Some of the photo stuff I’m enjoying:

• Linked before, The Big Picture blog puts together some great galleries on current world events.
• Go install the Cooliris (formerly Piclens) plugin now! Exploring their selections, or browsing Flickr photostreams is so very cool-looking, and more practical than clicking “Next” page after page. (When the plugin doesn’t mess up, of course)
• Browse the Getty Images Olympics coverage (also Piclens/Cooliris enabled!) for some great stuff.
• My new lens, and my first Canon “L series” lens. Expensive, but totally worth it. I still need to shoot a side by side comparison with my first kit lens (similar wide angle) to show the quality difference.
• I’m still posting some to my other Flickr photostream, but that’s getting to be a bit much with the iPhone and pocket camera (plus video mode) all contributing to the photo backlog.
• Weird Olympics photos from the Guardian.
• I keep hearing great things about the new version of Adobe Lightroom and will have to check it out, but I’m loving my Aperture workflow. Good organization tools, auto-tagging with the FlickrExport plugin, and all the adjustments I ever used from Photoshop.

Last September, I wrote this summary of three years with Flickr, and reaching the 1,000 photo-upload mark. Less than a year later, I’ve broken the mark of 2,000 photos on Flickr (somewhere in the midst of my bulk dodgeball photo upload). And in last year’s post, I claimed 32,000 views of my photos, but I think that was actually the view count for my photostream. Total views of my photos has now just topped the 150,000 mark, which I think is pretty crazy. Who are these people?

I guess I’ll keep taking photos as long as there’s stuff to be seen, and people keep looking.

The top one was the first I saw on my screen and I loved it. I went straight for the screenshot keys a couple times and then gingerly closed the window, hoping it wouldn’t be lost. To my relief, I was able to reproduce the glitch on some more photos. I started browsing my photostream for bunches of photos that might look good all mashed up together. Whatever the bug was, it didn’t really follow predictable rules, so many of my rational creative attempts were in vain.

The bug was also very intermittent. I’d scroll through a few screens of photos with nothing, and then finally get another surprise. But still, this process went on for longer than I’d like to admit. As you can see, there was an occasional continuity or pattern in the images, but not all. I like the glimpses of eyes, faces, or occasional landmarks sneak into focus in some panels.

What a beautiful bug! Some people pay hundreds of dollars for filters or plugins like this! Thank you. (not sarcasm, it really is fun)

PS – PicLens: If this is your bug, I was not able to reproduce this when looking at Facebook albums, only my Flickr stream so far. Browser: Firefox 3.0 Beta, Mac. It happened on clicking for a larger view of an image in the default view. When the higher-res photo finished loading, it would display as the glitchy image. They sometimes show the background window contents appearing in places. Following the link to the original image site, the photos always appeared OK.

PPS – Mozilla Firefox 3.0: If this is your bug, I’m using 3.0 on a fully patched Mac OS X 10.3. I think I had Bloglines and another Flickr page open in other tabs.

PPPS – Apple OS X/iMac: If this is your bug with system, drivers, or graphics card, well, see above if that helps. I don’t want to go buying another computer right now. :)

Danny Elfman’s original score was used and expanded a bit, and it works wonderfully as the backdrop (and sometimes the star) of the show. I was never bored of the dancing, and actually thought it was a great way to tell what’s already a very surreal, magical story. I also found a lot of the performance much funnier than I expected. The suburban scenes and elaborate group dances did an excellent job of demonstrating the variety of quirky characterizations.

Check out some of the short videos online here, as well as the longer interview/montage with the Director/Choreographer Matthew Bourne. And if you’re in Seattle, I highly recommend checking out the show. It’s playing through May 13th.

On the downside, the only real view from the park is looking West and a bit South, and while it’s a really great view of the sound and the Olympic Mountains, every other direction is a massive block of trendy new condominiums. That’s just what you get in Belltown. The Space Needle is visible in a few places, but is mostly obscured by the buildings. On the Western-most side of the park, you can look South all the way along the train tracks to Pioneer Square, which is pretty cool.

The sculpture itself was presented really well, except for the flourescent blue signage that was everywhere, asking people not to touch anything. The signs were a more common conversation topic than some of the art. And people were still touching everything. I’m a big fan of Alexander Calder, so his Eagle was a favorite, along with Richard Serra’s Wake. I do miss having the Calder right in my neighborhood in Volunteer Park, but the new location is a bit more fitting.

I look forward to heading back on a sunnier day, and catching some sunsets from the park. And for now I’ve got a small set of photos that most everyone gets from walking around the park:

A few good shots out of about 80 total. I had most fun playing with the macro attachment, but even normal scenes give good results. The principle is simple: you’ve got a flexible lens mount, so as you bend it and compress it, you’re changing the focal length and therefore adjusting the plane of focus as well as the “sweet spot.” It took me a while to get the hang of focusing, especially on the shaky macro shots and moving subjects (pesky insects!). Want a different aperture (thus expanding or contracting your area of focus), just pop out a disc and put a new one in.

Even though the lens is about as manual as you can get, my Canon continued light-metering in Aperture Priority (Av) mode, and adjusted the shutter speed accordingly. This is pretty nice, since it takes one extra piece of guesswork out of the process. Of course I still found myself making plenty of adjustments.

I’ll keep playing and continue to post the successes in my lensbaby set on Flickr.

On a different, but somewhat simlar vein, today I followed a link to this site of an autistic guy who has created an entire city through drawings and writings. There is a short video on him online here. He has written history, economics and demographics for the city and the detail in the drawings is remarkable. The cohesive vision and depth of content is what really makes it come to life.

Two passions for very different subjects, from not-quite-normal minds, both impressive and inspiring in their own right.

The other special exhibition running at the MOMA was on Pixar animation. The gallery walls were filled with concept art from all of Pixar’s films, including their upcoming film Cars. There were also quite a few character model sculptures and plasma screens showing slideshows, Pixar shorts and more concept art. It was fun to see all of the artwork together, but I’d still seen most of it already in the various special features from the DVDs. But… the real highlight of the exhibit was in one of the theater spaces, where they had this giant turntable behind a glass case (pictured above). On the turntable were countless character models from Toy Story, all in slightly different poses. The whole thing started spinning rapidly, and then the regular light went out and the strobe light came on. The whole scene animated into a continuous loop of Woody galloping on his horse, Buzz balancing on a ball, green aliens walking around, and little army men jumping out of the box in the middle. In motion the whole scene looked like it was a state of the art 3D hologram projection, but it was so much simpler. It was an amazing demonstration of exactly what creates animation.

Every year my mother sends out Christmas* cards to family and friends. Not just any cards, but some of her very own handmade cards. For those of you who didn’t know my mother was an artist, well, now you do. She does etchings, embossings and collages all out of her basement studio. Above are the 2004 and 2005 Christmas cards I received. Happy Holidays!

* Disclaimer: I’m not saying “Christmas” instead of “Holidays” out of any support for that idiot but rather because it is what I happen to celebrate, and also happens to be the theme that some of my mother’s cards take.