Religion

Today is a sad day in the history of humanity. hypocrisy has reached new levels.

http://www.cafepress.com/objectivemin.50869699

Idiots.

11 hours later

here is the first color test i did for my camera obscura with the film i am planning to use for the final series.



comments are welcome, as well as critique and suggestions. I would like to know what you think about the idea, how would you go about improving it and how would you change.

Tea give you cancer. I'm screwed.

I get online and this is the latest update on yahoo news:

"Researchers found drinking tea with a temperature above 70C inceased the risk of oesophageal cancer eight-fold.

But if you let your cuppa cool for five minutes it should be safe to drink, experts have said.

The cancer warning was issued after a study in Northern Iran where tea is often drunk piping hot."

Take a minute there to grasp the full imbecility of this string of letters. "s-a-f-e t-o d-r-i-n-k". Are they talking about tea? IT IS SAFE TO DRINK! I've done it thousands of times. If you would be talking about drinking mercury or sulphuric acid ... then you can put the words "should be safe to drink" in the sentence. Maybe if you'd drink it, you'd die and spare us your idiocy.

There is a new reason to stay at home, covered in your blanket and shake like a Chihuahua. There's a new factor that will increase the risk of you dying. Is this the world we live in? Are these idiots actually thinking before creating this kind of studies and spoon feeding everyone the crap in their head?

Why, i ask you people, is humanity so hell-bent on planting fear into everyone? I drink 3-4 cups of tea a day. And by the expressions on some of your faces while you are reading this, i can easily deduce that some of you are waaaaay more screwed than me.

Fear is fun. If you do it well it can be an excellent past time activity. But for fuck's sake do it properly. Don't tell people that hot tea causes cancer! It's like you morons think that we fell asleep on a nuclear reactor for 20 years and our brains have melted. And we are now nothing more than pieces of meat with eyes.

Fear no Gods

Regardless,somewhere there is a meaning to this song that sometimes doesn't let me sleep well at night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqiojZAlNt8&feature=related

Comments are not welcome. Do refrain.

Final test

Yesterday i left the Wista to expose the last bw negative text, for about 10 hours. This is the expected result at approx f 25, iso 100. Tomorrow the bed is going out, the furniture is getting moved about and the color shot will take place. Hopefully.
Here is the last test, with lenses, that i have done.

Roxy - Broadstairs shoot

Here's one of the models i shot Saturday, and played around in Photoshop for a bit. Nothing too aggressive. The happiness of having some good pictures coincided with the sadness of having 1x8 GB card fuck up on a permanent basis (doesn't format, doesn't open, doesn't do nothing - note to self never trust technology) and two letters with the bills.

Apparently everyone received the bills in this period so there was quite a bit of moaning from various people in the uni. Which made me feel quite good about not being the only financially illiterate idiot who didn't quite have the money for bills and stuff.

Today we also officially start the Camera Obscura project (my displeasing financial state comes from printing the Paris exhibition series A2 size, buying 4x5 color films from stores - because 7dayshop are all out and paying for trips to shoot for projects. FOOD has become a luxury until further notice)

So i was out with the Ds Mark 2 (thanks again Ionut) and here's a small bit of what i did. More to come, i think.

Cheers.

Nelda's Test

I took a stupid little test i found on my girlfriend's blog. This is kind of something a good friend of mine would tell me.

"You're a Prick

73% Extraversion, 97% Intuition, 87% Thinking, 87% Judging

People love to hate you, because you love to argue. The strange thing is you probably took that as a compliment. Why, I bet you've already got a witty comeback all lined up ready to throw right back at me.

What you don't realise is that your inane obsession with debating pisses everyone off. Whatever happened to us all trying to get along? Some people are as shallow or stupid as you might think and trying to know them is the key to being better.

Believe it or not, but there's more to life than your expansive knowledge and sharp repertoire. Get out of your steel tower and be a part of the world. Listen to the birds singing and the children playing and don't be so cold and distant all the time.

While you're up in Nevernever land, getting excited over future possibilities and your crazy theories, WE have to put up with trying to talk to someone who's constantly locked up away in their own sick head, who refuses to accept reality with it's good and bad

Your personality is ideal for that of a future artist, as you are already slightly autistic, unreasonably rude to everyone and have proven on several occasion your superiority towards the human race. Dali perhaps?"

How cool is that? 50 questions and some shitty little internet program got me all figured out :)

Beauty is a cruel mistress

Photoshop day. Despite rumors i heard about the digital classes not being so good, i signed up for an intensive digital workshop for the second semester. The people that said it wasn't good were the first semester (first time ever) lab rats so it might have gone a bit astray but this semester's classes are quite good.

Apart from the masks and layers and whatever else we learned, today we stumbled onto the perfect skin. Model's skins. The ones you see in the glossy mags that have no black heads, no zits, no moles, nothing. The perfect woman.

Having Jon Hempstead's image at our side, both initial and the final outcome, we got the idea, well Alex Kent did, but still, we were there so it counts, to blend the images in "differences" mode. For those of you who don't really know what it is (which i was part of until some time ago) it shows the differenced between any two layers/images. If the image is blac, the layers are the same. The more colorful it gets, the bigger the differences. So, from beast to beauty... this is the difference.



Hair, face, everything was retouched. So girls stop feeling bad about yourselves. Kate Moss ain't that big of a beauty and she made it. On the other hand, some other people i know don't need photoshop, they need a new face.

Dan Holdsworth Workshop

So yesterday we had the Dan Holdsworth workshop. Longest workshop we've ever had. Closing in on 13 hours. Quite fun. Here's a couple of shots that made it through. The Flexcolor seemed to be crashing at every goddamn picture, so i could only process these ones without losing my patience. Or sanity.

100th post

This is my 100th post of the blog.

Jenny Hewson is a toad.

The Social Contract

We've learned an important lesson today: go with your instinct.

Trying to do what you want, you get put down by your tutors. Trying to do what your tutors want, you get put down by your tutors. But they appreciate the "trying to do what you want" in the "trying to do what they want" now.

How madningly unhelpful and confusing is that?

Critics, especially art critics, at least half of the time aren't sure if they like something or they just ... don't know. The other half, they're sure they don't. But unless it's followed by compulsive niceness and doses of Valium, almost always will make the artist fell bad about him/herself.

And makes them try harder. That's what they should do right? No other use in existing.

Here's a few more shots with the M6 for this last project.

Slightly different news

Tonight is the 27th anniversary of the band my dad and his mates started back in communist times to promote music, poetry and to proudly stick it to the regime.





And they finally fired the manager. My childhood dreams and hopes have now fully come true. Save for that one where i wanted to be a crane, but that's something else.

A new age dawns

After a long waiting period I finally got most of the items I needed. The camera obscura project is well on its way now. I am shooting the Wista most likely and have constructed a combination of thin lenses to try and sharpen the images on the wall. This morning I did a test with it where I exposed for about three hours, which came out quite under exposed. I scanned it in Flexcolor and modified what was there to be modified and got a decent image.



The sharpness is really amazing. Now I just hope I will manage to get everything sorted out in time and have good images before the B:fest Arts Festival at the end of May. I will. I guess. I shot it on ISO 100 black and white sheet film at F16 more or less and with 190 minutes exposure. As it turns out it's quite under exposed and thus I would need to have a 6 or even twelve-hour exposure to get it right.


(100% blow up. The color ones will be mind blowing :) )

I am insisting on the closed aperture as I would like to have all of the items in the room in focus and not just the wall. I am still working on it and will have a little bit of a head ache because I am not quite sure that black and white and color films behave in the same fashion at long exposure (i.e.: lose their sensitivity with the increasing of the exposure time) or if there is any way I can manage to get out of the room. I am considering having a pin-up curtain to get out of the rooms I photograph - and not be trapped there for hours and hours.

Regardless of it, the exposure times are going to be horrific and I will need to find people who don't need their room for the whole day. Volunteers?

Mail me at rt@4x4offroads.com (Near London, Paris or Bucharest please)

Art Classes DIY

I walked 15 miles yesterday (half by choice) and had lots of time to think. Sometimes it just feels quite good to be alone. Have a shitty camera and shoot with it, because real artists don't care about their equipment - yeah, real artists also die from overdose or kill themselves, or both - please go ahead and be a real artist. Start today.

What we learned this week:

1) Pictures of yourself in a gallery are cool. They help the person who sees your pictures link up with your experience (no thanks. please fuck off and just don't look at my pictures. I refuse to use the timer to take pictures of myself. end of story)

2) Trash is cool. pictures of trash create identity. People link to that. Look, we use the same laxative. I can relate to that - i might like his pictures. (Imbecile!)

3) Subtle is not always good. Subtle is good because it sounds intelligent when you say it. Not when you do it ( subtle in pictures is bad because most idiots won't fucking get it )

4) art can be made with compact cameras. They are nice and very very good. People don't notice you ( I hate compact cameras. And people who take shitty pictures with them and after that hang them at the Tate Modern. Only an idiot could write a book about 20 unsharp pixelated pictures done with a phone )

4) The verbal diarrhea that you produce is always more important than others ( for me it's a rule - because you're still reading this )

But i suppose the path less traveled and not taking the free ride in your own life kinda make better topics of discussion. Dead chickens and pictures of your feet just don't cut it.

Ektar

So in the weekend i had a few rolls of film to put through a Leica M6, of which most interesting was one i saw in a shop and i wanted it: Ektar 100. Here are some of the test results.

Friends will be friends - Fundraiser

One of the most important assets you can have in life is friends. They can't be bought, or sold, but i presume that you could get a pretty nice price for a really good one.

And it's friends you help when they're in need because you know that whatever happens, they'll have your back for better or worse.

I presume it's my time to try and help a friend and, since there's not much i can do, i'm writing this.

My friend, Andreea, is one of only a handful of people i know who have the strength and determination to do what she did throughout the years. She owns a highly visited blog where she writes quite frequently, which has received a number of awards. The texts there have created the basis for two theater plays which have been on for a while now and have also been awarded important prizes in Austria.

Her life depends on a specialized electric wheelchair which she doesn't have anymore. A new one is priced around 5000 euros and it's quite hard to get the money. Friends have helped as much as they could but at this point there is still need for 500 more euros.

For this she's organized a sale, where friends have put up stuff like earrings, vases, blouses and frames, for people to purchase in order to raise money. I offered to put up two of my prints as well, for not very much money - but in the hope that they'll help. All of the stuff is CRAFTED AND PAINTED BY HAND (well save for my images) and is up for sale for very very little money. They're excellent gifts for anyone and their prices are a whole lot less than what you would pay in a normal shop for a consumer item - plus that all of them are unique. So what i would say is go to

http://www.andreeadora.wordpress.com/

Check out the pictures and see if there's anything you like. If so (even if it's in another language) drop a line at blogcaritabil@gmail.com and ask them to calculate the price in pounds for you. YOU'LL BE SURPRISED!

Give it a shot. It won't hurt and it will actually help someone and make you feel a whole lot better about yourself.