Ploafmaster General

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.

GENTLEMEN...BEHOLD!!!



(via Uncrate, which still has a good one left every now and then)

While searching for whether anybody had created a boat purely from duct tape, I was surprised to discover a host of cardboard/cardboard and duct tape regattas (regattae?).

A number of official local events can be found through a simple Google search or two, and there's a ton of hilarious videos on YouTube as well.

There's really only one word to sum up Rebel Without a Cause:

ICONIC.

This quintessential James Dean film is a prototype to for teen angst cinema. Our protagonist has a history of making trouble, and the movie opens with young Jim picked up by the police for public drunkenness. We learn early that much of his misplaced anger stems from an emotionally emasculated father, an introduction to the overarching theme of broken fatherhood throughout the picture. This lack of adequate fathering may in fact be Rebel's true antagonist as we see every tense situation resulting from the side effects of absent or poor male parenting. Even the climactic struggle reveals the desire of a desperate teenager to regain the father figure he lost as a child.

That's a pretty easy segue to my feeling that the script is spectacular, and with the exception of a few events, is timeless. The dialog feels natural, the pacing is even, and the plot is simple yet complete. Excellent directing augments the story with camera shots to heighten the drama and emphasize the emotional gravity of each situation. And let me just say that, yes, James Dean passed too soon from this world. His acting alone makes this film worth viewing, but he's joined by two strong supporting actors in Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo.

I'm telling you right now that you should see this movie. Make sure it's widescreen, and make sure you're not distracted so you can soak in every frame on the screen. I'm buying this when I get the chance, and I'll be proud to add it to my collection.

FIVE out of FIVE stars from me.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X-PRpqj7N4&hl=en&w=580&h=485]

Jack Conte's version of Radiohead's Exit Music (For a Film) is not only a superb example of a cover, but a very clever arrangement as well which is available for download.

(via Shaun Inman)

So today is "Download Firefox Day," wherein Mozilla intends to set a certified Guinness World Record for the most downloads of a single software program in one day to celebrate the release of Firefox 3. I wanted to participate. I'm an internerd, and besides, I use Firefox on my work computer. Too bad I can't actually download it, as of this writing, since it appears mozilla.com and getfirefox.com (which redirects to mozilla.com anyway, I think) are criz-ashed.

I'm sure everything will be up and fixed soon, but you'd think if you were purposely trying to attract as many visitors and downloaders as possible, your servers would be prepared.

UPDATE: Looks like they're taking care of things, but they put their pages back up too soon. The Firefox 3 download page provides links for downloading Firefox 2. Way to go.

UPDATE 2 (3:10 pm , EDT): I'm finally able to download the right version of the file. Hopefully it's worth the hassle.

The rubber met the road tonight.

We spent a short amount of time reviewing aperture and shutter speed basics before talking a little about prominent photographers and their work. We spend a short amount of time cleaning off our negatives from last week (water spots, man). THEN, it was into the dark room for the rest of the evening to work on contact sheets and prints.

First the contact sheets: we did test strips, initially, where we exposed each negative for five seconds more than the next. This gave us a feel for the range of exposure on the paper. After this we made full contact sheets from entire rolls of negatives at an optimal exposure based on our test strips. I, for example, made my full contact sheet exposed at 30 seconds with the enlarger's aperture set to f11, while some folks used exposed for 35 seconds.

Then on to the prints. We learned how to load a cut strip of negatives into the loader, adjust the height and focus of the enlarger, and set up the easel for the size and shape of our prints. We made test strips here, too, and finally made our own full prints. I chose to make my first real print of the 3600 photograph I've posted earlier, and when I get a chance to trim down the edges and scan it, I'll post it for comparison. I have to say that making prints was actually pretty easy, and a very enjoyable process. I look forward to many more pictures in the coming weeks.

So here's this week's assignment:
Two rolls as usual, same 400 TX, one of them whatever we want, but the other must be all longer exposures; that is, nothing faster than 1/30. If possible, in fact, we're to try capturing movement with these long exposures. Ghosting, light trails, and intentionally shaky pictures are all fair game.

Now I just have to use up this roll of color in my camera so I can get back to the black and white shooting :-)

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.)