Raven's View

I caught this at midnight on TVO earlier this week. A great documentary about Christine Taylor (Juicy) and Tom Comet (Danger) and their trip in 1997 to the Black Rock desert of Nevada. They took their underground circus act to the neo-pagan Burning Man festival - and loved it.
Same documentary is on Bravo, Saturday morning (Sept 11) at 5am.
For some film clips of Burning man from 2000, check out CBC's site 120seconds.com - just do a search for "Burning Man".
Browse the rest of the site too - some interesting stuff, but I wa surprised to see it from what we often think as "boring conservative CBC".

Found another in this series - both are posted here.
I wanted to try lighting a photo by opening the shutter in a darkened room and "painting" with a flashlight. This is a technique Diana Thorneycroft uses (although infinitely better than I did!). I metered the light from one of those big flashlights with the square battery at several feet, with ASA 200 was 5.6 at 1 sec. So I figured I would need to move the light along at about 1 ft/sec. That wasn't too bad, but tended to give a lot of hot spots depending where I overlapped. I found closing to f 11 let me overlap more, so evened the light out a bit.
A blue filter (as in 80A) would have balanced the incandescent better for a daylight film (Kodak Gold). And would have had to open up 2 stops, but I think the depth of field would have suffered.
I setup the camera on a tripod, with a cable release, darkened the room, opened the shutter, turned on the light and painted, killed the light, closed the shutter. With me in the picture I just swapped hands to do each side of the room - that's why my arms are blurry.
I kind of like the ghostly effect.

Gradually catching up to my piles of photos.
I've added some new pics to Ottawa Graffiti - 2004, House of Paint - 2004 -and various pics folder.

I sat down to add some links to my blog yesterday and grabbed a cold beer from the fridge. Which turned out to be a somewhat warmish beer but what the heck so drank it anyways and resolved not to leave a tip. My pc's just off the kitchen in the room formerly-known-as-dining (which is now just represented by a symbol I can't type here) so as I worked I could hear something clicking off and on every few minutes. When I went to get another warmish beer I discovered something worse - the noise was my broken fridge, vainly trying to start the compressor. Checked the top freezer - yup - definitely not a fridge any more, just a kitchen cupboard with a built in light. Various meats, bags of vegs, several cups of blueberries I'd bought from just east of Kaladar, all thawed. Damn damn damn. And the beer is getting warmer. And it's 3pm Saturday, on a long weekend.
But, I realized I have a chest freezer outside in the garage, and my daughter left her bar-size fridge down in her room when she moved back to her mom's - so all is not lost. Moved the mini-fridge up and chilled the beer.
Dinner was a mixed grill - we cooked up all the thawed meat, ate what we could, refroze the rest. I figure cooking killed any existing bacteria, now I can start on new ones.
And we made a great blueberry pie.

Guess I need to buy a new (or used) fridge now.