MeghanIsMe

People who know GIMP photo editing:

I had a workflow in Photoshop I was pretty happy with, and I learned most of it from reading how-tos on the internet. Do you know any good how-to collections for GIMP? I want to learn basic stuff like adjusting exposure, saturation, sharpness, area selection and feathering edges, clone brush-type stuff for fixing dirt on the sensor, all that kind of stuff. It would be great to read people writing about their own workflows and processes using GIMP too.

It would be nice to know how to do stuff like fix barrel distortion or do HDMI compositing too, but I rarely did that stuff in Photoshop anyway.
Thanks!

Boeing built planes with faulty systems that caused hundreds of deaths when two 737 Max-8s crashed. But hey, I just got served an ad for their gay pride shirts on Facebook so they're all good, right? I should totally *pay them to advertise their brand*...

(I have a personal gripe, too, from when one of their security guards told me I wasn't allowed to photograph the Boeing building in downtown Chicago. Try and stop me you power-tripping goon.)

I've commented before that different kinds of photography can be essentially whole different skillsets. Architecture vs. portraits for instance. Or even architecture vs. cars and trucks. Basical technical concepts carry over, but the details are nothing alike.

Enter digital vs. analog electronics. I started out being interested in analog, but that's led me into some digital stuff too and they are entirely different worlds. Learning to understand the analog amplifier in my radio kit while also watching Ben Eater's videos about constructing an 8-bit computer is like learning two different languages. Digital feels a little more straight-forward in its basics, but analog has more elegance and beauty, and complexity, right from the start.

In Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn," he criticizes architecture focused on static appearance in the present moment with no regard to use over time. One of the targets of his criticism is I. M. Pei specifically and many Brutalist works in general. There's a lot of well-considered and well-justified criticism of some of my favorite architecture; enough to make me consider how architectural photography can glorify commodity-value over use-value, promote form over function, and encourage the production of buildings that fail to meet the needs of their users.

Reading critical theory about stuff you care about is really hard.

And I started my current bunch of reading just wanting to know how they're built.

I'm scared today. Not of anything particularly scary. I'm just feeling the fear effect of chronic anxiety more than the anxiety effect, if that makes any sense. It makes everything seem more scary.

My ride in this morning makes 2005.1 recorded miles by bicycle for the year. My new rear wheel is holding up quite well.

I spent most of yesterday, when I wasn't out for a late birthday
dinner with Danae and folks, posting books to Amazon. I now have very nearly 500 listings. Amazon keeps prompting me to tell my friends on Facebook about new listings. I could be wrong in thinking that most of you don't care, but if any of you want to know when I post page-turners like "Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy In Invasive Bladder Cancer", let me know and you'll be the first to hear.

I have books stacked spine-up four rows deep on the floor of the workshop room, but at least things are more organized and my workbench is usable. I still have a frequency counter kit to assemble!

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Danae and I were at Todoroki in Evanston last night with a few other people who made it out. Dee, Lisa, and Nathan were there to offer her their birthday wishes and eat tasty fishes. (See, it rhymes!)

The director of the library I work at had a staff party on Saturday. The party menu was mid-century themed, and the director and her husband have some great mid century furniture too. I love their couch so much! As well as introducing Danae to a number of coworkers, I got to talk to the director's husband, an accomplished photographer with very similar interests to mine, a little bit about my own work while he was showing me his darkroom. He asked me to send him a few of my pieces and I will do so once I've picked out some that I think demonstrate my architecture work well. And once I'm not feeling quite so much fear about it. Looking at his books of urban photography in Chicago, I felt a familiar ache to *do* something with my photos, even while I wonder whether that's at all possible.

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I bought a cute little blue plate (or maybe it's a candle holder...) at the Goodwill to bring with me to work. Now I have that, a cup, and a metal spork in my drawer. I hate using disposable materials. For food, I typically walk the 4/5 mile from work to Jewel a couple times a week for sandwich fixings, frozen corn dogs, or whatever I feel like. I'm not looking forward to doing that as the weather gets colder. Maybe I'll start bringing things from home, even though it means more weight on my bike.

A couple paragraphs I wrote elsewhere in response to a discussion of politics (and a lengthy expansion of those thoughts):

"I'm frustrated with myself that it's so hard for me to try to rationally engage with people who are right-leaning politically. Understanding and respecting alternate systems of understanding, recognizing their internal validity and engaging them in ways that make sense not to 'me' but to 'them' is the very core of my undergraduate degree.

Hurtful language and petty attacks are counter-productive, but oftentimes these days, it's all I'm capable of. So I stay largely out of the discussion. I feel like I'm failing at politics."

My therapist asked what it was that kicked my legs out from under me in Syracuse. There were a few things that reinforced each other. One is that I have lost the belief that I have a chance of having an effect on society; of making it better. Because of that, so many things I was fascinated by because they were important to me as part of understanding how to do that are just depressing. Rather than being motivated to thoroughly understand systemic inequalities in urban geography, they just make me want to cry. Geographers and anthropologists and others have been talking about ways to make things better for decades, but the ears of the dominant paradigm are deaf to them.

The ruined buildings and blighted urban landscapes that, as objects of fascination for me, led me to photography and school and art and anthropology and geography, are also symptoms of that dominant paradigm's disregard. They are still history and the passage of time made manifest; that was what I hoped to convey in my photography. But their meaning as the chewed-up and spat-out leavings of a seemingly inescapable and deeply discriminatory system overshadows their other meanings.

Artistically, I'm still fascinated with the thought of how a space is made and unmade. When does a space become a place? When does it unbecome? When is a room no longer a room, as its doors and windows and ceilings and walls slowly rot away? I'm drawn to that kind of liminality in ways I can't explain. But that making and unmaking does not occur in a vacuum; it is part of the making and unmaking of communities, and livelihoods.

Divorced from that context, it is apt to call images of Detroit's burned out houses or Gary's empty church 'ruin porn.' It's an empty aesthetic that provides a thrill disconnected from the reality of the subject's life. "I love Brutalist architecture!" I excitedly commented in an online discussion. "You don't have to live and work in it," one person responded. In Detroit, a woman approached me to ask why I was photographing a crumbling stone house with a sagging roof. "It has a kind of beauty," I said, somewhat self-consciously. "Ain't nothin' beautiful here," was her sharp response.

The more I've thought about those exchanges, the more photography of ruins feels like a kind of exploitation; converting someone else's miserable day-to-day existence into some pretty pictures to show to other people to evoke some sense of authenticity and wonder. "I was there! I saw this myself and I am sharing it with you!" What does my brief passage through the place really teach me about its nature and its place in the lives of people for whom is is part of their everyday world? How much less does my self-conscious abstraction of that experience into a few photos show someone who looks at my photos? It's hard to think of a more inauthentic way to experience a place.

It's not documentary work with some redeeming intent to communicate what these places are like. That's been done, and claiming that's my intent without doing the very real and extensive work necessary to contextualize what I'm producing is a poor excuse. If anything, it has the opposite effect, abstracting real, living places into mysterious empty landscapes of decay and ruin that contribute to unfounded apprehension of cities, the very places I feel are the best way for vast numbers of people to live on Earth.

I...think I've lost my thread. I was writing about geography and ineffectiveness.

The study of urban geography makes clear that, just as these ruined landscapes are a result of the destruction part of the engine of creative destruction that powers the economic redistribution system of post-Fordist capitalism, their reconstruction is a result of the creative part of that same engine. When buildings are created or revitalized, when infrastructure like highways and rail transit are constructed, it doesn't matter who the metaphorical architects of such plans claim will benefit from them; the real winners are those who have the means to invest in their creation and the real losers are those who do not have the means to avoid the consequences of significant and irreversible change to their landscape. Everything I read in my urban social justice class (with the possible exception of that damned inscrutable book by Henri LeFebvre that I wanted to pitch into Onondaga Lake) pointed to that conclusion. Some of the best minds in geography and progressive academia can't figure this shit out; what can I do?

I don't want to feel so ineffective and helpless. But I do.

I also don't want to see random pictures of dying places anymore. I don't want to produce more of them myself. If I produce more urban photography, I want to make images of living systems. Working infrastructure that shows how deeply interconnected we all are. How many ways we all work with and for each other. How we all cooperate, consciously or unconsciously to create these beautiful, ridiculously complex, heart-achingly imperfect yet deeply optimistic engines of assault against entropy called cities. (Is that even what cities are anymore, or is it just a side-effect?)

But I don't know how to do that either.

In the meantime, right now, I'm conducting my own tiny fight against entropy as I work to repair my VTVM. For now, as I slowly work out where to go from here, that will do.

Someone tried to steal one of my bicycles last night and failed because I have a good Kryptonite U-lock. That person also tried to steal that bike's front wheel and failed because they were stupid.

I met a resident of our building in the lobby who told me her bike had been stolen last night, despite both a U-lock and a combo lock. That's surprising, since U-locks work pretty well, but it happens. When I went out to get on my bike for an errand, I saw that both of mine (I lock them together at the end of the rack) were leaning far over on their sides. I got my Summer bike unlocked and found that the front brakes were disengaged, the quick release lever was open, and the wheel was wobbling loosely in the fork.

So what likely happened was someone tried to take the bike and was thwarted by the U-lock. Then zie tried to steal the front wheel and were thwarted by the lawyer lips. See, bike wheels used to be attached by nuts on each side. Then the quick release lever was invented to make the wheels easier to pop off and on for transportation and such. Then people started crashing because of their front wheel coming off, which in the majority of cases is caused by not using the quick-release properly. And then front forks gained little metal flanges at the bottom, so-called "lawyer lips", to keep the wheel in the fork even if the quick-release isn't tightened down. They mostly defeat the purpose of having a quick-release and make it a nuisance to loosen the lever further and wiggle the wheel around out of the fork, so some people file them off. I can only guess that this would-be thief either got interrupted in the middle of his work just as he zie releasing the front wheel, or just couldn't figure out how to get the wheel out of the fork. I'm not sure which is more likely; the timing of the former seems pretty tight. The latter option gives me a good laugh, so I'm going with that one.

I need to get my winter bike back to Kenosha for storage so I can use the cable lock it has as a secondary lock for my summer bike to secure the wheels to the frame. I can't count on the next person who wants parts being as stupid as the last.

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I started on my project of riding to each end of every line of the Chicago L. I went to Linden first, the north end of the Purple Line and the closest terminus to where I live. It's very near the Bahá'í House of Worship in Wilmette. It's the largest Bahá'í temple in the world, both breath-takingly beautiful and of historical worth in several respects.

It's also near the north end of the North Shore Channel. The channel is a canal originally built after the reversal of the Chicago River caused the north branch of said river to lose its flow and become stagnant. The flow down the channel to the north branch keeps water flowing down to the junction at Wolf Point in downtown Chicago, and then up the river and on toward the Mississippi. There at the north end of the channel, the sluice gate controlling flow from the lake stretches across the water, and I spent a little while looking at it.

The presence of all of this infrastructure gave me ideas for a photography project. It would be really interesting to have photos of the most interesting pieces of infrastructure at each line terminus. Infrastructure connected by infrastructure. It makes me think, too, of the numerous ways that these disparate places are connected through water, rails, road, power grid, and more. Maybe I could incorporate that in some way too; photograph the network of infrastructure that connects places just as much as the railroad does, but in less visible ways. Something to think about.

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My bike is riding so nicely after the tune-up I did! Northwestern University has a few bike repair stands positioned on their campus, so I rode over and used one. It's silently oiled now and gear shifts are snappy. I'm looking forward to my next ride!

During one of our earlier visits to Hamilton, Ontario, danaeris took me on several wandering drives to show me the town. On one of them, up on the mountain (the upper 'half' of the town, sitting atop the Niagara Escarpment), we found several vantage points that afforded views of all of lower Hamilton and the steel plants. Exploring further, we bumped into an abandoned healthcare facility of some kind. She parked and we meandered around the grounds, talking and pointing out interesting details as I photographed.

These peripatetic drives to nowhere in particular are some of my favorite memories of our travels together. In December, we went on another drive up the mountain. This time, we found ourselves in Sam Lawrence Park, a linear green space that follows the edge of the escarpment near the Jolley Cut, a road cut into the cliff face. We parked and gave up the warmth of her car in favor of the chill mountain wind, tempted by signs and monuments scattered about the walking paths.

When I encounter a new space and spend a little time getting to know it, I revel in the sense of unfolding mystery. Whether it's an illicit tromp through an abandoned building or a simple stroll through a city park, not knowing what there is to find and see makes almost anything I happen upon a revelation. Most times, that thrill is a solitary one. As a photographer, the course and speed of my passage through a space is often constrained by the process of image-making; accompanying me on a photo trip can be an exercise in patience. I don't mind the solitude; I can connect with a space on its own terms and mine, spending as much or as little time as I please.

But I feel a different, equally special, thrill when I'm experiencing a new place in the company of another adventurer. Danae let me share my excitement with her, contributing her own as well as I bounced from overlook to interpretive sign to the top of a stone wall. Places and cities are meaningful to me; I find things to admire and appreciate in each one I visit. Danae knew this, and she shared a city, hers and her parents' city, with me. That sharing is an act of love. In a recursive way, that love is another part of what makes Hamilton special to me. And Danae's understanding of my desire to experience, and the way she demonstrates her care and affection in facilitating those experiences, is one part, among so many parts, of what makes her very special to me.

These are some of the most memorable moments of my visits to Canada with my beloved Danae. In these times, she gives me two things that are very important to me. First, her company and her own stories, experiences, and conjectures about Hamilton let me build a relationship to place that is both experiential and personal, adding to the historical and physical perspectives I can gain from reading about a city or exploring it with maps. Second, she gives me joyous time spent doing something personally meaningful to me with someone I love deeply. She takes joy in indulging my enthusiasms and seeing my excitement at the experiences she makes possible. When I think about standing at the top of the escarpment next to Danae, the two of us looking far out over the city below, pressed together against the cold and calling each other's attention to buildings or landmarks, I feel overjoyed that she is in my life. I feel loved.

I posted more Pike Creek photos today. This one is a portion of the creek that flows through the Washington Park Municipal Golf Course. It's also another one that I think turned out rather nicely.





We sneaked in through an open and disused gate at the top of the embankment leading down into the course, pushing our way through the thick undergrowth toward the water.

What most caught my eye here was the placement of the willow trees. Their even spacing clearly indicates they were part of landscaping, but by their size they've been there a long time!

I wonder if this golf course floods when Washington Bowl floods. They are the same waterway after all, both in a depression, and quite close to each other.

(My copy of John Henry, replacing the one that disappeared in my move, arrived this week and I'm listening to it. It's a really cool thing to be listening to music that I know so well that I can sing along with it while still having my brain free for typing up posts and photo processing!)