You may not know Julius Shulman’s name, but I guarantee you know at least a few of his architectural photos. I’m very sorry to hear that he died last night, at the age of 98.

Thanks to @DesignObserver for the link to this trailer for a new documentary of his life and work. He was also interviewed for the Dwell Design Leader series.

The crowdsourced Polaroid gallery at Lens is fun to click through and highly recommended. I have the analog equivalent on our hallway wall — a grid of images taken over the course of several years with various JoyCams. Landscapes, family and friends, adventures, sand sculptures, still lives, party detritus, a sweet cat since deceased. The hole is for an image that never turned up when we moved to this house. My favorite of them all, it’s of a taxidermied moose in a cage, along a roadside somewhere on the way to the desert. Maybe it’ll turn up next time we move.

One of my new favorite blogs, the understated Lark About, posted a bunch of photos by Valerie Finnis (RIP), who, as it happens, I just recently learned about via a feature in The World of Interiors. The Lark About post referenced this, where there’s some discussion of the images as well as the tasty fact that there’s a book of them: Garden People. Shame about the cover, but I’m hoping the interior will live up to the promise of Finnis’ photos.

There's a new photography blog at the Times, called Lens. There are only a few posts so far, so there's no judging it on content at this stage of the game, but it gets high marks for presentation. The navigation is really beautifully done, and there's a full-screen mode and blah blah blah. Go play with it and see.

But what caught my interest was the short essay from Fred Conrad, whose beautiful photo is above, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the digital age. I love everything he has to say about it, and this will sound silly but it ties in with my admiration for the ToyCamera app. I've linked before, elsewhere and surreptitiously, to this interview with the creator of the app. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. I'm one of those people who really mourn the death of Polaroid "instant" film. I was a devotee (particularly of the horizontal version that was resuscitated, for a time, for use in the JoyCam). The best thing about Polaroid film was that it wasn't instant — you had to wait for it. You took your shot, you waited to see what you got, and then maybe you shot again. But you were never frivolous about shooting when you were using Polaroid film. You thought about what you were doing and made every shot count, because you were always aware of the small number of shots per package of film, and the relatively high cost of each.

Until I read that interview with the ToyCamera creator, I hadn't really thought about how the functionality of it was fueling my attachment. ToyCamera re-crops your shot, asks for your approval, then (somewhat) randomly applies a filter from its bag of tricks. You wait while it processes and only then do you see what you got and ask yourself if you want to shoot another. It's a completely different experience from the woefully uneventful act of shooting with a digital camera.

I don't wave my iPhone around while I'm waiting for the image to appear, like we all did with Polaroids, but I am often tempted to stick it in my pocket while it does its thing.

I’ve been promoting this all over, but I’m a big fan of the blog A Journey Round My Skull and got a kick out of this week’s post Poets Ranked by Beard Weight — not least because it contains the exquisite photo of Whitman (sporting a “Hibernator”) seen above. Coincidentally, I’ve just been directed to this charming video of a Whitman impersonator, from a new TV show about books debuting this week:

My favorite thing about our house is that it feels like a treehouse, and my favorite people are those who make this observation. Most recently, a five-year-old boy we’d never met before came in our back door, looked around, and asked me point blank: “Is this a treehouse?” But living here hasn’t quenched my lifelong desire to have a real one — a fancy one. I’ve been collecting images for years, and I’ll be acquiring this new book reviewed and previewed at the LA Times, but I can’t imagine there’s a better image in it than this one.

Hotze Eisma is one of my very favorite photographers. We’ve used a lot of his shooting in the European interiors series I edit, and I’m compelled to say HOTZE EISMA! out loud, emphatically, every time he comes up. I also have a number of the original magazine features on my corkboard and in my files, and so know a lot of these places by heart — as if I've stood in those rooms, in that light. But Emma Fexeus today pointed out something I did not know: his website is not only packed full of images, many of which I’ve not seen before, but there are downloadable PDFs of dozens of homes. So much insanely beautiful stuff. For example, I’m pretty sure I could live happily ever after on this little Netherlands waterway —

VSL’s pick this morning was this remarkable collection of 100 photographs by Michael Wolf — the interiors of 100 apartments in Hong Kong, each 100 square feet in size. Most of the residents are older individuals, but there are a number of couples, a few kids here and there, several middle-aged women with their elderly mothers. How one person can live in this tiny space is hard to fathom, and then you run into this one, which has been divided into two compartments.

The young adults leave me wondering if they’ll grow old in this same cubicle. Some of the rooms look like death scenes in the making, the contents sure to collapse on the tenants. There’s some noble poverty and some squalor, all in this same building, in these identical spaces, but what simply does not exist anywhere is a window.