Congrats to Sheila who got one of her photos published today! Not to shabby She, getting a full page in the New Yorker as one of your first photo credits…

Photograph: Sheila Griffin (2005)

My friends’ baby (her father is a lawyer).

I have marvelled at Denis Darzacq’s photographs before and was pleasantly surprised to see a link to them in today’s VSL.

I have been playing around with my photoblog for over a year. I have tried various blogging platforms and plugins in search of an easy way to manage a photoblog. The quest was elusive and, as a result, I never really gave the photoblog the attention it deserved.

I finally got around to updating my photoblog to run on Wordpress (special thank you to YAFB - Yet Another Photo Blog). So what does this mean? A few things. Most importantly, it means that I will frequently update the photoblog. It also means that you can comment on individual photos (if you wish). Finally, for those of you reading along in your feed reader, the photoblog now his its own RSS Feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/mikeoliver-photography).

There are still some bugs (I can’t figure out the archive pages) and some ommissions (I need to add links back to the main blog and create a few pages), but its up and running and now the design matches the design employed at mikeoliver.org proper.

I hope you enjoy.

I am currently in love with Bruce Davidson’s photos from the old New York City Subway (you know, the one with graffiti inside the trains and really big hair).

I love the old school subway map in the first photo. Visit the entire series, and be sure to spend some time with the East 100th Street series.

So after washing and drying my camera, I finally got around to getting my hands on a new camera. I am a happy boy.

This photo may or may not have been was taken by Sheila Griffin.

The print version of Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photo essay in today’s NYTimes was spectacular. The online version is even more powerful and includes narration by the subjects of the photos.

I recently experienced Julian Montague’s Stray Shopping Cart Project at a gallery in Chelsea (the name of said gallery escapes me). Montague’s project is both beautiful and hilarious. Montague has developed a sophisticated classification system for identifying shopping carts in the environments in which they are found. There are eleven types of Class A: False Strays, including the A/2 Plaza Drift and the A/3 Bus Stop Discard. There are twenty-two Class B: True Strays including the B/7 Transient Imposter, the B/21 Naturalization (a cart resituated by natural forces), and the B/10 Plow Crush.

My personal favorite is the B/13 Complex Vandalism, which can be differentiated from Simple Vandalism by the degree of complexity and effort required to resituate the cart (in his example you can see a shopping cart inside an empty pool that is enclosed within a fence).

In addition to the entire classification system, Montague includes photographs of 160 specimens on the project website. Each is, of course, properly classified.

I am not sure which part of Montague’s project was more enjoyable - the informational graphics and photographs or the accompanying text. Something tells me it is the perfect balance of the two that made this work so memorable.

Update: Montague has a special Site Study: Cleveland and Environs Winter 2005 section. Yeah, I know. That is only of interest to me.

I am in the process of integrating a few thousand photographs from Flickr into this blog. You can view my photos by most recent, tag, and by photo sets. I am porting my photos over from one Flickr account to another so it may be several days before they are all available on the site.

Go ahead, check it out.

Watch Me Go by Sheila Griffin

My friend Sheila is an amazing photographer. I highly recommend taking some time to browse her photoblog.

I am sitting for the New York Bar Exam Tuesday and Wednesday this week. God help Manhattan on Wednesday night. They aren’t going to know what hit them when three thousand over ten thousand over-stressed aspiring lawyers hit the town to cut loose after a summer of memorizing mind-numbingly arcane legal rules.