Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
This isn't a tutorial. If you're in need of one and you've somehow stumbled onto my blog of jumbled thoughts on a variety of topics, sorry. You'll need to go back to Google and try again (though, really, you should be using Duck.com). I recently upgraded to a 16-inch MacBook Pro (review forthcoming) and had the opportunity to…
Marcus Herrmann: Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a /feeds page? You can put your blog feed there, but also RSS generated from your Twitter account (via RSS Box), Mastodon updates, or even the starred items of the feeds you…
Chris Coleman: Eventually I ran out of steam, life changed a bit, and the vacuum that this site filled in my day was filled by other things. I was 23 when I started this site. I’m 41 now. A lot has happened in 18 years, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a long time has passed. Also, hot…
TTTThis: When you search for blogs now on you see things like 'Top 100 Blogs.' 'How to Make a Successful Blog.' 'Most Powerful 50 Blogs.' But what you really want is 10,000 unsuccessful blogs. Much of the linked piece is likely to be taken as hyperbole but it is mostly true-ish. It is true that it is harder…
Exposed root – April 2020 If you walk through the same forest for months and months – you begin to notice the details you’d normally miss. Also on Flickr, Instagram.
Manton Reece: Today we’re launching a new feature on Micro.blog: support for multi-user blogs, so your whole team can write posts on a shared blog. We think it’s going to be great for small companies, families, and schools, with everything from shared photo blogs to podcasts. This is a big update. You may remember that I try to…
Contact print Above is my first ever contact print. A contact print is when you lay a negative (film, paper, tin, glass) onto photo-sensitive paper and shine light onto it to expose the paper. You then develop that paper into a positive print (or what you'd think of as a normal photo). This is a milestone in my…
Flowers – May 2020 The above image is a digital positive created from a paper negative. It was handcut from Ilford photo paper, shot, developed by me last night. I also used it as the subject for my first contact print. You can read the behind-the-scenes story here on my blog. Also More also on Instagram.
Are you enjoying these links? I know I am. Worlds Largest Puzzle – Seems terribly reasonable that this is priced at only $600. I sent this to my parents half hoping they'd buy it. Flower Garden without People – Dutch tulips, with no one to look at them. Excellent photographs from the aforementioned Albert Dros. C/2020 F8 (SWAN)…
Birds on wires – January 2020 Somehow these images got clogged into my drafts and never published. These pigeons roost above and below a nearby highway bridge. They were enjoying the sunset when I captured these images.
I'll likely touch on this topic in an upcoming pandemic powered Podcast episode. Albert Dros, 2017: Sometimes the area where you live would not be motivating to photograph because you see these things everyday. However, when I started photography I began to see the world (and my home area) in a different way. I started to look for…
Late last week I published an interview with Marco Taro Holmes, one of the original members of Urban Sketchers, on my now 10-year old web site The Watercolor Gallery. It was a pleasure to interview Marc and a lot of his answers epitomize the reason I built The Watercolor Gallery in 2010 – to inspire and motivate other…
👉 Brent Simmons: I keep thinking how the 1918 pandemic was followed by the Roaring Twenties.
Mic & Nics Photographing Mic & Nics – January 2020 Recorded January 15, 2020 You may recognize this building. I wrote about how I practiced my light metering with it. Well, I also recorded myself on a different day shooting it with very expired film. The filmstrip In this episode of the podcast I chat about using a…
A few houseplants – April 2020 On Sunday morning I decided to quickly set up a photo shoot for my current houseplants. Here are just a few that I liked. The others didn't come out the way I wanted due to a few limitations. So I'm hoping to do another photo shoot in the near future.
A few links to expand (or shrink) your mind. WildEarth Live Safaris – Two 3-hour safaris live broadcast on YouTube daily. I've watched one completely through and plan to watch more of them. They are relaxing and informative. 98.css – CSS stylesheet to make all HTML elements styled as if they exist within Windows 98. Fun. Planet of…
Taken with Ansco Speedex on expired Kodak Tri-X 400 Over the river – March 2020 I love how this tree hangs over the river. I've photographed it many times and assume I will many times more. This particular image is a re-scan of a negative. I learned a slightly different way to scan and edit the resulting digital…
A few things I bumped into recently: Studio Ghibli Backgrounds – These are great. Reminds me to watch these again. Jonathan Yeo's Live Portraits – I hadn't seen Yeo's work before this, but I caught a retweet from Brian Cox and I've been keeping up with his Live Portraits. Parts 1, 2, and 3 are already online. Part…
Taken with Ansco Speedex on expired Kodak Tri-X 400 Rail side – March 2020 I'd forgotten to publish this one. It is from the same expired roll I shot Sweeny's Bench and the Studebaker on.
Common Merganser takes flight triptych – April 2020 Sort of a triptych I suppose. I wish I had set the camera to a much faster shutter speed but I just didn't have the time.
Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, regarding Instagram's TOS: The language is typical of many photo sharing sites (including PhotoShelter), so in that sense it’s unremarkable. The company needs the ability to redisplay images, and wants to be able to have, for example, an image appear in the app, within an Instagram Story, and on the website without having…
Stephen Wolfram continues to make me feel lazy: Today we’re officially launching our Physics Project. From here on, we’ll be livestreaming what we’re doing—sharing whatever we discover in real time with the world. (We’ll also soon be releasing more than 400 hours of video that we’ve already accumulated.) I’m posting all my working materials going back to the…
Looks to me like a red and grey squirrel mix Male Cardinal Male Mallard Sparrow taking flight Freshly flowered Forsythia Possible bilateral gynandromorph Cardinal (male and female) Nuthatch Chipmunk Male Garter snake Common Merganser Turkey Vulture Nutchatch Wildlife from recent quarantine walks – March/April 2020 I've been shooting mostly digital during our as-often-as-possible nature walks near our home….
Some links for your edification: Chuck's Astrophotography – Amazing astrophotography from Chuck Ayoub on Instagram. See also, him capturing Comet ATLAS on Youtube. See also, Comet ATLAS. Camera Work – A quarterly magazine published in 1903-1915 by Alfred Steiglitz. It was an attempt to raise the level of discourse about photography as an art form. It worked. I've…