Jennifer Jupiter Stratford Photography
When I came across Jennifer Jupiter Stratford’s portfolio, I was instantly smitten. A whole series following Leslie “Sweater Lady” Hall? A look into the forgotten visions of tomorrow gleaned from video game console
? Another series about videogame cosplayers and the overall nerdy spectacle? This picture of a forlorn Tails? To say that this is relevant to my interests would be an understatement.
Add to that a series on inflatable mascots, giant speakers, and a collection with the hopes to understand mysticism and loneliness when faced with the grandness of nature
and I am an instant fan. That’s not even mentioning the wonderfully bizarre videos.
Monumental
I got off the Berlin bus in front of the Brandenburg Gates at half past six in the morning. This was my first time there since I was eleven, in 1991, when unification and the fall of the Berlin Wall was still fresh in the minds of the locals. The sun was just starting to rise and the whole place was deserted save for two lone photographers, probably two wayfarer visitors with no time for sleep, like me, wandering around the gate. When I made my way back to the Brandenburg Gates around the noon hour, after a circular walk around the city, the place was awash with tourists.
The crowds made taking a photo of the monument, on its own, an impossibility. Not even the likes of the Tourist Remover would help in this situation. But that’s a good thing. Unless you are taking generic photos for postcard use, the crowds are part of the experience. This is a tourist attraction and trying your hardest to hide that fact, especially during peak tourist hours, feels a little less than honest. Same goes for removing the mundane city realities of cars, traffic, commuting, and people doing their jobs. If you feel the need to use the Tourist Remover, I think you are missing the point of what you are doing (or are very impatient.) The practical solution is to photograph things that by their nature don’t attract crowds, or, if you’re feeling particularly travel wary, show up at six in the morning.
This is why I like Joel Micah Miller’s “Monumental” series. His photographs revel in that tourist filled reality, showing how it really is to be at those monumental locations.
I also like it for the selfish reason that he photographed many of the same things I have photographed from the very same vantage point I photographed them. It gives my amateur self a good point of comparison for technique in contrast to that of a professional, award winning photographer.
My Year in Photos: The Second Half
Also known as: “The more photogenic half.” (Part One here.)
Big pictures follow:
My Year in Photos: The First Half
One of the best weblogs to emerge this year was kokogiak’s The Big Picture. I was pleased to see it get the go ahead from legal because it was a risky venture for a major publication (if you don’t believe me, risk your sanity venturing into the comments of any post.) The large scale photos brought a new perspective to world events and brightly highlighted others that were not always reported. Alan Taylor’s curatorial duties have been excellent and as impartial as possible (though douchebags in the comments always disagree.)
The appropriately named The Big Picture proved that we don’t always need to consider users with: VGA displays, 640×480 resolutions, web safe colours, and modems. This isn’t the 1990s anymore. You can now provide photos larger than thumbnails that make the most of today’s display technology (millions of colours! *gasp*) Bigger is better. So with that in mind, here’s my own personal year in review.
I bought a new camera in April, a few months after giving my old one to my sister for Christmas. I bought it, in part, because by then I had decided what I was going to do with the rest of the year and wanted something good to document it.
Big pictures follow:
Windsor, Ontario
Driving down Ouellette Ave. you get the sense of being in a metropolis. Buildings tower higher and higher above the street the further north and the closer to the downtown you seem to get. Then Oulette opens up to Riverside and you realize that a wide river divides you from the rest of the skyline and that between where you stand and where the city continues is an international border. You see that where you are is all there is. A city stunted in its growth, infested by a rash of “for lease” and “for sale” signs. This is a city with a 13% vacancy rate. This is Windsor.
Looking back at the city you see decrepit apartment buildings, bland run down office buildings, and two clean and radiant towers rising from the east. The dissonance is striking. The two skyscrapers are modern, slick and bright white. Their blue tinted windows and unblemished pure exteriors shine in the late day sun. They are beacons of promise and prosperity amongst the grey and brown of the old city. They belong to the casino.
At night it’s even more dreary. The walk into downtown is described as a trek into Mordor. The towers rise above the dark wastelands, casting a blood red glow on everything. The powerful neon “Caesar’s” signs on top of the casino are so strong they illuminate buildings in another country, across the river. Waving at the sky are a half dozen spotlights, luring travelers into its trap. That’s all there is in Windsor: gambling and drinking. The city has a suicide rate well above the provincial average.
And for a moment I thought about living there. It would be cheap, I would be free of distractions, and I’d be a river-crossing away from a quality NHL team.
Site Tweaks
Those that only see this weblog through an RSS reader might not have noticed that I’ve made a few tweaks around here. The second column of links, imported from delicious, has been moved to the bottom of the page. Since there’s only the one core column now, I’ve merged the wordmark, which sat above the second column, with the header image and centered everything. I haven’t changed a single thing in the main body since I was happy with the readability, so that column retains its width and font size. It has more breathing room now.
In the footer, I’ve elaborated on my details and added an extra area of “recommended” links. It is, as they call it, a “blogroll.” I wanted to have something a little more permanent than my delicious bookmarks to point out some sites I’ve enjoyed recently. Those links will change, but not too frequently. All are highly, well, recommended but for entirely distinct and diverse reasons. It is an eclectic bunch.
Anyway, the main reason for these changes is that the single column allows for this:
Brighton sunsetImages float outside of the main column so the extra room allows for some extra large photos. I’m using the camera more often than I’m writing paragraphs, so I figured that I’d let the site reflect that.
Paris nights.The Thames Path
As with most days here, this afternoon I headed for the Tube with the intention of going for a long, wandering trek around London. I wasn’t sure where I’d go; I figured I’d decide on the train. I walked down the road past the station to a little bakery around the corner and grabbed a croissant and stuffed it into my camera bag. The blue eyed blonde Polish girl wasn’t working today. I crossed back to the station, pulled out my Oyster card and set it against the sensor. The light went red, the gate didn’t open and “SEEK ASSISTANCE” lit up on the display.
Twenty four pounds (and twenty pence) later I had a renewed weekly travel pass. It’s essential to have this in London if you are aimlessly traveling because you can hop-on, hop-off anywhere without ever having to worry about the fares and how much money you have left on your card or in your pocket. Still, for my simple TTC inspired ways the price is a major sticker shock. Then again, the London Tube is refreshingly free of TTC Union assjacks and it’s worth paying more for that privilege.
On the Jubilee Line, somewhere near Baker Street, I decided that I would get off at London Bridge and venture eastward along the Thames. The farthest I had been along in this direction was the Design Museum a block east of Tower Bridge, where the throngs of tourists start to thin. Many people are quick to point out that galleries and museums in London have free admission but if you want to see anything remotely contemporary or non-institutional–and you’ve already been to the TATE Modern–then you have to pay. This is true for the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Hayward Gallery and the Embankment Gallery (in the Somerset House) and, of course, the Design Museum.
I’m unsure if this is true for the Whitechapel Gallery. I ventured out into urine-smelling Aldgate last weekend to see it only to discover that it’s undergoing renovations and won’t be fully open until 2009. The auditorium was open, showing a film shot in an abattoir, and there were a few scattered locations showing stuff around the neighbourhood but after going to one space on Bell Lane and seeing nothing but a cardboard box, I skipped most of them. Granted, it was a very large cardboard box and the lady there tried to tell me about the artist’s motivations and inspirations for the work but, still, it was a cardboard box. That trip was a complete bust.
The area east of the Design Museum, along the Thames Path, is quite nice and suitably quiet. After you pass the last tourist and the last riverside restaurant and pub you enter a meandering path of riverside walks and silent side streets that takes you through miles of wharf lands. Amongst many others, there’s the Chambers Wharf, the Hope Wharf, the Ivory Wharf, the Canada Wharf, the Lavender Wharf and so on. Some of them sit there, decaying. Most have been converted into residential spaces, studios, pubs or an mixture of all the above. On the other side of the narrow streets upon which they sit are row houses, apartments, manors and all sorts of quiet residences. The traffic here was non existent, the pedestrians few and, refreshingly, no tourists to be seen except yours truly. To experience a city you have to go through these kinds of areas.
After a while I sat down on a bench overlooking the Docklands, the steel and glass skyscraper new city development, across the river. I ate the croissant I bought earlier while I watched planes fly by towards one of the many London airports. The Docklands is the most un-London-like part of the city. It’s overly planned, commercial, full of chain restaurants and retailers and it all has little character because of it. It mostly reminds me of North American cities and makes me homesick, to a small degree, for the small town charms of Toronto.
Several side streets and pathways later I found myself near Surrey Docks and the Greenland Lock, where I was crossing the road as a blue car approached from my left. “Excuse me.” A grey haired woman was sticking her head out of the car’s window as it rolled to a stop in front of me. She spoke with that old English woman accent.
“Excuse me, do you know where I can find the Wibbly Wobbly?”
In a self-conscious-of-my-Canadian-accent manner, I replied that “I have no idea.” She smiled, said “alright” and drove off.
I finished crossing the street and was shortly riverside again. In the corner there, next to the lock, a shirtless fat man was fishing. I continued down the path and, once I was at a point where he was no longer visible, I sat down on a piece of marble street furniture. I stayed there for fifteen minutes, dumbfounded, wondering what the hell the “Wibbly Wobbly” could be. I am, truly, in Britain.
Pentax K20D
I have a penchant for overly expensive hobbies. When I’m not playing an over-priced game on an expensive console connected to an even more expensive HD television — like right now, with the XBox dead in the water — I like to go out and take pictures. Photography, even if you go digital and remove the film and processing costs, is not a cheap hobby if you want to pursue it seriously. It’s a relatively new interest for me but it is, yes, something I want to pursue seriously. Hence, I bought a new camera. It was an impulse purchase.
Those that are in the know would ask “but didn’t you buy a new camera less than a year ago?” Well, I did. It was the Pentax model previous to this one. It was a fine camera and was a very good introduction to the world of SLR and I took many photos with it, but I gave it to my sister for Christmas. She had more use for it than I did, being a third year photography student and all. After several months, however, I started to miss that camera. Lucky for me, a new model was just around the corner. No, I did not need all the new stuff — the K10D was perfectly good — but something about the new and top-of-the-line appealed to the technodork in me. When I found out that it was released, earlier than I anticipated it, I had to have it. I like being bleeding edge on the pro-sumer front.
There isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two cameras, especially to an amateur that’s still learning. The body is practically identical. The UI is practically identical. The features are mostly the same, except for some additions like better ISO, “Live View” and other more advanced features. I think the sensor is new too, but I’m not sure. Most notably the biggest change is numerical: the K20D has 14.6 Megapixels compared to the K10D’s 10.2.
That is a fucking lot of pixels. The uncompressed RAW files it generates are over 24MB each with a resolution of 4457×3104 at 240dpi. That is a fucking lot of pixels. To better visualize what that means, here is a picture at a 1:1 pixel ratio:
Now here is the picture it is taken from, scaled to fit:
It’s really quite striking. I can’t imagine taking too many photos at that full resolution, but it’s nice that it’s there. Of course, any photos I take as I learn and familiarize myself with the camera will be posted to my flickr feed so if you’re curious about what the camera can do check that out and also look at the fledgling K20D flickr group.
Oh. I should also mention one other reason why I purchased this camera: I quit my job, I am moving out of my apartment and moving to Europe. It’s a minor thing.
