darenw

Southern California is too warm.  Not as bad as Florida, but I am *so* looking forward to the end of summer, which around here is usually, oh, about mid-January.  Spring starts in late January.  That's much more winter than they have in Orlando! 

Warm weather, especially when lacking coolness at night, melts my brain.  I don't get far with intellectual projects, science, writing, software work.  But hand me a camera, and somehow it's more fun to capture a creative shot, find a new point of view, show interesting objects in their settings.   I also love photography on cold days.  I had a great time in Boulder during a blizzard - took a zillion photos. 

There is a huge blank wall at one church I go to.  There had been photographs from a member hanging, but after many months it's time for something new.  Now it's a large empty wall hungry for artworks.

What has that to do with whining about warm weather?  Nothing, until I start thinking about how I could feed that hungry wall.  Many people have said good things about my digitized "Marpinated" photographs.  What if I crank out about twenty or thirty of them, printed (high quality) and matted and framed?  I have no trouble coming up with visually interesting photos.  But turning one photo into an artified digital image takes much time. 

Normally I do it in GIMP.  A typical photo becomes like a watercolor or ink drawing after maybe fifty, maybe eighty steps.  It may look blah at the end, because a guess I made, a nudge to a curve in HSV color space,  during step 9, wasn't quite right, and so detail got lost during some fancy oilifying filter at step 70.  With infinite time and patience, I'd go back and do it better, but that can be a lot of work, with little chance of getting all the little nudges in stesp 10-69 the same.

So I have designed a tool, a chunk of software that reads a script of steps and performs them on an image. It'll work on huge images, more than ten thousand pixels on a side, for high-res high quality prints. Precidse colors, ICC profiles and all that. GPU for fast blur and median filters. Command line only; I don't have time to think up a fancy GUI.  I'm going to write it in D.  

But that's where I get stuck!  To write any software, I need my brain in a non-melted state.  So I tend to put this off for "winter" when it comes. I will be wating for the next ice age! 

Maybe if i take a photo of that hungry blank wall and post it over my desk at home, I'll remember, and come up with motivation to write D code and get this thing done sooner.

Moved from New Mexico to southern California about three months ago for a new job.  It's yet another software job, ugh, making me ever more motivated to become independently wealthy.   But I am good at twiddling the bits and slinging the pixels.   Some of my digital art pieces, nicely framed, are on the walls in my office. They remind me to crank out more, find a good local framer here.  Todd in Socorro is very good at framing, including tricky jobs, but it's kinda far to drive from Escondido.  Anyway, except for uploading photos to Panoramio (mostly not artsy ones) I've been ignoring art.  Been busy with finding where to get good coffee, an electronics parts store,  visiting the beaches and exploring the area.  

San Diego and Escondido are way nicer than Florida.  Warm, with beaches, but not so humid as Orlando.  Not as dry as Socorro.  Wonderfully in between.  

Time to get back to work on that stuff, join an artists' group in Escondido, do an occasional show, and fix my personal website.  Make some 2D and 3D animations.

Someone at Spirit of Joy (Orlando) mentioned their daughter had a Deviant page.  Someone else mentioned some artist they knew was on Deviant.   I'd been to Deviant on occasion the previous couple years.  Now, after moving to Socorro I hear once again from someone that some artist they know has a page on Deviant.   Okay, okay, I get the idea... me too!

My interest in art goes way back to when I was a kid, but growing up in a non-artist family.  My parents were teachers, mostly science.  Engineers for uncles.  One uncle was an exception: he was a commercial artist for an advertising company in Detroit.  He'd spiffy up photos of cars with airbrush and paint to look really slick for brochures and magazine ads.  I was impressed by the fine detail, realism.   

My grandmother, same side of the family as the artsy uncle (now in Arizona), was a newspaper reporter and photographer.  She showed me how to develop film in a darkroom (a *very* dark room) and how to expose prints.   This was way cool stuff!   

I was also fascinated with the insides of the TV.  The glowing tubes, strange orange blobs, the little cylinders dressed in rings of color.  Why are some wires thicker than others?   But most of all - how did the actors and scenery appear on the screen?  What magic is going on?   

So naturally as I got older, I studied electronics, art, optics.  I would have been a digital artist, but back in the 1960s and early 1970s, "digital" was a word appearing only in encyclopedias and library books, not in real life.  

Then one day, in high school, around 1976 I think, the electronics teacher (a magnificent fellow) had a Motorola 6800 CPU trainer kit: a tiny computer with 256 bytes of RAM (was it 512?) some LEDs and that's about it.  I built a couple 8-bit DACs, hooked them up to an oscilloscope, wrote some machine code and soon had some dynamic dazzling math-based art on display.  That was probably the first program I ever wrote that actually did anything at all.

Now I use computers with far more RAM, fantastic LCD screens that would have been science fiction thirty years ago, and write in C++, Ada95, Python and Ruby (and sometimes a bit of assembly), design fancy nonlinear unsharp filters, image averagers, and noise reducers to enhance images from one of NASA's flagship unmanned missions, and make big colorful prints of digitally artified photographs.

Now, I am Deviant!   

How will exposure here differ from having works in a gallery?  For sure, it will differ.  Framing is cheaper, heh heh.