Free stuff!

Man, I went nutty today with the photoshop freebies out there. Found some cool textures and brushes at a place called Bittbox and grabbed this new template from N.Design. Some slick code there.

What I've Learned

"The pro game of acting is very difficult. You go into that editing room and there is empirical evidence of what you've done. And no matter how good they say you are, well over half of what you do is pure shit. You can be totally self-annihilating about it if you want."

Jack Nicholson

Thomas Gauck

Interesting... Kinda of like the Starn Twins, but digital. I like this one the most I think. It's a hard line to ride with digital compositions between cheesy and art. Good ideas here though.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn!

"Upon receiving my order, I carefully opened the box and dug through the packing peanuts in order to get to the pen contained therein. 'Beautiful!', I thought, and promptly opened up my moleskine notebook to jot down to myself some notes. My previous pen had ran out of ink four weeks prior and I didn't want to splurge on expensive shipping, which meant I had a lot of notes to catch up on writing.

But, when that quality carbide ball touched the surface of the paper, it was not ink that came out. From a distance I heard the screams of men and the cackling of innumerable ravens. I stopped, cold and sweating profusely. I looked down at the Bic Crystal black medium ballpoint pen which I held in my hand, only to see darkness. I dashed it against the wall, recoiling in horror. I saw in the corner of my eye my faithful notebook, which now lay on the ground. Once unmarred, I saw now the small mark which I had made with the devil's own pen. It spread across the page like a plague, and looking at it I gazed upon true horrors. For, what I thought had been ink was in fact a portal to a dark, unforgiving dimension. A portal whose maw was now widening to engulf all hope and joy in the world.

'God, what have I done?' I exclaimed as I weeped and fell to my knees, 'What have I done?'

From beyond the Dark Gate I heard these words, words which I can never forget. A terrible, booming voice said to me, 'Ia! Ia! Cthulhu Fthagn!'

I ran, blindly stumbling, away from that place and never looked back. My only hope is that none shall follow in the path I've walked down, too blinded by hubris to realize my follies.

Customer review for a Bic Crystal ballpoint pen which is simply awesome.

As seen on the boing boing

Kim Keever

Yeah, here is another one I like Kim Keever. 

I really dig the people who set up these make believe worlds but don't use any photoshop trickery. I think the back story is that this Photog sets upa 500 gallon fish tank, builds these landscapes with plaster and stuff. Then squirts in different inks and liquids to create the clouds. All 4x5. I THINK!

Don't hold me to that. I can't remember or find where I found that info. And my memory is shite.

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!