Abandoned Hospital Visit

Rush Hospital is one of, if not the largest, hospital in the Chicagoland area. I was able to get access to a couple of abandoned buildings that Rush had stopped using and were planning to demolish. Ken Kanno, friend and fellow Board Member, has a buddy who gave us a guided tour of some of these buildings. While the buildings had been marked for demolition, certain floors were still occupied. It was rather funny going from an old, dusty floor past people working while carrying our tripods and gear.

A couple days later, Ken forwarded an email from his friend, in which we found out that the day after we went in and photographed, the building was closed and entrance was strictly forbidden. We were the last non-personnel people to get access inside, and therefore these are the last photographs of this building.

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Chicago Community Darkroom's Gallery Showcase Pt. 1

So today is the big day: Chicago Community Darkroom is having our member showcase at Cobalt Studio here in Pilsen. We were contacted by Antonio Martinez, the owner of Cobalt, and a fine artist in his own right, about CCD having a gallery show at his space, and we jumped at the opportunity. It's such a great feeling when other artists see what you do and respect it enough to offer their help. Anyway, Antonio has been great about it all, and we've spent the last couple days getting it all ready.

Personally, I didn't think I'd be showing any of my work at the show, but since the other CCD board members are showing their work, I figured I should show some solidarity. It's funny, but even though I'm involved in the day-to-day operations of Chicago Community Darkroom, (heck, I'm a board member) I don't do much darkroom printing anymore. I still love it, and I find it very therapeutic to work in the darkroom, but since getting my scanner and printer I haven't done as much as I should.

It was a bit of a scramble to get everything in order, since I just moved into a new apartment and everything is in boxes. I knew there was a particular piece I wanted to show, 'Boy In Protest', but I only had enough frames for three other pieces. My roommate, Paige, and I went through the 30 or so pieces that made it through my initial culling. I probably have over one hundred analog black and white prints, but I quickly excluded the vast majority. It's an odd combination of fondness and humiliation looking through prints that I'd made almost two years ago. We spent the day getting the frames cleaned and ready to go, and had to order some custom square mats, since most of my prints come from my 5DmkII.

Here's what the final three prints ended up looking like. 'Boy In Protest' had been already assembled, so that was already at Cobalt. The funny thing is that we've been planning on doing this showcase at Cobalt Studio for a couple months now, but I hadn't realized that Cobalt is less than a two minute walk from my new apartment!

I gotta go now and help finish hanging the rest of everyone's prints, but I should have some photos of the party later. If you can make it out, thanks in advance for what I'm sure will be a great time. You can check out Cobalt Studio at cobaltartstudio.blogspot.com, and of course CCD is at chicagocommunitydarkroom.org

Organizing Large Photo Libraries in Aperture

Apologies for the boring title, but it's an interesting solution to an interesting problem. You see, when you shoot photographs in RAW format, you need some kind of software that will be able to process those RAW images into something that you can work with. For example, if you use Photoshop extensively, but want to work with RAW photographs, you have to use Adobe's RAW convertor software to turn the image into something that Photoshop can work with. The issue with using Photoshop is that, while you can adjust things like white balance, saturation, etc... in Adobe Camera RAW, that's the extent that you can work on the RAW image. Once inside Photoshop, any and all adjustments are being done to a TIFF file or PSD file, a copy of your camera's original data. And I don't like that kind of workflow.

What I think is preferable is to use software that will manage my photo library in RAW form, and I can make adjustments on a preview image and once I am ready to export, that software will apply my changes as I export from RAW into a TIFF file. I like the idea that my software will arrange my massive library, which for me means using Aperture to hold all my images based on date, within the month, within the year. Here's a look at how my Aperture library holds my images:

As you can see, every shoot day is labeled with the date, nested inside folders for the month and year. Metadata is tagged on every image indicating not just the date, but also the project name, location, and other keywords. This system allows me to easily find any image quickly while also keeping everything organized.

First Blog Post

So, I've decided to add a Blog section to my website. My hope is to use this page to post personal opinions, techy-nerdy stuff and the like. I've never blogged before, nor did I ever think I would, but hopefully other people will get some entertainment from it. Thanks for looking.