MeMag - Me Magazine

Today I added a comment thread subscription to this weblog. Of course… as long as I’m not posting much of anything, there is very little to comment on. Nevertheless this is a very useful feature which I often use myself whenever available on other peoples’ sites.

Lately I have done a great many invisible updates which should hopefully make MeMag a faster loading, less buggy experience. Who knows… I might actually come up with something to post about one of these days and a nicely tuned, perfectly streamlined weblog would make a great canvas for it.

I don’t really know how any of this works, but there are tons of plugins available, written by people with bigger brains than me.

The hidden improvements include MySQL database backup directly from within my browser admin interface, better comment spam protection, truncation of long links in comments, meta keyword tags in posts for search engines and a more accurate search function. I’m sure you are happy for me.

Visible features include live comment preview that lets you see your comment, xhtml tags and all as you type them, and RSS 2.0 , Atom and comment feeds.

Some of these features may require a decent browser.

If any of these features bug everything up for you, then please let me know. Also if you know of any features that all the other really hip bloggers have, that you cannot live without finding here as well, let me know.

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The Internet Archive keeps adding goodies to it’s already huge collection of royalty-free downloadable media.

Their current spotlight feature is Herk Harvey’s 1962 low-budget masterpiece Carnival of Souls. It’s even the director’s cut, judging from the length. Shot for just over $30.000, this is the kind of film that fills a failed filmmaker like myself with envy. Film critic Roger Ebert says:

“Unlike most of today’s horror movies, Carnival of Souls has few special effects — some wavy lines as we pass through various levels of existence, and that’s it. Instead, it depends on crisp black-and-white photography, atmosphere, and surprisingly effective acting. It’s impossible to know whether this movie was seen by such directors as David Lynch or George Romero. But in the way it shows the horror beneath the surface of placid small-town life, it suggests Blue Velvet, and a shot of dead souls at an abandoned amusement park reminded me of the lurching undead in Night of the Living Dead.”

Which brings us to another downloadable free film, George Romero’s original zombie classic Night of The Living Dead.

I was discussing the 1949 film noir D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) just the other day with one of this weblogs four or five raders. It turns out that this movie is available as a free download as well.

And here is another coincidence: I was just thinking about buying a DVD of His Girl Friday since I can’t be bothered to search for my old VHS taping of it. I have so many movies that sometimes it’s actually faster to go out and buy a new copy than to read spines looking for the one I already have. (I only buy new ones if they are an upgrade to the old copy though. A DVD or a director’s cut. Something like that). Anyway… His Girl Friday is now available as a download too. It starrs Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell (who plays a “girl reporter”).

There are also several great ’50s monster/alien invasion B-flicks. I have seen and can recommend Killers From Space, Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman* and Ray Kellog’s The Killer Schrews. Kellog also directed The Giant Gila Monster, which is even better.

A final recommendation is F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922).

I think I will grab something I haven’t seen before. Last Woman On Earth or The Phantom Planet sounds like good places to start.

*= This movie is erroneously entered into their database as The Wasp Women (plural) instead of Wasp Woman (singular). If they correct this, my link will no longer work, in which case you have to search for it.

These are some of the other photos I took and also considered for the cover, either for the front or the back. I suppose anyone sensible would have saved them for a possible future cover, or to sell off later. But when people ask me if they can have such leftovers, I usually hear myself say “ok”. So in this case I’m including no less than 40 additional images with the cover. The artist can use them for promotion or whatever he wants. Fair enough really. He probably hasn’t got a lot of money right now. I’ll charge him double when he is a millionaire and has his own reality-tv show. Kind of tedious to scan that many photos and spot off the dust tho.

P.S. If anyone knows how to get thumbnails to be clickable and open a new window hugging a photo (in WordPress) then I want to know.

I put together this CD cover for another emerging artist; RAW. I’m quite happy with it myself. Now I’m in the naive short happy phase that occurs between the time you have showed the client something new and he has said that he loves it, and the future unavoidable moment when the phone rings and some executive has decided that you have to do everything over again differently.

Trying to figure out this thing called color profiles. Seems like I’ve been using the wrong color profile for my entire new unpublished website, which is slightly annoying. Also every photo posted here is most likely wrong. God knows what it all looks like on other people’s screens. This is ColorSync RGB. I suppose someone who has made a living as a designer for the past five years should know these things.

We’ve been having a heat wave here in Oslo with temperatures reaching giddy heights of almost 30 degrees Celsius (86F). This may not seem very impressive to people living in countries where the sun is visible for more than 4 months every year, but to the scandinavian physiology, this kind of heat is nearly fatal. People are doing traditional summer activities, such as swimming in the polluted fjord, getting blow-jobs from the African hookers and the ever popular national passtime; drinking beer.

Myself I have been unable to find the energy to do any of this. In fact I’ve hardly done anything, except to lie in bed and watch Stargate-episodes on video and overdosing on ice-cream. Pretty much what I always do, come to think about it. Now the heat wave has broken. It’s cold and it’s raining. If this summer is anything like the one last year, this is it as far as sunlight and heat is concerned. A couple of weeks, then back into our thick sweaters we go.

Looks like I don’t have any more negatives lined up for scanning. Don’t know when I will be able to do any more photography. Right now I’m not really interested in it anymore anyway. Would love to start something else instead, but I don’t know what. Needlepoint maybe. Or a nice stamp collection. Who knows.

This is a recreational area crammed in between a highway, the train tracks and some old factory buildings. There are some medieval church ruins there and the idea was that if they built a beach around it then people would be tricked into going there and absorbing some history. The artificially made beach looks great, but swimming is not recommended. Poor local immigrant families go there for family picnics, and the scarce native Norwegian locals sit among the church ruins and drink and smoke pot.

The white object in the bottom left of the photo is an empty pizza box.

I should probably strive to make fake places like this look less beautiful. I don’t know why I always try to make everything so damn pretty. I mean… it is nice on the surface… the sunsets there are great, you can see all the lights from the passing trucks reflecting in the water. And there are lovely Pakistani girls everywhere with long black hair and brightly colored scarfs waving in the wind. But the idea of an artificial concrete laguna that attempts to beautify a tiny little segment of a real shithole and then sell people the idea of it as a place of culture and tranquility… It is a lie. And since it is a government lie, it is a slick and overly vulgar lie. And do I ever focus on things like that? No, I just see the nice sunset.

Chasing the unicorn that is the perfect photographic moment…

In 1952 Henri Cartier-Bresson published a book called The Decisive Moment showing the world a seemingly new form of camera magic; energetic impulsive and absolutely brilliant journalistic street photography, wrapped in a bit of conceptualist new age philosophy. The myth of the decisive moment was born. And it has frustrated many a photographer since.

The book-title and philosophical concept of “The Decisive Moment” refers to the precise moment when both composition and subject come into place and it is time to release the camera shutter. As Cartier-Bresson himself put it: “It is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organisation of forms, which give that event its proper expression”.

The decisive moment is often likened to zen archery where the archer strives to become one with the target. The problem is that you cannot become one with your target. It only happens in your imagination. You can be very concentrated, yes. You can take your time aiming or you can use a hell of a lot of arrows until one finally finds it way. But you cannot become one with it. Nor should you. Objective distance is what makes photography possible. After a photo is shot it can take years for the photographer to decide what he likes or dislikes about it. If he didn’t have some distance to his subject, he might never decide.

yes, everyone wants to take a photo at the exact right moment, but that choice is no more profound than someone making a small effort to select the best looking apple at the supermarket. In time, after buying apples for a while, you can draw from your experience and hopefully improve your selection skills. The same way a photographer may learn to look for a portrait subjects blinking-pattern to avoid getting too many photos of people with their eyes shut. Experience is useful. But there is nothing zen-like about it. Everyone tries to click the shutter at the right moment. It’s the natural thing to do. We don’t all elevate this simple fact into a philosophy however.

Over the years the idea of the decisive moment has grown into a mythical beast. For many years I was disappointed because I didn’t seem to have the ability to just shoot one frame of something and have it come out as a masterpiece. Then I saw Cartier-Bressons contacts…

Anyone who have seen his contact sheets may find himself bewildered by the fact that they aren’t a string of completely different single shots from completely different locations. They are like anyone elses contact sheets, full of short and long strings of unfolding events, captured in as many similar shots required to get a good one. And then often a few more for good measure. Knowing there and then which decisive moment is the best can be difficult.

The problem with perfect moments is that they don’t tell you what will happen next. You may see something amazing through your camera viewfinder and manage to release the shutter at the correct moment, yet you have no way of knowing that things won’t get even better a few seconds into the future. A perfect moment is often followed by an even better moment. Which is followed by an even better one still. You just don’t know until it happens. Somewhere in the middle of this, an outsider may walk into your frame, ruining the perfect composition or you may run out of film because you spent your last frame getting what was at that point in time the best moment of an event.

You can there and then attempt to anticipate how events will unfold during the next upcoming seconds and wait for the even better moment. But there is no way of knowing for sure. A person who is walking down the street in your direction is likely to fill out more of the frame as he is moving closer. That you can anticipate. But you cannot anticipate that he suddenly remembers that he has forgotten something and turns back, or that he suddenly sees you and quickly ducks across to the other side of the street to avoid being photographed.

I have on several occasions stood for the longest time waiting for the person I have envisioned to appear. And they do appear if you wait long enough. The same principle of ‘the more you put in the more you get’ is at work here only with time as the factor and not frames of film. More often than not, the person you have waited for will appear just as you have given up waiting and has started to pack up your gear and walk away. The fact that these mythical people actually manifest themselves seem to suggest that there is some sort of magic at work. But it is impossible to tap into it and control it. Again it comes down to good or bad luck.

When trying to capture a perfect moment, luck is always an important factor. But luck is something many photographers are reluctant to recognize. After all… they are the creators of their photos. If luck suddenly becomes a factor, then their genius is diminished… cheapened even by by things outside of their control. Luck is something we may refer to when it comes to finding money on the street. When it comes to finding the ingredients for a photograph on the same street, then the concept of luck is often dismissed.

Virtually every famous press-photo published during the last couple of decades have been one frame selected after shooting an enormous string of almost identical shots. Journalists know that coverage is everything. From a pure mathematical viewpoint, quantity is quality. The more you shoot, the more you have to select from later. Yet this method of photography is generally seen as being less impressive than a single perfect negative that embodies everything. Shooting a number of automatic shots-a-second seems less impressive because the act of choosing the right moment, or rather, to attempt to choose, becomes random. The camera does the selection for you. And on the other hand… no one would dismiss a video photographer shooting the same event even though his camera takes even more frames-per-second. Everything is subjective.

A sniper once told me that there are two general methods to choose from in order to hit a moving target: The first one is to pan along with the subject, following his movements and then at some point during this movement, squeeze the trigger. The second option would be to aim at some blank spot where the subject is destined to be in a few seconds time. Somewhere with a clear view, and then wait until the exact moment when he enters the crosshair. “That’s what we do as well”, I said. Panning along with someone gives you greater freedom in choosing a good facial and bodily expression, but the overall composition may be imprecise. Standing somewhere ahead waiting, lets you carefully compose a nice frame for him to walk into, but you have no way of knowing what his expression will look like when he eventually arrives.

Photographers are lucky in that they have even more options: They can shot the same person dozens of times on various occasions as he walks on down the street, and he isn’t likely to tip over in a pool of blood after the first shot. We can also revisit the same scene another day and wait for the same person to do everything all over again, or perhaps more likely, someone else to do something similar along the same stretch of pavement.

But do any of these options have more zen-like elegance than the other? Is there any difference between shooting 10 frames during one minute of a day and shooting one almost identical frame each day for ten days? To many photographers it is. We want to see ourselves as the perfectly tuned instrument. The zen archer at one with his target. Not just as someone with a nice camera and a lot of spare time to wait. But in reality, waiting is a necessity. One can either arrange something to appear the way one wants it to, or one can wait for something real to happen and then frame it into something subjective.

Cartier-Bresson waited when he needed to. You can see it in many of his photos. The bicycle rushing down the narrow street seen from a staircase above… He carefully composed that and then waited. The man jumping over the puddle… He knew anyone walking across there would have to jump. He waited. Perhaps he got the idea from seing one person jump and then waited for another one to do the same. The idea is to see the possibilities in a scene and then wait for it to unfold. If the apples don’t look good, you wait until next week.

The way to get the perfect moment on film is to put in as much as possible. More waiting when that is required… more film when someone is already there. Myself, I can’t afford to spend a fortune on film. And I absolutely hate the tedious routine of developing film, so shooting more than strictly necessary is not an option. At least this way I can take false pride in my archery even though for every decent photo I shoot, there were at least ten better ones that got away. Luckily, as Morten Krogvold puts it in the preface of his book entitled… yes, that’s right… The Decisive Moment:

“There are many decisive moments”. It’s as simple as that. And if there hadn’t been, there would be no point in continuing.

I was walking down a deserted street. There was something attractive about the place and I was wondering if I should spend a frame of film on it or not. A little boring perhaps… nothing was happening. As I started to walk on, some boys suddenly appeared, playing soccer in
the middle of the street. There was no time. After a few seconds, they ran off. Again I was standing still wondering if i should photograph the empty street. It seemed even more pointless now. Nothing like that would ever happen again. As I was contemplating this, a perfect formation of geese flew down the middle of the street. Very low, just above the rooftops. A perfect arrow filling the strip of sky between the buildings on each side. Too late again. I gave up.

The next day I went back to photograph the empty street as a memento of the most action-packed deserted street in history. As I stood there, the scene suddenly filled with people coming from all directions. They were everywhere like in rush-hour. It felt really bizarre. Then suddenly nothing. I shot the empty street (above).

Seconds later a cat ran across the street in front of me (below). I wasn’t ready for that. Still after what seemed like forever, I finally reacted and shot another frame. So now I have 2 different version. Decisions decisions. It will take me years to select which one to use now. The eternal dilemma of the indecisive moment.

…is now available as a free download through The Internet Archive. This classic no-budget flick was written and directed by Edward D. Wood Jr, who also wrote and/or directed numerous other cheap but occasionally fun and sexy horror films, including Bride of The Monster, Orgy of The Dead and Night of the Ghouls.

Plan 9, however, is his best known achievement (some would rather use the word “attempt”) due to the fact that it won Ed Wood a post-humous Golden Turkey Award, and has been proudly marketed ever since as “the worst movie ever made”. This of course is nonsense. Plan 9 is far from the worst move ever made. It’s probably not even in the top 50 if you think of it in terms of production costs and hype contra actual content. What about The Fast And The Furious? Or The Chronicles of Riddick? Or Pretty Woman? Or Gone With The Wind? Now those movies really sucked and nobody seemed to notice because they were marketed as masterpieces.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (almost) stars Bela Lugosi, who died before they really started shooting. It also stars wrestler Tor Johnson, Vampira and Ed Wood regular psychic Chriswell, playing himself (badly). The intended title was Graverobbers From Outer Space, but the Baptist church that Ed Wood conned into financing this epic felt that the word “graverobber” in the title might not be in line with the scriptures.

Chriswell intro:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal. The incidents, the places, my friend we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty, let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?

Discovered through We-Make-Money-Not-Art

Today I suddenly realize that after three days of no tripod and camera carrying, my back doesn’t hurt anymore. I quickly compensate for this by banging my right knee as hard as I can against the corner of the bathroom sink, which is really quite impressive, considering that the sink is a hell of a lot higher than any of my knees.

All day I sit and do nothing, waiting for the sun to sink and turn the world into something potentially photogenic. In Oslo in the summer, this doesn’t happen until some time after 10pm, and by 5 I’m already bored out of my skull from waiting. I have visited every photo website I have ever bookmarked and come to the conclusion that photography really isn’t that interesting. Why bother. A few hours more pass. I decide not to go out after all and eat 6 small sandwitches instead, knowing full well that there will be a payoff of pain. I welcome that. It is something I do. A way of hurting oneself in a pleasurable way. You eat because you are depressed, feel good and guilty at the same time while you are doing so, and afterwards you feel more guilty and more depressed and you deserve to be punished by an aching stomach.

After a while I change my mind and go out after all. As I limp down the street the sun is slipping behind the distant hills. The world looks a little better, but now the sandwitches are really starting to kick in. I pass a strange looking old woman standing in a doorway. She squints her eyes and looks at me like Lee Van Cleef. Odd woman, I think. I pass her and continue on my way. Ten minutes later I pass her again. Same woman. She squints her eyes again and looks at me like… I squint back, letting her know that I’m on to her. Things like this happens to me almost every day. No one else seems to notice. This city is full of duplicate people watching me. I wonder what they want. Eventually, I’m sure, I’ll find out.

A young woman is staring at me as well. Then a little later, another one. Not being very knowledgeable in matters of this nature, my first thought is that they’re probably looking for trouble. They want to fight me. I give them both my best “you wanna piece of me?” - look. In my mind I’m already well into a kind of Travis Bickle routine. Then slowly it dawns on me that I’m probably just very sexy when I’m pissed off like this. Of course they have to look. Who could blame them? Besides it’s not everyday they see someone wearing twice as much clothing as anyone else, carrying an absurd ammout of camera gear and mumbling to himself through angrilly clenched teeth.

Two hours later I’m home again. No photos. My back hurts again. Everything is back to normal.

Taxi Driver clip through Travis76

I usually have a small camera in my inside jacket pocket wherever I go. The only problem with always having a camera at the ready is that you get so used to having it there that whenever something interesting finally happens, you just never remember that it’s there. So I only ever use it when I’m drunk, which is about twice a year. I always feel a strong urge to photograph everything when I drink. Too bad I’m not an alcoholic. Then maybe I could have gotten some work done.

This roll had been in there for at least a year. Nothing good on it whatsoever, except for this shot here, which is sort of nice.

After yesterdays post about the deconstruction of Oslo, I went for a walk and tried to shoot some color shots, which never turns out well. Color film is so expensive that I can get several rolls of black & white for the cost of one color roll. Just the development of one roll of color costs the same as buying and developing two rolls of b&w. I am cheap. Also, once I get a roll of color film into the camera, I feel that I have to finish it quickly so that I can reload with black & white. Last year I shot only two rolls (of 12 frames) of color film. (And forgot to take the yellow filter for b&w off).

This time I managed to underexpose one third of the film by three stops. The next frame after that I managed to double-expose. Then there was the row of buildings that I have so far visited twice because I missed the very last sunlight the first time. That frame alone was six streetcar rides all-in-all. Then yesterday I finally get my shot, and somehow, when I see the result, a car has managed to drive in front of the camera on the finished exposure without me noticing it. A huge white van.

Anyway… I shot these cranes where they are building the new opera house. Not exactly a timeless classic among photos, but after all that trouble I’m posting it anyway. Very difficult to get into a good position with all the fences and warning signs blocking the view. There are cranes all over the rest of the city as well. Maybe I’ll find some better ones later. But I don’t think I will use any more color film. Since I have hardly ever used it, I have no idea how to get color photos to look the way I want them to.

Lovely opera house webcam here.

Beijing Video has a great guide to the various Bruce Lee clones that popped up in the ’70s. These guys were all over the video stores here, or rather, the gas station shelves, because there weren’t any video stores yet where I grew up. This was in the great days of the VHS/Betamax war for world domination. There was no video censure yet and the market was flowing over with badly made violent low-budget flicks on low quality tapes with poorly illustrated cover artwork. Very few people had these new bulky and hugely expensive machines that played video tapes, but some lucky kids (myself not included) could sit at home and watch Bruce Le and Bruce Li and Bruce Lei as they fought their way through bad plots and badly dubbed lines of dialogue.

After this first video boom, all of the feminist amazons who really run this country started anti-video campaigns. They convinced the courts that all scenes in movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were real murders, and that anyone who caught a glimpse of any of it on tape would instantly turn into a homicidal maniac. So anything good was either altogether outlawed, or cut into shrivels by distributors who wanted to avoid having their films on the banned list. Even to this day, most releases of actual Bruce Lee films in Norway have half of the action missing.

Discovered through We make money not art

This public service from David Lynch has been linked to by everyone for quite some time. It was on Boing Boing today so I guess it’s still relevant. What I like about this is that it is the only useful weather report I have ever seen. It doesn’t attempt to predict what the weather will be like in the future. It reports what the weather is like where David Lynch is at the moment of his reporting.

I have never understood why people believe in weather reports. After all, you simply cannot tell what the weather will be like in the future, because the future hasn’t happened yet. Hence it doesn’t exist. Why isn’t that apparent to everyone? Every day people are amazed by the fact that the weather is completely different from what the newspapers said it would be. Of course it is, stupid. -That was yesterdays paper, not todays.

These two looked extremely bored. She was SMSing frenetically (like women do) for the longest time and he just sat there being ignored. I wonder how many relationships cell phones manage to kill each year. Also… it is becoming impossible for people to meet. A male cannot get eye contact with a female in the street anymore because she is always looking down towards her display as she is walking. Not that I ever met any women while walking down the street anyway. I’m just thinking… The human race may become extinct because people are busy romancing other people who aren’t actually present. In the future all sexual acts will be performed by single individuals in front of a screen running downloaded porn. Which of course will produce no offspring. Just as well maybe.

I’m really too shy to photograph people like this, but I wanted to try out my theory that if you put a tripod in front of someone and then spend several minutes carefully focusing and measuring light, then they simply don’t believe that you are shooting them. It seemed to work. Maybe the same will work for snipers. Instead of hiding for hours in a book depository, they could just casually stroll up to whomever they wish to assassinate, whistle, hum and slowly rig up one of those movie-rifles that needs to be assembled before each use.