my life, as far as i know.

i was trolling through livejournal when i came upon a post that caught my eye. this guy had written an open letter to ashton kutcher; it was a funny jab at his life and acting. but what really caught my eye was how he signed the letter — “jeff zacuto”.

i blinked. zacuto? this guy lives in los angeles. my dad’s stepfather was named zacuto. i replied to this guy’s post and gave him my background on the zacutos. turns out my dad’s stepfather was his grandfather’s brother.

i’m not sure if there’s any designation for that kind of relation, but i said we are quasi-related from the intersection of our two families. it was weird reading him say that my uncle bob is the stepbrother of bruce and carolyn, since to me they are stepbrother and stepsister of bob :) anyways.. small world!

shot in santa cruz, california, yesterday

had a great day today. i went to my favorite coffee shop today and read about the zone system. it’s really sinking in now. the other day i talked to a guy at keeble & schucat about exposure and meters. that plus playing with my new light meter (thanks mom and dad!) and thinking, i’m starting to understand: zone system, compression+expansion, lattitude.

i decided to practice shooting today so i loaded up some film and went down to santa cruz.. i haven’t been there in ages. i ate a corndog.. i looked at the pier through one of the pay scopes, i watched kids on the roller coaster. i took notes on what i was shooting. i picked some subjects i knew would be off from normal average-metering. i used incident metering as a test (to get a ballpark) and used spot metering and averaging to decide what to shoot at. some of the shots i wanted to adjust the overall exposure.. so i’ll see how all those turn out.

i ate pizza-by-the-slice for dinner and headed back home. it was a great day.

last night alex and nick came over for an imprompu movie night. we watched sur mes levres (”read my lips”), a french movie that got excellent ratings. and it was a pretty good movie. turns out alex’s dad is doing art photography for a living now!

tonight i have to pick up a friend at the airport. tomorrow i’m going to boman’s after coffee to help out with the dinner party.

my grandmother said she wants a computer some day. i asked her what she’d use it for. pornography, she said.

i love my family :-)

from my test roll last night, playing with the holga and a vivitar 102 flash..

i just developed 10 rolls of film. half of that i shot in the past 48 hours. i am catching up, though (i still have undeveloped film from my roadtrip).

i took a look at the machine i run (which is host to offramp.org and other domains). there is about one and one-half gigabytes of outbound traffic each day on the machine. i estimate two-thirds of that is web traffic (according to august numbers). that’s a lot of traffic. no wonder it’s lagging the connection it’s on. :-/

guess what i did.

i finished up a first version of my photo website. i emailed someone who is opening a new gallery close by and is looking for new/fresh artists. then i emailed someone looking for pro-bono photography for a debut cd cover. scary!

i just realized i don’t work tomorrow.. company holiday.

last night i popped some popcorn and watched a clockwork orange at home. it was nice to relax. and with a good movie!

your mother made you cry when she told you about the womb
and how people die
watching over you when you were young
smiling when you learned to crawl
you don’t know her at all ..

woi! my manager just dropped off a generous bonus check, for all the hard work and attention to emergencies over the past month.

went out with my brother, who was in town for the weekend. we ended up at vasona park in los gatos.. the weather was very pleasant. i took this picture of him along the lake.

who says you can’t handhold a pentax 67 at 1/30? the original negative scan shows the detail on his sweatshirt with clean, crisp lines.

was playing with studio strobes. this was a simple still life i setup using darkroom equipment. it turns out the flash measurement on the minolta flash meter v is right on. i connect the flash units to the minolta, hit the button, and it does all the work for me. i thought enough about it to do a control test, doing a long exposure with the model lights turned on. but thinking back, i should have run another couple tests: one with the model lights off, one with all lights out (save for the strobes) to see how that would have turned out. i want to try one more thing.. have a human subject.

went music shopping with my brother, who is a big dream theatre fan. he recommended scense from a memory, which he said is his favorite album out of everything. i picked that up and train of thought, which neither of us heard but has “as i am”.

some spam has been getting through my email filter. i grepped out the titles from my mail spool to generate the following poem:

[jss@detour:~]# egrep 'Subject: Re: [A-Z]*\,' /var/mail/jss
Subject: Re: VRYPUXBM, an artiste came
Subject: Re: FFBMKV, was very seldom
Subject: Re: IQTMP, knee - two!
Subject: Re: OWSVMFDR, twice the upset
Subject: Re: AL, who could show
Subject: Re: CNEYPOJA, extracted the deck
Subject: Re: WPTCWQY, with his head
Subject: Re: KPLCXF, this taletelling about
Subject: Re: FN, question is asked
Subject: Re: WGDVL, with lions muzzles
Subject: Re: KNZLMKL, little elongated cases
Subject: Re: QZCXLRM, at once that
Subject: Re: QPJPSFJ, threads flashed every
Subject: Re: IWHU, the fear somewhat
Subject: Re: ARF, the messenger karpov
Subject: Re: SYUCBOSV, on the grounds
Subject: Re: BNRMT, when he laid
Subject: Re: KRM, that had come
Subject: Re: GNA, unnecessary to take
Subject: Re: KRX, of the gang
Subject: Re: AUTNUZ, the belt girded
Subject: Re: HEBQCAI, the big windows
Subject: Re: KJNMJ, living beings also
Subject: Re: BR, yeshua was more
Subject: Re: KUSJZ, death would overtake
Subject: Re: QKHHX, correct thought that
Subject: Re: JHE, straight away there
Subject: Re: FKDVVLT, offered the brunette
[jss@detour:~]#

even the byproduct of photography is beautiful

through two coworkers i have access to a negative scanner and a nice printer that can do 13-16″ prints. “but i can print 16×20 with no conversion,” i replied.. referring to using my original negative and printing it directly to paper. this morning i thought about that and it reminded me of being fascinated by how all the hardest-of-core audio folks swear by analog equipment and media for most accurately reproducing sound (after all, sound itself is analog).

i am happy to still see traditional photography magazines in stores. and talk to people who are still into film.

i drove around the town of alviso last night taking pictures. it was a lot of fun. the only thing i have to worry about is battery life on this camera. oh, and thanks, boman, for teaching me how to meter light. i used the minolta.

woken up at 1:10am on 11/30 by work

woken up at 4:15am on 12/12 by work

woken up at 2:30am on 12/14 by work

why can’t bad things happen during the day?