So,

I spent 4 tedious hours today scanning in over a hundred of my slides. Every little problem I didn’t anticipate came up to bite me in the bum.

I managed to get hold of the slide template and the scanner was free. The computer was not happy with finding me on the network, I’d left my usb stick at home and had no blank cds. The template is due back tomorrow morning. I ran down to the studio and borrowed Matt’s stick. 256mb, with some stuff already on it. So I scanned some, then crashed a classroom of ‘typology showing students’ a couple of times to offload onto my drive – which was having issues also.

The usb stick went psycho and filled up with only 2.5mb spare even when I deleted the last lot, which would’ve left more than half the slides un-scanned. I had a moment of triumph when I worked out what was going on – more really that I fixed something I don’t know why the heck was happening.

I get home and spend ages getting them across from the ftp onto my computer because I want to be able to have a good look at them and put a few up. Sure, I’ve scanned them in at a mighty high resolution (as they are slides and really small and you want to get them up to beyond thumbnail size). That’s fine. I saved them as .tif to attempt to keep as much quality as I could. Anyway, now photoshop is chucking a spaz and not letting me resave them as jpgs. even when I try to ferry my way around it. I can’t help but thinking that this is something to do with the bit-depth, which I think was also very high. But why! It doesn’t make any sense!

And flickr claims to be able to read .tiff files (which I can save them as) and still doesn’t like it!

So, you’ll have to be satisfied with a screenshot for now. I can’t put them up on flickr until I work out what’s going on. Any suggestions would be marvellous.

General Life Photography

On June the 18th 2005 I bought a camera.

Today that camera rewarded me with a System Error. I thought the SD card would’ve been the first to cark it. Sadly no.

I have given the funny old thing a run for it’s money and have taken thousands of photos – so many photos that I’d just tipped the 9,999 limit and the counter had restarted. This is still pretty frustrating, particularly as the waranty ran out only two months ago. You’d hope a $600 camera would last you longer than a year.

I sincerly doubt it’s worth getting fixed. Cheaper to just get a new one. It was already starting to tell that the button was getting less responsive.

So. I guess it’s now on to saving for a digital SLR and work out what my dream (but still affordable) camera is. I somehow don’t think buying one is going to happen any time soon.

much sadness.

General Photography

Dora Marr, supposedly inspired Pablo Picasso intellectually, artistically and I dare say emotionally. It would have to be a pretty powerful thing to have those behind you. Fairly honoring to be in that position for a start. But then – they as two artists, they would’ve fed quite regularly off eachother. The interaction is interesting.

I can’t help but wonder if it was shared emotion, if he was so close to her that it got utterly poured into (particularly) Picasso’s artwork. It’s all so dramatically depressing. I genuinely like his work and can appreciate it, despite it being quite strange, but do I find exceptionally dark.

As you may or may not have picked up – especially if you didn’t know it was on, I visited Picasso: Love & War at the NGV this afternoon. It was worth a look, maybe not quite what I anticipated and it didn’t give me quite the same thrill as when seeing Rembrants, but I can claim satisfaction in having experienced a genuine Picasso and have definitely lit (and perhaps burnt out) that small woodpile of curiousity about the whole thing.

Why the city on a friday? Well, I did first make the trip into to uni for my one hour lecture (WWW) and then stopped by the Hawthorn’ish area to have lunch with Geoff, which was rather good! I could definitely justify the ‘afternoon’ out.

The train was highly entertaining today. I don’t think I’ve ever had a better run of ‘the funny stuff’. I got to the station early after heading up to fill up my front tyre with some air, so I jumped on the 8:3something instead of the 8:53. It left late due to some trouble with the doors. A few stations down the line the driver’s voice comes over the P.A. “Passengers, we’re still having some trouble with the doors so if you can try closing them again and giving them a kick then we might get going!” His colloquial tone and words were beautifully human. You sometimes forget that they’re having, ‘just another day on the job’. Trains don’t drive themselves. Whatever kicking the passengers did do, it worked. Had to change later on due to the same problem, but it was worth it.

On the way into the city. Sitting behind me was a classical voice music student (guy) and a 40yr’ish, older guy who had obviously just started talking to him ‘because’ he was within proximity. The conversation was loud and I found it incredibally funny, to the point where I was laughing as silently as I could and not just doing the whole ‘grin my face off’ thing.

The student was listening to the musical soundtrack of Rent (something Jess W has talked about a lot recently) and let the other guy have a listen. It hit the point of where he made the descision to go out and buy it, but couldn’t get his head around what the piece was called. “Oh wow, this is great music, I really like it!”.

The conversation extrapolated wildly from there on and at one point the older guy got quite excited, “Maybe you could join my brother and I, we’re thinking of starting a band, you could do back-up vocals…”. Middle aged pipe dreams?

I have no idea how the student was finding it as I couldn’t see either of their faces, but he was quite amiable and he played along with a cool, “Maybe.”
I think he really baulked when the older guy asked about singing excercises. The student mentioned the larynx and moving it up and down and then after a little longer, “Uh, I’m not really a teacher”. They talked about the future and how musical theatre was on the cards and how difficult it was to get in. The student was encouraged in his pursuit of what he wanted to do, “If it’s really in your heart” but the guy suggested quite unhelpfully that perhaps he’d better seek more stable means. He meant well.

The whole thing was gold!

So. A very peaceful in many ways kind of day. Thoroughly enjoyable. A bit of learning, a bit of humor, a bit of being with someone I rather like being with, a bit of culture and a lot of taking the whole thing at my own pace. Can’t top that very well, although maybe a sleep-in would’ve been nice…

General Life Photography

Lovely coffee. Real stuff. I’m going to be up late tonight. An interesting day. Got thrown in the deep-end of what we call ‘culture’ and came up for air in the National Art Gallery. The Dutch Masters. Entirely worth it, if only for the Rembrandts. I was minorly disappointed that the first memorable (I may have seen one when I was younger) Rembrandt original was that of an old man with white hair. Impressive, but not stunning. They improved from then on, and in the expansive exhibition I found my favourite of the day in amongst the Van Ecks and such – a small self portrait, a Rembrandt.
There was so much more in the way of beautiful, detailed, realistic, artistic, carefully composed paintings and I found the best (subjective) in simplicity and light. Ha, you wonder why he’s famous.

After lunch, I made my way upstairs to explore the photography. Only a small amount there, a collection called, “Skin”. And here I entirely recant what I was thinking when I placed myself on the ‘without pictures of naked people the world would be a better place’ side during Ethics (class) as there was no middle ground.
The human body is beautiful.

“No longer in the nude, I was now naked, and I could see the contempt in the lip lines of the assembled constabulary…” (Malachy McCourt – A Monk Swimming)
Strangely enough the differentiation of a word creates a chasm. We may abuse bodies visually in this (in any) society, but not always.

To have another ‘best’, there was a photo at the end of the room, a little out of character with the rest of the work, a portrait, a face of a girl. Amazing.

Thanks God for culture and beauty, for the human body. Thanks for being a creative God. You are good.

General Photography

Playing with new camera…

Job the dog

and the wonderfully interesting things in our house result in photos of flowers:

And was mucking around with settings, not like you ever use colour settings but yeh I like them.

and so you aren’t meant to take w/ backlight. bah to conventions this is weird.

General Photography