RE: previous posts and the future

So thinking back to my new years resolution to "blog more" and my feeble attempts at documenting my daily life, I think a change is needed.

Basically my problem is that I don't think that just because you can generate content, you should, or alternatively, if you are going to put something out there, at the very least it should be engaging, if not innovative or nuanced in some way.

As much as I enjoyed writing my snippets of my life, I don't think it is terribly interesting to anyone besides me (and even that hasn't been terribly captivating, as you may have noticed I stopped doing it a few days ago). So with that said, I am temporarily suspended blogging until I can come up with a better way to go about doing it—I might resume tomorrow or maybe a month from now, but I will come back.

In the mean time, if you are interested in beer, I have actually been writing worthwhile things here so check it out.

Also, my 360 project is still going on, I just haven't gotten around to posting the images yet, but they will be showing up here in the next day or two.


-peace
DAnley

So it has now been a year and I am beginning to worry that I will never actually get around to posting the recipes and photos for the things that I made, so instead I will just post a list of the items that you unfortunately will not get to see at this time.

Lime-coconut macaroons with haupia (coconut pudding) filling and chili chocolate dipping sauce
Chocolate-espresso scones
Coconut Creme Caramel
Poffertjes
Tiramisu
Vegan Date and Cashew Truffles
Oregano Flat bread
Beer Bread (multiple versions)
Walnut-Carob Biscotti
Sopapillas
Pannekoeken (Dutch pancakes)
Walnut and Brown Sugar Roll
Camembert, Fig and Basil Puffs
Chicken and Cheese Pretzel Bites
Cinnamon Rolls
Sweet Granola
Savoury Granola
Honey Florentines
Rootbeer Cake
A Decadent Morning: Waffle Sandwiches
Vegan Raspberry Cookies
Broiler Cake

Absence: explained...

Well, I haven't posted here is a long time and I thought I might as well explain why. I started a large number of posts a few months back after a flurry of cooking and never got around to finishing them (mostly due to the fact I misplaced there pictures). Nonetheless, I will try to finish them up shortly and back post them to the proper dates, plus add links below

End of Photography Class

For the past few months I have been taking a photography class on B/W Film Photography. I have thoroughly enjoyed the entire class and have definitely exponentially expanded my photographic skill base and knowledge pool. I am also beginning to understand what it means to have an expensive pastime. With cooking, you can always buy food cheaper or go to markets to get better deals, and even when that doesn't work, you can also just work with random stuff you have. However, that is not the case with photography. Especially when shooting film, the equipment (cameras and lenses), the medium (rolls of film), and the product (either computer programmes or photosensitive paper) becomes very expensive very quickly. It is possible to cut corners and such, but those "cost-saving measures" become very apparent, very fast.

However, for one of the first times in my life, I think I have really found a hobby - something that I feel okay spending inordinate amounts of my time (and money) on doing. On that interesting note, I started the class with one camera a 30+ year old Canon AE-1 with 50mm kit lens that belonged to my father, a flash that didn't work, a few filters, a 2x teleconverter, and a broken 75-210mm lens and now I own four camera bodies (two Canon AE-1, a Minolta X-700, and a Minolta SRT 101) four 50mm kit lenses a 28mm F2.8, 49mm F2.8, 135 F2.8 400mm F2.8 28-70mm F3.5-4.5, 75-210 F3.5, 85-205mm F2.8-5.4, 60-300mm F3.4-5.4, three 2x teleconverters, 4 flashes, an inordinate amount/variety of filters, two camera covers, three camera bags, a set of special glass magnifying filters, a mini-tripod, and three triggers. The best part about this is though family gifts and an amazing deal on Craigslist, I got everything I own for $120.

But back to the class, throughout the past few months I have been very busy doing work for it and trying to force my way through the learning curve for printing film. I have learned the hard way about all the various finicky aspects of film (light leaks, camera malfunctions, film inserted the backwards) and have spent countless hours reshooting and reshooting my projects. That being said, I have enjoyed every minute of it.

There is such an indescribable joy about walking out of a dark room after an entire night spent working with the perfect print in one hand and being greeted by the sun rising through the windows. It was those long nights that really made the class so worth it for me and because of that — even though it stole my life, even though I was always running around, and even though it is expensive — there is no way I will stop shooting film and taking classes.

The final assignment for the class was actually to upload all of the projects that I did during the class, with their accompanying statements. Additionally, what I decided to do was to upload all of my negatives that I didn't print for the projects to really round out my photographic journey.
The links to all of these can be found below.

In the end, looking back at the beginning of the class I came in thinking that I really knew photography even though all I had was trial-and-error and a good deal of intuition. Now that I have finished I have since discovered that those two are extremely important, but only one small part of a very big puzzle; More than anything, I have just re-enforced my belief that you can and should never stop learning, no matter what you're doing.

PROJECTS:
In all of these links you will find the various projects that I did for the class. Each one shows all of the final printed images and the negative scans from the projects, as well contains a link to the rest of the project negatives.

Experimenting Projects

Mapping Project

Emulation Project

Persona Project

Utopia Project

Persona Project

The concept of identity and what composes a person is a topic often fraught with with discussion and disagreement. In order to generate ideas, we reviewed a large variety of different photographs that were related to the concept of the persona. Some were of self portraits, some were of trains, but all had and underlying sense of exploration and definition. For this project, we were tasked to define persona in our own way

-- -------------------- --

"Indexing is the act of demarcating an object at a specific time, to represent how it behaved/existed in that time frame alone as to avoid possible confusion. For example Daniel: Age 3 behaves very differently than Daniel: Age 15."
- General Semantics Theory

There is no such thing as two completely identical objects. When you look snowflakes under a microscope, obviously they are not the same. However, if you measure an orange one day and then again weeks later, the same orange will give you a different reading. To measure this temporal change, we use indexing.

Throughout my life I have always found myself flitting from one group of people to the next, making friends easily, but making attachments only with great difficulty. In addition, as a third culture child, my sense of otherness has been magnifies as after returning of my place of birth I find I am more of an alien than in the foreign lands I just departed.

This project attempts to index the different facets of my life and subcultures that I did/still belong to. Some of the representations are literal and some are metaphorical but all are true and are me. The images are presented fading into the black background to represent the tentative and intangible hold that each had on my life, never quite becoming fully realised, but instead fluctuating in and out of my life, just like the many locales I have tried to call home.

Scanned Prints:
To be added
persona_image1_finalscan_print.jpg
persona_image6_finalscan_print.jpg
persona_image7_finalscan_print.jpg
persona_image8_finalscan_print.jpg

Scanned Negatives:
To be added
persona_image1_finalscan.jpg
persona_image2_finalscan.jpg
persona_image4_finalscan.jpg
persona_image5_finalscan.jpg
persona_image6_finalscan.jpg
persona_image8_finalscan.jpg
persona_image9_finalscan.jpg
persona_image10_finalscan.jpg
persona_image11_finalscan.jpg

Project Slideshow:


Project negatives: Persona Project