photobooth 1993-2006

Take a time trips in the flickr now and then pool.

Are you in New York and looking for something to do this weekend? ABCDF promises to be a great show. Many of the photographers like Daniela Rosell are well known but there are many names that are new to me. I'll try to make the opening on Sunday.

UPDATE: We went out today to check out this show and I was disappointed. The photography was presented mounted on boards and as big transparencies. Both choices minimize the power of the photograph as an artistic object, giving them a more commercial and less substantial feel. Many of the prints were poorly made. Additionally the curators made several bad editing decisions leaving the show without coherence. Modern photography was thrown together with a random shot of the 50's. Interior scenes were juxtaposed with architectural photography. Images practically screaming to be printed large were presented small and several humdrum shots were shown large. A few somewhat mismatched video and sculpture pieces were thrown in for no apparent reason. Unforgivably the lighting was bad. All this is a shame because the work of many compelling photographers was on display minimized by the presentation...

We're back home... Say hello. I'll be posting DR images on Mexican Pictures for another week or so.

Ever wonder what it feels like to hang out in Hanoi? Check out Thinh Le's Hanoi Panoramas.

If you ever find yourself in this part of the world. I recommend turning off the main road into a path that runs through a field of sugar cane. Kill the car, open the windows and maybe open the door and stand outside letting the sweet air envelop you. Listen to the sound of wind in the high cane with the surf beyond. This, you will not forget.

Many guidebooks on the Dominican Republic warn the reader WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T DRIVE AT NIGHT, but they don't explain their excess of caution. I wanted to know what the big deal was, so I went out tonight. Here are the reasons the warnings are in all caps.

1. No streetlights.
2. Motorbikes that pass on either side of you without headlights.
3. Potholes so deep they bang your teeth together.
4. Bridges that don't exist and are unmarked by some sort of "bridge out' sign.
5. People in the streets.
6. Dogs in the streets.
7. Chickens in the streets.
8. Police who stop you and ask you for a few pesos for some Presidentes.
9. Random guys waving machetes who appear out of nowhere in the middle of the road.
10. No stop signs on unlit 4 and 5 way intersections.
11. No streetsigns whatsoever.

Don't take this as a complaint. We're all enjoying ourselves here. Driving is part of the adventure.

I love driving in countries where there are no traffic rules. There is something exhilarating about getting to a 5 way intersection of zooming motorcycles, cars turning right and left across traffic and JUST GOING FOR IT.

I've had a couple of dogs in my lifetime although I don't have one now. New York despite it's abundance of smells is a cruel place to keep an animal who's great love is roaming around in the woods. I am thinking of a particular dog from my childhood. He's been gone for a while now. I was wondering if he ever dreamed of me and if so was I me or was I just some friendly anonymous human. Did he dream in color as I sometimes dream in black and white?

Often if I see a tourist taking a picture of something, I will step into frame just as he puts the camera to his face. Sometimes if it's a group shot and I'll step behind the group while the camera is being adjusted, step out quickly for the shot, and then head off before anyone notices. Over the years I've done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I've never told anyone. My wife will learn this small secret when she reads this post. I think of those pictures sometimes... I imagine them pasted in albums, lost in Parisian shoeboxes, and perhaps even hung by magnets on a few Japanese refrigerators... out there... somewhere. Do they wonder about the guy standing there with the slight grin?

My son is into bellybuttons right now. He likes to poke them and explore their depth. If you meet him don't be shocked if he goes for yours and gives it a good poke. Watch out.

The first picture is of two of my great aunts and my father's sister. The second is of a weekend barbecue. My grandmother is dead center. This is a lost world.

My web friend Angelica is the curator of Swapatorium a website full of compelling found images. Check out her recent find of 1970 Rice University yearbook. The student portraits are photobooth strips. Man o man is that groovy.

From an old journal:

It's almost 3am. My friend died today. Cancer. She was only 26. I couldn't sleep.

I drove up PCH. The clouds were low. The ocean dull, dark, almost invisible. Hungry and awake, I drove inland and stopped at a diner somewhere in Ventura county. As always at diners I ordered a burger and key lime pie. The place was empty and Janet, the waitress poured herself a coffee, sat down with me, and talked about a dream of horses she had had many years ago. I talked about India and the things I had seen there. She asked a lot of questions about camels and monsoons and holy men. Except for the cook and a sleepy bus boy named Manuelito, there was nobody else. I didn't tell her about my friend. When I got up to go she told me to come again, turned the TV to old Star Trek episode. Kirk was fighting some alien guy. Janet said she had seen it before. "The Gorn," she says, "They are unstoppable."

I drove back down the coast past the lights and stopped on a deserted beach. I like to open the windows, crank the heater up, and listen to the waves. I sat there in the dark for a while with the radio playing static. The world seems less round on nights like this. Hard to imagine tommorrow much less ten years from tomorrow.

I keep seeing lists of 10 must have Mac programs, but the lists is they are well known can't-live-without programs like Launchbar and Windowshade already installed on Machead machines. Here are some slightly more obscure programs I use every day:

1. Inquisitor. Inquisitor adds live search to Safari. You start typing it starts searching/suggesting. 90% of the time I never even have to go to the google results page because I find exactly what I am looking for right in the search window.. After installing this program Safari will feel better, smarter, better looking.

2. Saft. Saft is another Safari enhancement that adds the function of many of the most popular Firefox extensions to Safari. Think fancy ad filtering, tab restoration on quit, history search etc. My favorite addition: the ability to drag tabs from one window to another. This + Inquisitor have brought me back to
Safari after a several month hiatus to Firefox.

3. Flip4Mac is an extension that allows you to view unprotected Windows Media Player content within Quicktime. Why would you want to use this when Microsoft provides a free player? 1. Because it's better than the MS player. 2. Because the MS player is now discontinued and Microsoft is now supporting the flip4mac extension.

4. AppleJack. If you're lucky you'll never have to use Applejack. It's a little utility that hides in the bowels of your machine and gives you simple non-techie access to most of OS X's built in maintenance routines. What does this mean to you? If your computer starts acting funky you can boot up with command-S and type in "applejack" and repair a host of common OS X problems. It can be a lifesaver.

5. Growl is a utility that gives you translucent status messages from background applications. That description is deeply unsexy, but once you start using Growl, you'll forget what it was like to work without it. Basically it will tell you when downloads are done, what song is playing, etc without you having to move from your work.

6. Chax adds a host of large and small improvements to ichat.

7. Screensavers are never essential, but Soundstream is at least sort of fun. It's a screensaver that responds to the ambient noise in the room. Fun when the stereo is blasting. [Short aside] Here's the screensaver I want: Screensaver captures images from your iSight camera at defined intervals and then plays the images as a looping movie onscreen. When you return to your computer you see what happened while you were gone.

8. Are you a keyboard navigator? If so Witch will make you happy. It lets you jump from window to window easily without touching your mouse.

9. Sbook is a little notepad with smarts. Type in an address and it knows it's an address. A phone number is a phone number etc. Handy.

10. Delicious Library is probably the least obscure item on the list, but I'm surprised how few people know of it. This program lets you scan your book, cd, and dvd barcodes looks up info about the media (title, cover, etc) and stores it all in an easy to use database.

11. Here's an 11th one for free. Jumpcut allows you to keep multiple clipboards. It's simple low weight and it just works.

Update: Someone in the comments reminded me of Texpander. I use this program so organically I had forgotten about it. Texpander allows you to create abbreviations that expand as you type them. So instead of typing my name into forms I just type rrgg and it instantly expands into my full name. You can add bits of text (and images) at will. Darned useful. Also the sBook site is back up.

Why is a dot alone only a dot, but when joined by others a polka dot?