149.Blue Horizons Continued: "World's Easiest Catch: Zen of Rock Crab" Lightning Lamps Photoshop Experiment Resumed

I guess you can see an inherent obsession with lava lamps, plasma lamps, and the like. I already MADE a blog devoted to lightning and plasma lamps, and I can't help but doing a second! This blog also provided training wheels in terms of how to embed a picture slideshow to my blog. I will have to get used to this. It is in part distracting, and I would prefer still images. But it's good to experiment. It's always healthy to try something new! I remember Maria Gordon stating that it's important to have some degree of "motion" in a website, but there is a point where motion can become a distraction. I will have to find the right balance of motion: from healthy stimulation to cluttery, overwhelming distraction! *Sigh*

I remember Dr. George Legrady giving me a hard time with my rock crab film and the use of plasma lamps. The Media Arts Technology Approach is to create novel, sophisticated technologies to design a lava lamp or plasma lamp impression. And me? Shame on me. I did the cheapskate way: I USED a plasma lamp! With the Michel Gondry style, if you are creative enough, there is always some form of "cheapskate" way to do something that is supposedly complex. I will go the cheapskate route. Blame my mother for imposing her penny-pinching values on me :-)

The second thing I must state is that NO MATTER HOW MUCH FANCY TECHNOLOGY YOU HAVE AND USE... from paper and pencil to high tech mac computers to photoshop to new, fancy technologies from the MAT department, if you don't have any ideas INVENTED, DESIGNED, CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR OWN MIND, then nothing will come of owning a multi-million dollar entertainment operation. I have a relative who has a fancy macintosh and a $5000 Sony HD camera. He doesn't even use the camera. It sits in its box.

If you have no ideas on how to put together a story, you can have all the fancy equipment in the world and nothing will come together.

For me? I always start with the primitive: my brain, my hands and fingers, a pencil, and a paper.

133. Blue Horizons Continued: In-Between Randomness: Early Photographs of Crabs

Jack in the Box. Crab in a box. Or... err... crab in a bowl. What's going on here? These are just WARM-UP pictures to the real thing of Zen of Rock Crab. I took invertebrate zoology and parasitology for the entire year of 2002-2003, and I used a primitive Olympus digital camera to render these above shots. I was just happy to have some crab pictures before working with actual rock crabs for this film. At this point I am not showing any crab DISSECTION shots. Animal cruelty or biological reality? Or instead of being environmentalist elitist preservationist-- "SAVE THEM ALL!"--I am actually being a scientist conservationist "SACRIFICE A FEW, SAVE THE MANY!" I don't know the above species of crab off hand (it's not like I interact with them every single day of my life to give them a name), but I'm pretty darned sure they're not on the endangered species list!

I actually love the "framing" effect of the microscope, which is portrayed in the first two images. I am not sure if I told this story yet, but it was five weeks into the first invertebrate zoology course, and I had never thought into taking pictures of organisms under microscopes. It turned out that the zoom lens of my camera fit very well with size of the eye-lens for the compound scope, and the first image I ever took under the scope was phenomenal! It was the "test" or exoskeletonish-shell of a sea urchin, in which out of context, people mistakened it for cheese, crackers, and the surface of Mars. I must show you this picture sometime! Opa! I just uploaded it as an afterthought. No, it's not a crab. It's a sea urchin. I just broke the theme of this blog entry. Oh well. Candace, one of my lab partners for invertebrate zoology, actually suggested that I try and see what would happen if I tried to take a picture through a microscope. Retroactively, I could say it was an amazing suggestion, and that it changed my photographic habits for the remainder of the year and for the rest of my life!

In a sedimentology course a few years later (spring of 2006), we were looking at sedimentary rocks under a microscope. Geologists have special compound scopes that are designed to specifically look at rock samples. My brain is tired, so I can't think of it off the top of my head. So, to Martin Kennedy's and Dave Mrofka's surprise (Martin is the prof, and Dave is the TA), I whipped out my nicer Nikon Coolpix 5700 and shot pics of the rock samples. Martin came over to take out the shots. He was stated in ironic shock, "Your pictures are coming out nicer than the ones from our Nikon D100... attached to a thousand-dollar scope-camera connector piece!" I shrugged my shoulders and embarrassedly smiled. One less piece of technology in your life is probably a good thing nowadays.