talkingwires

Eh, I haven't submitted anything to my DA account in three years.

It's not that I haven't been working. I dropped out of school for three years. It was supposed to be a semester off, but I landed a good job waiting tables, made good money, and had no inclination to work on anything art related. Then I lost the job, found another one with terrible hours (1700-0600), but I loved they guys I worked with. And I had to pay bills.

Fast-forward a year. I'm back in school, passing portfolio reviews doing shit I was doing almost a decade ago and being compensated monetarily. I'm not going back as much for the degree (degrees are a given these days), but more as a portfolio-building exercise. And to prove to myself (and FAFSA) that I put this much time into school, I might as well graduate.

If I hadn't had an unfortunate data loss in the Czech Republic last summer (don't use a six year-old iPod as a backup device), I'd be spewing out dozens of new pieces. But in the mean time, I'll be posting my GD shit and a bunch of new shots I've taken... with Kodak TRI-X 400 and Ilford Pro 100 on my Canon AE-1 Program... because that's how I roll.

My iPod died.

This is a major blow. I don't have a car, so I listened to it several hours a day. Whether it was blasting my co-workers with my musical taste, the hour-long walk home after a fourteen-hour shift at work, waiting thirty minutes for the next bus to show up, or using it to drown out the ramblings from the crackhead next to me on the bus, my iPod was my constant companion. My ally against boredom, bad taste, and the insane denizens of Charlotte. Its death is especially frustrating when you consider that there isn't a mark on its body; it was always protected by a case, and I only dropped it once. And that was two years ago.

I spent a week trying to revive iTumble, but its HDD appears to have lost its will to live. Rest In Peace, iTumble (December 2004 - August 2007). You were too small to hold my music collection, and you didn't always get on with my refusal to use iTunes, but I loved you anyway.

The past few months, I've been working exclusively with color film. I use the word "working" loosely, as I've been in a creative rut and haven't had many fresh ideas. Color brings another dimension to photography, but you loose something, too: the emphasis on form, lines, and composition. I work better  in with black, white, and shades of silver. Maybe that's the wall I've been hitting. Or maybe it's genetic.

After months of lugging my eight-year-old laptop up to the local coffee shop when I wanted to get on the Internet, I finally have an ADSL connection in my home! This, coupled with both my brand new Print Account and increased financial pull (Hey, paying to have negatives developed and scanned is expensive!) should lead to a more productive period here on Deviant Art. At the least, I'll get those rolls of film I have laying around developed and see what's actually on them. I don't remember taking any pictures I thought were outstanding, but then again, I can always hope for a happy accident or two.

Speaking of finances, I miss having access to a university's digital imaging equipment. The local photo shop charges thirty bucks a roll to have film scanned at an ultra-high resolution, so I'll hafta limit my prints to 12x18 inches. I guess I'll have to make do.

My camera gave me a bad scare the other week when the shutter stopped working. In my typical fashion, I laid it down and ignored it, hoping that maybe the problem would remedy itself. Imagine my surprise when my passive-aggresiveness actually paid off, and it snapped a picture during my demonstration of how "broken" it was. Whether it sensed my helpless frustration or just had a "kink to be worked out" we'll never know.

But since I can now record images unto a photographic negative again, I think I'll start bringing my (barely adequate) drawings, paintings, and other "traditional artwork" into my gallery. As soon as I can afford to have the negatives scanned, that is. Stay tuned...