Here is an image taken just as I completed the last major edit of everything except the conclusion. The blank white area on the screen is a full-sized two-page spread, the paper in front is a printout of the second to last version with written edits, and the secondary screen there is of course twitter, and extra-large red bull to help me make it through till the morning; and last, certainly not least, the obligatory cat.

Started the car yesterday and saw that the air-conditioning, once again, was not working. The air coming out was actually hot. Six weeks ago I had spent $400 fixing the air conditioner in the car after it stopped working. Through a series of long drawn out events i will not get into here I had the work done not in Toronto where I live but up at Wasaga beach where my mother lives.

So at a moments notice I had to make an appointment to take the car in two hours away from my house. Fortunately, there is no one here, so that I can actually get a lot of work done.

Also, the sky is a beautiful dark blue, something I haven’t seen in a long time, as I’ve been trapped inside in a windowless office frantically writing my final thesis.

Of course, the downside is, because they missed something last time, it’s another $400. I’m not actually that certain the car is even worth $800, but we need it to be air-conditioned as it’s medically necessary.

Reason to keep hope in society is that there are smart funny people who would write the following as an update to a blog post: “Holy crap, y’all  It’s like $50 to see the dead body display.  For that price I could make my own.  Honesty, it’s like the Museum of Science is daring me to steal corpses from the funeral home.  Which I would never do because cemeteries have less security because that would be wrong.”

Go see for yourself: http://thebloggess.com/?p=1513

Sort of like if Hunter Thompson was a mom and actually funny all the time instead of only in that one book about Las Vegas.

I’ve just downloaded a trial version of Adobe Lightroom 3 and I must say I am quite impressed with its noise reduction capabilities. A few months ago I had made the decision to switch permanently from my room to Apple’s Aperture application. I can see now that the decision was quite premature. The image that I’ve posted below this shows the before and after of a photograph I took at night with the iPhone. Before I used Lightroom’s noise reduction, and after I applied the lightroom’s noise reduction.

Note the images still not perfect, or at least it does not look like it was shot with an expensive camera on a tripod etc. It still does have the appearance of having been taken by a small hand-held camera. It just doesn’t look as though someone took a potato gun full of dyed potatoes and shot it at the frame.

I think I will be purchasing an upgrade to the software very very soon.

Click on image to view full size.

There are just two things standing in my way at this point. The first thing is that I really can’t afford the film, if it’s still available. And the second thing is that I really don’t have the time. I do want to do this project so I will very likely find a way somehow.

I have a show coming up at the end of July and I hope to make some work for that as part of this project. If I am in fact going to do that, I’m going to have to work fairly quickly to shoot, edit, and print the images. I plan to use black-and-white film which should be the cheaper faster way to do it, I can buy the developer nd get into a darkroom and use my contact printer to make prints. It shouldn’t take me too long to get back into the groove. I used to be a good black and white printer.

I could, instead of using the  8 by 10 inch camera, use the Linhoff or Arca Swiss 4 x 5″ camera to shoot the images. Then I could scan them on a high-resolution  4 x 5″ scanner and make prints using the archival inks that I have for my 24 inch printer. I have some 4 x 5″ film in the freezer that should work for that project.

I will however consider the smaller film format a copout, or expedient compromise. I really do want to try to do this project with the larger format film and equipment

It has been a long time since I’ve made a purely photographic project and I’m quite excited by the prospect and plan to actually do this in addition to everything else I have to do.

I will post some images from that project here within a week or so if I actually go ahead with it.

That is, I made a home for the photographs that weren’t particularly part of any other project.  At first they were just photographs taken with a small point and shoot camera, then later there were photographs taken with my new iPhone. The attractive thing to me about the iPhone was that I was able to shoot the image process it in Photoshop and then uploaded to my blog by only using the telephone. It brought a certain photograph it upload it and forget it process to one aspect of my work.

This state of affairs continued for a number of months. About a month ago Photoshop for the iPhone was upgraded and included a mechanism to upload your photographs to twitter. I had just become interested in twitter for another project I’m working on so photographs that I took with the phone were uploaded to twitter. And I never got around to posting them to this blog.

By sending them to twitter they reached a potentially larger audience, but on the other hand I did not have them in a fairly convenient place for me to review the images. One of my main goals with this photo blog is to eventually, perhaps in the next few weeks, go over the photographs from this blog reformat them and have them printed into a small 5″ x 5″ book. Since many of them were taken with the rather poor camera contained in the iPhone the images would have to be quite small on the printed page. I would also have to do a little bit more processing of them in Photoshop on the Mac to optimize them for the printed page.

I also want to get back to one of my original purposes of this blog by putting up fairly random bits of writing. This writing will range from snippets of short fiction to little thought pieces on current events or some of the critical theory  that I’m working on is part of my thesis.

I know that with this blog I’ve completely broken most of the rules of successful blogging, at least as I understand them.

• the subject matter for the blog should be clearly defined
• the updates should be regularly scheduled and if any are going to be missed there should be a note posted with a very short explanation
• community of commenters for guest bloggers as the case may be should be encouraged
• clear rules on commenting should be placed prominently on the site.

I’ve broken all of them. Perhaps someday I will actually fix this.

Lovely.

A couple of things make this possible. One, the camera in the phone is actually quite good enough for posting images to a blog. I probably wouldn’t print these at any large size, but it is my intention eventually to print them at small sizes in a book form. The second thing that makes this possible, is that there are a number of applications available for the iPhone that make it fairly easy to edit or apply special effects to an image that will take what would normally be a fairly flat image and make it an interesting one. the third thing that makes this possible is the fact that I have a data plan that allows me to upload up to 6 GB of data per month, an amount that is effectively unlimited. I have yet to use even 1 GB in a month and that is without paying any attention at all to the amount of data actually use.

Right now I use a combination of three or four apps each time. I have two camera apps, one that is the one that was provided by Apple, the second one takes advantage of the accelerometers in the phone to wait until I’m holding the phone steady before it takes a picture; kind of like an image stabilizer. I use Photoshop to do any image tweaking. And I have a couple of other apps that I use if I want to use a special effect.

After an initial flurry of putting quite a lot of images up, I have slowed down a little bit because I’m so busy right now and my life is so regimented that if I’m not careful, I’ll put up a lot of images that repeat in its subject matter. For instance right now I have quite a few that are taken on the platform at Union Station. For some reason as well I almost always take photographs during conditions that are not really optimal for the camera that’s built into the iPhone.