So good!

The Violin Maker from Dustin Cohen on Vimeo.

Continuing my Knight Riders portrait series, I present Marica and Mark:

I have started running!

Last year I did the Vancouver Sun Run (the biggest 10k in the world, or something, with close to 60 000 participants annually) in one hour and five minutes, and then I tried (and failed) to run a half marathon. To be fair to myself I did attempt to run the half marathon the weekend after doing the Ride to Conquer Cancer (Donate to me Here). Anyway, this year in preparation for a better Sun Run time, I have started running twice a week; well, I am about to go out for my second run for this week, and then the plan is to continue on each week like this. This past Wednesday I did a simple 4k run, which will lead me easily into the St. Patrick’s Day 5k, and this morning I am about to go do a 9k run, which over time will help me immensely in finishing the Sun Run in less than an hour. My goal for the Sun Run is 50 minutes, though I will be happy as long as I break the one hour mark!

In addition to raising another $2500 this year to ride in the Ride to Conquer Cancer, which is seeming more impossible this year than last, I am intending to do an 8×10 photo project that will, rather than help me raise money, give my team mates some awesome photos of themselves, as well as give me more content for another Knight Riders’ Calendar! I’ve got some ideas for the 2013 calendar, and I think that these 8×10 portraits will go a long way to make that happen.

Here is the photo I took of myself to entice my bike team to let me photograph them:

I have made a bunch of photos in the last week or so, mostly from thanksgiving weekend. First off, I had a roll of Polaroid PolaPan instant Black and White slide film. I have what mostly amounts to snap shots, but they’re fun, and the film itself is a lot of fun to use! You get to stick it into this simple processor, and when it’s done you have a bunch of shiny black and white slides! Mine are very grainy, and they’re awesome.

Kirsten & Ruslan

Robyn

Amanda

Anne

Momo

Tootsie

And finally, from thanksgiving Sunday, we have a beautiful 8×10 coloir photo of Anne, myself and Robyn wearing Hawaiian wear! Anne’s Parents returned at the end of September from a cruise to Hawaii, and brought back Hawaiian wear, and then proceeded to proclaim that this thanksgiving was Hawaiian themed. So this is our first “Family Portrait”:

While I haven’t done a whole lot of photography lately, I did start a project several months ago creating composite photographs. The hook to this project is that I never took any of the photos involved. My jumping off point is twofold: first, the idea that every photo is the copyright of the creator, even if two people take photos at almost the exact same time, from the same vantage point, or from very nearly the same vantage point as to make the photos indistinguishable. Second, that people take photos of the same main locations, or monuments, as everyone else, and generally take the same “iconic” image as everyone else.

This is partly why I wanted to use other peoples photographs, rather than take my own. Also since I decided to focus on (modern) monuments, and I do not have the budget to travel to any of the places that I am creating composites of, it’s much easier and cost effective to use photos found via Google image search.

My main problem with this project, for myself, is that I am stealing images, and dismantling them without asking anyone’s permission. It’s akin to Girl Talk and his remixing of songs. Maybe in the US it might be considered Fair Use since the original photographers probably could not tell that I used their specific images, and so there has probably been as acceptable level of transformation done to the images.

Another problem I have, which isn’t really a problem, per se, but does point out to me clearly something that this project aims to point out is that it’s very difficult to find a group of images that are similar enough to be used for this project! Since the aim of this project is to at the same time work off the fact that people take the same photos of monuments, but at well that not all the photos are identical, it seems fitting that this should be the case. It doesn’t make it any less frustrating…

But I digress. I would like to share the five Composite Monuments that I have put together. They’re not perfect, and will almost certainly be reworked as I look for and find larger resolution images to use. As of right now, some of these images are quite small.

I hope some of you, other than just me, enjoy these:

Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View, Yosemite National Park

CN Tower, Toronto

Statue of Liberty, New York City

Parliament Building, Ottawa

White House, Washington DC

Tootsie, our cat, is currently unhappy. She has managed to give herself a very serious injury on one of her toes. The result is that we have to disinfect it twice a day, and make her wear a sock all the time to prevent dirt from getting into the wound! She does not like this sock business one bit, and is doing her best to not move as much as possible. This makes taking her photo pretty easy — when she decides to sit where there is ample light.

Here you can just see the stripy blue baby sock that we have on her foot today. She is a very stylish kitty right now, having a different colour sock for all her moods!

After giving our notice at the end of last month Anne and I, like so many others in Vancouver, have contacted and looked at (mostly Anne did the looking) many new apartments, trying to find the right one; happily the right place came to us! It’s not even an apartment, but the main floor of a house. There’s no upstairs, but there is one other tenant in the basement suite below us. We will be sharing our new place with our good friend, Robyn, and happily there is plenty of space for all of us! Just take a look at this awesome kitchen:

In an effort to reduce costs of shooting large, 8×10 film, I have attained some green sensitive X-Ray film. Rather than more than $4 for each individual sheet, this film costs less than $0.50 per sheet! Granted, it is a little trickier to use, as it is more delicate, and has emulsion on both sides of the substrate. This meant that for my first test exposure, my negative was WAY too dense, so I tried bleaching the back side emulsion, which had already been damaged. My efforts were less than perfect, and in the future I will simply adjust my exposure, and shorten my development. Here is that first effort, a portrait of Anne which she is sure to hate:

I was practicing “zone system” (quotes are more ironic, rather than for emphasis) exposure and development, and thought my adorable little teapot that I bought for green tea would do nicely against the dark grey blanket we have hanging about our apartment.

Basically I metered a couple of places (the darkest and brightest areas that I still wanted to see detail) and figured out the dynamic range between them. I determined that giving normal exposure and normal development would put the brightest area too bright to print (or in this case, scan), so I compensated for my highlights by under developing my negative by about one stop (I reduced my development time from 3′ 36″ to 2′ 32″).

In other news, Anne and I have given notice on our apartment, so we will be moving in a month! ACK! Packing and cleaning are my two least favourite activities. Seriously.

Also, I’m getting my last wisdom tooth yanked out of my face in the morning. “Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.”

I think this is funny:

I shot and developed these on Saturday. Sadly, something happened while I was developing, and you’ll notice on the right hand side of the photo of my old bike that there was a development problem, and sort of on the left hand side of the photo of my guitar. Somehow there was some splashing and overdeveloping. Shucks.

That’s the first time that’s happened to me while rotary developing, so I was quite surprised!

Anyway, here are the pair of photos I did – I scanned them today.

I definitely have composition and subject matter to work on, but I’m getting happier with my exposures, and development. Baby steps that I probably should be past, seeing as I have a whole degree in photography … really it’s mostly that I just haven’t been making any photographs, and I’m more concerned, right now, on my exposure and development process.

I made a couple of photos over the weekend, too, so when I pick them up (they are drying at Emily Carr) and scan them, I’ll post one, or both of them. I was a little disappointed in them, as I noticed splash marks (likely from developer) on one side of each of the negs (they were developed at the same time) so I’ll have to look into that – my home development has been working fine, but I developed those at Emily Carr with a different developer, so maybe that’s the cause.

Anyway, here’s the still life I made (set up was discussed in my last post. Like I said, simple, but I think my exposure was good here, and the shirt definitely had a positive impact on the shadows on the bottom halves of the boxes.