Ploafmaster General

Tonight's class started off by demonstrating a camera obscura constructed by taping black tarp over the windows except for a penny-sized hole cut out of a flattened piece of soda can. When we killed the lights, the whole room was turned into a canvas for an upside-down projected image of the scene outside. It was impressive to see how much detail was visible as well as the rich, full color. All this served as an elementary example of the optical principals of reproducing an image.

Then, of course, it was back into the darkroom for more print making. Tonight I took a different path with my test strips; I used multiple strips with a single exposure time on each instead of incremental exposure times along the same strip. This allowed me to have a better idea of how the different exposures would affect the whole image instead of different patches. I think the results were an improvement, and I was able to make three prints after a contact sheet.

There was no particular assignment this week, but as we finished up we were given handouts with additional information about how images are reproduced. Christopher may send us something to work on via email during the week, but otherwise we're simply to shoot more film :-)

I think I'll cut up some of my pre-class negatives this week so I can make prints from those images next Monday...

Proving once again that its customer service department listens and acts, Netflix has decided to keep profiles after all. Less than two weeks after pissing off hordes of subscribers, Netflix sent out this glorious message:



Thanks for listening, guys. The goodwill you earn from this is worth more than any perceived technical hassle from keeping profiles in tact.

As if you couldn't tell, I'm hopped-up on photography these days. I'm also, as you may have noticed, a fan of my locality, Richmond, VA.

It's truly a shame, then, that it's taken me this long to highlight the photography of Ansel Olson. With a background in photography and interior design and a practice in the graphic arts, Olson has a clear eye for well-conceived photographs, be they digital or film. From the literal to the abstract and sometimes surreal, there's a rich variety of work, and plenty of inspiration for a novice photographer like myself.

Okay, there are enough gushing reviews of Pixar's latest release, Wall-E, that I needn't muddy the waters with my lesser writing skills. I loved it. Best movie of the year so far in my opinion.

This post, on the other hand, is about the brilliant end credit sequence. Not only do we catch a glimpse, in a combination of stills and light animation, what happens after the conclusion of the feature, but we also see the visual design of the titles transition from cave drawings through hieroglyphs, to impressionism, and even up to 8-bit video game graphics. Pixar outdoes themselves with their films quite often, and the attention to detail - artistic detail, mind you - in an oft skipped part of a movie was a surprise indeed. Give these folks a Best Picture nomination.

Ten fresh frames on my Flickr pro-feezy.

Today I was thinking about our national debt in the United States, as of this entry estimated at about $9.3 TRILLION, or nearly $31,000 per person. This got me wondering whether other industrialized nations suffered from similar financial problems. So I did what any nerd with an internet connection would do, and researched my quandary on the Internet. Here's what I found:

France has a debt as of this writing well over 1.2 trillion Euros, which is close to $2 trillion, and considering their population this is nearly $30,000 per person.

The UK, in a 2006 estimate, is around 1.3 trillion Pounds, or $2.6 trillion. That's a hefty $43,000 per person.

Sweden, on the other hand, reported today that it expects a surplus this year of 163 billion Swedish Crowns, or $27.4 billion. They're expecting their total national debt to fall to around 933 billion crowns by the end of 2009, or a little more than $17,000 per person.

Yes, it's conspicuous consumption. Yes, it's impractical. Yes, it's so awesome my head asplode.

BEHOLD! The Terra Wind Amphibious RV:


(via Uncrate)

There's an article in The Atlantic making its rounds 'round the blogosphere about the affects on the human mind of the Internet and its immediate information availability. The general idea is that with the advance of the Internet the very mechanisms of human thought are changing, affecting our attention spans and memories. Slate recently published two related articles - one about GPS and its effects on learning about our surroundings, and another about how we read online - that support this notion of technology standing in for our own brain function.

On Tuesday, I posted my short quiz about memorized phone numbers because I wanted to emphasize the dulling of this simple ability. I got to thinking about this after reading the Slate articles (but before The Alantic's piece) and wondering just how many people with GPS units forget simple directions after extended use. If this even happens, how long does it take? Is it different because of the different sensory experience that comes with driving around?

Sure, some people have a hard time remembering all sorts of small details, but I bet for most of my (admittedly few) readers, the idea of memorizing a phone number was commonplace before cell phones went everywhere with us. For my part, I used to know anywhere from three or four times as many phone numbers by memory as I know now. I don't personally have a GPS, but I know several folks who do. I wonder if they've found a tendency to rely on that more than an understanding of where, exactly, they are.

I'll be looking out for other ways in which we turn over our own brain functions to technology and other systems. I can only imagine what impacts yet-to-be-developed devices will have on the way we interact with and understand our history, our world around us, and ourselves.

Oh boy, where do I start?

The only reason I went to see Shyamalan's waste of celluloid, The Happening, was because Val really wanted to see it, and wanted me along for the ride so she'd have an arm or knee to grab if it was frightening. I was glad to go out for the night with my wife, but WOW! was this movie horrible. The script, the acting (I hope just from bad direction), the direction, and worst of all the story were all third rate. I really can't tear apart the details any better than Christopher Orr over at The New Republic, so check out his review for a thorough take-down of The Hapless. I mean Happening.

This past weekend Val's mom showed us some old high school report cards from her husband which she dug up in the basement. The cause for interest was the grading scale - widely different from today's typical American report cards. The letters ranged from "A" through "G" and every letter in between, with "A" as outstanding, "B" as excellent, et cetera.

I give this R-rated feature a "G," for BAD FAILURE.

This one is hilarious, but if you're at work or are sensitive to profanity, beware some of the language...

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1228473 w=580&h=437]
Park from Amir on Vimeo.

(via Jakob Lodwick)

Tonight I decided to eat dinner at Chiocca's in the Museum District. It looks like my favorite sandwich in Richmond has been usurped by a piled-high pastrami and cheddar on rye, nice and hot.

If you can take the smokey and dive-yet-comfortable interior, grab a seat and enjoy. If you can't, call a head and take out. Either way, bring cash, because they don't take plastic (and as of this writing, their in-house ATM is busted). This is the real deal as far as deli sandwiches are concerned.

I have six fresh frames on my Flickr page tonight.

The above is one example of a series of Thomas Roche photographs from the aftermath of fighting at Petersburg, VA in 1865.

Think about this to yourself for a minute...

Without looking at your cell phone, how many phone numbers do you have memorized, including the area code, NOT including your own?
(answer in the comments, please)

Tonight was fairly simple in structure, so this blog post will be light on content compared to past weeks.

We started off each thumbing through several of our teacher's photography books and choosing several which stood out to us. We then described why the photos caught our attention before Christopher expounded a bit on the photographers we examined. Then it was into the dark room for the majority of the evening to focus on improving our print making. More test strips, contact sheets, printing, developing, et cetera. I feel like I got two solid prints out of the evening...one a little dark, the other fantastic. You'll have to wait 'till I get them scanned before seeing what they are, so stay tuned :-)

This week's assignment is fairly simple to describe, but should afford wide artistic latitude: We're to shoot at least one roll, focusing as much as possible on line. I hope to capture some examples of concrete and implicit line. I think a challenge, for me, will be to capture line without all my photos turning out geometric. That could be fun, but it could also be the easy way out.

We'll see. Until then, the shooting continues!

While at my mother-in-law's house this weekend, she indicated she'd been cleaning out the storage room in her finished basement. She spoke about a few boxes containing some of her late husband's photo gear. This was news to me as I thought Valerie had taken all of it in college and gave it to me as my wedding gift.

Not so, it turned out. In one box I found a meter nearly identical to the one I purchased recently - only better. It's in nearly mint condition, has a nice chain, a hard case, and functions perfectly. It's actually older than the one I purchased, at least based on the inclusion of the DIN number in addition to the ASA film speed, but it's otherwise indistinguishable from the meter I bought. I think I'll resell the purchased item and keep the one I found today.

The second box may as well have been a treasure chest to me. Here were several original boxes for lenses and the metering finder. Inside the box for the 135mm lens was a hard case and a lens hood! There's also a different type of focusing screen for my camera, and the original leather fitted case in nearly mint condition. There was an empty box for a 35mm f2.8 wide-angle lens which makes me hopeful that there may be more photo gear in that storage room buried in the hundreds of boxes.

Then there was this glorious discovery:



This is a Pentacon FM 35mm SLR camera, manufactured in EAST Germany sometime between 1958 and 1961. There are a number of quirks about the operation: M42 screw-mount lens instead of the snap-in bayonet mount we're all used to, no lever for film advance - you turn a knob instead, the aperture and mirror do not return automatically to their starting positions after the shutter (though I don't know if this is simply broken), and several other quirks. I don't yet know if it works, but I plan to run the roll of 100-speed color through it since it's only 12 exposures, just to see if it's usable. I can't see this becoming a camera of any regular use (the advances of the Nikon F alone are huge), but at the least it's nice to have a piece of photographic history.

I'm starting to get the impression that Valerie's father was a serious amateur photographer, or at least somebody who dove head first into his hobbies. His Nikkormat slide projector and a presumably unused film enlarger are still in the garage, and who knows what other gear is stashed in a box somewhere. I have to admit that there's a part of me hoping to discover a medium format camera or at least that missing 35mm lens as my mother-in-law continues to dig through storage.

Yeah. I'm sportin' it.

I'm currently at a Holiday Inn around College Park, MD, and when I went up the hallway to grab a soda from the vending machine I noticed a credit card reader. This reader accepted both swiped and contact cards, and you could purchase multiple sodas per transaction before pushing the Complete button. If this spreads, it'll be one less reason for me to carry cash :-)

I was first intrigued by the idea when I saw card readers on VCU's vending machines in the student commons, but they only read the VCU cards. I hope the idea catches on a larger scale.

It appears Martha Stewart's criminal record is preventing her from obtaining a travel visa to the U.K. Who knew a stint in "Camp Cupcake" would force the homemaking maven to wait out the summer at home?

In case you had any doubts that Big Business completely misunderstands youth, technology, and how the two interact:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQJ2SegGWyc&hl=en&w=580&h=485]

Marketing Exec: "Oh yeah, those kids love the blogging. That guy should talk about the blogging."

Big ups to my man Dave for really picking up his photographic game on some of his recent shots.

John Gruber's post covering stray observations from WWDC 08 has this interesting nugget:

The combined market share for, say, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 is larger than the overall market share for Mac OS X. Plenty of developers write desktop software that only works on the Mac — why aren’t more people writing apps web apps that only work in truly modern web browsers?

I hear web developers and designers complain about spending 80% of their time fixing bugs in Internet Explorer. Imagine how much cleaner and spectacular their work could be if that time was spent polishing the app itself? At the least they'd be more productive without having to devote so much time to the garbage browser. I don't think this would work in all cases right now - I don't, for example, see a major financial institution ignoring IE in a sight rebuild/redesign. But for new web applications delivering innovative ideas and functionality, why not?

I'd be interested to see what the browser usage is among early adopters of web applications. My guess is many of them aren't using IE.

Do yourself a favor and check out Tommy Oshima's photos on Flickr. He's shooting primarily film, and he has a fair number of incredible pictures taken with a Super Ricohflex TLR medium format camera. These pictures, particularly, seem to indicate an affordable way into medium format film. Cameras in decent working shape can be had for well under a hundred clams, and maybe even under fifty...

Some of my favorite shots from Tommy include "ripplet" and "...Zarathustra"

Here's a shocking message that arrived in my inbox this evening:



I have to say that I'm extremely pissed off about this right now. I subscribe to the two-at-a-time/unlimited-per-month plan, and Valerie and I split the two DVDs between separate profiles. This allows us to maintain our own ratings for movies we watch, and the recommendation system (one of Netflix's main strengths, in my opinion) for each profile remains unpolluted by each other's differing tastes.

I'm calling B.S. on their reasoning for the change, too. I followed the link to the help page, and the "Why?" portion simply repeats the third paragraph from the email. Netflix has a solid reputation for going above and beyond customer service expectations, so maybe they'll offer a better explanation when I call them tomorrow, but I can't help feeling like their public reason is a PR answer. How will taking away a very useful feature (that I don't think is very complicated) improve the website?

I seriously hope there's sufficient customer push back to this ridiculous move. Otherwise, it looks like I'm going to drop my subscription to a single DVD, and get a second subscription for Valerie. This will bump up our cost by about $4 a month, but at least Valerie's recommendations won't be affected by my art-house flicks, and my recommendations won't be affected by her chick flicks.

Not cool, Netflix.