An early figure study with Ashley. I tried for a more artistic composition, and while there are some good images, the background is not my favorite. We shot this in my living room, which left us little room to get away from the background. As an experiment, it is a success, but I've changed how I arrange the set since. Don't be shy, though. There's still plenty of good shots to see.

Say hi to Catriona. I worked with her for the first time last week and got some wonderful pictures, including 3 rolls of film. Speaking of film, I've started processing my own. I gave up trying to chase down a decent affordable photo lab. There was one in downtown Portland that always did good work, but they closed last year. Then I was sending the film to LA. Way too expensive. So, out of necessity, I've been developing in my laundry room. It's sad to go to a photo supply store and see nothing on the shelves. Thus is the photo chemical rack in every place I visited to buy some developer and fixer. And that was just in the places that still sell chemicals. I did get a new tank, well, a new used tank. Used film processing stuff is now plentiful and cheap. Film, of course, will never go away, but it sure seems like it's become the imaging equivalent of the LP.

Most of what I read online I read in RSS feeds.  It's easy to accumulate feeds, too many feeds maybe, but there is no shortage of information in them.  Finding information relevant to my interest is the challenge.

Lately we have seen a number of websites claiming to organize and filter web feeds.  Yahoo Pipes may be the well known option, with sites like Feed Rinse offering flexibility and functionality.  The list is fair, ReadWriteWeb offers a good summary, but in the end, as good as tools like Feed Rinse are, they still require an unacceptable amount of manual manipulation to get them to work.  I have to construct keyword based filters to sift information out of a collection of feeds, which doesn't really help if I don't have a clear understanding of what those keywords should be.

Think of it this way.  Each keyword is a white dot on a black page.  Let's say that keyword is Flyers, as in Philadelphia Flyers hockey.  I set up my filter for Flyers, and all pages with Flyers get through.  But surrounding the keyword, our white dot, is a whole spectrum of gray containing ancillary keywords of associated interest.  Names of Flyers players or coaches, for example, may be in an article not naming the team specifically.  It feels like these filtering tools still put the burden on me to cope with associated information by laboriously constructing filters to accommodate it.

It's a dicey proposition.  Will these RSS filter sites be able to figure out an article on Eric Lindros' may be of interest to me because he once played hockey for a team I like?  We'll have to wait and see, but until then, I'll just skip over what's not relevant.  It's still quicker that way.

A few months or so ago I was walking home and saw something in the road before my house. It was evening, the sun was down, and the way was lit only by the orange street lamp. Whatever was in the road was big, bigger than a cat, even though it looked a little like the silhouette of cat. It might be a dog, so I walked closer. Raising its head, I could see glow in the creatures eyes, and in the next step saw the black mask of a raccoon, a large raccoon, looking right at me. Now I wasn't prepared for no raccoon. I'm not used to seeing these wild creatures in my urban surroundings, but there he was. How big was he for a raccoon? I don't know, but I imagine big enough. He sat there, squat and bulbous, like a gallon jug on its side. We stared at each other, then he loped off...into my yard and into the dark. Over the weeks I occasionally saw Mr. Raccoon hanging around and doing very little. I assume it was a he, but never felt the need to be sure. I'm satisfied with simple assumptions sometimes. There's a little creek about three blocks from my home, and I further assume he lived there. A fact also not verified. As infrequently as I saw him, though, he seemed to be part of the neighborhood. Today, while walking to my bus, I saw the raccoon had passed away in the park. I don't know what killed him, maybe old age caused inevitable fate, maybe a sudden fatal affliction struck, or maybe an illness took its toll. However it happened, animal control apparently removed the remains this afternoon because the park was empty when I got home. And the neighborhood was officially less one raccoon. Bye bye old gray. This picture of Brandy is not gray, and has nothing to do with raccoons.

I finally got around to processing some of the film that has been sitting on my counter since, well, a while. I took several rolls with Ashley. This, I think, was the last shot on the last roll of the day.