Coldenhagen
Riveting, eh? Anyway, turns out humans don’t hibernate, so I’ll be around.
And, Exhale
The lack of chronicling from our recently wrapped three-week roadtrip through 3500 miles of magnificient US countryside and cities isn’t from lack of wanting to bore you to death with the details; but between a whirlwind trip to see various parts of the family trees and a waterlanding of a ‘back to work’ start, in which I managed to get the cold before lunch was served, time and energy has taken a toll.
Our trip took us from San Francisco to Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Seqoia, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Bryce Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, up Highway 1 and finally back to San Francisco again where we, ready for three more weeks, sadly departed all too soon.
It was, amazing. An experience of a lifetime. Two in fact. To explain it, to show pictures from it or write about it, cannot do it justice. I won’t bore you with hyperbole, but it was everything we had hoped for, and a lot more.
But it would not have been all that it was, were it not for Tara (and Leslie), Tina and Kate, and of course the good Mr. Rubin, a thousand thanks. You all made our trip an unforgettable adventure.
Also, thank you all, who over the last year or two have been throwing advice and tips at me on Twitter and here on BB. We tried to adhere to as many of them as we could along the way.
And yes, I was scared shitless when I first rolled the Mustang convertible we had rented onto the South San Franciscean freeway, and no, there is literally no way to prepare you for LA traffic. Yes, we had lunch at Pixar and at Skywalker Ranch, how cool is that? Yes, I teared up—as I always do when I hear it—when John Williams conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonics through the Main Title from E.T. under a fullmoon at the Hollywood Bowl, and yes, the sunrise in Monument Valley is perhaps the most stunning sight I’ve ever beheld.
And yes, I have photos, in multitudes. Some we uploaded as we went along, but there are more to go. I tried twittering from time to time, but between the road, sightseeing and sleep, there wasn’t a lot of Michael to go around. Hopefully I’ll be able to remedy that over the coming months.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lingering cold to fight.
The Day by Day Map
View Roadtrip 09 – Day by Day in a larger map
Posted some photos on Flickr, by the way.
Firebreather
Ouzo, is there a liquid more vile, and yet more appropriate for putting the world on notice: “World, I’m ready to party” (Update: Yes there is, and it’s called Sambucca, and that’s what Garret was being lit on fire with in this shot, or so I’m told). At Bjørn and Chloë‘s wedding, Ouzo (capital O) Sambucca (capital S) was what it came to. Miraculously, my 50mm caught it at just the right moment.
2009
It’s not that I don’t want to say anything; I just don’t have anything to say. I’m sure I’ll get around to it soon enough.
Shine a Light
Best large, on black.
Gundam
A quickie from my burgeoning Sony 50mm ƒ/1.4 flickr set.
Je Ne Sais Quoi
Even as an experienced photography-enthusiast, people remain the hardest subject for me to capture. Not only do I rarely find myself in a situation where I’ve brought my DSLR
Well, we’re all a ‘cheese’‐conditioned lot, who look into the camera, smile and wait for the ‘I release you from this spell’‐click. Sure, you get people drunk, it’s another story—rabbit-ear-fingers, cheek licking and funny hats—but the basic premise remains the same; namely ‘acting’ for the camera. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it yields nice in-focus photos of happy people who’re willing to hold still long enough for me to adjust the focal length and take it up an f-stop or two to get the shot right.
But the ones I really want and the ones that stay with me, are the stolen ones. And I don’t mean paparazzi-style 1500mm gyro-mounted zoom objectives from a hilltop 2 clicks away and down into your garden where you frolic around in your birthday suit. Just friends and family being themselves, unaware of the CCD ready to reach out and snatch away their soul.
Those shots are elusive. Real life doesn’t stop while I switch from auto to manual focus; which in turn means that when they once in a blue moon do happen, they’re that much better. In fact, out-of-focus snapshots are often even better than cheese-shots by pure virtue of the intimacy of the subject(s).
When people know they’re being photographed they stiffen up somehow, suck in what can be sucked in, squint, go from ‘listening’ to ‘listening, intellectually’
Then again, maybe it’s really the other way around. By virtue of my understanding of the construction of ‘cheese-shots’; that little else is happening between the portrayed than what meets the eye, which is what makes even the most pedestrian stolen shot unexplored and unexplained territory.
What I’m driving at, is that in the end, when all else fails, a chimp will never give you the cheese-look and that’s why chimps always work.
In the Cracks of Copenhagen
Copenhagen is a treasure trove of street art, with its hip and healthy anti-everything sub-cultures. A living mosaic created in unison by hundreds of more or less talented people, some of whom take great pride in their work and then of course a large following who are satisfied leaving their mark across the city, in much the same manner as a dog would. We’re lucky, in that living in the heart of Copenhagen, we often come across some pretty interesting pieces, some of which I’ve documented. And amongst them, the above, rather obscure and easily overlooked one, is a favorite of mine.
Also check out the Little Brother project.
Meet Mr. 50mm f/1.4
Script Frenzy is over, and I didn’t write the 100 pages. I made it to 38 pages on the 13th, then looked at what I had, and spent a day or two thinking about what to do. On the one hand, continuing was very much possible, and the 100 pages were within reach. On the other, my antagonist was by far the most interesting person in the story, quite contrary to my protagonist, who was somewhat passive in the whole thing…
By now, that’s almost habitual for me…
So I made the decision to halt the endeavour, and re-outline the story. And that’s where I am now.
The only thing standing between me and a finished outline is thus, GTA...
DAMN YOU GRAND THEFT AUTO!
I’m not even kidding. That game is seriously addictive.
Meanwhile, I also had my 30th birthday, for which I gifted myself a 50mm f/1.4 Sony lens, which I eagerly took for a spin around sunset today:
The depth of field on that thing is like having sex with light…
NASA's lenses in Barry Lyndon
To the people whom I told the story to on friday, consider this an errata, with a complete technical rundown.
Buran
Oh dear Yod. Space Shuttle Buran.
GTAIV
Yeah, we’re back in the D of the K, resting our feet and recovering from jetlag. Anyway, I thought I’d share the above photo of a recently completed ad we happened to pass. Cuz let’s face it; it kicks ass.
Recovering JPG's
Two entire days, comprising around 3-400 photos from New York were crunched by iPhoto. The thumbnails are recoverable, but despite being listed properly, sizes and everything, they’re all corrupted.
Help?
More: I’m using iPhoto ’08, and it is the JPG’s themselves, inside the iPhoto Lbrary package that are broken.
Solution: Exif Untrasher helped me recover the deleted files off of the memory card, getting me back one of the two lost days.
The Problem With Social Networks Is...
These are things that, in this brave new world of the ‘consumer content provider’, would increase all our combined standards(s) of living(s) substantially:
- Being able to sort out ‘HDR’ images on Flickr, like for instance this one, or this one or hey, even this one. Yes yes, it ‘can be done better’, but that’s not the point. The point is, it shouldn’t be done at all. That or a license should be required.
- Sorting out AMV’s on YouTube. Yes, Anime Music Video’s… The idea is kinda good; the general implementation? Not so much. Don’t believe me? Try searching for “AMV Linkin Park”. That should land you about 28.000 results! Twenty Eight Thousand! (for kicks, try spelling it “linking park amv”, and see the results jump up by a few thousand… what does that tell you?) Now I love me some angsty teen hybrid rap/metal (I do, check my last.fm), and despite their latest album being largely worthless, I can see the chemistry between that and big bouncing manga tits, flying robots and swarming missiles. But enough, is enough, and really, can you call it a ‘music video’ if it’s a random serious of clips out of sync with the music?.
- Sorting out ‘fan trailers’ on YouTube. Yes, it would seem YouTube has become the defacto hang-around for teens with all too much time on their hands. A quick search on YouTube digs up a cool 20.000 fan trailers=, as it would happen, I did a quick survey, and out of those 20.000 fan trailers, 19.998 are actively dangerous for the human mind to observe… Scary stuff.
Yes, I could add ‘–amv –“fan trailer” –hdr’ to all my searches online, but what I’m talking about here is much larger than that. We are on the brink of a global catastrophe, ladies and gentlemen.
I’m talking about an international effort, through the UN even, to finally get to the root of this problem. Forget about M- or AO-rated games, this is serious business, because this isn’t just corrupting the youth of today (as if the youth hasn’t always managed to corrupt itself; it’s called ‘evolution’), this is actively wasting everyone’s time. And surely, that must be worth getting to the root of.
A funny sidenote is, and you can try this at home, if you change the sorting of the search results on YouTube, you’ll see that the number of results change. The default is ‘sort by relevance’, which gives us the 28.000 Linkin Park AMV’s. Now try sorting by ‘date added’... It drops to 15.100!... How can there by nearly twice the number of videos under ‘relevance’ as there is when sorted by date?! What in the hell is going on at YouTube? (scrape here for answer)
Regardless, I hope the world has heard my plea, otherwise I’ll have to resort to a little thing I like to call intensive carpet bombing, with extreme prejudice.
Have a good day.
"No, hush, don't speak..."
“Just go with it…”