Stimulating Pixels

I’m looking for a few small pieces of lighting gear. Checking out the Bogen/Manfrotto web site (who manufactures what I’m looking for) I discovered they have their catalog online and available for download as a PDF. This is great since most web sites do a horrible job of putting small pieces online, but generally do pretty well in their catalogs.

They didn’t quite make it as easy as I would have wanted though since they split their two lighting catalogs up into a little over 50 separate PDF files for each section in the catalogs. While this is nice to have as an option, what I really want is to be able to pull down the entire version of each catalog. There’s no reason at all for them not to offer this since they already have everything prepped for PDFs.

The past two Halloweens I’ve shot for a costume that I could incorporate my “real” camera into. Two years ago, I was a playboy photographer. Photo Vest, big camera, and a laminated ID badge. This year, I was peter parker. Thick glasses frames, big camera, dress shirt opened a little to reveal the top of the spiderman outfit I was wearing under it, and an ID badge.

I just saw what I want to go as next year. My own light stand.

“Shooting the Leica is like going out with Pamela Anderson. The camera keeps saying you can make me clean, cook, raise the kids, but I won’t be very good at it., though if you let me do what I’m good at you’ll be very happy.”

- – James Russell (from Leica M8 Revisited)

Even if you are not into photography or Leica’s you gotta give him props for that quote.

George Clinton had it dead on with Bob Gun. “I got to get over the hump”. Thankfully, I can see the hump now. First off, we’ll pass the solstice in a few days and it’ll start getting lighter earlier each day instead of darker. To me, this makes days feel more like going downhill than up.

There is also been work. It’s been a grind this year. We changed partners at the start of last year with only about three and a half months prep time. Since then, it has been non-stop with huge projects. Any one or two of which should have really been allowed several months to come to fruition. Just an estimation, but by the time we get them all closed (hopefully late Jan.) we will have done two and half to three years worth of work in about fifteen or sixteen months.

I’m totally exhausted, and a bit burned out. I’m seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now which has given me a bit of an 2nd, 3rd, 4th, something-nth wind. This should net out to allow me some good time off to recharge early next year. Some of that time, I’m going to nothing more than sit on my tail at my house and stare at the wall, but I’ve also got my eye on some travel for fun. Who knows, I may actually have a decent work/life balance next year…. Place your bets.

So, I finally got a new computer put together a little while ago. Been so busy at work, I really haven’t had time to do much with it yet. Till tonight that is. I finally managed to dig into some old photos. Mostly, I’m just getting them imported into lightroom. 2,577 music images so far. It’s sooooooo much better with a computer that can actually handle it. In the past, it was so slow, that it really turned me off from doing much of anything photo-wise. While I think there will always be room for improvement, I wasn’t really waiting on the computer for most stuff. That’s the major hurtle to get over.

Even though I really haven’t done much messing around with the images yet, it really got me thinking about how much I love photography. Now that I don’t have to dread the computer time, hopefully I’ll be more likely to shoot some. Of course, this will be after we get our redesign launched. But still, it’s nice to think about.

Incidentally, here’s an image to celebrate the fact that I can actually work with images now without wanting to stab myself in the leg with a fork to distract myself from waiting on the machine. It’s the drummer from The CodeTalkers. Or, at least it was the drummer back in Sept. 2006 when this shot is from.

I’ve decided to decorate my office with some 11×14s of my music images. I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of them.

A buddy at work was talking about the movie Firefox which I’m familiar with but don’t think I’ve ever seen. He sent me this trailer on you tube. A wonderful example of movie trailers form the early 80s.

Explosions, super serious but short dialog, sneaking around the corner with a gun, a hell of a left hook, and that A-Team sounding announcer guy. Awesome!

CJ just sent me this link to photos by Pieter Hugo taken in Nigeria of “a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes.”

Tenuously Domesticated Hyenas. Both scary and a cool band name rolled in one.

From time to time, I get individual emails (not bulk spam) from people trying to sell me a product or service. It’s a part of the gig and I don’t mind taking a look to see if it’s something we might be interested in. Occasionally, the people sending these notes get a little tricky in their quest to get their pitch in front of me.

I recently got an email from a person I didn’t recognize, but the subject line had “follow up on questions”. An interesting tactic. It makes it sound like I’ve been in contact with the person before and event asked them something. Psychology of marketing would suggest this makes me much more likely to open the email and then see their pitch.

Unfortunately, there is one big flaw with this tactic. While I like the psychologically theory behinds this from an academic perspective, tricks like this piss me off when used in the real world. So, I didn’t even read the sales pitch and I’ve added the entire company to my email kill file which sends anything any of their employees sends me straight to spam hell.

Was browsing around the library yesterday and saw “Absolute Sandman” sitting out and waiting to be re-shelved.

Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: Reprinting The Sandman issues #1-20. The more than 65 pages of bonus material include the original proposal for the series and the full script and pencil art for issue 19.

And about the Absolute Editions in general: DC Comics Absolute Edition is a series of archival quality printings of graphic novels published by DC Comics and Wildstorm Productions. Each is presented in a hardcover, dustjacketed and slipcased edition with cloth bookmark consisting of one or more books which include restored, corrected and recolored versions of the original work, reprinted at 8 inches by 12 inches. Also included are supplemental materials regarding the creation of the work, including sketches, comic scripts, memos, etc.

Kinda surprised me that the library had a comic book collection, but I don’t guess it should have.

I think I mentioned before that I went out to Las Vegas for the first time back in October. It was just before my trip to Bama. The main reason for the Vegas trip was to go to another Supershoots event. Here’s one of my favorite images from the trip:

And here is a link to the rest of the proofs: link