U-B-C.

so, it's just been the first week of school. i just did my first (online) assignment of uni. i feel fucking clueless. i read the readings, i listen in class, i do some notes, and when the question pops up i have no bloody clue what the fuck is what?!?!?. or in the case of math, that occurs before i've even left the classroom. trololol. i think i'm probably not as bad off as i make it sound there, but still. and part of this is insecurity. in high school, without sounding like a bragging douche, i was one of the guys on top - i was in the top smarterish bunch, and i knew it. but here, in UBC sciences...well, the welcome speech said it all. the admission average for my faculty was 89.5. my average was 89.25. i bring down the average of my faculty; i'm on the low end of the spectrum now. ffs.

on the other hand.

i'm fucking proud of getting in, hard as it is here. and i'll fight for that.

photography as a record

I think that was one of the first intentions for photography. Well, in the end, there're really only two intentions for it - art, or record-keeping. Everything else is just some mix of either in various proportions... Journalism, art photography, whatever, all that.

Lately, I haven't been really feeling it. My super-compact k-5 has been feeling like a tank to bring around, and excuses are abundant as to why I should just stay home instead of go out for a photowalk. The routine's grown stale, really. go out, shoot, go home, edit. Upload, bask in comments, get a bit of an ego fix on that, rinse repeat.

I think I'm slowly growing out of that though. I think I'm slowly making photography more for me. I'm barely just uploading the photos I take, and pretty much not posting them to forums or anything at all anymore. who cares what other people take, cause so much of what I take at this point is just a record of my life. The places I've been, the people I've come to know and love, the things I do, the times I've had. The thing is, a dSLR isn't really that great a camera for that. A cell phone, much better. And that's another thing that I'm starting to change up - image quality. I'm caring less and less about the pixel level of the photo, and just seeing the photo itself. It's blurred, it's out of focus, but it's a goddamn funny moment and I am uploading right now. Or, y'know, stuff like that.

Maybe it's just gear lusting, but the olympus e-p3 sounds really appealing. Especially with a 12mm f2 - I really do crave a fast wide angle. And the m4/3 system doesn't have a ton of lenses, but it's got the 3 I need - fast wide, fast normal (Leica 25mm f1.4), and fast portrait (Oly 45mm f1.8). And its art filters are supposed to be quite great too. Now, coming from a RAW-only shooter, art filters wtf ?! But. I dunno. I just feel burnt out on editing, burnt out on deciding whether I wanna go all-out or just a "natural" look, burnt out on having a backlog of photos waiting to be edited. On the other hand, just having some quick presets that I can tweak around a bit sounds pretty appealing. Straight-to-fb.

But, that's the kind of camera I'd love to have. Bring it everywhere, just a bit better quality than a phone, but not so amazing that I'll worry the second it's not perfectly sharp. And the autofocus is quick and accurate, again, taking worry off of the mind of someone whose equipment has to function absolutely perfect. I can take  everyday photos, record-of-my-life types with it. I can bring it on the road with me, I can take it for photowalks for "serious" shoots too. God, I'm getting myself all worked up for this camera and I haven't even decided if I'm actually going to go for it yet. If my future shop gets it in stock I'll have to try it out a bit first, we'll see. Also, just saw this, and not gonna lie, that's pretty hot.


I'm hungry.

hedonistic materialism

so i got a new phone.

i upgraded from my old shitbrick:

the sony ericsson t715. it was a pretty decent phone, one that i was excited to get at the time. but now, at the end of 2 and 3/4 years with it, it was pretty much approaching the end of its life cycle. i guess all you truly need phones for are calling and texting, but calls on this thing were difficult to make out at times. texting was dead slow, tons of delays all around, even after deleting all my messages (and i do love my message logging).

also, i was starting to want something more out of my phone - a center for me to do anything i wanted/need, ever. jot down notes/ideas i have or list shit i have to do, or get directions, or simple stuff like copying down my work schedule.

so i got a new phone.

it has been dubbed the red river rhino. 

it is this:

the HTC Evo 3D.

my first choice was the samsung galaxy s ii, but this is damn good all the same. the 3D works better than i thought, and is pretty cool. about 85% of people i've shown it to are impressed right off the bat, though about 1 in 3 or 4 of them do get dizzy from it. still, i think it's pretty cool. it's a little thicker and heavier than many modern smartphones, but i don't really mind the weight - coming from a photographer using pentax's Limiteds, tiny but all-metal-and-glass lenses, i quite like the feel of something relatively small but hefty. it gives it a dense feeling of solidarity and quality. i like, i like.

and jesusshitballs it's fast. sometimes i feel like it's faster than my laptop/pc. and while part of it is because my old phone is so slow, i'm not alone. continuing with my potentially bullshitty statistics, about 1 in 5 people i've shown it to have commented on how fast it is. two of them were iphone 4 users ;D

and useability. just now, while being distracted from writing this, i read a review on an android game, used google goggles to read the QR code (the square blocks of whatthefuckery), which took me to android market and let me download it. under 30 seconds.

goddamn i love this thing. i think half of it is being in love with having an up-to-date smartphone on android, as opposed to being the htc evo 3d itself, but still. 

also, the camera. i'm surprised to see that the 3D output of this thing is actually quite great. it's every bit as 3D-ish as the sample photos, which is rare. and, the interesting bit. i have it with me everywhere. while my k-5 is more of a conscious decision to bring along, my phone is a no-brainer to come along. this means the everyday moments, my phone'll capture and my k-5 won't. and since i'm in a bit of a photographic lull, this is a double-edged sword. on the one hand, it lets me focus on just composition and light and moments and timing and forget about what's, in the end, unimportant - like sharpness or bokeh quality. on the other hand, it makes me wish my k-5 was smaller, even though it's the smallest-in-class dslr, as are the lenses (by a significant margin, too). or it makes me feel bad that i don't bring around everytime i go out. though, if i'm watching the movies, i guess i do have something of an excuse there.

<3redriverrhino.

TL;DR - i had nuggets for breakfast.

inspiration

need a little bit.

between a stifling work/life schedule (which always take up the golden hour) and great blue skies (which mean almost unworkably harsh light), i've had a pretty dry photographic start to the month. my lack of inspiration, i think, really shows in post - i just don't feel moved by a lot of my shots, and most of them get smashed with the delete hammer before i ever tweak anything with them. next day off i get, i really need to just spend a day and photowalk. if only there were somewhere to go photowalk though, cause i feel like i've exhausted vancouver. which isn't really possible considering how vast it is, but still. no ideas. anyways, these are the only few recent ones that i don't hate, all with the FA 77:

Roadtrip.

the last week was a bit.. emotionally, physically, mentally tiring. the usual go-to people were unavailable for whatever reasons, and i was going crazy cooped up at home. so, cancel all plans, make sure i'm not working, and tuesday morning i headed right out of vancouver; it was time for a roadtrip. i didn't know where i was going (well, eastwards outside of vancouver), and my GPS nearly killed me, but otherwise, damn it was good to get out for a day. away from people and stress and things, away from the city and noise, away from it all. just me, my camera, my car. in a word, it was damn cathartic, and i hope to do it again sometime soon. thing about living on the coast is i only have 3 directions to go, and north is basically just one highway, and south is limited due to the border, so basically i only have 1 direction to go.

also, i listened to the radio a lot and downloaded like 10 songs cause i hadn't listened to it for a sustained thing for a while, and i found that i actually liked a few non-metal songs. so that was cool. also, it was quite the thrill stopping on the highway, running down a few feet, snapping a shot, and back into the car before i slowed down traffic. though actually i don't think i ever stopped on a highway, just more isolated roads. anyways...out of 100 shots, narrowed it down to about 10, and of those, 5 i really love. i consider that a great success.

my main lens was the s-m-c tak 28/3.5. i think it's all in the focal length. the 15 was a great one to have around as well, but the 77 and 50/1.4 that i brought too didn't really come out much at all. but the 28...it's slow, it's got some distortion ( i think i've talked about this before), and it's not the sharpest at times, but i just always seem to get great shots with it. all in the focal length, i guess. plus its 5 aperture blades is fine for landscapes, since landscapes aren't too bokehlicious most of the time, or at least tuesday's weren't. anyways, here're the shots!

this was rather unsafely shot through my windshield.

"where eagles fly"

this shot is basically a dozen meters down from the one above it. i got out of the car for that one, but for this, i was just driving, when fucking a million (four) eagles (!!!) flew out into the clearing. i shat myself and snapped a few right away, only half-pulling over. this is the best one out of the series i snapped, and i love it.

the sole non-15 or 28 shot that made it past my delete button from tuesday, done with the 77. i really need to remember to cap  the viewfinder for long exposures....

one of my favorites, fo sho. i love the atmosphere in this shot, if that's not tooting my own horn too much.

"duality"

one thing i've found during post for these was, i've found that i'm now less attracted to the super-processed look i was giving my shots before. for some shots, like the barn, i still like how that looks, or for monochrome shots. but for regular ones, i'm starting to doing it a bit more subdued as far as editing goes. like in these last two shots, they aren't too horribly off from, yknow, reality, but still convey the mood i wanted. i guess the benefit of reigning it in a bit is that hopefully, i'll put some more effort to finding epic light when i do landscape, than just do w/e. though then again i've always found that a bad landscape shot is  nearly irreparable in post. not quite so with, say, portraits.

man, i love roadtrips. and photography. i would never have given two shits about driving out, or exploring the world, if it weren't for photography. well aren't i getting mushy now.

GIG: Zawiyah Foundation

So, Sunday afternoon, Mattang and I shot as the hired photographers for the Zawiyah foundation at an interfaith event. Being more or less an atheist, but coming from a Christian background, it was a pretty interesting event to observe from an outsider point of view, but from any perspective, it's definitely cool to see so many people of different religious backgrounds speak openly about their beliefs peacefully and with unity.

Good shit.

The majority of the event was speakers talking, lecture style, to the audience, so from a photographer's point of view, there weren't a million things to cover, and only a limited number of angles to use. Though it can be said that the limitations forced my creativity even more.

Anyways, editing for those photos are well under way, I'll update this post when they're done.


Afterwards, we went over to co-worker Tracy's birthday party, where I got the privilege of molesting Angus' 5Dmk II and 135/2 L. That was...quite exciting. ;D

back to roots.

went for a bit of a walk at Iona Beach today. the lighting was harsh and boring, the scenery was uninspiring but still... it was good to get back into a bit of landscape/nature, what i started out photography in. i only ended up with three shots that i liked, and one very soggy shoe, but it was pretty fun nevertheless...