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Nylon Smile

3

In any case, I’ve been work­ing on my projects, though mostly try­ing to fin­ish the ones I’ve started. Sometimes it seems like there’s no end. Aside from an awe­some Friday night (and an hour after din­ner on Saturday night try­ing to digest a big meal), I’ve been work­ing non-stop this weekend.

At the very least, the days have brought much rain, and even more inspi­ra­tion. I miss the snow, but the rain sat­is­fies for now. I’m not even sure if I like how early the sun sets at this time of year. Both day and night affect the mind in dif­fer­ent ways, bring­ing out (or mask­ing) dif­fer­ent parts of you that you for­got were there. Each has its own importance.

At one point, I real­ized that life is a series of Jens, from win­ter to win­ter.

There’s been much music too, so much that I’m think­ing about start­ing up a pod­cast again. But it’s another project, another idea I have yet to do.

I could have writ­ten so much more about each one of these top­ics, but I tried to keep digres­sion to a min­i­mum. They’d end up being full-blown entries of their own, and I’d never fin­ish writ­ing any­thing. For these entries, the ones that ram­ble about no sub­ject in par­tic­u­lar, I always look for lyrics, or titles, or snip­pets from other people’s entries that sort of explain the mood I’m in. Yep.

I’ve been feel­ing dis­con­nected, some­what for­get­ting my Taoist teach­ings. This is prob­a­bly a good thing, as I tend to be focused on the thought and the­o­ries too often, and not enough on the application.

There’s a fine line between res­ig­na­tion and accep­tance. But some­times I feel like I’ve fallen face-first to one side.

To be hon­est, I’ve been writ­ing this entry for over a week now, but my thoughts and ideas keep branch­ing out. Every time I sit down at the com­puter, I delete some­thing that’s lost rel­e­vance, and add some­thing more. Like this.

Date  October 26, 2008
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Categories  Daily Life

Video Love and Hate

2

I’ve been play­ing around with video all week­end, try­ing to get a bunch of things work­ing to no avail, when really what I wanted to do was just do some edit­ing and get a project under my belt.

Among the problems:

  • My Canon HF100 shoots in a pseudo 24p, which doesn’t get imported into Final Cut Pro as true 24p. This means I have to con­vert the video from the cam­era to ProRes, then con­vert to 24p, then bring it back into Final Cut Pro, then begin my edit­ing. Too bulky a work­flow for my tastes.
  • Rendering a few min­utes of video will take sev­eral hours. So I have to leave the ren­der­ing on overnight, occa­sion­ally into the next day, which means I can’t use my lap­top until it’s done. Thank god I have two computers.
  • Clips in the Final Cut time­line become unplayable when using Magic Bullet for colour tints, due to dropped frames.. This means I have to do all my edit­ing, mak­ing sure all the tim­ing is per­fect, then add the colour effects to it, then ren­der. It’s a leap of faith, because I can’t pre­view motion with the colour; if I don’t end up lik­ing the effect, I have to re-render the whole thing again.

I hate giv­ing up these things, but see­ing as how I’ve spent count­less hours research­ing and exper­i­ment­ing for solu­tions with­out any luck, I think I’ll have to for now. Hopefully full-frame sen­sors will become cheap enough that reg­u­lar con­sumers (like me) can afford them, and maybe video stan­dards will actu­ally be more stan­dard. Until then, I’ll have to accept this “highly-rated” cam­corder that still lacks a man­ual focus ring, can’t pro­duce any kind of shal­low DOF with bokeh, and has an annoy­ing amount of low-light noise.

On the non-technical end of video, one of the dif­fi­cul­ties is that I’m always torn between telling a story, and sav­ing a mem­ory, both of which seem some­what mutu­ally exclu­sive. The for­mer tends to be more con­cise but cold and mechan­i­cal, whereas the lat­ter is filled with all the lit­tle details I enjoy but poten­tially boring.

Video is also less for­giv­ing, as fram­ing is more final with­out the crop­ping func­tion of still pho­tos. Then when you move into high def­i­n­i­tion, things like dirt on a car, blem­ishes on a face, stray hairs, become much more noticeable…and invari­ably end up dri­ving a per­fec­tion­ist like me crazy.

I still love the com­bi­na­tion of move­ment and sound and dia­logue that video affords though; it’s the medium that I find comes clos­est to real life.

Date  October 13, 2008
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Categories  Random

Blood Work

3

Vial of blood

This lit­tle vial, along with a few drops of anti-coagulant, is filled with blood. My blood. I needed some for a pho­tog­ra­phy project I’m work­ing on, so I got a friend of mine in the med­ical indus­try to take it from me.

Now I’ve both fig­u­ra­tively and lit­er­ally bled for my work.

Date  July 22, 2008
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Categories  Photos Random

Emergence Exposition Opus 02

6

The last three months led up to this night.

Gallery viewing

Thumbnail: Ysabella's sculptures
Thumbnail: Baby dance
Thumbnail: Ceramic tower
Thumbnail: Ceramic sculptures
Thumbnail: Jacqueline plays piano
Thumbnail: Chocolate truffles
Thumbnail: Louise performs
Thumbnail: Frédéric plays the harp
Thumbnail: Prairie Cat
Thumbnail: Tree sculpture

After attend­ing Opus 01, I knew I wanted to be a part of this.

John, as a true friend, flew from Toronto to be there for the night. Alex, who was doing a med­ical intern­ship at a fam­ily prac­tice in a nearby city, drove there. Even Pearl also dropped by and I got to meet her.

I was so busy talk­ing with my guests that I didn’t even have time to go into the other rooms to see how the other artists were doing. The house was packed with peo­ple again, young and old.

Performances

Jacqueline’s sec­ond piece was Sonata in A Minor, by Franz Schubert (unfor­tu­nately, her first piece was over ten min­utes long, which isn’t allowed on YouTube). I found it to be a rather mas­cu­line piece, begin­ning like a som­bre funeral march, lead­ing to a jour­ney of bub­bling emo­tion, so it was mes­mer­iz­ing to see a girl play it with such con­vic­tion. Pay spe­cial atten­tion to the burn­ing trill at 5:28, which leads back to the main theme.

Misun told me that when she handed Jacqueline a rose after the per­for­mance, it looked like she had run a marathon.

Afterwards, Jacqueline told me after she couldn’t stop look­ing at my penis through her per­for­mance, then quickly cor­rected her­self and said the penis pic­ture, which was hung across from her.

Louise plays the harp by feel­ing only. She doesn’t have for­mal any musi­cal train­ing, so she doesn’t write any of her com­po­si­tions down. It just flows from her fin­gers, and quite well I might add. As a result, her music is semi-improvised.

John kept telling us how not drunk he was, even though you can clearly see­ing him down­ing glasses of wine in this video.

The after party

Thumbnail: Hors d'ouevres table
Thumbnail: Alex plays piano
Thumbnail: Cary and Ysabella
Thumbnail: Alex, me, and John
Thumbnail: Salon window

When the peo­ple left and the doors closed, the real party began for the artists, their guests, and the vol­un­teers. Frédéric and Misun broke out the cold cuts, the fresh and fancy bread, the wine, the cheese and we cel­e­brated a suc­cess­ful night. We had been stand­ing for five hours, so it was time to take a break.

When Dan gave me a read­ing two years ago, and said that I would be mak­ing money off my art within the next 15 years, I never would have believed him.

Note: All media in this post has an extremely warm colour tone. I decided to keep it instead of bal­anc­ing it to neu­tral white, because I enjoy the cozy feel of it, which expresses the mood of the house-gallery.

Date  March 3, 2008
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Categories  Daily Life Photos Video

Emergence Exposition 02 Invitation

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Carrot feet

The Emergence Exposition: Opus 02 vernissage is com­ing up in three weeks and if you’re in the Ottawa area, you can drop by to see my exhibit!

The show is free. Over three hun­dred peo­ple were packed into the last one. I’ll be the one walk­ing around with a cam­era strapped to his hand.

Four exhibition rooms, Four creative styles

Like the exhi­bi­tions of old France, the idea of this gallery-house is to have a mix­ture of dif­fer­ent artis­tic styles.

J’ai eu envie de recréer quelque chose dans cet esprit-là. Il ya un côté intim­i­dant et même assez froid aux galeries d’art. Les gens n’osent pas tou­jours entrer, mais je veux leur mon­trer que l’art c’est pour tout le monde, dans une ambiance chaleureuse.

— Frédéric Daty, gallery owner

There will be four visual artists — metal sculp­tor, ceramic sculp­tor, painter, pho­tog­ra­pher (me) — and three musi­cal artists — con­cert pianist, harpist, soft pop musi­cian. Featuring cham­pagne and home­made truf­fles too!

For more details and a glimpse at some more of my work in this theme, you can read the descrip­tion in the new pho­tog­ra­phy sec­tion, as well down­load the invitation.

Date  February 6, 2008
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Categories  Daily Life Photos

A Chance To Create

11

Good news. Wait no. Great fuck­ing news.

I met with Frédéric, the owner of the Salon, and after show­ing him a port­fo­lio of my pic­tures, he agreed to let me have an exhibit in the next show in February.

As this wasn’t only his art gallery but his house as well, I offered to let him make the deci­sion after see­ing my com­pleted work. He told me there was no need, as he trusted me based on what he had seen in my port­fo­lio, which I felt was a very nice compliment.

As artists (and I use this in the loos­est sense of the word to describe myself), we’re very dif­fer­ent. I told him that I like to study pho­to­graphic tech­niques, espe­cially in pho­tos that I like, and apply those tech­niques to what I want to express or show. When I look at a piece of visual art, I look at mean­ing and intent. When I cre­ate, I keep the same thing in mind. Frédéric, on the other hand, is more of a gut-feeling type of artist. He does what he feels is right, and doesn’t worry as much about the under­ly­ing message.

He asked if I was sin­gle, and I told him I was. “Good”, he said, “That’ll help you focus”. It made me think of a quote by Alexander Dumas:

Woman inspires us to great things, and pre­vents us from achiev­ing them.

I made a remark about how I’d have a forum to develop my ideas now, projects I never pur­sued because I didn’t have a way to get them to a wider audi­ence. He told me that I shouldn’t worry about an audi­ence, and gave me an exam­ple to demon­strate his point: if you cre­ate the most beau­ti­ful thing you’ve ever done and you keep it in your base­ment, it isn’t art because no one sees it1, but to get caught up in that dilemma, and to not cre­ate sim­ply because of that, is a tragedy.

So now I can pur­sue and develop one of my photo project ideas. I have to decide on a theme. I have see how much enlarge­ment I can do to my pho­tos with­out too much loss of qual­ity. I have to decide on the size of the final prints. I have to decide on the frame size and shape. I have to get the final prints framed.

I’ve always wanted to cre­ate acces­si­ble art2.

Perhaps this will be my chance.

  1. An inter­pre­tive answer to the Zen kōan of the sound a tree makes falling down in the for­est, I’m sure [↑]
  2. As opposed to some­thing such as poetry, which is less acces­si­ble to the com­mon per­son. As a medium, film, pho­tog­ra­phy, and music (with lyrics) are more eas­ily digestible. [↑]
Date  November 21, 2007
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Categories  Daily Life

First Photo Contest Win

10

Thumbnail: In A Flash Contest Results

Not the grand prize, but I won the por­trait cat­e­gory for my pic­tures of Chaos from Canada Day ’06, and Gerry from my Gerry Project.

Our judges had their hands full. With close to 100 entries, and pho­tos of every­thing from pen­guins to croc­o­diles to war vet­er­ans and other UCC lumi­nar­ies, it wasn’t an easy deci­sion to com­pare these apples and oranges. Ultimately, the judges decided that tech­nique and con­tent counted in equal measure.

To cre­ate as fair a judg­ing process as pos­si­ble, names, grade, and grad­u­a­tion years were left off the pho­tos, and replaced by a num­ber. That way, cur­rent stu­dents and Old Boys all had an equal shot. (To ensure no judge was swayed by the opin­ion of another, each wrote down his or her favourite num­ber, with no prior discussion.)

It was a blind judg­ing, and as a result, my two pho­tos tied with each other for first place with­out the judges know­ing that they were both from one per­son. Not bad for the first pho­tog­ra­phy con­test I entered.

Seeing my pic­tures in print is great, but win­ning isn’t the impor­tant part.

The most sat­is­fac­tion comes from know­ing that I could step out of my com­fort zone to call a stranger and take pic­tures of him, which was the main goal of the Gerry Project.

Being rec­og­nized for the pic­tures was a nice lit­tle bonus.

Date  April 2, 2007
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Categories  Daily Life Photos

The Gerry Project

8

Thumbnail: Gerry 1

Thumbnail: Gerry 2

This is Gerald, or Gerry as he prefers, an alum­nus of my high-school, Upper Canada College.

Gerry was born in Germany, but being a German-Jew, he soon moved to Holland in the years lead­ing up to the Second World War. “My father was rather pre­scient”, he put it. Eventually, he came to Canada. For four years, he attended UCC, grad­u­at­ing in 1940. I was in the class of ’99. After a year at uni­ver­sity, he vol­un­teered for mil­i­tary ser­vice at 19.

“19?”, I asked in dis­be­lief. With a smile on his face, he told me, “You grow up fast”.

He began as a com­mis­sioned offi­cer for an artillery unit. Responsibility of the lives of many men under his com­mand was some­thing he didn’t want, but his knowl­edge of German, Dutch, and English moved him to a more prefer­able posi­tion as an inter­ro­ga­tion offi­cer. His supe­ri­ors would send him co-ordinates of intel­li­gence to gather, some­times behind German lines, some­times in a downed tank, and a pri­vate would drive him in a jeep to obtain the information.

He sur­vived.

From left to right, his medals are:

His proud­est accom­plish­ment is the Maltese cross he wears on his chest — The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, pre­sented by the Governor General her­self. Even though he’s a com­man­der of the order, sec­ond only to knights or dames, he’s extremely mod­est about it. The framed award pre­sented to him lies in a pile of assorted things in his bedroom.

I first met Gerry a few days ago, after find­ing out about him from the bi-annual newslet­ter pub­lished by UCC. The newslet­ter, called Old Times, is a way for alumni, called Old Boys, to keep track of the goings’ on at the College. There was an arti­cle about the school’s prized Victoria Cross medal col­lec­tion being pre­sented to the new Canadian War Museum here in Ottawa. These were the same medals I walked by in the front hall dis­play case every day at school, too young to appre­ci­ate their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance. Gerry was one of the vet­er­ans invited to attend the pre­sen­ta­tion ceremony.

However, my inter­est in Gerry stemmed from a dif­fer­ent sec­tion in the same issue of the newslet­ter, announc­ing a photo con­test open to all past and present stu­dents. The con­test seemed like a great project, not only as a way to prac­tice my pho­to­graphic skills, but to test myself as well. I would have to find a sub­ject related to the school in some way. Gerry, being an Ottawa-area Old Boy, was my clos­est con­nec­tion. Taking pic­tures of some­one, let alone some­one I had never met before, was a daunt­ing idea, and I would have to step out of my com­fort zone to do it.

After look­ing up his name in the phone­book and gath­er­ing up the courage, I called Gerry. He was happy to meet.

I’ll be sub­mit­ting the sec­ond photo.

Update: Here are the results of the project.

Date  October 20, 2006
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Categories  Photos Random
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