I'm posting this a day early and I won't be posting next week at all because I'm going to be in Penticton looking at rooms and apartments.

The photo is of a grape leaf in mid-winter, shot at night with illumination provided by a motion sensing yard light.

No more deers my dears, at least not now. Today, another photograph of night: three spruce trees slowly shot, this December past, in Grand Forks city park.

It's been a long week, I've walked into town and back three or four times. I'm tired and sore, but I'm happy.

My nose has pretty much healed up and other than that, things haven't changed much in the past two weeks.

I still have those three rolls to be developed. I should manage to get that done in the next day or two.

I'm not going to have any printing done for a while. I want to save up about a grand (maybe a grand-and-a-half) and then set up properly on the business end, and only then start printing again (thinking a semi-coherent group sufficient for a show). In the meantime, i'll just have fun shooting and scanning and editing, when and where i feel like it.

Today's photo is of Canpar and Roxul in Grand Forks. Shot in the spring, it was a grab shot (like most of my better work) i was just walking by one evening and had my camera and tripod with me.

I've spent a good part of the past two days in a crawl space, running black pipe. Place, fit, figure, and crawl out to use the power vice to cut, ream, and thread the next piece of pipe. Today wasn't as bad, less time in the hole; and at least that part of the job's done, but still, five hours today and five yesterday.

And then of course, silly me, i went out photographing last night, stopped in at the Winnie about nine, went to Wayne's place afterward and didn't get home until three in the morning. Didn't get to bed until four.

Lost my camera bag shortly after leaving Wayne's, it might have been in his building (i stopped on the way out to take another photo) and if so someone from his building might have spotted it. I'll talk to him about it the next time i see him. If the bag is lost, it's no great great loss, all that was in it was a roll of unexposed film, a lens cloth, a cheap UV filter that i haven't used in over a - year - and - a - half, and an opened pack of Zeiss wet-naps.

Today's photo is the Boundary Museum in Grand Forks, I had wanted to crop out the flare caused by some passing headlights when i took the shot, but after exploring the options, felt that it was less damaging to leave it in than to try to remove it (and certainly less work).

Hay There

Well folks, i only have one roll of film to rescan (actually only about 6-7 images) and only one roll of new film to get developed on Thursday (hopefully, there are still a few unexposed frames, but i'm going out tomorrow night so i should be able to remedy that).

So anyway, with this in mind, i've been sorting through my early early work, finding which store prints go with which negatives (everything before mid 2005 was all jumbled together) and i had to sort this all out because i use the store prints to index what was scanned how. It's all part of my misfiling system. With two more rolls to match up, it looks like i've got about a hundred extra prints. I'm pretty sure that some of the prints will match up with film/print combinations that were found "intact," but somewhere or other i've misplaced about three rolls of film (out of twenty-five or thirty pre-misfiling system rolls). Oh well, i suppose that's not too bad over the course five years, and two major and three to five minor moves (the latter depending on which year at college i got that little 35mm point and shoot).

Enough digression. Today's pic is the other one that got a bit munched in developing (only i know where). It was shot at about quarter to eight pm on 2 February 2007, downtown Grand Forks. Too bad it's a fairly new truck eh, but in ten years the designs will be completely different again and in twenty to thirty...

Kentucky Woman

Life is good. Seriously, the last time i felt this good was two years ago.

Thursday i went to karaoke at the GF, and i totally nailed "Bad Moon Rising" by C.C.R. For next week i'm thinking about maybe some Def Leppard or ACDC (listening to a little Motörhead right now, but i don't think i'll find any of that at karaoke).

Between Thursday and Friday, i also picked up three shots that i'm very interested in seeing. The first was Thursday evening, one of the local Chinese food restaurants lit up with the clouds behind it oranged with the last of the sun. Friday evening, i shot Canpar, it's windows a warm orange, in front of a (i'd guess) cerulean sky with fluffy grey clouds. Finally, as i was leaving my buddy Wayne's place at about 2am, the light in the second story hall his apartment building caught my eye (just trust me on this one).

I'm starting to plan things out for my birthday (three weeks), and i know i'm going to have one helluva night. Not only do i deserve it to begin with, but let's face it, 25 is pretty big deal. That's a quarter century, i've seen some amazing shit: the fall of the Berlin Wall, two invasions of Iraq by the U.S., the destruction of the Twin Towers endlessly looped on CNN, the dismantling of the Canadian welfare state (still in progress), and so much other stuff it would take me week to add it all.

This is one of the shots i was worried about (the neg was a bit munched) but it cleaned up real nicely, with a lot less time and work than i had worried it would take. It's a 2 minute exposure at f8, shot 2 February.

*edit: i've decided to title this photo "Kentucky Woman" for no particular reason (that just what was playing at the time i decided to title this).

Ride On

I almost had a very exciting moment. I had two comments to moderate when i logged on. Both turned out to be spam, in fact, both turned out to be the very same spam message, which is very annoying because there is nothing sadder that repetitive spam, and really, isn't it just a sign poor coding for spambot to hit the same site with the same message twice in 24 hours.

Oh well, here's a shot of the Chevron Cardlock in Grand Forks, shot 22 March this year, at about 730 that night. Got some good pictures that night with the rain (and missed more than one excellent shot because of the rain). The pub behind the cardlock is the Station House: wings on Wednesday, corn relish on the burgers (tasty), and the building used to be a railway station way back when people commonly used trains to travel from place to another.

Grand Forks City Hall III

Yet another shot of Grand Forks City Hall, from a very different angle this time. 2 minute exposure @ f8, 35mm angle of view on Fuji Superia 200ASA for anyone interested in such things.

We picked up the shower for the downstairs bath today, "my" bathroom. It'll be ever so nice to be able to hop out bed and straight into a shower without having to half dress and go up-stairs first. Not to mention having room to store my shampoo, conditioner, etc. in the shower (the up-stairs shower is only 30 inches across and used by two other people).

Other than that, my main excitement for the past two days has been going through old papers/bank statements/receipts and deciding what to keep, what to shred, and what to just toss in the recycle. Oh well, the slow days keep the fast days from killing us, just as the fast days keep the slow days from killing us. Balance.

"Reality: A Work in Progress, please STAND BY!"

It's been a busy couple of days. Right now I'm about a-month-and-a-half ahead of schedual as far as scanning film goes, which means that I have some of my old favourites digitised and ready to work with. I got back in touch with an old friend from Penticton, Stirls, the craziest cat I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. I've also made a couple new friends here in GF, which is always good. And I've got this feeling right now like this is going to turn out to be one hell of a good year for me.

The photo is 2nd street by the Pope & Talbot yard here in GF. Shot the beginning of January, I've done something to this one that I don't usually do to my photos these days. Normally, I try to shoot for the 1:1.5 aspect ratio inherent in 35mm film, but this shot works better in a 1:1.25 ratio. It's just a little less grey overcast off the top of the frame, but it seems to pull this together a bit more. I considered a square, 1:1 ratio, but felt that there wasn't enough grey left in that to give a sense of the overall weather conditions.


(Limited Edition Print offer. 5, 10x13" no border, signed $70 Canadian. ? S&H)

Dig the joke?

I can't say that I'm exactly pleased with this shot. It doesn't look too bad like this, but the focus is very soft and that really shows up in the print. At least I think I know the cause of the problem.

The image was shot with a zoom lens (nothing wrong with that per say). Zooms tend to be sharpest in the middle of their range of focal lengths, with things getting a bit "softer" towards either end. I was using my 28-80mm at 80mm. Compounding this problem, I was also shooting "wide open" (i.e. using the largest aperture setting available), most lenses are sharpest when "closed down" 1-2 stops from maximum aperture.

The good news is that the overall conditions (light, weather, etc) of the scene are common enough here and I can re-shoot the scene with the technical problems in mind. The bad news is that things are warming up and I'm still not quite ready to lug around camera and tripod over hill and dale again, so I might have to wait 8 months to a years time before all the factors come together once more.

Fire & Frozen Steel

So much to do these days, and still only 24 hours in a day. Just getting my daily blog fix can take up to an hour, at least having subscribed to the RSS feeds of my favourites saves time, no more loading ten or twenty pages that haven't been updated.

Film to scan, pictures to edit, books to read, prints to make, (an affection starved Shih Tzu to pet so that I only have one hand free to type with). Even if I didn't expose any new film for the next three months, I probably couldn't get caught up on everything, and if I did, there'd just be more to do. There will be more to do.

Oh well, at least I'm not bored.

The photo is something new, shot 26 January this year. What does it mean? it means I've finished scanning the first roll of film of 2007, that's what it means. The bridge over the Granby river, and a very small part of Highway #3.

Froze my ass off to get it, it was worth it.

Went to Penticton today, got a roll of film developed. Several promising shots, I'd say about 8, not counting similars. Still have to scan and see what's really there though.

This one was shot the beginning of this year, but I count it as part of last years work (my "filing system" is based around complete rolls of film, it's simple and let's me easily reference any negative I've shot since the system was implemented in June '05. Before that time, things are just a mess). When I shot this, I was considering mostly the abstract qualities of shape and light.

While I was doing the post work, I inverted the colours, just to be sure the forms/patterns worked. I actually liked that way more, but didn't know if my printer had a large enough colour space. A day later, I'm tempted just to say fuck it and try making a print anyway, it's not like a $1.50 in materials is gonna break the bank.

This less than focused composition was shot last July, in the flower beds outside Grand Forks City Hall. At the time I was mostly interested in the light, its directionality and how it was affecting the colours (how the colours would represent on film). Prior to that night, I don't recall having ever uses a 5 minute exposure, honestly, I think that I had only exposed for 60 seconds and 2 minutes a total of perhaps ten times all together. Since then, I've exposed for 2 minutes or more a total of 13 times, three of those times for 15 minutes each. Often enough, I'm really only making an educated guess about exposure times. Right now, the best I can tell is if I need more that 30seconds wide open based on 60/40 partial centre weighted TTL (through the lens) metring of the total scene, use the "rule of reciprocity," factor in reciprocity failure, and run a gut check based on experience and intuition. So far, it usually works out.

Well, it's Friday, so it's time to get dressed, go out, shoot a few frames, and then go and get drunk (or at least a bit tipsy). Ciao

Grand Forks City Hall II

Things have been fairly slow the past few days. I can't complain, it gives me time to read, research equipment, figure out what the hell I'm doing and where I'm going.

One of the things I've been looking at is a 13x19in printer, and realising how close I am to actually getting one, naturally leads to other thoughts. Such as, "when should I register for tax purposes?" and "should I even register for GST?" The GST is a federal sales tax, in Canada, that is levied against just about every product sold in Canada. Small businesses having "taxable sales" under a certain threshold (I think it was $10 000 a year, I'll have to check that again) don't have to register for and collect the tax, but they can voluntarily register, and while they would then have to collect the tax, they would also be rebated any GST paid on equipment and materials purchases.

If I'm predominantly selling directly to other persons in Canada, then I don't necessarily end up with any more money in my pocket at the end of the day by registering (at least not where total end cost to the consumer is fixed at $X for both scenarios). Where things get interesting is in the realm of commissioned sales and exports. There is no GST on exported goods, such as a 12x18 photographic print shipped to Detroit or Hong Kong, and if the print is sold on commission through a gallery then they handle the tax collection. Similarly, GST does not appear to apply to publication and usage rights (but don't take my word on it). It really depends on how much of what type of sale to where, as to whether or not it make any sense at all to register for GST.

Naturally with all these thoughts, I also started to consider "value added" services for direct sales. To be brief, for either matting and framing, or for just matting, it turns out that it will only cost me about 60% more to gussy up a 12x18 print than it would cost to gussy up an 8x12 (and to be clear the 12x18 covers 2.25 times the area of the 8x12).

*the photo is Grand Forks City Hall, taken on a wonderfully misty January night.

Grand Forks City Hall

I've been spending some time going back and adding labels to all my previous posts (mostly about the photos, not so much about my words). As I've been doing this, I've had the opportunity to look at some of the night photographs that I had posted early on in this blog's life. Photos that come from a time before I got my own film scanner, and so had to rely on store scans (some of these I've already re-scanned, and others have similarity with new work that I've scanned myself).

I find that having my own scanner has really opened up many new possibilities in the way that I interpret an image. With picture CDs, the purpose of the jpeg is to allow U to get an exact duplicate of the store print, meaning that the file has the same (largely) automated "corrections" to contrast and colour as the print that U took home. With the scanner, I start with the raw and unedited data that exists within the piece of film, and I get to choose what "corrections" will be made, how, and in what order. Often enough, I find that it's just easier to get the effect that I want when working with the raw data, because, often enough, those automated store processes either edit out, or over emphasise, various subtleties that I really like working with (or at least having the option of working with). And all of this without even talking about the difference in file size, 20 million picture pixels compared with little more than 1.5 million.

The photo is actually the first shot that I ever took of Grand Forks City Hall, on 11 July of 2006. Ironically, I probably could have gotten the same end result off of picture CD jpeg (at least as far as this blog is concerned, printing is whole 'nother story).

Well, New Year's was pretty much a bust. Blew all my money at the casino and wound up going to bed early. Grandma did pretty well though, she managed to win back about half of the cost of our little outing.

Beyond that, there was actually quite a bit to bitch about, such as the in hotel restaurant being closed on New Year's Eve, but it just doesn't seem worth the effort to type it all out. So here's a photo from Grand Forks City Park, taken last year in June or July (looking at it, I have a few ideas about how to re-shoot this spot in about six month's time).

PS, I didn't make any New Year's resolutions (it saves me the trouble of having to break them later), I am, however, working on my list of goals for 2007.

Happy New Years

This is yet another shot of the Kettle river, taken on Friday the 13th of Octobre 2006. I set up my tripod on a small (minuscule) bit of beach in city park, within perhaps five feet of the water (probably a bit less). Almost all the light was coming from the Pope & Talbot yard, just beyond the top of the far bank.

I know the three big things ($ wise) that I'm going to be working towards next year. A 35mm f2 Zeiss ZF lens, a spot metre (which will be particularly indispensable since the combination of the the Zeiss lens with my heavily computerised Nikon camera body knocks out TTL metring), and a 13 inch pigment based printer.

I'll also continue working on my generic and expansive pocket-portfolio, and I still have a backlog of 20+ old rolls of film to scan (don't expect to get too much of use out of the oldest rolls, but I do know that there are one or two gems back there).

Since I don't know if I'm gonna manage another post before the arbitrarily set cosmic odometre rolls over, Happy New Years, and I see U in 2007.

Trestle Over the Kettle River

Well, merry Consumersmas and all that.

I'm really looking forward to next year, I figure I'll manage to get both a new lens and a new printer (something 13 inch and pigment based).

All in all, things are pretty slow right now. I've started work on a pocket portfolio, and there's still that huge backlog of scanning to do from a time before I had a film scanner. But other than that it's just so quiet.


This old rail trestle hasn't been used in a long time. It hasn't seen any restoration, like the other on in town, but this one isn't on the Trans Canada Trail. I guess they figured it wasn't a good idea to run a hiking trail through the middle of a saw mill. Go figure.

Yesterday, New Years, and last August

I went down to Chewelah Wa. yesterday, with my grandparents, to the casino there. I didn't take my camera, mainly because it was a spur of the moment type trip and we didn't leave here until 2pm. Still, I did see some pretty country on the way down, and one or two interesting things that would have been worth the film to shoot (even in the overcast dusk).

We only spent about an hour in the casino, because we had to get back to the dog. The Fuzzbutt's day is loaded kinda heavily in the late afternoon/evening; with a walk, her supper, and her evening treats. If we had left closer to noon, we could have stayed longer, and if the weather was nice and temperate we would've taken Hound with us, but... Anyway, I didn't do too well at the casino, but between my grandparents we came out ahead around US$120.

For New Years, we've reserved rooms at the Lakeside Hotel & Casino in Penticton, with $100 spending money each (sort of a trade off for a quite Christmas). And yes, Furball's coming with us.

The photo was shot last August, in GF of course.

Right Side of the Tracks

Just spent the past two-and-a-half hours scanning the month old roll of film that I finally got developed yesterday. Scanned a total of 16 out the 24 images as having some potential, but I'll probably only wind up using six or seven, even just to show them here.

The photo shows the tracks that I have to cross each time I go into town, and also part to the Pope & Talbot yard. Shot as I was walking home from the bar one August midnight.