I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ve now done something with it!
Now I’ve got otacracy, apocalypsewow, insertcredit, this blog, and my academic blog… yeah, that’s exactly what I needed. More places to put stuff on.
But I think I’m going to be concentrating on otacracy for now, just so I can mess around more with this newfangled cms and perhaps learn something…
This past weekend I hung out with some cosplayers and photographers and shot a couple of pictures.
Usually when I’m invited to do a gig, whether it be a photo gig or a music gig or a [stand around and explain some friend’s friend’s art] gig, I jump into it immediately. When the invitation reached me on this occasion, however, I said I wasn’t sure if I could or should. And I thought long and hard about whether I should go, and if I went, whether I should bring my camera system at all. This was largely spurred by the fact that I had a camera system that didn’t feel like the one that I brought to Fanime just weeks earlier. Really, it didn’t feel like me.
The difference was just one lens. The image quality from my 16-50 standard zoom wasn’t feeling right on the borders. A real estate photo gig revealed to me that the right border was really quite poor: something that hadn’t been a problem in any of my Famine pictures (though examination of that set reveals that the problem was in there since my first days with the lens.) Since it was relatively new, I went to the dealer and switched it out. This newer one had no problems with the optics, but the focus would randomly decouple from the control ring so that I couldn’t manually focus the lens, and the autofocus wasn’t quite as good either. I went back to the store and it turns out that they didn’t have any others in stock. I needed a standard zoom, though, so I grabbed a 16-45 to tide me over and wished my 16-50 a safe flight to Colorado where it would be serviced and repaired…
And while the 16-45 is a decent lens, it never felt like MY lens. Yeah, it’s a dumb psychological ownership/extension of self sort of crappy thing, but it really hit me. During the photoshoot at UCLA, it really was a struggle for me to actually wield that thing. Objectively, I could tell there were things about this replacement lens that were better: faster focus speed, smaller, lighter, slightly easier to manual focus… but I could never get it to feel like it was mine. That 16-50, though… from the first shots I took with that lens, I knew that it was mine… and after a few hundred shots, it went beyond simply being mine to being me.
In the music world, there aren’t too many instruments that I would call an extension of me. That one Petrof piano, perhaps. In the camera world, however, I had run across a number of pieces of equipment that became me. Probably the first lens was a Quantaray (Sigma) 24mm 2.8 Macro. And then there was that Minolta XG-M that might as well had been grafted to my right hand.
And then there’s the Pentax 16-50. It’s not a brilliant lens the way some other lenses in Pentax’s catalog are brilliant. The purple fringing on this thing is really tough to deal with, and it would be nice if the minimum focus distance was shorter. But man, the je ne sais quoi!
I personally hate using that phrase, but when it comes to matters of self, it’s so appropriate. I’ve always thought it amazing how we can know so much about the little details that make up these complicated things that exist outside of us: electric and electronic sequences, mechanical craziness, chemical surprises, aesthetic decisions. But all these things that we recognize as our own personal processes; the first thing we look at when we enter a room or the firmness of a handshake; how our body somehow makes the subtle switch from voluntary to involuntary breathing; we don’t know anything about them… but at least we own them and are proud of them to the point we allow it to become us. And every now and then, it is just so awesome to come across something outside of us that could possibly become part of us.
I just need to wait for that part of me to come back from Colorado.
I don’t often check out Wired’s Game|Life blog, but recently a few of my photos have been showing up on there. Late last year, Wired’s Epicenter blog used a silly picture I had taken of some smartphones in a blog post about smartphone sales growth. This last week, however, two (2!) articles used images taken from my flickr stream: one of Nintendo’s Miyamoto and another of (friend/colleague/former classmate) Jenova Chen. The Jenova picture isn’t half-bad, I think… but why did they use THAT Miyamoto picture? At least clean it up, do some sharpening on it or something. It’s an okay pic, but it’s painfully soft thanks to the quality of the lens I was shooting with (a rather cheap Sigma I was shooting long and wide open) and the rather slow shutter speed.
Back in the day, despite identifying myself as primarily a video game music composer/designer, I was recognized more as a video game journalist, and the work I had on the internet at the time bore that out. All the little bits of audio and music I did never showed up, while my insert credit and Gamasutra output just rose to the surface.
I wonder if this photography hobby of mine will work similarly.
I’ve always thought that I’d never get a domain name quite as cool as apocalypsewow.com… but it doesn’t stop me from trying. Instinctgratification.com doesn’t really do the trick. Forcedfeedback.com isn’t bad at all, but you do have to spend a bit of time ensuring recognition of that unexpected extra ‘d’. But now I’ve got something that’s nearly as good as apocalypsewow.com. In fact, it might be something that inspires me to go all insertcredit-style on making a new site:
Nothing there right now, but man, I really want to put something up there that’s substantial. Something that has stuff that people would willingly click on. Maybe even something that could get me a bit of extra pocket change thanks to the wonder of ad impressions! Maybe!
(Also, otakracy.com points to otacracy.com. I prefer the ‘c’ spelling, but enough people have mentioned the ‘k’ possibility that I had to get it…)
…just about. Standard stuff: having fun writing music and teaching classes and other random stuff, mostly related to writing music and teaching classes. The summer is going to be similar stuff and the fall will be only slightly less similar.
Since the last post, I did a bunch of stuff for Gamasutra and GameSetWatch regarding Game Developers Conference, although it really just boils down to two things: writing articles and taking pictures. A bit more interesting are a few photos I’ve taken that have been used as material in news items. Now I can add NPR to the sites I’ve had photos on… and that feels pretty nice, I have to admit.
A little part of me tells me: Maybe I should try to do more with this photo thing. Maybe…
Writing music, teaching, generally working hard while maintaining appropriate levels of geekiness.
This morning was particularly fun, though. I forced myself to write music for a 3 minute long short film… in 30 minutes.
I really wish I had more time for fun… especially writing music for fun. It’s rather frustrating that I have to force it in through these small windows of time between real work…
Yes. My computer is broken again.
Running to Fry’s to get a mobo, processor, memory, PSU, case, and hard drive.
I am severely annoyed.
Web 2.0 is all over the place.
Facebook is really nice, but then there’s stuff there that I would like to put on my blog (which is mirrored by my LJ), and that blog is totally separate from my academic blog (that I haven’t touched since summer), and all three of them don’t quite connect with the people I connect with on AIM, ICQ, MSN, or the various people on the 5 different IRC networks I’m on. So to recap:
I’ve put it off long enough. It’s now time for me to reinstall Windows.
Damn.
I hope I survive.
[Added 10/14]
…
I didn’t.
[Added 10/15]
…
This is a piece of utter bullcrap. No USB 2.0. This is definitely a software problem as depending on the order I install things, I can actually get the whole non-hi-speed problem to affect an add-in USB PCI card.
This is pretty crappy. I want to punch something.
Next stop, Windows XP with SP2 as the install disk. After that, Vista.
…return to the forefront thanks to the launch of a new website: Indiegames.com. A brand new website from the guys that gave you Gamasutra and GameSetWatch, quite a few of the photos I’ve taken during Game Developers Conference this year feature on the pages. Maybe I should do this photo thing more seriously…