Happy Accident Fire Truck

For thirty years I’ve been clapping gleefully whenever something visual screws up.

The blurry, or double exposed, photos Black’s didn’t charge you for. The odd shapes formed at the edges on stat cam prints by the bulbs when you really shrunk something down. Postscript printers deciding it didn’t like your file and spitting out pixelated mayhem. PMT prints that didn’t work and left strange patterns and colour fades. Early monitors that would sometimes show a chopped up version of the file you were working on as you zoomed out, and stay there long enough to get a screenshot of. Images after they’ve been stapled to a phone pole for a half year. Run up sheets from offset presses, with oddly juxtaposed type and images.

I’ve got a huge file of this kind of stuff. Not used so frequently, but when you can find a use for this sort of randomly generated imagery for something, terrific.

Happy accidents I called them.

A bunch of years back I was home one morning when a fire truck parked between calls on the quiet cul-de-sac I lived on. Went out to say hi and snap some photos as reference for possibly building a Lego version. (Still haven’t gotten around to it.) Somewhere along transferring them between camera and various storage mediums, the entire folder of images got truncated.

PhotoShop can’t do anything other than show a narrow strip along the top. If PS can’t open it...that’s saying something. Single previews don’t work, but for some inexplicable reason, opening them all at once showed me this riotous collage of strips of stuttering colour. Took screenshots of the expanded screen, because other wise these are inaccessible.

“Accident is the greater part of art, not design.” – Aleister Crowley

Accidental Art – Bradford Go Stop

I love accidental art. One of my favourite quotes is by Aleister Crowley - “Accident is the greater part of art, not design.” I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had inspiration dropped into my lap at the most unexpected moments. Paints spills, monitor display glitches, signs that have been ravaged by weather, press make ready sheets, etc.

This one was on a lamp post by a GO stop in Bradford. Don’t know what it was originally, but I snapped a pic.

Rainbow Over Water

The new camera I got has a weird aspect that certain pictures, depending on how the camera is angled and where the sun is located, puts a rainbow in the photo. Always on the bottom right. Kind of odd, never experienced it with my other camera. It’s only happened a few times, but makes for a neat effect though.

My view for the last year

My camera for the last two years has been a Fuji FinePix A610. While I would have loved a far better camera, it was what I had, and I made do with what I had. (I is a po’ boy.) And I’ve certainly taken a pretty crazy amount of photos with it. Close to 20,000. It has served as a way to chronicle my various adventures, and catalogue all of my various creations. It has done a great job of taking macro shots, and done all right with just general photography. Long distance and low light photography were a bust though.

One big drawback for the past year has been the fact that the LCD screen on the back has been damaged. And this is what I’ve had to look at.

I must have bumped it against something hard when I had it in my pocket. A small bit of damage appeared, but I could still access most of the controls. After my water logged adventure on the North Mountain, water must have gotten in and damaged it even more. The pattern I saw, looked like a culture spreading across a petri dish. And it changed over time as well. 

Not being able to see the picture I had taken wasn’t so big a deal, since I uploaded pictures on to a computer shortly after taking them. In order to take a photo all I had to do was point it in the right direction and click. Usually a few to make sure I got it all. Sort it all out later. But not being able to access the controls anymore was an issue. I remembered the button sequences to get to certain things but other features had become inaccessible. 

Well I just got a new camera. (More to come on that.) And I can now happily roam all through the controls, see what I’m shooting, see what I shot. Yippee!

But as annoying as that oddly shaped and coloured glob was, I kind of liked it. I have a thing for accidental art, and this was an interesting image that was created without any intent. I’m sure I’ll use it in some bit of graphic art I do at some stage.

But it has got me wondering. There are protective covers for lenses. Why doesn’t something similar exist to protect the LCD screen? If I bumped it and damaged it, I’m sure others have as well.