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

One benefit of having to get up early early every day.

Processing 31 rolls of film from a WW2 US soldier

This is kind of a slow 10 minute documentary, yet I found it utterly engrossing. Anyone with a connection to film developing and photography, and history, will appreciate this. Interesting exposition on the magic of film photography, the art of developing, wanting to preserve locked away history, the mystery of who even took these exquisite photographs. Fascinating they really are. Both in terms of subject and composition. Clearly this was someone with a good eye, some talent and a good camera. I was surprisingly absorbed by it.

The photographer was photographed by the photographer

My sister was looking through photos of the neighbourhood we grew up in in Amsterdam. She saw one of the mayor at a ceremony for driving in the first pile for the office building slated to be built behind our place. He was in a 1910 Spijker, a car that had been produced in a factory that had stood there in the early part of the 20th century. She saw that someone was standing on what she figured to be our balcony. Now, our father was a serious shutterbug. She looked through all of our photos and found the photo that he took the same day. Same scene, two perspectives. The photographer was photographed by the photographer.

First Warzone Tintype Since US Civil War

Ed Drew served as an aerial gunner in a USAF rescue squadron, but while in Afghanistan, he also took what are believed to be the first photos taken on a battlefield with the tintype photographic process since Matthew Brady’s work documenting the Civil War.

The results are fascinating, and I dig that someone went to the trouble to use an “archaic technology”. It produced results no chintzy Instagram filter could have achieved.

Link to a story about him and his work.

A link to his website.

Smoke Portrait

Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera

Want!

http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera

Balcony View

The friends I went to help on Saturday, live in an apartment building up on the mountain. I went there on Friday night to pick up a pass I would need to get me into the event. Just before I left their place, I couldn’t resist taking a quick shot of the view they have, just as the sun was going down.

Camille Seaman’s Big Cloud

Photos taken in the American Midwest of cloud formations called supercells. Capable of incredible destruction, there is a strange beauty to them.

http://minimalexposition.blogspot.com/2010/11/camille-seaman-big-cloud.html

Ghost Ships of the Mothball Fleet

I was into “Urban Exploration” long before I ever even knew there was a name for it, or a movement. Abandoned buildings, storm drains, unfinished apartment buildings, tunnels under university campuses.

This isn’t quite “urban”, but a pretty epic exploration nonetheless. And great photography as well. 

http://scotthaefner.com/beyond/mothball-fleet-ghost-ships/#more-146

Dirkon – Paper Pinhole Camera

Based on a project that was published in a 1970’s Czechoslovakian magazine. Fantastic project if you have kids. A downloadable, printable PDF of a paper pinhole camera that you can cut out and build, and then take pinhole pictures. Two fun projects that you can use to teach kids some skills - both the making of the camera and then opportunities to teach about film and photography. Or…you know…if you’re a just big kid, it’s fun for you as well. 

http://www.pinhole.cz/en/pinholecameras/dirkon_01.html

edit:
If you find this subject interesting, a book has just been released about the subject: PinHole Cameras: A DIY Guide by Chris Keeney.

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Orgy of Orange

Okay, so it’s more yellow than orange, but after the poppy photos called Riot of Red, I had to carry on the theme.

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Riot of Red pt. 2

Riot of Red pt. 1

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Lego and PhotoShop

Yes, two of the most fun things in the world, together. I could add one or two other things to the mix, but then my brain might implode.

My nephew has been expressing a lot of interest in PhotoShop lately. Which I think is great!

He had a book about ghosts from the library the other day. Tried to convince me that ghosts are real. “Look! See! Here are photos of them!” On the one hand I felt bad about being such a bummer, but I felt I had to break it to him that those were all examples of advanced for their time photographic techniques. That when people didn’t know any better, it was easy to fool them. “These aren’t ghosts buddy, they’re hoaxes. People may well have done these to get rich off of. There’s nothing honourable about profiting from bamboozling people.”

I took him over to the computer, opened PhotoShop, found a picture of one of his school pals standing against a blue back ground (made it very easy to crop her out - didn’t want to spend too much time on the demonstration) turned her about 35% opaque, found another picture, dragged the selection over, and presto, his pal was now a shimmering ghost.“What I just did is a more high tech version of what people were doing in a dark room 100, 150 years ago.”

On the one hand I felt bad about bursting his bubble, and yet at the same time I want to make sure that he is media savvy. I guess you have to start that conversation at some point.

Coupled with that, he’s been expressing a desire to have a blog to show his Lego creations, “just like Uncle Thomas has.” To him it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’s grown up with it. Yet there are some thorny issues surrounding a 7 year old wanting to have a blog. While on the one hand I think it’s great if it inspires him to want to make stuff, practice writing, learn about taking photos, using a computer, etc., there may well be some bigger issues involved in it that he doesn’t entirely grasp yet.

While babysitting him for a while on Saturday, we of course spent a delightful hour making stuff out of Lego. I let the box of parts speak to me and I felt “wheels.” So I made a car type of thing. He told me his creations was going to have wings. And of course, it ended up with a whole bunch of blasters. Can’t forget the blasters.

When we were done he asked if I could take some photos. “And then could we do what you did with those photos? You know where you made it look like it was flying?”

So we went outside, snapped some pictures in the backyard, and then back inside to give him a lesson in PhotoShop.


Showed him a whole slew of things, and I heard the phrase “That’s amazing!” several times. I don’t know how much of it he’ll retain, but you gotta start somewhere. I told him that I’ve been using it since day one, and I’m still learning things all the time, so not to feel bad if he doesn’t remember everything. 

Explained to him the concepts behind masking. “Remember when we were painting the wall and we put masking tape along the edges so we’d end up with a nice straight line and the paint wouldn’t go on the baseboards? Well this is sort of like that. Pretend that I’m putting tape all around the edge of your ship. That way I can paint over it and not get anything on the ship itself.”

I didn’t get too fancy with it, and none of this is anything I’d put in a portfolio necessarily. But the main aim was to introduce him to some fun stuff you can do with PS. And I think I succeeded in inspiring him.

Showed him the clone tool and what it could do, and that elicited a “That’s amazing!”

“Can we do another one?”
“Sure.”

“That’s so awesome! Can we do another one?”
“Sure.”

Tried to take a few photos against the sky, but this is the only one that turned out halfway decent. Would have gone back to do more, but after the computer noodling, it was dark.

Probably touched on way more things than he can possibly retain, but he prattled on about it the rest of the night, rightfully amazed at the awesome power of PhotoShop. (I may have just blasted Adobe and their handling of the whole FreeHand debacle, but PhotoShop is something I can’t fault them for.) I hope these two introductions to some of its capabilities inspires him to want to learn more. I’d be delighted to sit down with him any time and teach him anything I have learned over the years. I was already an adult when I got my hands on PS. Imagine what a kid could do with it.

Behance

Finally got my ass on to Behance. I needed an online portfolio and it seems to get good reviews from all my creative friends. There are several online portfolios and I’m thinking of getting on to a few of them.

Behance seems pretty straightforward, but I wonder if it isn’t a place where it becomes easy to get lost in the absolute deluge of stuff that gets posted there. I posted some stuff, and 20 hours later went back to post some more stuff and also to have a look at what else had been posted by others. Page after page of stuff. After a while I stopped actually looking at other peoples stuff and just out of curiosity started to see how much had been posted. 12 items per page. After just shy of 150 pages I found back the last thing I had put up. Wow that is a lot of people putting up a lot of material. I realize that quite a few disciplines are represented, but that is still a pretty staggering volume of work being shown. I suppose as a quick way to show a prospective employer or client some of what you’ve done it’s fine, but as a random showcase for your skills, I wonder how well it does.

Another thing I realize is that I need to take much better pictures of my stuff. I don’t have a great camera, and for the purposes of a blog, where I just want to quickly throw up what I've done to share, it’s fine. I tend to have a ton of ideas in the hopper that I’m working on and want to get to. I finish one thing off, snap some shots, process and edit them, throw them up here, and then it’s off to the next project. But that process of getting photos, downloading them on to my computer, sorting what is okay and what isn’t, rotating them, cropping them, editing them, saving a smaller version, putting a watermark on them, flattening that - I shudder to think how many hours I’ve spent on that in the time I’ve been doing this blog. Hundreds of hours. Weeks of time. Some of the steps I’ve created actions for and I can just batch them, saving me some time. Some things still require a human hand though. Selecting, cropping.

For the sake of an online portfolio, and looking at the high quality of photography others are using to showcase their work, I feel decidedly inadequate at some of my half assed photos. Time to devote some more time to taking some better photos. *sigh* But...lots of the product designs I’ve glanced at seem to be 3D renderings. Now I’m impressed by the ideas shown and the ability represented by the 3D renderings. But I feel somewhat more confident in the fact that I have actual products to show. A mockup is great and all, but to my mind it’s trumped by a physical object. Unpolished as some of my items may be, it’s considerably further along the process than a rendering is. I suppose that if I had gotten a proper education as an industrial designer, I would place more emphasis on the rendering part, but I’m merely an amateur tinkerer. I just want to get on to the actual making. To me the proof is in the pudding. I suppose also that it really depends on the item being created. For some things a detailed rendering to present to the client may be the only feasible way to go. For sewn goods, if someone wanted me to make a...messenger bag say, I could likely whip one together faster than I could do a rendering of it. And an actual object the client could hold in their hands might do more to sell it than a rendering could.

But hell, if I had access to the software, I would likely love it to bits and be teaching myself to use it and creating all sorts of nifty stuff with it.

All right. Enough writing. I have to get back to working on the logos and typefaces I have on the go right now, so that I have something more to feature on Behance. And here. And maybe Coroflot soon as well. And maybe Deviant Art. And....

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