Ploafmaster General

The following is excerpted from an actual conversation with an Arby's employee while I ordered my lunch today:

ME: I'd like a roast beef melt -

EMPLOYEE: Do you want cheese on that?

Honda's first production hydrogen car rolled out today, but my excitement can only go so far since it will initially be available lease-only in Southern California to a select few living near hydrogen fueling stations. Maybe they need to start wide sales of the Home Energy Station...

It's no secret that I've been shooting a crap load of film since February (well, as much as can be called a crap load for a guy with a non-artistic desk job). Over the past few months, however, I've witnessed the outmoded medium take hold with quite a few people in my sphere of influence.

I've already highlighted my friend Dave whose pictures seem to improve with every roll, but a few others have come to the fore. My homie Jake, who's only recently acquired a camera from his dad, started clamoring for a film camera since Dave and I started producing lots of output a few months ago. He's shot a single roll of film on my flakey back-up Nikon F, so unfortunately there's not much to show for it yet, but he hopes to put a roll through his new-old Pentax ME Super in the near future to really cut his teeth.

After some explanation of manual film cameras to Mugs, my brother, he decided to drop some bills on a truly stellar deal for a Minolta SR-T 101 and now he's been shooting film for the better part of the past week. He took his wife along for some picture-taking, convinced her to start shooting film again, and she produced some gorgeous results.

Regular users of Flickr already know that film isn't dead (it just smells funny ;-) ), but I'm glad to see several people close to me taking it up either again or for the first time. I wonder how many other people are spooling up rolls around the country, and whether its making any real comeback. I believe the constraints that come with shooting film with manual adjustments provide a valuable learning experience, and I'm happy that folks care about picture-taking enough to educate themselves. I really can't talk about this, of course, without acknowledging the impact my wife has had on this whole post even existing. She gave me my SLR, and from her gift and teaching me how to shoot, everybody I've mentioned has been affected by what you can burn on that thin strip of plastic.

Laugh Out Loud Cats are the brilliant creation of cartoonist Adam Koford. Armed with a brief but humorous "back story," he assembles a collection of vintage-style funnies which bear the mark of expert nerd convergence.

They're all pretty funny, but some of them are clearly genius.

(via tumblin' trey)

I've uploaded a new batch: Nine goofy portraits of Dave and two architectural shots. Check it.

A piece on The Morning News posits that email, sometimes, can be entertaining to read. I really enjoy the lead-in: "Emails have about as much room for nuance as Post-It notes, and less staying power. But sometimes they’re pure poetry."

Reading this page made me pause and consider what's been lost since with the rise of email and instant messaging. With the ability to respond and communicate around the world at the speed of electrons, less thought is required in our written correspondence. The result is an ocean of thoughtless thought passed back and forth with little-to-no consideration of how the message is delivered or perceived.

Of course, this is likely my romanticized notion of the world. I'm sure the world was filled with plenty of trite and careless handwritten (or type-written!) letters long before The Internet changed things irrevocably. Still, it's pleasant to be reminded, as by TMN's article, that the quality of the writing is not dictated by its medium.

There are trends everywhere in creative fields. Brown and light-blue clothes. Chipotle chilis or truffle oil in food. Reflections in web graphics.

There's also crappy creative output in these fields. Trashy romance novels. Kenny G. Soap Operas.

Tonight I'm a little heated about a collision of the trendy and crappy in the photographic landscape: High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography. These images are actually composites of multiple exposures of the same scene which, when done well, can provide gorgeously detailed pictures.

Abused, however, we see work that gags me with thoughts of Thomas Kinkade. Blown-out and garish colors, strange exposures, and unpleasant artifacts around areas with large differences in brightness (such as where a building's roof meets the sky) detract from what are in some cases decent photographs.

I sure hope this fades away in short order.

Compared to the veritable ocean of garbage job listings on all the major job websites, this posting for Greenview Data is a heaving sigh of fresh air.
(I don't know how long the listing will persist, so check it while you can.)

Oh boy. The Smurfs are going to have a movie of their own. This seems like a crappy idea intended to lure the nostalgic children-of-the-eighties parents into theaters, and I seriously hope it flops.

(via Joshua Blankenship)

(click the image to see more details about my new toy on the Flickr page)

What happens when summer blockbusters collide? McSweeney's imagines the answer with Jill Morris' SEX AND THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL.

Bamboo, in recent years, has become a trend so widespread that prices have gone up and the grass-as-industrial-raw-material has found its way into bowls, utensils, flooring, furniture, counter tops, rugs, and any number of other goods on the market. Such popularity owes itself mostly to the perception that bamboo is a sustainably harvestable crop with environmentally-friendly processing practices. An article in Slate this morning, however, charges that there's more to bamboo harvesting and processing than meets the eye, challenging the notion that it's automatically the greenest flooring material available. I'm curious, now, whether such manufacturing concerns exist in non-flooring applications as well.

Holycrapthisistoocoolforwords:

http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.swf?mediaId=585392&affiliate=139603
(via yewknee)

While we didn't make our contact sheets or any prints tonight, this week's class was still both informative and exciting. The intention was to develop our unprocessed roll and make contact sheets from both rolls. Some slowly cooling developer, however, ate up significant time and kept us to the negative processing. This was interesting in its own right though.

The teacher had us practice on already exposed film, and made us close our eyes while we practiced clipping the end and spooling it up. This prepared us to do the following in a light-sealed closet:
1. Pry the film canister open with a bottle opener.
2. Clip the end of the film between the sprocket holes, in a straight line.
3. Feed the end of the film strip into the developing reel and ratchet the film the rest of the way on.
4. Drop the film into the developing can, and screw on the light-tight top.

Once we had a canister with film inside, we were able to begin the...well...this is where the hold-up occurred. The freshly-mixed Dektol was still too warm for developing, so we eventually made an ice bath in a garbage can and floated the tub of developer until it cooled sufficiently to use. This ate up a bit of time, but provided space for everybody to socialize a little bit.

We rinsed the film for a few minutes (there's a spout that allows liquid but not light to enter), and once the solution reached an appropriate temperature, it was poured into each developing container. After much waiting and agitating, the developer was poured out, and the stop bath came next to halt the developing process. Next came the fixer to keep the image from degrading, then a cleanser, rinse, and we could open the containers for the final element - a few drops of a drying agent. By the end of the class we had developed strips of negatives, and seeing those images held up to the light was a pure form of thrill resulting from hands-on learning and understanding. We hung the strips to dry in the drying closet, and we'll work with them next week. I can't freaking wait.

The big take-away from developing negatives, though, was to understand the methodology and process. Because most of the intriguing work of the darkroom is in the printing, we're not likely to process much of our own film. This is fine by me - I'd rather have the precision processing from a commercial lab for my negatives. It's the prints I want to control, and I think we'll have plenty of opportunity for that sort of work in class. Besides, if I have my rolls processed by Richmond Camera, I'll have more pics scanned to CD allowing for further comparison to my prints.

Our assignment for this week:
1. Shoot one roll, 24 exposures, of portraits. The catch? One subject only. Same 400 speed film.
2. One more roll, same film as above, but any subjects we wish. Both rolls are to be processed ahead of time.

This will give us four rolls total for contact sheets next week. More pictures to come!

I'm going to be very distracted today from about 1pm until 2:30 (my guess) because Steve Jobs will be delivering the keynote speech to the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference.

What I'm hoping for? An iPhone with 32 Gb of storage so I can replace my phone and iPod in one fell swoop (and one slimmer device!). I'm pretty sure there will be some other amazing announcements (like some of the applications for the iPhone, or perhaps some updated machines?), but my Windows Mobile smartphone is getting a little long-in-the-tooth.

UPDATE: Okay, so no 32 GB iPhone yet. But the 16 GB phone is going to be $299, so that's a tough call. I've been thinking a lot today about how I could probably do without a lot of the music on my iPod now which makes up the ~16 gigs occupied. Of course, adding new apps to the phone takes up space, and this would be my first "iPod" that could also hold movies. Decisions, decisions...

This past week I was fortunate enough to experience two inventive foods - each from two of my favorite Richmond food establishments.

First off was the pork/pistachio/truffle sausage from the Belmont Butchery. When Tanya suggested this initially I decided to try a link mostly out of curiosity, but I was completely taken aback by how well the components blended, particularly the pistachio and the pork. The black truffle shavings were so spare as to have only a small influence over the complete flavor, but they certainly rounded out the whole thing.

The second was this evening at DeLuca Gelato. While Valerie was deciding which flavors of sorbetto to combine, the proprietor offered me a taste of a new flavor: Balsamico Estasi - Balsamic Ecstasy. Here were raspberries steeped in quality aged balsamic vinegar mixed into a rich base of gelato with shavings of chocolate. Now chocolate and raspberries are a no brainer pairing if you already like both, but the balsamic provided a subtle fruity complexity and tanginess.

Richmond may not have a larger city's profusion of top-notch food outlets, but we sure do have our share of inventive places to chow. This week's surprises confirm that, and reinforce my love of eating here.

This is my favorite shot off my first roll for the photography class I'm taking. I'm pretty happy with it as is, but I'm also interested to see how some of my prints turn out. If I get a decent one off of this negative, I'll post the two side-by-side for comparison.

This is probably one of the most clever song covers I've seen. Old electronics used to play "Nude" from Radiohead:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/1109226 w=580&h=326]
Big Ideas (Don't get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.

(via kottke)

Blankenship blogged about Plainview. Gruber blogged about 280slides. I decided to see how it would work putting the two together.

The result is a little slow on my 2006 Macbook Pro, but the concept and the possibilities are pretty amazing. Combining the two tools, you have a (so far) totally free solution for creating and presenting slide shows by way of a web-based tool and a small desktop application. Both Plainview and 280slides only released this week, so there's plenty of room for improvement, but they each seem to be off to good starts.

Sweet vindication!

Bruce Schneier writes a piece for The Guardian debunking the ridiculous notion that terrorism makes regular use of photography.
(via Daring Fireball)

Have you ever wondered what would happen if four vegans were lost while hiking on a mountain of meat? No? That's okay, because David Henne, writing for McSweeney's, lets his imagination answer the question that nobody asked.

This is, hilariously, for real...and not the first year his has happened, either:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITq-38X2UTY&hl=en&w=580&h=485]

In what was, in my opinion, one of the most beautifully filmed and cleverly directed movies of 2007, Julian Schnabel adapts Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography The Diving Bell and The Butterfly with startling emotional force.

The camera shots are at first simply disorienting and discomforting, representing Bauby's waking from a coma. This transitions to an even more unnerving choice of camera work; the majority of the film proceeds as a series of static camera placements moving slowly about each set like the single functioning eye of this paralyzed man, occasionally "blinking" for Bauby's communication. I've never felt so trapped in place from watching a movie, and I've never experienced film direction so effective at generating audience empathy.

It certainly helped that the acting was excellent all around, the screenplay was well done, and the soundtrack was full of fine choices. This is highly recommended to anyone who appreciates the artistic side of film making, and doesn't mind reading subtitles.

Five stars out of five, and I may have to add this to my collection.

Today Weezer released their third self-titled album (the so-called "Red Album"). I decided it'd be quicker, considering my busy after-work errand schedule, to simply hit the 30-second samples on iTunes.

Yup. They still suck hard. Probably harder, in fact.

Steven Hyden over at The A.V. Club sums it up for is:

The breathtakingly stupid Weezer begs the question: Is this for real? Or are the over-processed hooks and lobotomized lyrics intentional self-parody? When Rivers Cuomo sings, "So turn off the TV, 'cause that's what others see, and movies are as bad as eating chocolate ice cream," is he a comic genius feigning creative bankruptcy?