happy accidents

Last weekend I took part in a workshop on Photogravure (I'll explain in a later post) and had a lot of down time so I started scanning in some of my photos from the blackbird, fly. Here is an example of how amazing the Sam's Club technicians are, though I think this one is something of a happy accident. Notice how the picture changes half way through? Two of the 16 pictures I got back were like that and about 6 more had a small strip at either the top or bottom of the photo.

I was only able to get one negative strip scanned but I'll try to finish up the rest later this week, along with posting an image of my photogravure print.

jazz game

Here is a great picture of my mom after the Jazz game we went to last week. You'll notice the logo on her jacket is an RW for Rocawear, which I believe, and confirmed on Wikipedia, is the clothing line started by Jay Z. If you know my mom you should realize just how out of place this is. Apparently sometime in the past couple years that I've lived away from home she got some street credit and is now representing it.

bbf

I've developed my first roll of film from the blackbird, fly but it'll be a little bit before I can get them scanned. My conversation with the "technician" when I was dropping the roll off:

Me: The film has been exposed over the sprocket holes too, is that going to be a problem?
Them: Probably. We don't have photoshop.
Me: ...? I don't follow.
Them: ...We can only print what's in between the sprockets.
Me: Ok, just do that. It'll at least give me an idea of what's on there.
Them: We could just process the film.
Me: No, I want prints.
Them: Are you sure? Then you could just scan them in.
Me: I'll do that anyways, but I want prints. And can I get them printed with a border?
Them: No... well, yes.

Needless to say I was pretty surprised to find that when I got the prints the "technician" had taken some "artistic liberties" and printed most of them with a bar of the next shot on one side of the print. Most of them were pretty small bars but two prints came back with it split right down the middle. I actually really like the way those two turned out.

I hope that all made sense. I've found out in the past couple years what a horrible explainer I am.

moosen

This is probably my favorite picture of Whit and I ever. I just found it again.

blackbird, fly and new year's weekend.

Well, I hope everyone had an enjoyable New Year. I did. I figure any New Years adventure that involves cops showing up has to be good, right? No, it wasn't anything alcohol or nudity related. Instead it involved some friends getting booted and throwing a snowball at the booter's car. An hour and a half later the cops, who I'm sure had nothing better to do on New Years Eve, showed up and gave us all a good scolding, because it is their duty to do so.

Beyond that, we went down to Provo for Whit's brother's wedding. We decorated his car and went through all the standard fare of oreos, shaving cream, plastic wrap and a large box of condoms, but also involved a 5 foot high bag of packing peanuts. Come to find out that last part should only be done on the very rarest of occasions to your worst enemies. It really crossed a line. I found out first-hand what it is like to clean out a car like that when we found out that the bride and groom missed their flight and spent the day in the airport trying to get another flight to Houston so they wouldn't miss their 3000 dollar cruise. After a day like that nobody should have to deal with a car full of packing peanuts. It all worked out in the end, today they are flying to Jamaica where the boat will pick them up on Wednesday.

More good news, as you can tell from the photo above my Blackbird, Fly arrived! It comes in this great plastic birdcage for storage. It's a little bit smaller than I had imagined but I'm excited to really try it out. I found a roll of film that very well could be from before my mission (8+ years) and I took a couple shots at the wedding on Saturday. I can already tell that I've been spoiled by digital photography and fancy DSLRs because I forget that I have to manually focus and wind the film.

Also on Friday I went to the BYU museum of art to see their show on Japanese Wood Block prints. All the prints are from their permanent collection and we actually got to talk for a while with the curator of the museum about the history of the prints. I've always been impressed with the prints but it's nothing until you see them in person. I always assumed that the prints were actually mixed-media because of the amount of detail, particularly in the typography, but it has all been meticulously carved to look that way. I tend to spend a lot of time working on my prints, but seeing these prints made me feel like I rush my way through all of it.











I found this on Scott Hansen's blog:

"If you count yourself among the ranks of web designers you know that Internet Explorer is still the bane of our collective existence. At some point, long ago, when Microsoft ruled the browser universe, some genius over there decided to give a big middle finger to all of us designers and our so-called 'web standards'. The result is that things just don’t look the way we as designers intend in IE: CSS elements don’t render properly and various functionality breaks down forcing us to implement IE-specific hacks and tweaks to make it all work. Well, MS, in their infinite wisdom, have finally decided to back down and have announced that the forthcoming eighth iteration of their Internet Explorer browser will embrace web standards. What a novel concept! Embracing web standards in a web browser? What will they think of next?"