Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Traces



I am now old enough and have known and interacted with enough people to have created some indelible memories of me for a number of people.  It's saddening to realize that a good many of the memories I have created for them must be of the unhappy kind.  Overall, I have not been a particularly good person to have a relationship with.

혹 너도 이거 보고있어?  그럼 알겠지.  미안해.

Friday, July 5, 2013

A Family Portrait

The recently-made faces waiting to be baked.  So far I have been very lazy;  I need to make many, many more for Avidya -- they are intended to replace ones that were damaged when I moved downtown -- and also ones I plain don't like much.


June Bug And June Bug Shadow



Another Omelet

This time I managed to transfer it to the plate without too much damage.  It could have been folded better, but I was in a bit of panic mode and rushed it, because I had suddenly realized that the skillet was hotter than I had thought it was and the omelet was in danger of being overdone.


First Time Trying This

The photographs I put up here usually are intended to be taken literally, for their visual interest alone.  Their points are the images in and of themselves, not abstract or technical qualities that might be implied but not inherent to what the eye sees.  Certainly there are exceptions, and many of them, but most often, what you see is what you get.  So normally I try to obtain the clearest, most distraction-free images possible, and that includes doing what I can to smooth out overly grainy images.  That process can result in loss of very fine detail, but usually extremely high resolution is not necessary for getting my points across.

This time, though, when I ran this image through a noise filter I realized it was less interesting.  Is it because its point of interest is not a figurative subject?  Perhaps.  Anyway, I ended up doing the opposite of what I normally do -- made the cloud grainier.  And I think the image is improved thereby.


Thursday, July 4, 2013

Elevators Are Scary (Even Without Bad Writing)

IT'S OPEN-AND-SHUT

Some pulp (and pulp-ish) writers of yore used to make good capital out of a low trick to create a threatening atmosphere right off the bat, whereby things would randomly and without any cause be described as 'sinister', 'weird', 'mysterious', and so on.  For example:

"So he stepped out into the HORRIFYING night.  The ELDRITCH coolness of the night breeze made him shiver with a MYSTERIOUS TERROR, terror that he could not explain.  The SINISTER new moon hung low and pallid over the OMINOUS horizon like a POISONED CROISSANT".

Hey, I like that.  I think H.P. Lovecraft might well have liked it too, since he was notorious for the practice.

On the other hand, while it's obviously true that skilled presentation can make anything seem vaguely sinister, some things, I think, really are inherently a little sinister.  At least so I find them.  Elevators, for one.



Chocoholic

At work there is someone in another department who keeps a jar of candy for anyone to dip into, bless 'er.  Yesterday I took a Hershey's Miniature Krackel bar from it, and after enjoying its crisp, crackly puffed-rice-and-chocolate goodness I made an origami crane out of the foil wrapper.  It turned out well and I decided to photograph it.  Only then did it occur to me that it would have been a nice idea to have the Krackel crane sitting on a Krackel bar pedestal.  So I went back to get another Krackel mini bar from the jar, and wouldn't you know it, I had just eaten the last one.  I did not want to wait for however many days until she refilled the jar, feeling antsy the whole time, so I decided to make do with a Dark Chocolate mini bar.  On the way back I ran into someone and we started yakking -- and before I knew it, I had unthinkingly unwrapped and eaten half the bar.  I really did not want to eat another one, so I just used the half that was left.