Shorts
Short film nominees come to theaters (that's March 10th at the Lagoon for all of you Minneapolites).
Crash
I've made no secret about how much I hated Crash. I still can't believe that it won best picture. Here's my favorite review quote:
"Contrived, obvious and overstated, Crash is basically just one white man's righteous attempt to make other white people feel as if they've confronted the problem of racism head-on. The movie is a gross oversimplification of a serious issue that exploits every stereotype imaginable, cramming them all into a plot that moves from one white-knuckle scenario to the next with an almost disgusting self-importance."
- Peter Debruge
Ditto. Maybe reviews like that are reason enough to hope that more films like this get made.
Darkroom Disorder
I've been shooting a lot of film for the photography class I'm in and have really been enjoying it, but I'm freaked out right now. Tuesday's class is going to be a photo review in front of the entire class and I need to have six to twelve 8"x10" prints ready. With the darkroom hours being somewhat limited on the weekends, I'll have about 10 hours to do all of the work.
Fortunately, I was able to spend several hours practicing in the darkroom last weekend and feel fairly confident that I can make good prints. The thing that ends up taking the most time is dealing with my OCD about dust on the negatives (should I admit that I used to actually hand wash compact discs?). I'm sure I'll get better at cleaning them with more practice, but right now it's driving me crazy. That said, I do have a couple of tips that I think are worth sharing.
First, the Static Master brush is a must have. It works wonders and you barely have to touch the negative. I see classmates that scrub their negatives pretty hard with ordinary lens cleaning clothes and scratch the hell out them. I'm glad that I dropped $20 to get this brush.
The other thing that I see most people using is compressed air. Personally, I won't use it on anything that I value or can't replace. I just can't take the risk that that I'll get a burst of that freezing liquid on my negative or the other equipment. What I do instead is use a Giottos Rocket Air, which I am also a fan of for my cleaning my camera and lenses. I picked up a new one that I keep in a zip lock bag for exclusive darkroom use.
Oh, I almost forgot! I picked up a Nikon Super CoolScan 5000 ED Film Scanner last weekend to digitize all of the stuff I'm shooting, which I'll get around to doing after the darkroom pressure is off. I've done a few test scans of slides and negatives. This scanner is AMAZING. So far, it's doing what I hoped it would by suppressing my desire to get a full-frame digital SLR...for now.
Forty Thousand
After reading this story of a guy losing his entire Gmail account, I got really paranoid about not having my account backed up. I set up the mail program on my Powerbook and let it download all of Saturday night while I snoozed on the couch. Four hours, 1.5GB, and 40,000 message later, all of my mail is backed up. Whew!
