I just saw the email they sent out yesterday with the announcement. I am stunned, to say the least. They have been THE go to site for all things photography for so long now! Nearly 25 years…
But, come April 10th, that’s it. End of an era.
Apparently, their parent company, AMAZON (FYI, DPreview was a bit vague about who the parent company was; I had to go dig this up myself), is shutting them down as part of their effort to reduce their workforce by 18,000 people.
Up until now, they were adding positions which is a bit crazy, if you ask me (you’d think they would go through a slower alteration rather than a sudden yank into reverse done quickly enough to grind their gears and strip their clutch).
At his memorial this past Saturday I took a moment to voice my thoughts. Here is what I had to say:
I wish…
I wish I had known JD better; we were always just acquaintances. I wish I had known he was sick; I would have done anything to help in anyway I could. I wish I could have experienced more of his glowing smiles that emanated from the depths within him and emanated throughout his entire self. I wish…
But alas, wishes are the seeds I throw into the soil with intense dreams of trees growing fruit, but I know full well that they are only dreams painted by a wistful mind. Instead, I think it is important to focus on the seeds that did grow trees & bore fruit.
My sporadic interactions with JD were always wonderfully sweet fruit of experiences plucked and enjoyed from his tree of Life. When I would sit down idly to perhaps say hello or catch up, we would pluck that fruit, I would peel back the skin, split it in half to share, and look at it in amazement; The fruit of experience with JD were always glowing. It radiated the light of happiness from the center all the way to the skin.
I will always remember those fruit from JD’s tree of life in celebration. We may not be able to hold any in our hands, feel it, or see that light with our eyes any longer, but the sweetness shall forever live on in our memories.
I wanted crunchy jalapeños a few nights ago for one of my Royally Awesome Sausage on a Bun™ which usually includes things like thyme aioli, sauerkraut, caramelized onions with garlic, hot Russian mustard, and other delicious garnishes.
The experiment turned out very well.
To make them I used your standard jarred jalapeños, patted them down very well with paper towels to get them as dry as possible, and pan fried them in hot canola oil. When I took them out I gave them just a small pinch of salt and a good grind of pepper to stick to them.
Next time I am going to try frying them more to actually make jalapeño chips.
I saved the now bright green oil presumably jalapeño flavored, but have yet to use it.
A screenshot of my Aperture “fern” session. Full res. uploaded so you can see the details.
I have been using Aperture (currently version 3.x) for a while to organize and do post production for my photographs trying to minimize the time I spend in Photoshop. This post doesn’t go into some of the Aperture jargon, so please pardon me if you are not privy to Aperture slang.
I have 504 photographs that I took of the small ferns (less than a foot high) that started sprouting just outside my apartment in Seattle back in May. After many hours of sorting the images, this is what I’ve ended up with:
79 stacks of images with the best pulled to the front of each stack. Only the first two thumbnails are images I have actually done any post production on. (As noted in my previous post, one stack, for example, is a set of 127 photos.)
I have it sorted by rating, so my current picks are at the top decending down to pictures I might not even use.
My next steps are to actually give more accurate star ratings, choose which images are the créme (and which are shit), then edit those images to polish them for publishing.
All this for ferns. Then again, I can’t help myself; I just love the shapes, textures and colors that fresh ferns have.
If you are curious to learn more about how I am using Aperture, let me know and I might take the time to go into detail. Cheers!
After 127 shots of this fern “branch”, I finally captured what I was looking for.
I was working with a breaze which made it exceptionally difficult to get a clear macro shot of this small fern. The reason is that I was working within a very close range with a 60mm macro lens. (I took the picture 4 months ago, but based on my memory the lens was probably ~4inches away from the subject.)
This means that the depth of field is so exceptionally shallow that you have to hop the ƒ stops up just to get the bend of the tiny leaves in focus. As you can tell in this photo, I had to go up to ƒ/14. In turn, this means that I had to make up for it in either shutter speed and/or ISO. Since I don’t want to have anything higher than 400 as my ISO, I kept taking shots at exposure rates that would make even the tiniest of gusts of wind blur the furn. Thus, I took 127 shots hoping that at one of those instants the wind didn’t gust the fern.
I think that this one optimized the depth of field, kept the noise to a minimum, and still allowed me to get a nice crisp focus.
(The above is a composite of 8 images with exposure times in the 5min and above range.)
HDR is one of those buzz words in Photoland that usually invokes a set of viewer expectations and a bit of mystique. In a nutshell, the photographer is “merely” taking the same photo multiple times, and at various settings, such that they can get the over exposed and under-exposed elements properly exposed in a single image. The basic example is a bright sky; You want the bright sky to show the great cloud formations, but you don’t want to alienate, say, the trees in the foreground. (Poor trees!)
(This image is one I am using as a learning piece and is not meant to be a token of great composition.)
Here are the specifics for each photograph used in this composite:Composite of 4 images. All images captured at ISO 100, focal length 48mm, ƒ/5.6
Shutter speeds:
1/250
1/640
1/1600
1/4000
I have started using HDR because I take a lot of nighttime photographs. This means that if I am doing a very long exposure and there just so happens to be, for example, a street light in frame, then that street light is going to end up extremely bright compared to the rest of my image. This is where HDR comes to the rescue.
I rarely publish the lyrics to songs I write, but have decided to start looking back at a few. In this post I am going to let you in on the song “Lilacs” which I wrote for “Electric Ballroom“, the Specimen album released in 2007.
Get the song or the entire album on iTunes or… Original Demo & Full Song Download After the Break.
Before you read the lyrics, make sure you have heard the song first. I vehemently insist that the words used behind a voice on a song is dependent on the combination of words and music. Sometimes the way a word, or set of words, lay upon the notes is poetry itself – regardless of what that word is. It can be the way lips and tongue lick your ears that can make the lyrics profound rather than their literal (or metaphorical, of course) meaning.
I used to pride myself in never writing the emotionally promiscuous and easily tapped Break Up Song™. As it happened, I went through a rather rough break-up just as I was beginning the process of writing songs for the album. There was almost no way of avoiding the topic that was consuming my brain at the time, so I gave in. “Lilacs” is completely, from head to toe, a Break Up Song™ and I am proud of it.
I had some friends in from out of town which I find to be the perfect excuse to make a delicious dinner using all of the wondrous ingredients that the Pacific Northwest has to offer.
I started with Kale stew I made last week; stews get so much better with a little rest. Full of red kale, red greens, black eye peas, celery root cubes, turnip cubes, tomato paste, mirepoix, veg stock, some mushrooms, and…well, probably other stuff I’m forgetting.
Then, insalata caprese. I used fresh cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, both from my favourite produce stand in Pike Market (Sosio’s), fresh mozzarella (made that morning) and some good french olive oil mixed with a nip of lemon juice.
The main corse was a fresh morel mushroom (again, from Sosio’s) gnocchi in a white vermouth cream sauce with black truffles served with baked purple baby carrots with ramps (I have never cooked ramps, but now I’m hooked!).
For desert I made a glass cub of coconut sorbet with shaved mexican chocolate and ginger syrup on top of fresh blueberries and cream.
To finish, I served up the stinkiest cheese I could find. A wonderful, gooey, and creamy cheese with an orange tinted rind who’s stink was met with a spicy bite and lingered for near 15 minutes after a nibble. (I made sure to end with the cheese due to the linger on the palate.)
Kryptos, for those not in The Know, is a wonderful art piece commitioned for the CIA headquarters. Jim is an artist, not a crytpographer, so he was advised on how codes are made. Even the person who mentored his cryptography has been unable to decode the full piece.
Although Jim is best known for this piece, his work spans an amazing gaumet. His current project, which my dear friends Jon Singer and Doug Humphrey of Joss, Inc. helped with, is a remake of the first man made nuclear reaction:
“His next exhibit Terrestrial Physics, is scheduled to be displayed in June 2010 as part of Denver, Colorado‘s Biennial of the Americas. It will include a sculpture that is able to generate a 1 million voltpotential difference. Utilizing a recreated Van de Graaff generator, Sanborn will have created a fully functional particle accelerator capable of creating nuclear fission.” – Wikipedia
Jae Ko: Paper Artwork
Aside from being a great artist, he is also a great guy with a loving wife of amazing talent. Jae Ko holds her own rite as an amazing paper artist. You can see some pictures of her amazing artwork on the Walker Contemporary website.
I will have my ear on the ground as this pans out. Sadly, this event has meant that I am not hanging out and gutting fish on their little island…
