If the craziness of this week with the proposal video wasn’t enough, I got some more great news today.
One of photos taken during the last Critical Mass Chicago ride won third place in the Hidden Chicago photo contest in Time Out Chicago!
The winning photos are available in the “Photo Issue” in Time Out Chicago today and online here.
Woot!
My Early Muir Owl - FAQ and thanks.
After a few days of riding a huge internet wave, the flood of comments, links and hits are starting to calm down around here.
This tiny insignificant, gnat of a blog went from picking up accidental traffic from random Google image searches (not even real text searches!) to at one point, getting 18,000 hits in one hour. That was more hits than this blog has had in its entire lifetime.
Even though I mentioned this in my last post, I would like to take another opportunity to thank everyone for their support. Sara and I are still in shock over how much heartfelt goodwill this video has generated. We’re honored to have read so many lovely warm wishes.
Some of my favourite comments I read so far:
“You had me at laser cut foam core”
“the feel-good YouTube video of the summer”
“Just an all around feel good video. You watch this video - you’re gonna feel good!” as spoken in a strong southern drawl, by JohhnyTV.
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I’d like to acknowledge a few people whose support was critical in all of this:
Annette Ferrara, my friend the writer and art historian who dug the idea from the start. She was instrumental in helping me find a gallery to host the event.
Britton Bertran (from 40000), for being such a supportive gallery owner and idea patron. Throughout the build and during our initial talks, he was able to give really helpful constructive design critique that made the installation so much more stronger. I think that any artist would do well to have Britton in their corner.
Eli Robb, for his performance on the night of the opening. He brought the artiste, Serge Gandaora to life. The black cut-off t-shirt was a nice touch.
To all my friends that were so good for playing along with the ruse. In particular, I’d like to thank Emily (who also took the photo above). Also to her husband, Craig for his fantastic photos of the night that I used for the video. Also to Erin and Chad for their photos.
And to John Grimley and Matt in the studio for helping me understand how to use the bench drill and for letting me borrow the tools from the IDEO workshop.
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And now some answers to the growing list of FAQ:
The soundtrack is by the Icelandic band, Sigur Ros. The song is called Sæglópur from their album, Takk. Please don’t sue me Sigur Ros! I love your song and think of all the people that now do too.
Everyone at the gallery that night was in on the plan. But I think there were a few people who walked in off the street, thinking it was a real opening. Thanks, random people, for making the event look more “real.”
“My Early Muir Owl” is an anagram of “Will you marry me.”
“Serge Gandaora” is an anagram of “george and sara”.
The white ‘art’ on the walls were the original 3′ x 2′ foam core sheets that I used to cut out the letter forms.
I only got one paper cut during the entire build.
The installation took about 24 hours in total. 4-6 hours each day over four days.
How the installation was made:
Each base was cut from a few bits of spare MDF with a circular saw bit on a bench drill.
The tall rods were made from 8′ length of aluminium screen door frames cut to length. Each stroke of the letter forms was a made from stacks of identical cutouts or folded together from a flattened ‘net’.
The full ‘artist statement’ written by Eli/Serge can be found here.
Sara said yes!
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In the end of all this, we’re just glad we can share our happiness.
If I could have imagined the response to the news of my engagement to Sara, I would have wholly underestimated the sheer flood of comments, well wishes, emails and slaps on the back we got.
I’m completely floored. If planning and making the installation wasn’t distracting enough, watching over 15,000 130,000 almost 200,000 people , read the story and see the video has been even worse.
Thank you to everyone that have sent their congratulations.
And sorry to all the single guys that now hate me. If your woman starts hinting, get sketching.
I’m available for wedding proposals consultations. My rates are competitive!
Sara and I just got engaged!
I don’t even know where to start with this one. After months of planning, weeks of lies upon lies to my poor unsuspecting girlfriend (now fiancee), and countless hours of laser cutting foam core and hot glue gun finger burning, I can now spill the beans.
Sara and I got engaged at the 40000 gallery, in Chicago’s West Loop district, Friday night at 7:19pm precisely. But rather than trying to explain all the whats, whos and whys, I’ll let you see the video that I made that tells our story.
If you have questions, please add as comments and I’ll try my best to answer!
We’re so incredibly happy.
Update: I totally screwed something up. I somehow, totally, completely just deleted this post and have just managed to retreive a copy of it from Google cache. I was futzing around with this post when I accidentally pressed delete. ARGH! The worst part is that the 475 comments have gotten screwed up. I’ve now pasted the comments back but in a slightly messed up way. My apologies to everyone that submitted a comment.
The iPhone is gnawing at me again
Ugh.
Whenever I think I’m free of it’s grasp, I realise that it has still got a hold on me.
Why oh why must I be haunted by you?
Why must you be so damn attractive?
Why must you be such a compelling experience?
Ugh.
I thought the other day, wouldn’t it be cool to show someone your latest photos on this thing? It sure would dumbass. That’s what Stevie J wants you to think! But wouldn’t it be cool to just keep up on just those few blogs and sites you read each day without booting up your laptop? Yup. But wouldn’t it be cool to be able to only carry one device that had a camera, mp3 and phone in it? ARGH!
Damn you iPhone. Your day of reckoning will come…
Starting in the Fall, my girlfriend, partner and general ‘best-thing-ever’, will be teaching a class together at the School of the Art Institute. It has the fancy title of “Innovation Workshop” and it’s a seven week continuing studies class, mixing degree seeking and non-degree seeking students.
Funnily enough, at this point there’s no one registered for it, but hopefully in the next few weeks there’s been hundreds of people clamoring for pearls of wisdom. I’m waiting patiently for the right moment to shout, “Come on people, this class isn’t going to teach itself you know!”
I work as a designer at IDEO, which is leader in the field of design and innovation and when I was approached by the head of the school of continuing studies for the SAIC it quickly became clear that I would need some help. And this is where my partner in crime comes in. Class, meet your co-lecturer, Sara Cantor.
Now Sara works as a Researcher and Retail Planner at RTC, a retail design and strategy company. Also, with her Masters in Design Planning at the Institute of Design, she is not only uniquely positioned to talk about innovation strategy, but she still maintains many of the principles from her graduate degree.
What I’m excited about with this class is the opportunity for Sara and I to work together in a completely new way (teaching as opposed to running a business together). I’m looking forward to seeing how our fields of expertise, namely design and research, will play together to create a fair and open discussion about innovation. And lastly, I’m really excited to see how our students will be.
Our hopes are to open the students’ minds to an understanding that innovation and design are powerful forces and they are shaping the world around them everyday.
40,000 views of the Flickr photos!
Somehow, somewhere, 40,000 clicks onto my Flickr page has been logged.
Word to your respective mothers.
And guess what? Today was the day that I saw Flickr say hello to me in Burmese for the first time. How cool is that?!
Mingalarba, my Flickr photostream viewers!
Mingalaba, my blog readers!
Canon EOS 1D Mark III firmware update 1.1.0
Announced yesterday after much speculation, Canon released a firmware update to its new professional series camera, the Mark III. The word from a number of vocal internet forum writers/whiners is that it hasn’t fixed their specific, AI-Servo Auto Focus problems, it has improved the one thing that I know for sure bugs me about the camera.
The new LCD on the back of the camera is bright and huge. It’s now 3″ across, an upgrade from the 2.5″ screens on the latest crop of DSLRs, but it’s still using the same number of pixels. 230,000 of them to be precise.
The screen’s size has proven to be very helpful already as you can usually get a good sense of composition, proportion and general colour rendition on it, than I ever had with the tiny 1.8″ screen I was used to using on my D70. Another benefit from it is the fact that I can now share and review the images with my clients (or my mates) easily.
The problem with the new LCD though is something that requires getting into file formats, and the inherent differences between JPEGs and RAW files.
Are you sitting down? Then I’ll begin.
RAW, which is the generic term, is as close as one can get to a ‘negative’ when shooting with film. Similar to film negatives, it needs to be developed before it can be viewed, but it has the greatest amount of information available from that camera. Annoyingly, a different type of RAW image is typically created by each camera manufacturer. Canon’s is sometimes called, CRW or CR2. Nikon’s is NEF*. Annoying.
JPEG, the most common file format of all, is the equivalent of shooting a Polaroid and as such, are viewable immediately without any processing.
Conveniently enough, many DSLRs have been the ability to shoot, ‘film negatives’ (RAW) and ‘Polaroids’ (JPEG) sometimes even at the same time (RAW + JPEG).
Um ok. So what?
Well the point is that while RAW files require more work to be viewed straight away, they usually reveal their true value when it comes to processing and manipulating them in Lightroom/Photoshop. The RAW file contains all the data that the camera’s sensor was able to capture with little to no ‘artificial flavouring’ applied to them. The most common flavours that get added to a JPEG is sharpness, saturation, contrast, colour space. “Sharpness”, literally pertains to how ‘sharp’ an image looks. While this can’t make an image that’s plain out of focus, back into focus, it can give images a certain crispness that very sought after in this day and age.
RAW files are unflavoured, untreated, and on the whole untouched. Which means that they often look a little soft, unsaturated and kinda dull, when they come straight off the memory card. But this is exactly what photographers want! Since the RAW file is so free of any manipulation, one can really go into the file and add the appropriate amount of saturation, contrast, sharpness and even adjust exposure. Since RAW files don’t have these setting baked into the file, they give photographers a great deal of latitude in how their images should be interpreted.
So… how does all this come into play with this little piece of firmware released for my new camera?
Well, the LCD on the back of the camera is obviously able to display the images that were just taken on the camera, right? Well yes, but the LCD is also able to show you the difference between an image shot in RAW or JPEG. This translates into your JPEG images looking sharp and in focus, while your RAW files look soft and out of focus when they’re in fact in focus. Annoying! Apparently, the new firmware will apply an extra amount of ‘sharpness’ to the RAW files when they’re viewed on the LCD which should alleviate some of the anxiety that I experienced shooting in the field.
The first few hundred frames that I viewed on the LCD really gave me the spooks as I couldn’t tell if I’d hit critical or not. I was starting to wonder if I’d just bought a $4500 Holga. Thankfully, when I reviewed the shots on my laptop, everything looked sharp, crisp and in focus.
I will update my firmware in the next day or so and report back.
*In an effort to bring about some order to the 100+ RAW formats knocking around out there, Adobe systems, is encouraging photographers and camera manufacturers to come towards a common RAW format. Adobe’s attempt a creating a single, universally readable RAW format is DNG, or Adobe Digital Negative.
