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LiveJournal for krylon. View: User Info. View: Friends. View: Calendar. View: Website (Photos and the Like). View: Memories. You're looking at the latest 20 entries. Missed some entries? Then simply jump back 20 entries.

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Subject: zen and the art of bar applications Time: 9:27 pm.

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Subject: D.C.: the first 40 hours Time: 2:21 pm. Mood: caffinated.

rae coming out of the apartment I'm not sure when this place will begin to feel real to me. Right now it's just a jumble of things, people, and buildings tossed into a small space and jostled around by throngs of tourists. Once I get a job, this will change. The apartment kind of reminds me of my dad's old office at the University. I think only because it has aluminum blinds and a view of not a whole lot, and the fact that it isn't ground level. It's very cozy though, made even cozier by Rae being here. The city itself reminds me of Rome. The collision of tourism with business in such a big city, most of the business of which involves running the country. Pomp, circumstance, and car exhaust rule the day. We had pizza last night in Georgetown. Rae left early this morning to go home for Rosh Hashana, leaving me to my own devices in the big city. She was somewhat worried leaving me here alone, but I can manage. Suffice to say though, this is what I saw first thing when I woke up this morning: A little disquieting, no? In sum: things are going well. I might go see the Electric Six on Saturday, and I have plenty to keep me busy all day.

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Subject: ice smashing Time: 8:25 pm.

I smashed some things again. I borrowed a telephoto lens from a friend and that made a world of difference. enlarged versions: movie about trip to miami & pictures of nathan's BFA show forthcoming

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Subject: first of what is likely to be many series of exploding chocolate rabbits Time: 7:27 pm.

click any of the below for a zoomed image of the explosion Notes: - i need stronger firecrackers. these are designed for noise (the force of the explosion is directed towards either end of the tube as opposed to outward equally) and require large openings to put in, as seen here: The fuse is also in the middle, which makes this a huge pain in the ass. The firecrackers I used before were small and didn't require large holes. They also were REALLY LOUD. I'm driving through South Carolina in the coming weeks and will see what I can do in terms of getting bigger firecrackers. - despite these not being the loudest, someone called the cops on us. they didn't arrive until half an hour after we had already gone inside, and they never talked to us or anything, but I can only assume they were wandering around my complex because of us. i suppose it was a sunday, but come on: i live on a street with 6 frat houses. if you aren't used to dumb shit happening by now at any hour of the night, move. - yes, some of the bunnies came in ice cream cones. why? well, why the hell not? - i forgot to adjust the F of the camera and as such all were taken at F5.6, which means the last couple got knocked out of focus. - I'm not sure if the nikon D50 has wonky autofocus or if its just the lens I have on it. - i'm also considering giving them little suicide bomber headbands in some completely and totally tasteless attempt at turning this into an art project. on the one hand, juxtaposing superfluous candy images of pagan symbols of the most sacred christian holiday with self appointed muslim martyrs seems like an interesting comment on self absorbed western christian ideals. on the other hand, it feels like every other piece of art out there: trying way too hard to be witty the but in the end just being tacky and intentionally insulting so as to try to create some kind of controversy and dialogue. See the works of Andres Serrano At the same time, I have chocolate NASCAR cars, and how ridiculous would it be to turn them into little car bombs? - coincidentally, those NASCAR cars were hellzaexpensive compared to the other chocolate things, i guess because it cost a lot to license the car likenesses. - speaking of Andres Serrano, I once had a professor who met him and asked him about his photographic techniques. it turns out the fucker has no idea how to operate a camera, develop film, or enlarge his own photographs. i don't think I will ever consider anything I ever pursue (be it random odd photographs, paper cut outs, or writing) as art for the simple reason that people like Andres Serrano consider themselves artists, and I want to have as little in common with them as possible. In the end I make shit for the sake of making shit. The product is insignifigant to the process except for being able to say "wow, cool" when i'm done. - there will be a lot more where this came from

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Time: 5:15 pm.

1500 miles motherfuckers. i want to go to miami and south carolina in the process, it'd be nice to stop in atlanta, sarasota, and most definitely jacksonville sooo yeah. i might be crazy. i also might not have enough time for this. everything is tenative and splendid.

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Time: 1:48 pm.

my new tallahassee friends are crazy movie of the above and other craziness is here

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Subject: smashy smasha Time: 5:51 pm.

Time for the smashing! ( more inside )

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Subject: i lost count! Time: 7:37 pm. Mood: spring break-itis. Music: southerland's drone.

Before I describe the process of building my second circuit and its eventual success, it's important to note that I have absolutely zero electronics experience. Having someone walk me through the process of completing a circuit, before even really understanding circuit diagrams, is helping a lot in the process of learning because I'm watching the effects different things have without completely and totally lost. I'm also learning from mistakes with someone over my shoulder, as the steps online offer an e-mail address for help if your circuit doesn't work. That said, I recieved the kit for my second trigger and messed it up. Not a big mess up, but enough of a mess up to fry a timer and make me embrarassingly angry for about 24 hours. I actually followed the diagram incredibly well, I just failed to shove a capacitor hard enough into the breadboard. 2$ later at radio shack, the trigger works flawlessly and, might I say, exactly as I would have hoped. As it was, I was afraid to take the open breadboard and simply stick it next to a splashing bucket or a smashed bit of ice. Thus i needed to cram it into something, the only question being what. The traditional place for such projects, an altoids case, wasn't big enough. So I stopped by the easiest, one stop shopping location where one can find the most extraneous, wastefully packaged gifty food crap in the world: I couldn't find any tins that were large enough without being too large, and I was close to pursuing the wild idea of simply gutting a rubber duck and sticking the circuit inside, stitching the rubber duck up afterwards and soldering in switches such that i'd only need to dissasemble it for replacing the battery. I didn't try this as I didn't think the duck was quite big enough and it Instead, i found a large novelty egg that a pez dispenser came in and decided it'd be perfect. The bottom was flat such that it could sit on a surface without moving, it came apart easily, and it was large enough. Here's a picture I dug up online of them: I naturally chose the sheep as it's the scariest goddamn thing I've ever seen. I'm googling for an image of it rather than having to take another one, and a wealth of cute, non-slutty looking pez lambs are coming up that are making me wonder what the hell they were thinking when they designed this scary thing. I think i'm sticking a firecracker in its head. Anyway so I took the stuff out, put a frosting of matte finish on the inside of the clear plastic, glued down the weights on the inside of the egg (pennies and washers, it was all I had) then zapped that with some spray plasti-dip. The delay worked great and I finally managed to get the precise moments i had been trying to get. click for biggins! Note that blocks of ice took flight in a lot of these, either in total or in chunks. The first few attempts had the delay set for too long, and by the time the flash went off, the ice block was already out of frame. The last few i tried zooming out a bit, and as such the last few are granier crops. i think my neighbors think i'm nuts. i'm going to need to post printouts in my window and ask for forgiveness for doing crazy stuff on the pool deck after dark.

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Subject: attempt 4ish Time: 9:00 am.

I feel like I could do this a hundred thousand times and never feel I'd gotten it quite right. This is a good thing. ( more inside )

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Subject: attempt 2! Time: 11:51 am. Mood: dizzy. Music: beastie boys - high plains drifter.

hammer! Sand wedge! I figured out that I've been exposing them far too long. These ones had shortened exposures so less ambient light was exposed and, in some instances, so there wasn't a second flash. They got a little boring at this point, so these are just the detail shots. Lessons: - I either need to take shorter exposures or start doing this in a totally a dark area. I'm thinking of putting a 2x4 across my bathtub and doing this inside there with the door closed. Alternately I can start opening the f-stop a little further (i've been doing this at f11 for a decent depth of field). - the flash keeps flashing twice; once on impact, and once again when whatever I hit lands (this is especially true in the sand wedge pictures). Solutions: either move the sensor further away or turn down the sensitivity. The biggest problem thusfar is the flash goes off at the very first instant of impact. this isn't necessarily the most interesting moment to be frozen. What I need is a way to delay the firing of the flash by tenths or ten thousanths of seconds before firing. This could be accomplished by soldering in a delay, which I could buy from the same place that I bought the flash from. This is unfortunate as it's another 20$ to throw at this project, with another 6$ yielding me a whole new sensor/delay setup (s/h is 6$ flat from this guy, so I can spend 18$ just getting a delay, or 25$ getting a delay and a new sensor). I'm tempted to do this and have 2 flashes going off at different times and from different angles but with different color filters on them (i.e. red at instant of impact, blue midway through explosion). I'm doing more research into doing this, the biggest problem being I have only 1 vivitar 283 (the easy to use flash for this project). I might wind up having to open up my other, smaller and cheaper flash and re-solder some connections to get it to flash for a shorter duration as well as for triggering remotely (as it lacks a PC cord). In other words, If I start this project from scratch, I'll be out 20$ and have a somewhat useless trigger stuffed into a tupperware container. The alternative I thought would work when I bought it was moving the trigger further away, as the time it would take for the sound to reach it would create a minor delay. So lets try some math: Sound travels at around 700 miles an hour. There are 5,280 feet in a mile. 700 x 5,280 = sound travels at 3,696,000 feet an hour. Divide that by 60 (minutes in an hour) you get 616,000 feet a minute Divide that by 60 again (seconds in a minute) you get a number around 1000. Ok, so sound moves about 1000 feet a second. Meaning moving the sensor an extra foot away would take it another 1/1000 of a second to respond. I'm not sure I can move it any further than 5 feet and still have it work (it was at about 2 feet last night). Obviously more experimentation is required. While all the above math might seem superfluous, it will come in handy for a later project that will involve much larger distances and incredibly loud sounds that will likely trigger the flash no matter how far away it is.

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Subject: not art! Time: 12:24 pm. Mood: gorbleh. Music: why is "supercalifragilisticipsialidocious" in my head.

I assembled a high speed camera rig of sorts. Really its just sound trigger for a flash, soldered together and stuffed into a tupperware container. Leave shutter open on camera, make noise, flash goes off. What i'm actually most proud of is the fact that I managed to solder the thing together and a) not mess it up b) not burn the hell out of myself and c) incorporate an on/off switch that wasn't in the plans. You can see it in the pictures below. Last night was kind of a test run and wasn't done in a dark enough place. Plus it was rainy and freezing, so not a whole lot was done. Later: bottles will be thrown or shot with slingshots or those crappy little pistol crossbows, and firecrackers will be stuffed into all manner of things. We'll see. I need a backyard. I also need to start taking the pictures in RAW format so I can twiddle with the exposure more post taking the photo. So far the results aren't as exciting as I would hope, but it's getting it at the instant of impact. I might later on add a delay to it so as it'll wait increments of 1/10,000 of second so as to not get things at their most speedy and blurry. note: After reading the instructions for setting up my flash (half the reason i chose to do this project was that I owned the flash already and the chip and other components cost like 25$ total), I realized I was doing it wrong (namely, I needed to make a short in the thyristor to make it flash for as short as possible a time. i would never have figured out to do this on my own). The re-attempts are below. Note that I found out that my flash, that I inherited from my family, is still made and costs 120$? I feel kinda bad putting stickers all over it now. click on any of the below for an enlarged detail of the impact NOTE: ADDITIONS YO! Crap, the flash went off twice. More attempts forthcoming. and detail:

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Time: 11:06 am.

My grandfathers Dob kit, which had long become a repository for small things.

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LiveJournal for krylon. View: User Info. View: Friends. View: Calendar. View: Website (Photos and the Like). View: Memories. You're looking at the latest 20 entries. Missed some entries? Then simply jump back 20 entries.