Jeff Bark

Stumbled upon this guy the other day on a web site that scrapes content. Direct links too.

"How very rude!"

Yes, yes, I thought the same.

Had the guy had a damn water mark I would not have spent 20 minutes staring at blogger code to figure out which direct link was his. That was the only thing that allowed me to track him down.

How many other people would do that? Not many.

WATERMARK your shitz please!

Anyways, his name is Jeff Bark and he is fucking amazing.

This series is amazing.

I love his tones. Very dutch painter.

ARNO RAFAEL MINKKINEN

Man I have always liked this guys stuff.

Here is a link to one image that is amazing.

The main gallery window is here, no direct linking to his work for some reason...

I like how he takes straight process photography and yet makes it surreal as all hell. Very creative this gent is.

A call for watermarking

This is a call out in favor of watermarking. I know all you purists get your panties in a bunch when people do it. But god dammint, people put their images on the web to be seen right? The internet is the world biggest library right herein my hermit cave / studio. And. I can run ape shit crazy with sissors. 
When I go looking for inspiration and to see what others are doing, I copy that shit to the desktop. Oh, you flash guys? i just screen shot. Get over worrying about people stealing your shit. 
But back on topic, when I go back to these folders and say, "Wow, that one is still cool.... who the fuck was it?" I would god damn well know if it was watermarked.
That's all.

"If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It's a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul.These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you've inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it's soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn't get any better than that."


- Tom Robbins VIA the always amazing Whiskey River.

So I have not been posting lately because my comment spam software went haywire and was blocking my own IP for some odd reason. So not wanting to tinker around I let the site go into dry rot for awhile. But work permitting I'll be back on more often.
Also, I have a showing tonight for my new series, "Tip Well You Bastards" (Yeah, I changed the name). Gonna go out in the rare L.A. rain and get good and drunk at my own show! I like to think it's raining just for me as I am the only person here who enjoys the rain. L.A. is kinda like Portland rain, more misty then anything else. Having grown up in the midwest where rain means thunderstorms and torrents of rain it is actually quite pleasant to walk around in.
Don't drive in it though. Good god man, it will boggle your mind to see how people drive out here when it rains. You can see the series if you are patient and can use the gallery function Pixelrust or you can just go to my Photosite, danielkopton.com


Uh, about the photosite, it's buggy still and not all there.... but hey, it's a start.

For L.A., not against.

"In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.And I don't just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void. It's the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It's the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots. And it doesn't need humanizing. Who cares if you can't identify with Los Angeles? It doesn't need to be made human. It's better than that."

Nice take on L.A.

Fine Art Stuff

Been working pretty hard on my Bartender series called, "Tip well you motherfuckers" and it's starting to really shape up. Have 6 images atm and when viewed side they make quite a impact. Well, at least to me it does, we will see what others think late November, LOL! I have not been this motivated with my own Photography since my college days and I'm loving it. Here's to hoping I can keep the ball rolling.

Think about it

Who has the god damn time to blog anymore? With all the mutated worm people digging up through the cellars and shit. I mean seriously.

ink jet papers

Hmm... interesting read about some new ink jet papers that are based on the old ways of making B&W photo paper. Luminous Landscape has the write up on it here. "Prints made on Harman Gloss, when viewed in most types of light, display the best characteristics of gelatin silver prints. At a workshop, students and instructors inspected dozens of gelatin silver prints as a baseline for comparison– including ones by Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. We then viewed prints made on Harman gloss –– looking at image tone, surface, reflectance and black values. Everyone who observed the Harman’s gloss prints agreed that this paper has a truly outstanding surface. It’s gloss and sheen are very similar to traditional prints. Other gloss papers, like Innova F-Type FibaPrint Gloss Ultra Smooth, look like poor imitations of traditional prints. Photographers have been asking for a surface similar to traditional gelatin silver prints, and Harman has delivered. One digital photographer remarked, “This looks like the best silver print I have ever seen.”

It's called Harman Gloss FB AL and is about 210 bucks for 50 sheets. I was printing on the Epson Luster paper for a bit, but then I switched to Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300 becuase even though it is a matt paper, everything looks amazing printed on it. Really smooth tones and poppy whites. I may have to try out some of this Harman paper though. If it looks and feels like a classic Black and White paper, that could really be something there.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue

You read a pamphlet from a mailbox that urges low cunning, offers cursor and prompt: type >run and you’re running, and parses what you tell it, pronouns intact, abbreviations if you need ‘em (better keep it gramat.). Better punctuate your sentences and never redact the name of anything ambiguous. You’re about to get asked, do you mean the red one, the round one, the crooked, or the blue? Better keep that in your pocket, don’t know yet what it could do. Could be the spray for the grue; you’re gonna need it if it is — a situation that reloads, restarts, or quits.

You are likely to be eaten by a grue. If this predicament seems particularly cruel, consider whose fault it could be: not a torch or a match in your inventory.

MC Frontalot = awesomeness

Score one for us

"Judge Victor Marrero, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, ruled Thursday that the Patriot Act provision that allows the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to obtain ISP and telecom subscribers' billing, calling and Web surfing records without court approval violates the U.S. Constitution. Marrero ordered the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to stop issuing so-called national security letters, or NSLs, requiring ISPs to turn over subscriber records. The NSL program prohibited ISPs from telling customers that they were being investigated."

Thanks Slugger!

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal

"I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud,what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers." Interesting read on someone trying to operate a farm on a local basis and how agri business has shaped the laws to make it impossible.

Where did that food come from?

"The apple-blackberry sauce sold widely in Seattle supermarkets, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture organic seal on the label, says it comes from Chino, Calif. It also says "Product of Canada." So how do you know where it's from? You don't.

Dried banana chips are labeled as being from Sumner. But banana trees don't grow in Sumner. Peanut butter from Canada? There are no peanut farms in that country.

Congress passed a law in 2002 saying that consumers were to be told where the food they buy comes from. But five years later, shoppers who try to determine the origin of meat, poultry, fruit, vegetables and frozen or canned food in most of America's grocery stores often enter an Oz-like land of obfuscations, omission or outright lies.

Without knowing where the food came from, consumers can't be certain it is safe, experts say.

"This labeling becomes vital in ensuring that products are of high quality," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "If people know they're going to get caught for shoddy practices, they're much less likely to engage in them."

So what happened to the labeling law?"

Whats in a name?

"Diebold Election Systems has decided to steal a page from the playbook of that paragon of corporate responsibility Philip Morris (aka the Altria Group): Diebold will erase its sorry history with a simple name change!Henceforth, when reaching for an example of mind-boggling incompetence, please say "Premier" rather than "Diebold," because Diebold Election Systems is now Premier Election Systems."

You know, I fear how history will view us Americans at the start of this century.

We are not a caring people. We are not a forgiving people. We are not a law abiding people.

I'm just saying, it does not look good.

DIY Guide: Your own Supervillain Hideout aka tailrace tunnel of Niagara

"Behind the raging horseshoe falls of Niagara there lurks a dormant monster, a century old redbrick tunnel painstakingly laid. There is no recorded tally of its human cost but in 1906 it would be the biggest tunnel of its type in the world. Like the secret hideout of a supervillain it defies belief and comprehension, a stronghold behind the crashing waterfall. To rappel through the treacherous bowels of a decrepit powerstation is the single entrance." and more at Sleepy City

Thoughts on the Canon 21MP EOS-1Ds Mark III

If you have not heard Canon just announced the 1ds Mark III with a new 21 MP sensor and, but of course, I have a few rambling thoughts about it. First off here are the basic new stats to get that out of the way:

• A maximum shooting rate of 5 fps, for a Canon-specified 56 Large Fine JPEG frames, or 12 RAW CR2.

• An ISO range of 100-1600 in 1/3 step increments, plus L (ISO 50) and H (ISO 3200).

• Promised much faster CompactFlash write speed, owing to the EOS-1Ds Mark III's support of the UDMA protocol utilized by newer CompactFlash cards such as Lexar's 300X and SanDisk's Extreme IV and Ducati Edition lines.

• The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II).

• Most everything that's found in the EOS-1D Mark III, including dual DIGIC III image processors, 14-bit A/D conversion, JPEG, RAW and sRAW file format options, 45-point autofocus system, 63-area ambient metering, E-TTL II flash metering, 300,000-cycle shutter, 3-inch (diagonal), 230,000-dot rear LCD, Live View, Highlight Tone Priority, High ISO Noise Reduction and more.

• The Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III professional digital single lens reflex camera is scheduled to begin shipping in November and will have an estimated selling price of $7,999

So what gets me all hot and bothered is this tid bit:

"The ability to configure a Speedlite wireless flash setup via menus in the camera (when the attached flash is a 580EX II)."

In my dirty little brain I hope this means you can finally sync the damn thing to strobes faster then 250 of a sec. This slow sync is the reason why all my sport shooters have to go medium format so they can sync up to 800 ad really freeze the action. If this solves this it could be a very big win for people.

Now what makes me cringe is that the pixels have almost doubled. Why o why would that make me cringe? Another reason people go with a medium format solution is that it's just sharper. No debates. Medium format is just sharper. More glass makes for a better image. Even the 1ds Mark II was out resolving the lenses and producing softer images. Now we are gonna use the same lenses with a chip that has almost twice as much detail? Hmm... Me thinks there will be some very soft images coming around soon.

Still pretty sweet though and if I fell in a pile of money I'd buy one. Anyone wanna rack a big old pile of that stuff up for me?

on creating

There is a fine line between over thinking to inactivity and and working to avoid thinking at all. The artists job is to navigate this minefield.