Posts
Potholes and Broken Bones
2012-07-16 • 15:20:11

If you haven't heard, I ate it while biking through West Oakland yesterday, tried to avoid some train tracks, inadvertently steered into a pothole and somehow broke my femur. Went through surgery this morning, and I can already walk mostly fine though with a bit of pain. They're going to keep me for another night here, not sure if it'll last longer than that but we'll see. Modern medicine is amazing, there is no cast!

I've been in good company so far (Al is sleeping in one of those crappy hospital room chairs) and the hospital staff here has yet to fail. I'll most likely be here for another night. Some people have asked for visitor information, poke me if you'd like to visit (but honestly nothing special is happening).

Thanks for all the well wishes, but what I would appreciate far more is for folks to (properly) wear their helmets. There's a good chunk of my helmet that compressed and crumpled during the fall, I would have been seriously fucked if I wasn't wearing it. And don't give me that shit about not riding in traffic. There were no cars around when I hit the pothole from hell.

Photo by Sofauxboho, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

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Posts
XOXO Handsome
2012-07-03 • 10:37:01

My friend Ari is selling a beautiful bike of hers. I dragged Docpop and the bike up to my roof for a quick photo shoot that turned rather fun.

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Posts
Film Photo Workflow
2012-06-12 • 01:03:00

Handsom, Doctor Popular

  1. Take a photo
  2. Finish a roll (30 minutes - 3 months)
  3. Try to remember to label roll with load and finish date (only done it once)
  4. Develop roll (a night at Noisebridge), or hand off to Photoworks (a few days)
  5. Wearing gloves, load film into scanning trays, cleaning off all dust then using canned air just to be safe
  6. Scan roll with VueScan on an Epson V700 (30 - 90 minutes depending on how anal I am)
  7. Scan again because I missed some setting within VueScan because of how horribly complicated it is
  8. Apply exiftool metadata changes for camera body type, and lens
  9. Place photos somewhere in a directory structure that makes sense to me
  10. Boot up Windows virtual machine and start Lightroom
  11. Import photos placed in the right spot into Lightroom
  12. During import also stamp into the EXIF my name, contact info, site, and Creative Commons license
  13. Make sure photos imported chronologically
  14. Track down film manufacturer, make, ISO, film codes, and tag all information into each photo (15 minutes)
  15. Make a first pass of picks, only update those from this point
  16. Bring up Google Latitude history, my calendar and digital photos I took along the same time frame
  17. Attempt to remember where specifically I took each photo
  18. Using Latitude approximate the time stamp for each photo and update EXIF (60 - 120 minutes)
  19. Target by hand exact geo location of each photo with the jfGPS plugin, because Latitude is inaccurate and only updates every 15 minutes (60 minutes)
  20. Reverse geoencode city, state, country data into EXIF
  21. Make a second pass of picks, only update those from this point
  22. Rotate photos to proper orientation
  23. Mass apply 2:3 aspect ratio
  24. Crop, tilt (30 minutes)
  25. Third pass of picks
  26. Dust/scratch/artifact removal (60 minutes)
  27. Development corrections, colors, tone curve
  28. Noise reduction or sharpening
  29. Artsy farsty color isolation and other things I tend to avoid in film (60 minutes)
  30. Fourth pass of picks
  31. Add content tags for names of people in photos, landmarks, objects, colors, spirit animals, hate, anger (60 minutes)
  32. Add snarky titles with odd capitalization and captions that only make sense to me (15 minutes)
  33. Double check that photos contain the proper metadata, including Creative Commons license information, geo data, film type, camera, and anything else that'll get stuffed into the EXIF
  34. Fifth, final pass of picks
  35. Create a "collection" in Lightroom with time stamp of first photo taken and toss photos in there
  36. If other photos exist (digital, other rolls) taken at the same event/date, check time stamps make sense and photos appear correctly when chronologically ordered (60 minutes)
  37. Last minute dust removal and other developing things (15 minutes)
  38. Using jfFlickr plugin prepare photos for Flickr upload with film, camera, lens, geo location data also included as (machine) tags and Creative Commons info in caption
  39. Export and upload to Flickr
  40. Babysit the upload, while compulsively hitting refresh on the Activity page to see if anyone favorited anything yet (60 minutes)
  41. Check photos to find the two with spelling errors or screwed up tags or wrong geo location, correct it in Lightroom, resend metadata only (15 minutes)
  42. Resend metadata to update "Photo" link in the Creative Commons license info in the caption to actually point to the same page
  43. Create a new Flickr set for the photos with proper time stamp of first photo taken, throw photos in there
  44. Review the photos and criticize myself about nothing more than just having to see these photos over and over again for the past week and being completely sick of them (30 minutes)
  45. Dump some of the better photos into a couple random Flickr Groups for posterity (15 minutes)
  46. Make a post on this site with a hand full of photos I liked from the roll and a link back to the set on Flickr (60 minutes)
  47. Tweet and Google+ about the post
  48. Compulsively watch the Activity page (for the next couple of days)
  49. Become frustrated with this garbage that has taken so long that it's 5 in the morning now and there's no one around that gives two shits about the photos I've posted (again for the next couple of days)
  50. Get disgruntled over this masochistic photography workflow I've created for myself (extra minutes if I vocalize it to others over IM)
  51. Resolve to cry and masturbate on the floor of a cold and dark closet, never wanting to ever pick up a camera again (two bottles of wine later)
  52. Months pass
  53. Photo backlog spans over a year
  54. Feel like I'm creatively dying and need to improve something (end up at a bar)
  55. Select a couple rolls of high speed black and white and toss my film camera in my bag, because it'll some how make me feel good to carry around that extra weight with me for a few weeks, like a dead body rolled up in a carpet representing the alternative time line where I pick up meth and become a wedding photographer
  56. Take a photo

Or I can just take a crappy looking photo with my Android, 'chop the shit out of it, push it to Flickr within the same day, and just remind myself that no one looks at photos bigger than a 640px resolution and that online photography is a sham, like with the one above.

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Posts
London January 2011
2012-06-05 • 00:22:20

Finally after well over a year, here are photos from my little jaunt through London.

Our Dinner

Arthur

Finer Teeth

A very Generic Mind the Gap Photo

In

Untitled

Clown Vomit on the Thames

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Posts
New Years 2010/11 – Berlin and Vienna
2012-04-15 • 23:30:21

Finally got done with processing film photos from Berlin and Vienna during the 2010/11 New Years.

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Posts
History Memes Itself, Again and Again
2012-04-04 • 17:40:20

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Posts
FriscoGate’s lack of respect for the Creative Commons
2012-04-04 • 16:28:49

This morning I had a number of friends point out an SFGate blog post that included a photo I took of a pair of MUNI transfers from a few years ago. Little did I know this would be the Nth time I would get annoyed by an entity on the internet. At first I was generically flattered by the whole thing, photo of mine, on a largish site, wow! Maybe I should check to see if my servers can handle the load from the link back. The post itself is about what makes you a San Franciscican, and also talking about how the last time they did a post like this they had of negative responses to the word usage of "Frisco".

After actually finding the post and where my photo was in it, all of my dreams of how I've just hit the big time and am totally making a name for myself as a street photography among the millions of other street photographers also trying to make a name for themselves here in San Francisco, came to a crashing, sobbing, forum trolled end. Why? Because groups of people backed behind the blurred name of a larger company typically don't respect licensing and copyrights of individuals on the internet.

My photos are available online through the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons License. I do this because it allows me to share my works for others to come by and use in whatever they want to noncommercially. And sharing is caring right? If you're unfamiliar with the various kinds of Creative Commons, the license is broken down like this...

  • Free to remix and edit the work
  • Free to share, copy, repost the work elsewhere
  • If the work is shared elsewhere, edited or not, the editing/reposting author must give attribution back to me
  • The work may not be used in any sort of commercial capacity
  • The same Creative Commons license must be used when reposting the work

SFGate is a commercial company, with ads all over their site, that page in particular is features ads for AT&T and some car insurance (I despise AT&T and would like to see less cars in my city). Within the terms of the Creative Commons license SFGate isn't allowed to use my photo, they can however contact me and ask for some kind of permission, to which I would respond back with, "Sure, buy me dinner," and they would tell me to piss off by simply not responding, and I live a happier life knowing my work isn't on a commercial site where they don't want to share any of their revenue with me. In sort my photos aren't published from commercial use without prior permission and a worded out waver.

Additionally as part of the Creative Commons if attribution is required and instructions on how that should be displayed aren't attached along with the item, the party wanting to use it must ask how so and get a response back from the owner of the work before actually posting it anywhere, SFGate completely failed at that. They did provide my Flickr name, no linkage back and the title of the original work is missing, so if someone wanted to find the original copy they would have an crappy hard time doing so.

On top of all of it they didn't republish my work with the same license, which is also required. At the bottom of the SFGate page you'll however find a link and some text: © 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.

Material published on The SF Gate online service is copyrighted by Hearst Communications Inc. or its licensors, including the originating wire services. Such material is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and treaties. All rights reserved.

Users of the SF Gate online service may not reproduce, republish or redistribute material found on the web site in any form without the express written consent of the copyright holder.

So my photograph is either now under the copyrighted work of Hearst Communications Inc, or it's still mine but you really can't tell because they're not providing any specific information on how to find the original copy or even how to contact me. Additionally Hearst Communications Inc has altered the terms of my license to the point where others can no longer use it within the capacity of my original Creative Commons license, which is exactly what I don't want.

What's going to happen next? Possibly SFGate isn't going to care after they read the annoying email I've sent them asking why they feel ripping off other people's (not other company's) work is OK in their book. I could do the same to them by scraping their site and republishing their content somewhere else on the internet, possibly with a little twist, hurm...

Lastly, what the shit, MUNI doesn't punch transfers. Are these people even from San Francisco?

Update 20120405 113346 - Looks like my little troll rage is slowly making its rounds. As of this morning the SFGate blog post no longer has my photo in their slideshow rotation, also missing are 2 other photos (suppose I'm not the only one to get their panties in a twist). Sadly no email back from them with an answer as to why they thought it was ok to count Creative Commons as free domain. I imagine they're attempting to word out the most politest cease and desist email right now, scented stationary and all.

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Posts
2lb of Political Spam
2011-11-05 • 21:04:08

So tonight at some point in time I went to the front door of my flat, to find this...

2lb of Polical Spam

2lb and 9oz of political spam, 53 piece in total, ranging from supporting runners for offices and propositions to bad mouthing individuals and groups. For the most part I consider much of this fiction and not worth my damn time. It's weight is approximately 10 times what my household normally gets a week in paper snail mail spam. All of it went into the recycling bin at the top of my stairs under our little mail slots for each housemate. I could sit here and do the carbon footprint math, but just by looking at the pile of junk it's pretty apparent that there's a bunch of money and resources wasted that go into these paper campaigns.

It boggles my mind on how we don't have a system to opt out of this trash.

Next to the recycling bin we have a bench, where this was sitting on top of...

9oz of Fact

9oz of fact. I would like to see political parties throw their money into making this booklet easier to read and not as daunting, more recyclable, more apparent that it's available online.

I don't care how much politicians want to toot the truth or name bash the other runners, but please stop doing it in print, stop filling up my mail box with this garbage, it makes me not want to vote for any of you, or maybe that's just the point?

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Posts
Layers
2011-10-31 • 22:34:59

Star Filled Ceiling

The universe at its core is extremely binary. Without the attention to detail and the ability to look closely we perceive it as analog and rather confusing or possibly chaotic and random. Computers are an attempt to recreate a binary systems on top of the analog layer we have such a hard time seeing beyond, pushing for some sort of sane black and white order. Video games, social networking, online communication, the attempt at providing an over all seamless web experience, transparent inside that little device sitting in your pocket, purse or bag, are us pushing for an artificial analog experience within this digital binary world we created, on top of the analog universe that's just an overly complicated binary system.

We are nothing more than meme/meta machines....

Yes I'm on my 4th drink for the night.

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Last Things Last Forever
2011-07-26 • 08:47:13

Alone on the Train

I've kept a bit of distance away from Twitter for the past couple of weeks, it's been good, though I'm sure this post will auto update my feed. Disconnection has lead to a bit of wondering where and when things happen for a given night, but the return value of hearing about stories, events, interesting things from people directly through passing has been worth it. I've gone from compulsively refreshing Twitter to my lone RSS feeds, Slashdot and Latitude.

My trip to Europe happening in a day or so already feels like escape, really don't want it to feel like that. I'll inevitable come back and it's no longer escape. Keep track of me on the Locate page. I'll have access to phone, email, IM, etc for most of it. Looking forward to Camp.

New job has been great, rather enjoy working out of a castle. It's also been challenging to the level that works well for me.

Distance and pain lasts forever, a closed feeling. I busy myself with new projects trying to keep my mind off of the past, present and what could have been the future. Multiple futures. I wake up each morning early wondering, making my bed, having a tiny bit of breakfast, picking out what to wear. Mannerism I didn't have before, they're not mine. Now I'm not really sure who's they are.

Last things last. At the point now where I need to for myself to understand that this really isn't the last thing.

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