mollynme80's mop

This is an ever-so-slightly modified version of a photo that I saw at http://www.flickr.com/photos/27566278@N07/3696575119/in/pool-donoteatbaybay/. I can't seem to figure out how to post this image in a flickr comment without putting it in my own photostream, so maybe I'll try sending the URL to this page to the photographer...
for no good reason that I can think of.

Did I mention that I finally have Photoshop?

I found an old copy of CS3 that was sooo cheap that I was able to buy it.

Chuck and Carl #5: The search for R'lyeh

Another installment in my Chuck and Carl series on flickr. Lately C & C have been reading H.P. Lovecraft's annotated Necronomicon, and the result, of course, is plenty way cool adventures!

Blog entry posted to the wrong blog

To sum up: go find some of Leonard Cohen's songs to listen to, and listen.

So many graves to fill; oh love, aren't you tired yet?

Tom Waits' Rain Dogs:

"There's a hole in the ladder
A fence we can climb
Mad as a hatter
You're thin as a dime..."

This has nothing to do with ducklings, so far as I know.

Blogger is resizing my pictures so they look terrible, and I can't remember how to fix that.

Thank god Rain Dogs isn't finished playing yet.

C & H from the outside

From the outside, it's necessary to cross the river to be able to see all of the C&H property at once. I did that one day and spent a few hours on the shore trying to get a photo, or a series of pictures, that would take the whole thing in, without much luck.



From town, you can see the place in pieces; you can see different parts of the property from various places. It sprawls out under the bridges, where you can see it from the Al Zampa bridge ped walk.



There is a no-man's land in a few places, where you might be able to claim that you weren't
really trespassing. There's one under the bridges, where people fish without being hassled (so far as I know), and where you can look for interesting grafitti on the boxcars on a siding. This one is behind the museum.



The Castle City is an integrated tug-and-barge; I think it transports C&H products from the refinery to the Oakland harbor, but I haven't been able to find that out. It's not possible for the public to visit the dock, and it's hard to get a good look at it from outside the C&H lot.



Crockett cogen is a symbiotic appendage at the refinery's east end, next to the dock. It burns natural gas for electricity, and the leftover steam is used to refine sugar. I don't suppose they like visitors, but I'll try to find out.



No trespassing, no tours, visitors should go away. Private, do ya hear me? I couldn't get on the grounds legally, so I've taken lots of pictures from the outside, looking in. The place seems like a different landscape from the various places where the edge of the lot is accessible.



The place is photogenic, depending on where you look: inviting, even, from a safe distance.



I think these are abandoned silos.



The refinery can be pretty at night. There are hundreds of lights, and in particular: the giant C&H sugar box, and ...



...the C&H sign. You can see this from the highway, and probably from the water, but you can't really see it in town. I'm temped to draw some sort of conclusion (or make a presumption, or something) about the attitude of the C&H management towards Crockett. They built a lot of the town, way back when, and employed most of the people who lived in the homes that they had built. Now they seem more insular.

Lethem's _The Ecstasy of Influence_ article

[this isn't finished, but it's all I have]

I think we can't create something meaningful that doesn't define its meaning in terms of existing ideas, so anything meaningful that we create can be seen as plagiarism if you define "plagiarism" strictly enough.

(from the) Strait to the (stone) Chair

I was going to add a couple of other images to the set before it was due, and (surprise!) I ran out of time. So, I'm going to post an alternative set on flickr with extra images in it. Hurray.

stupid blog

I kept trying to add a post, and the server would just return an error message - so I didn't think it was being posted and I kept trying to add it;

and now, it won't let me delete the extra posts.

Broken internet things suck.

from the strait to the chair

This is the set of pictures for the final project. These aren't print-sized yet.

The 136 final assignment

the Strait to the Chair set on flickr.com.

(Monday, May 18: fixed the link to flickr.)

If...

If that green thing hadn't been there, and if it the focus was just a little better, then this would be my best duck pond photo ever. And if there weren't those washed-out spots. And if the goslings were a color that would contrast more with the background. Yep.

Ted Hamiter's Collage

I had a vague idea of making a spoof of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, and then, since I didn't get anything done until the last possible moment, I got this instead. The rabbit was swiped from the Wikipedia Commons, the coins were scanned (since I couldn't find anything interesting to scan), and everything else was from images that I had posted at flickr.com.

I had also thought about making a sort of recreation of William Kurelek's The Maze, and I guess it's just as well I didn't start that ... and besides, that could always be saved for a future project.

It seems to me (now that it's finished) that if I had thought to add some pigs (and maybe a hyena) I could claim that this was meant to illustrate the dehumanizing influence of the oil market in our culture. That, however, would have also meant having to have one of the animals performing some act of needless cruelty on the bunny, so screw that.

For now I'm going to claim that it's an indictment of consumer culture, or something, with a subtext of ecological awareness.



Potential titles (all of which were made up after the thing was finished):

Shopping at ConocoPhillips,
The OPEC Swap Meet,
Petroleum Products are Good for Your Genes,
and
Some Birds and a Rabbit and Some Coins and a Bunch of Pipes and Mechanical Things and Whatever

Gulls

The Trestle in Martinez

The rail trestle over Alhambra Blvd. in Martinez, only this time it's all artsy-fartsyfied. (Alternately, you can imagine that this is what the trestle would sorta look like to a very dizzy person with compound eyes, but this should only be done on an empty stomach.)

More movement ...

... but the camera was moving while the subject held still.

Movement photos in taken in the afternoon

Horse shadows

The hood for my telephoto lens disappeared, and I wasn't able to get a shot of this scene that didn't have glare (I didn't think about using a polarizing filter.) Is there some way to edit the glare out?

Retouched photo

Taken on Wiswall Drive in Richmond, CA, back in the mid-1960s.

Extra credit

This is a photo of my mom's mother back in the 1920's or 30's. I had misplaced the file that I'd already worked on, so I redid as much as I could at the last minute, and the results aren't impressive. I tried to restore some of the washed-out detail, and I didn't worry about the smudges and stains and spots.

Leftover goose heads

These were supposed to go with a previous post. Didn't, though. Nope.

But they're here now, and I suppose you're saying to yourself "I knew something was missing in my life; and now - as if by magic - it's here, and all is right with the world."

Or you might be saying some other thing to yourself, but I guess it takes all kinds. Yep.

And a second installment...

There are few creatures as huggable as the redtail catfish. (This one's name is "Smoochy.")

This isn't the same as the image in the last post, honest.

DitL: the overdue first installment

I just haven't been able to get anything uploaded for this assignment; I haven't been able to get anything else done, either. Sometimes things just suck that way.

Whether it's too late now or not, here are some of the photos from the Day in the Life assignment. These are going to require some explanatory captions, which are oh-so-soon to follow.

"Event" assignment leftover #1

Corvus Deflatus, Karen Bondarchuk 2007; made from scavenged tire scraps, and displayed at the Lindsey Museum a few weeks ago. Most of the pictures I took there weren't very good, and I didn't take as many shots as I needed for the assignment.

That, and this was supposed to have been posted weeks ago, but it was filed as a draft instead. Stupid blog.

Leftover from the QOL assignment

The above photo got lost for a while, and it wasn't even on the contact sheet.