I LEGO NY

“During the cold and dark Berlin winter days, I spend a lot of time with my boys in their room. And as I look at the toys scattered on the floor, my mind inevitably wanders back to New York.”

Christoph Niemann’s illustrations have appeared on the covers of The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and American Illustration. His work has won numerous awards from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Art Directors Club and American Illustration. He is the author of two children’s books, “The Pet Dragon,” which teaches Chinese characters to young readers, and “The Police Cloud.” After 11 years in New York, he moved to Berlin with his wife, Lisa, and their sons, Arthur, Gustav and Fritz. His Web site is christophniemann.com.

[ www.christophniemann.com, via nytimes.com ]

Posted on February 3rd, 2009 in art | 1 Comment »

San Miguel and Guanajuato, via tiltshiftmaker.com

tiltshiftmaker.com is a web site that transforms regular pictures into tilt-shift photos. Here’s my trip to San Miguel De Allende, shifted:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on January 8th, 2009 in digital | 1 Comment »

I don’t know…

Ever take a picture, leave it on your media card for a few months, then have no idea what it was you took a picture of?

Posted on January 5th, 2009 in digital | No Comments »

JPG Magazine says goodbye

Sad news from the folks at JPG Magazine:

JPG Magazine Says Goodbye

Posted by Laura Brunow Miner on 1 January 2009.

Today is a particularly sad day for all of us at JPG and 8020 Media.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success. As a result, jpgmag.com will shut down on Monday, January 5, 2009.

The one thing we’ve been the most proud of: your amazing talent. We feel honored and humbled to have been able to share jpgmag.com with such a dynamic, warm, and wonderful community of nearly 200,000 photographers. The images on the website and in the magazine were adored by many, leaving no doubt that this community created work of the highest caliber. The kindness, generosity, and support shared among members made it a community in the truest sense of the word, and one that we have loved being a part of for these past two years.

We wish we could have found a way to leave the site running for the benefit of the amazing folks who have made JPG what it is, and we have spent sleepless nights trying to figure something out, all to no avail. Some things you may want to do before the site closes:

Download the PDFs of back issues, outtakes, and photo challenge selections. We’ll always have the memories!
Make note of your favorite photographers. You may want to flip through your favorites list and jot down names and URLs of some of the people you’d like to stay in touch with. You may even want to cut and paste your contacts page into a personal record.
Catch up with your fellow members. Our roots are in this humble flickr forum and we recommend going back to find fellow members, discuss the situation, or participate in another great photo community.
Keep in touch. This has always been much more than just a job to each of us, and we’ll miss you guys! We’ll be checking the account jpgletters@gmail.com in our free time going forward. We can’t promise to reply to every email (since we’ll be busy tuning up our resumes) but we’d love to hear from you.
Stay posted. Although the magazine is ceasing publication, we’ll be updating you on what’s happening with your subscription early next week.

We’re soggy-eyed messes, but it is what it is. At that, JPGers, we bid you goodbye, and good luck in 2009 and the future.

Laura Brunow Miner
Editor in Chief

Posted on January 2nd, 2009 in uncategorized | No Comments »

How to develop film using coffee and Vitamin C!

 

Survival scenario #117:

feature-caffenol

You’re trapped in a grocery store. Zombies are closing in from all sides. You have a crucial photo that could end the carnage, if only you had some way to develop the film.

What do you do?

You grab some instant coffee and vitamin C, you develop the film, and you vanquish the zombies.

What, you don’t think we’re serious?
First of all, zombies are an inevitable part of life.
And secondly, you really can develop film using vitamin C and coffee. For reals.

Read on, and we’ll show you everything you need to know. Quick, before the zombies regroup!

[ found photography, via photojojo ]

Posted on January 1st, 2009 in photo | No Comments »

The Conet Project – mysterious shortwave numbers stations


For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a superb receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.

Although no broadcaster or government has acknowledged transmitting the numbers, a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”

A sample of these recordings is available at http://www.last.fm/music/The+Conet+Project. More information about the project is available at http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm. Although the project is currently sold out, the sound files are available elsewhere on the net. The location and whereabouts of said files are left as an exercise to the reader.

[via The Conet Project ]

Posted on December 24th, 2008 in blog | No Comments »

The Conet Project


For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of “Numbers Stations”.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a “one time pad” is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a superb receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.

Although no broadcaster or government has acknowledged transmitting the numbers, a 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, “These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn’t be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption.”

A sample of these recordings is available at http://www.last.fm/music/The+Conet+Project. More information about the project is available at http://www.irdial.com/conet.htm. Although the project is currently sold out, the sound files are available elsewhere on the net. The location and whereabouts of said files are left as an exercise to the reader.

[via The Conet Project ]

Posted on December 24th, 2008 in uncategorized | No Comments »

More FM3-derived ambient works

http://www.archive.org/details/okk016mystziel

“Sounds of the Buddha Machine 1.0”

Since FM3 was kind enough to offer the loops from their Buddha Machine 1.0 for free and on a Creative Commons license, Mystified and Zieltogend endeavored to create pieces of music using only these sounds. Unlike the original Buddha Machine, more than one loop is heard at once in these pieces, giving them perhaps a little bit of an unfair advantage. We hope you enjoy the music.

This audio is part of the collection: Okkulth Records

Date: 2008-11-09
Keywords: ambient; FM3; Mystified; Zieltogend

Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 Netherlands

The intention of Okkulth releases is that they are dubbed onto a cassette. These songs will fit onto one side of a C90 tape. It is recommended that you use the PDF file to print the artwork. In the unlikely event that you want to burn a CDR, you can use either the low-resolution thumbnail file or freely alter the artwork provided in the BMP image.

Mystified is Thomas Park.
More at: http://www.mystifiedmusic.com

Zieltogend is [empty].
More at: http://www.myspace.com/zieltogend

Okkulth can also be found at:
http://www.myspace.com/okkulthrecs

Posted on December 15th, 2008 in blog | No Comments »

Boodler and Buddha Machine together

I’ve been playing with my Buddha Machine v2.0 for the past week and love  it. I downloaded the .wav files played by Buddha Machine 1.0 and decided to buy one to play next to my 2.0 unit.

While googling around, I came across a post on the Healing Beats forum describing  a program called Boodler. From the web page:

Boodler is a tool for creating soundscapes — continuous, infinitely varying streams of sound. Boodler is designed to run in the background on a computer, maintaining whatever sound environment you desire.
Boodler is extensible, customizable, and modular. Each soundscape is a small piece of Python code — typically less than a page. A soundscape can incorporate other soundscapes; it can combine other soundscapes, switch between them, fade them in and out. This package comes with many example soundscapes. You can use these, modify them, combine them to arbitrary levels of complexity, or write your own.

What rocks is that FM3 has released the .wav files for 1.0, as I mentioned, and the author of Boodler has written agents to use them:

1. Download the soundscape buddhamachine and place in the ‘effects’ folder. (of course you will need to extract it first) http://eblong.com/zarf/boodler/extraboo … ine.tar.gz

2. Download the buddha machine sounds which you will need from here: http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/downloa … Vfiles.zip

3. Extract these and stick the ‘buddha loops loud’ folder in the boodler-snd folder.

4. Start one of the agents (see the buddhamachine readme for a list) I like buddhamachine.Layers or buddhamachine.ComplexLayers

5. Instant Buddha machine with virtually infinite combinations and pitches = CRAZY DELICIOUS.

Posted on December 14th, 2008 in blog | No Comments »

Buddha Machine

My Buddha Machine arrived yesterday.

I opened the shipping container to find a box roughly the size of a deck of playing cards. The outside is festooned with the FM3 logo and chinese lettering.

The box opens to reveal a retro-looking plastic slab resembling a 1970’s transistor radio. It’s the brainchild of FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian) an ambient duo based out of China. The Buddha Machine plays “drones”, little low-fi downtempo ambient clips ranging from 2-45 seconds. Each drone plays continually, or at least until the 2 AA batteries run out. A 4.5v DC adapter (not included) allows the unit to play for longer periods of time.

The only controls are a  volume control/power switch, a push button to change drones, and a pitch-bending dial. The Buddha Machine plays through a small speaker and can fill a small room; the tinny response seems to improve the quality of the sound. Think of film grain improving an image. If you choose a more personal experience, there is a mini headphone jack on top.

Even though you could download the sound files from FM3’s site, it’s just not the same unless you hear the cracks and pops of the unit’s tinny little speaker. It’s deliciously analog, completely non-upgradable, and offers a warm, imperfect analog sound.

The Buddha Machine can only be found a few places right now, including Forced Exposure.

http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/

Posted on December 5th, 2008 in blog | 3 Comments »

Photography is for…

Want to be a renowned photographer? follow these seven steps. (links include “colorful” language, but we all know that color is an important part of photography)

1) Make sure you have a LOT OF F**KING NATURAL LIGHT.

2) Make sure the natural light SOURCE is behind you

3) Make sure the flash on your camera is OFF. If you need a FLASH, it means you don’t have enough NATURAL LIGHT. (step 1)

4) Look through the viewfinder: Make sure that everything in your shot is symmetrical. If a tiny bit of it isn’t, like a bird or a queer walking down the street, that’s OK because it makes the photo “cool.” Go watch every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made if you don’t understand this. (Study Alex’s fake eyelash as the archetypal stylistic symmetry violator)

5) Take pictures of everyday sh*t from stupid angles but make sure it’s all SYMMETRICAL and that it isn’t MOVING.

6) Make sure YOU don’t move or have your fat black fingers in front of the lens when you push the button. (priceless tip: push the button down halfway, wait for a clicky sound, and then push it all the way in – this is the BIG photography secret that professionals don’t want you to know.)

7) Take TONS of photos of the same thing and then only use the good ones where the bird or the queer wasn’t blinking.

You’re done. You’re a f**king photographer. See how easy that is? That’s because it’s for JERKOFFS.

(kottke.org, via avenues)

Posted on November 26th, 2008 in journal | No Comments »

Testing new all-in-one widget

Scanner, fax and printer.

 

Posted on November 14th, 2008 in journal | No Comments »

SwitchProxy update – google posterity post

I swear by SwitchProxy for Firefox. I use proxies to test our work environment and route web traffic through a SSH tunnel when I’m on an untrusted wireless network. Unfortunately, SwitchProxy hasn’t been updated for some time – it doesn’t work on newer versions of Firefox.

I read this post which talked about tweaking .xpi files – the files mozilla uses for add-ons. Changing the extension from .xpi to .zip results in a file you can open with Windows Explorer. Open it up and look at the install.rdf file. There’s a line in the file that reads:

<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
                <em:minVersion>0.8</em:minVersion>
                <em:maxVersion>2.0</em:maxVersion>

Change the lines to reflect your current version, update the file, change the name back to .xpi and you’re good to go.

This won’t work with all add-ons, as some of them require specific versions. SwitchProxy seems to work just fine, however.

Posted on November 11th, 2008 in blog | No Comments »

I sense a pattern here…more doors, San Miguel De Allende

A little blown out, but I like the effect. Canon FTb, 50/1.8 lens. Most likely shooting with Kodak UC 400 at midday, hence the blow out.

Posted on November 9th, 2008 in film | 1 Comment »

Mystified / Zieltogend – Black Lotus

 Since FM3 was kind enough to offer the loops from their Buddha Machine 1.0 for free and on a Creative Commons license, Mystified and Zieltogend endeavored to create pieces of music using only these sounds. Unlike the original Buddha Machine, more than one loop is heard at once in these pieces, giving them perhaps a little bit of an unfair advantage. We hope you enjoy the music.“Sounds of the Buddha Machine 1.0”

This audio is part of the collection: Okkulth Records

It also belongs to collection: Netlabels

Date: 2008-11-09
Keywords: ambient; FM3; Mystified; Zieltogend

Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 Netherlands

 

Notes

The intention of Okkulth releases is that they are dubbed onto a cassette. These songs will fit onto one side of a C90 tape. It is recommended that you use the PDF file to print the artwork. In the unlikely event that you want to burn a CDR, you can use either the low-resolution thumbnail file or freely alter the artwork provided in the BMP image.

Mystified is Thomas Park. More at: www.mystifiedmusic.com

Zieltogend is [empty]. More at: www.myspace.com/zieltogend

Okkulth can also be found at: www.myspace.com/okkulthrecs

Posted on November 9th, 2008 in buddha_machine | No Comments »

Woops!

I’ve used York Photo for my mail order film processing for several years. They’re inexpensive ($2.20/roll, $1.50 shipping, and $1.00 scans), they turn rolls around in a week, and they partner with Snapfish for their online service. They offer perpetual hosting and have great deals on prints.

I got my first rolls back from San Miguel a week ago, and was waiting on two other rolls. One roll showed up online yesterday, and when I got home, found this in my mailbox:

Woops!

Woops!

There was a note from York saying that they received the roll in this condition, damaged beyond repair. I used to send film without film canisters to save space, but I think I’ll send them in film canisters from now on.

Nothing York could have done about it, USPS strikes again.

Posted on November 8th, 2008 in film, journal | No Comments »

Special San Francisco PHOTOJOJO shoot this weekend!

I received this email for a photo shoot this weekend. The mural work in the Mission district makes a wonderful subject for shooting, and the PHOTOJOJO people are a lot of fun.

Hi! Your pals at Photojojo (that’s us) are planning a series of really fun photo events in San Francisco and you’re invited!We call ’em Photo Safaris. The first one is this Saturday. We’ll be exploring some of the beautiful street art in the Mission then heading to a local bar, checking out everyone’s photos, and giving out some great prizes.

Hope you can make it! Feel free to bring some pals, and be sure to sign up for updates on future events.

Details
Mission Murals Safari
– Saturday 11/8 @ 3:30pm
– Meet @ Market St & Brady St
– Host: Heather Champ
RSVP

Love,
Photojojo

p.s. Help us spread the word about this weekend’s safari by twittering it or RSVPing on Facebook.

p.p.s. Here’s a video from our last event in NYC. Get excited!!

Posted on November 4th, 2008 in uncategorized | 2 Comments »

More San Miguel de Allende / Guanajuato photos

Untweaked, fresh out of my Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim.

Posted on November 3rd, 2008 in uncategorized | No Comments »

Meikai El test shots, as promised!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted on October 16th, 2008 in film | No Comments »

Cover

Test with my new Olympus Stylus Epic.

Posted on October 15th, 2008 in film | No Comments »