Photo: March 2004 Archives
Gotta pee, gotta pee, I'll just post this quick.
As sad as it is, The Daily Show has had some of the best political commentary I've seen lately. The Daily Show. Top of the pack, journalistically. Tonight, they've got Richard Clark coming on. How the fuck did it come to pass that John Stewart can get Richard Clark on the show? And what can I do to make sure that the Daily Show becomes more and more central to America's political and cultural dialogue.
For example: Robert Novak: A Douche Bag for Liberty
Fund Race is actually kinda fun to play with. Look at all those attorneys, professors and teachers. Ok, maybe that's skewed by where I'm looking, but it's interesting none the less.
Apperantly, over here you can order samples of aerogel. Neato.
So any way, I'm back from a bout of illness, being busy and gardening. Whee, I can only imagine exactly how amazingly exciting my life is. In other news, the whole idea of having to delete comments and ban ips based on spam is odd to me.
Oy, I swear everyone in Iowa City got sick last weekend. Must be something in the water. Uhg. My sense of smell is all messed up. Snot makes everything smell like garlic, apperantly.
Reading the news and "The Great Shark Hunt" alternately, I keep expecting to hear John Dean testifying on NPR.
Uhg. Just uhg.
I'm sick as a dog. Really sick. At work. This sucks. Have a picture.
I've finished printing my midterm photos, which makes me very, very happy. Plus, I think I'm still about 2 weeks ahead on shooting and work prints. Which, once again, makes me happy.
Thus, I bring you....more color.
ACM server back up. I'll get around to making a gallery of the new color stuff there at some point, and probably of the prints I'm making for my docuphoto midterm.
So, I just noticed the ACM server is down. Which means a chunk of my stuff is inaccessable. So, if you're looking for something off of keef.net or the page acts funny when loading...well...sorry. Presumably it'll come back up. I hope. That bandwidth and storage was really nice.
This color is very over the top. I don't think there's any subtle colors in this place. But...you know...I like it.
The York TurboMaster!
Erm. Yeah. The plumbers were changing the taps in the darkroom today, so I got fuck-all done, printing-wise. But, I did get some negatives scanned. Which is nice, I suppose.
I hate fiber paper. I love fiber paper. It's such a bitch to wash and dry. It's thick and heavy. It curls like mad. It'll last forever. It curls like a son of a bitch. I love it. I hate it. It curls. That's pretty much going to be my week, I'm thinking. 8 print midterm next Wednesday and I know that if I don't get it over with soon, I'll be involved in knife fights over the lens and enlarger I need to print on 16"x20" paper. But hey, I wasn't planning on doing anything else during break...
And now, an arty food safety violation photo. Less gruesome, certainly. But look at that composition, I tell ya. Once again, in her own words:
I was taking a picture of them not using proper ladles for the sauces and right when I took a picture, an employee put his bandaged bare hand in the picture.
I did not set that up at all (none of the pictures are set-up). He had
an open sore that I asked him to cover earlier. He also should have put
on a glove and not had bare hand contact with any food.
Work...makes...bad...head. No-sleep make unfun grrrrrrr. Kicky.
This one is mold dripping onto the ice in an ice machine, yet another aunt-food-safety-photo.
Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew. I love these, but some of them give me the heebie-freakin-jeebies. In my aunt's own words:
This container is holding soy sauce until it is served to customers.
It was in the dish room under the dirty dish section of the 3
compartment sink. Good thing it is so acidic so it does not have
bacterial growth. We had them get rid of it.
Hoo-ah. More black and white negative scans. This is from a batch back. Aunt sent me 3 more food safety pictures, which I'll probably get posted over the weekend.
Oh, and this should be safe to enlarge, if you want to see how poorly I dusted the negative before scanning it.
More industrial things. I'm 10 rolls behind in printing, but my paper came today, so this will be fixed if I can just stop shooting...off to India Cafe, then the dark room to try out this cheap 16x20 paper and see if it's up to snuff.
(Oh, and click on the image below for a slightly less browser-confuzzling version than people may be accustomed to.)
In the interest of wasting the right bandwidth, RIGHT HERE is a gallery of the Chilled Water Facility color stuff. Now, I'm not usually one to beg for comments but please, please, please let me know what you think. Throw me a bone here. I'm trying to decide if I want to shoot more color or not, and I have very little objectiviy when it comes to my own work sometimes. Especially when it's color.
Ooooh, pretty! bats at shiny thing on a string
UpdateFucking shit fuck, spammers love this entry.
I burned a roll of color 120 the last time I went out and shot. More to prove to myself that color sucks and I should stick to black and white for the whole project. Now I don't know what to believe.
More below. Tell me what you think. Do I suck beyond all measure? Are you driven wild with the desire to bear my offspring? Is it pretty?
We ripped out our old tin shanty/garden shed on Saturday. One of our neighbors stopped by with a small child to guilt trip us into being quiet. Luckily, by that point, we had already hammered all the bolts clean off and were on to the less noisy bits.
It is so Miller Time, yo.
GruntHORKcoughcoughcoughPTOO
Almost forgot, I should note that this is my aunt's photo, not mine. But yeah, it's hot.
Working with massive files can be a downer. Also, my work monitor is much darker than my home monitor. Which is a bummer. Erm. Yeah. I'm really, really out of it. I tore down a shanty yesterday between shifts and I'm whipped. Plus, a server heat death made my day long and unhappy. So you'll have to excuse me for not being my normal bouncy and...something, something...
Warning Clicking the image will point your browser at a 30-some meg jpg. This may well make it shrivel up and die. If you want to see it, save it, then open it with the sort of program that doesn't balk at that soft of thing.
You know, posting at work kinda saps off my desire to bitch about my job. What with the ability to post at work and all.
Ok, these health violation photos (which are, bear in mind, not mine) are a hoot. I'm very, very fond of them. So, I share.
So, Hillel House brought John Waters into town to speak. On Wednesday night. During my photography class. On a week when I had to present. Luckily, NPR's Fresh Air recently interviewed him, so I can pretend, I suppose.
Tonight was some sort of gallery walk in Iowa City, which is like a bar crawl with wine and cheese instead of sexual assault and vomiting. We only hit two of them...and really only hit those two because I knew both of the people. One was Laura Langdon, whose name I'm slaughtering. Interesting urban stuff at Mythos. The other was Brad Causey who had quite a bit of really, really nice semi-abstract color photography, a spot of traditional dance-stuff and a handful of nice panoramic b&w landscapes at the Frame Shop, whose full name I'm blanking on.
A few times, I had to politely interupt Christine to keep her from telling random wankers exactly what she thought of Rothko or quietly step between her and someone rambling about art being a process or how "other-worldly" New York is, in order to prevent bloodshed. Which makes me want to get her liquored up and take her to gallery openings of people I don't know. I'm sure she'll deny this. "I wasn't going to sterilize him, I was just going to give him a love-tap in the happy-sack."
Right, so, I've been meaning to do this for a while, because I think it's kinda funny and neat.
Here we have something I've recently shot: If you click on the image, you will get a ginormous version of the image (on the order of 30-some meg.(Note to Keef, No, I'm not dumb enough to do this to your hosting.))
Which is neat, I think.
My aunt is a food safety trainer and health inspector in a midwestern urban area. I've been talking to her for a while about doing a photography project with her. Going out and hanging around for a couple weeks and following her on inspections. Preferably, of the most skanky nature. There's something about photographing health violations that seems just great. As a selling point, she dropped me an email with one of her pictures (since she photographs violations anyway.)
Pure. Class.
I suppose the point is that if someone is wearing something patently silly or doing something to blatently draw attention to themselves, I'm more than happy to shoot them. For example, if someone is doing Tai Chi in the middle of the Ped Mall where they're obstructing traffic and generally showing all of the hallmarks of poor self control, I'm on it.
Have I mentioned recently how much I love medium format and 16x20 paper? Yes? Well, have I mentioned how quickly and monumentally expensive of a habit photography can be? Oh, that too...well...did I mention that I don't have any paper left right now, so I'll probably be scanning negatives today? Mmmmyes.
Not that I'm just digging around the old photo directories or anything of that sort, just to pull out a picture that amuses me...no, banish the thought.
For someone who spends so much time behind a camera, I'm suprisingly reluctant to photograph people. I think this is partly because I'm not terribly fond of having my picture taken, so I don't usually photograph people unless I think the image is really worth it. There are, however, exceptions. Like, when someone is just begging to be looked at and photographed. For example:
The boots and skirt, to me, scream "Pay attention to me!" so I have a hard time feeling bad for this girl, who is walking, quite rapidly, away from me to pay for her gas, after noticing that I had a camera out. Christine and I were having a good laugh about this. Then, the girl comes back out and gives me dirty looks all the way back to her car. Vis:
So yeah, the point here is that I'm a bastard. And that, apperantly, I'm supposed to be.
Small World-O-gram to Finch
For some reason, I always find it amusing when someone I've been thinking about recently pops up at random on the radar, online-wise.Doubly-so when said person convinced me to give the Invisibles a try, and they pop up on diepunyhumans. Sure, sure, grant-morrison.com would make sense, but I'll take what the cosmos dishes out.
But yeah, I think the point I was going to make was something like..."Hey, look! Shiny!" Except with bigger words or some such.
More stuff from the rally against...hate? I don't know. The whole situation is silly beyond belief. If you're going to get all worked up every time someone impersonates an animal at you, you're going to get your ass beaten. It's just that simple.
