15-11-30

15-11-29

 No more Toy Camera Filter shots. Or maybe one more, as a comparison. Two different photos, the first out of the camera with a traditional film type setting (that's why there was different films, right?) and then a warming photo filter (found in any photo lab, right?) and it's a photo. Or you push the magic filter button on the camera and you get the second photo. Is that a bad thing? Maybe not. I don't think it's any less legitimate than buying Kodak Portra film for a desired affect. And yet I resist it even as I use it.

What I find more intriguing is how consistent the composition is between the two images. The pair of images weren't taken right after each other. I had to go into the camera menus and change the settings and recompose the shot and it's nearly identical. I find that interesting.

15-11-28

Toy Camera Filter day 2. I've now turned it off.

15-11-27

Toy Camera Filter. Makes your fancy new compact camera take pictures like an old crappy camera. Fun for a day, I suppose. Maybe eve two days. We'll see.

Blessed with sunny but cold days. No rain for nearlya  week now and it's been appreciated.

15-11-26

Nearly a month later and you can still smell the smoke in the street. The lingering effects of a moment in time are so multidimensional. A tarp to protect a broken thing, and even if you close your eyes you can still smell it. It's going to need more than a bit of paint to fix it. But isn't that always the case?

15-11-25

A pile of skids. Maybe it's time to take a break from this. Though I did find the "toy camera" filter on my camera. That only supports the fact that maybe it's time to take a break from this.

I found a cheap-ish Olympus Pen EE camera on eBay. I've had a half frame camera before but the drive cog stripped out. I got exactly one roll of film out of it before it broke but the photographs were quite soleful. That camera might have even made a pile of skids look interesting. Or not. But it's that to "toy camera" mode on my current camera. There's something about shooting pictures on a camera that's older than you are. I'm looking forward to the Olympus.

15-11-24

Terrible photograph today. I should have skipped it but I do like the subject matter even if I did a terrible job of trying to photograph it.

15-11-23

It's been a while since I've used this crap little S100. But when I bought it I thought it was the best little camera in the world. It probably was. Now all I see is soft focus and muddy details. There's been an S110, and an S120 since. And now Canon doesn't even bother with the S series. I don't often complain about cameras anymore. I'm exceptionally lucky in that I have a couple of really amazing ones, and they are both quite old relatively speaking, in a world driven by technology anyway. Both have been replaced by newer models, one has been replaced by a newer model twice. It's still a good camera. A Nikon D700 is still a very good camera. A Fuji X100s is still a very good camera.

The Canon S100 produces muddy images at anything above ISO400. It's half the size of my Fuji but the pictures are a quarter as good. If nothing else, I'm good at math. It's also bigger than my phone, and my phone has as many megapixels.

I don't know if there's a compact camera that takes decent photos. Video killed the radio star and cell phone cameras killed the need for a decent compact camera.

1st world problems.

15-11-22

15-11-21

JFK.

In 2000, Laurent Malone and Dennis Adams put together a collection of photographs documenting their walk from Manhattan to JFK Airport in 1997. They shared one film camera (it was 1997 after all) and they took turns taking photographs, either one being able to take a photograph at any time. The catch/gimmick/beauty of this walk was that each time one took a photo the other had to take a photo in the opposite direction. They placed all the photos on opposing pages. I've been trying to find this book for 7 or 8 years.

There was a book store in Toronto that claimed to have a copy but they couldn't find it to sell it to me. I've tried to find it in various art book stores in various cities. I finally found a copy available on the wonderful world wide web and though I've paid for it, it will still take a month and a half to arrive, but that's not much time after looking for nearly a decade.

I've been intrigued by the idea for a long time and though I didn't have someone to walk with me to the airport, I finally found a day when I could take a camera with me and spend the day walking from where I live to where I would leave where I live, YVR.

It's 15kms. It took about 4 hours; I wasn't in a hurry. I will have to do it again with someone to hand the camera off to, to look in the other direction, to make me look in the other direction.

Regardless, it was a lovely way to spend a morning.

YVR.

15-11-20

15-11-19

This is taken looking east at dusk. Strange light. Sophie and I talked this morning about prevailing winds and standards. "the winds usually come from the west, but sometimes they come from the east, and the easterly winds usually bring bad weather." I wonder what sunsets in the east bring...

Another day with a bonus photograph. It's 2for1 week, I guess. Unless tomorrow only brings one. We'll see. Maybe.

15-11-18

They built an outlet mall by the airport. It's such a strange distortion of reality and nearly deserted. And it's on the flight path so every few minutes it feels like a plane is about to crash into it.

15-11-17

15-11-16

Short, dark, rainy days. It's probably a good time to add colour to the queue again.

15-11-15

A week shooting in black and white. Perhaps that's enough.

15-11-14

Attacks on Paris last night. I don't get it. I just don't understand. I don't even know where to begin talking about that so I won't.

I visited Paris in 2007. I wore these shoes when I was there. I literally wore holes in the bottom of these shoes walking around Paris. It is a lovely place. I mostly keep them because they are the shoes I wore when I was in Paris. I should have thrown these shoes out years ago. These days I mostly use them to take stuff out to the composter in the back yard. Today I took them for a walk well past the composter in the back yard and was grateful that what was happening in Paris was unlikely to happen here.

15-11-13

A couple more days of black and white to make up a week. That seems about right. Bonus photos most days too.

15-11-12

15-11-11

Bahamas played the Orpheum tonight and were perfect.

It was a long day.

15-11-10

Two shitty little houses will be torn down. A million majestic homes will replace them. The knob and tube wiring will be hauled out like withered little veins no longer able to carry life to the corners of these houses. The asbestos will be extracted and put in bags tagged with its origin, forever the property of the owners of these two little houses. Strange that, safe "removal" really meaning safe "storage." It never really ever goes away.

Things are supposed to get better. Photos were archaic things on toxic plastics, coaxed to life by toxic chemicals (that would do in a pinch if you run out of whisky, or live on a dry reserve) and the grains got finer, then colour, then better colour, then Kodachrome (sorry Paul, they took it away, but there's an Instagram filter that's pretty close...) Then digital, grainy little pixelated crap photos, but you could take a million million of them. You could see the photos before the memory of the event had faded, or before the event was even over. Better.

Then more pixels, and 3D, and video, and high definition video, and 4K videos, then 4K videos in your phone.

Better. Always better.

I shot these in native black and white. My little Fuji (and most cameras) will let you do that. The Fuji has a list of a dozen or so film types it tries to mimic, and various filters too. Things get better, and we ask them to mimic things from our past; all that technology working hard to make things look like they used to look. It was strange looking at a representation of what I was about to take a picture of in black and white. When you shoot black and white film you look at a colour thing and then later you get to see it in black and white. I might guess that every single photo I've taken has been seen in colour and then turned into black and white. This is the first time I've looked through a view finder and seen a black and white version of what I was going to take a photo of before I took a photo of it.

It's not always about better.

Sometimes it's about taking a photo of something in the moment, and understanding what it is in that moment, where it came from, where it's going, and where it is in a moment. That shitty little house will be knocked down soon. It's been there for 60 or so years and I've spent much more time in consideration of 1/60th of a second of its existence. In black and white. And grey.

15-11-9

"Most people see the world as being black and white when in reality it is grey." It's been a very grey day, and so I will shoot black and white for a few days. Probably.

15-11-8

At some point a kid decides the best place for a xylophone is in the back yard. And then it sits there for a couple of years. I'm sure it was a loved possession when it was carted out into the yard and somehow that's just where it stayed. And then one day it will be gone.

15-11-7

15-11-6

Limbs of the Stars. An incredible show in an incredible converted office space come music venue in an industrial part of town. And friends of mine.

"Limbs Of The Stars are probably one of the most talented groups of musicians currently residing in Western Canada, let alone Vancouver." - Fraser Dobbs, Discorder Magazine

15-11-5

15-11-4

I imagine it would be quite soulful to have a large garage where I could putter around working on an old car late into the night and on the weekends. It sounds better than the reality. Mostly. This car has been in this bay for more than a year. Maybe even longer. I've taken pictures of it before. I guess there's the proof it's been longer. It sometimes lives in the shop bay, sometimes it's on the lot. It would seem it gets worked on regularly, probably more than it gets driven. That's where it loses me. I like the tinkering but there has to be a payoff too; the road trip that lasts weeks, or months. Or at least a long weekend. A longer weekend than the long weekend spent working on the thing.

But that's a question of time. There are too many other things to spend time on, and not enough time to spend on them. Maybe the picture is enough. Maybe it pushes all the buttons that need to be pushed.

Probably.

15-11-3

15-11-2

15-11-1

The view from Science World. If you have a 9 year old and the rain is heavy there are few places better suited for forgetting about the weather. But in case you do forget, they have a few well placed windows to remind you why you're indoors on a Sunday. November 1. The days got shorter by an hour last night with the changing of the clocks, and the rain didn't wait for the month to settle in before it did.

15-10-31

15-10-30