Go, Speed Racer. Go.

This is ancient history, but such is life when one finds himself shooting images with a camera that effectively doubles the number of exposures that he has on a roll.

The culprit this time is an Olympus Pen EF. Instead of making one horizontal image in the space of a single 35mm frame, this makes two vertical images. As a vacation camera, it was undoubtedly an asset. For me, it’s almost too much. I can never use all of the frames I’m allotted.

This is one of the cameras I took to England a couple of weeks ago and though I shot 50 frames or so with it, I still have more than 20 to go. (I’m using a 36 exposure roll.)

Anyway, this image is from a day that a friend of mine, Harper Wagner, came down and let me shoot some images of him. I got a few winners that were digital, but I also got a few interesting ones with the little camera.

The camera forces me to shoot more than I would on my own. I like it for that. It makes me think more. As an added plus, it makes for interesting diptychs. You can follow the image link back over to flickr to see a few other examples.

The Author.

Every now and again I actually do something that might be considered photographic. Today, I shot a headshot for a book cover. The book is about Catherine the Great. Of Russia. The author is one of the foremost scholars on the subject and he teaches at VCU.

*shrug*

It’s a living.

Mrs. Butter-One.

My dad (whose birthday was on Saturday) used to make most of the breakfasts at our house. He made cream-of-wheat, but not as well as my mom and he scrambled eggs and made French Toast. Occasionally, he’d even pull out our antiquated waffle iron and make waffles for us.

But what he excelled at was pancakes. Dad was in the army when my sister and I were kids and he’d been stationed (along with the rest of us) in Germany where, if I understand the story correctly, he learned to make these beautiful crepe style pancakes. I could eat 10 or 12 of them because they were so thin. They were rounded by these lacey edges and the colors of golden brown he could make were simply magic.

The syrup of choice at our house was Mrs. Butterworth’s. As an added bonus, before I figured it out, Dad would let us talk to the bottle. He would talk out of the side of his mouth while we paid rapt attention to the sugar filled vessel on the table. We’d seen her move and talk on TV so it wasn’t a stretch to believe that our own bottle had things to say. My sister fell for the gag longer than I did, but I still loved it even when I knew better.

It’s because of this history that I have with the lady on the bottle who my sister called Mrs. Butter-One that this most recent Geico spot is so funny.

Enjoy.

via adfreak

Hangin’ Out With the Big Kids.

I should start by saying that I like very much to make photographs. Really. I do.

Despite that, I’m not a photographer all of the time. Most of the time, I am a college English teacher. I convince people that they want to write better. I convince them that ignorance, despite its bliss, is for the birds. I only wish that people would pay me to do what I love. It’s a reasonable dream, so I keep at it.

When I come across jewels like this, from A Photo Editor, I’m bound to pass them on. I’ve met a handful photographers who are in the big leagues and, in my experience, they’re really nice. I, on the other hand, had not withheld payment from them.

This bit that Rob writes about Mary Ellen Mark is both scary and hilarious at the same time. For what it’s worth, people I know who’ve met her say she’s really neat to work with.

One day I got a call from Mary Ellen Mark who’d recently shot a feature story for us. I was so proud that I’d landed her to shoot for the magazine and was so intimidated when I had spoken with her about the assignment and then when she’d called me from location to discuss the images she was getting and in general giving me an update on what was happening. Well, M.E.M. was not calling to tell me what a fabulous Photo Editor I was. No, she was calling to rip me a new one from head to toe because it had been over 90 days since she’d turned in a bill and had yet to receive payment and Christmas had passed and all those expenses we’d owed her would have come in handy. So, I sat there on the other end of the phone for a good 15 minutes possibly half an hour as Mary Ellen Mark shredded me into tiny little pieces and then stomped up and down on the pile of pieces and then loaded them into a cannon with a couple pounds of gunpowder and shot them out so they fell from the sky like confetti.

I for one am glad not to have his job. Whoa.

The Flickr-ator

Gotta love BoingBoing. They have everything there.

This snazzy application called Compfight searches Flickr for all the photos that fit whatever search terms you choose. On a whim, I searched for “rabbit mask” wondering if I could yield one of my own images.

Sho ’nuff. I know this photographer pretty well…

For a Photo Blog.

This is sure turning into a place where not many photographs are posted, innit?

I’ve got some film I’m working on and actually a couple of projects in the wings but getting back into the swing of things after a week in merry old England is taking longer than I thought.

Until I get my head on straight, have a gander at this site: RiotClitShave

Photosnobbery.

pho to snob ber y. (foto snŏb’ə-rē)
n. pl. snob·ber·ies

Snobbish behavior or an instance of it, particularly when looking at other photographers’ work. General condescension with regard to the photographic endeavors of others.

C’mon. You know you do it.

Pretty Little Pictures.

Once upon a million years ago, Jim and I dallied with photographs of small things. Jim figured some pretty low-tech ways to collect images of insects and small plastic toys and I went in the opposite direction (sometimes) and went so far as to purchase a smoke machine. But that’s a different story.

In my incessant searching of the interwebs to find images to share, I came across this stuff by Richard Edson that’s pretty cool.

David Levinthal has some versions that are simply out of this world.

Give Us Free.

Internet access.

I suppose it was bound to happen. I just never thought I’d fold so easily, so comfortably. I also figure that it’s because I live in Richmond, a quiet town where you can scoop up WiFi access almost as easily as finding a patch of green earth to sit on, that the desert of free WiFi that seems to be England was so alien.

On the one hand, there are plenty of hotspot providers, some with funny names, others that I knew already. As long as one has the batteries and the coin of the realm, he can dip his cup into almost anyone’s stream. I chose T-Mobile, principally because I knew I could use whatever time I had left over at a Starbucks at home.

But it’s the fact that I had to pay at all that shocked me. I can connect almost everywhere I want when I’m home. At school, the University’s WiFi is there. At home, if mine’s out, I can kinda piggyback on my neighbors. Heck, I even was sifting back through the logs in my router to find that at least one of my neighbos – probably a student – was using my internet connection. It just didn’t seem all that bad to me.

I was reading an article at Wired a few months ago in their ThreatLevel blog in which the author talked about how his wireless network at his home was not encrypted. I understood. Certainly, access to the web oughtta be free.

Ever since wireless internet became a possibility at my house, our system was open. I figured since I was paying for it even when I wasn’t using it, someone may as well have the option. When my wife became a victim of identity theft (not through our network, I’ll have you know), she insisted that I update the system so that it required a WEP key. Thankfully, all of this kinda stuff is made readily available in the software for the router we use, or else I’d be in really big trouble.

But that’s my point. If it’s easy enough for someone like me to set up, how hard is it for someone like one of my students (the honest-to-goodness Power Users) to break into? Am I just making it harder for people who know nothing to break in or am I really keeping the whole world out?

But back to my original concern: Has wireless connectivity become so ubiquitous that we all just pay for it? Is it really true that nothing comes for free anymore? Suxor.

Out of Town

Honestly, I had no idea I’d be so caught up in being away from the web.
Happily, Liverpool came out on top over Inter thanks to a 64th minute goal by golden boy, Fernando Torres.
More on everything when I get home.

…