A conglomeration of stuff, from the front page of my site.

Front page archive.

A loose collection of links, thoughts, quotes and other crazy stuff, that originally appeared on the front page of this site, that I think is worth archiving!

December

31.12.03 10:43 ESDST

Another year draws to a close, and tonight is the one night of the year I NEVER drove, when I was a taxi driver. So if your out there partying hard just remember the guy behind the wheel will have been working his butt off all night and will have had no shortage of well wishers and a fair share of drunks too! Go easy on him. If they are total fools, or real bad drivers with dirty smelly cars, take their number down and report them to the Taxi Directorate.

Above an sample of an image from a recent expidition near my house the links leads to the whole series, enjoy, if not let me know

One of my Christmas presents was a book entitled ‘The book of 101 books, seminal Photographic books of the 20th Century’ What an awesome book It has prompted me to consider a short run edition of my own work. Some of the books that made it into this book were artists books with very small print runs. Now both of my regular readers will know that I have for many years been thinking about what I was to do with the now over 10,000 images made with my Kodak DCS 260 camera and this book may prove to be the impetus to launch the project. Of course one of the problems I have yet to resolve with large quantities of digital images is… how does one edit them? Traditionally, I would “proof” my images cut up the “proofs” sequence and organise them physically until I was happy with the outcome. Not so easy with 10,000 plus digital images.

I have a software package that allows me to create catalogues, and from these I have been selecting images when I wanted to make small sequences. But publishing a book maybe a different matter. Well with all this time up my sleeve over the holidays I guess I can put something into action.

The other awesome book I received was a book of work by Walker Evans, a series of Polaroid images made in the final years of his life. Stunning and inspirational makes me want to go out and buy a bucket load of polaroid film and go berserk!

23.12.03 19:39 ESDST

our back yard at sunset

Wandered off to pay a bill or two today, took some shots on the way, I love looking for something odd or different in your own surrounds. The pictures when I upload them will be in the nu-pics gallery. Meanwhile above is an image I made from our back door a couple of nights ago, tweaked in photoshop of course!

22.12.03 10:13 ESDST

Second entry in as many days, WOW! Yep folks I am on term holidays, and now have time to catch up on all the low priority things I have been trying to do for what seems like weeks now. Things like, update the mobile phone gallery, and the events page over at the school site.

I have however been doing a little bit of reading both in cyberspace and with good old fashioned books. Over at Plastic.com there is a discussion going on about, film versus digital cameras. In my humble opinion most folks are missing the point. And I feel a longer faq article coming up.

The weather is being typically Melbourne today, kinda warm, kinda windy, just your usual 4 seasons in one day sort of stuff. So the rest of the day will be spent in the darkroom for sure.

Just have to mention the fab photographic resource that about.com is check out the listing of “Notable Photographers”. I particularly am impressed with this sites historical information and it's source of other references/sites, not sure of the photographic technique side of the site but I guess it needs to be fairly popular and IMHO Photo technique is not suited to teaching online anyway! Despite this I turned up some great photography/photographic sites.

The way i turn up articles like the counterpunch article has been from Google's new service this service allows you to subscribe to a list of items that you are interested in and receive alerts as to when the google robots find news on these interests. being the sad sack that I am I of course subscribed with the keywords photographic art. And it has turned up some gems. Still there is a level of noise filtering involved, something that I guess only a human can really do?

Righto off to the darkroom I go!

21.12.03 ESDST

Light— given the last few days of warm weather we have been having, I'm reminded of the light qualities of summer light. With holidays now officially on I have been watching the light lately. Sadly this kind of light isn't very manageable, and even with contraction developments difficult to control global contrast I rarely shoot this time of year. Of course sunset and sunrise make for better lighting qualities even more so with colour materials. What this really means is that I will be concentrating on printing particularly the older work I have been working with lately.

Just installed a brand spanking new hard drive all on my own! So far so good. Also running panther and things seem ok there as well. Of course I always seem to miss some part of the back up process, my bookmarks are one, my addresses from my address book, my calendar/organiser info from iCal and sadly the more recent version of this page. So the links and information I put on this page a few days ago will not reappear here till I can dig them all up. This much I do know , the article came rom a website called counterpunch.org, and was about Brett Weston.

02.12.03 ESDST

Recently received some disturbing news about this site looking mangled in IE 6 for the PC, at first I fretted and fiddled with stylesheets and what have you. I have now considered that the problem may lie more in the fact that IE 6 has buggy support for CSS 2. So if either of my regular visitors are using IE 6 my apologies but without resorting to all sorts of hacks this is the way it's going to stay.

01.12.03 ESDST

Monday, recuperating from a hot day that had plenty of drinking, all in the name of a celebration of course! Nadia and Simon were married yesterday at a little chapel on the grounds of a reception centre in Eltham North. Nadia's heritage is Italian so it was big compared to ours. This wedding had a couple of traditions that started me thinking about tradition generally. Nadia's dance with her father and a couple of group dances at the end, in particular. I got the impression that the younger Gen Xer's like myself seemed to embrace these traditions.

As I watch digital technologies impact more and more on photographic education I have been wondering about some of the “traditions” that I have learnt and become used to. The fine print tradition is something that is certainly falling by the way side, maybe more of a post-modernist thing than a technology thing, the desire to have hands on control over the final image is another. How much of this is important, is it wrong to want to have a level of push button control over the outcomes of your creative efforts? What is more important? The image or how the image got there? Well the answer to that is obvious, to me anyway, it's the image and how it looks that's the most important. But the image still needs to reflect the makers intentions. Happy accidents shouldn't be discounted however.

I guess the biggest difference between the Analogue traditions and the newer digital ones, is that a knowledge of what is happening underneath the surface was needed to really control and predict the outcomes of the final product, where as with digital manipulation software like , Live Picture™ and Photoshop™ all you need to really understand is which button to click to get a result.