Gravel Worlds Video Recon

The Good Life Gravel Adventure/Gravel Worlds is only a few weeks away. Sunday, I went out with some of the crew to shoot video promoting the event.

Sometimes, you find lounging furniture. Is this a dump or a hangout spot?

Or just stadium seating for wheelie contests?

Gravel grinders are all about where the pavement ends.

The weather was perfect, and shadows were a perfect length, too.

Curvy little bits of gravel close to town, shade and sun.

The PCL looks nice and intimidating in this silhouette.

At the top of the Denton Wall. 11% grade on this climb.

Fob climbs the wall. I swear there's no way to capture how steep this is in a photo. Get out and ride it yourself!

New Project

‘pho∙to∙gra∙phy’ (etymology of): from photos (ϕοτοσ), light, and graphos (γραοσ), writing, delineation, or painting.



I love pushing the limits of relatively uncomplex consumer cameras, repurposing their pre-programmed photo modes for unintended and beautiful consequences of imagery. Here, "Starry Night" mode on the Panasonic Lumix TS-1 becomes more Mark Rothko painting than photograph as a 15-second exposure soaks in colors and attempts to white balance. See more this Friday at Roundscapes, 14th & O in the Parrish Building, where I'll be showing along with Jason Ortiz.

The Battlefield Pinhole Camera | DIYPhotography.net

The Battlefield Pinhole Camera | DIYPhotography.net

This is just so beautiful...

Weekend in Chicago

Last weekend, I went to Chicago. This is the view from Nate's rooftop. Pretty great, especially after nine hours of driving.


After a late-night party in Pilsen, Nate & I rode to breakfast at Lula in Logan Square. It was incredible.


Having my own bike along made the long drive well worth it. On Saturday afternoon, Nate & I spent some time in Millennium Park, reading & watching the clouds.


We met up with Dave and rode up the Lakeshore. Dave has a pretty sweet looking ride with a tension disc.

Nate did live visuals for the CAVE show Saturday night. Totally beautiful. Not pictured: my lovely dinner with Rob Sand in Iowa City on the way home.

Poets in Denver

After helping Becca move to Ft. Collins, I headed down to Denver to visit Jules & Mathias and D'Count in their new home. This is their dog park.


Not satisfied to be so close to the mountains without venturing up a bit, Jules & I headed up into Rocky Mountain National Park this morning before I came back to the flatlands. This stream had wonderfully cold water to walk in.


Even D'Count tried it out, albeit puppy-hesitantly. Smart puppy! Water is fun! It was his first trip out of the city.

US Mail on the SF-NJ haul. Oh, Nebraskus.

One of the better ones

The trope of photographing oneself every day for a year (or two, or more) and turning it into a stop-motion video is pretty well worn at this point, but the effect is doubtless still cool. This video, however, is by far the most visually interesting of them that I've seen.

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

Most of these self-documentarians choose the same plain background, focussing the viewer's attention solely on changes in the facial characteristics of the subject. In this video, however, it is the background that is dynamic -- in addition to the subject's facial hair transformation. Titles in the lower third heighten the piece's storytelling power as well, meriting multiple views to piece things together. Well done.

Photography

I took a walk with the work 40D to test out various settings and experiment with a cracked filter.



A few shots viewable here.

On Longing

"Nostalgia is the desire for desire."

-- Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection

Lens Ad

This is how you sell a wide-angle lens.

Recent Signage

This Lens Costs More Than My House

While "researching things" at work today, I came across this lens in the B+H Used Department. I love the fun their copywriter clearly had with this description.

Features:

The Canon 1200/5.6L USM, the longest fixed telephoto lens ever built by Canon, contains 13 elements (2 Fluorite) in 10 groups and focus' down to 49.5'. With an angle-of- view of about 2° on a full-frame 35 mm camera, calling this lens a 'tele' is like calling King Kong a monkey.

Built-to-order by Canon from 1993 to 2005, each lens was hand-crafted at the rate of about 2-per-year and a delivery time of about 18 months. Only a dozen-or-so were ever made. Who bought them? National Geographic magazine and Sports Illustrated are known to own a couple, the Feds probably have a few squirreled away somewhere, and a few well-heeled photo enthusiasts.

This particular lens is extremely clean inside and out. Included with this lens is a leather slip-on 'lens cap', the original fitted aluminum trunk case, a custom trunk case with wheels that holds the original trunk case, and a prodigious measure of ego satisfaction. Weighing in at over 36lbs and an overall length of 33 inches, a sturdy tripod and pan/tilt head is highly recommended.

Pack mule not included.

Geek spec sheet:

Construction

Metal Alloy

Angle of View

2°

Minimum Aperture

f/32

Closest Focusing Distance

49.5'

Filter Size

48 mm Drop-in

Lens Hood

Built-in

Length

32.9"

Weight

36.2 lb

Oh yeah, and the asking price? $120,000.00.

Annals of Caution: Ice

The Feeling of the Place

After being in Red Cloud (Willa Cather's hometown) while on BRAN, I decided I needed to re-read My Ántonia.*


In just the introduction, I'm compelled to stop reading in order to transpose a few choice sentences.


As Cather & Jim are on the train, as adults, returning to "Black Hawk":

We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulation extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.

Jim, the novel's narrator, describes his arrival in Nebraska:

There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction. I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it. But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.
...
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky, I felt erased, blotted out.

It's a good thing I'm re-reading this. I didn't appreciate it as much before as I do now. That ground definitely undulated; twas evident on a bicycle. There were some tough climbs going into Red Cloud, with a relentless headwind to boot.

A house from one of the families in My Ántonia.

*Oh, go get the paper-printed version. That way, you can take it with you.

Macro Food

I've been eating well recently...

Le Quartier pizza crust with a sautéed portabella & caramelized onions, fresh tomato, Parmesan & pecorino romano.


Strawberry from Princeton Produce, consumed with Le Quartier bread, Branched Oak Farm Quark, and Shadowbrook Farm pea shoots while watching the Capital City Criterium.


"Cheesecake" made with shortbread, sweetened quark, and fresh strawberries.


Roasted beet, arugula & chèvre sandwich with a cup of Cultiva coffee at thé Cup.

Memorial Day Swedish Pilgrimage

My mother's father grew up in Malmo, Nebraska. Every Memorial Day, she and my aunt drive up to decorate the graves of the Bredenberg family at Bethesda Cemetary. It's full of Swedes.



My grandfather's parents. Evalina ran away from Sweden to Nebraska when she was 17. She worked for the lawyer who defended Chief Standing Bear in Omaha. Simon came from Säfsnäs, Dalarna, Sweden.


This is my mom's favorite gravestone. Nora Alebana Bredenberg was born on the ship on the way to America.


After decorating the graves, it is customary to take a spin through Malmo. Peering into the Bank.


This is the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church, which my grandfather's family attended.

Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks