, download the app, then search for the article in the app. It’s too much. We click links, and links don’t work in apps. Wake up! Apple has already created an app for your news website. It is well thought out, engineered for the touch screen, linkable to the web, I can zoom in and out to look at articles… it’s a web browser called Safari and it comes pre-installed on every mobile device.

.:.

One of the big problems that the power readers of digital content have is that it’s easy for us to skip topics and stories that we don’t think we’re interested in. We don’t even see them, because we don’t even look at the places they’re posted. That’s the good thing about the old fashioned newspaper, where every story gets in front of your eyes and you might be surprised to find a great story about something you didn’t previously care about. Great sports writing for example. I’m not going to read a sports story, but a great sports story I will definitely read.

What I’m getting at is that better news sites sort their stories by quality and importance rather than subject. Stop breaking out all the news stories, sports stories, entertainment stories and give me the best stories of the day from top to bottom. You’ve already got tabs along the top for Sports, Entertainment, Money, or whatever. Check out how the Guardian does it: http://www.guardiannews.com/

Everything is just out there on the Guardian’s page, in a much looser format. I might even go looser than they do.

Top reads. That’s what I want. I guess the problem is that such a system acknowledges that many posts aren’t top reads and in fact, aren’t worth reading at all.

.:.

Film: The Cabin in the Woods. Amazing.