Ploafmaster General

My older brother sets up for a family portrait outside my grandma's house in Farmville, VA.

Antsy. Today I'm antsy.

I'm adjusting to this archaic Dingleberry device I have to carry around for the week, so I'm less antsy about that. No, I'm antsy because of something I had shipped to my office. My new (used) camera is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and I'm of a somewhat singular mind anticipating its arrival. Once it arrives I'll put a test roll through it and take some pictures of the camera itself using my old workhorse, the Mamiya C3. I should have some pics of and from the new beast by the weekend, I hope.

In other news so personal that I wouldn't be offended if you were stricken by a boredom-induced coma from reading it, I was reminded in a major way that there's light at the end of my educational tunnel. It turns out that because I'm within a year of graduation I qualify for a "priority pin" which lets me register early for classes. This nearly guarantees placement in the courses I want/need during my final two semesters. Hooray for unsettling transition and all that!

Anyway, that's today so far (at this post-lunch hour). I'm expecting 32 small plastic bottles to arrive at my desk soon (125 mL) that I'll use to preserve my Tmax developing concentrate in single-shot quantities without oxidizing the unused portion every time I want to mix up a batch. Assuming those arrive as expected, I'll be processing a roll of Tri-X that I shot at ISO 1600 when I get home this evening.

Oh yeah, and I guess some homework in there somewhere if I can ever stop being such a slacker.

One more shot of my great uncle Vinny at my grandma's house in Farmville for his surprise 70th birthday party.

Today is my first day on this silly thing call the "Primary On-Call" rotation at work. This means I have to carry around an insipid Blackberry that may or may not buzz and ding repeatedly for the next week. It could even squawk at me in the middle of the night.

Now I'm told it's not so bad - I'm basically a communication hub, passing information about emergencies and their causes/resolutions to the appropriate parties. But I'm anxious, none-the-less. Anxious because at any second, any time of day, I may have to stop what I'm doing and spend an unknown amount of time shepherding the story of a problem through its lifespan. But really, I'm anxious that on this coming Saturday I'll be interrupted by the stupid Blackberry when I'm trying to make prints in the darkroom during my final day of the large format photography workshop I'm in.

That class, by the way, has been spectacular in its initial two days. If only for the enthusiasm of the teacher and my fellow students, it's been refreshing and inspiring. All 6 of us students are in love with film photography, and the teacher is an extraordinarily knowledgeable professional with a similar mixture of technical and creative emphasis to me. We spent Saturday learning the basics of the view camera movements and their effects on the image, and we spent some time learning to use a light meter to place our subjects within the desired range of the Zone System. Sunday was spent out on the grounds of the VMFA actually using the cameras to take photographs. As I already indicated, this coming Saturday is about printing from our 4x5 negatives. I can't freakin' wait.

So that's a summary of the past few days, pretty much. This weekend also sees the arrival of my wife's sister - typically a herald of many fun times to be had - so Valerie and I are both looking forward to that.

No emergency calls yet, but I feel like that Blackberry is giving me dirty looks...

As soon as I finish listening to this week's episode of The Talk Show I'll devote my undivided attention to this post...

...Ah, there we go.

In the interest of attempting to continue writing, I present to you another post written largely for the sake of momentum. But I do actually have a real topic for at least part of this entry: The Space Shuttle program. The first space shuttle launch (for orbital testing) was in 1981, the year I was born. Today, some 30 years later, sees the end of the space shuttle program with the final launch of the Atlantis orbiter. I watched the launch live via UStream, and I couldn't hold back a little wave of nostalgia seeing the orbiter lift off, solid rocket boosters and fuel tank under-belly.

But that's only part of my day. The better part of it, at least what I anticipate being quite good, is that I get to hang out with one of my best friends for the first time in what seems like ages. Just dude time. Our wives will be hanging out elsewhere, and we can head out, grab some brew, and just chat. I normally like to go out taking pictures with Dave (he's a great photo-excursion buddy, too), but it'll be nice to just chat, joke, and so on with the dude who was one of my two best men in my wedding. These things get more difficult when graduate school (both of us) and a child (his) start to disrupt your schedule. And as much as I crave the sort of sitcom-style buddy situation where a friend just stops by whenever he feels like it, the real world seldom affords such a situation. So that leaves me to relish these times where I actually get to develop that friendly bond, left unexercised these past six months.

As for the remainder of my weekend, I anticipate a mixture of immense fun and equally immense boredom as I spend much of Saturday and Sunday in my first two of three classes about large format photography, and much of Satureve doing homework.

My primary reason for reviewing the details of my weekend is much more about forestalling the inevitable: my first week on the on-call rotation at work. A week that is sure to fill me with frustration, and empty me of sleep. We'll see...

Trying to get a handle on this writing thing all over again.

I remember a time when I used to post here so frequently that I'd have at least two or three items to share every day. Of course those days included copious links to YouTube clips, pictures, stores, and other items that were somebody else's content. But when posting with such frequency, it's hard not to begin synthesizing at least semi-original thought into the occasional post exceeding one paragraph. That's because to post so many items required me to scour the internet, reading news stories, political commentary, tech journals, and link-dump websites; emulating, in my poorly approximated way, the sort of curatorial approach of Jason Kottke on his eponymous site.

Well the major difference between years ago and today is that I so rarely have that time at work. It's unsurprising, too. I'm no entry-level desk jockey anymore. I actually have people relying on my specialized institutional knowledge. So I can't give the same level of attention to my beloved internet as I used to.

Another difference is that I've long since worn myself out on political and social diatribes. Sure, I may still have a few left in me, and there will never be a shortage of moral, social, and systemic ills, but I've lost the desire and stamina to be a public complainer - hurling my outrage to servers far and wide. Even on Twitter I hesitate to complain, knowing that there are far too many real problems out there to which my petty travails pale in comparison.

And Twitter brings up the final shift. That's been, increasingly, my venue for the quick share; links to McSweeney's articles, pictures, cool products, or funny videos. I hate to post things twice, and I think it's the worst kind of internetting to tweet a link to a blog post that only links to something else.

All told, that's reduced my blogging largely to my own photography with the occasional recap of a restaurant or event I attended.

I'm hoping, however, to simply write when the feeling strikes me. That means that, for a while, my blog may feel more like - GASP! - a journal. I'm okay with that. I want to try writing as a mental exercise, and if that means stream of consciousness, incoherent rambling, so be it. I see it as an opportunity to clean my mental house, uncovering and making room for those things truly worth writing about. Maybe I don't have anything buried in my head worth writing about, but at the very least I can't be a better writer without first writing.

So there's that.

My great uncle Vinny at my grandma's house for his surprise 70th birthday party.

He's a man of wit, warmth, and wisdom.

As is often my custom, when I make changes to my website I make sweeping changes in rapid succession with frequently mixed results.

Well today I made a bit more of a serious chance. I've migrated my entire website over to Squarespace. I've transferred both of my domains (danielcwarshaw.com and ploafmaster.com - both of which point here), and as soon as my files finish downloading from Dreamhost, I'm pulling the plug after more than 6 years of hosting there.

Squarespace has allowed me, in one day, to get my site up and running the way I want with minimal fuss. If I ever get around to customizing the look the way I want, it should be fairly straight-forward, but I'm happy with things the way they are right now. And I even implemented a little CSS trick to get my images to auto-resize. Considering I've never taken the time to properly learn CSS (I know, I know...), I'm pleased as punch that it worked out.

So I prepaid for the year with Squarespace. That means I'm in it for the long-haul, and I look forward to having a website that I feel comfortable using again. Oh, and the iPhone app lets me post in Markdown, too, so I'm pretty happy about that as well.

It's a cliché to claim that a barber is a counselor or an advisor, but it's a claim with merit. That a proper barber possesses skills in the cutting, trimming, and shaving of all things growing from a man's capital follicles goes without saying. But any barber worthy of his chair provides much more for the common man than a simple ear-lowering.

You see, a man makes himself vulnerable in a barbershop - trusting his own flesh and blood to the scissor- and razor-wielding hands of another. Such trust, cemented over time and trimmings, opens one up to his fellow man. Perhaps it starts (and indeed may stop) with talk of sports, fishing, food, or events around town. Eventually, however, a loyal customer may feel comfortable sharing the minor trials of life and work. Nothing shared in a barbershop ever passes from those walls. One leaves his stress and clippings behind as he steps out beside the candy-striped pole, refreshed.

True barbershops become more difficult to find every year as fewer men enter the trade and the old professionals retire or pass away. This is problematic for me because I have such finicky hair; it grows out rather than down, almost fro-like. Most unisex hair salons, consequently, ask little more than what guard size to use on my head. I see no point in paying for what I could do myself (and certainly no point in tipping for such lack of imagination). So I was excited, several years ago, to discover a younger barber working at the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop here in Richmond, VA. Dave was only in his later 30's but possessed the demeanor and skill of the elder barbers of my youth. After a few months he needn't ask me how I wanted my hair cut; he simply told me to have a seat and got started. I left each month feeling like my hair had a style and shape heretofore unavailable to a Brillo-headed boy like me.

Dave was from Pennsylvania. So each month when I parked my tukhus in that chair we extolled the virtues of a real deli and a genuine pizzeria. We lamented the paucity of decent bagels in Richmond, talked about the real New Jersey Shore, and traded jabs over the Giants (my team) and the Jets (his). Dave wasn't perfect and he had his issues, but he was always affable and a welcome sight on a Friday afternoon when I walked in with a head full of fuzz. One time my wife and I even ran into him at the bar in Lemaire at the Jefferson Hotel and he bought us each a drink. Each month I tipped him well (I believe) and tipped much more in December before Christmas. And Dave called me Danny. You see, everybody generally calls me Dan or Daniel, except my family. Now Dave was hardly family, but he sounded like my family in his manner of speech, so there was something reminiscent of my Yankee childhood when he greeted me.

Today I stepped into the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop just as I always do on the first Friday afternoon of the month. Dave's chair was empty, and when I asked the short Slavic woman where he was she informed me that he left.

"Day off?" I asked.

"No, he left. He's gone."

Gone? He'd left without notice, it seems. Too dumbstruck to simply walk out, and no back-up plan in my head, I sat down in her chair.

"What clipper size? Number two on side and three on top?" she asked. She proceeded to give me the most boring haircut I've had in years. She rushed those clippers over my head with all the style, grace, and craft of military in-procesing.

I don't think I'll be going back to the William Byrd Hotel Barber Shop anymore.

Today I attended a launch event for i.e.* - a conference for a multi-year initiative aimed at highlighting and elevating innovation and creativity in Richmond, VA. There was a series of talks by artists, business owners, and other members of the community. There were activities designed to illicit collaboration and ideas from attendees. And there were a lot of fantastically creative and interesting people involved in putting the whole thing together.

Several of my Twitter followers mentioned that they were only just hearing about the conference, and it turns out that's not an accident. It was intentionally un-marketed - as an experiment, essentially - to see whether word-of-mouth (traditional or electronic) would be enough to build up enough buzz. All 200 seats sold out this week.

So here's a summary of thoughts I gleaned from the speakers throughout the day.

• From painter Ed Trask: He shared a fascinating idea about two major forms of preoccupation when people are out and about; functional preoccupation when we're caught up in our tasks and visual preoccupation when we're caught up in what we see around us.
• From Matt Williams of The Martin Agency: A quote from French author Albert Camus regarding Sisyphus: "The struggle itself...is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Williams was not suggesting that we all seek futile work; rather he was highlighting that the process and work can be fulfilling regardless of the outcome. A recently popular quote from Chuck Close was also shared: "Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work." I've seen this message a lot recently in the creative world, and it resonates with me every time. Echos of this idea would manifest themselves a few times throughout the day.
• From writer Valley Haggard: Be vulnerable and naked/uncovered in your creative pursuits.
• From Jeff and Joey Anderson of BioTaxi: These guys killed it. Dynamic and funny, they seemed to have hooked the whole crowd. They're only 23 and 21 years old, but they're entrepreneurial spirit was evident. Two main take-aways: 1. It's all about people helping people - small businesses helping small businesses. 2. Be open to new, untested ideas, and just get started doing.
• From the folks at Rainbow Station: Why not teach leadership skills to kids? They have kids participating in volunteer work at the preschool level, and they were genuinely interested. While a lot of the philosophy comes from Steven Covey books (the language of which makes me gag a bit), it's remarkable to see such young kids engaged with their communities instead of just their toys.
• From Ken Johnson of Johnson, Inc.: He doesn't worry about his competitors - he makes himself his own competition so that he's always trying to improve.
• From Cam DiNunzio of Black Iris Music: 1. Do the work you want. 2. Own your work (whether it's artful or just paying the bills). 3. Be the easiest person to work with in the room.
• From poet Joshua Poteat: Don't let your lack of credentials keep you from doing something.
• From artist Liz Kellinger: Don't let "not understanding" keep you from doing. She never knew what compelled her to leave the business world and move into the visual arts, but she just went with it.

Also, there were mixed messages on the importance of "inspiration" touched-off by that quote from Chuck Close. I think it may have been important for somebody to differentiate between waiting on inspiration to strike before working and seeing inspiration as a set of inputs that help shape the outcome of your creative process.

Whew! That doesn't cover everything, and it completely missis the short "pod talks" where several speakers had 8 minutes each, and attendees chose between 4 presentations. I had an accidental "local small business-owner" theme with my choices hearing great origin stories from the proprietors of Pizza Tonight, West Coast Kix, The Camel, and Scoot Richmond. I sure hope there are follow-up events, particular smaller meetings and happenings designed to keep up the direction and enthusiasm generated by this launch conference.

And a parting word: During a break-out session in small groups we were asked to answer some questions about what this conference means for our actions in the future. Two people in my group described the notion that folks from different backgrounds trying to solve a problem together are more likely to be creative in their joint problem solving because they are each naive about each other's existing assumptions and ideologies. This is advantageous over homogenous groups attacking a problem where they may be hampered by shared misconceptions.

Let's be naive together.

Had to snag a normal lens in advance of my trip to Budapest, right?

UNDERSTANDING that: museums often operate under severe budgetary constraints and that the forthcoming suggestion (of a theoretical technological nature) may cost far more than most museums could afford, this blog post seeks not to establish the realism of the ideas proffered therein; rather said post attempts only to suggest a solution to the author's own perceived problem in a manner that would be, in effect, "totally sweet."

So it occurred to me a few weeks ago, while perusing the galleries at the wonderful Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), that it would be helpful to know whether certain works were presently exhibiting. I thought of this while my wife and I were in search of some Chuck Close pieces that we know to be in the museum's permanent collection. But we couldn't find them. And the museum's paper map indicates only (and fairly) which sections of the building contain which major categories of art. Museum's often keep excess pieces in storage in order to rotate in other works from time to time, but I'm not aware of any museums with a system by which patrons can tell whether their favorite works are on display or in a climate-controlled storage crate.

So my idea: location tracking within the museum for each catalogued work of art.

Using RFID tags, museums could mark each work. To keep things simple, the system could track only whether a piece was in a certain room rather than trying to scan the presence of pieces in every potential hanging/display space. Museums should NOT incorporate such asset tracking into their security system due to the insecurity of the RFID format. But using the simple location data along with detailed descriptions of each work, museums could create websites and mobile applications that allowed users to search for works by their favorite artists and see whether anything is on display - and in which gallery. Users could, alternately, search by any other form of data made available by the museum, whether descriptive tags, title, period/style, etc.

So...does anything like this currently exist? If so, I'd love to know about it.

Okay. Everything is set up on Posterous now with my domains pointing here. The theme may change with some frequency in the near future as I figure things out, but for now it's all stable.

Outtake from my photo shoot with Cassandra for my Creatives series. I shot this one using an old sheet film holder and some of the tape was crappy. I was afraid this would happen, but I still like the way this shot turned out.

Ektar 100
Graflex Speed Graphic