Wow – busy time

Long time, no bloggy. Hmmm.
Went to our traditional Thanksgiving trip; Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Iowa with the extended Mineart family. Almost everyone was there – something like 48 family members all in the same house at the same time. Yep. I took lots of photos; most from the trip are up on Flickr.
While we were there, we drove out to Eldon, Iowa to see the little house from the famous Grant Woods painting American Gothic, and took photos of us in front of the house. (Obviously, you can see one of them a few posts down.) I’ve been wanting to do that for years. The house is designated an historic landmark owned by the state of Iowa, and this year the state opened a visitor’s center/museum near the house so you can find out more about the painting and get help getting your picture taken. The proceeds from the center help pay for the maintenance of the house, which is nice. And the volunteers there are pretty fun-loving and enjoy tongue-in-cheek parodies of the painting.
A few years back, I read “American Gothic : The Biography of Grant Wood’s American Masterpiece” so I knew a lot of the background of the painting, but the museum was really interesting, and it makes me want to go back and read it again. Strangely, I know I wrote a review of the book for my blog, but it’s not coming up in my searches. Hmmm.
Speaking of Flickr and photographs, I finished uploading all of the digital photos I have to Flickr. I still have a lot of captioning and tagging to do, but they are in sets in roughly chronological order going backwards to September, 2000 when I bought my first digital camera. I also need to pull significant events into sets, as well, and then embed galleries throughout my site. I have some of that done, but not nearly enough. I had quite a nostalgic time going through all my old photos. And a bit of a sad time, too, coming across photos of our friend Joe. I have more of him I haven’t added to that set, but I stopped hunting for them after awhile because it made me too unhappy. I’ll have to complete that task later.

Continue ReadingWow – busy time

links for 2006-07-11

Continue Readinglinks for 2006-07-11

My Favorite Flickr Photo Pools

In the Fringe > Alternative category, Flickr has some really funny and interesting photo pools — which anyone and everyone can contribute photos to. Here are some of my favorites, which I subscribe to through the pools’ rss feeds.

Adventures with Monkeys Photo Pool
I contribute a lot of pictures to this pool — people who take their stuffed monkeys on trips and to events and photograph them in front of landmarks.

Atrocious Apostrophe’s Photo Pool
Photos of signs with mis-used apostrophes.

Bad Signs Photo Pool
Photos of signs (often handmade) with misspellings, bad punctuation, poor design, or just bad ideas.

Big Things – Big Kitsch Photo Pool
Pictures of my favorite stuff – giant advertising art and roadside attractions.

Book Oddities Photo Pool
Photos of unusual books or strange covers. I have a fun one I need to add here.

Bullshit! Photo Pool
The premise is that you take a picture, and make up a totally fictional story explaining it.

Doing the Lynndie Photo Pool
Pictures of people shooting the “Lynndie England” Pose

Happy Ham Photo Pool
Those oddly disturbing signs on restaurants or butcher shops or elsewhere, showing whistling octopi or dancing pigs or other animals who are just so thrilled that they are about to get eaten.

It Came with The House Photo Pool
Pictures of stuff that was left behind in peoples houses by previous tenants. I have several things to contribute to this one from my current house, and I know there are going to be some great contributions from the new house.

League of the Empty Chair Photo Pool
Photos of abandoned, discarded or just solitary empty chairs; there’s an element of melancholy and loneliness to this photo pool.

Like a Person Photo Pool
Pictures of animals acting like people

Monkey Pictures Photo Pool
I just love monkeys.

Mr Flickr Photo Pool
Pictures of advertising signs that have a “courtesy title” (like Mr. or Dr.) in the name of the business.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/nosexplease/pool/ No Sex Please Photo Pool
Pictures that look risque, but really aren’t.

Statue Molestors Photo Pool
Pictures of people performing inappropriate actions on public statues and sculptures.

Things on Roofs Photo Pool
Pictures of odd stuff on roofs. I contributed a picture to this pool of a strange sculpture on an apartment rooftop in my neighborhood.

Continue ReadingMy Favorite Flickr Photo Pools

Age Maps

Bobby Neel Adams has an interesting photography project: “Two photographs of the same person, from different periods of time (child and adult) are spliced together.”

bobby neel adams agemap

I can’t truly recreate the effect of their project for myself without a lot more work, but the idea of two different pictures from completely different ages is interesting.

2019 update: Can’t find the image I created for this. I’m curious now what I was doing. There’s a guy named Ard Gelinck doing some ‘family picture’ type portraits of celebrities with their younger selves here on Instagram.

Ard Gelinck celebrity portraits

Continue ReadingAge Maps

So Dick Wolfsie called me this morning…

From WISH-TV morning news. We’re going to do another interview about my “Big Things” photography, on June 29th. This time we’re going to film first and they’ll put it all together and broadcast it, and they’ll go grab shots of some of my favorite stuff around the city. I have to decide which Big Thing I should do the interview near, though, and it has to be in Indianapolis. Check out all the sites I have, and let me know what you think I should pick in a comment.

Continue ReadingSo Dick Wolfsie called me this morning…

Not Fooling Anybody – Photo site

A photo gallery of bad architectural store front conversions. This is great. I think there are a few of these in Indianapolis, so now I have a new photo collection hobby to take up, right after Big Things, bizarre stuff, places I’ve lived, graffiti & murals (not yet posted) and the all new Dangerous Intersections.

Continue ReadingNot Fooling Anybody – Photo site

Sky City / Pyramid City urban development projects

Some stuff I’ll have to photograph – Discovery Channel’s Engineering the Impossible – someday.

Tokyo’s Sky City
It would house 35,000 residents and host 100,000 daily workers, students and visitors. This space-age city in the sky might seem like science fiction, but it answers some questions about where humans might live as our most crowded cities become even more densely populated.

City in a Pyramid
Imagine a self-sustaining pyramid-shaped city in the air. And imagine that it is built by robots and with little help from human workers.

Continue ReadingSky City / Pyramid City urban development projects