Dreams of a Cardboard Box

An acquaintance of mine recently posted a link to an article on Blog.To about a photographer in Toronto, who, for the past 12 years has been taking a single portrait of himself every day. These works compromise some 3500+ images which document his own journey through life. Looking back at my own studies, one has to wonder if this gentleman can be considered a photographer, or if these images, on their own without the aid of an audio or textual explanation, can function as a body of work. Let me explain:

Historically, a body of work has some cohesive theme which ties it all together. Any body of work by a "real" photographer has some underlying thread which pulls the pieces together; without this thread, any collection of photographs is just that: a random assortment. This is what would delineate a shoebox of snapshots of a family from Aunt May's trip the Grand Canyon: While they are both deeply intimate collections of images, the shoebox is random chaos, while the Grand Canyon tells the story of Aunt May.

The challenge that I see with this work is that, other than the portraits of the subject-turned-photographer-turned-subject, what, if any, is the underlying theme of the work? At the surface the work seems to be a random mish-mash of individual images with no cohesive structure which ties it all together. If you watch the mini-webumentary about the work he does go into great detail about how he came to start the work, and what it all means. He even goes to length of how there are a set of sequential images, one of him jumping off of a speaker, and the next of him in the hospital having a fractured foot looked at, because he broke his foot jumping off of the speaker. HOwever, without his explanation, would an individual have been able to make that temporal connection which linked the two images, or are they so diverse in their nature that the potential for an underlying thread is lost in the chaos?

Or is the fact that the photographer as the subject the main theme, and thus it is his own image which ties everything together? And if that is the case, it begs the question whether this is is a body of work, or if it is simply a narcissistic activity aimed at promoting the photographers self? Not that his life isn't interesting -- again as you view the webumentary he speaks of his bout with cancer, and the fact that he has survived is a feat in itself. But then does one grow a new perspective on the work because you now have pity on what he has gone through? Is the knowledge of the cancer, and which throws this body of work into a new light of autobiographical documentation of ones own existence as one brushes with death, something that should be ignored in viewing the work?

But this discussion begs the question about the current state of affairs in the photographic community at large. Above I made reference to the underlying thread in a body of work. However, as evidenced by the likes of Flickr, with the explosion of the interweb and the instantaneous sharing of images from across the globe, virtually every second of every day, the notion of theme has been thrown to the wayside; the incessant buildup of kipple on the internet has allowed the image community to build new, interconnected stories from seemingly disparate elements: the chaos has become the story -- the thread, while frayed, when viewed from 10 meters away is now a hundred thousand threads with a hundred thousand stories, all being spoken simultaneously.

This begs more research.

Part of the challenge in using Windows is that the Regional Settings control many (if not all) of the date formats in other programs in Windows. This in itself is a good thing: users would prefer all applications that they use to behave similarly.

The challenge comes up when you have to distribute documents to other people. My personal preference for dates is in the classic "Y/M/D" format. It allows things to be sorted logically (20110105 (Jan 5, 2011) is before 20110202 (Feb 2, 2011), but if you had the dates in D-M-Y format 02022011 would come before 05012011 -- not the case!), and it was th eway that I was brought up in school. However, when I create reports in MS Project the project uses my personal date preference, where the rest of my organization prefers the D/M/Y format.

A way to get around this is to use a custom date field. You can program one of the custom text fields in MS Project (labeled Text1 through Text10) and designate them as formulas:

The above code snippet formats the activity finish date in D-M-Y, regardless of your own localization settings.

Jay Kana of the Noble Rogues at Lee's Palace. May 21, 2011.

It's been a while since I posted any images. The good guys at The Noble Rogues were kind enough to ask me to shoot for them the last time they were in Toronto at Lee's Palace. I thought it'd be a nice opportunity to have some fun shooting again, try something I hadn't done before (live concert), and give my new camera a good workout. All in all I shot over 100 pics and edited the series down to about 20 images. I'm pretty happy with the work.

Interestingly enough, everything was shot in full colour, but I ended up reducing all of the digital negatives to black and white and treating them as I would have in the darkroom. I guess at heart I'm really a b&w shooter. I also realized that I'm still a heavy "printer" (even though these are for on-screen use). I really love deep blacks and lots of contrast. Next time I might pull out a film camera and try some high speed b&w film to see what kind of effects I can get.

After some experimenting I've managed to successfully scan some 126 film with my Coolscan 9000, without having to purchase a pricey $75.00 mask that I have seen on eBay which is "specifically" for 126 film. I bought some 240lb black paper from the local art store, and cut it into a 21cm × 6cm sheet which fits into the Nikon FH-869G glass carrier. From there, I cut two 6×7 windows into the sheet.

The results were pretty good. I had to tweak the Strip Film Offset setting under Scanner Extras in Nikon Scan 4, but after doing so I was able to fit two 126 frames in the left 6×7 frame mask, and the other two in the other 6×7 frame mask. This assumes that your negatives are cut into 4-frame strips of course. Scanning 30+ year old film, the colours are pretty washed out, but nothing that some colour correction in Photoshop can't fix. I do love the square format; it's a shame that the quality of those cameras isn't that good though. I'm doubtful that I can print any of my scanned 126 film images larger than 6"×6".

So for the price of $2.50 in heavy black paper, I've created the equivalent of a $75.00 126 film mask. Sweet.

Keywords: CoolScan, 126 Film, Photography, Scanning, Digital Darkroom

Since purchasing The DAM Book I've been going through all of my negative scans to ensure that I have everything scanned and properly catalogued. In the process I came up on a negative page that had a mixture of 126 and 110 film, likely from the late 70s or very very early 80s. The pics look like I am about 3 years old.

Some sample scans were successful and I think these will make great gifts for my family (they likely haven't seen the images since they were first taken 30+ years ago). To make this effective I'm going to have to make up a custom slide mask to fit in the glass carrier of my CoolScan 9000. I think if I treat a 4-frame strip of 126 film as two 6x7 negatives, the CoolScan can scan two frames: one 6x7 frame for the left two 126 frames and one 6x7 frame for the right two 126 frames. I can then crop the images to 4550x4550 pixel TIFF files in PhotoShop.

Keywords: CoolScan, 126 Film, Photography, Scanning, Digital Darkroom

With my new found free time I've dusted off my scanner and made a gameplan for how I want to approach my photography in 2011. To that end, I purchased The DAM Book to help me get a grip on my overall digital darkroom workflow.

I've since moved away from Apple Aperture, mainly because Apple has discontinued support for it in G5 computers (one of which I own), and gone back to iView. iView has since been purchased by Microsoft, sold to Phase One, and now renamed to Expression Media 2. The software is pretty good but for some reason my catalogues kept crapping out and corrupting. I finally realized that EM2 has a nasty 1.8GB memory limit on catalogue files. Absolute fail. I've had to split out the Blue Sky Solar Racing images to a new catalogue.

Oh well; onward and upward. My goal is to have enough material for a showing in 2012 Contact. We'll see.

Keywords: Contact, Photography, EM2, Expression Media 2, DAM, Digital Darkroom

Today's WOD:

Warm-up: 3 rounds of:

• 10" Samson stretch
• 10 × back extension
• 10 × situps
• 10 × squats

WOD: Jackie. For time:

• 1000m Row
• 50 thursters at 50# (Rx=45#)
• 30 pullups (Assisted at 70#)

My time today was about 20 minutes. I shaved 9 second off of my 1km row (compared to 29-Jan-2011, which I was very happy with).

After the WOD I tried my hand at Glute-Ham Developer ("GHD") situps. Some really good information:

• Good instructional video here.
• Good article on proper situps here.
• Really good article on the actual GHD-situp here from the Crossfit journal.

Looking at the video it took me forever to figure out what the difference was between "good" and "bad". If you look closely, as the demonstrator sits back up after their head approaches the ground on full extension, their legs straighten and lock. This forces your abs to actually do the work. I didn't know this today when I first tried it but I'll be applying these new techniques at my next session.

Crossfit warmup: 3 rounds of:

• 10" samson stretch
• 10 back extensions
• 10 situps
• 10 squats
• 10 pullups (50# assist)
• 10 pushups

5km Row: 23'32"

Warmup: 3 rounds of:

• 10" samson stretch
• 10 back extensions
• 10 situps
• 10 squats

Deadlifts:

• 3 @ 135#
• 3 @ 185#
• 3 @ 205#
• 3 @ 225#
• 3 @ 235# (personal record)

Angie: for time:

• 100 pullups (25 @ 70# assist, 25 @ 80# assist, 25 @ 90# assist, 25 @ 100# assist)
• 100 pushups (on toes)
• 100 situps
• 100 squats

Total time: 32'23".

Today's WOD from 2010/01/29 Crossfit.com. For time:

• 50 × 20" box jump (clocked 3:39.91)
• 75 × pull-ups with 85# assist (clocked 7:47.62; Rx was 5 rope climbs)
• 50 × 1.0 pood Kettlebell swing (clocked 3:22.44; Rx was 1.5 pood)
• 50 × sit-ups (clocked 2:02.82)
• 50 × 60# barbell hang power clean (clocked 6:15.40; Rx was 40# dumbbell power clean)
• 1000m row (clocked 4:01.50; Rx was 800m run)
• 50 × back extensions (clocked 2:48.58)

Total was 29:58.27, not including approximately 1 minute between each station to set-up/break down. My last fit-test results on the 500m row clocked in at under 1:30, so pacing myself for a full 1000m, four minutes seems about right. My back was killing me afterward, and as expected the pull-ups were my biggest hurdle. I was most concerned about the box jumps having pulled my calf muscle the other day, ouch! The kb swings were the biggest area of improvement: when I got the motion down and forced my hands down vs. letting the kettleball fall by gravity, I got more power out of my swing -- I'll be trying for 1.5 pood next time around.