unbillable hours

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, et Mentam Mortalia Tangunt

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

"There are tears for things, and our mortality touches our souls." 
Virgil, The Aeneid

It's All So Obvious

New York, New York
Update: Gothamist has more on the Pale Male protests that spawned this photo series. 

Picture Envy for December 24, 2004

A slightly belated Picture Envy this week, due, somewhat obviously, I suppose, to the convergence of the Christmas Holiday with the weekend. It's been a busy couple of weeks, and it feels like this Holiday is the first one during which I can sit down and breath for a moment.

So, I find myself sitting at home, in my drafty office over the garage, listening to Matthew Sweet's How Long Until You Break while playing around with Del.icio.us. I've been fiddling a lot with technology lately. I suppose it makes up for my now defunct – and likely not-to-be-replaced – palm pilot. Still, I've moved most of my bookmarks to my Del.icio.us page. I like the idea of not having to worry about finding or remembering links that I made at work or home while at another location. It took me a while to get into this tool, but I think it's pretty neat. I've been playing with Photoshop a lot lately. Obviously, Philosophy is a Walk on a Slippery Rock is a fairly explicit example of photoshopping an image, but I've also been working on changing the heat of an image by adding and removing color layers. It's interesting, in the sense that recognizing color "temperature" in photography is probably an intuitive version of figuring out what probably would have taken psychologists a long time to do if they studied it in line with the scientific method. Next week, I'll be doing a bunch of photos that relate to one of my favorite subjects: statues. I take great pleasure in shooting pictures of statues because, between the interplay of the coldness of the marble/granite and the often-dramatic shadowing of a statues face can create powerful emotional images.

 To put it another way: Statues never look happy.

 

Joe Cunningham - Saw These

So… let's get on to the "meat" of this post, shall we? I feel like doing for links for picture envy this week, largely because the first one, Joe Cunningham's saw these is, itself, actually a collection of links. Joe's photoblog includes a collection of links under the heading "see these." Saw these is the archive of all of Joe's favorites for 2004. It became the inspiration for Brandon Stone's suggestion on the photoblogs.org blog regarding the use of Del.icio.us for a collective link list of favorite photoblog posts. As an aside, you can also find a list of the most popular photoblog posts linked to on Del.icio.us here (this is a little more selective than the general photoblog posts link).   

 

The Little Green Suitcase - Indifference

One of the pleasures of seeing what other people find interesting on Del.icio.us has been finding a number of new photoblogs that interest me. The Little Green Suitcase is one of them. Indifference is apparently a shot from when the proprietor of The Little Green Suitcase was in high school. I like the repeating near-symmetry of the park benches, as well as the off-kilter placement of the two young women on the bench in the center of the frame. The image looks a little beaten-up, and, overall, it has the air of being from thirty or forty years ago.

 

640x480.net – Untitled

640x480.net represents an interesting project. Developed by Michal Daniel, the site is dedicated to images taken with the Eyemodule2 camera (the old plug-in for the Handspring PDAs). The images have a great "surveillance camera" feel, and the untitled image I've selected for this week's Picture Envy is especially pleasing to me because, upon viewing it, I imagined a story of instability and suffering. The sense of motion conveyed along the top of the subject's face and the minimal depth of field convey an image of a startled man, perhaps unwell, being surprised on his way home to a darkened apartment where he usually listens to AM radio – more the commercials than the sports and commentary – while sitting in a secondhand high-backed chair.

I know that, probably, I should be doing a sappy, nostalgic collection of images that relate to the Yuletide, but, frankly, if you're coming to Unbillable Hours for a while, you've probably learned that my stock in trade is melancholia. The untitled image linked to above is heavily perfumed with the musk of sorrow. Anyway, melancholia is part of the Christmas spirit. Remember, one of the gifts of the Wise Men to Mary and Joseph was myrrh, the ancient funereal scent used for the preparation of the dead. Melancholia was always intended to be part of the holiday. It's probably a nod to those melancholy people like me who have to endure the "comfort and joy" parts with squinting discomfort.

 

Visual Gratification – Starburst

Visual Gratification has a particularly interesting shot, Starburst, that is a great example of why I think light, itself, is perhaps the most interesting subject for shooting (in fact, earlier this evening, I went out to take some long exposure shots of the lumenaria that has been set up by many families on my block.

Philosophy Is A Walk On A Slippery Rock

The "Pale Male" Protests, New York, New York (my first attempt at removing color from all of an image except for one individual). 

Religion is a Smile on a Dog

The Sh*t Weasel, Thompson Park, Lincroft, New Jersey

On Using Del.icio.us for Noteworthy Photos and Typepad's Degrading Quality of Service

I just tried to use the Typepad "Quickpost" bookmarklet feature to put up a quick blurb about Brandon Stone's suggestion on the photoblogs.org blog regarding the use of Del.icio.us (hereinafter "Delicious") for the creating of a master list regarding "hot" photoblog posts. Unfortunately, Quickpost, like most of the new "improvements" made to Typepad by Movable Type, sucks.  The post I had written was mysteriously deleted; I spent five minutes sending frustrated help ticket messages to Movable Type; cursed, gave up, and decided to start all over again using MS Word as a text editor rather than Typepad's internal text editor. I am pretty sure that I am not going to stick with Typepad for very long. I am getting more and more unhappy with this service the more I use it. And, well, if Movable Type doesn't like that I post messages like this on the service it operates, it should consider ways in which it can keep its early adopters happy.

Okay. Deep breath. Let go of the anger.  

Brandon Stone, the mastermind (sorry; I'm keen on masterminds, having finally seen The Incredibles last night) behind the Photoblogs.org group of websites, made the following suggestion regarding the use of Delicious for the purposes of creating a RSS feed-adaptable, collaborative list of those photoblog posts that the photoblogging community considers "hot."

The recent post from Joe Cunningham about the Ten Links section on his site really got me thinking. Mainly, it got me thinking about how a person could use del.icio.us to create such a list. In fact, it looks like Heather Champ is doing just that for the "Fabulous Elsewhere" section on her homepage.

Now, this really got me to thinking...  If we all did something similar using del.icio.us, we could create our own collaborative feed of noteworthy photoblog posts.

Brandon Stone, An Interesting Way for Us to Use Del.icio.us, blog.photoblogs.org (Dec. 18, 2004).

 

I'm not necessarily technology-oriented. I've learned enough of HTML and the like to maintain my blog on the Typepad site (for now, Movable Type, for now…), and I've basically ignored all of the other technological advancements other than Bloglines. Delicious included. Still, I think this is a good idea. However, I don't think that the Delicious method proposed by Stone can be a final solution for the posting of noteworthy images for me.  To some extent, it's useful because it shows the collective's view on what is noteworthy, but it doesn't provide the sort of in depth reaction to an image that I would want to use my Picture Envy posts for (or Heather Champ's Fabulous Elsewhere link list); in other words, don't expect that feature of Unbillable Hours to go anywhere. Even if Unbillable Hours goes somewhere beyond Typepad. (Can you tell how ticked off I am with Movable Type today?)

 Here's the methodology suggested by Stone for using Delicious to effect this collaborative noteworthy image collection:

1. Create a Delicious feed. (My Delicious feed is located here. Here's the RSS feed for it.)
2. Bookmark noteworthy images using an identical tagging system within Delicious (Stone suggests, and I use, "photoblog-posts").
3. Consider using the photoblog-posts feed that Delicious automatically creates to see what everyone has linked to in that category. 

Of course, the downside to this is that there may be such a mass jumble of posts that the photoblog-posts feed becomes useless, an overwhelming list of links that no one will go through in its entirety. However, I still think it's worth giving this idea a shot. I'll continue to create my formal Picture Envy posts, because I like  the idea of  actively pointing people to posts I like, rather than merely creating a link list.  Still, the link list acts as a working notebook, which is valuable as well.   

Update: Formatting fixed after cutting and pasting from MS Word.  Typepad misunderstood the spaces between words as Tabs. 

Update 2: (12/20/04) Okay, I am officially addicted to using Delicious.  It's probably precisely the sort of thing I should not use, being a compulsive link aggregator.  Once again, here's the link to my Delicious page. 

Picture Envy Goes All Sopranos On You

Since last week was focused, to some extent, on New York, I figured I'd stick to a more Jersey-centric Picture Envy this week.  So, let me give you a list of the active NJ photobloggers I've been able to find.  I've skipped those that appear to have not posted within two months, and I haven't picked favorites (as encouraging NJ photoblogging would be enough for me), but this list is a good start:

• Cobwebstudios
• Kevin Reed... Photoblog(wow... hell of a site name, Kevin.  Way to get all "creative" on us.  Just kidding, just kidding, don't get uppity.)
• OneReaction
• donald tetto: photography (Tetto divides his time between Providence, RI, and New Jersey, but only due to college, so he still counts as an NJ photoblogger). 
• thediaryofjunkoseven: photoblog (ifyouusespacesyourtitlewouldbeeasiertoread)
• tssullivan
• Wax Rhapsodic (has a cool bulldog post... I love bulldogs.  Bada**es with a fondness for milkbones)
• Chaoss Control

The next time you feel compelled to analyze the political meaning of music, just consider this: how many people must hide their secret embarassment that, in the eighties, they tried to engage in discourse over After the Fire's Der Komissar?

On Turkey

Gadling, the travel blog, has two posts on traveling to Turkey (something I would like to do someday):

• Turkey Bound
• And Yet Still More on Turkey

The freedom to criticise ideas, any ideas - even if they are sincerely held beliefs - is one of the fundamental freedoms of society. A law which attempts to say you can criticise and ridicule ideas as long as they are not religious ideas is a very peculiar law indeed.

Rowan Atkinson, quoted in BBC News, Religious jokes 'won't be crime' (Dec. 7, 2004), cited in Little Green Footballs.