Straight Edge Life

It was hot out at Smith. Really hot. There were fewer than 20 cars in the parking lot and the majority of those were there for a family picnic of some sort. I got only a few photos and a hell of a lot of sun. Bummer. But it was good to be out and tromping around smith. I’m getting to know the camera a bit better and am falling in love with my new meter. Now it’s back to work for a solid week at least.

Confirmed. The ballet shoot is off, the bike race is on. This is much better. Now I only have to drive to central Oregon once. I’ll head out shoot the race, spend the night, shoot Smith in the morning, maybe stick around until sunset and shoot again, come back the next day. All good things. Ok, that’s it for now. Lots of packing and laundry to do. And I promise, I’ll shoot a bit of 35mm so I can upload a few scans for you all to see.

It’s another three entry day. Didn’t go to the coast with my dad. He wasn’t up for driving 2 hours right after work so we met for dinner at West Brothers Barbeque downtown. Going to go see Pirates of the Carribean later. I would have prefered heading out to the coast but I’m going to get plenty of shooting in this weekend as it is. Let’s count shall we. Tomorrow (if Steve calls back) it’s bike racing in Bend. Saturday it’s ballet with Cliff in the studio here in town. And Saturday night it’s Smith Rock for climbing photos. I think that’s a pretty good lineup. I have a bunch of Velvia 100 that I’m dying to try… ooh hang on I have to burn this Bjork CD. “Army of Me” is a really cool song. Bjork has such an awesome voice. Hmmmm. So sweet. Ok. Anyway… Uh, velvia yeah. And if I’m realistic I think I have enough film to just barely make it through the weekend. So it’s probably good that I’m not going to the coast. I just wish my dad was doing more active stuff. I’m getting worried about that actually.

Cranked through the image details page and the upload script for 3G today. I’m making good progress although there’s a lot of layout work that I wasn’t really expecting and is sort of slowing me down. It’s weird being a programmer who used to be a designer. There’s a point in programming where you just completely fail to care about design. But as a designer that point is very hard to reach and very hard to hold on to. Always torn in two directions. But I have to admit that my strength is definitely in programming right now. I haven’t been happy doing design for a long time. And my Lasso / MySQL skills are ramping up pretty fast.

I brought my chromes home and slapped them onto the lightbox. Upon inspection under magnification I was appalled! Not only were the exposures funky (for lack of a meter I didn’t expect more) but the images where soft! I sorta started to freak out a bit. They didn’t look any better than 35mm chromes with cheap lenses. After about 20 seconds flipping through the sheets I cranked up the eyepiece on my loupe and bam, razor sharp chromes. Christ. Exposures funky, images sharp, bad loupe diopter. Ah, much better now.

Might head out to shoot some bike racing with Steve tomorrow. Could be quite cool.

I’ve got 6 rolls waiting for me at PhotOregon. I’m thinking I’ll take a shower and roll over to pick them up. After that I’d like to take off to Smith for the rest of the week and maybe I will. I’ve been working on 3G for a couple of days, making slightly slower progress than I was hoping to make. But it’s going well and is less difficult than starting from scratch since I’m reusing a lot of Pixenter’s code. So I think I’ll stick around for a couple of days, make some more progress on 3G and go to Smith on Sunday after the Ballet shoot with Cliff. Yeah hey. My next mission is figuring out how to afford a new camera bag and tripod.

Something that’s driving me up the wall… I have no medium format scanner. I can’t even track down a place that has one that I can use. Grrrr. I’ve done this before. I’ve gone on long trips and walked around with the weight of 60+ undeveloped rolls of film over my head. This isn’t as bad as that, at least I can see my chromes. But I can’t do anything with them right now. Maybe it’s going to become imperitive as soon as I take an image that I’m really excited about. For now I’m still just getting to know the camera.

England completely infected with a rage virus that turns it’s victims into zombies. Not as frightening as the trailers make it out to be but it’s worth the ticket price. It’s filmed with a video camera rather than a film camera and it adds a nice layer of ambient grit to the experience and actually makes up the majority of it’s charm. For whatever reason I didn’t really care about any of the characters. I wasn’t all that scared either. But it’s a nice flick. I give it a 6.

My favorite number. It probably comes from my college days when I was shooting using the Zone System constantly and zone vi was my favorite value. It’s a magic number to me. It has all sorts of fabulous meanings, memories and connotations. Like six; the year my great uncle gave me 6 silver dollars on my birthday. He turned out to be a racist pig and taught me a lot about human nature. Or six, the amount of time between now and when I was climbing seriously, in years. Right now I can’t underestimate the power of this kind of magic. Silly but honest. How many times have I been surprised by the unexpected? How many times has it been for the better that I left my options open and my preconceptions limited? There’s a lot to say for people who don’t have all the answers. People who spend half their day wondering about the world. People who believe in a little bit of magic. Why would you want to be with someone who has nothing left to discover.

Tonight, I discovered a road that parallels a track in the Union Pacific rail yard this evening. Along this railroad is a pile of fir bark that’s probably 40 feet high. Across from this mass of bark is some kind of petroleum storage unit. Massive round storage tanks with staircases spiraling around their white bellies. I haven’t seen something like this in Eugene before. At the expense of about 2,000,000 splinters I climbed the bark pile and took photos of the evening light casting shadows through the staircases onto the tanks. VI is the value of the mid tone highlights.

I like that. I like that Eugene still has secrets for me to discover. I mean it’s not like this find tonight is a place that I’ll take Nichole to to romance her or anything. But I think it’s all just part of me being alive and full of passion. And that’s one of the most attactive things of all. This simple little place makes me happy and it gave me an excuse to do what I love. Regardless of whether I’ll get a great photo out of it. Regardless of whether I’ll go back again. Anyway. I’m off to bed. Sleep well.

It’s been a long day waiting for my new light meter. Right about now I ready for that UPS guy to show up and ring my bell. The light is good today. I’ve got a lot on my mind too.

I watched a good movie last night. The Believer. It’s about a Jewish kid who’s hiding his faith and living as a Neo-Nazi. I never know how to interpret a film like this. I rarely rent nazi subject films because it’s such a hard subject to handle. Both for filmmaker and audience. I never feel like I can talk with authority about anti-semitism either. But this is a good movie. Completely devoid of much of the hype and shock value that accompanies so many nazi movies. It’s a clean delivery of a complex subject. I didn’t feel like I was being scolded or moralized while watching it. I felt like it left me to draw my own conclusions and I like that. It gives you a lot to think about but doesn’t force you to think in one direction. The main character afterall is living in the ultimate paradox. Any work the audience has to do pales in comparison to the work this guy has to do to untagle his situation. In a way this film freed me up to think about the neo-nazi issue with a bit more willingness and with a bit more information than I started with.

I advise checking it out if you can. Blockbuster’s got it.

Tuned up the Retroglide, Nichole’s sweet beach cruiser from Paul’s Bike Shop, put air in the tires, wiped off the tree drippage from the seat and grips, fitted a pannier and went for a ride. Nice day for a ride. I think tomorrow while the chemical brothers are bombing our roof to demolish the evil termite population I’m going to go for a ride down to Allan Brothers or go do a little photography. I love the river trails in this town. I love Nichole for letting me use her bike all summer while she’s in Boston and Italy. Life is good.

Didn’t even make it to the butte. Didn’t even get up the guts to rent kangaroo jack either. Didn’t pump up the bike tires and go for a ride. Didn’t do jack. It’s a sad story folks. Although I am a rock star for debugging an obnoxious thread locking issue in lasso. But damn I need to get out. I’m dying to shoot some photos but don’t want to spend film before I have a meter. Monday. So long to wait. I even had plans to go down to allan brothers and write a letter to Nichole, but I could decide on what sort of paper to use and couldn’t find a good pen. This is really pathetic. Help.

By the way, is anyone else dying to get the liz phair album? Me. Me. Me. I listened to the preview of just about every track on the itunes music store this afternoon. A little more mainstream than her normal stuff but she’s still got the magic touch on my wallet. Monday, deposit check, buy album.