masona

By design. An element of randomness in the reward drives creators to put more and more content into the Skinner box.

The first time definitely has a novelty to the experience of getting in the tank, settling, then floating. Then towards the end of the first session you really start to feel comfortable. Second time around you really get the max relaxation. Floating like that really lets your muscles settle in a way that they never have before - usually I carry that relaxation for a week afterwards. I never was much for massage but floating is amazing.

The fine art market has been doing this for decades by using auction records to set prices.

It was like this for me until I muted any word that was remotely political. All of a sudden it was like a toxic fog had been lifted and I could see clearly again. The article really undersells the importance of muting words. It changes everything.

You answered your own question - it's a play for the next generation.

My kids bounce between a multitude of shared digital spaces (games, chat, social, videos etc) and they would be right at home at some kind of metaverse that would bridge them all (if that's even possible).

Getty already offers free images through embeddable content as well as brand partnerships, so it's natural for them to want a fresh injection of great work. Especially since their library has been rather stale for so long. It's hard to keep nice pictures coming in when photographers are getting royalty statements of only pennies. Of course, that's still more than Unsplash photographers receive. It will be interesting to see how Getty leverages this new model of 'images as ad network.'

The Unsplash dashboard features the number of image views/downloads very prominently and artists treat it as a kind of cachet. An image with 100,000 views at $2.00 CPM is what, $200? It's strange to me that photographers brag about their view counts when it's plain evidence of how much the company is making off their shadow labor. Credit to the Unsplash team for taking this dissonance to its apex - it really did require a new way of viewing images as assets that hadn't exist before. I'm hopeful that they can bring that kind of thinking to Getty. I'm not that hopeful that any photographer benefits from this new partnership.

In the art world it's a pretty straightforward formula: -Buy out the estate of a 3rd tier artist who once drank a beer with a famous artist -Created slick marketing materials written by an art critic who was paid a lot of money to hold their nose -Place several key pieces up for auction and an accomplice buys them at inflated prices -Market is cornered, established prices are high, nothing left to do but sell to buyers who are too lazy to form a critical opinion and who instead rely on the manufactured signals from steps 1, 2 and 3. -Once all the best pieces are picked through you still have a bunch of inflated junk that you can use as collateral for other nefarious schemes. Source: worked in a gallery for many years.

That would definitely make sense if all the shots were from the same angle.

We designed/built a nursery that could accommodate shooting from all angles so that all the different shots would look like they could be in different places. That was important because there were infants (on the changing table) to crawlers (on a blanket) all the way up to toddlers (bumbling around).

Exactly. The thing is, even shooting tethered with medium format, the pipe just isn't big enough to keep up and the computer and/or capture software gets bogged down, too.

It's not about fps, though the shutter was really fast since babies move a lot. That was hard to balance with the lighting because we couldn't fire strobes since it would freak them out.

Basically we were shooting a lot of captures really fast (but not quite burst shots) to get the perfect facial expression. Medium format camera digital back files are so huge that they can't cycle that fast. As it was, the photographer's team had to set up a system that got jpegs and RAWs at the same time: the jpegs were radioed into Capture One for immediate review, while the RAWs went to card and were imported afterwards. It was amazing to watch the team work. We had 30k captures after 5 days of shooting - it was a beast to edit down to 27 final shots.