Creek Bed, 2011-11

All of you in Austin remember last year.  For those of you not in Austin, suffice it to say that I have never seen such an extensive drought.

So, of course, we all started celebrating when the rains returned in October.

Strangely, in November I get up one morning and everything is different.  Crystal clear.  Luminant.  I discussed it with one of my friends and we decided that what we were seeing was likely the result of a recent rainstorm cleansing more dust from the air and then the moisture in the air… capturing the light.

This concept of capturing light tantalizes me.  Photography amounts to painting with light.  Light is so hard to direct and understand.  Our eyes both let us perceive the light around us and deceive us at the same time.  They don’t always let us see what color light has fallen in the scene.  They let us know that something is different, but they don’t tell us exactly what that thing is.

They leave us in wonder.  And in the soul of the photographer, success is when that wonder makes it all the way to the screen.

This photograph, “Creek Bed, 2011-11″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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Vote with your dollars… and your votes

Today is a massive day of protests on the internet.

I have discovered already that the companies I work for, Goldenfrog and Data Foundry, have put “censored” tags over their logos.  Google blacked out their main logo. Wikipedia  replaced the entire English-language version of the website with a black protest page.  Wired censored their website.  I’m a little surprised that Facebook doesn’t have “censored” put all over their front page.

The best part of the protests is that now most everyone on the internet is forced to actually take notice that there is something so greatly wrong that companies that form critical parts of our internet are screaming and throwing around enough weight to say “this has to stop now”.

The merits and flaws of the bill I can’t exactly say.  Everything I know is from analysis by other people.  I tried to read Protect IP yesterday and actually could not make any sense of it.  I still have a few comments.

Lamar Smith, the congressman who wrote the bill and probably the biggest supporter of the bill, keeps insisting that the law will never be used against American websites.  This is fundamentally a lie.  The companies that have the money to push this bill through will never stay their hand just because the target website is American, nor will the courts stop them.  We already know that the big music and movie companies illegally lay claim copyright claims on works that they don’t own and works in the public domain, but the mass media doesn’t publicize this.  All of the enforcement power is basically in the hands of the people who have the money, and they do not have your interests in mind.

So, yes.  Protest.

And then, make the protest real.  Do something radical.  Vote.  With your money.

Stop watching movies put out by the motion picture industry.

Stop listening to music put out by the major record labels.

Don’t buy their work.  Don’t pirate their work.

Vote all the SOPA and PIPA supporters out of office.

If you can’t do it perfectly, do the best you can.

Consuming their work in any way, whether you paid for it or not, keeps you in their trap.  Instead, find a local musician who is struggling to make ends meet.  Find a small independent film company that has a good idea but doesn’t have the money for flashy visual effects or high profile stars.  Take your money to them.

Or just stop consuming altogether.  Go for a bike ride.  Walk your dog.  Catnip the cats.  Hack some code.  Write a poem or compose a song or photograph a snowfield.  Make something.  It doesn’t matter whether it is amazing or crap.  If you’ve never made anything before, your first work will be crap.  That’s inevitable and it’s a part of the learning curve that most of society taught you is bad.  Fuck that.  Get out there, make something, then try to make something better.  Spend your time creating, not consuming.  And keep doing it even when those companies try to silence you.

Withhold your money and your attention from companies that seek to do you harm.  Let them drain their coffers on lawyers and lobbyists when they should be innovating.  Spend your money and your attention on supporting your art, your friends art, and the art of the people in your city.

You set yourself, and the people around you, free.

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Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge

I took this photograph almost a year ago.  Shortly after I upgraded my camera, we had a full moon on the equinox.  Since it was also the closest the moon has been in twenty years and the moon will not be that close again for another twenty years, I made sure I was out to photograph it.  So, I joined a great many other people, out for the same purpose, on the Pfluger Pedestrian bridge that night.

I still haven’t been able to make those photographs work.  I overexposed the moon in every last one of them, so I have no moon face to work with.  But this photograph I took in a bit of down time.  It was not until recent weeks, when I discovered the trick of developing an image at multiple exposure levels before feeding into the HDR processing, that I gained the ability to turn this into a fantastic image.  Still, I would have liked a really extended bracketing set.  -4 all the way to 4 would have been fantastic.

This photograph, “Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge, 2011-03?, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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I will always dream of the moon

Saturday night, it was very cold.  We had thin clouds overhead.  My significant other and I had gone off to dinner, and on the way back home we both noticed that the moon had a ring about a portion of it.  So, we got home.  I beelined it to the door, snagged my camera, tripod, and housemate, and we all went out into the back yard.  There I snagged this photo.

Using the new Magic Lantern features on my camera, I actually snagged a 9-stop bracket (four stops down, four stops up, one frame at each stop).  And then I discovered that the HDR processing did very little good in this case, and just some basic curve adjustment on a single image did all the magic.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be an astronaut.  But my choices took me in the direction of being a programmer.  I will never regret becoming a programmer, but I will always regret losing the moon.

This photograph, “Moon Halo, 2012-01″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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Car Free

I am going car-free this year.  I have car insurance coming due in April and then again in October.  My registration comes due in August and my inspection in December.  I will sell my car between August and October.  So, right after my registration (so the next owner doesn’t have to cope with that) but before I pay late-year car insurance.

This will require… changes.

First, though, I will impose some constraints.  Given that I recently started keeping to a budget, the best constraint I can start on is to constrain my Transportation budget.  As of this moment, and because of my trip to Houston over the weekend,  have spent about $35 on a fillup and some tolls.  I have constraint my Transportation budget for January to $90, which is slightly less than three fillups on my car.  That’s about 900 miles, 700 remaining.  Not much of a constraint, really, but something I must watch now.  I’ll constrain it further in future months.  But now I have to start being careful about how much driving I do.

After getting rid of the car, I’ll get a Car2Go account so that I can use that when I do need to head north.  I’ll also slowly migrate onto the new recumbent so that using the bus becomes an option.

(I might need to frequently rent a pickup early next year when I start construction on my tiny house.  I’ll deal with that when the time comes.)

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Photofile is now Open Source

I have been debating this for two weeks, and now it is official. I made Photofile an open source project today. The source code is hosted on Bitbucket and I am doing very rapid development on it at this time.

If you are interested in the application and want to try it out… watch the commits or watch this website. It is not even at dogfood release yet.

If you want to join the project and contribute code, let me know.

Originally, I had hoped that I would make this an actual commercial application, and I cannot rule out the possibility that I will start requesting donations or (inexpensive) paid licenses for the application. However, a reality of Clojure is that once distributed, the full source is visible. Same as with Perl or Python. There is no on-disk binary-only storage of the application.

If nothing else, putting this in front of some eyes may also convince people that there’s something to this Clojure business and it may get me some attention from interested employers. Further, I have something publicly visible to talk about more. Such as an article that I am writing on Ports, Adapters, Test-Driven Development, and Mocking.

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Local Calls 35c

Remember that old concept? The pay phone? Yeah, I do, too. I even remember when local phone calls cost 25c. I’m sure there are even a few of you out there who remember when a phone call cost 10c.

This scene is at the front of Bouldin Creek Coffee House in Austin. It’s my favorite coffee house. Also, total hipsterville. But I go there to people watch. I just feel really, REALLY weird driving there. That’s a place that deserves the full bicycle treatment.

Happy New Year!

This photograph, “Local Calls 35c, 2011-12″, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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A Year Through the Lens

This evening I gave a presentation to my friends showing the best of my photography over this last year. The presentation is also available for download from my public Dropbox folder. Note… this is a 300MB file. Why is it so big and what is included?

  • The presentation and my presentation notes
  • A calendar for 2012 with my photographs in the background
  • 14 full-resolution portfolio images

I have never before released one of my portfolio images into the public, and now I am releasing 14 of them.  As always, they are released under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike license.

If you like the photographs, please let me know that you appreciate my work.  Email me, circle me and comment on my posts on G+, follow my RSS feed, or contact me about potential commercial work.  Please share my work with other people.

Here’s to you!

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Christmas Lights

One last Christmas photo before I bid farewell to 2011.

I found this house on my walk over to the famous 37th street in Austin. The house does feel a bit tower-like, but I very much like how they used floodlights reflected off the house instead of directly using fairy lights for the decorations.

While I was in Portland, I wrote some introspections about self-care. This trip to 37th street fit the bill perfectly. I was feeling a little down that evening, so I went. I posted on the local poly list that I was going and invited people to join me. Nobody showed up, and I went, anyway, and had a fantastic time! It was exactly what I needed that night and reinforces what I learned in Portland.

This photograph, “Christmas Lights, 2011-12?, is copywritten by Savanni D’Gerinel and is available under a Creative Commons, By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share Alike license. If you liked this picture, please tell a friend about it, link to it from Facebook, Tweet about it, or add my weblog to your feed reader. I specialize in High Dynamic Range photography and gladly take requests. You can also license my work for commercial purposes or commission me for custom work. Just send me an email.

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Returning to the more sedate posting rate

Okay, I’m returning to the more sedate posting rate.  My current work/social/Work schedule does not permit me to really keep up with one photo per day.  So, I am going back to the one photograph every Wednesday, followed by additional photographs and articles as I finish them.

It was, however, a very fun try!

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