Posts tagged with "projects"

Nylon Smile

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.

Video Love and Hate

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.

Blood Work

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.

Emergence Exposition 02 Invitation

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.

A Chance To Create

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. [↩]