A Funkaoshi Production

My Poor Stomach

   24 January 2010, early morning

Cross your fingers that I’m not totally wrecked tomorrow. Kerela would have been more fun if not for the … sickness. Today I did manage to leave the house, and saw an elephant, so it’s not a total wash.

Comment [1] Life 

Chennai

   21 January 2010, late evening

We spent the first 3 days of our trip in Chenna, formally Madras. The city is absolutely insane. There are people all over the place, and cars and motorbikes and auto-rickshaws everywhere you look. The place is pretty dirty. I guess it’s hard to keep a city like that clean without some serious infrastructure spending. The food is good: hot and mostly vegetarian. I don’t know how people don’t get ulcers here. You go for breakfast and get fried bread (poori) to eat with some hot curries. That seems like a bit much so early in the morning. Driving here is incredible. There are basically no lanes, people just drive where they can fit. Everyone uses their horn to signal they are near by. At first I thought people were being ridiculous, but it’s clear there is a method to all the madness. At around 6-7 you start hearing all the car horns, and it’s non-stop till late at night. In Kerela now. And we have to head out.

Comment Life 

India Bound

   16 January 2010, late afternoon

I always tell myself that the next time I travel i’ll find someone to post links and other such things here while i’m away. Yet again, I haven’t done that — next time. Shima and I are leaving for South India in a few hours. We get to enjoy a 14 hour flight to Abu Dhabi, and a 4 hour flight to Madras. (Oh dear God.) We’ll be back in 3 weeks.

I really don’t know what to expect with this trip. I have been to South India before, but it was almost 20 years ago now. I can’t say I liked that trip at all. I suspect the country has changed a fair bit since then. I most certainly have.

I’ll probably update the site when I can. See you!

Comment [2] Life 

Developing Film at Home: A Year in Review

   7 January 2010, mid-morning

It’s been a little over a year since I started developing and scanning my own B&W film. In that time i’ve developed 49 rolls of film. Well, those are rolls that actually turned out. I’ve also destroyed 4 rolls of film due to using bad chemicals or other stupidness on my part. Developing film is a pretty satisfying process. For the most part, I think I’ve more or less sorted out how to do it properly. I’m probably not as careful as I should/could be, but my negatives seem to turn out fine nevertheless.

I’ve been using FilmDev.org to track how I develop my film. The site works well, and can be instructive in showing you how different films and developers work together. Because HP5+ is readily available on the cheap here in Toronto, that’s the B&W film I’ve used the most. I started off using Ilfosol-3 as my primary developer, but I think I prefer T-Max Developer from Kodak more. It seems more versatile, and the results seem a bit more punchy. I suppose it’s all a matter of taste.

Developing B&W film at ImageWorks costs $7 a roll, which works out to $343 to process everything I’ve done. (Holy shit, right?) Since I started developing at home I’ve used up one bottle of Ilfosol-3, one bottle of T-Max Developer, one bottle of Ilford Fix. That’s around $30 of chemicals that are now all gone. I’ve still got bottles of: T-Max Developer, Diafine, Ilford Fix, Ilford Stop and some Kodak Photoflo. That’s probably $50-$60 worth of chemicals that should last a good while. I could probably do another 50 or so rolls with what I have left. I had to pay about $40 to get all the other materials I need to develop film, but that’a fixed cost. So, the conclusion here is that it’s a lot cheaper doing this all yourself. I think the results are better as well.

The big problem with shooting film is getting the results onto your computer. I have an Epson V500 scanner, which has an attachment for scanning negatives. Having ImageWorks scan film for me would cost $6 a roll, which would have cost me $294. My scanner cost me $200. Again, this is a fixed cost. So, for the most part scanning at home is another win. Well, almost: scanning film is horrible. It’s a slow, boring, and more often than not frustrating process. I still can’t figure out — at all — how to scan my slide film correctly. Colour film is just as problematic. I manage well enough with B&W film, but it’s not without its own issues. No matter how hard I try I always end up with dust marks on my scans. All the scans I post online need to be spotted to get rid of all these marks. The whole process, scanning and touching up, is so damn slow. I’m not sure if there is really anything I can do to improve this situation.

You can see all the photographs I’ve developed myself in my Flickr set, BYOB&W. (If you have a fast connection, IMG VQVZ will probably present them in a nicer fashion, all the images on a single page.) I’m quite happy with all my recent shots. This roll in particular has some really nice pictures.

I’ve been developing film at home for a year now and save for some strange stains on my bathroom vanity I think the process has been a positive one.

Comment [4] Photography 

Group VIEWQVZ

   4 January 2010, lunch time

I wrote another small Sinatra web-app over the holidays, one for viewing groups on Flickr: Group VIEWQVZ. This site is basically a simpler (lamer?) version of Flickr River. I think if I knew how well Flickr River worked I wouldn’t have started with this thing. I did learn a little bit about HTML5, and a bit more about using Sinatra. I put the code up on Github for those of you who want to see how a Sinatra application works. For those of you who know Ruby, you can tell me what i’m doing wrong.

Comment Code 

2010

   2 January 2010, lunch time

The last decade has ended. I met Shima and got married, so i’d say the last 10 years weren’t a total write-off. On the whole though it does seem like a pretty shit decade. Especially compared to the 90s, which I quite liked. Now it’s twenty-ten. That sounds like a good year.

Comment [6] Life 

Across the Universe

   29 December 2009, mid-morning

I watched Across the Universe over the weekend. Maybe on Christmas Day? That weekend is a bit of a blur now. The film is a musical, set in the 60s, which uses music by the Beatles. Visually it’s quite well done, but the rest of the movie seemed a bit weak. (And this is a film scored with Beatles music!) I thought they were trying a bit too hard to cram in as many Beatles songs as they could. There were several plot points on the go that didn’t really add anything to the main story. (Prudence? Why was she in the film at all?) More so, they touched on a lot of interesting issues without really putting much thought into any of them. Still, the movie looked pretty awesome in Bluray. After watching the movie we played The Beatles Rock Band game. Now that was awesome.

The official Across the Universe website.

Comment Movies 

Blansdowne

   21 December 2009, late evening

I took the code I wrote for IMG VQVZ to finish off my Blansdowne photo site. You can now browse my most recent photos of the area, and look at the sets of images I’ve made using those photos. The only thing left to do is take photographs that are interesting. This might be the hardest part of the project.

Comment Code | Photography 

IMG VQVZ

   18 December 2009, mid-morning

When I met Ali and a few of the Well.ca people at Startup Camp a couple years back, I told the organizers I was working for the skunk-works project VQVZ. I suppose technically I was, since I’ve been sitting on the domain for a long time now.

I bought Blansdowne.ca a while ago. My original plan was to set up some sort of community site, similar to the site Joe Clark runs about Leslieville. I sat on the domain for ages. Shortly after buying my GRD II I snapped a few photos of the neighbourhood, put them in a small set on Flickr, and thought it’d be nice to use Blansdowne.ca for a photo project instead of yet another blog. The site remained static for a long time. A few weeks back I got to work figuring out how I would build a simple photo application to run the site. I wanted to be able to display collections of photos on a single page, and have a simple photoblog that would display images in chronological order. One reason I gave up updating We Must Abuse the Broadband was because Flickr was basically easier in every regard to work with. So, one of my main goals with this project was that updating the site needed to be easy.

My first idea was to have a simple text file that would act as a manifest for the site, describing images I’d keep in a directory on the file system. A Ruby script would read the manifest, and generate a bunch of web pages from that. I got this working fairly quickly. I realized that updating this text file could end up being a pain in the ass as the number of photos grew, so I started adding more logic to my script to manage adding images to the file. I didn’t get very far with this. The command line script worked well, but I still thought as the site grew it wouldn’t scale. The first thing I did was drop the text file. I started using Datamapper as a front end to a SQLite database. I decided to worry about how I would update the site later and ended up moving everything over to Sinatra, which is a simple Ruby web framework. (Sinatra is so simple I figured out how it worked and got the site working with the new framework in the middle of the night after drinking at LeVack Block. I am a big fan of the framework.) The Sinatra application worked as well as my little Ruby script, but now the pages were being generated dynamically. This done, I started working on a seperate Sinatra webapp that would be used to manage all the images on the site. (I built a separate app so I wouldn’t need to worry about authentication: this second application would never be running on my webhost.) I managed to get adding images to the site working fairly well. I was at a bit of a loss as to how I would manage the sets of images I wanted to display. I left the site alone.

Late one night, after drinking a coke and being totally wired while trying to sleep, I realized that trying to be better at managing photos than Flickr was probably a waste of time. I put the Blansdowne site aside and started working on a little test site that would use Flickr as the back-end for a photoblog. Yesterday I finally put something up at VQVZ. Currently it’s simply a way to view all my photos on Flickr. It is similar to the site I Hardly Know Her. One improvement is that you can use the keys j/k to browse through the photos, and to move between pages on the site. (This is a feature I was bugging the guy who runs I Hardly Know Her to add.) The site can use machine-tags to display a subset of photos: for example, pictures of my lovely wife, and the same Blansdowne photos that started this whole process. This isn’t an ideal way to display sets, since you have no control over the sequence. So the next step in this project is to sort out displaying actual Flickr sets. Well, there is probably a lot more to do, but you need to start somewhere.

And that is probably more than you wanted to know about how my brain works.

Update: And i’m more or less done.

Comment Code 

Ricoh GR1s

   16 December 2009, mid-morning

Ever since getting my Ricoh GRD II I have been looking for a Ricoh GR1 for some time now. The GR1 series of cameras are what the Ricoh GR Digital line is based on. They share a very similar form factor, a fixed 28mm lens, and similar shooting modes. GR1 cameras are reasonably rare nowadays, and they don’t seem to show up for sale all to often (or end up costing far too much). So it was strange to find one selling in Toronto on the cheap.

I ended up getting a GR1s. It’s in reasonably good shape, save for the fact the LCD no longer works properly. It only displays when the camera is in snap mode or not. Thankfully, you can figure out what other modes you are in by keeping track of how many times you’ve hit the mode button. The in-focus indicator box thing in the viewfinder is also really dim. I’m not sure if these are common GR1 problems or not. I’ll need to look into that.

I’ve ran one roll through the camera thus far, and am happy with the results. I think I need to sell some cameras to balance things out.

Comment [2] Photography 

Using Local Gems on Dreamhost

   12 December 2009, late morning

This was tripping me up this morning. Dreamhost doesn’t have a lot of rubygems I use installed for everyone to use. I have gem installing rubygems in my home directory, under $home/local/gems. You do this by setting the environment variable GEM_HOME. In Bash, I have the following in my .bashrc file: GEM_HOME="$HOME/local/gems". In order for passenger to use your local gems when it is running a ruby web application, you need to set the variable ENV['GEM_PATH'] in your Ruby script. An alternative would be to “vendor” all the gems you need to use — that is storing them locally and referring to them explicitly. This seemed like pain in the ass. To see this all in action, here is rackup file I use to run the Sinatra app that is currently running blansdowne.ca.

Update Dec 18 2009: This looks to barely work. For reasons I haven’t quite sorted out, you end up with random Rack errors on occasion. I suspect it’s because Dreamhost isn’t the sort of place to host Ruby applications, but whatever.

Update Dec 21 2009: I think a more complete solution looks to be outlined here I’ve updated my Rackup file as well.

Comment Code 

LeVack Block's Two Year Anniversary

   12 December 2009, the wee hours

It’s 2:15 on a Friday night. I got back from LeVack Block on Ossington an hour or so ago. It was their two year anniversary. It was a pretty good party. Rather than sleep, I thought i’d figure out how to generate my Blansdowne site using Sinatra, instead of generating all the static pages up front. I’ve actually got it all working, though I need to handle errors better. I’m impressed at how productive I am this late at night.

Comment Life | Technology 

Advanced Figurative Photography: Part 6

   10 December 2009, early morning

Tonight is my last Figurative Photography class. Since talking about the class previously, I’ve had two more sessions photographing nude models. It’s strange how normal the whole exercise becomes. The second and third classes were more about setting up lights and figuring out what to shoot, rather than dealing with the fact there is a totally naked person in front of you. That’s not to say I got better pictures during the subsequent session.

During the first session I took pretty vanilla photos of nude people. Some of the photos turned out nicely, but a lot of them were pretty plain. So, I thought for the subsequent classes I’d just muck around with things and try to take different sorts of pictures. During the second class, in between taking regular portraits and what not, I had the models stand up and down while I took longer exposed shots. I wanted to end up with safe-for-work nudes, shots that hinted at the nudity and the human form.

During the third class, I brought my flash, and tried using that while photographing. I took some long exposure shots where I’d fire the flash and move, so you end up with an echoed image after the first. A series of shots using my flash and a flash light to illuminate the scene turned out nteresting. (And at times a bit messy.) Someone wanted to photograph the body with images projected onto it, and that actually turned out pretty interesting. The model looked like he had a full body tattoo. We ended that class doing multiple exposures using my flash and long shutter speeds in a black room. These photos have a sort of ethereal look to them.

You can see everything I’ve posted from my class on Flickr, though the set is probably NSFW. Tonights class is probably going to be spent looking at photos.

Comment [7] Photography | Advanced Figurative Photography Class 

City of Sadness

   25 November 2009, early morning

I watched City of Sadness last night at Cinematheque. This is the 20th anniversary of the film, and it looks like they are touring a new print of the movie from cinema to cinema. The film is set during the period of unrest in Taiwan during 1945 – 1949), when the Chinese nationalist government took over control of the island from the Japanese. Director Hou Hsiao-hsien examines this unrest by following the lives of an extended family: a family patriarch and his 4 sons — one of whom is missing for the entire movie. (The film stars Tony Leung as the deaf youngest brother in the family the film follows. As one would expect, he’s awesome in the film.) The story is slow. The arc the plot travels in is strange, and it’s hard to sort out how all the pieces relate. I suppose ultimately the film is about conflict, in particular between the Taiwanese and the Mainland Chinese. It’s a beautiful movie; depressing, but not as depressing as I thought it would be. I was reminded of the film Yi Yi, by Edward Yang, a contemporary of Hou Hsiao-hsien. The film is probably not for everyone, but I quite enjoyed it.

City of Sadness at Cinematheque

Comment Movies 

Advanced Figurative Photography: Part 5

   20 November 2009, early morning

Since my last class taking nude photographs, I attended two photography classes where we spent time looking at photographs and reviewing each others work. One class focused on street and vernacular photography, the another on nudes and fashion photography.

The street photography section was interesting, but since this is a topic i’m interested in I was fairly familiar with a lot of the work. There were still some new names to learn and photos to see. Sally Mann, Tina Barney, and Larry Sultan all take family photographs, but with a fine-art twist. Tina Barney is interesting in that she uses a large format camera to take what look like snapshots — except there is no way they could be snapshots because of the nature of the camera. I had no idea Larry Clark, the director of Kids, was an accomplished photographer before he became a director. His photos are in the same vein as Nan Goldin. The class covered a whole slew of photographers, ending with a look at Trent Parke’s work.

The following class started with another look at the body. Of particular note was the work by Francesca Woodman. She committed suicide at a young age and came to prominence after her death. Her portraits and self portraits are pretty haunting: long exposures, strange settings, etc. On the fashion side of things, the work by Deborah Tuberville is really interesting; she barely showcases the clothing. It’s interesting watching the evolution of fashion photography: early photographs look and feel like photographs of real live people, while what we have today is so over processed and shiny everything looks so fake.

Last night’s class was once again spent taking photographs of nude models.

Comment Photography | Advanced Figurative Photography Class 

The Pan Am Games

   6 November 2009, mid-afternoon

We won the bid to host the Pan Am games in 2015. Bizarre. I always think of Toronto as the city that almost wins at these sorts of contests. Maybe it was a good thing Harper didn’t show up. Now lets sit and wait for all the crazy infrastructure spending that is going to happen. I want to take the Sheppard subway to Scarborough. Or take a Kingston subway from Union. Make it happen people!

Comment [2] Toronto 

Advanced Figurative Photography: Part 4

   3 November 2009, late evening

The 4th class in my Figurative Photography Class was the first class where we photographed the nude body. I found the experience quite surreal. Normally the people you interact with are clothed. Having a conversation with a naked person is odd. Asking them to pose this way or that way is all the more strange.

The models were regulars at the AGO. It seemed like most of my class members had taken other gallery courses at the AGO, so they had already worked with nude models before. (A few even knew the models in question.) We were supposed to have a male and female model to work with, but the sculpture class lost their model so our female mode left to help them out. The male model called up his friend, another AGO regular, and so a half hour or so into the class we had two male models to work with, Ab and Flip. Being regulars, they were quite comfortable getting naked and contorting their body. They were probably far more comfortable with the situation than the people in my class.

I found that I would get wrapped up in the way the models were posed and forget where the shadows are falling on their bodies. Another issue is that the schlong is a very awkward appendage: it’s hard to place in a photograph. More so, I think it’s hard to photograph a dude’s junk and not have it be vulgar. I’m not sure what I can say about nude photography. I found it hard to take a meaningful photo. There are a few shots I thought were standout, but for the most part I felt like I was just taking pictures of naked people. Hopefully the next time we take pictures i’ll have a better idea of what I want to photograph.

A few NSFW images from the night are up on Flickr.

Comment [6] Photography | Advanced Figurative Photography Class 

toronto.ca/open

   2 November 2009, early morning

This is pretty neat: the city of Toronto is releasing a bunch of the data and information they collect online, via the portal toronto.ca/open. There is a companion site, dataTO.org They look to be following the lead of the US government, who recently created DATA.gov not too long ago. This stuff is all generated using tax payer money, so I think it makes sense that the data be available to the public. You can grab the entire TTC schedule as a series of text files now. There is a real time XML feed of events and festivals taking place in the city. This address validator web service looks like it could be used to do a lot of interesting things. I’ll be curious to see what sorts of things people start creating with the data released so far, and what other datasets the city plans to release. There isn’t much online right now, but it seems like a good start.

Comment [3] Toronto | Technology 

4 Billion Photos

   29 October 2009, mid-morning

Flickr is often looked on disparagingly by the more established photographic community. This is understandable. There are 4 billion photographs on Flickr, and for the most part they are pretty shitty. If you browse the Explore feature of Flickr, you’ll see photo after photo of HDR scenes, flowers, stupid shots with lots of “bokeh”, and other stupidness. I wasn’t sure what you would call this aesthetic till I read the following: the main thing that makes Flickr unattractive is that it is dominated by ad-educated aesthetic, by which I mean, sleek, surface-based, and impressionable with little beyond that point. In case you get the wrong idea, hyperallergic labs is a fan of Flickr. He goes on to say, “I am an art critic in NY and I use Flickr ALL THE TIME, if I find something interesting, I write about it.”

I’ve seen Flickr come up in two discussions on other photography sites recently. Burn Magazine published a photo essay edited by Rafal Pruszynski featuring photographs came from the Flickr group La Familia Abrazada. The group consists of family and vernacular photography. The photographs are usually pretty damn good. Some of the contributors to Burn Magazine and the regulars who comment at the site were offended a set of images from Flickr were featured on Burn. Flickr is for your mom and douche-bags with 5Ds, while Burn is for serious-ass photographers pursuing their art! Things were fairly obnoxious and heated in one of Burn’s forum threads. The discussion is a bit disappointing because it seems to focus on where the photographs came from rather than the photographs themselves.

A few days later Jorg Colberg wrote a follow up to a piece by Jin from Shooting Wife Open. Colberg’s article, particularly its conclusion, offended Bryan Formhals of La Pura Vida, who responded himself. This sparks some discussion on Flickr itself at HCSP. Colberg posts yet again, complaining that people on the Internet don’t know how to debate, and are jerk-asses. Perhaps. I think the thing that riles people up with Colberg’s initial post is that it’s incredibly dismissive. He seems to argue that Flickr is useful for finding photos you can use to make real art out of. And that’s it. He completely glosses over the fact there is real talent on Flickr itself. I would argue that not appreciating the Behemoth that is Flickr suggests you’re a bit out of touch.

So as I said at the start of this post, there are 4 billion fucking photos on Flickr. It is the height of arrogance to suggest in that mess of images there aren’t a substantial number of incredible photos. It’s probably not unreasonable at all to argue there are more absolutely incredible photos on Flickr than there are anywhere else on the Internet. I’m not going to argue that though, I wouldn’t know where to start.

Comment [7] Photography 

Advanced Figurative Photography: Part 3

   25 October 2009, evening time

he third figurative photography class I attended was split, more or less, into three sections. We started the class with an overview of nude photography. As with the class on portraiture, we more or less covered the history of nude photography from the advent of photography to the 70s or so. (I believe we are covering more contemporary nude photography in an another class.) As with the previous class, there were a few names I recognized, and plenty I did not.

I haven’t really sat down and looked at a lot of nude photography, so it’s interesting to see how different people approach the subject, and how it has changed over time. The very early nudes seem to have a lot in common with classic sculptures of the body, or paintings. This is to be expected to some extent. This is also probably due to the nature of cameras at the time. They were large and cumbersome, and the exposures were quite long. Most of the photographs we saw from the early part of the century were of full body nudes. As cameras get smaller, and film more straightforward to process and develop, you start to see more interesting takes on the subject. Surrealists like Man Ray were doing pretty interesting things with the nude body. Other photographers whose work I thought was quite good include Peter Hujar,
Lee Friedlander, and Bill Brandt.

The second part of the class was reviewing each others work. Everyone presented 3 photos from the previous week’s class (Stacey, Dave), 2 portraits they took outside of class (Shima), and one self portrait. It was interesting seeing what everyone decided to photograph, and how they lit their subjects.

Finally we went up to the fifth floor of the AGO to check out the Beautiful Fictions exhibit currently taking place. I ended up going to the AGO again today to check it out once more. It’s a really cool collection of contemporary photography. There is a lot to see, and a good variety of images, so it’s well worth the trip to the gallery.

Next week we are working with nude models. That should be an experience.

Comment Photography | Advanced Figurative Photography Class