notes from overground
While I'm enjoying the air conditioning at a coffeeshop, I thought I would post a few brief notes about my New York trip.
- I took about 250 pictures on my digital camera, and I don't know if I'll get around to posting any of them. It's a little hassle to process and scan film, so it takes a while to post images taken with a traditional camera. But I'm much more judicious with my shots when I'm shooting on film. I take as many pictures as I want with the digital, and culling through the images and editing them in Photoshop can slow down my uploading process as much as film. The ease of creating digital images introduces it's own data-managment hassles.
- I get sloppy shooting on a digital camera, too. I started using the viewfinder to frame shots, because the LCD screen on my camera is hard to see in direct sunlight. When I shoot on film, I'm pretty careful about framing my shots, even when I'll be printing on an enlarger. On the digital camera, I just assume that can crop and recompose a shot in Photoshop, making it easy to take lots of bad pictures.
- I still haven't quite figured out the exposure and white-balance settings on my point-and-shoot digital camera to my satisfaction, which also means a fair amount of fiddling in Photoshop. I still don't think I'd want to go back to carrying my 35mm SLR around the city.
- Does anyone know of a Flickr plugin for Photoshop on OS X? I'm pretty happy with this plugin that allows me to publish to Flickr from iPhoto, but I would rather export from Photoshop.
- $30 seems to be the standard price for a limited-run T-Shirt in New York. I can understand the offbeat-T-shirt-as-status-symbol phenomenon, since I often buy funky, obscure shirts online. $20 is the most that I'm willing to pay for a shirt, but after looking at shirts in New York, I might not feel so bad about buying this $22 shirt from the Space 2026 collective in Philly.
- I insisted that my hosts go to P.S.1 with me, since I remembered the building itself was really interesting. On the way there, I worried that it was just a rehabilitated school, but, it was as weird and crazy as I remembered. It's a little hard to describe the experience of walking through the building, but many of the installations are integrated into the building and play off of its urban decay. I would have liked to spend more time there, but I'm glad we got to spend a little time there.
- Coming home to a broken air conditioner is a cruel trick. The last two nights in New York, I only got about four hours of sleep, and I got the about the same amount of sleep last night because it was so hot. The temperature inside was still around 90F when I woke up this morning. I was ready to spend a productive day at home, but, by 10am, it was so hot I had to leave my place. I'm feeling a little grouchy and scattered.
Posted by McChris at August 23, 2005 11:24 AM