Something Wickedly Overpriced This Way Comes

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Gabriel

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I haven’t walked through the gates of my hometown summer fair since I was a kid… and, from what I remember, back then we mostly crawled through a hole in the fence separating the fair grounds from my friends house. My fair avoidance is mostly because I don’t like crowds. But, seriously, the games are almost guaranteed to be rigged, the prizes were probably stolen from children in the last town the Carnies worked, the rides are a broken bolt away from having my hometown featured on CNN, and it’s just way too frigging expensive.

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Technical Stuff: I had the exposure settings on my wee pocket digital set at +2, which, in a real camera, would mean the aperture was open to allow more light to the film. With a digital it basically means the tiny internal computer modified the brightness/contrast settings on the image with some rudimentary PhotoShop-type program. I was also resting the camera lens on a link of a chain-link fence because I didn’t have my tripod with me.

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Admission to Canada’s Wonderland amusement park, plus a handful of ride tickets, is $35. Just to get on the grounds of Vankleek Hill’s fair this year cost $20 for the day. Thing is, even if you took the time to examine each cow, you could have seen the entire thing in under two hours… if you took each ride twice, walked with a limp, and ate a long lunch. The funniest part was the concert on the last night where the featured band forgot how to play AC/DC. Watching that would have been worth the price of admission, but we could hear them for free from my friends place where we were roasting marshmallows. The song is “As Wicked” by Rancid, from their 1995 classic ‘…And Out Come The Wolves.’.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Favourites, From My Wall, Occasional Events, Photography, Seasonal, Vankleek Hill Photos | 5 Comments

Red Sky At Night Mmm Mmm Mmm

Posted on September 19, 2009 by Gabriel

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Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, red sky in the morning, sailor’s take warning because she’s probably got an STD. Better listen, because that’s a direct quote from Jesus Christ. Seriously. Jesus Christ of Nazareth is quoted, in the Bible, as having said “when it is evening, ye say, it will be fair weather: for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and louring.” I don’t know what “louring” means, but I assume it’s an STD of some kind.

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Technical Stuff: The first thing you have to do to get a photo like this is make sure there’s no traffic. I was standing in the middle of a crosswalk with two blind turns. It’s not exactly dodging gunfire on the Gaza Strip, but every situation has its own unique dangers. I also set the exposure at ‘+1’ which, on a real camera, would mean I closed the aperture a couple of stops (less light). No, digital cameras are not real cameras, and all of us using them to capture our important moments are all going to be fucked when they finally change the default image coding standard away from jpeg — bet you didn’t know saving an image as a jpg/jpeg automatically reduces its quality.

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So the sum total of direct quotes attributed to Jesus in the Bible comes out to a couple hundred words. Maybe. The guy lived for thirty-three years, I’m sure he said a lot of things. But the editors pared it all down to a couple hundred words, and thirty-four of them are about the weather. And the translators couldn’t even get the rhyming scheme down. Honestly, I think the poor bastard got crucified twice. The song is “The Storm” by Big Country from their 1983 debut, self-titled album.

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Posted in Everyday Stuff, Nature, Photography, Sunrise Project, Vankleek Hill Photos | 1 Comment

Almost Like Art | Clouded Eye

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Gabriel

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It has been a long time since I last published an “Almost Like Art” post, and that’s mostly because when I take a photo of a brick wall, it looks exactly like a brick wall. I have friends who are artists because they have the skill and ability to make a brick wall look like art. It’s like I stalled, or took a different branch in my photographic evolution. So, while I can make sure everything in the frame is interesting and basically in focus, I can’t do it to the degree where someone’s going to shell out $200 for a limited edition print.

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Technical Stuff: The idea was to put the camera lens against the peephole of my door. It’s a shot I’ve taken before, but I couldn’t find it so I thought I could recreate it… but I pressed the trigger before the camera was against the door. So, long story short, the light meter fucked up and the shot was overexposed. Taa-daa, it’s art. And now that it’s in your computer’s Internet cache you owe me $200. No personal cheques.

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While you’re searching for your credit card the song I’ve posted is called “Is Is”, from the 2007 EP of the same name by Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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Posted in Almost Like Art, Cool Stuff, Experiments, Photography | 1 Comment

Sundown You Better Take Care

Posted on July 17, 2009 by Gabriel

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Sometimes the rains end and the clouds break and you see the sun setting and there’s an almost immediate sharp quiet where once you were just becoming used to hearing the rain hit the roofs of empty cars and houses and you can’t help but stand mesmerized in the street as you watch the sky turn gold and peach and WHAM that’s when the car hits you and it’ll be a Mazda… you know, one of those little fuckers with the happy face grill. Fuck I hate those.

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Technical Stuff: This shot is all about light settings — exposure time / shutter speed, and how today’s pocket digital camera is useless at deciphering them. On most of these camera’s the automatic exposure settings are set when we half-depress the trigger, and hold for a split second. During this time the camera focuses, which is obvious, but this is also when the camera decides how long the “shutter” will stay open — or, how much light will hit the digital pixels to create the image. So when it’s dark, the “shutter” stays open longer, and when it’s brighter the shutter is quicker.

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The thing about pocket digitals, however, is because the focus and the exposure settings work on the same button, chances are very good either you’ll get the subject properly lit, or you’ll get the sky properly lit… but never both — the sky is never as white as it is in a digital photo. So if, as in this photo, you take the reading off the clouds, they look great, but the townscape is blacked out. This basically makes photo software mandatory because to get this shot perfectly lit means lightening the town by a full stop. The song is, of course, Gordon Lightfoot’s 1974 classic “Sundown”.

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Posted in Everyday Stuff, Favourites, Nature, Photography, Seasonal, Vankleek Hill Photos | 1 Comment

It Never Rains

Posted on July 5, 2009 by Gabriel

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The saying goes “God gave Noah the rainbow for a sign, no more water, but the fire next time”, and that was pretty easy to interpret for most of my life, what with the ability to destroy the world dozens of times over locked into the sweaty hands of two deaf, dumb and blind governments. But unless there’s some spontaneous combustion involved with getting swine flu, I’m not seeing any obvious candidates who can bring down the Jesus fire anytime soon, so I figure we’re good to sin away at our leisure for another few decades at least.

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Technical Stuff: My wee Kodak C533 pocket digital, set on landscape and multiple exposures — my hands shake for a number of reasons, so using the multiple exposure setting generally ensures one of the three shots will be in focus. I took four sets, at different exposures. This one was the closest to reality. That’s not dirt on the upper right of your screen, it’s a bird. Or maybe it is dirt… scratch it and find out. No, really get in there. Harder… a little more, just to the right a bit. Oh yeah, right there. Wow… in some countries we’d have to get married now.

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I just finished watching John Bonham beat the crap out of his drum set, he was playing his legendary “Moby Dick” drum solo way back in 1970 at the Royal Albert Hall. The rest of Led Zeppelin were there as well. It’s part of a two disk DVD set of nearly six hours of really early Led Zeppelin concert footage I borrowed from my uncle. “Borrowed”… heh. The song is “Moby Dick” and it’s from their 1969 release, ‘Led Zeppelin II’.

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Posted in Cool Stuff, Favourites, Nature, Photography, Seasonal | 3 Comments

Saving Newspapers From Their Slow Suicide

Posted on July 4, 2009 by Gabriel

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Fifteen years ago no one in news reporting knew what to do with the Internet. The general consensus of analysts was newspapers should put their content online, but the only way to make money was to offer it a paid subscriber only service.

But that made no sense, people who subscribed to the paper already received the paper, and people who only read it on the Internet either had no direct means of payment — if they lived out of province, for example — or they didn’t want to pay for a full subscription only for the privilege of reading two or three stories a week on their favourite team.

Advertising fifteen and ten years ago consisted almost entirely of banner and clutter advertising. All of which made reading websites a chore rather than something enjoyable. So using advertising to make money was an excellent way to make sure people didn’t read your newspaper online.

So newspapers and magazines started to put their content online for free. And it was this decision which is responsible for the slow death of print news media today.

Because, in retrospect, it’s not Twitter and blogs and Facebook that are responsible for the slow death of print news media, it was the decision by the print news media to relinquish total control over their brand and their product as soon as it’s published.

The print news media could have, should have, never given their product to the Internet… at least not without an explanation.

The decision fifteen years ago to give their product away was a defeat, it was done because everyone told them it was inevitable. Since then everyone has treated print media as though the entire industry was on a death watch.

But it’s a self inflicted death, it’s suicide not murder.

It’s as though the print news media has been sitting back waiting for the inevitable. Every decision they’ve made, every strategy they’ve undertaken regarding the Internet, has taken them one step closer to obscurity.

So called “New Media” cannot exist without print journalism, that’s the irony. News published on Twitter, Facebook and general blogs is reprinted mostly from print reporting. Social network companies then make money off the personal information people give up willingly to be included in them, then from advertising surrounding the content.

And, just like YouTube, the content of the social network firms is provided entirely for free by the users — as we are the content providers for the social networking business.

So the business model print news media has selected for itself for the past ten years involves giving away it’s content for free to anyone who wants it, these people then post it to social networks — which exist only because their content is provided for free, and which then profit greatly from the free content.

Keeping in mind Facebook, as it’s currently valued, is worth more than the print news media industry in North America.

It’s the complete lack of ideas coming from the print news industry, and their acceptance of the perception of their inevitable irrelevancy that’s so infuriating. There’s no fight when someone makes the claim bloggers are the reporters of the future. Or that print news is dead.

The famous 1994 quote from Conrad Black, where he called reporters “ignorant, lazy, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised hacks”, fits with the vision the owners of print news media have had with their business for the past decade.

Ironically, the quote definitely also applies to the “new media” industry which almost entirely relies on untrained and barely motivated people who blog and “tweet” for their profits.

When newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer close, all of the knowledge and sources and information gathered by those reporters is lost. There is power in group reporting that blogging cannot hope to match.

A blogger might be a source, but she’ll never open a foreign affairs bureau in Beijing.

But this isn’t about which delivery system is better, or more accurate, or which is easier to hold accountable, it’s about the resignation of the print news media to its obsolescence.

Why have there been no television commercials or print advertisements showing what kind of power and ability the print news media really has? Why no television ads showing a lone blogger looking into the Hells Angels? Why no commercials showing someone walking around trying to report on genetically modified foods by updating their Twitter account?

Why are newspapers so timid about explaining to people what services they really offer? Why are they so willing to continue to take part in their own demise?

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Posted in Canada, Entertainment, Journalism, News, Politics, Reporting | 1 Comment