Two photographs - minimal photoshop editing

Victoria street Blues?

Picture this, it's a mild sunny morning, you're sitting in a cafe having a coffee, reading a book, in particular a book of Jack Kerouac Poems. You realise that you have actually got a recording of Alan Ginsberg reading one these poems. You can "hear" the poem and you slip off into the street in front of you. The traffic moves and hums, a woman's heels click click past you on the pavement, the sun shines. You finish your coffee and read some more:-

"...In the feel of their stride
Touching to hide the sidewalk,
Blackshiny lastnight parlor
Shoes hitting the slippery
With hard slicky heels
To slide and fall:
Breboac! Karrak!"

You return your cup to the counter inside walk across the street, after braving the peak hour traffic, hop in your car and look back at the red building bathed in morning light that houses the coffee shop, and read the sign on top.

It reads - Wayne Wong and Associates.

As an aside the excerpt from the Jack Kerouac poem, "SanFrancisco Blues", is reproduced here without permission.

Simple icon software for the Mac

More nifty software! Now I can make really cool icons for my Mac. All it takes is a simple bit of photoshop editing and then dropping the image on the software, hey presto a nice custom made icon.

Is Google the only answer?

Currently trying this search engine. It's called cluster and turns up some interesting results - quickly.

See my links to the right, for the reason why I am thinking of switching?

Let X-mas Begin!

In town today, and of course the silly season has officially begun! The crowds were surprisingly quiet for the first day of the "Myer Windows". Snapped up a few CD's today as well. Some might say an eclectic list, other folks, just know me and my tastes.

• "Closing Time", Tom Waits
• "Used Songs 1973-1980", Tom Waits
• The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• "Amelie" Film soundtrack
• "If I should Fall from Grace with God", The Pogues
• "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death", The Dead Kennedys
• "Unknown Pleasures", Joy Division
• "Apollo Atmospheres and Soundtracks", Brian Eno
• "You Don't Know Me", Dannielle Gaha
• "Scar", Missy Higgins

More images of Melbourne over at Flickr

Art banned in Darwin

Coffs Harbour hosts banned photo exhibition. A photo art show that was banned in Darwin is opening tonight at the Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery on the NSW mid-north coast. The Northern Territory Parliament banned a scheduled exhibition in March of Belinda Mason-Lovering's collection called Intimate Encounters, Disability and Sexuality. The ban sparked an outcry from one of the models with disabilities, former ABC reporter Cath Duncan, who says she thought it was a joke at first. Tonight's opening also has a local contribution from sculptor John Van der Kolk, a collection inspired by the visual memories of blind people. Ms Duncan says it is a poignant and moving exhibition. "I'm quite hardened. I've seen a lot of disabled art and photography, but I walked out of there in tears," she said. "It moves you to really get an insight into how somebody else with a different sort of body and different senses views themselves. It's all about identity, sexuality and all that personal stuff. It's very beautiful."

Taken from the ABC arts site

Pictures on Waferbaby

Just had an image loaded on Waferbaby.

CMA graduate show 2004

Opening tonight, the graduating student's show 28 k, from CMA at Victoria Universtiy, here are the sites they built as part of the unit of study they undertook with me.

Colour tools?

Nice little colour generating tool, lot's of them out there, this ones very elegant

Thanks to Ed for the heads up

Pet peeves whinge number #041111

One of my main peeves in life is the way we are pigeon holed by advertisers and marketers, this article on wired throws some light on the the issue and also gives some hope.

[Wired News]A PBS documentary makes the case that Americans have tuned out marketers pitching everything from cars to candidates. The result: even more crass attempts to get through, and a fragmentation of American society. By Jason Silverman.

Bush salutes us - NOT!

Finally G. W. Bush reveals his true feelings about the rest of the world.

Berencie Abbot and Eugene Atget

The article below, on Berenice Abbot from about.com, mentions one of my early favourites Eugene Atget. A street photographer who never saw himself as an artist, but has been elevated to that status for many years. The trouble is, his work to my mind, takes a lot - and I mean, a lot, of close inspection and reflection to see that. The problems begin I guess, if you use the yard stick of "what is the function of this work" as a means to measure the work. Even though the work indeed was used by Atget to sell to Museums and other artists as either reference pieces or documents if you like, it somehow moves beyond mere documentation. One extra factor in Atget's favour is of course the fact that the majority of the imagery is of a place that no longer exists, pre-war Paris of the early 1900's.

Personally I like his work, I can connect to it on many levels and it's always a pleasure to look at. I have of course read several tomes about him and his work, so my understanding of where he's coming from maybe different to someone discovering him for the first time. This is what I like about this article, it gives a teaser and links and allows the reader to explore more in their own fashion based on their needs and desires, a very handy function of the web.

Enjoy the article and the links.

Berenice Abbott's own place in the history of photography is sometimes overshadowed by the work she did in bringing the work of one of the greatest of all photographers, Eugene Atget, to the public eye. After his death in Paris, she bought much of the work from his studio, and brought it back with her to New York where she exhibited and published it. In his lifetime, Atget had sold large numbers of prints of aspects of Paris to various museums as well as to individuals, including artists such as Man Ray, but had not generally been recognised as a significant artist. Although his work was written about in Europe, it was the collection in New York (later at MoMA) that made him a well-known name in photography. Abbott took many fine portraits, but her work on the city of New York is her finest monument You can see a good selection from this at the Hacklebury Gallery in London until January 29, 2005. Also on the gallery site are some other interesting images of New York, including work by Ted Croner, Elliott Erwitt and Arthur Leipzig

I am so inspired by some of the work I am seeing on Flikr that I am planning on spending the day out and about with my camera, seeing what I can, so stay tuned for a big update either here or at flickr, or my own site - oh and there is the travelogue as well.

For both my readers I wish to share the latest gem of software I have picked up from the internet, it's called Quicksilver and it is a useful and free utility for speeding up access to the contents of your Macintosh computer, bypassing the need for the dock, which for me had become painfully slow and time consuming. I am still learning it's intricacies but within minutes of downloading and installing last night, I am already opening and closing documents and files quickly with nothing more than a couple of keyboard strokes. A very useful tool indeed. The application's website will of course migrate over to the right with all the other interesting stuff I've found. One thing I neglected to mention was the quality and standard of work over at flickr, unlike other sites i've seen out there in cyber space this one is populated by people who are not onlt talented but also able to "see" wit their cameras in away that makes the world an interesting place again, go check it out.

my desktop 08/11/04

Changes are some what infrequent on my laptop, but as I'm sick of fiddling with the dock I've gone back to the old system of the alias on the desktop

my desktop 08/11/04,
originally uploaded by s2art.

Flikr and photo-sharing

I have been hanging around flickr now for almost 3 days! Unheard of in this era of nano-second attention spans. Admittedly I have been adding tons of my own images, from my own site, but also busy adding tags (to my shots) and making contacts, and commenting on these contacts' work as well.

This site really interests me. It allows the user to upload and store their own photos these can then be organised into galleries, and set for public or private viewing, tags allowing sharing of common galleries. You can also set up galleries of images with images that are cross related, this is a fab idea and allows any user to organise threads and connections within their own bodies of work. So when another user browses a gallery they can then see the other connections made by the original maker of the images.

Macs are a tool afterall?

Here's one for the all macophobes out there, if they can stop playing their 3rd person shoot 'em ups long enough to read it -and - think about it

blue sky. look!

Have spent many many hours on flickr today, thank god things are settling down at work! This woman's imagery is just stunning

blue sky. look!,
originally uploaded by swissmiss.

Have signed up with Flickr, I am here if you want to find *me*One of the neat features is it posts straight to this blog if I so choose, as can be seen by the sculpture of Jesus below.

Uncomfortably Close Jesus

Hee Hee gotta love this one, says it all really, in one!

Uncomfortably Close Jesus,
originally uploaded by fboosman.

Canon images from my work

Some images made at work today the vibe is good and the work is getting done! The end of year show is only days away now and the students can smell it I'm sure!

Stupid online quizzes?

Well apparently according to this test I am an exe file, what tha!

Which File Extension are You?

Of course I'm only useful to PC users and who would want to be that!