SightPhoto Blog

From the time Kodak introduced the Brownie in 1900, a camera that made photography accessible to the masses, literally billions of images have been snapped. Most of those images came home in a paper envelope, got passed around once at a family gathering, then were forgotten in a shoebox or a drawer.

The combination of the Web and the digital camera has changed all that. Picture in your mind all the images reduced to packets of digital information, flowing out over the internet as attachments to emails, or being shared on sites like Shutterfly, Flickr, etc., etc.

A couple of noteworthy Web projects tap into the stream of photos in unique ways. Montage-a-google lets you put in a search term -- Colorado, or poodle, let's say -- and the applications pulls back 20 images from the Google index, arranging them into a cool collage of images. (Okay, after I wrote "poodle" as an example, I figured I better actually try it -- the results made me kind of nauseous, so consider yourself warned).

Another fascinating project, 10 by 10, takes an hourly snapshot of the current images and words flowing from the news services. For a moment, the river of time is frozen, and can be examined -- both a compelling and disturbing experience.