Digital Snapshots Into Unconventional Portraits

The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Online Diary: "When does a still life become a portrait? Susan Hesse knows the answer: when it is a picture of a used Swiffer pad, a slice of pumpkin pie, or a cabbage, each with the face of the man in your life superimposed on it. As with many artistic ventures, Ms. Hesse's series of more than 300 photographs started by accident. After retiring and moving from New York City to Ithaca, N.Y., 15 months ago, she and her husband, Stephen, began taking photographs of each other in their new environment with a Nikon Coolpix 3100. A friend who teaches digital photography at Cooper Union surprised her by compiling them at a Web site (normansanders.com/susan).

Judy Weitz's site about her hometown, New Orleans, also began as a way to keep in touch, but not with a group of friends. She used it to stay connected to her husband. When he took a job with a pharmaceutical company in another city, Ms. Weitz, a fifth-generation New Orleansian, told him, "I'll see you when you get back." Corresponding online over the next several years, the two hatched a plan for the site (mardigrasneworleans.com).

Feb. 9 begins the Year of the Rooster on the Chinese calendar, and it has special resonance if you were born in 1921, 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993 or, for that matter, 2005 (in which case you are not likely to be reading this). Wolff-Michael Roth is not versed in such matters - he did not know that the year he was born, 1953, makes his zodiac sign the snake - but he did lead a team of students in British Columbia who built a site about Chinese culture. It is at www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/438/china/china.htm.

For the record, people born in the Year of the Snake, according to a site built by students at the Chinese Culture Center in San Francisco (c-c-c.org), are "determined in whatever they do and hate to fail." As for any roosters out there, be mindful of this trait as the new year begins: "They can be selfish and too outspoken, but are always interesting and can be extremely brave.""