Moguls of New Media

August 1, 2006 9:06 PM

WSJ: Moguls of New MediaHave nearly a million friends on MySpace and you get $5000 endorsements. Make a comedy podcast with cocktail recipes and you get endorsed by Steve Jobs and get interest from advertisers. Post seemingly impossible self-potraits on Flickr and you get hired by Toyota. The Wall Street Journal looks at these and many more "whos' who of new media". from BlogHer
posted by divabat (22 comments total)

The WSJ link and the "Have nearly a million friends" link are two separate pages - the Myspace one is a VERY Graphics-heavy profile. Sorry, didn't realize the two links look like they go to the same place.
posted by divabat at 9:07 PM on August 1, 2006

divabat, is this the photo from rebekka's stream you were thinking of? Her photos are mesmerizing!

Or perhaps it was this one?
posted by fenriq at 9:19 PM on August 1, 2006

fenriq: the links were off WSJ's picture piece (at the end of the article); this is the photo they're referring to (the floating apple).
posted by divabat at 9:42 PM on August 1, 2006

Those doppelgänger photos are creepy.
posted by Zozo at 9:48 PM on August 1, 2006

i kinda like rebekka's photos, but don't understand her compulsion to mythologize (i.e., lie about) the circumstances -- we all know they're photoshopped to death, so why the "freezing my fingers off/watching my kids play in the snow" baloney? it's creepy.
posted by turducken at 9:50 PM on August 1, 2006

rebekka is a true artist. Very impressed. Deeper in the stream there are pencil and pastel drawings as well.
posted by Ynoxas at 9:51 PM on August 1, 2006

The best part is her second highest friend is delivertheshocker.com - which is apparently some sort of cell phone ring-tone run by people who must be really high all the time...

Deliver The Shocker! She got 5000 bucks for that? I love MySpace.
posted by Fidel Cashflow at 9:54 PM on August 1, 2006

divabat, yeah, I saw that photo. Its a good one of hers but I really like the ones where she gets all freaky with her bad (and sexy) self.

But I remember there were a ton of people calling BS on that floating apple shot so she did it again with a banana and they still called BS on her, non-believers!
posted by fenriq at 10:06 PM on August 1, 2006

Those are awesome pictures, but you can't blame people for calling photoshop on that apple picture considering there's a ton of photostopped stuff on there.
posted by bob sarabia at 10:19 PM on August 1, 2006

Rebekka has great pictures / art / images... but many of them are not photos in the way that I think about that word. Combining multiple photos together (he whole doppelganger thing) as layers results in something which is no longer a photo. That said, her art is quite nice. I'm not sure how many of her pictures are actually photos. So... what bob said.
posted by pkingdesign at 11:22 PM on August 1, 2006

If not photoshop, then dark room and/or exposure tricks.
posted by TwelveTwo at 11:50 PM on August 1, 2006

What's the apple picture? Anyway obviously the photos are photoshoped. Unless she has a twin. And if not, why go through all the work to do something everyone would just assume was a photoshop?
posted by delmoi at 12:19 AM on August 2, 2006

Oh, this? Could be done with puncturing the apple with a rod and attaching it such that it was obscured from by the apple apple itself.
posted by delmoi at 12:22 AM on August 2, 2006

Oh, pshaw. You set your shutter speed just so, and toss the fruit. Given how hard it is for people to set the clocks on their home video units, of course shouts of "fake!" will arise.
posted by Smart Dalek at 12:43 AM on August 2, 2006

Actually, I was thinking that with that one she probably used a shutter cable (tossing the apple, then using the cable - which sets off the shutter). I used to have a cable for my manual camera - it's great for self portraits, or when you don't dare shake the camera at all.
posted by jb at 3:27 AM on August 2, 2006

Someone notices that there are no people of colour on that list.
posted by divabat at 3:28 AM on August 2, 2006

and if you need an agent...

We are a group of experienced Hollywood agents, marketers and entrepreneurs that have teamed up to create the world's first agency for "Internet famous" individuals. Our goal is represent these people, and provide them with the resources they need to further their Internet endeavors.

Are people addicted to reading your blog? Do you have hundreds of friends on MySpace? Do your videos on YouTube get downloaded thousands of times? If so, we are very interested in working with you.

posted by divabat at 4:18 AM on August 2, 2006

"In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." -- Andy Warhol.
posted by beagle at 5:17 AM on August 2, 2006

rebekka says in the comments she does not use layers in her doppelganger pics, but she does say she uses the cloning tool, which in my mind means she takes each picture probably 3 times: once without her, once with her in pose 1, once with her in pose 2, then clones herself from the 2 posed pictures into the surroundings of the empty picture. Voila. I think.

That would be the only way to keep the lighting consistent on the background objects while properly illuminating her.

As far as the apple pictures, toss something up in the air. See how it doesn't go up forever, but decelerates to (almost) a standstill, then begins to fall back to earth?

Line up shot, use remote shutter release, throw apple a few times for practice, take 30 pictures, get amazing result.

Anyone in this thread that knows how to properly work a manual SLR camera could produce that same image within 2-3 hours if motivated.

In fact, if you have the right (enough) light, and the shutter speed was fast enough, you could do it almost the very first try. (Notice the depth of field, she is somewhat blurry, implying a wide aperture, implying a faster shutter speed).

She does use photoshop to a great degree, but doesn't try to hide that.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:37 AM on August 2, 2006

The self-portraits are hardly unique:

http://flickr.com/search/?q=multiplicity&s=int&page=1

Actually, I came across someone else doing this about 2 months ago, whose images were a lot more interesting / weird. Unfortunately she doesn't use the "multiplicity" tag and I didn't make a note of the username.
posted by dvdgee at 8:39 AM on August 2, 2006

beagle: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people." -- Momus or someone he ripped off.
posted by thedaniel at 1:52 PM on August 2, 2006

I love Journal. Their are great story tellers. This one has also been a great article.
posted by aeromit at 5:46 PM on August 6, 2006