sixthirteen photo blog

In my last entry which I wrote weeks and weeks ago, I complained of it being hot.  Silly me.  Since those frosty days of June the temperatures have just been nuts.  My friendly local weather station has us at 39 days straight above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the forecast shows no end to that.  Today it was 111 degrees.  Yesterday 109.

Texas is always hot in the Summer, of course, but this year it has been just a little more brutal than usual.  Nobody’s going outside.

So, no, I haven’t done very much photography.  Just enough to keep me sane and that is all.

And I haven’t yet found gainful employment, either.  I came very close to a gig with a certain company that was actually photography and videography related, but the problem was I had to get a high level security clearance.  Now I am an honest person, but my dad wasn’t (at least in this company’s eyes), so they determined that the chances were too high that I’d be rejected for a clearance.  Hiring me and walking me through that process would be a waste of money for them.

I find that very disappointing.  It would have been a dream job for me.  Decent salary, great benefits.  I would have had my own studio, office and workshop.  My own Frontier printer.  They were even going to outfit me with whatever photographic gear I needed to get the job done.

Don’t want to talk about that anymore.  It’s sad.

But all things considered, I’m pretty happy.  Sure I am running out of money quickly and jobs are damn near impossible to find, but hey, I’m not alone and I take some solace in that.  At least I don’t have debt.

Here’s the link to the story. (courtesy MacTrast)

I have enjoyed my iPhone, but when it comes time to get a new phone I doubt it will be an Apple.  I’m more likely to go with Android.  The reasons are many, but you can add this to the list.  A phone is a phone, and whether smart or not, it should do what you want when you want it to do it.  The technology should not be making moral or ethical decisions for the user.

Sometimes when you go to a show, you experience more than music. In 1994 I went with a friend to a fIREHOSE show at Fair Park band shell in Dallas.  Without going into all the details, a few of DPD’s finest decided that a couple of drunks throwing bottles at the stage lights constituted a riot.  Riot police were called in, and without any warning tear gas was fired into the crowd.  There were probably other emergency exits at the band shell, but they were either blocked or people just couldn’t find them.  The seats at the band shell were benches cemented into the ground.  Immovable.  So people were tripping and climbing over these benches and each other toward the only visible exit, which was blocked off by a line of riot cops.  As the crowd advanced on them, trying to get away from the gas, the police got brutal.  I saw people shoved down with those giant shields and then stepped on by the crowd.  I saw people break the line and get beat up.  Luckily I got through unscathed.

Funny thing…this incident didn’t make the local news.  It wasn’t even in the Dallas newspaper.  I found one sentence about it in the Fort Worth paper, buried in the entertainment section.

If we had iPhones and YouTube in 1994, the footage would have traveled the world over.   The Dallas Police Department would have been held accountable for firing tear gas into a confined crowd and then beating people for trying to get away.  But we didn’t have iPhones.  We didn’t have YouTube.  We barely had internet at all.  And it would seem that the RIAA and Apple would like to roll us back 20 years.

When I go to a rock show in Dallas, a city in which I have seen numerous but less dramatic cases of police misconduct, I want people to be able to record evidence.  It’s for everyone’s own good.

Further more, what if the regimes in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere had the technology to disable recording on mobile devices?  If a protest crops up in China, the first thing they are going to do is fire of a wave of infrared signal telling every iPhone to disable its camera.

I really don’t know if staying away from Apple is going to solve anything in the long run, unfortunately.  I’m sure other smart phone manufacturers and software companies will be pressured into adopting these kinds of measures now that a giant like Apple has invented them.  While hackers may be able to get around circumvent this “feature”, why should they have to?

And it has been June for a while, it seems.  So what has been going on?

Technically still unemployed, but I’ve been able to scrounge some dollars here and there.  So far it has been enough to pay my living expenses and even a little more.  I’m getting pretty close on a couple of jobs, I think.  If I do find steady, gainful employment, the first thing I do after I pay off my dentist debt will be to buy this.   Now that is a camera.  Since I’m not a pro photographer, it’s more than I need, of course.  But never again would I miss 35mm.  And, really, I don’t think still cameras are going to get much better than that.  I suppose they could get so good that they deliver what medium format film used to, but I don’t need that.  If I ever do need that I will rent it.  Yeah, the a900 will be just fine until it wears out.

Anyway, my teeth are better.  I was having some trouble with my jaw bone trying to grow through my gums.  Apparently this is normal.  Can be quite painful but it’s nothing like I was experiencing over the Winter and Spring, so no big deal.

Texas is hot, but I have been shooting photos anyway.  Last week I went to East Texas for a change in scenery and I came back with two full memory cards.  Before that I hadn’t shot much for a couple of weeks, but in May I did.

Why isn’t any of it on the blog, then?  I don’t know.  I just have this weird aversion to processing photos.  They’re piling up in Lightroom faster than I could ever hope to process them, and I was already behind.  There are even a few shots from 2009 that I haven’t processed yet.  A bunch from 2010 and I’ve processed almost nothing I’ve shot this year.

So it’s a pretty good thing I have Lightroom, then.  Someday I’ll get to work on those photos and with LR it’s so easy to see which ones are worth working on.  Love that program.

Anyway, I’m sorry that I haven’t been visiting photoblogs as much as I used to.  Today I did visit quite a few, but I’m the type that will sit there and ruminate on photos for a while so it takes me a long time to get around to everyone.  But I love doing it, which makes me wonder why I go for so long without making the rounds.

I was discussing with someone yesterday about how I need to look at peoples’ work more often.  It helps me in my work and it keeps me in a photo-centric routine.  I’m a musician and I couldn’t imagine trying to write without listening to a bunch of music.  It’s the same with photography.  We should look at and enjoy what’s out there.

And I set this blog up for a reason but haven’t followed through.  I really need to get on that.  Texas is so brutally hot in the Summer that I will probably want to stay inside a lot.  No excuse for not doing this stuff.

Last time I wrote to you, I was very busy.  At that time I had been beaten down by my business spiraling southward and my personal life had all but fallen apart as a result of that.  But I was hopeful.  It was going to be my last stand, and I was confident things would work out.  By summer I figured I’d be right back on top again.

Well, it didn’t work out that way.  I will not get into the details except to say at least I went down swinging.  I do feel good about that.  I’ve seen some people run into financial problems that just destroy them gradually.  They never made a stand, taking things passively which caused them to sort of erode away.  Me?  I went out with a fucking bang.  I spent what money I had left on what I thought was a good gamble and it just didn’t work out.  Oh well.

I’m not really all that depressed.  I see it as a chance to rise from the ashes and make something new out of myself.  Yet, doing so is as difficult as I expected it would be.  I’d be content now just to find some 8-5 gig with modest pay and healthcare, but they’re not easy to find at the moment.  Eventually I’ll get one, and hopefully sooner than later.

I have been taking photos from time to time, but I haven’t felt like doing anything with them except for importing them into Lightroom.  Sometimes I’ve been busy with cleaning up what remains of my business.  There’s still dental work left to be done and other health concerns that I have which have taken up some of my time.  And I’ve been helping my family out with a few things.  Overall, though, I’m not that busy and don’t want to be.  It’s been years since I’ve had a vacation so I guess I’m just taking time out from everything.

Anyway, I’ll be fine in the long run and I have no doubt about that, but some difficult days are ahead.

It is Friday (tomorrow is Saturday) and I had my wisdom teeth pulled out on Monday.  Since the surgery, I have had no horrible pain like I was having before.  I have had a little pain all the time, though, and a few other issues.  There were some minor complications with my procedure, though the important stuff went fine and I’m healing the way I’m supposed to.

I have been prescribed Lortab, a narcotic painkiller.  It started out being a helpful little pill, but as time went on it became more and more evil.  It made me sick to my stomach and nervous as hell.  I don’t know why it took me so long to figure out that Lortab was the main problem I was having, not the surgery.  I have figured it out, though, and am on Advil only from now on.

I hope to be doing stuff tomorrow.  Being trapped inside in pain and sick and everything else has just about driven me fucking nuts.  I need to get out and resume my life, and I am looking forward to it so much.  And even if I don’t get “out” tomorrow in any meaningful way, I’m pretty sure my head will have cleared up to do something around here if nothing else.  Photo editing, photo taking here in the burbs.  Something.

Anyway, it’s good to see that some people have finally started to find this site.  Soon I will add more features.  More talk about other people’s photography and creativity in general.  Maybe I’ll even post some of my music, I don’t know.

This post will probably be deleted, but for now I have to write and have shuttered my other blogs.

For most of 2011 I have been in pain to one degree or another, and actually it stretches back farther than that but back then it would come and go.  I have wisdom tooth that’s broken down the middle, leaving a big hole and a knife-like object where it used to sit unobtrusively.  The wisdom tooth right below that is impacted.  The two on my right are fine but show signs of decay and must come out, too.

I don’t even remember when I started going to the dentist.  It was in February and the pain I was in was worse than any I’ve ever experienced in my life, including broken bones and other trauma.  Going to the dentist didn’t help me at first.  They identified the problem and did a root planing, but the following weekend the pain had grown so severe I went to the ER.  The best description I can come up with is that it felt like a hand grenade had gone off right in front of my face.  The worst pain wasn’t really in the tooth itself, though the tooth and surrounding tissue hurt quite a bit.  The worst of it was centered behind my left eye.  From my shoulder up to my ear on that side was in agonizing pain.

I went back to the dentist as soon as I could.  He gave me antibiotics.  They, of course, took time to work.  I got thrush while waiting for them to work, which sucked.  But eventually the pain began to subside a little.  I remember my first “good day” in quite a while happened to come when I met with the oral surgeon.  I was expecting to have surgery within a couple days, but no.  March 28 was the first day he was open.  I called other oral surgeons in the area and they were also busy.  So I’ve been waiting all this time, and finally on Monday the issue will be taken care of.

I’ve had a few real bad nights this week.  At least it’s not an every single day ordeal like it was before, but I could be in debilitating pain at any time and with very little warning.  Last night, for example, I was cleaning out my car.  Nothing strenuous.  Suddenly I felt it begin, and within two minutes I was in a darkened room crying.  Crying!  Hours went by before the pain went away.  And it went away as quickly as it came on, leaving only a bit of soreness.  Then around midnight it happened again.  This time it only lasted a couple hours and the last hour in particular wasn’t so severe.  But then 3am came.  Worst in weeks.  Eventually it went away, though, and I got to sleep.

I woke up very tired, but just a little bit sore and that’s it.  I’d feel pretty good if not for all the shit I went through all night long.  I look forward to Monday.

After surgery I can’t smoke for at least a couple of days, so I’m going to take that opportunity to try to quit.  Since the economic collapse I’ve been smoking heavier and heavier, so I expect to have a rough go of it.  But it’s time to quit.  I still enjoy smoking, but there are so many things about smoking I’ve grown to hate: the cost, the smell that gets in your clothes (and everything else), the little bits of ash and dust that get everywhere, the way it makes me feel when I wake up, and on and on.  I’m turning 35 soon, and it has now affected my blood pressure.  I find myself short of breath at times.  Too young for that.  Too old to get away with smoking like I did a few years ago.

About the same time I began to smoke heavier, I started to drink a lot of soda.  I don’t really know why.  But I’m quitting that too.  I don’t expect to gain a lot of weight from quitting smoking because I will be consuming a lot fewer calories.

It’s going to be hell.  Recovery from surgery, nicotine withdrawal, caffeine withdrawal.  A long couple weeks.  And it probably won’t be an easy road after that, but by the time those two weeks pass, the worst should be over.  I want and need to be healthier.

Wish me luck?

A fence post and field lit by the 03/19/11 "Supermoon"

Click on the image to the left to see the whole thing.

Itasca is a very small town a little more than 40 miles south of both Dallas and Fort Worth.  In the photo the camera is pointed toward Dallas, which is why you see some orange in the sky.  Light pollution.

The image is pretty much straight out of the camera.  I had trouble getting the “supermoon” itself in any frames, but it sure cast a lot of light.  And moonlight looks pretty good if you ask me.  I’ve always ignored full moons before but I don’t think I will from now on.

There’s a bit of a smudgy dark place toward the right of the frame.  I’m pretty sure that was a weed moving back and forth in the wind.  Don’t know what else it could have been.  It was very windy that night.  I could have taken the smudge out but I decided not to.

Anyway, I’m having all my wisdom teeth pulled on Monday, so this will be the last image I post for a while.  And I suppose it’s possible that I’ll die on the operating table so this could be the last thing I ever post to the internet.

I’m living in a temporary location and only brought with me a very small Samsung Synchmaster that was about five years old.  It served as the secondary monitor when I had a full office.  When I lived at my old place, one of my neighbors calibrated my primary monitor for me, but he moved away about a month before I did.  So I never got that second monitor calibrated at all.

Well, I got tired of that pretty quickly.  Right after Christmas I bought some calibration hardware of my own, like I mentioned in my last post.  Had some problems with it.  Got a new monitor thinking there was a problem with the old Samsung, but it turned out that there was a problem with the Spyder itself.  Datacolor replaced it and I spent this morning on the phone with a very knowledgeable fellow from Switzerland.

After talking to him and sorting through/solving issues, it occurs to me that I cannot be the only one who’s had a bastard of a time trying to calibrate an H233H.  Lots of them were sold, and a few undoubtedly went to photographers who wanted to save a few bucks.  I was unable to find any good assistance on the internet, but hopefully I’m about to post some and maybe others will find it in the search engines.

First off, the H233H is a budget monitor.  You already know this.  As such it’s not exactly suited to editing photos.  Calibration makes a huge difference on this monitor so it’s definitely worth doing, but there are some things a calibration will not overcome.  I’ll get to those later.

Okay.  I hope you have the Spyder 3, and I hope you went ahead and got the Elite version.  The “Pro” and “Express” versions don’t have all the necessary options, I don’t think.  The Pro may and I may have forgotten.  That’s what I actually bought, but mine was a rare defect and they replaced it with an Elite.  Lucky me!  I don’t know about any of the other pucks out there, so if you have one of those you may or may not find anything of interest here.

Step one.  Darken your room.  I mean it.  That’s important.

When you start off, your Spyder software will ask you to select what controls you have.   Do not check contrast, even though you do have a contrast control.  Check only Brightness and RGB sliders.

Then, before you get to the actual calibration, you’ll come to a screen that tells you your monitor needs to have been on for half an hour, blah blah blah.  I guess that’s important.  But it says to reset your display to its default settings and that’s NOT what you want to do.  Instead, go into your menu and under “Acer eColor Management”, select “Graphics”.  If you choose user like I did or leave at the default (whatever that is), you’ll never reach your brightness target.  Selecting graphics will increase the contrast to 60 and the brightness way, way up into the nineties.  Next, you want to go to color temperature, which I think is “warm” by default.  Change it to “User”.

After that go to the next screen in Datacolor’s software.  The first thing you’ll do is change the color balance.  Chances are the monitor’s menu has disappeared, so go back into it and go back to the color temperature.  Hit menu again and you’ll be presented with a slider for R, G, and B.  The software will help you do that and it’s easy enough.  If your monitor is like mine (and why wouldn’t it be?), it’s too strong in the reds and greens and doesn’t have enough blue.  Fixing that is pretty easy.

After you’ve balanced the color, the puck will do it’s readings for a while and then it’s time to set your brightness.  This is where I was getting stuck before.  The H233H would never reach the target brightness.  And that’s why it was important to change that eColor thing before you started out, because with that done it’s easy to hit the target.  In fact you will probably have to back off of the brightness by quite a bit.

So then you just let the puck finish its business, and at the end you save your profile.  The next step is to look at the proofing screen.  Now, things may look a bit funny to you at first.  You’ve taken out quite a bit of both red and green so things may appear to have a cool hue.  But let your eyes adjust to it for a while.  Work a little bit, then open the software back up and go straight back to the proofs.  If you’ve done everything right you’ll hopefully see neutral black and whites and good skin tone in the color photo.

Then go to Lagom and go through the screens.  This is the first time I’ve had a cheap monitor that passed all the important tests on there.  Reviews of the H233H will say it cannot represent darker grays, but after calibration it does just fine.  The one Lagom test  it will not pass is viewing angle.

And that’s one of the problems calibration can’t do much about.  It’s a cheap monitor and you pretty much have to look straight on at it or things will get fucked.  This display in particular is worse than most, unfortunately.  The good thing about calibration is that it won’t look quite as bad.  Before if I sat back in my chair the top of the monitor would get noticeably warmer.  Now it shifts cooler and that sort of fits into the Windows environment a little better.  It’s still inaccurate, of course, so keep the photo you’re editing in the middle of the screen and just look at it straight on.  The other thing calibration can do nothing about is the color gamut.  Inexpensive monitors just can’t cover a lot of ground, color-wise, and that’s all there is to it.  You should get all of sRGB, at least.  You will not come close to Adobe RGB or True Color, of course.  You need a very expensive monitor to do that.

When I get into a more permanent living situation, I’m going to throw away my old Sony CRT monitor and buy a good flat panel.  The Acer H233H will be a pretty good second monitor in a dual monitor setup.