Well.. I’ve gotten rather into this sound project, and it seems to involve learning Kontakt 3 in at least some depth. So far the experience of this is mildly painful.. One thing Native Instruments sucks at is user experience.. making things simple.. thinking about the experience of trying to learn this stuff and making it “just work.” Excuse my Apple prejudices.

Examples of obvious problems: You have this manuel… printed, which is nice. In my instance I’m saying “I want to set things ups so that I have a convolution reverb that I can send all the instruments in my kontakt Instance into and automate. One would think this would be fairly straight ahead and obvious.. I mean how many production environments have I used before? But no.. this is stuff you gotta go to the manual for.

I wouldn’t mind if going to the manual was something you needed to do to get a complex piece of technology working… It’s that the manual is designed all wrong. What you want to do is figure out how to do one thing.. you go to that section of the manual and you realize that it’s description of how to do that one thing presumes you understand 5 other things.. and it doesn’t tell you where in the manual those 5 other things are located.

Eventually it seems to come down to trial and error… the manuel gives you some clues.. and you fiddle around and if you’re lucky you work it out.

The production I’m working with starts out, of course.. with a quarter tone tuned piano.. and what I want to do is create a string section that.. is more atmosphere then anything.. It’s something going on in the background. I don’t really want you’re attention to be called to it to much..

The way I’m working at the moment.. well I have a limited understanding of some of Native Instruments tools.. so this is all a learning exercise.. at any rate Kontakt 3 includes stuff from the VSL library. The VSL library is one of the top libraries you’d go to if you wanted to emulate real orchestral music on your computer.. Its the kinda stuff they use in Hollywood films if they can’t afford to hirer and orchestra.. and perhaps even if they can.. (so you can give the director / editors / whatever.. a kind of demo-ized version of your score prior to bringing in the orchestra.. and its a good way to work stuff out to, right?)

The VSL library you get with Kontakt, of course, is limited compared to the full VSL library.. but it’s still the best stuff I’ve got. So I start out by loading up a Violin Section. By default you can control.. would you call it the intensity or volume or? Well you can control it via you’re modulation wheel.. and it’s roughly the equivalent of “how hard the violin player is bowing the string.”So.. what I do is.. inside Digital Performer.. as I’m programing out the violin section.. I’m sorta making the violin swell a little bit.. It all ends up being somewhat complicated as I’m controlling key velocity, modulation, and pitch bend…. so far.

Tuning was, and still is, a big question mark for me. Ideally I might like to make the string section set out in quarter tone tuning.. but its not quite clear to me how to go about this, or what the implications might be. It might very well turn out that it’s a real workflow issue.

Lets explore the problem conceptually.. you have these things called “sample maps.” The sample map tell the sampler what samples to play depending on what note you play and how hard you play it.. So in our case all the notes of a violin are set up in that sample map. If you want to make that quarter tones.. do you have to do something along the lines of.. making it so that as you go up the keyboard… it only goes up a quarter tone per key.. and does that mean you have to radically change the sample map? If so, if you’re dealing with a complex sample map… that’s a task that could take a while to achieve.. and if it’s not really clear… all the details of how you do this.. you could very easily make a mess for your self.

Consequently I’ve decided to skip trying to deal with the tuning issue. A number of Native Instruments instruments are actually amazingly good on this front.. but its not clear to me how Kontakt works.. so screw it!

Now I’ve spoken a little about microtonalism.. and its implications.. in this blog.. as well as the implications for how I’m taking on this project. What I’ve decided to do is go with the usual tuning and just pitch bend stuff around. Trouble is.. for who knows what reason.. #1 Pitch bend is not enabled by default and #2 once I figured out how to make Pitch bending happen.. it wasn’t really clear to me how much pitch bending I was setting up..

Ok, let me explain. On you’re keyboard you might have a bitch wheel.. in your sampler you have a pitch wheel range.. You could make the pitch wheel range one semi tone.. which would mean if you move the pitch wheel on your keyboard all the way up while playing a note.. it will be the equivalent of playing the next note up on the keyboard. If you set the pitch bend wheel to an octave.. you’re going to get a pitch that is 12 keys up..

So.. the problem is.. it’s not clear what I’m setting the pitch bend range to.. so again.. I’m force to fly blind folded.. or lets say it’s as if the readouts in my cockpit are giving me information in a foreign system.. the equivalent to driving a car where you don’t get MPH, you get it in the metric system, while the speed limits signs on the highway are all based on MPH… and now you gotta try and do math in your head.. if you’re lucky enough to know the metric system and conversion rates.. but imagine you don’t even have that.. because you really don’t know what the hell is going on.. .

So the results:

The piano part.. I wasn’t sure if I was 100% happy with.. as far as I’ve written it. Some of it sounds a little flaky.. or.. I’m not sure exactly. However, there’s a lot to love in the piano part: It has the very emotional kind of feeling.. a kind of ambience to it.. it’s own sorta impressionistic quality.. Once the strings are added, the parts of the piano that sounded flaky to me.. well they no longer sound flaky. It’s as if, the flaky of it,now sounds as if it has something to do with it’s interaction with the strings.. so now the flaky has been transmuted into interesting. Yup, that’s how we like to roll… But.. the problem is that the strings are calling too much attention to them selves.. It seems that we are not quite getting enough control over them via simply programing there performance.. it’s sounding like what we need to do is control them via mixing.. which brings us back to the earlier issue of how do I automate aux send effects in Kontakt.

I haven’t worked this all out yet. I really want to avoid making it sound like what you are listening to is the result of a lot of mix engineering…. I don’t want it to sound like my music normally sounds like…  At least not at this point in the production. I want it to sound like you’re listening to a group of instruments play..

To achieve these results.. my plan is as follows:  

<editors note, I’m now writing from the perspective of a couple days latter in the production:>

When doing the mix engineer roll you’ll more or less start by creating a “virtual stage.” What this means is you define where various instruments are in space. How far an instrument seems to be from you is largely defined by the ratio of a dry signal, to that signals sound going through some sort of a reverb.. So to make an instrument sound more distant you both pull down it’s level and add to how much of that channel’s audio is going into the the reverb.

The problem was.. I could never figure out how to automate this in Kontakt.. I can set it easy enough, but automation is a bitch…  and then there are the work flow issues related to how you go about this:

Kontakt is a pretty complicated program… You can set the pan position of an instrument in multiple places.. which is to say how much of it’s sound is going to the left versus right speaker:

You can set this on the level of sample maps so.. lets say you have a sample map with percussion sounds.. you might like to make it so that every percussive instrument has a slightly different pan position.. which will give your mix a little more interest.. you do that here.

I’m not totally clear on how this works but.. you can set up an instrument so that it’ll receive MIDI data that will set it’s pan position..  which is easy enough to set up..   you can set the pan position for the instrument in it’s editor.. and you can set in on the total instrument.. (I know these distinctions aren’t totally clear)

As if all this were not enough.. you can give all you’re instruments in Kontakt there own audio out.. and give them all there own mixer channel in you’re DAW (where you can again set pan positions).

So lets talk about some of the pros and cons of various approaches this presents us with:

I started going down this route with the idea that I wanted to use Kontakts internal audio engine to mix it’s instruments. The main reason for this is that Kontakt has a convolution reverb effect.. that’s more realistic then the reverb effects I have in Digital Performer. Of course the problem is that I was never able to figure out how to automate aux sends…

In this sorta set up.. what you want to do is set the pan position of the instrument prior to the aux send.. generally.. that way the sound of the instruments stereo position in the aux send will be the same as the dry signal. There’s reasons why you might not want to do it this way.. but doing it this way will help reinforce the spacial sense of your mix.

Doing it this way means you pretty much need to control the mix via MIDI. This creates a couple problems for you. The first problem is that MIDI only has 128 increments..  meaning you’ve just limited the resolution of your pan positions…. Kind of a minor issue.. and Kontakt even has ways of dealing with this.. but still an issue.. that becomes more serious for other sorts of parameters, like aux sends, that you might want to control.

The other issue with this approach is that you have to control it via midi channels in your DAW…. as a pose to by audio channels. The MIDI channels would probably be the same channels where you are programming the performance of the instrument in question… and the way DP’s editors work.. its not always easy / obvious.. what’s going on with all the parameters of a given channel.. 

The final problem is.. One of the things you want to do is make it so that all the instruments in the mix sound like they are in the same space.. you do this by putting at least a little bit of the same reverb on all the instruments.. so the convolution reverb you’re using inside of Kontakt is not something you can put on instruments out side of Kontakt… so.. you’ll at the very least have to put some reverb on the master out of Kontakt. The trouble is.. for various reasons, you really want a more fine grain control over how much of that reverb goes on what instruments.

What I eventually settled on was giving each Kontakt its own channel.. and mixing via audio channels in DP.. which gave me my better work flow..

It turns out that nearly every instrument in Kontakt.. and even on my piano, have the same convolution reverb effect on it… so they are all rather consistent..  Normally the problem with going this kind of a route is that convolution reverb is a processor hungry effect.. but seeing as I’m working on a Mac Pro with 8 cores.. this would seem to pose no problems at all.

A few Days Latter: 

I actually like the resulting sound better…  and there’s a couple of things worth talking about here: First of all, one thing you want to do in any mix, 99% of the time, is have some reverb effects that go on ALL the instruments.. to various degrees. This unify the mix, making it sound as if everything in your mix is more or less happening inside the same space. The second thing is that we are now working with a reverb that isn’t terribly realistic.. but it doesn’t really call attention to its self as “super unrealistic,” or at least it doesn’t when its stacked on top the individual instrument’s uber realistic convolution reverb.

This brings us into a complicated subject of the aesthetics of reverb.. It’s complicated because there is a history of reverb in music production that.. influences the aesthetic implications of a reverb. The reverb in DP is a reverb that is.. well lets call it “historic.” Basically the reverb effect..

I don’t know the dates of it.. but digital reverb has been with us for a long time now.. prior to which echo chambers where what you’d probably use.. and you would really have to go to greater lengths to get that sound..  And it was also a period where certain studios had an incredible amount of value because of there unique sound characteristics… the dawn of the digital reverb marked the start of a movement out of all that. Reverb is merely..  Well all materials reflect and absorb sound.. and they’ll reflect and absorb different frequencies differently. So… to model that realistically was not at all possible in early digital reverbs.. and I dare say the actual issues are a little more complex then what I’m pointing to now.

Digital reverbs have a more simplistic sound then do real acoustic spaces. In my philosophical point of view I think of this as Plato versus Buddhism: With Plato you have the ideal that gets degraded when it gets into earth.. in Buddhism everything is ideal, its just a question of your psychological attitude towards it. In a sense the simplified digital reverb I think of as plato’s ideal.. and convolution is more like a Buddhist ideal..  

I’ll end this conversation more or less here.. without digging much more deeply into the matter..  and just going so far as to say that the simple digital reverb really does add something to the convolution reverb.. making the sound sound that much better.

In any event, I’d be interested in knowing you’re reaction to all this: Have you played with mixing? Have you played with Kontakt? What’s your experience been like? Hell, do you have your own solutions to my problems? 

I’m trying to work on communicating what I’m up to.. so I thought I’d try and fill in the artist statement section of my website. This is kind of a rough draft I guess, so I’m looking for feed back.

Matt’s Manifesto 

The arts, as I see it, are key to the health of culture and society. Big media influence on the collective consciousness of our times is at the root of what’s wrong with the world today. The solution to this is to develop new models for the business of art, media, and culture. There is a digital revolution, often referred to as “new media” or “social media” which to one extent or another addresses this problem. My podcast, The Asymmetric Biz Cult, talks about this and the deep systemic forces at play… along with how artist and media folks might engage with these forces, and how this could lead us collectively.. as well as the issues of our individual careers, to a new kind of world worth creating.

My arts project is one that tries to utilize this new existential relationship to the markets in order to facilitate a deeper more radical art. In my art and thought I am wrestling with the foundations of modernity and our collective shadow sides, and I try and throw light on where there might be cause for hope.

Central to my work is a exploration of consciousness and the depths of the human soul.. This journey takes us through Jungian psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, the world’s various religious traditions, history, politics, and business: We see everything in a radical new light, for so much of our understanding of all these things fails to appreciate the influence of what is often thought of as the irrational mind, and both our individual and collective unconscious.

Principle to to my art and thought is the idea that we must get beyond our inherited ideas on the nature of reality, to see what reality really is, and then build from there.

It is ultimately a journey towards wholeness and human potential.

So what do you think? Does it work, or not or I don’t what.. any thoughts? 

Long time readers… if I ever posted that post I meant to post.. will know all about “Bad Matt.” Bad Matt, as you might well imagine, is an evil bastard! What is the unspeakable evil that Matt is giving to partaking in? Well Matt has been known to spend large sums of money on books, music, DVDs and.. of course.. computer and studio related stuff. And today my fine friends… bad matt has struck again!

That’s right..  well you see it all started when I went to a little Boston Media Maker tech thing, MediaTechTonic. This was a little workshop sorta thing, led by David Tames, that explored WordPress. WordPress is a “blog engine” that’s very popular… In the circles I run in, it is the most popular. Indeed my podcasts, and this blog, run on WordPress. A long standing problem I’ve had is not really knowing how to do “theme design.” Theme design is.. well its like web design with a content management system… so you want to know  your xhtml, css, dom, and what have you.. and then you probably would like to know a little php… and um.. a bit about how WordPress works. 

Theme design has proven, at least for me, to be a major pain in the butt.. in part because I’ve had such a difficult time finding one source of information that sorta pulls it all together. David’s presentation..  gave an overview of some of the issues..  and was enough to really open my eye’s to the power of WordPress. Further, though he didn’t totally recommend it.. he sorta did: WordPress for Dummies.. which is so far the only good source I’ve found that brings all that together in one place.

Next Day:

So of course on my trip to the book store.. I made my way over to the WordPress for Dummies.. but…  Well the badness of bad Matt was such that I didn’t even stop there! Oh no, I went over to the music section! In the music section I found my copy of “The Indie Bible.”

If you’re an independent music person, the Indie Bible is a must have.. It’s basically a giant directory of resources for the independent sound person. It lists, as a for instance, radio stations, podcasts, periodicals, and what not.. that will play / review the work of independent sound people… and it does this by genera and location…

I suppose its worth saying something about where I’m at as it relates to this? As we speak the main thing I’m working on.. if I’m working on anything at all.. It’s at least the preamble to a project of some sort.. that I’d actually ask people to spend there hard earned money on… and of course I don’t know what the project will look like.. even what it will be actually… just that this is roughly my goal..  (which is not to say there aren’t a zillion ideas, much of which can be found scattered around this blog)

To be successful in the commercial aspects of this project… It would make a hell of a lot of sense if I did something to promote the works I’m currently giving away for free. This way.. you can just go check it out you’re self, and if you dig it, maybe you’d be interested in the project I’m now embarked on. So.. if I were able to sorta run a publicity type campaign while I’m working on what I have to work on.. to sorta get the word out.. then I could potentially build a fan base for the upcoming projects product cycle. So that’s the thinking anyway.

If you’d like to check out some of my music you can, of course, go to mattsearles.com/music where you can find 2CDs worth of free music. 

Well, as it stands, my last published blog entry should provide the back story, so let us go on with the front story. [editors note, this was actually written a little while ago, so its still back story]

I finally came around to “Ok, lets try this quarter tone thing.” Quarter tones.. it means you take what used to be the smallest musical interval.. which is to say.. take any instrument.. the notes that are right next to each other.. the different between one note and the next.. now divide that by 4.  That’s quarter tone tuning.

For me, quarter tone tuning is a little like going off the reservation without a map..  or its like all the stuff on the dash board, by which you normally drive the car, or perhaps fly the plane.. they all went and took acid on you without telling you about it: When you look at a keyboard.. its obvious what notes are where, and when you suddenly wack out the tuning..  well God only knows, right?

Yeah, I could sit down and actually figure out what the hell is going on.. make special maps, and move forward that way, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right to me. One of the thing that really appeals to my sense of adventure is.. being lost. It’s a little like Luke Skywalker turning off his targeting computer when he goes up against the Death Star.. where not going to rely on anything other then… I guess our own sense of things.

A challenge for the artist, always, is that you have a certain sense of taste.. you have habits.. you have all these things..  things you rely on.. and now we are pulling the rug out of all that… to go see what happens.

So I broke out my keyboard.. I’m no keyboard player, but I can noodle around on a keyboard.. and by doing that, I can kind of explore different possibilities as I go along. “What’s this harmony sound like” “how does this sound next to this.” What I find myself doing is just exploring this strange world.

A few latter:

The compositional process, for me, is a kind of dialog between.. myself and the canvas.. which in our case is a kind of sonic sculpture. I frequently call what I do with sound “sound art” as a pose to “making music” as… I think of it as more of an “artistic” process then “a musicians” process: I don’t think of my self as a great musician.. but a great artist I could be.

So what you’re doing is building this.. lets call it a “sound sculpture.” You’re putting stuff onto the sonic canvas, and in the end its what’s going on in the canvas that matters. All your skills, all you’re knowledge, all your musicianship.. all your abilities as a sound engineer, whatever it is.. in the end it comes down to that thing on the canvas.. 

Knowledge and skills amounts to language.. It’s a framework for understanding reality. Your framework for understanding reality.. has implications on the image of reality you behold. So for instance, my journey into quarter tone tuning.. is one of doing funny things with respect to your framework. For me its like “well I’ll just improvise inside of this context” so it’s a search for a context that will make magic happen.

The thing is, its not just about frameworks, its how you relate to that framework. The term “Dogma” comes to mind. I don’t know if religious people think this way.. but you could say.. on the one hand you have “the law” and on the other you have “your way of relating to the law,” and then you have a heretic like Jesus who comes along.. goes to the extreme of saying “yo, it’s just about loving God.” Jesus would tell you it doesn’t matter if you actually have that affair with your neighbors wife.. it’s did you do that in you heart. This, of course, was radical stuff.

Next Morning:

So I’m now trying to copy my Kontakt Sample library. Kontakt, of course, is a software sampler… Kontakt comes with an apparently incredible sample library… I say apparently because I’ve had a number of technical problems.. including defective DVDs, which has kept me from being able to explore said library. I still don’t have the damn thing working.. but now it looks like its simply a matter of copying the library from the DVDs..

The reason I’m doing this is because.. Well starting out with this piano.. just kind of the direction that was going.. It’s somewhat impressionistic.. and I had thought of throwing in some electronic sounds into the mix.. but I’m now thinking that what I want to do is.. keep thinking in the world of… kinda classical type orchestral stuff.. I mean just timber wise. And my understanding of the matter is that the Kontakt library stuff is the best library for this kind of thing… in my personal libraries anyway… So now its time to get that stuff working.

I do think having electronic stuff in the mix could be very cool.. if you’ve ever listened to OHM.. you hear electronic classical in action..  and I’d like to create that kind of a feel… where the work is basically orchestral.. but with electronic elements.. where the electronic elements function in a particular capacity.. but where the orchestral stuff is really the base of it all. I say this though I never know where my work is going to take me.

Back to the spiritual / relationship to law stuff:

My spiritual beliefs are clearly heretical. Jung has said that religion is a defense against religious experience..  which is to say that the church acts as an intercession between you and God. My sense of the.. way that religions roll in society has diminished.. and the kind of modern cultural climate surrounding it is.. I don’t always feel like religion is really doing a great job of serving the modern situation. There’s a reading of the Bible where you can say “Jesus didn’t come to bring people to the church, he came to bring the church to the people.” So I’d say that’s really the challenge for modern Christianity. 

My feeling is.. well I feel like.. do I even need the church? Couldn’t I just have a direct relationship with God? This is a somewhat dangerous idea.. but when I talk about our relationship to law, to conceptual frameworks, even to language.. I’m talking along these lines.. and so you can see how, on a process level in my work, my work explores this.

Hmm, how about we explore Ozzy’s take on this?

Always nice to have a little Randy Rhoads tribute, ha? (The boy could play!) 

I’ll end this entry here.. so.. I don’t know, what do you think? 

No really, I’ve been meaning to write.. its bad of me not to.. I’ll just post whatever random, who knows what, comes out of me tonight.

Lately I’ve been a little depressed.. I suppose it being mothers day season, this my first since my mom passed, plays a roll in this depression. In any event, I’m not getting much of anything done, or haven’t this week.. my psyche has seen better days…

In a defiance of all this, I cracked open DP a few moments ago.. started loading instruments, playing around… feeling like “I just want to be productive, it doesn’t matter how.” This is a good place to start.. I mean start anywhere, start where you are, just work at it.. It doesn’t matter if what you do is of any value, just get those damn wheels turning.In truth there’s probably grand possibilities all around.. and if I can just get out of this funk, I might just realize a few of them, and there by escape total doom.

In my little music project.. which probably wont reach “bean hill” status.. I fired up Native Instruments piano program.. for the first time.. and fooled around a little bit.. “oh, you can do quarter tone scales in this?”

Quarter tones is like the “Charles Ives” school of microtonalism. This is a slightly out there planet for me to talk about.. but I generally don’t give quarter tone music too much respect in the microtonal department. The reason has to do with justintonation… Basically.. once upon a time a musical system was created, that everyone uses today.. only trouble is that the pitches are all wrong.. Justintonation fixes this problem.. I’m generally not all that geared to justintonation because.. well just because of how my music is structured.. so what I normally do is.. “abstract from the traditional diatonic system.” What I mean by this is.. I start on the planet everyone else is playing on.. and sorta move out from there.. though I clearly don’t play by earthling rules!

Anyway, so quarter tone tuning is something that actually would work with the structure of my music.. but the problem is.. though it can come closer to correct pitch relationships then what everyone else is using.. it doesn’t quite get there..

My thinking is.. well.. 2 fold basically. #1 You can have instruments that are expressive with pitch, and #2 You could have different tunings going on at the same time. Let me explain the implications:

If you where to start with a quarter tone tuning system.. and then you were dealing with instruments that were expressive in terms of pitch.. there pitches would, one way or another, fluctuate around that quarter tone foundation.. inside of those fluctuations.. its at least possible that you could have the proper note relationship thing working.. in the justintonation sense of it.

Having multiple tunings.. means the cross relationships.. between the pitches of different instruments with different tunings.. could create the proper pitch relationships (particularly if we add the pitch expressive layer to the mix.)Working this way would create certain organizational challenges.. but the results could be interesting.. since I would be working in a way where I can’t really predict the results too well… and this often leads to interesting music. 

A few latter:

As I read what I’ve written I notice something. Most of the time, at least since I put together the new studio, I’ve been working hard to reach square one.. to do work that is.. “not sucky.” I mean.. its like you’re “pre good at this.” It’s like you have to work real hard to reach results that are.. not terrible.. but when we look at me working with music.. I throw some stuff out there, without giving it the least bit of thought… and look how sophisticated it is!?  Just seemed like a worth while observation.. anyway, let me post this.

A hat tip to Len Edgerly on this find.. what a great video with Dali. 

;

While Max Ernst is really my fav surrealist… Dali seems a bit too.. well branded I guess..  this is quite the video clip.

My last blog post featured some of my best pictures so far.. given, I’ve only been at it since Monday.. and as someone who’s barely ever handled a camera before.. I’m feeling pretty proud about those pics.. Though at the same time my honest assessment of my photography is not so high.. and I think this series will sorta show this off a little bit.. I like how these pictures function as a series, but if you look at them individually.. they are less then red hot..

Ok.. moving right along….

I love taking pics of my dad “for some reason.”  One of the things I’m learning about photography is that it’s “all about observation.” It’s in large measure a process of looking. You take once slice of time.. framed.. what have you.. and you can look at it for eons..

This amplifies that one moment beyond its significants in the flow of time.. to put it a certain sorta way. Significants, in this sense, meaning.. well what underlies… well how you remember things.. how things stick out in the mind. Another words.. I have an image of my father that is produced through a process of interactions.. let’s say.. and those interactions define the production of that image.. they define what stays in mind and what slips away.. which often might has more to do with my own interior.. whatever is driving me, then it has to do with my father. Taking pictures takes me out of that.. to one extent or another.. and now we are studying my father as a subject.

My relationship to my parents is a complex one.. psycho-socially speaking. Perhaps this is true for all of us? At this moment in my life.. shortly after my mom’s passing, in a situation of taking care of my father.. still feeling dependent on the money that is whatever wealth they managed to amass in there life times.. all this, along with other life issues.. puts me in a strange psychological situation.. which basically amounts to feeling like the challenges of trying to grow up.

A few latter: 

I’ve been reading some essays by Carl Jung recently.. which have re-lead me into a certain way of thinking about my own psychology. A somewhat simple way of saying it is that beneath the surface of waking life, and all our “reasonableness,” lys a “psychological reality.” Reality is, after all, never experienced outside the context of consciousness or our “psychological reality.” The empiricism of science, among other things, has lead us into a spirit of missing this underlying psychological reality.

I’m not blaming science.. Its simply that the scientific age, to put it a certain way, has lead us into a kind of psychological makeup that’s.. somewhat one sided and materialistic. Materialistic in the sense that we search for answers in the material world.. and understanding psychology from a material perspective is.. at the very least complicated from the stand point of our current understanding.. which is to say neuroscience is in it’s very very early days. 

Bug I digress…

So what of this underlying psychological reality? My sense is that it’s through a kind of dialectical relationship with this that I’ll make it through my current life challenges.. Though photography, at least as I’m exploring it at the moment, is slavishly tied to the material world, it has become a tool for exploring this sorta dialectical process.

So lets see if I can kind of wrap this up into a nice little bow: In a certain sense, photography is giving me an experience of reality that is out side the context of a certain psycho-social drama.. This is to say we are looking at the subject / object… err, how do I put this? Well in the case of the following series of photographs, I’m moving out side of “my idea” of my father, to my father. “Idea” here being a psychological idea that is out side of a purely conscious idea.. or one that is beyond conscious will. In so doing we shape the psycho-social drama in new ways.

I’ll conclude this part of the blog entry by telling you that what I’m saying is an over simplification of the matter.

Some background on these pictures:

There’s a couple things you might like to know.. #1 The cat in these pictures is named “Kitty.” Well actually he’s named Ginger.. or thats the name my mom and father use.. This would be our second cat to have a feminine name..  so that’s where I draw the line, and thus we shall refer to him as Kitty.

Kitty is an indoor cat who does not like being indoors.. All he wants in life is to go outside.. trouble is that our last cat probably got eaten by a coyote and thus… well my mom just couldn’t see letting Kitty go out after that. Personally, I believe in living dangerously.. so I side with letting kitty go out.. but at least for now.. the household continues to, kinda sorta, run as it did when my mom was living.

Anyway.. so Kitty is always trying to get out.. and no one accidently lets the cat out more then dad! 

#2 My dad has dementia. His dementia has not lead him to being totally unfunctional.. and he still has some short term memory.. but for the most part he’s not very capable of remember much from 30 minutes ago, to put it a certain sorta way. So a lot of really basic things can be very difficult for him.. and I think you can kind of see this in the pictures.

#3 My dad has a habit of sleeping too late.. so its my job to wake him up.. and thus we begin.

On with the Pics! 

Ok, so dad is more or less up.. but how can he start his day without getting the news paper or getting the mail? Hope he doesn’t let the cat out!

Aww, the taste of victory! 

So making a series like this was surely a lot of fun… And you know.. each picture, on it’s own.. the quality varies.. but as a group.. it’s kinda cool.

A final note / what we can look forward to in the future. 

These picts took about half of my monthly flickr upload allotment… they are, if you view them in flickr, about half the size of the originals.. So what I’m thinking of doing, in the future, is generally uploaded pictures that are a good deal smaller then this.. at least the ones for this blog.. 

I’m planning on releasing these kinda virtual photography books, in pdf form.. which will give you full the sized pics.. which you could even print out at full size if you liked.. 

I suppose the other thing worth mentioning is the pics are still not going through much of a digital work flow.. which is to say “photo post production” which involved working with them in Aperture and Photoshop..  which I of course hope to do for the books.. 

Finally, I’m hoping on putting Google Addsents in them.. so with any luck.. I could even make some money from the books! My ambition here being to pay for the cost of web hosting! 

So that all ought to be fun to do and play with.

Yeah, so I just got the EOS 4D.. and this is my first few steps into photography. I’ve wanted a do this since I was a little kid looking at the service merchandise wish book.. at SLRs and just dreaming of taking up photography…. aww, but my parents never helped me out along these lines… till now I guess.

There’s a number of reasons I’m interested in photography… everything from artistic ones to social media strategy reasons.. to it being helpful for the design side of my stuff to.. various other strategy stuff.. to.. it would be nice to document my paintings if I want to sell them.. to.. well it might be nice to sell stuff on EBay and what not..

A couple days latter:

So there’s a number of reasons I’m jumping into photography.. more so then I’ll get to in this blog entry, but it’s at least worth talking about to contextualize these adventures. Another words.. you have what I can only call “an ecology of goals.” That ecology defines what success is for me, and thus defines the sorta directions I’m taking.. and how I sorta evaluate myself.

Jesus, got a camera for less then a week and I’m already evaluating myself!?! Yeah, I have issues! I’m often told by friends that I’m too hard on myself, and too self critical. I don’t know how true this is, but I imagine there’s a hell of a lot of truth to it.. but I’m a rebel, and thus I continue on as always.. full of self doubt which.. lucky for me for the moment, fails to oppress forward movement!

The Experience of starting out in photography 

Well it started out via getting ripped off by an online camera dealer. The lenses they told me were $1400 lenses were $200 dolor lenses, the high speed SDI card they tried to up sell me to.. while me thinking they were nuts.. turns out my camera doesn’t even use..  aww the joys and shame of it all!!! All this I’ve tried to take in stride.. this and the slow growing realization that I probably need to invest in a lot of stuff I never budgeted for.. Or I would have had the budget for if I hadn’t been ripped off… but lets not dwell on that darkness.

I spent my first day of fooling around with the camera in manuel mode.. In manual mode you set all the controls.. everything from focusing the thing to shudder speed, ISO, and aperture. This didn’t work so well.. and I didn’t get too many good pics out of the deal.

A few latter: Ok.. screw this, lets just look at some pics!

Some Picks 

So this would be, like, the very first picture I took.. or close to it anyway.. shooting on auto pilot as it were.. I rather love this pic.. It’s sorta me showing my father my ultra groovy new camera.

This would be sorta latter this day.. I’m now flying full manuel.. though haven’t yet figured out how to control the aperture setting! This is pretty close to my favorite of the day.. but my favorite somehow corrupted.

This of course is dad watching Letterman..  at this hour I’m normally watching Steven Cobert or the Daily Show.. but dad’s a Letterman man…  the seat with all the light on it is where mom used to sit.. seems a little symbolic, ha?

That would be dad’s work bench.. kind of an interesting thing to explore.. you can explore it more by clicking on the picture and going to the larger version of the pic on my flickr account.. It’s a bit of a time capsule.

This, of course, is the leaf of death! It’s like a slab of beef Rocky would slam away on for training.. or something like that…

This, of course, is the leaf of life! Yup, can’t have a leaf of death without a leaf of life.. Through death comes life, don’t cha know? But we won’t explore all that stuff here today…  at any rate, this and the last one were taken during today’s Blue Hill’s hike.. I’ll no doubt be sharing more pics from this hike latter.. or at least I plan to.. but right now I must be rushing off to today’s Social Media Breakfast.. 

I’ll just make a concluding comment before I post.. It’s clear to me that I suck at photography!!! I’m struggling.. and.. well.. I’m fairly happy with these pics.. I meant to say more about this.. but for now I’ll just give you this.