better than this place

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experimentin'

The program Autostitch is advertised for making panoramas, and it does this perfectly by recognizing similar shades and shapes in multiple photos, and blending and stretching them for a seamless result. When something doesn't match, the program sort of smudges that part into the image anyway. People are usually the culprits, and they wind up looking ghostly.

I love this. The program renders movement in an accidental way that really captures the fleeting fact of the location of a moving physical body. This is Jan, the youngest Catalan boy I took care of.


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Assignment:

Your home studio space in whatever condition it's in *right now*, 5 pictures or less. GO!

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Notes on a Night Swim

ROAD ENDS AT WATER           

Three-quarter-fat moons

A mauvish, immaculately grey man-made lake, edged in woolly, unruly pine tree cutouts

Glen Miller from a car, with a bike in the back seat

Virg: It’s times like these that I realize why I’m glad I’m not fat.

Everyone else:  glad I’m not: ungrateful, sick of life, of the unexpected. planned. pretentious. afraid of water. afraid of letting go, letting in, giving up. afraid of what they think. glad I’m not dumb, too old, too tired to learn, to change, to go for a swim, when the road ends at water.

Virg: This is why everything I have breaks (lightly touching her grandmother’s chains and pendants), because I have no regard for them (hands to the air, and back down with the released trinkets, a pair of wings and stones to her sides and chest).

Balancing acts.

Virg: She said, you may not be able to do it now, but you will in one lifetime.  I admired her optimism. You have to be grounded to the earth.

What’s that marker for? I asked.  Virg: There are models weighted to the bottom, waiting for headlight photo shoots.

All hams are hit and miss.

Virg: Well I haven’t perfected my routine yet.  I’m only 22. 

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