I found some heavy poster stock while cleaning out a closet and decided to try my hand at mounting a few prints. I quickly discovered that the spray adhesive I was using is vastly less forgiving than I thought. My table was momentarily a wood-shod piece of flypaper until I found an appropriate solvent (50% toluene/50% isopropyl alcohol go!) but the true disaster were the prints. Bubbles, bulges, creases and some alignings that Michael J Fox could have set more assiduously.  I did some trimming triage and they didn’t turn out half bad, maybe I should aim to be the Jackson Pollack of mounting and framing.
Tag: photography
Photowalk at Churchville Nature Center
Teejay had a wonderful idea. Let’s take our cameras, and take pictures of nice things.  So, he, Sam Lodise and I went to Churchville Nature Center and attacked it with photographic vigor. Teejay, having more latent skill and inclination than either Sam or myself took a number of quality shots. Interestingly, the best photo he took of the day was in my driveway waiting for Sam and I to figure out if we wanted to bring our tripods. Here it is:
I printed it out as an 8.5″ x 11″ and it looks swell. I desaturated the background a little to make Max stand out and punched up the red a bit to compensate for a loss of brilliance on printing.
Teejay also took my favorite shot of the day, catching me in my “aggro-photo” pose that’ll I use as my stock icon for things from now on:
I think it conveys my theory of photography whereas the photographer should have a warcry, mine being “ROTATE, CROP TO WIDESCREEN, PUNCH UP SATURATION.” I was mocked for this tendancy in post processing but the new site banner is a result of this. The picture I’ll giggle at for sometime is this gem:
If you blow it up to full screen, Teejay looks a spot like a Faulknerian Idiot Manchild or saying “my feet hurt” and Sam’s preoccupation with his uber-mega-macro-telephoto-portrait-widescreen-pano-lens. He used it in manual for most of the day resulting in a very nice close up shot of blur. If Sasquatch ever had a photoshoot, that’s what I’d use.
The day also triggered two Moments of Fatness.
The whole album:
[flickr album=72157618703444396 num=30 size=Thumbnail]
Douche Camera Block
I’m pretty principled when it comes to not buying things that people I don’t like buy. But I may have to change that.
Ryan: How’s the camera working out?
Me: Pretty well. I’m shooting about 100-200 pictures a week. I’m thinking of getting a macro lens.
Ryan: Yeah, *guy I can’t stand* just got one.
Me: Damn it! First he makes me stop reading New Scientist and now this. He’s really is a jerk.
I really want that macro lens though. I heard he got a telephoto lens too but that was 3rd hand so I think I’m safe. I may have to abandon photography to avoid more of these heartbreaking losses.
Printer Fixes
The first few printed images came out ok but I found after printing a few portraits, this only applied to greyscale or bright colors. Skin tones looked a spot odd as done by my quadtych of Kyle Harris ranging from ghoulish to gangrenous. I also have a few profile pictures of Randy Booz where he looks like he recently became either a vampire or a mime. I purchased a monitor calibrator to fix what seems to be the excessive warmth of my monitor and was stunned. I’ve apparently been producing portraiture for some type of emo mausoleum or possibly a image survey appropriate for the color blind. Sometimes the truth hurts.
So I started printing out stuff to adorn my non-cubical walls at work but all my pictures are nature or people in stereotypical poses. Either they’ll I ripped off issues of National Geographic or failed to remove the placeholder image from the frame. I’ve compromised by making picture frames out of a pizza box and picking the oddest poses I could muster.
Portraiture Progression
After taking another 300 photos over the last two days and reviewing them in Lightroom, I’ve noticed I’ve been too enamored with the dramatically short depth of field of my 30mm lens and about 90% of my pictures are portraits. I now need to expand out into doing small groups or possibly objects before I become trapped in a particular paradigm. I wonder if this is how adult magazine photographers get their start.
Camera Mockery
I anticipate sometime in our future doctors’, occupational therapists’ and osteopaths’ offices being filled with people who have chronic elbow pain from “Digital Camera Elbow” whereby instead of using the zoom function the camera user extends the arms and peers at the live view to take a picture as follows:
The combination of poor focus, unsteady arms, cantilever jiggle amplification, and crappy cameras results in shots that if properly tamed could create a pleasing pointilist effect when the wobble is combined with noise from poor ISO usually results in 12 megapixels of meh. We decided to create a shrine to these Wizards of Wobble. Here are two:
I have to admit. There’s a certain amount of athleticism involved in cantilever photography. Kyle suffered lower back pain on the second take.
The Making of the OSR Video
The below video is the result of a ludicrous amount of time. Had I the chance to go back in time and change my response to Bill’s question “can you make a promo slide show for camp?” I would have said “no, I need to catch up on flossing” or something equally dumb as an evasive move such that I could run when he blinked.
The source material wasn’t exactly designed for promotional means. The photos had a “family photo album” quality to them, which is nice for slide shows and adds a homey touch, but not too good for promotions. Every good picture of the Water Carnival had someone mooning the photographer.
Some photos simply made no sense, such as this gem:
Joe, doing something....
From the cropped picture it may appear that Joe just discover that his boxers were a bad place to store his loaded mousetrap collection, but it can’t be. In the uncropped version, one can clearly make out Joe’s shorts and the only place that pain that’d induce this phase could come. More importantly, this is one of two successive photos where Gary’s to Joe’s right (our left) holding a snake and he’s staring into the distance like someone sent a curling stone into another man’s scrotum.
Trying to find a picture of the water carnival was tough for 3 reasons:
1) The photo was underexposed or noisy
2) Dan Rowley or another member of the Aquatics staff looked like he was about to rip off a kid’s head and sharpen his ogre teeth upon their bones.
3) Some kid is mooning the camera.
Normally the last isn’t a problem as I’m rather good at removing undesirables from photographs as proven by my “no pimple left behind” treatment I’ve been called on to perform for people looking to gussy up a photo. But, somehow the very gestalt of the picture screamed “ass crack!” such that if it weren’t present, the visceral equipment of perception would be aghast to not find a vertical smile as it condensed meaning from a cloud of data.
I don’t want to lash out at the photo takers as they’re all nice people who been given technology with little training like expecting a boa constrictor to operate a x-ray machine or an 18-year old a voting booth. Every camera has a review function built into the LCD so while reviewing the photos I entered a near paroxysmal rage when I saw a photo that was both underexposed and noisy, followed by 22 other underexposed and noisy shots.
Finally, there was the actual content. I excluded several COPE pictures of the mountain board operators seemingly ignoring the kids going down the hill (there’s always the photographer). Although there were several amazingly framed shots of kids succumbing to sudden gusts of gravity from their carbon fibre death traps as the Health Lodge sign came into view. One COPE picture actually made me smile in joy for literally minutes.
Richard Ebright - Transcription Expert
As I thought an later confirmed, Dr. Richard Ebright is an expert in DNA transcription at Rutgers, and he had the courtesy to sally forth and risk death at our COPE course after years of unfolding the mechanisms that create human life.
Gun pictures were tought to get as it was either a child who would probably be blown back as the bullet stayed stationary or a grizzled, slightly crazy adult, getting his last Charlie. Every picture of the archery staff involved them wearing some sort of non-hat on their heads even in the Norman Rockwellesque “Son, lemme show you how to shoot” ones. There were about 20 pictures of people cycling, but each was either a kid, thinking he was about to fall, a kid about to fall, or a kid falling. “Oh Shit!” shouldn’t be the face when one tries to inspire confidence. I could have used a cannondale promo image, but most were out of place.
Considering we started with 13,000 photos I think we pulled out a solid 60. Tempus fugit!