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Showing posts from February, 2013

Xerox Phaser 4500: exhibition 3

Kelli Connell takes over from Chris McCaw on my printer art gallery at work tomorrow.  All welcome to attend the private view.  

stitch alignment. errors.

 

92 percent moon. overcast sky.

There's a delusional period after taking photographs when you feel open to the possibility that there could be something good.  The harsh reality that what you've got is a bag full of useless usually becomes apparent a little later - but at a point where you are less invested and so you can keep making more.  It's all about just keeping going sometimes, or maybe all the time.

Michael P Berman: Gila

Photo-eye book view here

Tom Blackwell: Odalisque Express

Tom Blackwell website

fence.site.

Andreas Gursky: Zürich Bankproject No. 5

Christies auction lot details here

Michael Benson:stitched panoramic from Mars

Another half-inched from DLK Basaltic Dune Field in Gusev Crater, Mars, Spirit Rover, December 30, 2005 - January 1, 2006, 2012 Digital chromogenic print  50 x 106 "  ed 3 Michael Benson At Hasted Kraeutler gallery    

Tripod

I went back to 'the fence' this afternoon.  No, not a person connected to the criminal underworld but the metal barrier constructed around the construction site at the bottom of my road.  I got there then decided I needed a tripod, good job it wasn't far. After a few hours photographing and rephotographng it, this way, that way, all along it's 150m length, and some sections a bit obsessively so, multiple frames, vertical format, horizontal format, different focal lengths, different shutter speeds, I think I may have done 'the fence' .  Done, apart from the time it will take attempting to stitch frames together. Stitching software struggles with parallax problems which arise when there is foreground/middle and/or background information which shifts around as the camera is rotated around a fixed point (or even when it travels a parallel line).  So the bloody pain of walking backwards  and getting stuck in a sharp and thorny thorn bush will be as nothing compa

40"

I had another go with Hugin , the programme that stitches photos together - and despite still not having got around to reading up on how to use it, somehow I pressed things in the right order this time and out came (after my laptop worked itself to exhaustion) an actual proper finished wide format 30MB jpeg image.  It would make a forty inch wide print (at 254dpi) - so quite big, and that's without interpolation.  How the software managed it with all the junk in these frames, I don't know.  I've not looked that closely but I don't think it's messed up on hardly a single thing. The effect of all that big print readiness is slightly lost when then scrunched to a 800 pixel wide web-friendly version, and it seems to be falling apart in some weird way.

Rachel Sussman: Spruce, 9,550 years old; Sweden

Another photo lifted from flak : this nine and a half thousand year old tree  is from Rachel Sussman's oldest living things series. The minimum age requirement to be included is 2,000 years.  So not much longer to wait till she gets in touch then.

Bryan Schutmaat

 Meyers Ave, Goldfield, Nevada, 2012 on Flak website and his elegaic big landscape small communities series here    

Su Sheng

Chinese Childhood - Lili Weiv (Xi'an City, China, 2008)  Link to Flak website

Ruby in Paradise (1993)

I saw Ruby in Paradise, starring Ashley Judd, a low budget independent film once maybe ten years ago and I've been telling people how good it is ever since - but for some reason it never got released on DVD - so at least they can't contradict me. But recently somebody has uploaded it here The site asks you to download a plug-in to play the film - DON'T!!!   Forums elsewhere advise that the plug-in may be the portal to another world of endless computer hell.  BUT if youare still prepared to take a risk - register and then go back and click on the download option, 680 MB later you have an .avi file you can watch, not HD but OK quality, and no problem. Here's the trailer to help decide if it might be worth the hassle:

The man on the bus who spoke to a foreigner

BBC website link Chinese/English wesbite interview Chinese table-tennis player Zhuang Zedong, who had an instrumental role in the so-called ping-pong diplomacy that led to a thaw in US-China relations in the 1970s, has died aged 73.     (Photo: news.yninfo.com)

MT. FUJI IS THE SKY

nothing/something

night photo

Female cross-dressing legalised in Paris

A 200-year-old law forbidding women to wear trousers in Paris has final been revoked. By Devorah Lauter , Paris - link (03 Feb 2013): On January 31, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, France's minister of women's rights, made it officially impossible to arrest a woman for wearing trousers in the French capital. The law required women to ask police for special permission to "dress as men" in Paris, or risk being taken into custody. In 1892 and 1909 the rule was amended to allow women to wear trousers, "if the woman is holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse." The law was kept in place until now, despite repeated attempts to repeal it, in part because officials said the unenforced rule was not a priority, and part of French "legal archaeology." In July however, in a public request directed at Ms Vallaud-Belkacem, Alain H

Stars and new build

Before moonrise

Remembering

custom white balance from a day earlier

Unstitching

Last Sunday I spent at least ten hours trying to stitch together 60 photographs, without either success or interesting failure.  Perhaps I should have read how to use the software first but after a certain amount of wasted time it became psychologically inconceivable to stop and start learning.  Today I attempted, slightly less ambitiously, to stitch 5 images, but maintaining the same approach of not finding out how to use the software first (Hugin is definitely not the most intuitive programme, is all I can say in my excuse).  Nah, still no joy but at least it failed at one point in a way that I liked.  I took screenshots, the only way to record what happened inside the panorma preview window; multiple images seemed simultaneously to have all their pixels smeared laterally, in depth as they were overlaid one on top of the other, in various stack order depending on a row of numbers that I clicked through on a largely random basis. I think this sort of file-fail is not uncommon and

Lee Friedlander

Whatever it was that set Lee Friedlander off taking photos several thousand years ago but he has been a non-stop image making machine ever since.  Probable influences were books by Atget, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank - and a love of jazz.  The best of his photographs look noisy - almost insanely so when considered against the cool Dusseldorf/New Topographics minimalist style that soon came to be accepted as the preferred manner of contemporary art photography.  Friedlander remains pretty much another of those photographer's photographer like Winogrand and Eggleston. His approach of have camera-will photograph stuff - is usually overlooked by non-photography educated curators who find it awkward to interpret and easy to dismiss.  The all important bigger meaning is obscure although, ironically enough, obscuring is one of the essential devices that Friedlander employs again and again.  Old school observational photography just seems too rough and ready, too intuitive, and jus

Zwelethu Mthethwa: Brave Ones

 Coolhunting web link & DLK In the new series, "Brave Ones," Zwelethu Mthethwa travels back to Durban to consider the style of dress worn by a group of young men from a Nazareth baptist church. "There's an androgynous element in the fact that they wear kilts and blouses with frills," he observes. "And then they contrast that with something like sports socks and they wear shoes with the metal toe—so it's very interesting how they mix and match."

It's a day/night thing