Haven't done much this winter...

But I did take some pictures.

Go Pro! and other stuff

I've been updating my professional photography portfolio. I don't really have that many examples though. Anyone want me to shoot some headshots?

I checked out five more books from the library even though there are already towers of books that I'm halfway through around my room. I think I have an addiction. NO! No. I can stop whenever I want to!

Nina Here Nor There by Nick Krieger
Ontology of Sex by Carrie Hull
Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg
Prisoners of Childhood by Alice Miller
The S.C.U.M. Manifesto

Drag and other shenanigans.

This is one of the numbers I'm doing in the spring drag show:

Bring on the Disney.

More gifs are upcoming, but in the meantime, check out the gym I shot some of them in. It's at my sister's school which was built in 1929 or something, and the gym just SCREAMS "90s high school flick." John Hughes, where are you?

Book I just got that I'm super excited to read: Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty. I'm also midway through Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and I finished Chelsea Handler's Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang the other night. It wasn't quite as funny as her standup, but I enjoyed her family anecdotes.

Photos of the day and things

 

I was organizing my photo archives (fun times, I know) and found the ones I'd flagged for whatever reason, way back when. Thought I'd share some. Apparently I take more self-portraits than I thought.

GIIIIFS

I'm in the process of producing more gifs. I use DAAP's computer lab to make them in large batches, however, so while you're waiting (on the edge of your seat, I know) for new ones to appear, here are some stills from the latest shoots I've done.

The fully animated gifs will be on my tumblr within the next week.

Pictures from SPX

Quinn reading a comic based on Aztec mythology.

The hotel was quite fancy.

Yuko of Johnny Wander and Jamie Noguchi of Yellow Peril.

JUST. ROWS AND ROWS OF COMICS.

People buying comics... and Kevin Bolk behind them.

Realized later that I caught Katie Olmburg of Gay Kid chatting up fellow exhibitors.

Pizza Island ladies! Minus Julia Wertz, I think.

That dude with the backpack got in the way of a spectacular beard.

My computer is home!

Yaaay! I had to have the logicboard thingie replaced, since it just up and died on me... but now I can post photos and write the rest of my proposal for the Prairie show and waste time on tumblr and watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 again!

HUZZAH!

As for artworks... I've been on vacation the last ten days or so, but I did do a little series of tiny ink drawings in my sketchbook as well as a schematic drawing of a sandwich. So eventually I suppose I'll get around to scanning those and posting them. I also took a good many pictures, but with a film camera. I did take some digital images with my cell phone and with my dad's full-frame Nikon, but I have to go through them and edit them so they'll follow in another post.

Work for the show (which might be called something like Hetero-types) is progressing, artists are being collected and negotiated with, I'm meeting with David Rosenthal on Monday to discuss things.

Tonight is The Denton Affair's production of Cry-Baby, which hopefully will be a great time. We've done a pretty good job with costumes and props, I think. I made a car muffler out of a giftwrap tube and some cardboard yesterday and I even figured out how to make my hair do this:

Following are some pictures from my cell phone that I did get uploaded, but more will follow (and be posted on my tumblr, which is slightly more active than this blog, hah).

Storms and other impediments to my productivity

Things I am working on for the end of the quarter:

-my alternative processes photography books (hand-bound little things I'm still working on individual pages for)
-a paper on relational aesthetics, comics, and whether comics can be considered as such (I think they can) for visual arts concepts
-an ergot for comics
-a two-page color comic about a veteran I interviewed last week (also for comics)
-a statement of intent/ artist's statement for a show I might tentatively have at Semantics in the fall sometime (involving my YouTube stills that I am still slowly collecting and that can be viewed here)

It is once again pouring rain and it is distracting me from comic layouts. Mom called me earlier to tell me a big old front is moving in (again) and it's been spawning tornadoes (again).

Also I keep wanting to get up and dance to the music I'm listening to. Maybe I'm using the wrong playlist?

Here, have a tampon ad from the 70s or something. This is what my best friend Christina and I look like when we're biking around in a park. All the time. Forever.

Updates all round!

Here's the information on Van Dyke Brown processing: click!

And here's a comic I recently read, by Sarah Glidden. Click!

And eventually REALLY GOOD SCANS/ PHOTOS will make their way on here, I promise. It's nearing the end of the quarter now so after finals I'll have a little more time.

Selling a piece and other shenanigans

So someone (a friend, but still) asked to buy one of my instax photos. This one, to be exact:

Now I have no problems selling this (after I get a better scan of it from the big DAAP scanners, not my little HP)... but I have no idea what to price it. Especially between friends. Suggestions? It is a VERY small photo, about the size of a credit card.

In other news, I finally got around to scanning some of the daily comics I've been doing, so they're all available on my tumblr. (Also on my tumblr, continuing work on my YouTube photography.)

Check them out! (Click!)

Photos etc

Also in the works is my alternative processes project, for which I have shot 5 rolls. I have started learning the Van Dyke Brown process but have not produced anything worth showing yet, so here are some scanned negatives instead. Quality is not good, sorry. Hopefully I'll have some actual prints to show before long.

Christina

Fashion things happening at Prairie Gallery

Rocky Horror Picture Show

My hallway being extra-creepy

The Shriner tiger at Taza Coffeeshop

Photo usefulness

Today in photo class:

RECIPROCITY means THE TENDENCY OF FILM TO REACT A CERTAIN WAY WHEN EXPOSED TO LIGHT.

RECIPROCITY FAILURE means WHEN FILM DOES NOT REACT THAT WAY WHEN EXPOSED TO LIGHT. (As in very long exposures, etc.)

RECIPROCITY COMPENSATION means WHATEVER IT IS YOU DO TO AVOID RECIPROCITY FAILURE. (In the case of long exposures, you make the exposures even longer, for example.)

No one has ever really explained it to me before. I've been in college for three years and in photo classes since my sophomore year of high school. Admittedly I could have just toddled off and asked the internet, but honestly, I will remember what Janie Stevens calmly explains to me much, much longer than what I read off of Yahoo answers at 2 am.

THIS.

This is just so brilliant. I want to make my photo project at least a quarter as brilliant as this. If I can do that, I'll be VERY pleased with myself.

Shakespeare and other things

So today I went and saw the Cincyshakes' production of Julius Caesar. It was fantastic--the roles were all gender-swapped, so pronouns and suchlike all had to change... but names stayed the same. It was such an interesting study in gender roles, especially for a Shakespeare play... but even in today's day and age, it was tricky to wrap ones' head around Calpurnia being the obedient, worried husband. And I consider myself a feminist!

If you live in Cincinnati and enjoy live theater, go see Cincyshakes at some point. I've seen several of their comedies (set in different eras, like Twelfth Night in the 20s; Taming of the Shrew in the era of silent films with incarnations of the Marx brothers and the Three Stooges; and A Comedy of Errors in gaudy sci-fi) and they have all been excellent.

In other news, I am getting rolling on my photography project. I stuffed a roll of 100 TMAX into my Pentax PC-33 (my very first camera, a cheap point-and-shoot I've had since I was eight or so), so we'll see how those turn out.

Basically, this. I have misplaced the vinyl case but the thing is pretty sturdy for being all plastic and over ten years old. The only issue I have with it is it EATS batteries. Oh well.

120 film and fun things

So remember how I got a good stock of free film from SPE? I finally learned how to use a camera that could take the 120 film, in this case a Mamiya. It looks something like this:

Of course the film I'm using is color film so I won't be able to develop it myself, so it might be a little while before I see some prints of what I've taken... but at least I'm familiarizing myself with the thing. It's kind of exciting, actually, I love the ground-glass focusing (like in 4x5, except cuter somehow) and this time I'm actually kind of understanding what bellows compensation is. So there's that.

Stay tuned for pictures, I suppose. In the meantime:

My sister with a lampshade on her head.

Guess what I'm doing again

If you guessed intaglio (etching), then huzzah! You get a virtual biscuit.

For Carol Tyler's comics class, I am starting to work on a collage comic that will involve etching, sewing, and (hopefully) black-and-white photos. I'm drawing inspiration from this, amongst other things (this is only one page of it, click the link for more):

 As for photography with Janie Stevens, I am actually going to work on something very similar, but less sequential and more conceptual in nature. And I will utilize the Van Dyke process, as it is an alternative processes class. I'll be doing these, but in a more photographic form.

ART HISTORIANS AND ARTISTS

So today I went to Louisville with my art history professor Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller and a retired DAAP professor named Lloyd (whose last name I never caught) to hear Linda Nochlin speak at the University of Louisville. Her lecture was on Misere: Courbet, Millet and the Representation of Poverty in the Nineteenth Century.

It was interesting in that I gleaned a whole trove of new artists to look at both from her lecture and from looking around the Speed Art Museum at which the lecture was held. Also I was simply impressed that she's still teaching and giving lectures. She's eighty years old.

But I did expect the lecture to be more theoretical and less... didactic? I'm not sure if that's the word I want to use. It was simpler than I expected. Not to mention that for a feminist she certainly focused on male artists more than I expected her to. I don't think I wrote down any female artists during her lecture.

I'm mostly glad I went, she had some interesting points and I felt like I could follow along quite easily, which I guess I'm not used to (maybe I've been in visual arts concepts too long).

I did get to use my brand-new Fujifilm Instax camera, which I was rather excited about. I received it as a 21st birthday gift yesterday.  

 Me looking ridiculous with my sister and my mom.

 I love that this camera makes any photo look like it was taken in the 70s.

 Laura Fisher and David Miranda-Klein.

 Linda Nochlin hiding behind the dude in the suit, and Theresa.

 

My favorite by far. The green thing is the flash that went off against the car window.

I'm heading into the darkroom tomorrow to develop some 100 speed black and white film, so we'll see how that goes. I'm also going to have to post about all the new comics and graphic novels I received for my birthday (primary amongst them were Jeffrey Brown and Shaun Tan, but there were many more excellent ones I had never heard of).

Also a comics-related side note, Carol Tyler was unable to come to class on Wednesday because her mother was ill, so she sent someone to take attendance, an older fellow with a slow deep voice and a head full of white hair. He took attendance and then took the time to tell us about how important lettering is in comics, and how we should develop several lettering styles to work with. Being a bit of a lettering geek I found it quite interesting but couldn't really think of any questions when he asked us if we had any, so he let us out of class early and we all scattered.

AFTER he left one of my classmates went, "so that's Binky Brown." And I had a minor WHATWHATWHAT moment. Justin Green just took our attendance?? He didn't introduce himself, how was I supposed to know it was Carol Tyler's husband telling us about letter-spacing? I have got to learn what all my favorite artists look like now. Man.