How do you organize things?

I've arrived at a point where I have acquired so many things, that it makes it hard to find a thing if it's been a while since I used it.

If I make a system with many boxes, that takes up too much space, and I probably can't remember what I filed a thing under anyway.

Too few though, I end up like my "gadget shelf", which is now so crowded that it's just luck if I find anything, and to drag it all out and be systematical would take an hour.

Any good tips?

Breakfast Club Dancing; Molly Ringwald

Breakfast Club is having a rennaissance.
For me personally, the dance scene is the heart of the movie.
Note especially Molly dancing on the stair. Seriously, how do women move like that?! It just seems they are constructed a different way.

Oberon Design

A few years ago, I bought an Oberon iPad cover in thick leather, embossed with a beautiful design based on an old drawing. It is stunning, though with the downside that it is hardly lightweight.
Since then they clearly expanded a lot, despite making leather and metal designs are quite resource-demanding. I find their designs, now both in leather and metal, to be gorgeous, and if I need another lifetime and it's female, I know at least one place to get my jewelry.
OberonDesign.com --- Page of sample designs

It seems van Gogh's Starry Night is becoming iconic. It was

Also used in the excellent CGI movie Home.

Wildlife Comedy contest winners

These winners of a "Wildlife Comedy" contest are wonderful.

Brilliance is always opposed

Yoshihisa Maitani was probably the most brilliant and visionary camera designer we had had. He invented the compact Olympus Pen camera and the SLR version the Pen-F (with a big system of lenses and accessories), and he invented the Olympus OM-1, which brought about a wave of other manufacturers finally seeing that an SLR camera needs not be able to double as a mace.

Here is a speech he made where he talks about what he had to go through to get his visions engineered and produced. It is funny, and fascinating both from an engineering and social perspective. After he had produced two cameras which shattered sales records like glass, his ideas were still actively resisted in the company!

[Alternative link, though the article is split up in many pages.]

There are some rrrrealy bright people out there

A town has rejected solar panels for some, er, unusual reasons.
Here is a part of it:

Bobby Mann said he watched communities dry up when I-95 came along and warned that would happen to Woodland because of the solar farms.

“You’re killing your town,” he said. “All the young people are going to move out.”

He said the solar farms would suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland.

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Was not worth the wait... (Miley Cyrus nude)

(Sorry, this is the style all the way through.)

I'll bet many many of Miley Cyrus' fans have been wishing for a nude shoot of her. Well, now it is here.
But don't get too excited; it is not all that great. In fact I would say it's just about as boring as it could be.
This photographer, Terry something, gets the chance to photograph one of the world's most famous young singers in the the nude (what a chance!)... and what are his preparations? They were:
1: Saying 'Take off your clothes.'
2: Saying 'Stand in front of this plain white background.'
3: Putting a flash gun directly on the camera, guaranteeing the most flat and boring light we could get.

There were a couple of attempts to be "provocative" with a black dildo and such, but other than that, clearly neither he nor Miley thought this event to be worth going for any interesting, pleasant, or exciting expressions, poses, or compositions.

Of all the 120 photographers I dealt with when running my nude sites, I don't recall any of them ever sending me a submission which was this lazy and boring. And most of them could have done this job way, way better.
I think things like this gives nude photography a bad name, as if it needed it.

[If you're still interested, here they are.]

Get relaxed on grammar

If you are writing, and ever have doubts about grammer*, don't miss this lecture. It's even funny.





I think I may continue to spell it "grammer" just to make a point...

To me, "grammar" obviously comes from "grammatics", but then got to be used instead of the correct word, and the original forgotten. Surely a cosmic joke that this happened to the name of the field of protecting proper use of words!  :-)

Us, drinking on the job?? Never!

Olympus offer

[Update: would you prefer the Flag Ship camera?  Check out this amazing CyberMonday offer on the Olympus E-M1]

TCG found this: Only until November ends: the excellent Olympus E-M10 with two lenses for only $450. That is a fantastic deal on a great system camera starter kit.

Update:
(Last day today, by the way.)
EmptySpaces informs us:
"That 40-150mm lens is a hidden gem...it's plastic-y but dang is it sharp."

Great.
It's like the 45mm 1.8 I have praised: It's also a plastic body, but that doesn't stop the optics from being excellent.
Its 'partner' which came out around the same time, the 12mm, has a metal body, and costs twice as much. But it's no better; actually some say the 45mm it a notch better.

I love metal things in terms of sheer feel. Like the PRO lenses for example. Fantastic feel to them.
But Plastic can be a very, very good material these days, costs less and weighs less.

Do you know a good web host?

Do you know a good web host?
I have maybe half a dozen low-traffic domains looking for a host. Reliability is good, but good service is essential.  Good friendly service, speedy answers and handlings, 24/7.

Currently I'm still with my old host, which I love, but they are geared to very high-traffic sites, and the prices are thereafter (and they don't do shared hosting). That made sense when I had sites which had over 100,000 visitors per day, but now when I no longer have such busy professional sites, I'm hoping to find a host for a handful of domains for under, say, $20 a month.

The fifty-mm lens

I wish I could be kewl and say "I've always come back to the fifty-mm" or something.
But I can't, I just don't care much for it, sorry. As an artist I feel like I am trying to play volleyball with a straightjacket.

"But it's what's closest to the way we see things." Yeah, that's great, for documentary work.
But as a wannabe art photographer, I don't want to show things like we always see them, I want to see and show them like we *don't* always see them.

People work in a myriad of different ways. Some photograph the world. Me, I don't, really. I make pictures, using a camera. I used paint and canvas many years before my first camera, and still do sometimes. There, as with photos, I love pictures which have elements of both the real and the abstract.