Walk Through The Park Reflected Through Photoshop

As I walked the park path I noticed strict segregation.  The mallards were in the water on the left side of the path.

[This is using the colored pencil filter.  It minimizes the ducks that were scattered over this pond, but I couldn't resist the glow on the tops of the trees in the background.]

On the other side of the path were the Canada geese.

[The ended up with the Fresco filter.  All I can say is the others were worse.]

Another area had robins all over the lawn.  And this one in the tree.  

[This resulted from playing with curves in the image tab.]

Then this row of trees.  

[First curves and then the - oh dear, I forgot which filter.]

And then it began to rain.  This was the picture that made me go play with Photoshop in the first place.  The ripples weren't all that interesting in my original picture, so I played around.

[If my notes are right, this is ink outline (filter) in the center and poster edge on the outside.]

Posts like this one let me experiment with Photoshop a bit.  Unfortunately, my life is too busy right now to seriously work on new Photoshop skills that are more significant.  But there are countless websites and videos online to help you learn to do all sorts of things with Photoshop.  I'm starting to work on a book for my grandson and then I'll need to study hard to do some of the things I'm thinking about.  

Mario And Marlene After Their 3 Day El Capitan Climb

After watching the slackline walkers at Lost Arrow, we took the shuttle to El Capitan and looked up at the giant rock to look for climbers.  I could only find a couple.  (I did not take my telephoto lens on this trip, so this was the best I could do.)

Let's put this into the context of the whole rock.

I know a lot more now about El Cap (as the rock climbers all called it) than I did when I talked to Mario and Marlene.  I've watched several El Cap climbing videos and realize that where I saw a big rock, the climbers saw various routes and various features that are all named and ranked by difficulty.

At the meadow below El Cap,  I asked this photographer which climbers he was following, he said all of them.

Which leads me to believe, now that I have had  time to poke around online, that he might well be Tom Evans who has a website call Elcapreport.com which I got to because I saw several vehicles with that url on them in Yosemite.  He's got much better shots (yes that telephoto does much better than my camera) there, with a set of photos of climbers on El Cap from this week.



There can't be two photographers who know as much as he did about all the people on the mountain. (Well, sure there can, but I'm betting it's him.) Marlene and Mario (in the video below) are in the background. They had started up the Triple Direct route on Friday and reached the top on Sunday and had just hiked down when I met them.

This is probably a good time to just watch the video.  Remember these two had just spent three days climbing El Cap and a fourth hiking down with heavy packs.  I didn't quite catch what they were saying about their route, but I've looked up the routes on El Cap, and it was clear they were talking about Triple Direct.  So listen for it.




I took this screenshot from Triple Direct El Capitan.

It looks a little different with the shadow, but you can figure it out on my picture above.

We went back to El Cap when we drove home on Tuesday.  Here are some more pictures to help you put this all into some context.  In the one below, you can see some climbers, and you can see what I mean about all the crevasses and other features that, if you take time, you'll get to recognize.

Click on any of these images to enlarge and focus - I saved some in higher res than normal

On Tuesday, I walked through the woods closer to the base.  Here's a sign I passed on the way.

And another:

Here's a look at part of the base from a clearing.

Again, saved this in higher than normal resolution, so click to dramatically enlarge

And here's most of El Cap from below.  The wide angle lens does distort it, but this gives a better sense than the other pictures of how big this mountain (It really seems more like a rock than a mountain) is.  (I googled "Is El Capitan a mountain?"  Wikipedia calls it a "vertical rock formation.")

And here you can see El Cap on the left (and Half Dome on the other side of the Valley in the distance) just before we entered the tunnel out of the valley and headed south.  It was still a bit smoky, but not near as bad as when we got there.  

After talking to Marlene and Mario and watching some YouTube videos of people climbing El Cap, I'm more inclined to see these folks as much saner than lots of people think about climbers.  You have to be pretty well organized to undertake an adventure like this.  These people are not, as many of the tourist observers at Yosemite seemed to think, suicidal.  They have lots of equipment to ensure their safety.

Here are two YouTube videos that get you much closer to what it's like to climb El Capitan.
These are two very different stories of climbers on the same mountain.  Both fascinating stories that fill in a lot more than I got this week.




These videos show us how much more we are capable of than most of us think.  But it takes work.



I think I need to check out the rock climbing wall when I get back to Anchorage.

Still Life With Steller Jay (And PhotoShop Filters)

When I came upstairs, J, with calm urgency, asked me to get it out.  I had no idea what she was talking about until she pointed at a Steller Jay in our living room.  This was a different experience than when we had the black capped chickadee earlier this summer.  It was struggling to fly against the windows.  When I lowered the shades and opened the sliding glass door, it found its way out quickly.

The jay was not as bold as it is when it visits us out on the deck.  It hid under the couch and side tables.  I tried to take pictures with my rebel, but the shutter jammed on all the different settings I tried.  So I had to use my little powershot.  This picture below was the best shot of the jay, but part of the picture was totally washed out and the rest a bit fuzzy.  So I cropped it and put it through different filters in Photo Shop.  Except for poster edges, the differences are very subtle (to my eye anyway.)  There is more or less light in different parts of the images from filter to filter.  Some parts are sharper than others.  So here they are:

AK Press Club - What Do Media Folks Talk About At Their Conferences?

It's getting late, but I have some pictures and notes about the panels I went to today.

I'll just do them in chronological order.  I already posted about Matt Pearl's discussion on how to put together a video story.

Then came Matt number two - Matt Eich, a photographer who shared his photos that have been put into book form.  His projects are ambitious.  He finds interesting people and gets permission to hang out with them over a long period of time taking pictures.  You can see the albums on his website at the links below, including a better version of the picture on the right (it's in Carry Me Ohio).

THE INVISIBLE YOKE

• Carry Me Ohio
• Sin and Salvation in Baptist Town
• The Seven Cities
• We, the Free

It's Matt's head in the lower right of the photo, sticking up out of his computer.  I had a little trouble balancing the brightness of the screen so you can see the photo and the darkness of the room so you can get a sense of that too.

I had some trouble understanding Matt over the sound system so I missed a lot of the explanations of the photos, but this is serious photography and commitment.

Then I went looking for the Hearken Meet-up, but ended up in another session in the old TV studio on campus that had a video connection called "Smart, effective and ethical audience interaction."  The program says "Join presenters from the West Region of the Associated Press for best practices to apply your journalistic ethics in the world of social media."  While I was there the discussion was focused on how to find stories and contact people using Facebook.

But I really wanted to hear the Hearken meet-up talk.  It said it was about a way for radio folks to connect better with their audience.
It turns out to be an online system for getting suggestions from listeners for story ideas and there's a way for all the listeners to vote on the suggestions.  The idea is to engage the audience more.  It also costs stations and this was a sales pitch.  But it was an interesting discussion of one attempt to connect more to listeners.  Below is Steve Heimel talking with Hearken's Ellen Mayer on the right.

After lunch I listened to Jenna Johnson with moderator Liz Ruskin.  Johnson is a reporter for the Washington Post and followed the Trump campaign.  I've got lots of notes from that discussion, but given I'm trying to get all these in before I go to bed, I'll just offer a few things I found interesting.
Johnson said that she was curious about some of the off-the-beaten-campaign-path cities that Trump was speaking at so she used census data to come up with profiles of the places.  They were all well under the average US income, education, and employment levels.

Jenna Johnson and Liz Ruskin

At one point in the campaign, reporters had to get tickets and wait in line like everyone else.  No one from the campaign came around - as they did with other campaigns - and gathered voter data or offered water (it was hot) or even apologies for the inconveniences.  But she said the Trump supporters didn't seem to mind.  And she came to value these situations where she could get a more visceral sense of the people there and could slowly reveal herself and get interviews.

Johnson said that one good thing about the campaign was that you need it would end on a certain date.  But then Trump was elected and she ended up in the White House press.  Some asked if things gotten less hectic.  In the video below she answers:




Someone asked if Trump voters had  simmered down a bit.
Johnson said they had.  Once Trump won, they won.  Before that, they were angry at media.  Once election over it was cool.  They don’t have to fight you any more.  They had their victory.

There was lots more, but time to move on.





NPR reporter Kirk Siegler's topic was "making news stories pop.'  I liked Siegler's laid back style, which goes along with his rural beat.  There was nothing slick about him.  He came across as genuine.  Some of the points he made about getting good stories included:

• A strong character, and the example stories he played did all have strong characters

Kirk Siegler

• Tension - competing values or loyalties
• Knowing the point of your story
• Take your listener on a journey - he gave an example of walking from one end of a wildfire zone to the other, stopping along the way to make comments on talk to someone
• Immediately after the interview, jot down notes - "what is the most important thing she said?" What are some of the interesting takeaways you want to remember?  Write it down right away.
• Find a local guide.  A fixer.  When you're going to a place you don't know for a short time, you should contact someone who can then lead you to others.  Do this before you get there.

[UPDATE June 27, 2017: The Alaska Press Club has put Kirk's talk up on Soundcloud. You can now hear it all.
You can hear several other talks from the conference here.]

OK, that's a very abbreviated view of what I took in today.  These conferences always give me things to think about, new ways to do things, a checklist for how I do things, and sometimes confirmation that I'm doing things right.  

Venice Beach Sunset - But Which Picture Would You Prefer?

I didn't get on the bike until late this afternoon.  The downside is I have to ride back at dusk when, even with blinking bike lights, I'm not as visible to the cars.  The upside is a great sunset.

So, this picture looked pretty good right off the disk.

Directly from the camera

There's the bright pink clouds, a bit of ocean at the bottom, framed by the palm trees.

But could I make it better with a little tweaking?  Nothing fancy.  No photoshop.  Just playing with the contrast.

Contrast bumped a little

Which would you prefer to see?
Does it matter if it's digitally enhanced?
Would you know it was enhanced if I didn't say so and the other picture wasn't there?
Would you know the other one wasn't enhanced?

And, does it even mean anything, since the camera doesn't capture a true image anyway?

Do you even care?
Would you like enhanced images to be marked somehow so that you know?
Does cropping count as enhancing?
Does increasing the contrast matter?
Where is the line?  Adding in the palm trees?  (I didn't, they were there)  Changing the color radically?

For pictures like these, my questions are more aesthetic.  But when wrinkles are removed (or added) to people's faces larger ethical issues arise.  And what people are doing is manipulated (a gun is put in someone's hand, or removed) there are more questions. (I removed a cigarette once from someone's hand because he wanted to share the post with family, but they thought he'd stopped smoking.)

Will people just become sheep and accept what they see if it supports their world view?  Or will they not believe anything?  Both situations become debilitating for a civil society.  

These aren't new issues.  Jerry Lodriguss goes into more detail on this issue in The Ethics of Digital Manipulation.  He even says there are times when it would be unethical to NOT manipulate the picture.  I couldn't find the date of the post.

Another post, on what sounds like a promising website - Ethics in Photo Editing - offers some examples starting with an Abraham Lincoln photo.  The problem is that the posts I could find were all 2009, so either this blogger moved stuff elsewhere, or just gave up.

Another problem is that the post is dated April 1, 2009.  I always have to wonder about things posted on April 1.  But whether the examples are real or not . . .

[Writing that caused me to google one of the pictures (Oprah Winfrey's head on Ann Margaret's body on TV Guide, with neither of their permission) which got me to a 2012 Atlantic article with some of the same examples, which linked to Izitru (say that out loud) which has a large collection of such doctored photos.  It also has a service where you can send your jpg pictures and they will officially verify that it's not been manipulated.

There are some pretty egregious ethics lapses - there's one where anti-John Kerry folks added him to a picture of Jane Fonda talking to a crowd making it look like they had appeared together.]

I guess, since I posted about The Cloudspotter's Guide, I should be saying something about the clouds.  I still haven't read that much more of the book so I'm not too sure.  My guess would be cumulus medics radiatus but that's because it's one of the few I've read about.  And cloud experts out there can you confirm or correct?

Voting Booth Selfies - There Is A Good Reason To Ban Them

When I first heard about bans on voting booth selfies, I thought this was ridiculous, and probably impossible to enforce.  After all, I've taken pictures in the voting booth myself for this blog.   The one on the right I took after voting and slipping my ballot into the secrecy sleeve at the August primary election.

But last night at dinner the conversation turned to the American tradition of taking voters to the polls and then paying them to vote for a particular candidate.  According to this Washington Post article published in 2012, it still happens and the price is often alcohol and cash.

But before cell phone cameras people buying votes had to rely on the honesty of the voter, and considering the voter was willing to sell his vote, that wasn't necessarily a sure thing.

But with everyone carrying cellphones with cameras now, a vote buyer could condition the payment on a selfie of the voter with his filled out ballot in the voting booth.  Selfies make buying votes a much more certain enterprise.

But There's Better Reasons Not To Ban Them

That said, I still don't see this as being enforceable.  Are we going to have TSA monitor elections and everyone has to empty their pockets before they vote?  Even having election officials ask people to empty their pockets and leave their purses and other bags outside the voting booth is untenable. I hope that doesn't happen and it certainly shouldn't even be considered until there is hard evidence that vote selling/buying is at a level where it is affecting the outcome of elections.

And this ignores the positive message that gets sent when people see their friends' voting selfies online.  Perhaps selfies that show how someone voted that are found online can get a fine if buying votes for selfies becomes a thing.  But maybe better drug and alcohol rehabilitation and poverty programs would be a better way to spend anti-voting-selfie funds.

Now that I've written this post, I'm going to read this Mother Jones article I found titled The Case Against Voting Booth Selfies.   OK, I've read it now.  It's basically the argument I just made about verifying bought votes and it's shorter than this post.

As I'm writing this I'm thinking about my discussion with the village head man near the town where I taught English in Thailand and influencing the elections there.  Maybe I'll do that as a part 2 to this post.

What's An Iconic Photograph? Thinking About Tank Man

 A lone student protestor blocks Chinese army tanks near Tiananmen Square.

In 1989, when this photo was taken, most people still believed in the power of a photograph to tell the truth.  With digital photography and Photoshop people are still taken in by the apparent 'truth' of a photograph, but many people are also much more skeptical.

PetaPixel writes about this photo:

"AP photographer Jeff Widener’s “Tank Man” photo, shown above, is widely considered to be one of the most iconic photos of the 20th century."

 Though Business Insider says that Stuart Franklin's image is the iconic image,

". . . Franklin's image is arguably the most iconic, having appeared in Time and Life magazines, and winning him a World Press Award."

There were actually four photographers who managed to smuggle their film out of Beijing that day, all shooting from balconies or rooms at the Beijing Hotel about half a mile away:  Widener, Charlie Cole, Franklin, and Arthur Tsang Hin Wah. A fifth photographer, Terril Jones, got shots from ground level, but did not publish them until the 20th anniversary in 2009.  He wasn't aware of what he had until the film was developed several weeks after the events.  There were also two videos made of the event that got out.

My questions today, 27 years later, are about what makes a picture 'iconic,' what story does it tell, and  how close is the story to what really happened (assuming anyone can even know that)?   I'm afraid I'm only going to make some quick stabs at answers, and perhaps raise more questions about how we interpret what we see.  

1.  What makes a picture iconic?

Wikipedia's definition is similar to many others I found:

An icon (from Greek εἰκών eikōn "image") is typically a painting depicting Christ, Mary, saints and/or angels, which is venerated among Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and in certain Catholic Churches. Icons may also be cast in metal, carved in stone, embroidered on cloth, painted on wood, done in mosaic or fresco work, printed on paper or metal, etc. Icons are often illuminated with a candle or jar of oil with a wick.

The term has evolved to have a more generic meaning which is appropriate to the idea of an 'iconic photo'  (from Oxford online):

"A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something: 'this iron-jawed icon of American manhood.'"

So, what exactly is the tank man photo a symbol of?

2.  What does the picture tell us?

Here's how the New York Times interpreted the photo in 2009:

"The moment instantly became a symbol of the protests as well as a symbol against oppression worldwide — an anonymous act of defiance seared into our collective consciousnesses."

Charlie Cole, one of the photographers on a balcony at the Beijing Hotel, says it this way (from the same NY Times article, in which  he also gives a detailed account of what happened and how he got his film past the Chinese Public Security Bureau):

"I think his action captured peoples’ hearts everywhere, and when the moment came, his character defined the moment, rather than the moment defining him. He made the image. I was just one of the photographers."

For people outside of China, this is probably the story we give to and take from this photo. [Yes, 'give to' because all interpretation is based on how our brains relate the meaning based on what we already know and expect.]

For Chinese officials, I suspect it represents the restraint of the Chinese government which patiently bore months of demonstrations.  It also showed the compassion of the tank drivers who didn't run over this man.  We get a hint of this in a 1990 interview Barbara Walters conducted with then Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin.

"Walters : Yes. Do you have any idea what happened to him ?
Jiang : I think the picture you mentioned just now shows exactly that the
person stood in front of a tank and the tank stopped. Why did the
tank stopped ? Did the child stop the tank ? It's because the tanks--
the people in the tanks -- didn't want to run over the people
standing in the way. But I think this picture just proved that."  (Emphasis added)
(Transcript of the interview are from a Google Group forum.)

I'd add one more interpretation.  I arrived in Hong Kong for my Fulbright at Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 1989, barely a month after Tiananmen.  I met a number of people who had been in Beijing during those times, and ended up taking a group of students to Beijing the following May.  It was a trip we had to schedule well before the first anniversary of Tiananmen, because the parents of my students didn't want them in Beijing during the anniversary.  One student wasn't allowed to come at all because his father thought it was potentially too dangerous.

But I'd like to highlight here just one story.  I had a student who was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).  He'd spent time in a mental hospital and had either thought about or actually tried to commit suicide (I don't recall exactly.)  He told me his interpretation of this picture, which went something like this:

"I wanted to be Tank Man.  I could end my life as a hero."

I'd say this was a version of what in the US is called suicide by cop.  When he told me this, he had a wistful smile on his face.  He considered this the perfect way to go.  This was his reaction to this photo.  [As I write this, 27 years later, I realize that I don't know if he had a wistful smile.  I've seen him with a wistful smile, but did he really have it when he told me that?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I'm just writing this to remind folks not to trust people's old memories.]

We could spend days studying what this image means to different people and whether it has any meaning to people in China at all?  The photo was suppressed in China.  Given the scope of the internet today, I'm not sure how many people have since had access to this picture.  But as I was working on this post, I came across a  Japan Times story on a photoshopped version of this picture from 2013 with Tank Man standing in front of a line of giant, yellow rubber duckies.  The article said

"Internet searches for 'big yellow duck' were blocked by Chinese censors, but the image went viral on social media overseas."

But let's move on to the more concrete aspects of the picture.  What does it factually tell us?

3.   How close is our understanding of the content of the picture to what actually happened?

Here's how Wikipedia describes the photo:

"Tank Man (also Unknown Protester or Unknown Rebel) is the nickname of an unidentified man who stood in front of a column of tanks on June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese military had suppressed the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 by force. As the lead tank maneuvered to pass by the man, he repeatedly shifted his position in order to obstruct the tank's attempted path around him. The incident was filmed and seen worldwide."

Did you catch that?  June 5.  June 4 is the date of the so called Tiananmen Massacre.  The photo was taken the day after.  I didn't realize that until I was working on this post.  If you google Tank Man Tiananmen, you'll see a number of pictures.  This one is very closely cropped.  Others show a long line of tanks.  And here's one from the shots taken by Stuart Franklin (you can see it and more of the original slides and about Franklin's story here.)

Image from Business Insider

This is an image of one of the original slides that Stuart Franklin took that day from a balcony of the Beijing Hotel.
The green arrow was on the image I copied.  It points to Tank Man walking into the road.  I've added the yellow circle.  It shows Tiananmen Square, which continues to the left of the circle beyond the photo.  The tanks are headed away from Tiananmen Square.  In the bigger scheme of things, I don't think that means all that much, except for the way we in the West, most of whom have never been to Tiananmen Square, associate this with atrocities in Tiananmen Square itself.  Knowledge gained since June 3, 4, and 5, 1989, seems to show that most of the people who died did not die at Tiananmen Square, but at other locations in Beijing.  And most of the deaths were workers, not students.  Again, I think those are details that don't change the meaning of all this, but I am simply trying to discuss the difference between people's perception of the facts and the facts of the photo.  And how cropping
a photo can take away the context of the image.

Again, the images (since multiple images of this event  shot from the same location were published and now we can see many more that weren't originally published) have a meaning that goes beyond what happened that day.

And now that we've discussed the photo and questions about what it means, here's some video footage of the event that also gives more context (though it doesn't show the people walking Tank Man away.)






And, here's another take on the image.  Stuart Franklin talks about another image he took during the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in spring 1989, that he would prefer symbolized Tiananmen demonstrations.

From Business Insider

"This is an image that changed everything because, for me, it crystallized the spirit of revolt. The uprising in Tiananmen Square was one of the most moving events I’ve witnessed. It was a tragedy to see unarmed young people shot down in cold blood. It was a movement for freedom of expression, for basic rights, and against the outrage of official corruption. It ended badly, a stain on the reputation of a great country. The facts should not be denied, but discussed, so that people can move on. A lot of things were misreported on both sides. A lot of outside actors were involved that may have worsened the situation for the students and their protest. I want this photograph to be available to people for whom this is an important memory. It symbolizes the courage of the time. What it doesn’t show is the bloodshed. I am best known for the image of the tank man. That is called an ‘iconic’ image, but what such images sometimes obscure, with the passing of time, is all the other pictures that lend explanatory power to the story. I’m interested in history, and this landmark event changed my life.” — Stuart Franklin

An ironic twist I can't help but mention, TechDirt reports that a Chinese firm now owns the rights to the Tank Man photo.

And finally, I'd note that Tiananmen 天 (tian) , 安 (an) , 门 (men)  means, literally, Heaven+Peaceful+Gate (Door)

Pictures From An Alaska Press Club Conference

To add a bit of drama to this meeting, you might want to imagine the strains of Mussorgsky's suite.  Here's some help if you can't.










Clifford Levy, NY Times Pulitzer Prize winner, giving the keynote where he discussed how the Times is dealing with the move from print to online presence - the experimenting, what's worked, what hasn't.














The Press Club's Saturday morning business meeting.

[click on any of the images to enlarge and focus]

Board nominees:

Erin Lee Carr, Friday morning, on making dark documentaries, from identifying subjects, getting their confidence, and finding money.  

Levy, LA Times Puliter Prize winner Kim Murphy, and ADN's David Hulen on story building in the digital age.

The Washington Post's Audience  Enhancement director discussing Facebook's algorithm and Snapchat.

















Former ADN editor, UAF Snedden Chair Richard Murphy, and UAA Atwood Chair Julia O'Malley talk about story telling and Pulitzer prizes.

Lisa Demer's panel of Alaskan media folks who have done cross platform collaborations.








The AP's Northwest Regional Media Director Jim Pollock, West Region Director Jim Clarke, and Alaska/Hawaii News Editor Mark Thiessen.

As I look through my photos, I realize that this time I didn't really take out my camera except in the sessions.  While I had my pocket Powershot, I also had the bigger camera and the Powershot images no longer seem adequate.  But the Powershot is much easier to pull out and use.

Photoshopping Spring Icicles

The sun is rising from the east now.  That may not sound like a big deal for most, but in the winter in Anchorage, the sun barely peeks up above the southern horizon.  Now it's in the east, and by the solstice it will be rising in the north, circling around the sky, and then dipping down again in the north.  So I had a little sunlight behind these icicles.

My autofocus was trying to decide if I wanted the icicles or the trees in the background.  So I took one of the pictures with the icicles  way out of focus and played with it in photoshop.


On top is the original picture with the blurred icicle.  Some interesting shapes, but not a very pleasing picture.









In the middle is the same picture after playing with it in curves.  I like the background here, but not the icicle.











And on the bottom, is using filters on the picture above it.  I'm pretty sure I used reticulation in the sketch folder, but I can't replicate it.  I get the purples, but not the greens.

In this last group, the middle picture is the original - the icicles somewhat out of focus.  Again, a bit of curves help, and then back to filters.  The one on the right is the posterize filter.  Can't remember the one on the right.

Relax

I was going to explain this picture.  But why?  Just absorb its quiet, relaxing tones.

Clutter Wars Report

Here's the garage yesterday.  I'm sure it looks hopeless to most of you.  But I have to tell you that since August, we've gotten probably 50-60% of the stuff in the garage (by volume) out.  To anyone who was in the garage a year ago, this is an enormous improvement.  But this is also why I feel like for every bag of stuff we take to the thrift shop, throw out, or give away, it feels like two more reappear in the garage.

Here's just one of many car fulls of stuff headed for the nearby thrift shop.

  

And here's the line up waiting for Monday trash day.  Fortunately, my mom's neighbors don't fill up their garbage cans very much and they are more than happy to let me use them.  In LA, I found out that styrofoam and shredded paper can go in the recycling bin.  The latter if it's in a plastic bag so it doesn't fly all over when they dump it all into the truck.

And then there are all the interesting things we've been finding.  Some are treasures like my brothers old record albums.  These and a bunch of others have been in a box on an upper shelf in the back in the garage for probably almost 40 years.  I'm looking forward to getting them home to the turntable.  

And this chess table was stored in a box with the legs detached.  And yes, I've done some photoshopping with a few of the images in this post.  

Or this 1930 school photo of my step-father's class in Germany.  The photo is getting a little funky, but it's really sharp - at least in the original.  If you click the photo it will get bigger and sharper, but still not as good as the original.

This one is 13 years later after he's immigrated to the US and getting ready to go back to Europe, but this time in a US military uniform.  It says on the picture, in part,  "the 8th Medical Training Regiment in Camp Grant, Illinois, August 1943."  I could even find him in the picture.  This is a small portion of the long panorama shot and the sharpness in the original is amazing.  

I found other photos of his time in the army and letters commending him for his work.  Since he spoke fluent English, German, and French, I'm sure he was useful when the US got into France and then Germany.  

And then there are the stranger things like this bathrobe I found.  At least that's what I thought it was at first, though it seemed pretty heavy for a bathrobe.  Then I looked at the label.

It says:

COVERALLS, COOLING, ROCKET
FUEL HANDLER'S 

WEAR OVER COVERALLS, ROCKET FUEL
HANDLERS, VINYL COATED, TO PREVENT
OVERHEATING OF BODY.
DO NOT SHORTEN LEGS OR SLEEVES BY CUFFING.
KEEP SOAKED WITH WATER TO GET MAXIMUM
EVAPORATION FOR COOLING
PUT ON OVER PROTECTIVE FOOTWEAR.
IF CORROSIVE AGENTS ARE SPILLED OVER
SUIT GET UNDER SHOWER IMMEDIATELY.
USE LARGE QUANTITIES OF WATER, IF SUIT
IS DAMAGED EXCHANGE FOR NEW SUIT.
AFTER USING RINSE SUIT THOROUGHLY
AND HANG UP TO DRY.

I couldn't tell you how it got into my mom's garage.  I don't know of any rocket fuel handlers in the family.

We have Anchorage friends who will stay in the house for the next three months - they have a new grandchild who lives a few miles away and will play Mary Poppins for a while.  So we'll get as much done as we can in the next few days, and then tackle it again in the spring.  

AIFF 2015: First Night

It's been a bizarre and busy day.  I woke to a Japanese business man, a rural Alaska mayor, and our house sitter having coffee in the kitchen.  Some video on their project coming in the future.

Best thing that happened didn't happen.  The car that smashed into the rear end of the car to the right of me at a stop light, in all its wobbling and skidding, never touched my car.  It was like watching a slow motion shot in a movie.

My cough/cold was better today, but it's still lingering waiting for me to stop paying attention.  So I'm  going to keep this brief so I can go to bed and heal more.

Kyle Rideout Q&A after Edward

We got to see Edward at the film festival.  Interesting movie.  Great subject and two interlocked stories - the first being the use of photography to capture motion, but having a row of cameras take pictures as people walk, jump, etc.  The second was his troubled relationship with his young wife, with lots of hints that his earlier carriage accident and resulting frontal lobe injury, had changed him.  But were not uallysure what comes from the accident and what would have happened anyway.

As he moved from clothed to nude models, I couldn't help but think about how many people volunteered to pose nude back in the late 1870s.   What does it mean about those times?  What does it tell us about our naked selfie era?  What might it suggest about the social construction of nudity?

There were beautiful shots all through the film.  I would have like a little more on the mechanics of how the cameras actually synched.  There were lots of ropes, but it was never clear to me how the ropes triggered the cameras.  Maybe I just missed it.  Given that Eadweard Muybridge is famous because of these photos, and not because of his marriage, a little time explaining that better would have been good for me anyway.  And yes his marriage and jealousy are important.  A well prepared questioner pointed out that timing in the film different from actual history - that he'd done these action photos before he met his wife.  Kyle explained that in the play the chronology was correct, but that the need for constant flashbacks in the film convinced them to portray them as married while he was doing the action shoots.  But when he said that, it some things much clearer - why his wife would have known about him and sought him out, that he was already fairly eccentric before they got married, and why he wouldn't use her as a model in the action studies.  I recognize that the logistics of flashbacks is tricky, but meshing the time together seemed to take something away from the emphasis on their marriage in his life.   We really didn't understand who she was and why she had nothing to do all day but wait for him to come home.  That didn't seem to match the progressive, forward young woman who would cross the country to meet and marry this older photographer.

But it was a perfect film to open the festival given it focused on the beginnings of moving pictures.  Eadweard plays again Wednesday night at Ak Experience theater.


Afterward I got to talk to several filmmakers and festival folks.

Bjørn Olson - Heart of Alaska

Bjørn Olson is a filmmaker from Homer, whose film Heart of Alaska, is in competition among the
Alaska Made Films.  His website says:

Hig, Erin and their two children walk out of their comfortable home on a cold March predawn morning and begin a four-month human powered expedition around Alaska's Cook Inlet. While carrying food, camping gear and other necessities for their survival, the family also carries a question – 'what do you think the future of Alaska will look like in 50 years?'
Read more: http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/movies/heart-of-alaska/#ixzz3tRNPAZ5e

We saw a film from Hig and Erin's earlier trek from Seattle to, what was it, the Bering Sea?  So this ought to be good.  It plays next Sunday (Dec 13) at 11 am.

Scott Ballard's feature, Death on a Rock, is a bout a woman facing death.

Here's the film's Facebook page.   It plays this Sunday, Dec. 6, at 8pm at the Alaska Experience theater.


Yeah, the lighting was weird after the movie.







Phillip Thomas, co-wrote and acted in When the Ocean Met The Sky  (just remember it's in the past tense) about three brothers whose inheritance is dependent on them doing a treasure hunt together.  You can watch the trailer and see him as one of the brothers.

This plays this Sunday (Dec. 6) at 2:30 pm at the Bear Tooth.  Here's the trailer:




OK, I need to get to bed now.  And get better.   Enjoy the festival.