365.189 a shaky sense of diction

And this is another attempt at Levi Moore’s SLIproject, and it’s also not an entry for that project.

If you read yesterday’s novel-style WoT 365 project post, you have some idea of what this book has been through over its existence… for those of you who have better things to do, I got this volume of Jack Kerouac novels from the QPB Book-of-the-month club in 1993 or 1994, it went upside down in a car with me in 1994 and got rained on for several days before I retrieved it from the wrecking yard; it got rather horribly defaced by a drunk roommate in 1996 or 1997; it’s been to Illinois and Long Island with me, and has somehow made it, and only slightly-the-worse-for-wear…

I like how it sorta looks like an iguana, or maybe a beat-up old pirate, maybe… either one would likely have a shaky sense of diction, much like Brian Eno’s Dead Finks, perhaps. Anyway…

This particular 365 shot got rather more post work than usual…

It’s a 6-shot HDR, all shot with the D7000 and 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series, at ISO100 and f/3.5, and bracketed at 1/15th, 1/8th, 1/4th, 1/2, 1″, and 2″. A couple of blue led lights and a yellow mini maglite provided the color. Photoshop CS6 Merge To HDR and Flat preset provided the starting point, and I don’t remember what all I pumped in there before adding a warming filter and doing some levels adjustments in PS. It then came back into Aperture for some minor tweaking of various things, as well as a lift to the blues, reds, and yellows, and I think it came out quite pretty, even if it does look sorta like a squinting pug in a tricorner hat!

And with that, I’ll wish you a Happy Independence Day!

365.188 just a dying fiction

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that On The Road is dying… or that beat literature is dying, for that matter. Dharma Bums remains one of my favorite novels, and the beat writers and poets will always occupy a special place in my heart.

But this particular book has definitely seen better days, like the roughly 2 years that it sat on a bookshelf, or laid on a side table as I slowly struggled throughOn the Road (it would be years before I read The Dharma Bums…) before it went upside down in a 1990 Honda Civic with a friend of mine and I.

I guess that was some time in late-1994, or maybe early 1995.

When I recovered this volume—some weeks after the crash, and also after some heavy rains—from the backseat of the totaled Honda, it was sopping wet.

Over several years, it developed some fairly nasty mold, and I kept it segregated from other books for some time, until I moved fully into the apartment I shared with some friends in 1996 and 1997. I was a bit lazy, and ended up stacking a bunch of books next to my bedroom door. This volume was on top of one of the piles, that, when taken together, in the dark, at 3am, after many hours of copious cheap beer consumption, and viewed by a myopic roommate apparently looked like quite a convincing toilet, and all of my protestations and exhortations could not stop the deluge that splattered all over this book and some of its brethren…

There must be something in the filtered schlitz that put down the mold, or perhaps some years of moving around, mostly packed tight on a shelf with other works, and traveling from Texas to Illinois to New York and back to Tx did the trick, because I can only find faint traces of a grey stain on most of the pages, rather than the rather mossy black that coated the sides and had infiltrated many of the pages.

This is a long story, I know, and if you’ve read this far, Thank You!

This picture is an in-camera multiple exposure: shot with the D7000 and Nikon 75-150mm Zomb-E Series, all at ISO100 and -1EV, two at 1/5 and f/16, one at f/3.5 and whatever the camera decided the shutter should be, since I shot them in APmode, and with some mild post-processing, mostly to pull another stop of exposure out.

Shots 1 and 2 were focused in such a way to give acceptable levels of blur to the spine, while keeping ‘Kerouac’ legible. Shot 3 was focused tight, just past the curled pages, and gave the overall dreaminess to the scene.

Also, if you’re wondering, this is another preliminary attempt at Levi Moore’s SLIproject, but not the final, and the lyric comes from Brian Eno’s “Dead Finks Don’t Talk,” from 1974’s Here Come the Warm Jets.

365.187 Come On and Sing it With Me! _______! Get with the feel in’ y’all _______! yeah!

For the record, this is NOT my entry for the Levi Moore’s SLIProject this week, and that’s why he’s not + mentioned, and the project is not tagged. I’ll make a separate post for that, and put a bunch of flashing lights on it, and it will come some time after I post 365.192 on this coming Saturday, as I plan to make this fun project part of my 365 work for the month.

If you’re unaware, the SLIProject is an attempt to illustrate song lyrics, one lyric/one picture per calendar week (Sunday-Saturday) for the month of July. It was started by Levi Moore on GooglePlus, and there are likely to be very many pictures that you can view by searching for #sliproject in G+.

I think it likely that the intent is to 1) come up with a groovy lyric, then (and only then) 2) go shoot it. For example, go shoot “Elementary Penguins Singing Hare Krishna.” Or maybe go out and find (or somehow construct) “these bathing caps that you could buy that had these kind of Fourth-of-July plumes on them.”

I think it likely that the intent is not to find oneself in a situation that has some tangential relationship to a song, and to snap some pictures hoping that you could find a lyric to match…

Today’s 365 shot is closer to the latter than the former, and that is part of why it is not my entry for the SLIProject…

I stopped to fetch some fuel on the way home, and decided to give the VW a trip through the carwash.

And as I was pumping diesel, I looked over at the Carwash, and started singing…

And I finished pumping gas and drove the car into the carwash, and only then realized that this would be much easier than shooting “just a dying fiction” or “please be still and hide your madness in a jar,” which were two lines I had in mind…^

So I whipped out the camera and started snapping away. I ended up with a couple that I didn’t mind, but none that I really liked, and the ones that captured the song the most needed some unnatural processing to get by.

But I think this one works, so here it is. And it definitely works for a 365 shot, I suppose, since I did experiment a bit, and did learn (or was reminded of) a few things, so that’s win, I suppose.

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 1/2000th (AP Mode), f/4, -2EV. Mild processing in Aperture.

^Yes, I listened to some Brian Eno today.

365.186 Ohne Titel

On my way to the dumpster with the days deposit of cat droppings at just after 5am, I noticed something odd. I had the iPhone on me, but its low-light capability is somewhat lacking, plus, my ability to handhold 1 second shutter speeds is rather limited.

So I came inside, fetched the tripod, remote shutter, and big camera.

I could’ve saved myself a bit of trouble if I’d swapped out heads right quick, though maybe not, since the joystick ball head refuses to support the ~5lbs of camera and lens at any sort of severe angle for long enough to pull of a 2″ exposure, which is what I wanted to keep the low ISO, and even though its rated for 8 or 12 pounds and has a tensioner built in…

So geared head it was, and getting the camera in position with that thing was the hardest part, next to getting myself into position on the dog-stained fake grass carpet that surrounds the planter on which most of the tripod rested.

After finding an appropriate exposure, the rest was fairly trivial, and I snapped this shot at shortly after 5:15…

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 2″, f/2. Minimal processing in Aperture.

365.185 Abstraktes Bild

On the back of the camera, this looked like Captain America somehow.

In the computer, it looked fairly dull, at first, but then began to transform: a discotheque; a growth of some foreign mold or crystal; superman’s skin, even; there were others.

In the end, it just became an abstraction, and I’m fine with that.

D7000. EL Nikkor 50mm f/2.8, on 100mm extension. ISO100, 1/25th (AP Mode), f/2.8, -2EV. Levels, mid-contrast, definition, and some other slight pushes in Aperture.

And now I need to clean this mess up… Insofar As I planned on shooting the same thing with the same tools all week, I didn’t put my toys away a single day: for shame. This place is now a wreck. Yuck.

But I made some pretty pictures! So that’s win, I suppose.

365.184 Anytime is the Right Time

I wrote a whole rant about some advice a couple of professional photographers gave on their video podcast a couple of months go (and that I’m only getting around to watching just now), but I realized that 1) their advice was aimed at people who want to be professional photographers (i.e., not me); 2) their advice was based around photos to include in one’s portfolio (not this one, to be sure, and not that I particularly need a portfolio); 3) they were talking about traditional sorts of proper photography: landscapes and people and whatnot (and not abstracts like this); 4) there is no number 4; and 5) this is not a good enough photo to challenge any claims made by the pros, for sure.

So I deleted the rant and started again, since I only really wanted to say one thing:

Anytime is the Right Time for Photography!

D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO100, 1/30th (AP Mode), f/4, -2EV. Mild-to-medium processing in Aperture.

365.183 Killer 2:40-3:02

Open a new tab and go find a way to listen to Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Killer, especially the little section from 2:40-3:02. (This would be the version on theSamdhi album from 2011, the one you can find a youtube of with relative ease, or could as of 4:50pm Central Time today…) That rather manic bit of sound is the title of this piece.

I’m feeling a bit manic and put off all of a sudden, or maybe for the last half hour or so, I don’t really know, and I had a much calmer composition all ready—come to think of it, I’ll post it below—but I decided to just check and make sure there wasn’t a better one, and this one jumped out.

Groovy.

D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 E Series, extended by ~50mm. ISO100, 1/3, f/3.5. Minimal processing in Aperture.

here’s the outtake… same settings, but a bit more processing in Aperture:365.183 Killer 2:40-3:02