Blog archive November 2006
<< October 2006 / December 2006 >>
29.11.06 / 01 / adam & kathy's wedding
i especially like the expressions and gestures here and here - worth looking at full size.
[note that anna asked us all not to take photos during the service to prevent distractions or holdups]
it was a very good time.
21.11.06 / 01 / skaterham
..so a skatepark in a church actually exists, not unlike the last graphic here
19.11.06 / 01 / the flaming lips
...were holy.
photos here. this is a good one to view as a slideshow since there are 46 photos taken from the beginning to the end of the gig [the last photo is the end of the last song]. wish flickr did full-screen size slideshows. you need the full size to feel like you were there.
Comments:
Oklahoma representin'
daniel miller
Didn't expect to see nudity.
david cowan
the actual nude in the animation was a fleeting moment that my camera happened to catch. the bare-breasted woman had pants and boots and was doing kickboxing moves - which made a bemusing video for 'do you realize??' i notice that photo has had twice as many views as the rest...
steve
14.11.06 / 01 / older grace tech
some older grace technology in the grace tech set on flickr, in reverse chronological order now back to 1999. amazing how clunky the new stuff of five years ago looks now. all that is solid melts into air. the other change is the way things are now silver or white instead of black.
...and the other change is in the technology used to record these things. looking back now at those old photos is decisive - i realise how much better, in the end, digital photography is.
Comments:
weird...i met you in like '01 i think...
daniel miller
this is really sweet to look at. Thanks for putting this up, i am really digging it.
chad brooks
that's quite a bit of kit!
in our european trip, the same one where we dropped in on grace, i distinctly noticed the abundance of tech on the western side of things.. and the lack of it on the eastern side. creativity levels were not affected in any way, simply the tools to achieve the means. it was an interesting contrast.
as an example, in poland we knew a guy doing VJ stuff (simple geometry, nature stuff, etc..) with 6 ghetto slide projectors all aimed at the same focal, and he mixed and interfaced with them by covering the lenses with his hands, swapping out slides, etc.. then to UK/CH (bryce, etc..) we go and it's powerbooks galore...
it wasn't that the tech's not available, it was just out of reach financially speaking. and i think in many ways that was a blessing. maybe you should have lo/no tech nights at grace, for creative diversity.
on a completely different note, modul8 is some killer software, if you haven't tried it yet.
cheers!
tim westcott
12.11.06 / 03 / green park
you'll be wondering why there are photos of green park tube station on my flickr. well, various tube stations are having their wall tiling replaced atm. this is generally a good thing, but i was horrified to see the jubilee line platforms at bond street attacked with a pickaxe. the 1970s jubilee line stations bring a welcome note of intense colour into the tube system, and i had assumed they would be safe - there are plenty of dingy corners to be tackled first. it may be that this is just part of the general refurbishment of bond street station - but still, why?
so i rushed off to photograph green park jubilee line platforms before the vandals got there too. it's perhaps my favourite place on the whole network - you will see that it's influenced my colour sense - in particular, the original smallfire site, with the blue section titles taken from the bond street platform tiling!
the laminate elements at green park are getting tired, especially the yellow, and i hope that whenever they refurbish it they'll do a sympathetic restoration and not rip it all out for the standard white tiling. many early stations are classed as heritage - i hope that this 1970s work can be seen that way too.
12.11.06 / 02 / grace tech
i've been photographing the technology used at grace services, as a matter of record and because it's visually interesting. i'm going to see what i can find from earlier years to add to the set, as a record of how things have changed. certainly the slide projectors have long gone. mike even baulked at being handed a cd last night - it had to go into a laptop and thence into an ipod to be cued.
and then there's technology as ornament. wonder if i've got a good photo of our pair of mac classics? we stick them on altars for decoration - they can only handle a couple of words or a logo in black and white.
Comments:
i have got a couple of photos you might want to add? certainly a mac classic or two... and some of the stuff from grace ten - adam's electronic wizadry then.
jonny baker
Some pics that always stuck in my head were the one of Justin in front of the ibook/icon, me in breaking the bread at greenbelt (I always felt that caught what it was like sitting in the corner doing the tech stuff), and the old tvs around the barbeque for the fire service, pictures of fire with a real fire above it was tech for tech sake but looked good.
adam baxter
12.11.06 / 01 / listening
photos of last night's grace service which was about listening - to each other and to god.
an enjoyable evening which put me in a place of peace and quietness. i realise that that doesn't happen very often. was good to see old friends there too. i've missed a lot of grace services this year - march i was in austin, april i was visiting my father in hospital, may i was at his funeral, october i was in melbourne.
07.11.06 / 01 / st. ives
...so to chill out on my own for a few days after the flat upheaval i took the train to st. ives.
got round to visiting the barbara hepworth museum and garden. i'm not a huge fan but the studio and garden were lovely - i thought, this is a model for church - a place with beautiful objects, chairs, garden, you get a guide, there's one or two books to read, the garden has a circuit and gathering places - would be great to do a communion in this piece with the central 'stone' as an altar [it has a circular recess in the top surface to put bread and wine in]. no doubt some diagrams will appear in a presentation.
Comments:
The Hepworth Studio and garden are among my favorite places - and on my list of liveable houses open to the public. Quite apart form the objects the light in the studio is something else again - especially after a rain shower.
sue donnelly
04.11.06 / 03 / the twelve apostles
photos of the twelve apostles on flickr
cheryl picked me and cathy kirkpatrick up from melbourne airport, straight off our planes, and drove for 5 hours along the great ocean road to reach the twelve apostles at sunset. we were there for an hour or so as the sun sank into the roaring ocean and the light changed, and then the penguins came up on the beach.
i have to say this was worth any amount of driving to get to, in its scale and magnificence, an oceanic grand canyon. many thanks to cheryl for her heroic effort in getting us out there and back to melbourne again around midnight.
Comments:
the great ocean road never fails to take my breath away. your photos are great. and those penguins were worth any amount of driving...
cheryl lawrie
04.11.06 / 02 / 90s computer nostalgia
after getting back from melbourne i spent a week sorting out my flat, turning it into something more like a home. something more comforting to come back to after a day at work. one casualty of the process was my january 1996 power mac 7200/90 and its SCSI accessories - monster scanner, 10Gb hard drive that's bigger than my 120Gb firewire one. the apple laserwriter went a few years back.
the 7200/90 was my first home computer - at the time it was far faster than the work computers which were 66MHz compaqs. see i kept the faith, buying a mac at apple's lowest ebb. and then i had to get a modem to be part of grace! and negotiate phone line usage with my landlady. up to then my net access had been at cyberia, the world's first internet cafe, which happened to be near my office.
[rather amusing australian 1994 review of cyberia: "I can really see it working in Fitzroy and Glebe"]
[1995 cyber cafe guide says cyberia "has had more media coverage than a small war"!]
[the cyberia clientele were a mixed bunch. it became the hangout for 'cyberpunk'/technopagan goth types of spectacular appearance - i remember a bunch of businessmen walking in, turning pale and walking out again. what was i doing? buying fonts, which then came on a floppy disk snailmail from the US]
i've kept a copy of netscape 3.01, just for nostalgia. those big clunky toolbar buttons with words on. and system 7.5 always carries for me a sense of doing something for the first time. checking the shareware on this month's macworld cover floppy.
Comments:
it's always sad to see an old mac go
chad brooks
I found that my most productive writing was on an old Powerbook 150 running Word 5. No distracting whizz-bang features. Just a black and white page of text to work with - and Word seemed to keep up better on the PB150 than it does on the iBook now.
Sadly, the PB150 died and couldn't be resurrected. If I had to take myself away to a quite place just to write I'd take it over the other computers (Win/Mac) I use, anyday.
stephen garner
you can relive your old netscape versions with this icon pack for firefox:
http://iconpacks.mozdev.org/packs/classic.html
it makes me happy.
andrew lorien
04.11.06 / 01 / smallfire update
massive update to smallfire, which had been neglected for most of this year. the actual sets of photos will now go on flickr, which is easier for me and allows people to see bigger pictures. smallfire still carries the thumbnails for browsing but then links through to the flickr set.
i couid do away with the thumbnails too, now that it's quick to jump to a page full of images and jump back. smallfire was designed for the days of dial-up - thumbnails meant you could browse before committing to a five-minute download, and the photos on the event pages are limited in size and number to what was tolerable on a 56k modem five years ago. i still think lightness is a worthwhile discipline - there will always be moments when access is poor or time-limited.
i'm wondering abut starting a smallfire group on flickr, so that others can throw their photos into the pot in an easily found place. the problem is that as far as i can tell flickr groups don't allow photos to be added as sets, which means contributions get jumbled up as a stream of single images. contributors would have to be disciplined about naming and tagging their photos.
Comments:
You can start a group and indeed. It's hard to manage the policy of the group. But on the other side. Flickr is more interactive. Is it a blog, forum or stock? Feel free to add some impressions to: http://www.flickr.com/groups/cwl/
peace, GL
geerard labeur
steve great stuff as ever. it makes sense to use flickr... i like it that the photos are available in a bigger format as well.
maybe the key to a smallfire group is that you are disciplined about the tagging - e.g. if say the grace set was tagged grace, participate and smallfire that would make it easy? the good thing about tags is that you can add them to other peoples so you could always edit as people added photos if they forgot.
jonny baker
Comments:
There's one in Auckland, NZ too, but it's not that cool...and I can't remember the name for the life of me.
craig mitchell
There's a skater church and youth congregation called Legacy at Benfleet in Essex meeting in a custom designed building. It's a church plant from the local Anglican church and now has a congregation of about 60.
tim abbott
you've missed the point. legacy is purpose-built. what interests me is skatepark as new interior for old church. skatepark in a church not just as a church.
i'm quite into skateparks as artificial landscapes, independently of the skating.
steve
Indeed! I guess Legacy is church in a skatepark and Skaterham is skatepark in a church, though not quite the 'church as third space' suggested in your link. Took a bunch of young people to Radlands once - awesome place. I like the idea of skatepark as artificial landscape.
tim abbott