Photo enlarging
I'm having a bunch of photos enlarged to adorn the walls of Jimmy's Coffee for a little while. At first, I wanted to pick all the most well-received photos on Flickr, using it as sort of a crowd-sourced top ten list of my work. Unfortunately, many in the top ten are highly cropped digital shots, and simply can't be printed at "gallery" sizes without getting pixelated. Plan B was picking a series of shots with a smooth contextual flow. I couldn't really pull this off either. Plan C was just to print a few favourites and hope they work well together.
I went with Plan C.
Here's a photo you'll be able to see exhibited in a coffeeshop for a month and then in a dark corner of my home for the rest of my life:
Film scanner comparisons, Part 1
I am in the market for a film scanner. I shoot a lot of black & white film with my Pen and my Canon, and these days I've been developing it at home. I figured I was approaching some Holy Grail of cost effectiveness by shooting cheap b&w and processing it myself, so I started researching the final step in my camera-to-Mac-to-internet workflow. I find, though, that I've been spoiled by expensive photo lab scanners and that the sort of good enough solutions that I was shopping around for simply won't satisfy me. And this sucks.
Anyway, I took a trip to Vistek the other day with a binder full of negatives. I wanted to compare the scans from an Epson Perfection V500 with a photo I'd had scanned by the lab (a service for which I was paying $6/roll). The V500 and it's bigger brother the V700 are considered some of the finest consumer flatbed scanners ever made, so a thorough test of one would certainly answer any questions I had about affordable scanners being appropriate for me.
More under the cut, with photos and unscaled 100% crops...
VIVISECTION OF THE BOXMASTER
A conversation with Jeanette brought the KFC BOXMASTER to my attention recently. The KFC BOXMASTER is made by Yum! Brands, who mercilessly abuse flora and fauna around the world. I was inspired to take a BOXMASTER apart by her question: "is that a hash brown tucked in there?" To me, that question is comedy, but it's also a little bit science. I thought I'd expand on the science end of things a bit with a BOXMASTER of my own and a camera. I was also inspired by the "What's In My Bag"-type photos I see fairly often on Flickr.
Come along for the journey. Let's see if that's a hash brown tucked in there, shall we?
More M$ code nonsense
I copied the following two sentences to my clipboard from Microsoft Outlook 2003 and pasted it into a rich-text box on a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 site:
Performance management is about developing people, setting performance expectations and giving and receiving feedback.
It’s an ongoing cycle involving three phases – Planning, Assessment and Support.
That's it. Two paragraphs, and one swatch of bold text. This is the code I was presented with:
<div class="O">
<div style="mso-char-wrap: 1; mso-kinsoku-overflow: 1;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;">Performance management is about developing people, setting performance expectations and giving </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;">and receiving feedback. </span></div>
<div style="mso-char-wrap: 1; mso-kinsoku-overflow: 1;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;"> </span></div>
<div style="mso-char-wrap: 1; mso-kinsoku-overflow: 1;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;">It’s an ongoing cycle involving three phases – </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;"><strong>Planning, Assessment and Support</strong></span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: Verdana; mso-ascii-font-family: Verdana; mso-hansi-font-family: Verdana;">. </span></div>
</div>
OMG IS WORKING WITH M$ SOFTWARE SO MUCH FUN.
“Street Scene, New York” by Walker Evans (1928)
Brilliant. I'm still trying to track down what he shot this with.
Brantford’s folly
The City of Brantford today (8th of June) initiated the wholesale demolition of forty-one Upper Canada-era structures in its downtown:
Ontario city to demolish historic street, despite Ottawa’s objection (National Post)
City of Toronto Installs 77 New Downtown Security Cameras, Announces Premiere of New Urban Reality TV Show
CTV Ottawa story here.
Map, plotted lovingly by myself, here. Use it to concoct mischievous G20-related strategies! Ha ha, don't get caught!
DARK BLUE: New cameras installed specifically for G20.
LIGHT BLUE: Existing 14 Division cameras.
GREEN: Existing 52 Division cameras.
