Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Will next season start with them landing at LAX successfully or has all of this happened before and will continue to happen?

I wrote that on May 14, 2009 and for the last 265 days I have continued to think about it, understand how it all connects and patiently wait for the last eight and a half months.

I have continued my MSN profile tribute, which has been running since before the start of season five and will continue with it through the remainder of season six. May seems like such a long time ago, and here I am, hours away from the wait being over. It feels like it has gone by fast, and other times it has dragged on.

Tonight will be the last Lost premiere. The last chance for a new curve ball to be thrown. The last time the season can open on a new eye and a new piece of the puzzle to be introduced. Tonight is the last time I order Hawaiian pizza for the premiere. Tonight, it is finally tonight. I am almost in disbelief that this moment has finally come.

It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress. (Jacob from The Incident)

Oh, I can’t wait until I’m old enough to feel ways about stuff.

As part of my shutter resolution I have doubled the size of my RSS subscriptions to include feeds from portraits, candids, photo-journalism and wedding blogs, tutorials and everything in between. One common message I keep reading is to ask yourself what is the purpose of my photo. Remember the subject and be clear on the story you are trying to tell.

I have never felt that my photos tell more than where I am or what I was doing so I find capturing emotion or making a story unfold in a picture challenging. Now when I find a picture that strikes an emotional chord with me I appreciate it more because their art affected me and I want to learn how to achieve the same.

I start things off with Days With My Father. This photo album has been around for a while but the message and emotional impact is still very strong. The photos are accompanied by a story, but in most cases words are not necessary and I find the whole piece very moving.

I am amazed by how human triumph, suffering and devastation can be captured and the photos compiled by the Big Picture from Haiti are worth viewing, but the photo set that inspired this post was Todd Heisler’s “Final Salute”.

Katherine Cathey draped herself over her husband's casket.

The amount of emotion in those seven photos can be a little overwhelming, but the glimpse into such a personal and sad moment are remarkable. I can just picture photo seven and get swept up in the feeling again.

To end on a lighter note, Beyond The Still is a project where photographers take a single photo and film a story around it using the video capabilities on their DSLR. Only the first of seven chapters has been released, but this concept should produce some interesting results over the next few months.

It may not be a print magazine, or prominently displayed in an advertisement campaign but something I photographed was displayed on another site and it is a pretty neat feeling.

The photo was used on the Edmonton Real Estate blog as a photo of the week for what is happening in Edmonton. The photo was taken at the Ice On Whyte, and the rest of the photos from that trip can be seen here.

Sadly, I use Flickr less than I should. I use it to publish my Project 365 photos, and with the free account only showing the last 200 photos it is barely a snapshot of my portfolio. I am unable to justify the cost of a Pro account but the social networking aspects of the site cannot be beat because this whole thing transpired through a comment on my photo.

In August I read about the Brando Ultimate 3-Point Hand Strap on engadget.com here. I had starred the item in my Google Reader and it sat there for a few months. After lugging the Rebel with the stock strap through England, France and Las Vegas I thought I would take a different approach to how I hold the Canon.

I ordered the 3-Point Hand Strap on November 24, 2009 and it arrived on January 6, 2010. I had no photo walks or tours planned immediately but giving the strap a work out during my daily photos would be a way for me to see if the $16USD was worth it.

So begins my 3-Point Hand Strap review.

Installation was breeze. It’s a simple concept but I am able to let go of the camera and it will stay close to my hand, attached and secure.

I didn’t realize how often I moved my right hand around the body until it was locked into place. Most of my setting adjustments were done with my hand pulled off the body, but being strapped in I had to slide the hand out of the strap a bit to make changes. This was a little awkward because I have been using the Rebel body a certain way for over a year and I had to re-learn how to make adjustments.

One thing that bothered me the most was that my Lowepro Nova 160AW case had to be reorganized. The Brando strap was just large enough that I couldn’t use my standard configuration, so I had to remove the divider between the 500D and my 50mm f/1.8 lens, which has worked reliably for me for over a year.

When Gord and I went to Troll Falls in Kananaskis I thought this would be a great opportunity to test the hand strap. It stayed ready in my hand but when the walk got extreme with snow and slippery conditions I was handicapped with being able to use only one hand. If I had to tie my shoe lace or write something down the camera had to be removed. These are not deal breakers for the strap, but if I just had the regular neck strap on none of this would have been a problem.

However, the afternoon walk to Ice On Whyte was ideal for the Brando strap. It was nice to have the camera always present and not worrying about moving the body as I went through the crowd.

The hand strap was able to remain attached to the camera when I would put it on the tripod, but I never felt that the camera was securely on there. I could still adjust the cameras position because the Brando attachment had some give. I was never concerned about the camera falling out, but I would have preferred it if the DSLR felt a little more tighter in there.

I think there is a definite place for this Brando strap, like going on a long photo through a city park or on a leisurely stroll. However for everyday typical camera use it was mostly an inconvenience and may not have aided to a steady hand with the camera. Simple urban exploration is where the strap excels, but should be left at home if you leave the city limits and do some exploration.

I am not one for making a New Years resolution. It may be my problem with executing the plans or my inability to create a worthwhile resolution but I have not seriously considered one in a decade. When it comes to resolutions, or plans to change your life I like to reference a Vanilla Sky quote that goes “every passing minute is a another chance to turn it all around”. Instead of waiting until the next calendar year I want to make the effort to make the change now.

However, I am breaking my own code but for 2010 I want to learn more about photography. I have taken a photo every day since October 2006, and some days are a chore, but I believe that if I know more about what I am doing I will be able to photograph the familiar and ordinary in a new and engaging way.

• I feel that it is time to take it to the next step and focus on composition, exposure and lighting. To learn the technical aspects of a photo and how it all goes together before I press the shutter.
• I have subscribed to more photography websites and will actually think about techniques I am reading.
• I will visit sites that are recommended by photography people I follow on Twitter and really give that link my attention.
• I will look at good photos and really examine them. Why do I like a certain photo? What are they doing that I can learn from? How is their photo so good?
• I want to learn more about products (and not just what Canon is offering).
• I want to get more involved with the Edmonton photo community, as there is a good base of users from #yegphoto that I could learn from.

Where does this ultimately lead me? I do not think photography will be anything more than a hobby for me but knowing more will only aid this hobby. If there is a weekend course or a seminar I will make more of an effort to seek them out and attend.

In December I did a round of head shots at work for the company Christmas video, and it got me thinking. Will I approach people on the street to take their photo? Maybe not. However working towards that is something that interests me. Approaching someone on the street, getting some information about them and then putting a story to their photo sounds like a great project. It’s a scary thought, but exciting.

I have never evaluated what I am doing as a guy with a camera, and I hope at the end of the year I will have an answer to that.

No better way to start a 12 month plan than by reading some very niche and highly accurate comics from What The Duck.

Say cheese!

As a 2010 gift to myself I purchased a one month subscription at last.fm. My original intent was to see the historical information presented in their “Playground” and get a sense of my listening habit over the last seven years I have been with last.fm.

I paid my $3USD one-time fee for a months access and immediately downloaded my “Tag Tube”.

It looked neat on the surface, but I was a little disappointed to see what it only went back as far as April 2008. Still, there are ebbs and flows with my listening habits and this map does a good job of representing that. See the last twenty months of my last.fm tags in Underground Tube format here.

There is not much to glean from this, but it looks like the tagging system is a little off because Matthew Good appears under “Alternative Rock” and “Canadian”. Both are accurate tags but I feel that if they had went with one over the other then MG would have had a more consistent presence in my Tubes.

Otherwise the information is pretty accurate. The White Stripes usually dominated my listening in any given month, but there were occasional binges with soundtrack scores (as “My Aught Nine Numerical Review” showed). I will investigate the other features of being a Last.fm subscriber, and since listening to their radio does not interest me, I will see if this was a worth while purchase. If not, then I may consider buying again in another 12 months to see how my Tube Tags look.

I feel like I missed a great opportunity to recap 2009, or even the decade that was. The final weeks of December flew by at an accelerated rate I didn’t think about a blog entry to commemorate the occasion. Therefore I am going to take a recent page from Jeff’s blog and do a statistical year in review.

Top 10 Google Queries
1. google analytics
2. wct
3. weather Edmonton
4. wcf
5. canada post tracking
6. ack attack
7. sean gursky
8. whois seagurs.com
9. virgin festival 2009 calgary
10. petro points

I have two Gmail accounts, one for work and one for personal but my work account does not have Web History enabled so everything that did go through my query appeared above. My busiest month for searching was in January with 489 queries recorded, and my least active month was in July with 117.

Top 10 sites
1. en.wikipedia.org
2. www.imdb.com
3. www.seagurs.com
4. www.worldcurlingtour.com
5. www.php.net
6. www.amazon.com
7. www.google.com
8. answers.yahoo.com
9. www.youtube.com
10. www.tv.com

I guess these results tell me I was obsessed with the status of seagurs.com (when it was in Redemption Period with 1&1 and waiting to take ownership back) and could never be bothered with bookmarking the Analytics site, or even learning how to spell it correctly. No idea how Virgin Festival made it into my top ten, especially since I did not even consider attending, but it stands as a testament to the year that was.

Top 10 Artists
1. Bear McCreary (2,587 plays)
2. The White Stripes (1,434 plays)
3. U2 (1,387 plays)
4. Matthew Good (877 plays)
5. Philip Glass (777 plays)
6. Bad Religion (726 plays)
7. The Beatles (684 plays)
8. Coldplay (680 plays)
9. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard (668 plays)
10. Michael Giacchino (520 plays)

No surprise by this, but maybe the sheer volume that Bear McCreary beat everyone else in the last twelve months is worth mentioning. Not counting the occasional song on Battlestar Galactica that contains lyrics, four of my top ten artists were instrumental and three of those were purely from soundtracks.

Top 10 Tracks
1. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis One (124 plays)
2. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Five (123 plays)
3. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Two (111 plays)
4. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Three (104 plays)
5. Regina Spektor – Man of a Thousand Faces (97 plays)
5. Philip Glass – Metamorphosis Four (97 plays)
7. Bear McCreary – All Along The Watchtower (77 plays)
8. Bear McCreary – Heeding the Call (74 plays)
9. Bear McCreary – Sonatica (72 plays)
10. Bear McCreary – Passacaglia (65 plays)

Pianos and Bear charge the way. I really enjoy Man of a Thousand Faces, it’s a beautiful song but I didn’t realize that I had listened to it over 3.5 times a week (“Far” was released in June, halfway through the year).

I boarded eight different flights in 2009, flying to London, Marseille, Calgary and Las Vegas. Those eights flights spanned the same number of weeks. Roughly thirty hours of flight time equated to covering a distance of 22,242 kilometres. I drove my VW Jetta TDI 11,000 kilometers and filled up the vehicles 16 times and filed a single police report.

In 2009 I wrote 81 blog posts and I sent roughly 350 emails from my @gmail.com and @seangursky.com email accounts and 110 from my @hotmail.com address. I made fifteen orders with amazon.ca, two with amazon.com, one from amazon.co.uk and three with monoprice.com.

My rough estimates lead me to believe that I took nearly 7,500 photos with six different cameras. 17% of my photos taken this year were done in the two weeks in England/France. The majority of my total photo count came from my Canon EOS T1i/500D which had over 5,300 actuations.

We shall see what 2010 holds, and if my past numbers will continue into the New Year or not. 364 days remain…

If you had to define my musical taste The White Stripes and U2 would be mentioned and probably be debated about which as more influential to me. For most of 2009 I have been teased about the documentary “It Might Get Loud” featuring none other than Jack White, The Edge and Jimmy Page.

This movie was made for me. I could watch a separate movie on either of these guitarists, but having both share the movie, their stories and space in “The Summit” was amazing.

When I wasn’t grinning from ear to ear I tried to soak up the movie. I wanted to know more about what songs influenced them, or hear for the umpteenth time how they got start in music. Even something I was familiar with (ie: band posting by Larry Mullen which lead to the forming of U2) felt fresh and intriguing as The Edge walked down the same halls that the band started in.

What I really appreciated was the reason for why The White Stripes are what they are. From the color scheme, caricature appearance and simplicity was a way to distract from what was really going on. I also respected that Jack White would intentionally go out of his way to make to things more difficult. To paraphrase, it takes him three steps to get to the keyboard so he will put it four steps away so he has to run to make it in time. He pushes himself, constantly doing challenges to never be stagnant.

There was a moment where nine year old Jack was being instructed by current age Jack to stomp on the Airline, to get angry with it. I yelled at the TV in horror! I feared for the Res-O-Glass, for the safety of the sound that iconic guitar had provided. However, if something else broke off it, or would go out of tune easier then it would just be that much more of a challenge for Jack to perform with it.

When Page and The Edge were revisiting old recording/rehearsal areas Jack White was with his “nine year old self” talking about kicking the chair away from the piano for dramatic effect and how to become a performer. I found it a little strange to have a younger version of yourself in the film, but this movie highlighted the unconventional nature of Jack White, and it worked for him.

The Washington City Paper interviewed director Davis Guggenheim and asked about mini-Jack.

WCP: Speaking of Jack, who was that little kid in the movie who helped tell his story?

DG: That’s Jack White as a 9-year-old boy. Did it throw you off?

WCP: A little bit.

DG: Yeah. Jack said to me, “I want to teach myself how to play guitar.” And I was like, cool. And the next day he shows up in a hat and a bowtie and a suit, and in the back, seriously, was a 9-year-old kid dressed exactly like him. And he said, “Davis, this is Jack. Jack, this is Davis.”

WCP: Any idea how he found the kid?

DG: Not a clue. I let them tell their own stories, and how he told his was quintessential Jack.

WCP: The kid was good.

DG: The kid was good. [Pause.] How do you know it’s not him as a 9-year-old?

There was a level of respect that felt genuine in “The Summit” too. The Edge was instructing the others how to perform “I Will Follow”, and when Page began playing “Ramble On” White had the biggest and happiest grin on his face. They may come from different disciplines but they all understood what it took to get where they are.

Obviously if you are a U2, The White Stripes or Led Zeppelin fan you need to see this, but the movie was made in such a way that anyone who has created music or picked up a guitar would be engaged for the full length of the movie.

When I changed hosting plans with GoDaddy I encountered a few problems with Gallery2. All of the configuration was correct, but when I uploaded a new image the square thumbnail would not appear. I deactivated the Square Thumbnail plugin from Site Admin > Gallery > Plugins, and reactivated it but there was no change.

I attempted to rebuild all thumbnails from Gallery > Maintenance but I received an error message about the last image I uploaded. I figured something was wrong and began the task of troubleshooting.

If I have a problem with Gallery2 there is a good chance the answer can be found in the support forums. The forums were helpful but there was never a ‘catch all’ thread for my problem. Since I have gone through this process twice in eight months I wanted to write the steps I took for future reference and possibly for others if they have a problem when their square thumbnails are no longer being created after a host move.

Getting Started
The Thumbnails / resized images section in the FAQ got me on the path to troubleshooting the Graphic Toolkits. I started off with completely uninstalling ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd. At this point I uninstalled the Square Thumbnails plugin; I don’t know if this was necessary to remove the Square Thumbnails plugin but I did not want to take any chances.

Installing ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd was easy, but configuring them was where the majority of my time was spent. Gd installs without configuration, but the other three require a bit more attention.

ImageMagick
Fortunately ImageMagick is accessible by a public directory on GoDaddy hosting accounts, so when I had to provide a path for the IM (ImageMagick) binaries all I had to enter was “/usr/local/bin/” and Save Settings.

Jpegtran
This is where things got a little more difficult for me. There is a /jpegtran folder at “/usr/bin/jpegtran” but that would fail to crop the image when I tested the binary. I also received the error message “Incorrect exit status for jpegtran command”.

I downloaded my own Jpegtran library from the file “jpegtran.tar.gz”, which can be downloaded from here. I extracted the file and uploaded it to a folder inside of my Gallery2 installation. Then I set the folder and its contents to 755 and tested the settings again and this time the crop function passed.

NetPBM
I downloaded a version of the NetPBM file from Sourceforge (the same file is mirrored here). I extracted the files to a folder inside my Gallery2 installation and set the folder and its contents to 755. When I ran the test I had the “Jhead” path empty and had several error messages.

I attempted to install the “Jhead” library with Jhead.gz and jhead-latest.tar.gz but neither appeared to work. When I did this in April 2009 I was not sure if I had “Jhead” installed or not, but I am still able to use NetPBM on MIME types image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/gif, image/png and image/tiff so that will meet my requirements for now. If I find the answer for the “Jhead” library path I will update this post.

With ImageMagick, Jpegtran, NetPBM and Gd installed and configured I reinstalled Square Thumbnails and when I re-uploaded the image my previously broken image now appeared.

Over the last few months I have noticed that the speediness of WordPress and Gallery2 (especially Gallery2) has become an issue. I have had to handicap the features on Gallery2 by enable caching, removing the random image and view counts all in an effort to ensure a quick page load time.

To combat this I am going to switch my hosting plan within GoDaddy. Unfortunately it will not be an easy and smooth transition. I will have to cancel my current hosting account, wait 24 hours for seangursky.com to disassociate and then it will be free to set up with the new hosting plan.

After my hosting failure in March I want to make sure I have everything in place before flipping the switch, and all told this process should take a few days. It would be great if it was all sorted out before the weekend, but we’ll see how these things go.