dispatches

The life of the work

Face it, mounting an exhibit is a lot of work. Most of the past week I've been engaged in the minutia of preparing one: tending the printer, cutting mat board and foam core, making exhibit labels, buffing out my artist's statement. And it was a long day to hang it, a three hour drive to Portland, four hours to figure out a sequence and adhere the things to the wall, and three hours home. Why, exactly?

This exhibit, at Cameraworks in Portland (just a wall, really, in a college building, but it apparently has a storied past as a long-time photography venue), is the first fruit of my Photo Lucida trial last spring, where I showed my contra dance project. Preparing the work has had a useful impact on assessing the body of material. Out of two decades of work, which are the 25 prints that should function as a summation of the project? Printing the work to size (18” wide) allowed me to see things in the photographs I had never considered before—all that shadow detail gained in significance in ways a 5x7 work print would never reveal. I had to make different decisions on how to print an image once I saw it to scale.

At the gallery I then had to make decisions on the flow of the work. The hanging guidelines of “22 to 28 prints” was wildly optimistic, and I had leave out a fourth of the work I brought. That forced a new line of thought to what should be shown, a harsher distillation, as it were.

And there it was, 18 prints, on exhibit. While I was hanging a few people drifted through. This, I suppose, is the whole point, and a treat for me. Alas, I know too few people in Portland to justify mounting an opening, so the next time I'll see the work will be when I come to take it down in a month. I won't have that evening of conversation and observation which is so rewarding. Nonetheless, the act of giving up control of the work, to allow the opportunity for others to admit the images you've made into their own experience, is reason enough. Art without an observer is a soliloquy with no point.  Just to know this comingling of experience is occurring, my life within the photographs, their associations from seeing them, is fulfillment enough. Being in room when it happens is a bonus.

The details: “Joy Unconfined! Contra Dance in America: A Photographic Journey” is at Cameraworks Gallery in Peterson Hall at 2255 NW Northrup, Portland, OR. Work is up from December 29th to January 26th.

The Photograph Within

Here are the particulars of our workshop, The Photograph Within.

Date: Sunday January 27, 2008, 10am to 4pm.

Location: Our house, NE Seattle, details upon registration.

Cost: $75.

Leaders: Doug Plummer and Robin Shapiro

Size: 10 participants. There are three slots left.

To register: email me.

Description: Henry Wessel, on artistic process, once said, “Part of it has to do with the discipline of being actively receptive. At the core of this receptivity is a process that might be called soft eyes. It is a physical sensation. You are not looking for something. You are open, receptive. At some point you are in front of something you cannot ignore." In this workshop, you will learn to come to that open state “zone” voluntarily and quickly.

We will teach you to be alert to those physical sensations, and to respond to the world from a deep and fast place We will talk about process and neurobiology, and use exercises to deepen your awareness of your own particular cues. We want you to get deeply familiar with that arrangement of reality in the viewfinder that “you cannot ignore”.

Bring a camera (and a laptop if you shoot digital.) We may be looking at our work at the end of the day, depending how the workshop unfolds.

Leader bios: Doug Plummer has been a fine art and professional photographer for most of his adult life, and then some. Robin Shapiro is a noted psychotherapist and consultant who has worked with many artists on performance enhancement and creativity. She is the editor of EMDR Solutions: Pathways to Healing, a book of clinical applications of EMDR techniques for therapists. This workshop will be a template for a chapter in her next book.

A milestone approaching

Posting to my Daily Photo today, I noticed that I have over 950 posts to that blog. Every day, I post a photograph that I took that day. In less than two months I will have posted 1000 photographs to that little-noticed blog (it averages 25 view a day, a tenth of Dispatches). How should I mark this achievement?

I started Daily as a mechanism to get myself fluent in a digital workflow. I had just switched over six months earlier, and I was still at that stage where it felt like, despite 20 years in the business, I was just pretending to call myself a professional photographer. I barely knew what I was doing anymore, and I had to get better at working in this new environment. Dispatches started then as a blog to document that transition, and the Daily Photo soon turned into a regular, daily discipline where I learned to become comfortable in this new digital realm.

Now it is a part of my day, and barely takes any time at all. It makes me carry my camera nearly everywhere I go. It forces me to "get in the zone," even when I don't feel like it, and to find a photograph somewhere around me, even if the prospects don't look promising. It has had an effect on my creative process much larger than I could have imagined.

There are two ways I could mark this. In 46 days I will post my 1000th photo. My first post was on May 11, 2005. But, I missed a day early on, June 8, 2005 to be precise. If I wish to count this as a continuous series of photographs, I can start the odometer on June 9, and buy myself another three weeks to decide what I ought to do. What ought that to be? A party maybe? An exhibit of 1000 (really small) images? Another book to match my best-selling (I've sold 10!) "365", the record of 2006 in daily photos ?  Got some ideas for me?

The latest video

If you thought editing digital photos was time consuming, it's nothing compared to video. It took me days and days to compose this thing.  It's from a family wedding in Los Angeles last month. My command of camera technique is shaky, to say the least. Fortunately, no one was paying me to do this. I'm still completely overwhelmed with how much I don't know.

Nonetheless, the bride has given me permission to post this, and I finally figured out how to get something up on the web that doesn't look like it was shot underwater. (Note: you can view a bigger version here.)

Maybe it's Munchhausen's Syndrome By Proxy

Computer tech people think that the only phones people use are cell phones, which is why I didn't figure out why no one showed up to fix my computer until I called them. “We left a message on your cell phone,” was, of course, the explanation. Nonetheless, within 20 minutes I had David back in my office, bearing a new logic board for my Mac Pro.

“Funny how much faster this goes the second time,” he said. Out went all the innards of my computer, arrayed in neat rows. Then a special heat-transfer goop onto the CPUs, and the radiators put back in place, then the fan, the hard drives, the PCI cards. Then he plugged it back in. And the fans still roared at full throttle. “What is going on?” he cried, almost in tears. The diagnostic program pointed again to errant heat sensors on a brand new motherboard.

I left. I wasn't of much help, Robin was back home and I wanted to catch up on her day. “Maybe it's Munchhausen's Syndrome by proxy,” suggested Robin. “Maybe you're lonely for company, and this is how you're getting attention from smart geeky people.”

“I think Cody was right,” said David, when I returned to the basement. “You've really pissed off the Mac gods by whatever you've been saying about Steve Jobs.”

“It's the ley line we're on. Or maybe it's a special gift I have. Computer manufacturers should just lend me new equipment for awhile, so I can generate some never-before-seen error for them.”

“Maybe it's the heat transfer mechanisms. Maybe it's memory,”  he muttered. I left to finish the Obama article in the recent Atlantic Magazine.

I wandered back to the basement. “Hear anything different?” The computer was on. It was quiet. David was smiling. “It was the power plug for the graphics card. There's more than one place it can get power from.” Who would have thought. “This is great intel for me,” he said.

“I truly hope we never see each other again,” I said as he left.

The latest chapter of The Storage Woes

Never say things can't get worse.

On one hand, Apple is being fantastic about trying. Within 24 hours, I have had a service tech from an Apple subcontractor, Mac House Calls, bearing a new logic board. He laid my computer on my worktable, completely dismantled it, laying out the organs and their screws in neat rows, and then put it back together.

The only problem is, this logic board is broken too. The temperature sensor is bad, meaning that the fans are roaring at full speed. It sounds like you're on the window seat just behind the wing, as the jet is accelerating down the runway. It's really loud. I can't work in my office if my computer is on.

But, I have a working sata connection, and a great new storage box.  I'm going to direct all my hard drives at it, and then I'll leave the house. Monday or Tuesday, my tech guy will be back, to do it all over again with another replacement logic board.

Somehow, it seems like it would make sense to just hand me another computer. It would be cheaper for Apple.

The best thing? I've had a computer tech here for hours, and this one knew how to fix it. When he had me sign the invoice, the total at the bottom was $0.00.

Make it stop!

The tally as of today: 15 emails, 5 hours on the phone, six different tech support people at four companies (not counting the three home visits from CreativeTechs, and who ultimately threw up their hands in defeat, for $525--grrrr!), three Sata cards, three RMA returns, two hard drive boxes, two operating systems, one overnight delivery. And 18 theories about what is wrong.

The result: everyone is more confused than when we started.

Faithful readers will remember that I just want to transfer big heaping gobs of data from my computer to an external, multi-bay, multi-terabyte box. Through something fast, like a sata cable, not through a wimpy USB connection. What has been happening for the last month is that, no matter the combination of sata card or storage box, the computer freezes up anytime I try.

At the conclusion of the last chapter we were about to install Leopard. I had an empty drive (a super fast 150gb I use as a Photoshop scratch disk) so that I did not have to commit to the upgrade. It's a blank slate. I had a clean install on an empty drive. There was nothing to get in the way.

Once again, it crashed. It's not the OS. Today a new Sata card came, a Sonnet Sata E4P. It crashed. It's not the card.

I pulled memory sticks. I pulled every other card in the computer. I tried transferring from different disk drives. nothing made a difference.

The only thing that got weirder is that, although all my USB ports work fine when the OS is up and running, they don't accept any input from the keyboard during the boot-up cycle. Meaning, I can't do P-RAM. Or open to a command line. Or hold Option down to choose a boot drive.

Actually, that's not quite true. Last night I could. One port worked. Now none do. Maybe tomorrow they all will. Who knows?

I convinced Apple that I needed and deserved a home visit, preferably someone bearing a new motherboard. I didn't even have to threaten to blog about them.

Stay tuned.

More storage woes

"I think the Mac gods are mad at you. Did you make fun of Steve Jobs' Lear Jet again?" said Cody at the Mac store, where I spilled my tale of woe and forked over my credit card for a copy of Leopard.

That is the level to which my technical assistance devolved over the course of another frustrating day. I have twice before now started this blog entry on a far more hopeful note, praising the simplicity of the Burly box from MacGurus that was just delivered, and celebrating the spill of data from my sagging, overcrowded drives into this roomy, 4tb JBOD box. But any time I tried to get my hopes up and pretend everything was running smoothly, the data flow would cease, and the computer would freeze up and crash.

Brian at MacGurus has been fabulous. "I'm here for you all day," was his message. "Most everyone plugs these units in and we never hear from them again, until they get another one. We'll get you through this."

I shipped off system logs and system profiles. I ran memory tests. I unplugged and pulled out innards of the computer. He also called in the technician at CalDigit, the maker of the eSata card that connected to the box, and we were on the phone for hours. They were not happy hours, nice as he was. "Let's do a P-RAM boot," he said. This, effectively, clears the computer's throat, getting all that data phlegm out of the boot cycle. But it wouldn't work. "Are you holding down the P and the R and the Command and the Control key, all at once? Here, go to this website at Apple. Are those the keys you're holding down?" They were. It wasn't working. Nor was another maneuver to open up the computer to a command line. The only thing that was happening was that, about every other time, one of my monitors wouldn't fire up. It was only making my graphics card hiccup.

The Mac gods were laughing at us.

Finally, I tried switching the keyboard to another USB port. Worked like a charm. "What is going on with your computer? I've never heard of that!" said poor Leslie at CalDigit.

I tried another data download. 10 gigabytes transferred over without a hiccup, the most yet. I hooked up my single drive CoolDrive box that I use for back-up. 20gb without a hitch. I said goodbye at 35gb. "It's working now. This is great. I'll write up how wonderful you were."

Within a minute of hanging up the phone, the computer crashed. I think I heard giggling from the heavens above.

Next move--change operating systems. I'm installing Leopard on another drive.

The year as blogged, abridged

Karen at Mysterious Traveler has a fun little meme she's passing around: take the first sentence of the first blog entry of every month from the past year. Here is my year, the non sequitur version.

If you want another way to look at these, I've posted my 2006 Daily Photos on Flickr.I hadn’t done a Seattle First Thursday art walk in ages, but then it’s been ages since I’ve had work in a downtown show. The top ten bestsellers on Photo-Eye Books. "I got 1631 last week. How about you?" Just got word that I made it into B&W Magazine’s Portfolio Issue. The Microsoft makeover of Iview Media Pro has just been released. I have not joined the cult. Peeking over her shoulder, I watched my 22 year old niece, Felicity, update her Facebook profile and check in on a few of her hundreds of friends. The Tri-City Herald puts its particular spin on the weather forecast. "Tomorrow, 94°. Almost hot." At the restaurant there were a group of students from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where I'm photographing today and tomorrow. There's a new comet in the sky, Comet Holmes, visible to the naked eye. Robin has another book contract with W.W. Norton.

The penultimate chapter of the storage woes?

Three trips to my place from Jasson at Creative Techs, and no solution to my Sans Digital RAID box problem. This last visit was post-installation of a high end eSata host card (a CalDigit Fasta-4E), which we thought would solve the problem. It still didn't work. “You have interesting issues,” he said. “It is way overrated to be interesting,” I said. No matter what he changed, what deep geek config alteration he made, after a couple of minutes the Sans Digital RAID box would disconnect from the computer anytime I tried to transfer data. Or, it would freeze up the computer so that nothing would work until I hot rebooted.

A call to MacGurus clued me into a possible explanation. “Check and see if you're using OEM drives,” Brian at MacGurus said. “I see this problem all the time. There's firmware on those that causes headaches. That firmware is specific to the manufacturer of the computer maker who ordered them, and it's not compatible. You have to use retail version hard drives.”

A man at Seagate's Indian call center assured me, after reading him the serial numbers, that my drives were retail, not OEM. Interesting. Then I looked at my on-line sales information on the NewEgg site, where the drives were clearly marked as OEM.

I got RMAs from NewEgg.com to return the box and the hard drives, with no restocking charge (good on them). Then I got on the phone to Macgurus and ordered a Burly Enclosure with 4 1tb drives.

I can't say enough about how accessible the folks are at MacGurus. The people who run the place actually answer the phone. They told me which unit would be the quietest (the Sans Digital box is definitely not quiet), and offered to walk me through the setup when I got it.

I'm giving up on RAID for now. It's too hard. I'm going to set this up as a JBOD, with 4 independent drives, make sure my back-up routine is impeccable, and think about another one of these boxes in 6 months when I'm handling more video files. I'll let you know how it goes.