Photographs... 


Just a few images to post this time. It's been dreary, by that I mean rain and/or mist with low-hanging and thick gray clouds blocking all but a neutral gray light. Good I suppose for black and white photographs, perhaps I should try that approach. Anyway, the first two images are a sequence I shot for Christmas presents for Leif and Adam's grandmothers (both grandfathers are dead). The other two are silly but what the heck. 


I shot these images in natural light in my studio over Thanksgiving weekend. This layout was done in Photoshop
and was my preferred series sequence. However, after two $9.67 purchases from Costco's photo "do it yourself"
kiosks I realized that the software used in these simple and relatively fool-proof systems does not allow it to waste
photopaper image area. The results I got back showed only the middle, cutting off both Adams on the left and both
Leifs on the right. Then I realized the kiosk imaging software was trying to maximize the coverage area and was
clipping the image in this format - which is 2-by-1 format when the software was expecting either a 3-by-4 or a
4-by-3 format. So, I decided to play the game - see below.



This is the format which the kiosk software liked and I had three 11x14 matte finish prints made. Two of them I
framed in 13x16 light maple wooden frames and wrapped them, put Christmas cards on them, packed them and
shipped them to Connecticut (Katherine's mom, or Grandma) and to North Carolina (my mom, or Grandma Mary).
Adam picked the frames for the grandmothers. The frames match the skin tones in the final, photopaper, prints.
The third print was for the wall of my studio and I picked a 13x16 matte black wooden frame to match the overall
black of the photo background. It's a good series of the brothers - they were playing with each other and with me
and their facial expressions have that axiomatic look of the devil having a good time.



One of a thousand online sites which offer Flash animation with a
gimmick offered the user the opportunity to take some basic South Park
character features and build a character which described the user.
This is the South Park character I built for myself. Infer what you will.



Okay, so I have thousands of free hours on my hands and sometimes get carried away wasting them. This is a
snapshot of the results of MacBench 5, an old OS-9 benchmarking program which runs from CD which MacWorld
magazine published and distributed for rating Mac computer systems in the late '90s through the early 00's. My
old, main, machine, which I still have and which still runs and which is turned on but rarely used, is a beige
G3/300 desktop. I bought it during the transition period from SCSI to firewire. It has a built-in zip drive, built-in
CD reader, built-in floppy drive (wow!), and two internal busses - ATA and SCSI. It also has built-in 10-base-T
ethernet and three PCI slots. I upgraded the onboard video with an ATI Rage 128 and put an Orange Micro
USB/Firewire card in - but don't use that presently. The other slot had a 100-base-T adapter until that burned
out. LIke I said, this was my previous "main" machine. Ever since the move to Seattle, my iBook G3/600 has
been the main machine. I bought it from SmallDog Electronics back in April of 2002 for $1,200.00 because it
was a 14-inch, 1024x768 LCD system with onboard firewire and USB and an Airport slot, which is filled with
the only card it can take - the 802.11B 10mbps card (the bus won't accept the extreme card's data rate). I have
upgraded to the max RAM, 640, but kept the internal 20 gig drive because I've got the firewire and several
outboard firewire drives. So, one day last week when I was cleaning out old CDs I ran across the benchmark
CD and decided to run it. It only runs in Classic on the iBook (which is running OSX 10.3.6) but I figured "why
not." As you can see, even running in Classic mode, the processor is almost as fast as the native OS-9 and
everything else is MUCH faster. That's actually my experience. Don't know why the publishing graphics test
didn't show for the iBook (which is the yellow) but it doesn't matter.

Now, some month or year soon I'll upgrade all this stuff to a G5, or by then, probably a G6. 

Posted: Mon - December 6, 2004 at 06:37 PM          

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