unbillable hours

Mail-Order Photo Processing

I have been playing with some ultra-high-speed film (film that's rated at ISO 1600 or higher; in this case, film that was rated at ISO 3200 and 6400) lately.  I discovered something interesting. 

No one develops ultra-high-speed film.  I went to the local pro shop, a place that is historic for development in the area (Dorn's, in Red Bank, New Jersey; it's been in operation since the turn of the 20th Century and has an amazing collection of historic shots), and was dejected to learn that I'd have to hire one of their technicians to develop the 6400.  (Dorn's is a great resource, nonetheless.)

I checked out the photographic equivalent of a cornucopia, B & H Photo and Video, a Manhattan-based photography shop that, frankly, causes me to hyperventilate when I enter.  ("They have everything here!")  B & H led me to A & I Photographic & Film Services, Inc., in Los Angeles, California. I purchased five pre-paid mailers, which I'm still awaiting, for the processing of the five rolls of the ultra-high-speed film I intend to develop.  Each mailer was $19.50, but I figure I would have spent nearly that much to have someplace else send out their film, if not more. Plus, frankly, this sort of place looks like it might do a damn good job. 

This sort of frustration almost - but not quite - makes me consider going digital. 

I'm curious; anyone else use mail-away processing services?  If so, who do you recommend?

I'd post this over on the Photoblogs.org blog, but I'm not yet a contributor (hint, hint). 

Barbarian at the Gates

...As in Christo's Gates.  I was up in Manhattan this weekend for the Politician's birthday, which was celebrated with much aplomb.  We saw the cheerleader-assisted pop-punk band "Bling Kong" (not even close to safe for work, particularly given the rather... "enthusiastic" advice column therein) at the Mercury Lounge, which may be one of the more surreal live acts I've ever seen.  I highly recommend a viewing, if you get the chance. 

Saturday was spent drinking much coffee and then engaging in a forty block tromp around Central Park to take pictures of The Gates.   I shot three or four rolls there, so I should have something up soon (actually, I've got a few rolls I've been waiting on, (1) because I need to get a new scanner, and (2) because I've been spending every shop class working on developing the new site). 

I don't think Christo, artist behind The Gates, is any sort of genius.  As I said to a fellow tri-state area blawger, I think there's a certain element of "The Music Man" con artistry behind these giant art projects that Christo does, but that works out just fine. 

See, the key thing is not that there was art in Central Park.  There's always art in Central Park, whether it be the sculptures throughout (even some of the playgrounds, like the Safari Park, are art) or the Met or the view of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim.  The key thing about the Gates?  New Yorkers (and the like) were promenading about the park as though it were the 19th Century.  They We wandered aimlessly (which, I can assure you, is not a normal behavior for New Yorkers).  Strangers chatted (again, rare in privacy-respecting New York) with each other. 

The art itself was pleasant, unassuming stuff.  The Gates remind me of Shinto arches, and have a moderate height (the enormity of the project comes from the miles and miles of the park covered in these orange nylon-and-steel archways).  I don't know how well my pictures will come out, as they are just big enough and (strangely) unevenly spaced out, so that a multiple gate shot is not always uniform. 

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. 

Robert Frank

"'Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice,' wrote Kerouac in his now famous introduction to Frank's collection The Americans , 'with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem right out of America on to film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the world'."

- Jack Kerouac, from the introduction to Robert Frank's The Americans.

Via "Wwhy should we remember anything? There is too much to remember now, too much to take in." | Metafilter, which has some fantastic links to Frank's work.

Photo Mosaics and Site Updates

Engadget has tutorial on how to make photo mosaics, for those of you interested in that sort of technical hocus pocus.

Just to formally note these things (because lawyers require formal notice for events to happen; without such notice, we descend into obsessive compulsive self-flagellation), I've finally gotten around to updating the links on the sidebar. Do check them out.

Weegee the Famous

"His name became synonymous with chiaroscuro night scenes of murdered corpses, crashed automobiles, and tenement fires and, as often, shocked onlookers in moments of touching humanity - the police officer with the mournful expression of a priest or the young woman swooning over a sidewalk murder. Weegee's style became the essence of film noir and it helped define the age.

Weegee's legend was partly his own eccentric creation. He playfully attributed his knack for arriving first at crime and accident scenes to premonitory powers, when in fact his 1938 Chevy carried a police dispatch radio. He stamped his prints on the back with the circular legend 'Weegee the Famous,' and introduced himself with those words, long before he had become well-known."

Art Access, Weegee the Famous

World Toy Camera Day

From the Photoblogs.org blog, news of World Toy Camera Day:

The folks at toycamera.com has declared this Saturday, October 23rd 2004 as World Toy Camera Day so on that day dust off your toy cameras, load it with film and go take lots of pictures. Afterwards select the best picture from that day and submit it to toycamera@gmail.com by November 6th, 2004. Prizes include a new holgamod that hasn't even been released yet!

Guess I need to break out my Holga and LCA and get to work....

It's a cold and it’s a broken alleluia

It's quite a little experience, going in for surgery. I went in yesterday, and the whole process took 1.5 hours.

In lawyer time, that is one and one half billable units. The surgeon did his job.

I tried to come in to work today. Everyone said I was nuts for doing it, and everyone was right. I left after six hours. I went home and slept through most of the day, awaking in the late evening. I talked to my friend Hugh about the surgery late tonight. Last year, he had gone in for an operation of his own. He described it best when he responded to my comment about feeling so tired. Hugh said there were times after his surgery that he felt like he was barely able to get up in the morning, and then there were times that he felt like he was able to fly. But, those latter times, he cautioned, only lasted for about forty-five minutes.

I tried to work these little details into a story, but gave up after about that long. I don't know what's going to happen yet, as I don't get the final okay from the surgeon until Friday. I know, as of right now, that he believes that I have a twenty percent chance of having another one of these. I'm not content with such long odds. Long odds are the story of my life. I suppose, then, it's a matter of waiting.

Again, I want to thank everyone that sent kind words. It's a good feeling, seeing that others notice and look out for you. I'm an independent sort, and don't often like or indicate my appreciate that sort of concern, but I do hope that I can convey my gratitude here.

I'm tired, and it is late. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to go to work again. Friday brings a hearing before the Superior Court. I'm looking forward to things getting back to normal.

A Real Cut Up

I'm going to be out of action for a while, as I've just discovered that I've got some sort of cyst on my spine. Tomorrow, I go in for exploratory surgery - my first day off from work since 2002 - and hopefully will find out that it's either just infected spinal fluid or something equally benign. Yes, I recognize the pun on benign there. Yes, I know it's a cheesy pun. I'm on percoset, though, so I could care less if I made puns about monkeys for the next two weeks straight. Similarly, I could also care less if you hit me with bricks. This is why I hate percoset. I hate being dulled in this fashion.

I hate doctors. I don't trust them one bit. They do too much guesswork. So, I'm really not looking forward to this surgery. When I was hit by a drunk driver in 2000, I had doctors working on my shoulder and upper back (my cyst is on or near the base of my spine), and I generally got the impression that "science isn't really an exact science for these science types," to paraphrase Twelve Monkeys.

Great....

I have two goals with this surgery. (1) I do not want to end up sitting on a goddamned rubber doughnut because some poindexter screwed something up; and (2) I want to continue to deal with this as if it were an annoyance and not something more serious. Point one is probably self-explanatory. Who would want a rubber doughnut? Not me, Dr. Jones. The second point... I just want this to be a one-shot deal. I go in, I get the thing fixed, I leave. Done. Nothing extreme. No "we think this is an indicia of..." sort of crap. I don't want to find out I have a goddamned tumor.

So anyway - I have no idea where I'm going with this - if you email or comment and don't hear back from me for a week longer than usual, please don't take it personally.

In fact, maybe I'll sneak the camera into the hospital and annoy the hell out of the staff.

Raise your hand if you want to see photos of TPB in his hospital gown.

Looking at Life II

This weekend, I was at the International Center of Photography ("ICP"), in Midtown Manhattan. ICP had an exhibit on photos used in Life Magazine, the now-defunct, classic image-oriented magazine (along with National Geographic). When I was a kid, my mother used to dismissively refer to Life as a magazine for people who couldn't read. One of the things she missed, though, was the fact that Life was able to rely on images, predominantly, to convey an emotion because its photographers – Robert Capa, Andreas Feininger, etc. – were so adept at conveying emotions through their image. Whatever dogma may have existed at the time, the photographers understood what people would respond to; even now, looking at the images from Vietnam (such as the classic Nick Ut shot of a young girl, naked and screaming, fleeing a village that was hit by napalm) and World War II (like Capa's classic image of men cowering behind tank traps on Utah Beach as they fought their way up into Normandy). Not many images today grab as powerfully. A few images by James Nachtwey – more on him in the coming weeks – of the Sudan genocide grab with similar emotional effect, but few really cause me to pause.

I've never been to the ICP before. It's small - very small. I arrived at ICP at 4:30 on Saturday, leaving me with just until 6:00 PM until the museum closes. I did the entire museum in 1.5 hours, with time to spare for futzing around in the gift shop, even after I had gone through the Life exhibit twice. Admittedly, I skipped a video art installation on the 1970's pop art group "The Ant Farm," but I was not really sure what a video installation had to do with photography (little), and why I want to see a bunch of stoned goofballs drive a car into a bunch of televisions or reenact the Zapruder film. While the Life Magazine exhibit was well worth the $10 I spent to get into the two story museum (the top of which has a small gallery devoted to photos of JFK's presidential candidacy; ICP wears its political heart on its sleeve, as downstairs had a small gallery devoted to anti-war photos from Iraq). When the sum of the exhibits were considered, it seemed that the museum suffered from bad judgment. Some of the photos from the JFK exhibit were covered - in fact, were duplicated - in the Life magazine exhibit. There was too much overlap between the exhibits. The Abu Ghraib exhibit seemed too "general news" for a museum. To me, museums are here to show me something new and novel or old and overlooked. I don't need them to show me something that I'll see ad nauseum on CNN.

I mentioned my concerns to one of my photographer friends, Wormold, and he pointed out the fact that, if ICP were to do away with its small, poorly thought out exhibits, it could probably have two large exhibits that are worth the cost of admission to see. I am certainly glad I spent $10 on seeing the Life magazine exhibit. However, I would never have spent that sort of money on the three other exhibits at ICP, and I spent so little time in them - I literally walked through the Abu Ghraib exhibit in under a minute ("Yep, exactly the same photos I've seen on television; moving on, then....") - that I agree with his notion that these other exhibits were not smart inclusions in such a small museum space.

However, I do have a snazzy ICP logo hat. That counts for something.