I’m rather proud of this photograph. First, I stumbled upon this truck hidden out in a field, probably unknown to much of the world. It was near sundown and the light was failing so I had my 50mm lens with me and open ‘er wide up to gather as much light as possible. And finally the post processing I think really makes this shot look like it was processed with real film.
In a Sea of Grass – By Neal Sanche
Tags: photograph
Well, sometimes I wonder what I’m going to do with my artwork and photographs in the future. Sure, they give me some respite from my depression and allow me to function as a, more or less, normal human being again. That’s nearly enough. Sometimes I wish that I suddenly had a massive audience that would love to buy my work for astronomical prices, and I could spend all of my time producing more photographs, traveling all around the world capturing things that nobody would believe.
The truth is, that’ll likely never happen to me. I’m not an egotist. I would like it if people would enjoy my work enough to purchase it. It has happened… I have had a few pieces commissioned and purchased through some of the online services that I use. Recently, I have begun to use online printing services to make gifts. I’ve also had someone approach me and gave me a bunch of money for advertising some websites. What I did with the money was print myself a set of Moo MiniCards, and they look great. My wife liked them so much she started to give them away to people before I even saw them.
Next, I spent some of the money to get a T-Shirt printed using one of my own drawings. This can be purchased through RedBubble by clicking on the following image.
Along with the T-Shirt, I have uploaded a selection of photographs to RedBubble as well. As with most online art sales places, it seems that a person would end up having to work 12 hours a day promoting him/her self in order to make any money at it. So if you’re a millionaire, please buy many copies of my work. I’d thank you for it.
The rest of the money was spent on Black and White film developer, Agfa Rodinal, that I’ll use to develop a few films when I finally finish shooting them. I bought a 35mm FED Soviet camera, made in USSR in the late 60s, and have been shooting the odd frame here and there using that. I’ll develop it eventually.
Last night, my wife and I decided to make a book, containing a selection of photographs from around the province where I live.
It’s simply titled ‘My Alberta’ and contains 50 pages of photographs from around the Calgary area, that I’ve taken and processed over the last 4 years. It’s a simple book and doesn’t contain a lot of text. I bought two copies of the book, one to keep and one to give away as a gift to the family who will be letting us stay with them for two weeks while we visit Paris at the end of this month.
And, finally, I have uploaded a select few photographs to ImageKind.
Keep in mind, that if you buy though ImageKind, while their output and packaging, as well as shipping, are excellent, I don’t make any money off the output. Very little anyway. Contact me first before you want to spend a lot of money there, and I’ll jack my profit margins up for you, okay?
I often have discussions with my friend Jack about the prospect of making money off our respective artwork. It’s a daunting task. The Internet has really diluted the share of buying interest between the millions of online artists trying to also make money. There is so much great art out there. I laughingly suggested that the only way to make money is to simply refuse to take any money for any of my work. Because it is exceedingly rare to find any printed copies of my work should make its value increase, right? So far, I have not had the demand I’ve anticipated that remark generating.
Jack, ← Photos on the other hand, is a brilliant artist, and does wonderful things with negatives. He spends a lot of time maintaining his Flickr stream, weeding things out so that only the best of his work is present. He has been teaching me a few of his secrets, and in return I buy him a coffee or lunch from time to time. We have also discovered some wonderfully photogenic places together. He often talks to me about why art doesn’t sell; whether his art would have mass popular appeal; whether simply being able to live off one’s art will ever happen.
Personally, I believe that art (if I can actually call my work art, or whether its a nomination best given by others) is the means through which I balance my personal life. It is that which, after a long day of writing tedious computer software code and supporting the programs I have written in my career, and dealing with the daily issues of my family, I can retreat to and gain enlightenment from. Through the creative act of producing a drawing, painting, piece of music, or photograph I connect myself back with what makes me human. The expression of the soul. And so, to expect to make money off of this really doesn’t jive.
So, if I do, I’ll be thankful. But that’s really not what I’m in it for.
Tags: art, photography, online sales, redbubble, imagekind, blurb, publishing, commercialism
Her work really defies description. She was blogged about, recently on Boing Boing, and I thought I’d reblog it, having gone to her site and watched the little video, and been inspired by it. I’m sure my wife would freak out if I started doing this kind of thing, but I have thought about it from time to time. Though, my tendencies are more to fabrication of images through digital manipulation, I love the fact that the opposite exists somewhere.
Lori Nix’s website is here.
What does it all mean, this Matriarchy business? Well, I have long believed in the cyclic nature of everything. Our world has been ruled by women in the past, and it will be again. It is also a statement about my discontent with the masculine, and how the man is screwing up our planet, our lives, and, well, everything pretty much. It is time for a new regime. It is time for the Matriarchy to take root.
So, recently I replaced my old Nikon D70s with a new D300. I haven’t had the chance to do much with it, at least not much that I’ve been proud of. This weekend I was invited to a photoshoot to assist a friend of mine, Jack, on a shoot of his. At the end of his shoot, I asked if I could put a few of the things in his basement up, and shoot Kara for a few minutes. I was super happy with the results. This was taken with a couple of strobes placed camera left and camera right, and triggered with my camera in commander mode. Edited the splits out of the couch using photoshop (the vinyl had split quite a bit and I thought it looked ugly). I’m very proud of the results. Thanks, Kara and Jack.
My Son and I designed this Multiple Address Teleporter for Garry’s Mod and the latest Wire Mod. You’ll be able to see the video for a tutorial on how to build this, with my wonder voice acting skills. Here’s a link so you can download the schematic diagram, written on paper and verified by my son to be correct.
Schematics are here:
So, today it took my colleague and I nearly two hours to figure out why a context menu had grayed out menu items in a WPF application we were writing. We had instantiated the ContextMenu as a static resource, and then we assigned it to the ContextMenu property of a button. Then when the button was clicked we were setting the IsOpen property of the menu to true. WPF was never able to determine the command handlers for some reason. It turns out the fix was quite simple, and the clue was given by this blog post by Andrew Wilkinson.
The trick is to set the ContextMenu’s PlacementTarget property. Without that there will be a difference in the behaviour between a right-click of the mouse, and a left-click of the mouse on the button. It’s because on a left-click, the PlacementTarget is null. Wonderful.
It has been so long, I can’t even remember the year I started this story. It took my 12 year old daughter Mary’s chiding to actually get it finished. And so, after a lot of percolation, I finally committed the final ideas into words. I wrote the final chapter two nights ago, but I had to make a suitably similar photograph to go with the chapter, taken from the same forest on Bowen Island that I made the first set of photographs from. Of course, the bird (also from Bowen Island) is an addition, but he is my favourite character in the story, so he needed some face time.
If you read the whole story, and like it, let me know. Enjoy.
Internet commerce is going gangbusters these days, more people are trying it out and getting good results. I, however have made two internet purchases this month and both of them have met with something akin to fraud. The largest of these purchases was a new IP telephony ATA device that would allow me to have a phone on my desk and pay very little money to allow people to call me. I ordered the device from the Voxilla Store on October 6th, 2007. On October 9th, I was sent an email message stating that my shipment was being prepared to be sent. I have heard nothing since. I have sent numerous email messages, and have phoned their business numbers many times in an attempt to be greeted by anything other than voicemail. So far, I have not reached anyone.
UPDATE: Well, I decided to go through the PayPal arbitration process and one week after starting that, I got a message back from Voxilla saying that if they were not able to ship the product in one day, they would refund me. I responded that it was acceptable to me, and waited. The next day I got my refund with a terse message stating that they could not meet the cutoff for that day and were refunding me. So, I purchased the item from a Canadian company and will see if that, too, fails to meet my expectations.
FINAL UPDATE: I purchased the same product from a Canadian company out of Mississauga, Ontario, called Gloria Network and immediately got an email telling me that the device had been shipped. Three business days later, I had the device and was up and running. The guys at Gloria Network were fast to respond to email messages, and I felt secure in knowing there was a human at the other end. The product arrived in perfect condition and was exactly what they advertised. So this little chapter of my life is hereby closed.
