Pioneer on the Internet – Sean Gursky

Like millions of fellow Canadians I enjoyed watching the 2010 Olympics from Vancouver. It was a fantastic seventeen days and I was able to see a lot of memorable moments play out live. I am going to miss switching between three Canadian networks and one American to get complete coverage and regardless of the day or time you knew something from the Olympics would be on.

One thing I am going to miss the most is the commercials. Advertisement is a necessary evil but I never felt one commercial overly annoyed me, even when played repeatedly. Some commercials still managed to excite me, get my blood racing and induce goosebumps. If you were lucky enough you would see the longer version of a commercial and feel a new surge of emotions all over again.

Here are some of my favorites from February:

Molson Canadian – Made From Canada (YouTube – 1:00)
It has great shots of Canada, inspirational words and as the commercial comes to a close you hear the powerful and always motivating music from Clint Mansell. I saw this commercial several times while I had a MGD in hand and felt a little guilt.

Visa – Go World
The “Go World” campaign was amazing. The commercials would change based on current events (like when Canada won its first gold, YouTube – 0:32) and as the medals accumulated the first names of the athletes would be added into the commercial. These were never dull and even after seeing the Dan Jensen (YouTube – 0:30) or Sara Renner (YouTube – 0:32) ad spots multiple times I still got emotional over it.

More TV spots available at YouTube or on their Facebook page.

Coca Cola – Whose Game They’re Playing
The first time I saw the “Whose Game They’re Playing” (YouTube – 1:02) commercial was in a movie theater in January and the way I felt then is how I felt all the way through February. It’s a great commercial, one that would always force me stop what I was doing and watch.

I have noticed that video montages have been appearing on networks as the Olympics came to an end, but one that really stands out was Stephen Brunt’s emotional discussion about being Canadian and celebrating as a nation. Even after multiple viewings it’s still good.

Thanks Olympics for giving us Canadians something to feel and cheer about, it’s been a fantastic seventeen days.

I had a pretty good week with hot dogs. It has been over two months since my last tube steak and in the span of a week I had three meals of dogs adding to my count by 8.

My dream of getting to 52 (again) is still alive.

For as long as I can remember I had a Fujifilm QuickSnap disposable camera in my bedside drawer. I don’t know when I got it, what photos were taken with it, or where it has been, but it was always there. I rediscovered the camera a few years ago and there were half of the exposures remaining. I wanted to make the most of this mysterious camera and took random photos with it until I finished the roll.

In January I took the last photo and was giddy with excitement to finally discover the secrets that were on the camera. When I picked the pictures from the photo lab the lady said “Not many turned out” and I was devastated. The camera did have an expiration date of 2005, so anything taken after that time would be a surprise. Sadly only ten photos turned out but they were a nice glimpse into the past.

It looked like the camera originated from our June 2004 trip to Jasper and could have been used at the three consecutive Matthew Good shows later that month before being tucked away in the move to the condo in 2006. Here are a few of the results from the mysterious Fujifilm:

I plan on taking this adventure with the disposable camera one step further. My Mom was an avid photographer and among her gear was a Canon A-1 with a macro and a zoom lens. The next time I am at the homestead I will recover the gear, purchase some film and see what sort of results I can get.

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…