Between the Holidays

In an effort to create connections between the online applications I am posting this evening that Chris Zinn and I went out shooting. The full set of pictures will be on Flickr, and the video on YouTube. Enjoy.



while your at it check out this oldy from High Street, watch it to the end!

Brain and Aesthetics

VS Ramachandran on aesthetic neuroscience: here

trip to the hospital

Last week my Grandmother had an operation to replace her pacemaker battery. I drove her down to Bay State hospital. We arrived at 7:15am, but they didn't get her to surgery until after 1:00pm. Grandma kept asking what we were doing there. She acted well until right after the surgery - then she was cantankerous. She said something about leaving her to die. Eventually I got her to drink some milk and eat toast.


She wouldn't let me take a picture of her in bed. All I got were pictures looking outside.
That's downtown Springfield in the distance.

american cars

moving over to flickr

I got a new camera and am taking pictures pictures pictures. This format is to cumbersome for the volume so I'm switching over to Flickr for most picture postings. Check it through the link at the side....
ice on dashboard
Tiffany, me and my new camera!

quick walk

I am waiting for a new camera to arrive. New, modern, digital. In my excitement I went out with my little P&S and drew a sketch of some of the things I might want to take pictures of around town. Here it is:

New Years Resolution

Last year I made two New Years resolutions: to go to the doctors and to read twelve books in twelve months. This morning I slept in and missed my doctor's appointment, but the other day I finished "Portrait of the Artist as a Young man" and thus fulfilled my second resolution. Here's a list of the books I read this year in chronological order:

What is the What, Dave Eggers, 2006
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami, 1987
Timbuktu, Paul Auster, 2000
Demian, Hermann Hesse, 1919
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card, 1985
Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag, 2007
Ghosts, John Banville, 1993
The Ongoing Moment, Geoff Dyer, 2006
Netherland, Joseph O'neill, 2008
Sputnick Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami, 1999
The Devil and Miss Prym, Paul Coelho, 2000
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, 1916

Maybe at a later date I'll write blurbs about each book, or maybe I'll just start on next years list...

i took a walk

Zone

Half of the front room is given over to my plants, precious junk and studio space. Here's a little trip through it.

it's a jungle in here
mantle one
mantle 2
mantle 3
hardware profile problems
"inbox"
more inbox

slowly carefully

Here's some updates in my life. Most of my time takes place at school, and I don't have any pictures from there. Maybe next time. But these are some snippets of the past two month:

my favorite meal
this root-ball is the best!
a dead bird at the hallmark photo museum
my new lens!!: fuji 135mm 5.6, fast and crisp. If you mujst know I have a box of color negatives sitting on the light table waiting to be scanned. So, this is the only image I've made with it so far...
I'm growing a beard again

quick link

Katie Koti's website:
katiekoti.com

enjoy

quicky

I've been looking for the time to post for a while... maybe i should move onto flickr

Autumn shadows

trip to syracuse

Here's some pictures from out trip to Syracuse last month.
Tiffany loves fill-flash and driving!
I took thirty pictures before I got this one, perfect.
Lead removal from my favorite bridge on the Erie Canal.
Okay, so this was weird. We were driving around Syracuse. We took a back route through the University. As we were driving down this back road I looked up and saw Budge Hyde staring down at me like the kindly face of God. What will happen to me Budge?

Twenty one posts ago I acquired a small digital camera. My first, a Canon a570. It is a small affair, not sleek, but with enough manual settings that I have a sense of control. Since then, I've been using the camera to document my life and make image sketches for my "serious" work in medium format and 4x5.

The question that's been bugging me is whether this camera can make a beautiful picture. Hold on, let me clarify: the question is, whether, in my hands, the camera is able to render a scene with the clarity and nuance that I desire. I've made pictures that are clear, that tell a story and a few that have a gurgling sort of drowning-man beauty, like, the blurry monochrome that a man drowning in daylight might see just before he looses consciousness.

This evening I made a hundred and ten dollar investment in Kodak 160 ISO Portra 4x5 film. NC for Natural Color. If you count the developing costs, I will, it's another hundred dollars. That's 210 dollars towards fifty pictures. At four dollars a shot, you bet I'm careful. But, and here's the thing, I have trust in the medium. I know that, if my exposure is on, and I've spent at least some time under the dark-cloth, I will have twenty square inches of a projection of the world, preserved onto acetate. With a little work in Photoshop, or the darkroom, I should find beauty there.

The digital camera, I do not yet trust. It's sensor is smaller than a postage stamp, and the lens is little larger than a contact. I am still nervous about approaching the world with this little box. So a couple hours ago, when a slash of orange light fell onto our ever cluttered table, and the floor around the table glowed with late summer evening blue, I grabbed my little Canon out of my back pack and, trusting it's image stabilization, held my elbows at my side and snapped away. This was the result:

my new toy

I bought this epson 4800 roll printer a week or two ago. I'm very excited and a little overwhelmed. Here's the first print I pulled, uncorrected, overexposed 4x5 of my grandparents.

the salt museum

I've got a back-log of pictures. Here's some from Syracuse when we went to the salt museum: