A Scenic World

I feel like, instead of July 1st, it’s January 1st. Just as if yesterday were New Year’s Eve, Jens and I celebrated. I made a lemon torte, and we popped up bottles of our favorite beverages - ginger ale for me, tonic water for Jens. We clinked glasses and exchanged cheers as our computer displayed “Upload Complete!” After we added our photos to the group, I lit the 3-6-5 candles I’d put on the cake and we blew them out together.

Another year of 365 self-portraits was complete!

After I was sure that the card wasn’t going to fail before I could get the photo off or that the computer wasn’t going to blow up before the photo got uploaded, I finally went to check out the “Congratulations Keitha and Jens” group that my awesome friends had put together on flickr. Fifteen people joined the group, and Ben (luzartphotography), Jan (Rosember), Thorsten (TheBrumReaper), Betsy (betsypdx), Mike Autry (mikeautry1) and Laree (lareecb) even made congratulatory photos for us! It really made the moment special for both of us.

Of course, we only had the one computer to use since my laptop died, so we were both vying for computer time to get our thank yous and to post our stats, and Jens was supposed to be reading a student’s thesis, so, yeah.

But then luckily today I got my new computer! It has a dual core processor, 4 gigs of RAM, a terabyte worth of space…Can you believe that most of the photos I processed and posted in the last 3 months were done on a machine with only 512 MB of RAM? I usually sat down to process with a book, because I could read about 5 pages while waiting for a photo to load enough for me to edit.

Of course with any new computer comes all the lovely software installs. We bought one with no operating system since Jens had bought me an English version of Windows XP earlier in the year, so I had to install that (and it takes a long while to format a TB) and then find the CD with the proper drivers for the PCI slot (it was hidden in a guide for the monitor) and finally, I was online. Then I had to install iTunes and Lightroom and download Chrome and Filezilla and Irfanview and .NET 2.0 and Winrar and Dipstych and….

And then I still had to decide whether I wanted to do a third year of 365 days. Last time, I took a month off between projects, but part of me wishes I had gone non-stop. And of course once you miss one day, you can never go back.

So of course I took a self-portrait today. Last year, a friend suggested that I take two shots every day, one a self-portrait and another “matching” shot. I’ve interpreted his “matching” to be something in the same tone or processed the same or a piece of the scene. At any rate, I think I’m going to give it a go. I don’t want to necessarily commit to doing 365 days worth, but I’m going to give it a try!

And now….

Day 1.

#365 of 365: You Knew It Had to End This Way, originally uploaded by aravis121.

More to come tomorrow!

I’m quite aware that not everyone in the photography world is familiar with Flickr, but it has a little feature called “Explore,” and yes, I’m using that as a noun and not a verb. You see, Flickr determines how interesting a photo is based on “where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” That last bit is important, because photos are constantly being added to and dropped from “Explore,” the list of 500 of the most interesting photos on a given day. Sso if I uploaded a photo a year ago and for whatever reason there is some renewed interest in it, it might make that list of most interesting photos from that day today.

Flickr and I differ tremendously on what we think are my most interesting photos. Normally only the account-holder can see their photos ranked by “interestingness,” but a little app called Flickriver allows you to view anyone’s photostream ranked by interestingness, so if you want to see mine, here you go! 

What’s interesting (no pun intended!) to me is that I have to go to slot #7 before I’d even find one I’d put in my top twenty! Of course, the flip side is true as well: very few of the ones that would be on my list are anywhere near the top of Flickr’s.

The “interestingness” algorithm can be excused, however, because - let’s face it - it’s just a computer program, much akin to Netflix’s lauded recommendation algorithm. There’s no human element to it. A lot of the photos that are at the top of Flickr’s list for me are there because they stood out as more interesting than the other photos I was posting around the same time (generally when I was a photography noob). Because I get so many more views and comments and favorites than I did when all I ever posted was pictures of me and Mike at Mike’s parties, any photo that rated more interest than just mine and Mike’s immediately stood out. Now, if my average photo gets 100 views and 5 comments and 5 faves, it takes a photo to get something like 1000 views and 50 comments and 50 faves to make its way toward the top of my “most interesting” according to Flickr.

So computers aside, we humans aren’t much better about being able to come to a consensus about what we think is interesting either. Just today, I finished the 365 project for the second time (yeah, there’ll be a post on that tomorrow once I’ve uploaded the shot!) and posted about it on the dpreview.com Pentax forums. I included about 10 shots that I really liked. Almost immediately, one of the photographers there said that they wouldn’t have chosen any of those to post, that they had a completely different list of ones they liked. And while I disagreed with their assessment, I could easily understand how there would never be any consensus about which ten are the best.

How much our individual aesthetics affect the outcome of our art versus our desire to have others appreciate our work will always be an open and - for me anyway - unanswerable question. Who are you trying to please with your art - yourself or your audience? Is photography the kind of art that demands someone view your photo for it to have any worth? And perhaps most scary of all: what if your stuff is only ever interesting to you?

Last week, we found out about color perception; today, we’re going to find out about sound perception - specifically, our own voices.

Why does our voice sound different on recordings than in real life? The editors of FYI of Popular Science answer:

It sounds different because it is different. “When you speak, the vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound,” explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality — generally a deeper, more dignified sound — that no one else hears.

You can find the entire article here.

That made me wonder: what do I sound like on recordings? It’s been a long time since I’ve bothered to record myself, because I always cringe at the result.

But then I remembered that I had recorded a rendition of Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” when I had a few minutes’ access to some semi-pro recording/mixing software (sadly, though, we didn’t have access to any pro equipment). I played the piano and recorded it with my computer mic, then I tried to put the horrible cold I had on hold long enough to sing the song (also recorded with a computer mic).

At any rate, if you are so inclined, you can hear how I sound here (and please try not to cringe too much, especially when I fall flat on “light”!): 

(mp3 file hosted at mediafire until I get a computer that has decent ftp software)

http://download747.mediafire.com/dncmnm9yj4lg/yzyjgentu2y/Hallelujah4.mp3