s2art's mophone photography blog.

8.10.04

Blast destroys camera

Blast destroys camera. Smart media card survives. This one has been around for a while now, so I'd thought I'd share it with you both.

7.10.04

Post Holiday reflections

My two recent loaves weren't too bad(both fruit loaves), I was surprised the first one worked at all as I completely got the measurements wrong!

Yet to purchase Tom Wait's new Album.

Have an upcoming exhibtion, the 20th Anniversary show from where I work. We're also publishing a comemorative book to celebrate this auspicious occasion. I'm hoping a copy of which will end up in the State Library of Victoria.

Some quotes from a book I discovered lying around at home

Good teaching is more of giving the right questions than a giving of the right answers.

Josef Albers

4.10.04

Bread baking

Back into bread baking, one of my ambitions to get a loaf that is fluffy, light, that rises high, and with a nice crust. This is my second attempt since restarting, I used to do it often a year or so ago, now with our new stove I am inspired to get back into it.

This one is good, bit heavy on the crust, but light enough for my liking. Could be a bit sweeter maybe, and not sure how to get a real dark crust yet anyway here's a snap of the bread just before I started eating it.

3.10.04

Google results?

Googled s2arts and came up with this site (allconsuming.net) linking to mine, bizzare really?

Richard Avedon dies at 81

Well known photographer Richard Avedon has died. He died after suffering a brain haemorrhage while on assignment for the New Yorker magazine in San Antonio, Texas.

2.10.04

Picture Australia, resource?

Researching online this morning and I stumbled across this site, Picture Australia, may well be useful in a variety of ways. Might even add it to my sidebar?

"Looking for images of Australiana? PictureAustralia® is the place to start! Search for people, places and events in the collections of libraries, museums, galleries, archives, universities and other cultural agencies, in Australia and abroad - all at the same time. View the originals on the member agency web sites and order quality prints at your leisure."

1.10.04

Who were the Ant Farm?

Funny how you stumble across information on the web, whilst browsing the ICP site, I cam across this info for some early video art,from a group calling themselves Ant Farm.

"...Projects by these media collectives ranged from documentaries and agitprop to novel street theater and performance art. Guerrilla video never fully achieved its utopian goals of returning broadcast power to the people or fostering the free flow of information and images, but the same iconoclastic spirit of skeptical political expression thrives today in new media, independent video, cable television, weblogs, and net art."...

Maybe I can use this in my classes next year, who knows?

30.9.04

Photographers Web Resource

Are you a student of image making using cameras? Do you enjoy taking photos and want to take better ones? Do you enjoy visual histories? Then check Kodak's George Eastman house web site out. It's a resource that as an artist, educator and photographer that will prove invaluable for many years to come, here's why. And I quote from the front page.

The photography collection includes more than 400,000 photographs and negatives dating from the invention of photography to the present day. The collection embraces numerous landmark processes, objects of great rarity, and monuments of art history that trace the evolution of the medium as a technology, as a means of scientific and historical documentation, and as one of the most potent and accessible means of personal expression of the modern era. More than 14,000 photographers are represented in the collection, including virtually all the major figures in the history of the medium. The collection includes original vintage works produced by nearly every process and printing medium employed.

Now if I could just find some one, anyone to pay me to study this collection full-time, I'd be a happy man. Are either of you offering?

For what its worth, I have made some small changes to my website, added some links, to my links page and modified my 126 gallery pageand tweaked the bbq page.

29.9.04

The days of the monolithic local television station Web site are numbered

Ah music to my ears, anyone out there in TV land listening? No I didn't think so.

The days of the monolithic local television station Web site are numbered. They're all built on the portal model, with a home page and links to material deeper within the site. That model is being rewritten by people who don't want to be forced to go here just to get to there. RSS and search are enabling people to have it their way, and who knows what's to come downstream?

You may well ask how I know this comment/idea is true? Glad you did, here's an example of why, last night my wife and I *both* had our laptops open and searching browsing the web at the same time. The TV? well it was on but we hardly paid any attention to it.

Will anyone in TV land notice? Probably not, do I care nope! All I ask for is the death of TV as we know it, and pronto thanks!

Digital versus analog photography?

This morning has seen a flurry of activity, thanks to about.com and it's photography writer Peter Marshall, as well as my fab little news reader, NetNewsWire, I have found a ton of interesting things relating to photography, but I want to draw both my reader's attention to this article about digital photography, found on digitaljournalist.org. It touches on some issues that I alluded to in my own article on the digital v analog argument.

To my way of thinking this argument is simply not a valid one, analog is good and has its uses digital is good and has it's uses, both have their own cons as well as a raft of pros. While I see my own creative analog output slowed dramatically over the last 5 or so years, I still qam not in the forseeable future going to abandon it. Particularly in the area of *fine* black and white prints.

New Raw Camera Format?

Adobe Systems Incorporated has today announced The Digital Negative (DNG), which they describe as "a new, publicly available archival format for the raw files generated by digital cameras.]"

Eddie Adams dies

Best known for his image of a Viet Cong prisoner being executed by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan in Saigon in 1968, Eddie Adams had a long and distinguished career as a photojournalist.

28.9.04

Photographic Imaging College site edit.

About to start updating my work's site, put together when I was beginning to learn more about CSS. Now with a whole new template, that for future updates will require minimal coding just a tweak of the stylesheet itself....I hope!

27.9.04

Second week of the holidays

First day of second week of the holidays. Things are shaping up to be an active one. Planning at this point to make images today, as well as, make some bread, mix developer for my students tommorrow, try and find some books on the new software package I am trying to learn, read some more of the interesting book I'm reading.

Recently while reading over on dog or higher I learnt about possible future developments of the web and it's associated technologies. Google featured heavily in this article John speculated that they were in the process of producing a new browser, which he felt would be more than a browser, a kind of Über browser perhaps? One that enables all the current technologies to accessed through one interface, that has full support for ALL CSS from 1 through to 3, and many other things beside.

Is this a good thing? I'm not sure, there are some folks out there who are absolutely paranoid about the power that Google has. I can kind of see there point, I mean they have vast amounts of data in there databanks, as they trawl the world for links and text.They have no accountability to anyone, yet if you are involved in the process of website creation ignoring Google can be a dangerous thing?

Do we need another Micro$oft to hamper our online endeavours, because that's what the guy seems to be saying on his website? For me the jury is out on this one and I guess I need to talk to more folks.