tending the garden » photography

PostgreSQL Conference Group Photo

selena — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:32:40 +0000

By popular demand! Magus Hagander is working on a little script so that we can fill in names for everyone. You can also go to the flickr photo and indicate who you are now.

eclipse!

pgconference — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:59:54 +0000

We had a lunar eclipse this evening. In the last few minutes before the eclipse, I got my camera out, and even managed a lens change (a 135mm my father gave to me a few years ago). I’m just learning how to shoot at night, but it was fun to play around with the lenses and my digital camera.

The tempo of the slide changes goes pretty well with Saeglopur by Sigur RÃ³s. Here’s the original. Still trying to figure out exactly how this embedding thingy works. You’ll note that the movie below crops things oddly.

an annoying form issue, easily solved with a regex

gut-wrenching photography, convergence on war

selena — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 04:16:43 +0000

If you haven’t seen this Nina Berman slideshow, go there now.

You can also read the NY Times article about her work on this project. I’ve subscribed to Jen Beckman’s blog for a while now, and been blown away by the photographers she curates.

I was impressed with the access that Ms. Berman had to her subjects. The soldiers reminded me of the men in No End In Sight. I saw that at Cinema21 just a week ago. It is the best war documentary I’ve seen about Iraq. Far better than Fahrenheit 911. I’ve been re-visiting 9/11 stuff – I picked up the Illustrated 9/11 Commission’s Report that I bought nearly a year ago and read it cover to cover.

And did you know that Errol Morris had a blog?

When I was a little boy I asked my older brother, If you blow up a photograph can you eventually see atoms? Here is one answer. When you magnify a leaf, in principle, you get down to the atomic level of the leaf. But when you magnify a photograph of a leaf, you get down to the atomic level of the photograph. You can keep magnifying the grains of silver-halide and get down to the atomic level of the silver-halide, but you do not see additional detail of the leaf. As a result of this inherent limitation, photographs are nothing more than coarse-grained screens laid over reality, revealing nothing more (about what is photographed) than a certain size. They provide an imperfect simulacrum of the surface of things.

And

Photography presents things and at the same time hides things from our view. It allows us to not-see at the same time that it allows us to see. But language plus photography provides an express train to error.

My media consumption is converging on war these days.

the kecky county fair

selena — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 20:29:47 +0000

Yesterday, our friends Becky and Kate had a county fair on the street in front of their house. There were more than 30 entries to the judged crafts which included: pies, baked goods other than pies, canned food, sewing and needlepoint, livestock (bees and chickens!), gardening and “other”. The “other” category included a cow sculpture made of butter.

Here was my entry:

I embroidered “I am not a douchebag” on the back side of the bag. I forgot to take a picture of it before I gave it away to a person who really wanted it.

What a great party! I can’t wait for next year.

More photos are in this photoset.

those canvas bags