I’ve been scanning old family photos for the last while, which is another reason that things have been rather quiet in this neck of the woods. (I’ll go into that in more details later.) My aunt gave me a bag of photos and letters that were from my maternal grandmothers things and because I (unthinkingly) offered I have now become the unofficial family archivist. I’ve gotten about halfway through the pics on my mothers side of the family - at least the ones I know about, I think another uncle has another heapum of photos somewhere in his attic as well.
The pic here is of ‘Gillie and Gang’ - my grandfather John Joseph (also known as Sean) is in the back row, 5th from left. I’ve not been able to find out anything about this bunch of reprobates, other than that my grandfather and two of my great uncles travelled around Ireland with this band in the 1920s. I’m also assuming that ‘Gillie’ is the slightly rotund jolly looking fellow on the far right.
Who knows what else I will find as I continue through the ‘Box of Mysterious and Slightly Dusty Smelling Delights.’
Click for more on flickr.
Because construction sites need prettification too.
I finished the 365days project on flickr yesterday. I can’t say that I’m happy with my final shot - I was tired and cranky and its kind of a lazy shot. Very little setup and effort put into it, which is why I’ve posted my day 363 shot in the blog which I’m much happier with. A year of my life in self-portraits - although even that isn’t quite true as I only managed shots for 217 days.
I ‘gave up’ twice - unhappy with both my technique and myself - and then came back to it with a bang for all of about four days until I once again lost my creative spark.
January and February I was using the Finepix Z2 - a slim little machine that could be thrown into my purse and pulled out on a whim. There are a fair number of ‘arms length’ self portraits from the Z2 - not particularly flattering as my arms aren’t that long and the fixed focal length made my face look deformed. With the limitations of the camera I tried different things, using a tripod, props, hats and different locations to make something interesting. My potatoshop skills were pretty rudimentary - cross processing and desaturation was about the limit of it.
March and April were fairly similiar but the weather was getting warmer so I could go outside - also I went to Barcelona but had neither the time nor the patience to set up intricate shots - he11 who does on a holiday?
I bought the D80 in May of last year and there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of shots. Partially down to the camera and partially down to a new found sense of interest in the project. Day 141 was the first hiccup. I took a break for a couple of weeks, unsure of what I was doing. July and August were pretty good months, I managed a shot most every day. Most of my ‘explored’ shots come from the summer portraits. Day 151 is still the most popular shot on my stream.
September was really flaky and October wasn’t much better.
Then came November.
The more astute among you will notice that there were NO shots taken in November. You may also remember there were no posts to the blog in November. Actually, there was nothing at all done in November bar me writing the World’s Worst Novel - I have mentioned that I killed off all the characters in one massive cull in the last paragraph haven’t I?
December wasn’t much better. I got lazy and used to not taking a shot - there was always ‘tomorrow’ and I wasn’t ‘that far behind.’ And then it was January ‘the final month’. Even that didn’t get me taking pictures, I knew I was falling farther and farther behind, and it was only in the last two weeks that I began to make the effort again, despite a massive lack of creativity.
And now its done.
I don’t know why I started the project in the first place, possibly something to do with the long cold boring January nights last year. Or maybe something to do with wanting to see if I really was any good at it. I know a lot of people think that the whole thing is pretty narcissistic but I never really thought of it that way. I hate looking at myself in photos for a start, so when I was choosing that days shot it wasn’t with the idea of ‘which one do I look the best in?’ The questions I asked myself were more technical: ‘Which one has better shape \ colour \ form \ lighting \focus?’
If I was to look at the photos from a more self-centred point of view I’d have to wonder what I was trying to say on a particular day. Some of them I really love and think ‘jeez, that was a fluke’ others are just awful, awful, awful and I don’t know what I was thinking posting them up.
And then there is the nostalgia \ life thing. Looking back at the first few days and weeks of the project I’m tempted to question everything. Has anything about my life really changed - besides getting another year older - am I any closer to realising any of my goals or ambitions? Probably not. Has my self-confidence increased? In some aspects, but generally no. Am I more comfortable in front of a camera? No, not really, especially if other people are behind it. Do I have a better understanding of what it takes to make a good portrait? I think I’m beginning to…
This is very cool. The (US) Library of Congress has started a flickr account which currently contains 3000 photos from its archives. Some extremely cool and interesting images here. They’ve left them as common use - so there are no copyright restrictions - and are encouraging people to add their own tags and any identifying information they can. Have spent a while browsing round the pics this morning, the 1940’s in colour set has some breathtaking images. Pic shown was taken in 1940, Pietown, New Mexico.
Pietown sounds very Suessian don’t you think?
So my flickr site is enjoying a bit of fame these days. Currently one of my photos is being used in an article about Dublin for Schmap and one of my self portraits is used in an article about the 365days project in NowPublic.
This morning I logged on to find a request from someone doing publicity for a Sadies gig in San Francisco. They want to use my shot of Travis Good on the fliers.
Well, I think its kinda cool.
Outside Mulligans this afternoon. Enjoying the sunshine and trying to cure an awful hangover.
C and P this one’s for you.
…
Blast.
I don’t know why the template won’t work properly with the pic.
So they did the usual thing of having a big flashing cursor where the password gets entered and if you want to blow up a house all you have to do is upload a virus but besides all the hollywoodification of the Haxxor side of things this is a pretty good movie. A bit cheesy in parts of course, but this is Die Hard we are talking about.
Bruce is showing his age a bit, but for all that he still drags his broken, bullet-riddled body through the movie beating anything in his path to death - leading me to surmise that the ‘Die Hard’ franchise is actually a series of zombie movies, cos seriously no-one could live through that amount of shit.
Timothy Olyphant is the bad guy and my, my hasn’t he aged well - although he appears to be channelling Tim Robbins throughout - which is still no bad thing. Justin Long (the Mac guy) isn’t bad as the side-kick and Kevin Smith is hilarious as the overweight-still-living-at-home-comic-con-loving-haxxor geek. There’s a bit of parkour, a bit of humour and a lot of explosions and fighting.
I’m not going to give away any spoilers here - because think about it, it’s Die Hard - what do you think happens? I’ll just leave you with this inspired tribute to the franchise (now with added 4th verse!)
Everybody sing:
‘We’re gonna die (die) die (die) die (die) DIE HARD
We’re gonna die (die) die (die) die (die) DIE HARD
Yippee kayay! Mother fucker!!
Yippee Kayay! Mother fucker!!’
About a month ago I bought myself a new lens for the Nikon. Unfortunately for whatever reason I didn’t get a chance to try it out before I went to Barcelona so I was sort of worried about how it was going to perform.
It’s a Sigma 28-300mm MACRO. Anyway, here are the results:
This was taken at the macro end (300mm) of the lens. No photoshop, scanned straight from the negative. And this one:
was at the wide-angle end (28mm). What impresses me here is that there is no vignetting. The kit lens that came with the F75 (A Nikon) has some pretty bad vignetting when I shut it down to 28mm - however the new ‘generic’ lens has absolutely none.
I think this is going to become my new favourite thing.
I meant to write a bit about my trip to Winnipeg last July. As evidenced I didn’t get round to it. But here is a link to my Winnipeg flickr set if anyone is interested.
Edit: Don’t know why the photo to the right looks so grainy here.
