Calm

Calm,
originally uploaded by The Imp;-).

What a week! (and it's only Tuesday!)

Tonight is scotch-night (www.thequaich.com), last night I ripped apart my computer and installed a DVD burner, tomorrow is coffee with a friend, I have about 1200 photos from the past Saturday to process and work isn't exactly getting any slower either! Man, I need to win the lottery; real life keeps interrupting the stuff that I love to do... ;-)

For the past three years or so, my computer has served me well... though they has had their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, on the whole I have to say that I'm happy with Dell.
I've done incremental upgrades over the years though... bumped up the RAM to 1 gig, added a secondary storage hard-drive, and put in a beefy 256 mb video card. The one major deficiency continued to be the fact that I had a CD burner and not a DVD burner. This became especially apparent once I started shooting with a digital SLR camera... when your raw files are about 7 meg each, you lose space quickly!
And so, off to Tigerdirect.ca I went, and for the reasonable cost of about $60.00, I had an NEC DVD+-RW DL ... you name it, it can burn it! \/\/007! What this of course now means, is that I'm going to have to spend a day this weekend patiently burning DVD backups of my storage drive, to free up some room. Much cheaper than buying a RAID system. :)

Scotch Night... I have belonged to a single-malt whiskey appreciation society for about 6 or 7 years now, call the Companions of the Quaich... normally, we meet once a month at The Ontario Club of Canada where we taste three different scotches that normally do not make it to North America... independent bottlings and the like. Thankfully this is done in between courses of a full meal, so you can avoid the possibility of losing your license, if you are fool enough to drive! :-) Tonight is the Robbie Burns Night dinner and tasting, so we can look forward to having haggis and Scottish poetry to go with our drams... :-)

Finally, as you can see from the previous post, I have a shwack of photos to get through, and find the keepers from the shoot, but that may have to wait a bit. I'm getting behind the 8-ball when it comes to getting my first photography show off the ground! Yes, that's right, on March 4th, 15 of my scuba prints will be on the walls at a local tappas lounge... I'm going to be selling them at cost; this is a test-the-market type of event for me. :) Still and all, I'm quite excited to see what some of my shark photos are going to look like in a 16"x20" format!

So, yeah, I need a little bit of calm in my life right now... but what the hell, life is meant to be lived, right? :)

Ciao,

/\/\4rK

40's-50's pinup/glamour

40's-50's pinup/glamour,
originally uploaded by The Imp;-).

In the summer, I'm pretty much doing nothing but diving on my weekends... it's an epic journey every friday night, up to Tobermory (4 hrs!), and another epic journey back on Sunday evening. Two days of helping the newbie-divers to perfect their basic open water skills and then leading them on their first dive as newly minted scuba divers is a lot of fun!

But that is the summer, and inevitably, it must give way to winter. And I'm just not a snowboarding or ski-dooing kinda guy. :)

This winter I've embraced my photography habit/addiction, and tried to take it up to another level, investing in a portable lighting setup and even (this past weekend) renting a studio with a cove that I might try my hand at some intensive model shooting. Big thanx to Jen (girl the in purple) for stepping up, including bringing her friends, a fashion consultant, and a Makeup Artist.

There were some better shots... there were some worse shots, but all in all, the above is a great representative of what we shot on Saturday. :-) More to come... but they'll be posted on my Flickr account, so head on over there to see the rest!

Ciao,

/\/\4rK

73. Oxymoron alert: Erotic City/Boise.

From 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, 2005's shenanigans, skulduggery and just plain stupidity.

By Adam Horowitz, David Jacobson, Mark Lasswell, and Owen Thomas

# 73. The proprietors of the Erotic City strip club in Boise, Idaho, attempt to circumvent a local law banning nudity except for performances of "serious artistic merit" by distributing sketch pads and pencils to customers for twice-weekly G-string-free "art" nights. Local police raid the club, issuing misdemeanor citations.

Hey, now if that's not creativity, I don't know what is...

How to be more creative...

This morning, while going through my usual ritual of injecting caffiene directly into my veins with a large-diameter syringe, I stumbled across a wonderful blog called "The Gaping Void".

Which of course, immediately pissed me off, as I had been called The Gaping Void for time-immemorial by some good friends from The 'Hat, and instantly thought... fuck-yeah, I should have started using that... but I digress.

No, what caught my eye was that he articulated something that few people do, but all of us worry about... How do you stay / get / become creative? And it's not just for writers / artists / photographers / fraud artists / porn stars or politicians. So without further applause, I present to you Hugh Macleod's how to be creative, the short version... (ps, go and read the long version, slacker).

1. Ignore everybody.
2. The idea doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world.
3. Put the hours in.
4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being "discovered" by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.
5. You are responsible for your own experience.
6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
7. Keep your day job.
8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.
11. Don't try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.
12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
16. The world is changing.
17. Merit can be bought. Passion can't.
18. Avoid the Watercooler Gang.
19. Sing in your own voice.
20. The choice of media is irrelevant.
21. Selling out is harder than it looks.
22. Nobody cares. Do it for yourself.
23. Worrying about "Commercial vs. Artistic" is a complete waste of time.
24. Don’t worry about finding inspiration. It comes eventually.
25. You have to find your own schtick.
26. Write from the heart.
27. The best way to get approval is not to need it.
28. Power is never given. Power is taken.
29. Whatever choice you make, The Devil gets his due eventually.
30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

scuba

mosaicfda7838fd16452fd0cfeb97f2d7c1869,
originally uploaded by The Imp;-).

damnit, but it's been a good year for underwater photos. :-D

/me pats self on the back.