Bringing back some old stuff from the deep web after talking with designer/screen printer extraordinaire Jon Johnson last week. This post was pre-kwartzlab, back when we were nomadic makers, building the community, under the temporary MakeKW banner. So cool to see the same spirit in action today, six years later, at kwartzlab and in the broader community. Proud? Yer damned right I am. -DW
26May2009
It kinda sorta actually worked. Read on for deets…
Continuing on from Part 2…
Downpour this morn. At King and Victoria, this is Kitchener.
DW
Welder-fabricator, to be exact. My brother from the very same mother, David G. White, aka Brohemus. Dave has a degree in Fine Art and History. He paints. He draws. And he builds gigantic tanks by day. Twenty years ago, Dave and I took a welding course at Conestoga College on Sundays to skill up and for fun. Much later on, Dave made a career shift to work with his hands every day. He worked a very physical landscaping job all day to pay the bills and attended a private welding school every evening. Earning his welding tickets in all positions, he eventually got a job he loves and is a real student of his craft, always learning and always pushing to get better.
Likewise, I’m stepping into a new dimension of photography, learning about lighting. This portrait shot was a trial to see if I achieve a certain effect of hard lighting on the subject with the light falling off radically in the surroundings. I haven’t quite got it yet, but awesome photog Mathew McCarthy generously offered some advice and my good friend Cedric Puddy is kindly loaning me some lighting gear so I can try a bunch of stuff before I go off shopping for gear of my own. GSD, every day.
DW
Like holes in air, this dusty pair in Paris. Paris, Ontario, that is. I swung down to the Paris Fair yesterday and soaked in the visually rich environment and broad cross-section of the county who attend the show. I grew up visiting the county fairs at Brigden and Alvinston over in Lambton County, so while I’m a visitor in the rural landscape, all fairs are familiar and delightful.
This Percheron from Sandcastle Farms in Bright, Ontario took third place in the horse judging, but placed first with me for a great visual. Studying Fine Art at the University of Guelph years ago, we would take our sketchbooks across Gordon Street and draw the horses corralled by the veterinary college. They are fantastic forms of muscle, bone, veins, and tendons in a velvet package. I don’t typically shoot animals, but horses have a special gravity that compels me to trip the shutter.
DW
This is the image I brought to August’s 3rdThur photo review with Foto:RE. You are seeing the post-review tuned up version that incorporates great feedback from Sean Puckett. He suggested I crop a bit more on the right side and darken a bright area under the leftmost bird. The result is, I think, a stronger composition. Here’s the backstory on the image.
Back in late May, Brohemus and I headed to San Francisco for a 3-day walkabout before hitting San Mateo for Maker Faire Bay Area. Cameras in tow, we spent days and nights combing through the Mission District. It’s a visually rich environment. It’s also socio-politically charged around the gentrification issue. And it has a lot of people in need. As we rode the #14 bus down Mission Street from 2nd, that aspect became increasingly obvious. Somewhere below 14th Street, I saw a shirtless guy flopped out on a mattress across the side walk. If you spend any time in SF, I think you can become inured to that need as a way of coping with its prevalence. But this image of mattress guy through the bus window really hit me in the gut. How the hell do we get to this place as a species? Is this truly an unsolvable problem?
After two days in the Mission, we headed up to the more affluent and touristy north end, checking out Crissy Field and the Palace of Fine Arts. Heading back along Baker Street to grab the bus, we happened upon this scene (above) at the edge of the side walk at the base of a tree. It was surreal. These five birds huddled together, watching over the dead bird. And they were not going anywhere no matter how close I got. It had a real gravity to it. As I laid on my belly, shooting with the 70-200mm, I couldn’t help thinking about mattress guy. This bird situation seemed like a powerful echo of the human condition in the Mission. My knee-jerk reaction was “See, the animals exhibit more compassion than humans.” And not to attribute too much emotional intelligence to birds, but maybe they are as confounded about their situation as we are are about ours.
My mom had an interesting take on this photo. We lost my Pops back in March, and Mom said this photo shows the utter helplessness with which we watch loved ones die. I reckon that was wrapped up in the whole image making as I shot this photo only six weeks after he passed. Whatever the interpretation, this shoot had the kind of gravity that presses on your chest, like some of the other photos that I shoot but then share with nobody.
Now the 1shot series is supposed to feature only one shot, but here on the edge of the long weekend you can click through for the bonus before-after pics I have brought to earlier 3rdThur photo reviews.
I was super-happy to re-engage with Foto:RE and friends last week for the regular 3rdThur photo review. I missed both June and July meetups due to travel and was very eager to share an image I had captured in late May while out in San Francisco. Will post that as a 1shot once I tune it up.
We got these reviews kicked off back in March and they have been invaluable in both the feedback I’ve received and the large tank of motivation they provide to bring my very best shot every month.
The format is simple: 1 image, 5 minutes, total honesty. Just show up on the 3rd Thursday of the month. For updated deets, just follow Foto:RE on fb or tw or check their website. It’s free-no-pay, but hey man, please buy drinks from our host venue.
Last Saturday Hespeler mashed up the art, music, and people out on Queen Street for A Day & A Night festival. I got down there after dinner to see what artists David Hoover and Woody Woodfield had painted up. I shot their work at the Hub a couple years ago. My interest was also piqued by a great piece on Jude Doble’s Red Leather Booth about Hespeler-based print maker Donna Stewart. Oh yeah, and live music in the street. I’m down for that anytime anywhere. Above is a backstage peek at Romeo Sex Fighter pumping out great covers with an awesomely self-deprecating sense of humour.
Click through for a quasi-reasonable number of pics…
Had a productive conversation about photography on Friday with representation from CAFKA, Christie Digital, Foto:RE, Communitech and the ever-awesome Catherine Bischoff. Stay tuned for more shortly. And let me say that this photo does not do justice to the panoramic projection of forest from the wicked Christie projectors in The Tannery Event Centre where we met.
DW
Sunday morning. 7AM. Two heavy metal bands. And pancakes.
That’s what cultural instigator and owner of The Princess Cafe, Marc Lecompte, was serving up at his Heavy Breakfast this past weekend as part of the Uncross Your Arms Fest. Above is the band Total Bummer, with volume cranked to 11.
If you don’t know Marc, and his two great restaurants Princess Cafe and Cheeses Murphy, then you probably are also unaware of how much he’s weaving into the cultural tapestry of Waterloo Region. Marc got on my radar four years back from this Waterloo Chronicle article, and Marc’s DIYDAY event last year highlighted his deep background in the music scene and on-going commitment to the broader ecosystem.
The point of this post was to respond to the oft-uttered “there’s nothing going on here” and not an in-depth look at Marc, but I can’t just post the photos without recognizing that this kind of cool shit doesn’t happen by magic, people! It takes a belief that cultural investment pays back and a willingness to do the work. Are you too busy? Marc’s got two kids under the age of 5 and two restaurants on the go. Kind of makes me feel like I’m slackin’.
If you’re wondering how you can get more involved in the community, I’ll again offer this unsolicited advice: just show up. It’s a good start. Here endeth the sermon, now on to the semi-unreasonable number of photos from the jam…
There are few things more beautiful to me than machined aluminum. So, I was delighted when my friend Brett Shellhammer invited me across the Hub courtyard last week to check out the plastic injection mold he had milled and test driven at TechShop in Detroit. For the uninitiated, injection molding is how the enclosures are created for lots of your plastic consumer goods. You put these two mold halves together like a sandwich and use a big press to force molten plastic through that port in the piece on the left. When you crack the mold open, you have a hard plastic shell the shape of the mold cavity.
“So what?” you might say. Your iPhone case, laptop case, and coffee maker are all made this way. Very familiar, right? Well, the thing is that five years ago this process/skillset/toolset was invisible magic and we only ever had access to the output. The maker movement has facilitated a tectonic shift in that dynamic.
Serial entrepreneur and outwardly a business guy, Brett is also a hardcore maker, fueled by a large desire to GSD (get shit done). So when his latest endeavour, The Quiet Coach, needed a plastic enclosure for part of their product and 3D printing was falling short, Brett flexed his maker-fu. It’s not a trivial workflow. He needed to 3D-model this enclosure in software. Then he took that virtual model and create an optimized toolpath for the CNC mill. He trained on the mill at TechShop, and then actually ran his toolpath against some aluminum stock to carve out the shape. More training, this time on the injection mold press at TechShop, was necessary. Finally, he had a complete toolchain with which to experiment, molding shells from different plastics. More importantly, he is now equipped to apply his learning to future challenges, not only in enclosure fabrication, but in any hurdle that requires modeling, machining, or CNC technology to surmount.
This is a small example of the watershed in manufacturing. It doesn’t supplant offshore manufacturing for large volume production, but rather complements it. Smaller volumes and quick-turn design changes (we used to say “rapid prototyping”) are within the grasp of mere mortal makers.
Click through for a few pics of the output and more machining porn…
