November 25, 2009
Shot with a Canon 30D. Click for bigness.
Looking over my Flickr account for today’s photo, I’ve noticed that I’ve done very little with color over the last few months. Mostly because I’ve been slowing down on my photographic output so it’s taking longer for me to finish a roll. Though I will admit that the fact that B&W is pretty forgiving of poor exposure really helps bring me back to it.
But I like color and colorful places. Korea had a lot of color if you’re willing to count neon. It sure wasn’t the mud brown landscape at any rate. And Taiwan did have a fair amount of neon as well, but all of the buildings were heat-reflective white or light grey. Kyushu, unfortunately, seems to be a lot like Canada, with a lot of drab greys, browns, and earth tones.
Now, don’t get me wrong, in the summer all of these places are a lush green. Okay, lush yellow-grey in Seoul, and a lush foggy in Nova Scotia. But let’s not get too nit-picky here.
Due to the change of the seasons, I’ve been wanting to see the explosion of fall colors we get back home. All the tree species here have such a wide variety of leaf-turning times that you never get that riotous landscape of color. Just the odd man out in bright yellow standing among a grove of fully green trees.
What this has to do with the image above is that I’ve been getting a hankering to get back into using DSLRs again. They have this weird “sharp blurring” effect that’s hard to describe, but I guess the best I can put it is that even the out of focus parts of the digital image are crisp. You can always pinpoint where one blob ends and the other begins.
For some, that’s why they dislike digital. For me, I think it’s part of the charm. Digital makes me think “Urban” and I feel it’s a technology that’s quite suited for that colorful neon-covered landscape. It just really seems to be a medium that thrives best with saturated colors like neon signs and busy city streets at night.
I just gotta find a good colorful place somewhere hereabouts…
November 24, 2009
Shot with a Canon 30D. Click to hop to a bigger size.
“I now see distinctly.” he said, “what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors,-a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester-and this is my last jest.”
November 24, 2009
Shot with a Canon 30D
This is a reply to Bob’s recent blog post that I liked enough to make it a blog post of it’s own;
It’s a lovely fantasy, isn’t it? Finding out that death isn’t really THE END, and we can get a chance to make amends for our many, many fuck ups in life. For some, knowing that we can’t make amends for our mistakes is unbearable, so they delude themselves into religion.
But everyone only gets that one chance to live. And we’re never wise enough to understand what that really means for us and the people in our lives until it’s far too late.
I know it’s easy to say, “If I knew then what I know now”, but if I could transport my experiences back in time and dump them into my younger head, I would.
November 22, 2009
Shot with a Mamiya C220f. Click to see deadly mantis action.
Turns out YouTube, besides being the internet’s number one place to see people insult each other, is also chock full of old Hong Kong kung-fu movies.
Clicking on the image will take you to one.
November 21, 2009
Shot with a Holga 120wpc. Click to see big.
Thing is, as I’ve gotten more anal unrealistic picky discerning about the images I take, and then the images I scan and put online, the less material I have to work from for blog posts. At least at the rate I’ve been posting at over the last few months. Soon I’m going to have to break format. Or perhaps even scale back the update schedule.
This makes me wonder about those pro photographers who have no choice but to put their work out there, quality or not. They can’t always keep their less-than-stellar work a shameful, shameful secret because even that less-than-stellar work might be this month’s rent. I’d be surprised if anyone working at a photo studio at a mall taking the same baby photos every day is telling themselves that they’re making great art and this is what they’ve always wanted to do.
Well, maybe they do. Can’t really say.
As mentioned before, both photography and comics are just hobbies for me. They are art forms I practice because they interest me. And during those times they don’t interest me, I don’t practice them. But pros don’t really get that freedom to stop, do they?
Sometimes I try to imagine what it’d be like if my job was cartooning or photography. Not having that freedom to stop when I get tired of it, or interested in something else… That seems more like a punishment to me. See, I’m not a guy with an overriding passion that I eat, drink, and breathe 24/7. A job is just a means to an end for me. Not the end itself.
When I imagine having to depend upon my sources of fun as my means of living, I can’t see it remaining fun for long.
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