the place i work at, is going through an interesting iterative process to define its project management style. it feels very awkward, having group meetings in which we talk about inputs and outputs of various project phases. the framework for the whole thing is a project lifecycle.

in my own personal research, this buzzword is flawed. the meaning of the work “lifecycle” as i know it comes from biology, where life is born, lived, deceased, and reborn or reused. projects do not regularly spawn new projects upon completion. wouldn’t lifespan be a much better term?

in any case, i’m really wondering why our project management doesn’t do research, come up with a methodology, get buy-in from senior management and key technical leads, then disseminate it throughout our organization. this way we don’t all have to become pseudo-project managers.

my real interest lies in providing good service, getting work done, and making things better. how the projects are managed is not that important to me, to be honest.

just tell me what the interface is, what the steps are, and make sure the communication is there.

interesting read: an improved project lifecycle model

once in a while i spend time reading twentieth century photography by reuel golden, a great gift from my mother who thought i should know who the greats are. this morning i found two photographers whose work i like. imogen cunningham (organic portraiture) and nick knight (who has done work with bjork, awesome cross-process fashion photography, and the ever chilling Devon (1996) shot for the magazine visionaire).

looking at all the images and reading about the photographers made me think (as always) of my own work. why don’t i combine my career and hobby in a project? i’ve noticed that a lot of the industry rags have few (or poor) photographs. would my attention span be capable of pulling it off? i always have ideas, and never time or motivation.

have i mentioned how good provenance 2001 rutherford cab is?

today i took ryan for a drive. my style of drive. quite randomly we happened upon the petrified forest in calistoga. it is the only forest of its kind in california. the weather was great out, and a walk in the woods was perfect. i shot some 6×7 fuji color while i was there.

we then took a beautiful drive north east along highway 29.

this is a picture of tague. it’s great when he nags me about doing art. i took this during the housewarming party with my beloved burke&james.

ranting on photos

i’ve been pondering a photorantblogpost for a while. i think most of it can be summarized in two ideas.

first, i feel insulted and our medium cheapened by people who put fake raw film edge borders on digital images. to me, it detracts from the legitimacy of the image. if someone writes they captured an image with a “nikon d70″ but i see the typical traces of 4×5 negative format, to me it’s like mocking art. when the effect is less blatant but still noticeable, it still seems like a lie. i’m not sure if it’s a statement that “the new medium replaces the old”, or that there is some sort of equality of the two mediums. i think one reason photograph printers use raw film edges is to add edge to their images and to bring the viewer closer to the medium used. i know i feel some sense of admiration when i see obvious large format images. digiheads, don’t diss me.

secondly, i’m disappointed when highly rated “photos” aren’t things that film or digital image sensors (CCDs, CMOS, or otherwise) could ever capture. i’m in favor of using words like “image” that are process-agnostic. even traditional photographic prints that are manipulated should be prefered to as images.

for me, a photo (photograph) is a truthful recording of light. modifying the light before it hits the recording medium is fine (eg, perspective control, soft focus, etc). i think the real skill in photography is recording just what you want to capture.

it’s interesting how the set of stages of my photographic process (composure, focus, exposure, development, paper/chemistry selection, projection, cropping/dodging/burning/contrast, development) has a fairly independent amount of creative potential. i know the term “art” is subjective, but when i see a very interesting image and find out it was digitally produced, i’m disappointed.

basically, i consider anything done before capture as more skill than art. anything done after capture (or straight development of recording medium), more art than skill.

so many people are hung up on methods and mediums. there is a lot to learn, a lot to improve upon, and lot of interesting light to capture.

i find web stats interesting. running a web server that serves multiple domains, i’m able to collect a lot of data. i recently ran a stats package against 80 days worth of logs. over 2 million log entries were tabulated. here are some of the results:

the top two ip addresses hitting the server are owned by microsoft, totalling 67,830 hits. googlebot.com accounted for 19,756 hits. seventh on the list was msnbot.msn.com, for 14,651 hits. another microsoft ip address was eighth and tenth, 10,469 and 5,297 respectively. two googlebot addresses were 4,720 and 4,663 hits.

there were 30 domains served, the top four totalling in at 1.9 million hits, or 35 gigabytes worth of traffic.

the top user agent was recorded as internet explorer 6. seventeenth was opera. webtv was twenty-first.

the most active half hour of the week was 1-1:30pm on monday (pst).

interesting week at work. met our japanese team member and talked with him for a bit.

had two coworkers (nick and jim) over for wine and music.

tonight i’m going to a big house party full of people i’ve known for years. should be interesting.

and my mom now is a subaru owner like i am!

and.. i think i may have to give up on ilford sheet film. at least in 8×10. i’ve been meaning to place an order with jandc.