Film

Do you live in a house full of unfinished business? Find an old roll of film around your house. It doesn't matter who took it (if it's someone else's, it might be all the more interesting). Get it developed. Be awed for a few minutes as you look over what's before you.

Ellie only shot in film on the few photo runs we ever went on. I'm wondering now if anyone has ever developed those pictures.

I Can't Believe It's a Law Firm!

It's not often I get to say these words, but I am so glad someone blogged this!

After mucking about in Lightroom, I somehow exported the lowest quality ever version of two really neat shots from Hungary that I found tonight, and they overrode the goddam originals! Thankfully, with that tip, I was able to get the pictures back to normal and learn my lesson to never trust Lightroom again.

Current Faves, Before I Go

As it happens, I am a fan of dusk.

Representin'.

I gave up on the 365, rather quickly it would seem. It was no good, and I felt like it was holding me back. Or obligating me. I'd rather just picturize when the mood strikes me, or when something cool presents itself.

Tomorrow, our little Mixi (who has recently taken to becoming a woman) goes in to get spayed. Good luck, cat! We'll see you on the outside. In the meantime, she and the other two have to fast for the night (or, we'll just feed the other two when she passes out). Rico is staring longingly at me; purring, wishing, hoping. Not any time soon, cat.

The Taurus, she is a-done-for. The other car passed the e-test (with flying colours, I might add. Suggestion: Put a new catalytic converter on your car if it's failing miserably [sometimes twice]; I'm almost willing to wager you'll see a significant difference).

Rico is now staring at me with devil-horned ears and wider-than-usual angry-owl eyes. So if I'm not cat-murdered in my sleep by him, I promise maybe I'll update more. There's not a lot of motivation for that since I started posting my pictures on ELITH, so maybe go there if you're bored. It'll give you a synopsis of what's new, and you can look at some pictures!

Oh yes, and Jay Leno sucks.

Happy 2010

New Years resolution: Post one (1) photo per day, each day, for the next 365 days. This is already incredibly annoying, but maybe some good will come of it!

Where you can see them:

• Every Light in the House (thank you, Miki!)
• Flickr

Gabbo. GABBO.

GABBO!

Things That Are Stupid #12983

My nana forwarded this email on to me today:

If I happened to show up on your door step crying,
Would you Care?

If I called you and asked you to pick me up

because something Happened, Would you come?

If I needed a shoulder to cry on,
Would you give me Yours?

Do you know what the relationship is between your two eyes? They blink together, they move together, they cry together, They see things together and they sleep together,

BUT THEY NEVER SEE EACH OTHER...
that's what friendship is.
Life is lonely without FRIENDS

I'm pretty sure if anyone short of a blood-soaked, drooling hobo came to my door, I would care. (Even then, I'd be concerned. I'd shut the door and call the cops, but I'd still care.)

I'm pretty sure I'd pick anyone I knew up if something happened, as long as they weren't about to kill me.

I'm pretty sure I'd let anyone, again, short of a blood-soaked, drooling hobo, cry on my shoulder.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is, I must be a pretty great person. Or, if that email is true, that I am a friend to just about anybody short of a ... well you get it. I better inser the tongue-in-cheek tag here in case someone decides to take this seriously.

We did our first family photoshoot today for Osenoa; it went well, I think! We'll have a website up in the next little bit.

Also new, there is a mystery concerning my bedroom and how a thick ceramic wall hanging was broken in half, then carefully placed together again so that it looked like nothing ever happened. Pieces that had obviously broken off were nowhere in sight when I picked up the wall hanging that mysteriously split all the way down the middle on its own. "Remember the time he ate my goldfish? And you lied and said I never had any goldfish? Then why did I have the bowl, Bart? Why did I have the bowl??" I'm suspicious of my superintendents, since I find them walking in and out of the place sometimes. Wouldn't be altogether shocking. I'm there barely enough to care, but I do enjoy a good spine-tingler now and then!

It's so different out here

So we're back from up north. What a great place, where the only thing you're blowing a tonne of money on is gasoline. It's nice not to be surrounded by products and crazy people, but rather by trees and crazy people you enjoy spending time with. Adding pictures to Flickr periodically for the next day or two.

There is nothing like a nice hike to simultaneously clear your mind and fill it with wonder. What a good trip. Back to grumbling when I wake up. It's laundry day.

Thanks for the fab painting of Yours Truly. I hung it on me wall.

Miklos is now selling prints. He's really good, so I think you should check them out and show them to anyone you know who has a bare wall they'd like to spruce up with a couple photos. He's also good for naturally-lit portraits, baby photos, and monumental events like 80th birthdays and bar mitzvahs. Even though the word 'bar mitzvah' is a giggle-maker to the non-celebrators, I am entirely serious. Contact either him or me if interested. On the weekends and weeknights, he's even willing to travel!

Back from Vacations

Photos:

• The Island
• Cottage 2009

It's friggin' late. I'll add some commentary later.

A Cigarette in Bed; or a Cookie, for Non-Smokers

It was a very gloom-and-doom weekend at the island, at least as much as an island on the border of Ontario and Quebec can be gloom-doomy. Allow me for a moment to be more specific: The sky spent a lot of time pissing down rain.

One bad omen was a horrible accident that had happened on the 400S the morning we departed for the island; a tractor trailer and a small car collided, spilling 400 litres of diesel on the highway and killing at least one person. The cars on the highway crept along for four kilometres, which took approximately one hour and forty-five minutes to clear. People were getting out of their cars, walking up and down the highway. Cars took a half hour to catch up with some of the walking temporary non-passengers. It was a sad sight when we finally could see it. By that time, there was no longer a 'teetering' tractor trailer balanced on the center guardrail as the traffic reports had suggested. Just a kind of banged up looking transport truck, a severely messed up guardrail, and a burned-out shell of a Mazda which had been cut apart to pull someone out. Horrifying.

After what became a staggering nine-hour drive, we arrived at Tee Lake. By this point I had re-read about a quarter of Timequake and remembered for about the fiftieth time why I have this affinity for the late Kurt Vonnegut's twisted cynicism. And yes, the piss-rain. We braved the weather, though. The lot of us:

• Took a billion pictures of frogs (even at one point seeing one frog eat another... wtf)
• Saw the incredible mountains and lakes from a lookout point in Ville-Marie and on the drive to it
  
• Drove all the way to Algonquin and saw some beautiful scenery but no moose (good thing Miklos loves to drive so!)
• Light-painted to our hearts' content on the dock by night after the lake had further filled itself with almost a foot of the previous night's precipitation.
  

It was only on the last night that my body was eaten to bits by vicious Quebecois mosquitoes. Fine holiday fun, regardless of dreary weather. And after a giant drive home, we've got two more days before we head up to my family's cottage, which I've not seen in a year. I'm excited. Hopefully less rain, yes?

Up/Down

Just clicking through my bookmarks at random, you know, since I have time to do that now, and I found this: Mark Twain's Top 9 Tips for Living a Kick-Ass Life. Pretty uplifting!

And, you know, I hate to kick you down when you're up by getting all serious, but there are some powerful photos here. Don't click if you can't stand to look at starving, broken-down souls. There's a whole other world out there that you and I are nowhere near familiar with. What can we do?

Weeeeeeeeeeee-ow!

They took down the MISSING CAT sign in the lobby, so I'm hoping that means the missing cat was found alive and well. He's a cool cat. All orange and white and goofy and really very friendly. Here's hoping he just took a quick vacation. I just saw him hunting outside last week when I was leaving the parking lot.

If there's one thing I can't let go of hating in life, it's when people insist upon their own total lack of common sense. My paranoia is high, but not to be outdone is the absence of sense so prevalent in some of the people I talk to.

Aside from that, everything else is so easy to laugh off.

Up at 5:30am, drive home from Welland, drive back to Welland upon mother's request, stress out a while over lack of laundry done, lunch, wedding, Ellie tribute, sleep, market, nap, drive, movie night at my second home, sleep, lunch, work, photo run to Hamilton with Miklos, hometime. I'm forgetting a lot. It's been a busy weekend (especially that nap part). Listen, I'm going to bed. More tomorrow.

This place is about as secure as a Geocities website...

2008: All about tips & tricks and death-wish adventures photography. Learned a few cool things, got into post-processing beyond the point of believability.

2009: Focus on reality. Everything's prettier when it's real. Well, I guess not everything, but as far as art is concerned, I'm not feeling the 'contrived' stuff lately.

In other news, Miklos won like a billion dollars at the casino tonight and I'm pretty happy for him. When good things finally happen to good people (he donated half of it to the people closest to him, man! That is a good person!), that's when I feel warm and fuzzy inside. And two seats from him, moments later, an older lady ALSO won like a billion dollars! What a celebratory state that corner of the casino was in for a brief moment in time.

Here comes "2"...!

Something special is about to happen. Tune in, tune in.
And if it's already happened by the time you read this, hello! Welcome to the future!

Cool jumping pic from tonight @Miklos.ca. I'm almost tempted to post the retarded looking outtakes, but I'll spare myself the embarrassment. One retarded picture should suffice.

Thumbs up thumbs down

I had a dream I was wearing paper towel pajama pants. It wasn't too bad. Super absorbent.

These sunny days are a nice change of pace. Thirty-two days and I'm done with this shitty school situation forever! YAY!

Cheers to this site, which transforms my Flickr photos into a sleek looking layout. It makes everything look good! And jeers to this rusty tailgate...

Some guys have all the luck

Third picture from the left is mine. Yay. Gotta help the gambling community out wherever I can, you know.

Check out the first picture too, although it's not to my credit. I love when they move the falls behind the casino in the summertime...

So. I'm doing a review for a test I have tomorrow and I've hit a roadblock.

Oh, ok, I found it now. This might as well have been Twittered, for all anyone will care. Hey, I took a bunch of pictures this weekend, many of which I haven't uploaded yet... but also, many of which I have. Go look if you're bored (be sure to click page 2 as well).

[Aside: When Flickr people add me who have displayed photos they took of the corpse of someone they once knew, that's when I get the shivers. I will not link this person. I just felt it important to note.]

Hey. It was a very pretty day out today. I hope you got out and enjoyed it like I did for a couple of hours. Spring, please come back soon!

HELP!

Nana emailed me last week to tell me my leaf pictures are great but she "doesn't really care for the blue photos". Nana knows how to kick my foto-esteem in the junk.

Got the front of my hair cut like George Harrison circa the mid-60s. These bangs are freakin' long, mang.

Went looking for scenery with to photog with Jesse yesterday; in that rain and gloom that is October 1st, we found nothing. As a switch-up, I posed in my grungy clothes in a pretty scenery (and did not post the pic, although Jesse is still a great photographer! This more has to do with my recently developed condition of terminal ghetto bootah). Next time I'll look cooler. How could I not? I'm a fackin' Beatle.