Further Adventures in Chronophotography

A Day at the Lake

The Leap

Lobby Art

Lobby Art,

Flickr Thinks You're Interesting

So far this image has had a grand total of 0 views but yet somehow ranks as my most popular photo as determined by flickr's patented interestingness ranking system. Hardly seems fair to the pictures in my photostream that actually get viewed. That said, vignettes are interesting.

The Cool Kids

It's no secret that I'm out of touch. Aside from that one good friend of mine in Chicago that occasionally feeds me the feel good songs of summer, I have to rely on my own hard work and research to get some semblance of a hip stylish groove on. Of course the one-stop shop for aging hipsters such as myself seems to be the always dependable and hopelessly stylized pages of Pitchfork, though prodding through their album reviews is no easy chore. I'd go into more detail, but I haven't the time or talent. Take a look though; you'll see what I mean.

The nice thing is that they have this handy 1-10 rating system (and for reasons I can't yet digest, they recently reviewed the entire Beatles canon – some solid 10s in there, which should come as no surprise to anyone) but even better are the 15 second audio clips. The writing is generally more clever than insightful, but I don't want to hate. There might be a good reason I never took notice of the Dirty Projectors and found The Knife utterly forgettable. There's not accounting for taste, and that definitely includes me.

In any event, it is thanks to Pitchfork that I'm now pleasantly ensconced in the warm, dulcet, and highly sexualized tones of The XX, and this is me sharing the love. Give 'er a listen.

I'd also like to send a shout-out to young Russell for pointing me in the direction of the Handsome Furs, playing live in Bangkok tomorrow. I am looking forward to establishing my indie cred one melancholic jangle at a time.

Lomo-ized

I can definitely see why this might upset a lot of people. Sure, it flies straight in the face of the 10 Golden Rules, but then I don't have a lomo that fits in my pocket so what can I do? The below shots were taken with my Samsung phone, so at the very least it adhered to the Don't Think philosophy. The rest was Photoshop.

Phrakanong Vespa

 

At TCDC

Early Adventures in Chronophotography

 

Ekamai Sub Soi

Reading Roth in Siam Square

 

View from my balcony

Lomo-Lovin'

I had a present waiting for her on the coffee table. We'd only known each other for about three weeks leading up to that fateful and exciting day that she consented to move in with me, which by anyone's standards would have seemed impetuous at best, but it felt right, somehow, and so we decided to just plunge right in.

Two of the three weeks leading up to our cohabitation, we weren’t even in the same country. Having left for Manila to see her family during the Christmas holidays, we went directly from second date to long-distance relationship. We spent long nights pining for each other’s company via the conduits of googletalk and skype. It was thoroughly modern and unsatisfying, but it was all we had.

During this skype-based courtship, I devoted a great deal of time to stalking her online. With a little tenacity and luck, I stumbled across her twitter account, myspace page, and few blogs in which she revealed her likes and dislikes, and in particular her uncommon affinity for cameras. Moreover, she revealed that she was by all senses of the word a complete and utter camera nerd. I was overjoyed.

But it was more than just a love of optics that struck her fancy; she was enamored by imperfections caused by old cameras (faithfully reproduced) and administered with a “shoot, don’t think” ethos. This strange new old-world photography even had a special name: Lomography.

 Here we see me holding one of the more popular lomos on the market, the Diana+. This camera is a bit deceptive, as it appears to be extremely simple (and light and, frankly, a bit flimsy), but in reality it is quite challenging to use. Fully manual, you have to do a lot of guessing to get a decent photo, or even to get a photo at all. From our first roll with the Diana+, I believe we were able to recover no more than four pictures. Now sure, some of that can be chalked up to ambitious double or triple exposures, forgetting to check the zoom length, or relying too much on the viewfinder, but I maintain that for the vast bulk of our failures were due to not adjusting correctly to the lighting conditions, which is just something you have to keep guessing at. This shot was taken with a Colorsplash, which makes lovely saturated images that are pretty much perfect the first time around.

The Colorsplash is elegant, easy to use, and a great deal of fun for just about any occasion. It looks like this:

So back to that gift. On one of her blogs she wrote a Christmas list to her Secret Santa asking for a wide range of possible gifts to suit any budget, including a lifetime supply of her favorite candy and even a brand new laptop.

Among the more attainable items that made the list, she asked for a 35mm back for her Diana+, which would allow her to use cheaper film and thereby take more photos with this highly temperamental camera. So upon her arrival, sitting nicely wrapped on the coffee table was a brand new 35mm back. She was overjoyed.

Over the past several months we have taken the lomos out with us on many different occasions, with mixed but generally amusing results.

Dream World's Angry Baby

Pretending to be Backpackers on Khao San Road

Today she returns from a four-day business trip, so I have decided to surprise her with the newest addition to our shelf of broken clocks, antique cameras and lomo-optics. Right now, wrapped neatly and resting on the coffee table, is our brand new Supersampler.

There are just so many cool things people are doing with this camera. I can’t wait to be one of them. Viva la lomo!

Like a Phoenix, Oh!

A blog by any other name? The former incarnation of this blog (the forced pun, the tired title) made no sense, nor did the several others leading up to it. The problem, without doubt, was the utter lack of a finely intertwined theme threaded throughout the varied and miscellaneous ramblings. Par for the course, I suppose, but surely some compromise could be found? If themes cannot be delicately strewn then we must aim for the coarsely woven: this is a blog about me and what I see, spread invariably over some unspecified but measurable period of time. It is.. chronoptological.

But moreso, it is a gleaming tribute to my special someone. She wanted me to get on the writing thing again (that is, writing without remuneration) and so here we are at last. This blogurrection is for you, baby.

As is customary in situations such as these, I will begin with a long time coming introduction, followed by the nuggets of change left by the furtive passing of time. In bullet form no less.

• I've aged! Over the past 18 months or so I have become 18 months or so older, though none the wearier, and it shows! As spoken by the inimitable Michael Scott: "It's like that movie, Benjamin Buttons, but in reverse!"
  
• I picked up and subsequently relinquished a rigorous exercise regimen, filled with muscles and sweat and all the rest. But it wasn't my doleful tendency towards lazing, or Newton's sensible law concerning bodies at rest that got me to quit this time. It was the knees. My knees are no good.
  
• And speaking of jointly appendages, I met my bee's knees, the cat's pajamas, my one and only lomoloving ladyfriend M. You're the best (around)!
  
• New apartment, newfound sense of urgency, some of the best damn Italian food in Bangkok (hush now), rugs, a renewed appreciation for tea, cameras, conjugal appliances, afternoons in second-hand bookstores, Japanese beef, and Love in a Time of Swine Flu.
  

Vignette:

Sitting under heavy covers our fevered minds drifted from each other to our fragmented dreams of what ifs and how whens. The slowly darkening sky beyond our lofty windows hung ominous and important. And we felt then that if we could only hold on to when things are large and important, when there is room for everything all at once, then perhaps we could put an end to what ifs and how whens and give each other over completely to here and now and forever. But we didn't have the eyes to see the lessons of the deep, darkening sky, nor the hearts to hold these tonic moments, and so we drifted along as we always have, as we always will, until the next time.



Random aside:

I like yellow and blue. Oh yes, I do.


Thanks Visual Search Labs!