KODA

Doesn’t she just make you feel reaallly sleepy?

Yesterday in the car, I was experimenting with some long exposure photography. For the last few months I’ve had a bit of an obsession with light painting, a technique of drawing forms with point light sources in a dark environment (example). Well, more recently, I’ve been interested in pursuing the opposite effect. Essentially my thinking is that with light painting, your base color is dark, and you draw colored light in contrast to it. Well, I’m flipping it around, making the base color white and the less intense objects the contrast.

I’ve been experimenting with quarter to half second shutter speeds in bright environments, with the goal of having light elements wash out leaving less intense objects motion blurred and distorted in an abstract way. This achieves a similar, desirable light painting look, but with more spread out color and a white background. It’s really just a quite roundabout way to say I’m overexposing motion-blurred images for effect, but that’s not as cool, is it?

Oh yeah.

Alright! The art section of chromakode.com is now officially open!
Took me a few days, but I finally wrangled ZenPhoto into something I feel has both form and function. ZenPhoto turned out very easy and fun to tweak, and I managed to get most of those things I was ranting about earlier into the site design. Oh, and this WordPress integration plugin is totally rad. Yay!

That’s about it. Ugh… I think I spent just about the entire weekend writing papers.

Sorry things have been pretty quiet here for the past day or so… I’ve been busy writing papers and other fun school-related stuff.

Well, I do have one announcement, and that is that I’ve finally found a PHP gallery app that fit my criteria, and that app is the excellent ZenPhoto. It’s just complex enough for my tastes, while being lightweight and having some neat ajaxy admin features. Not much to show yet, though it’s looking very good. I’m busy theming and tweaking things to fit the dark look of chromakode.com, though there are a few buggy things going on in the CSS that I haven’t figured out yet. Here’s a little preview, if you’d like to see what I’m talking about. There’s some old pictures up there for testing, though other than that it’s pretty bare. I’d love to hear any comments on the design, though (bugs aside).

And now for something completely different… free music!

Over the past week I’ve been working on a four minute piano piece. It’s part of continuning composition projects working with my piano teacher. This week, I finally got my act together and wrote something I feel is whole, and recorded it well enough that I’ll let myself get away with it.

In my opinion the song is about that experience when the weather can’t decide whether or not to be sunny. This is the first jazzy piece that I feel this satisfied with… so it’s a bit of a happy thing to get it out there. Oh, and everything was recorded and edited using Open Source software.

If you’d like to check out this piece of music, it is available for streaming and download on the Internet Archive.

Yeah, it drags in some places and occasionally I hit extra notes, but hey – it was a joy to create. Isn’t that what counts?

To be contemporary, one must mount an opposition to the old-fashioned.
To be old-fashioned, one must mount an opposition to the contemporary.

The joke is that what was once old-fashioned will soon become contemporary again, and the cycle will repeat itself.

To be modern, one must develop an appreciation of both the old-fashioned and the contemporary.

But while contemporaneity is brief and transitory; Modernity however, lasts.