Interesting: We all get dressed for him :)

Late one afternoon, like so many afternoons before, I found myself wandering aimlessly with a mouse in one hand, staring blankly straight ahead. Click after soulless click, hopping from one numbing page to another, hoping to find gold but all I’d found were grits.

That was until ‘The best 50 movies of 2011’ (of course there are probably a million more sites claiming to have the same list but with totally different films). Most of the films I have never heard of, but one particular film caught my eye like a vice laced with super glue, perhaps because it was a documentary about a photographer living in New York.

The documentary was “BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK”, if you are into documentary / biography I am sure you’ll like this one; what a life :)

Talking about dedication to one’s trade, he is the manifestation of the word “Passion”, he literally sleeps with his work :) the art of photography may not be his main concern, he simply wanted to catalogue everything he believes is important in the world of fashion, perhaps that sounds too simplistic, but the way he goes about it and the way he thinks is so fascinating (in a very good way).

With over 3 decades worth of photographs, consisting of street fashion and important social events (for the New York Times), he had seen it all, oh, did I mention that he was born in 1928/1929!. There are many memorable points of view from Mr. Cunningham, one of my favourite is “You see if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do kid. That’s the key to the whole thing, don’t touch money, is the worst thing you could do” (Bill Cunningham New York, 18:12 – 18:23).

I wonder what he will do, now that Kodak (sadly) is no more, only kidding, I think he uses Fuji films anyway (saw a few glimpses of green film boxes), will he ever move to digital?  The way he takes a photo is like watching fencing at the Olympics; the camera starts down low just below the chest, with both hands on either side of the camera, then suddenly it comes up to his eye as fast as an alcoholic downing a shot of whiskey in a typical Hollywood cliché film, SNAP SNAP SNAP, a quick jab and it’s down again.

After the documentary all I wanted to do was to go out, buy a blue smock, steal a bike, ride down to Siam Paragon to take pictures :)

Interesting: “and then…” will f*&% you up, shared South Park creators :)

Came across this short VDO through my Google+ stream that led me to ‘Mentorless’ and finally ended up at ‘MTVu’.

The creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone surprised a freshmen class of ‘Storytelling Strategies’ at NYU.

The writing tips in this 6 and a bit minutes clip is like pure molten gold, poured while red hot into a bowl of flawless, colourless, grade 1 plus diamonds, click ---> here to jump to the video :)

Worth a visit: Different in Colours

Came across this set of photographs on Chive (and yes I don’t just look at the FLBP sets, but when I do (cough, cough, every flippin day) it does make my day ‘most brilliant’). Their posts always declare the source, so I followed their link to a set of photos within Imgur (try it, it’s good :) (http://imgur.com/a/wapUe#mYGo9)

“Putting colours into black and white photos” would be my simplest description, I would love to mention his/her name here but couldn’t find his/her identity, for all I know it could have been Batman or Wonder Woman.

The best thing is that, this person doesn’t just transform historically important photos or portraits of famous people, he/she also does requests.

There are several reasons why modern photographers choose to take photos in black and white or transform colour photos into black and white before publishing them. To give it a somber tone (imagine a clown without make up, lol), to rid it of distractions (imagine a clown with black and white makeup), to highlight the subtle effects of textures, lighting or contrasts, and probably the most frequent one of all, giving it ‘timelessness’ quality to a photograph.

But to see these iconic photos, that most of us have seen a thousand times before, in colour, just made it more real for me, take this one (above) of ‘Dorothy Counts’ (probably was one of the bravest girl (fifteen at that time) in the entire galaxy). I don’t know, seeing it in colour just made me feel the pressure that she must have faced multiplied by about a billion (same thing for the Ann Frank’s portrait, of course it does help if you have the knowledge of who these people are).

Of course I haven’t got a clue how the ‘Architect’ of these photos had chosen the colours for the clothes, hair, chairs, background, necktie and so on. I’d guess he/she could have made research into the colour of the eyes and hair, and may be there is a tool revealing how different greys represent different colours (or am I just dreaming here).

None the less, this site is definitely worth a visit, please NOTE, parental warning, there are some iconic ‘graphic’ photos in the set.

Slightly defeating the objective of being ignorant :)

Being ignorant is such a wonderful thing, I wished I could be ignorant all the flippin time when watching films. If I had known prior that Bruce Willis was a ghost, the film would have been nothing more than just a very well made horror film, or who would have thought his father was Darth Vader and the Princess was his sister!

I am glad to be ignorant, well, at least for the hundred plus minutes or so; to have been lead by the director’s story telling skills, totally submerged into the characters due to the skills of the actors & actresses, to have been paced by the editors or overwhelmed by the sets and locations (sadly, mostly are now just CG). To have all those coming together, building and building, story, plots, sub plots, deceptions and finishing with a crescendo of the great reveal or ending is just so blooming fun :)

However, I am another victim of ‘curiosity killed the cat’ syndrome, totally my fault of course :) It all started with desire to know the plot line, Wikipedia is quite good for that, then discovered that some wiki pages were baring it all… after that it was all down hill for me :) ended up at this amazing site, www.themoviespoiler.com.

The name of the site utterly explains itself, from what I have read, each spoiler was around four to five thousand words and the quality of some of the writing was so good you’d thought it was the director who wrote it, lol.

Just read “Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, wow, no wonder why both got such a great reception, and of course spoiling it all for myself now… Oh why do I do it :)

Errrm… I wonder what should I read next? :)

“The Great Global Warming Swindle”

Somehow wandered into the Google statistic page for this simple blog of mine, and found out that the most visited post of all time, is a very short post named “Is Al Gore a Lier”, I had posted a link (along with some simple texts) to a youtube video of a presentation made by Christopher Monckton in which he gave a talk to quite a large audience, using a simple Powerpoint (well it could have been Keynote) to convey his message, and it was pretty convincing.

In following to finding out that post was the most visited post, I have decided to look around, to see if this anti-global warming is still going strong and came across the video below, which is (to me) quite convincing, unless someone comes out to say that these people are not the people they claim to be, I am pretty much sold on the idea.

Perhaps, a couple of minutes of fame :)

While walking after lunch in Sukhumvit soi 24 I’d noticed due to traffic a ‘Google Street View’ car was coming to a stop literally next to where we were standing.

I didn’t even know they were mapping out Thailand, and they were using a Subaru as well, how classy :) (Subaru is not at all common in Thailand).

Of course all the images of silly street view maps with people dressing up suddenly flooded my mind, all I could do was gave it a wave and a smile, truly hoping that it will make it on to Bangkok’s street views… :) I wonder how long it will take for them to upload it?

Strangely (very) Entertaining…

I was searching Youtube looking for clips of the game ‘Uncharted 3’, but somehow ended up on one of this guy’s vdo post, he goes by the name of SSOHPKC (real name being Seamus) and he is a part of the ‘Let’s Play’ community. Simply, he records his game play and post it up on Youtube in ten minutes or so chunks, the recording also includes his verbal comments which can be very ‘colourful’ (and very funny) at times (kids beware).

Strangely I find this so entertaining, just sat through ‘Uncharted 1’ (all 32 VDOs) and now making my way through ‘Uncharted 2’ (51 VDOs), with over 370,000 subscribers and over 194 million Video views it looks like I am not the only one who finds this fun :)

I have Google+ :)

For some unknown reason Google did not permit ‘Google Apps’ users to have a ‘Google Profile’, consequently this meant that I could not have the much talked about ‘Google+’.

So (very uncharacteristic of me) instead of using the other Google account to create the ‘Google+’, I decided to wait until Google kindly enabled it for all ‘Google Apps’ users (like they said they would).

So for the past couple of days I have been living in the Google+ universe, this isn’t a review, just a penny for my thought here. Google+ is a new social network that uses ‘circles’ to group your flock, with interesting (fresh) UI, it is still a social network at the core (of course), but I think it is as (functional) dynamic as twitter and will probably will be as deep as Facebook but with cleaner and easier layout to understand. I like it, like many, we all have more than one pair of shoes, so I can live with just one more pair for now…

Worth a visit: yowayowacamera.com

I am convince everyone who has a camera, even mobile phone camera have at least once tried a levitation / flying photo, or in plain English taking a photo while your subject is in the air after a jump. I was doing my usual browsing this morning, and ended up at digitalrev.com (can be informative and very funny ‘camera’ site), they had this short youtube vdo on trying to imitate the levitation / flying photo from this yowayowacamera.com site.

Several photos are fantastic, and totally believable (you’ll need to scroll through her album). the key being all the essential limbs are in focus (fast shutter speed) and try to hide the effect of gravity from all the parts (including clothing) as much as you can. She was kind enough to also give the detail on how she took all of her photos, definitely worth a visit.

Love this photo: Chris Farley.

I came across this photo several weeks/months ago, felt in love with it pretty much immediately. The subject of a sorrowful pensive comedian (clown) is certainly isn’t new, but for me this must be one of the best.
 
The emptiness of the ‘tall’ back wall, with its bland washed out colour of grey, feels like a perfect amplifier of Mr. Farley’s mood that is so clearly projected from his facial expression.

There is a slight hope in sunlight rushing through the gap in the curtain, behind Chris the wall is unnaturally lustrous. The hanging fag from a mouth that simply just ‘couldn’t bothered’ and the dull gold crown together with a generic white vest was absolutely perfect for a tired mournful king.  

Placing Mr. Farley right at the bottom and in the middle of the composition, I could feel the heaviness of anguish that he is carrying upon his shoulders (pushing him down, being swallowed out of the frame), cutting him off just slightly below his chest just forces me to concentrate on the subject even more, no clutter, no other lines to consider, no shadows to draw my focus, no colours to pull me away from the lifelessness objective of the photo.

I believe he died of a drug overdose, I have always loved some... liked most... and didn’t care for a few of his work. I remembered I was shocked when the news broke. I like comedy and I was hoping he was going to make all of us laugh for a lot longer, much longer.


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Source: I think I first discovered this photo on Chive (not sure though), but decided to find the source of the photo, hoping to find the photographer’s name or something , to give it the credit where the credit is due. Decided to Google Image ‘Chris Farley’, it came up on page 11, after a couple more click the trail went cold at reform.lt. The trail went cold here because this site has nothing but photos after photos in one never ending page (love it), couldn’t find a search option after scrolling endlessly for a few minutes I gave up, will try again later :)

OH oooohhhh, WLW has issue with the new theme - solved.

After fixing the width of the main post area, and updated the theme on WLW, all seems to be working seamlessly once again… :)

Now what can I do to f*&# it all up again :)

I am happy, fixing the blog content width.

I am not sure when Blogger have updated the tools for us blogger users, but this ‘Add CSS’ is amazing. Now I can tweak the codes until the keyboard breaks ;) My old theme (main-wrapper and so on) was quite simple to take and educated guess at the CSS code (for its function) but on the other hand my old theme did not work so well with the new tools that Blogger was putting up, together with my fiddling with the old theme at the CSS level, meant the new Blogger’s tools were absolutely useless to me, and that was one of the main reason I have decided to change theme.

Anyway it was fun to start again, and now being able to use all of the tools at Blogger is very enjoyable. However the new CSS codes were very different, not so easy to take an educated guess. The main thing that I wanted to do was to fix the ‘main post’ width, so that when I decide to change the theme again, the format (layout of content) of each post would remain the same.

I came up naught upon searching the net, so decided to copy out all the CSS and use the search to find any key words that could help me to fix the ‘main post’ width, so here it is.

Putting the below code into the ‘Add CSS’ worked for me.

body .main-inner .Blog {
width: 800px;
}

The above would fix the main post width, but the content (the actual words and pictures’) sits under another CSS codes.

.post-body {
width: 750px;
}

The above have fixed my main content to 750px, so if I decided to change the theme again all I have to do is set the content width to 750px then all things should look the same, it doesn’t take a lot to make me happy, and I am truly am happy :)

OH oooohhhh, WLW has issue with the new theme.

Everything was going swimmingly until last night, the blog is coming together nicely with the new theme, a lot of tweaking needed (but isn’t that part of the fun?), anyway I was preparing to walk down the arduous road of going through every post just to check the format until I realised that WLW (my fav.) was a little strange.

The WYSWYG is the key for me with WLW(Windows Live Writer), but with this new theme the theme on WLW wasn’t exactly the same as the theme on the blog, the width of the WLW imported theme is a little narrower making the well laid post on WLW becoming a little messy when upload to the site.

I had this problem before between WLW and Windows Live Blog, and that was the reason why I jumped ship to Blogger so many years ago.

Back to basic…

For the past few months or so I have been wanting to use another template on this blog, the original template that I have been using started off as a basic off the shelf theme, then with the power of internet I began to add things to it. Wanted a 3 levels drop down menu (had that), wanted a page navigation (had that), wanted little icon on my internet browser tab (had that), wanted round corners (had that too), the list goes on and on (even the ‘comment’ module I had to use Disqus). It looked fine when the page was loaded, but if you ever looked at the code behind it, it would give you fevers, I call it my private Frankenstein, for it was truly, truly messy.

But I had to do it that way, because when I first started using Blogger, the amount of customisation was very limited, and pretty basic, besides I was having far too much fun researching and trying different things, the community of bloggers on the Internet are amazing!!!

So I wanted to start again, using one of Google’s free template, this would clear out all clutter that had accumulated. I miss my drop down menu very much, but I am hoping one day a kind Google employee would have time to come up and offer a drop down menu for us mortals, instead of me using the hack and slash method to get the drop down menu, or the page navigation :)

I am pretty happy with this simple look, but most of the posts’ layout have gone a little wonky, and here begin the long task of looking at all the posts to correct the wonky ones, lol. It was just like when I moved from WindowsLive to Blogger.

Love this one :)

I don’t think the concept is new, I am not even sure if there are other sites dedicated to this type of photograph, but I just love it, “dearphotograph.com”

It got me thinking right away on an old photo that I have of my mother and me, posing next the the ‘Sao Ching Cha’ (Literal translation: Posts Swing’).










This is by far my favourite…

Dear Photograph,
We had nothing, but you gave me everything. Thank you for your never ending love. I love you Dad.
@okfollowheather