147-28

Sort of torn between two worlds. The first step is they remove the stairs.

147-27

14-7-26

14-7-25

Two good friends. One local that I should see more. The other from Vienna that I see often but never enough.

14-7-24

14-7-23

14-7-22

Weapon of summer.

14-7-21

Lots of mountain biking these days. It's the same trails over and over again, and it feels good. It's city wilderness, and this image is kind of all that wrapped up in one.

14-7-20

14-7-19

Lemon meringue pie.

14-7-18

I adjusted the grind. Crema is stickier. That's a good thing.

14-7-17

14-7-16

More squares.

14-7-15

14-7-14

Accidentally went mountain biking for the second day in a row.

14-7-13

Cleaned the coffee machine today.

14-7-12

Instagram drifting. And square photos.

14-7-11

Staff BBQs. Trouble.

14-7-10

14-7-9

Yes, it's a terrible photograph. But I like that you almost have to squint as you look at it. Even as a photograph, the sun hurts your eyes, so it's successful on some level.

14-7-8

Pictures of a picture.

14-7-7

Walker Pickering has a blog that I've followed for a while. He also has a Tumblr account, and his own photography site.  I think he's immensely talented. The images are rife with underlying narratives, emotion, intriguing juxtapositions of the normal and the absurd. There's an architectural element to them where he distorts natural perspectives and presumed horizon lines by tilting images so that vanishing points are upset. The buildings often look normal and unnatural simultaneously, it's more noticeable when you scroll through one of his sites and the buildings, for just a second, seem to fall over, or get wider, or something.

The other thing he does is shoot in square format. I don't know if he's using a camera that automatically crops to that shape or if he's just cropping to it. His images don't follow the hard, fast rule of being square but better than half of them are. I guess it's hip, or has been made so by Instagram and others. I looked for a digital camera of note that shoots natively in the square, I couldn't find one that was "good" unless you wanted to spend $17500 on a digital back that fits on your Hasselblad camera, Hasselblad camera not included. It's still not square but it's closer to it.

I've recently acquired a Rolleiflex film camera that shoots 6X6 negatives. It's square, and I like using it if only because it makes you look at things differently again, since anyone who shoots a lot of photographs already looks at things differently. My Fuji X100s has a square format option, but I feel like I'm wasting pixels, and I could always crop to square but as someone who composes in camera and rarely ever crops an image (I don't think I've cropped an image on this site since before January 1, 2013, and very rarely if ever before that) until today.

When I took this picture there was a bunch of stuff in the top right that I didn't want and if I panned down I didn't have the figures in the field where I wanted them. So I shot the left side of the frame the way I wanted it and cropped it to square.

Is square the new black? Is it cheating? Have I offended the 36X24mm gods? I don't know. I'm going to shoot a week of 120 Rolleiflex film for this site soon. It will be a good test. And then I'll irrationally long for Nikon to make a 6X6 sensor camera for under $2000 with a Rolleiflex equivalent 80mm fixed prime lens.

Anyway, there it is, a cropped photo and a non landscape format photo, both in the same day. Huh.

14-7-6

14-7-5

14-7-4

14-7-3

14-7-2

It gets tired sometimes. I bought a vinyl pressing of Beck's latest record Morning Phase a few days ago. I hadn't listened to it until tonight. The label proudly declares "180 gram pressing" suggesting it's somehow special. I get a rare night alone in my house, child off camping somewhere, I even forgot my phone at work in the work van, so I had brilliant, undisturbed moments alone with a record player and some pretty decent speakers and a couch that I don't spend nearly enough time on. And the damned record has a pressing defect. It's what happens now. I have a couple of these "special" records with the defects. It gets tired when one invests in a something that's supposed to be special and takes a rare moment to enjoy that thing only to find it's somehow wrong or broken or defective. So now more of my life will be affected by a trip back to the record store to discuss a replacement that may or may not be any better than the one I have. I paid cash, another rare thing these days, and don't know what I did with the receipt so I might be up for a challenge there too. $30 for a defective record. I shouldn't presume it will be such a challenge to rectify but even if it is a breeze to procure a replacement it's still going to involve another trip to the record shop and an interaction with a record shop employee that shouldn't have been necessary.

Why can't shit just be good?

Why don't people care anymore?

It gets tired.

I'm tired.

But at least at Kyle's Cafe there's a print of a schooner above the condiments in the booth on the east wall.

14-7-1

An exercise of sorts. Distorted colours, like an old roll of film where the colours are a bit off to begin with that's then printed cheaply with basic printer technology on cardstock that doesn't necessarily like to take on ink. It's a cartoon of a cartoon.

14-6-30

It's moving day. I should ride around town on moving day more often. Right at the front there, next to the big silver basin, is a little black cast iron frying pan. I almost bought one recently, and they aren't cheap, but they are good, and there's one for free. Of course I snagged it. It makes me sad that people throw away such amazing stuff but then again I'm happy I saved it from a land fill and got a really good little frying pan for free.