Art & Books: February 2004 Archives

I took Rosie to the dog park for an hour this afternoon (after she'd languished in the car while I mailed packages at the Post Office, then dropped off some dry cleaning). We stayed in the dog run area for half an hour, so she could get good and wet and have a lot of dogdy time, then we walked around outside with her on leash, trying to be a Good Dog (and not always succeeding).

I took a bunch of pictures while we were out, which I put up on the photoblog. I also posted the photos I developed from my latest couple of rolls of film -- for the Contrast in Nature assignment for photography. Some of them came out really well, and others... well, the others lack a certain depth or something, because they scanned horribly, and look kind of like photocopied newspaper photos. I'll have to figure that one out.

I'm still posting to the photoblog manually, as I need to confer with Noel (aka, The One With Root on the Server) about what I can and cannot have happen when I set up a post. Also, it's been like a hundred years since I used Perl, and all the programmatic interfaces worth dealing with are in Perl, so I need his expertise on that. I just never feel like programming any more, almost like I rarely feel like writing anything of length any more.

Anyway, there's a load of new stuff up over there if you're bored out of your skull.

I'm not even going to comment on the President's decision to get behind a constitutional amendment codifying marriage discrimination. Ugh.

I spent most of the day today in the photo lab, processing two rolls of film that I shot over the last week (mostly today, as it happens). I think I've got it down at this point; I can feel with the film is going on the reel right, and the chemistry part is naturally no problem at all. It is amusing how many superstitions people have about simple buffer solutions, though.

The lecture half of photography involved a trip to the library for orientation. These events are always painfully boring, and this one was no exception. If I have to sit through yet another lecture about The Magical Resources At Your Library, I think I may actually throw something. Half an hour of being lectured on using a search form by a librarian, I swear to god. Shoot me now.

Anyway.

Two rolls of film. But I somehow blanked and didn't bring my film-processing crap with me, so I wasn't able to make contact sheets from the negatives. I'll have to drop in and do that during open lab hours sometime. I think I got some really interesting shots in there. Some weird ones, too.

When I have scans I'll put them up on my wonderful new photoblog. Have I mentioned my wonderful new photoblog? I'm working on the comments templates and the archives as I write this, so I should have them up tomorrow or the day after.

I was chatting in e-mail this weekend about various issues around formatting images for the web, and that got me thinking about having an automated photo-posting location (ie, a method for posting images I e-mail to a script). I broke the problem down into two steps:

1. Make a template site and see what sort of actions will need to be done on the images/text in order to get it up.
2. Write the scripts.

I managed to get the first part done tonight. The biggest pain in the ass was vertically centering the image in the div, because fricken-fracken CSS doesn't have any way of handling that. I had to intall two MovableType modules and write a Perl script to calculate how far to offset the image from the top, and I don't even want to think about how idiotic some of the problems I ran into were.

On the other hand, I've worked out the kinks in the process, and have figured out how to do it all consistently, so now all I have to do is automate the process. Half the battle is over.

Oh, yeah, and that site's still very delicate, especially the comments area, so be gentle.

I stayed a bit later at school today and knocked off five prints for my photography class. These are my first official actual developed pictures from black and white roll film, so pay attention. Alas, the scanner made them much darker than they really are, and I lost a lot of the nice grain in trying to fix that, but that's what I get for doing this on Noel's computer instead of my own, where everything is calibrated right.

Looking up at the portico

Rosie in the grass

View through the fence

Rosie and ball

Staircase

I love how moody and artistic this makes our house look.

My Graflex Crown Graphic Special arrived today, in a large box marked "M&M's" -- leading to a moment of half-happiness, half-disappointment: "Oh, damn, no M&M's... wait, that's my new camera!"

I had to wait to unpack it because Ana wanted to sit on my lap for two hours, and she's been so angry at me lately that I let her do it and didn't knock her off to play with my new toy. I finally unpacked it after dinner, and Noel and I figured out how to open it up, aim it, and focus it. Focusing a view camera is a bit weird if you think normally: the image is upside down and backwards when it appears on the ground glass screen that you use to set up the shot. But it makes sense to me, largely because of my experiments with learning to write backwards like Da Vinci.

I'm going to go buy some film and take some sample shots this weekend. I'll be developing a roll of film in the darkroom on Monday, anyway, so I will be able to develop it then. I'm not sure if I want to develop my own film every time, but it can't hurt to give it a shot and see how much of a pain in the butt it is. Maybe I'll have enough time to do a contact print, too, if being in the darkroom for that long doesn't make me irritable.

It took a while, but I managed to get a couple of MovableType plugins -- MTAmazon and BookQueue -- and and running on this installation. So now, with a small amount of tweaking, I can maintain a list of books on queue on my bookshelves or in my mind.

This is far more interesting to me than to any of you, because I was looking for a way to flag books as "I want to read this" short of my current method (laying them on their sides on the shelves, which does not work for books I don't own). But now you can all (erm, all three of you) have a view into my book-mind. Also, you can see how slowly I read when I'm trying to teach myself abstract math.

All I need to do now is extend BookQueue to include a comments area, so I can write little notes to myself about why I was interested in reading or re-reading a particular book, and also a flag for "owned" so I can remember whether I've bought a book I was interested in. I'd also like to be able to sort by author name or genre, but that's sort of unimportant if I've got everything else.

Unlike many people, I've never thought that shaking a Polaroid picture would make it develop faster. That just never made sense to me. If it's a chemical process, you'd hope the chemicals are stuck on there pretty well so they don't make a huge mess when you're handling the photo later, which would seem to indicate that they don't need agitation.

And guess what. I'm right. Ha!

I managed to win an auction for a large-format camera on eBay. It's a Graflex Crown Special (a press camera, mostly) with a Schneider Xenar f4.5/135mm lens and Syncro Compur Shutter. Also a bunch of other things like a case and a tripod, and two film pack holders and thirteen sheet film holders. A good complete setup for getting going in large-format, definitely. I may look around for a Polaroid back, but I don't think that's going to be critical for the stuff I want to do.

Some photos:

The camera from the top, and from the front

The case with all the accessories (like a nice flash unit) and the camera packed inside

What's worse than form rejections? Here's a sample:

You receive your MS back with each and every page stamped in red ink: CRAP, CRAP, CRAP. Some pages have been virtually obliterated by the stamp.

I managed to develop a whole roll of black and white 35 mm film today, with no (serious) mishaps. I did end up making too damned much fixer, due to a ridiculous set of dilution instructions (which explained how to get to a concentrated solution, then how to get to a working solution, requiring two scale-downs, one of which I forgot to do). At any rate, I have film, and it is ready to be turned into a contact sheet.

While I was on campus, I dropped by the ceramics studio and paid attention to my wall piece, which is approaching greenware. It will be bone dry by Monday, I am sure; I think we're going to load them into the kiln then. It should be interesting to see how well it fires up; there are a lot of deep overhangs, and I'm sure there will be some unintended sagging. If I'd thought it through, I might have chosen to glue more of it together after the fact, firing it all flat. Ah, well. It's just an exercise.

I've been struggling through Anne Rice's latest offering all week. I keep putting it down and reading other things (like Carl Hiaasen's Lucky You, which was a significantly better read, but Hiaasen has yet to disappoint me). I'm not sure what it is about Anne Rice and her desire to be on the cutting edge of coolness, but I really do wish somebody would sit her down and explain what the parts of a computer are called and how to describe them properly in writing. Because at the end of the book, some people need to get vital data from a computer, so they grab the microprocessor. Good Lord, people.

OK, so she's not technical, you say. Willing suspension of disbelief. Well, fine. How about characters who don't seem to be able to stay in character (both from book to book and within the book), conversation that reads like some juvenile message board on MSN, and a plot that goes nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, until the book abruptly ends? That same plot is not so much a plot as a setup for a later book about what was happening with the Taltos from the end of Taltos until Blackwood Farm. I forced myself to finish the book tonight, and I rather wish I hadn't. If I hadn't, I could have lived in the delightful state where I believed this to be a perfectly good book that I had just not had enough time to read yet.

Everybody else has already blogged this (that's what you get for being in school), but I wanted to save a link to it in a place where I could find it again: Slushkiller