Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Favorite rock and party photos

Brutal Knights. Ottawa. 2006.

After spending over a year posting my most recent music and party photos to Flickr, I finally got around to making a bit of a “best of” collection for easy viewing. It’s a bit of a grab bag (Lesbians on Ecstasy to The Who) but that isn’t unlike my taste in music (if you actually read this, stay tuned for a best of 2007 post in a few weeks).

Please have a look. Feedback is encouraged.

music photos

party photos

Six movies I just watched.

My school was on a week-long holiday so I hung around to watching some movies. Does anyone else feel productive when they watch movies?

Black Snake Moan (Craig Brewer, 2006)

War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)

Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)

The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006)

Bloody Sunday (Paul Greengrass, 2002)

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

I had been meaning to watch most of these for years now so I’m happy I finally got to it! These along with that Chase Jarvis video I wrote about and I think I’m ready to read a book or something.

Vintage Citroën car ads

The Citroën 2CV was a really popular car a few decades back and I can say that I still see them rolling around Denmark a few times a week. Hi+Low found a collection of brochures from the sixties advertising this vehicle. Click around the page and take a look. The photography is awesome and the typography and design is good too.

Citroën 2CV brochures
Citroen 2CV on Wikipedia
Hi+Low post about it!

Virusphoto.com

Euro-Google is funny. Being in Denmark, you’d think results would lean towards the Danish side of things… Afterall, visiting sites like imdb and Facebook, all banner ads are in Danish and advertising Danish products. Google though, is giving me mostly French results. I can set it up to do this for me in Canada but I haven’t. It’s cool though as it’s helping expose me to sites I’ve never visited before. Sites like virusphoto.com.

Basically, it’s like a lot of the other photography portals out there – but en français. Tutorials, critiques, videos and other goodies. You kind of have to dig but there are some gems.

I don’t agree with everything in this article but I enjoyed it: 100 conseils donnés par les membres pour améliorer vos photos

Some key points (en français):

39. Maîtrisez les règles de la composition, de l’exposition …et oubliez les.

57. Cultiver son regard : voir la production des photographes, comprendre comment ils font, voir des peintures (les originaux en galerie), shooter à vide (sans apn), lire des livres (romans, poèmes, theatre…)

98. Ne soyez pas gêné.

Another good article is Quelques formules de calcul simples pour la photo.

Chase Jarvis @ Photo Shelter

Back in July, Chase Jarvis mentioned me on his blog (check it out if you haven’t yet) after I sent him a photo of me wearing one of his t-shirts in Resolute, Nunavut, the second most northern community in Canada. I got there after spending almost three weeks on the largest icebreaker in the country on a contract shooting climate change research as part of International Polar Year. This post is about Chase but first, the photo

600km north the arctic circle in a Chase Jarvis shirt

This is kind of old news but it’s worth sharing anyway. In September, Chase spoke at Photoshelter in NYC and the end result of this talk has been made available online. It’s just under an hour long so it took me a while to actually get around to watching it which is why I’m only posting it now but definitely, watch it if you want to learn something about the photography industry, lighting, production values and more. Some other videos from Photoshelter are linked over at Strobist. I haven’t watched them yet but I bet they’re also cool.

Freeing hard drive space on internal drives

My computer has an internal 100gb drive.  To protect myself, I have a pair of 250gb external drives that mirror off eachother where I store photos, movies and music.  Naturally, I rely on my internal drive a lot – something that has been more challenging lately as I have been regularly working with less than 5gb of free space.  I like to keep photos from the last two or three months saved on my laptop in case I ever have to quickly access them while traveling but the space issue has made this difficult.

Enter Disk Inventory X (free!) ! This program, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at first, graphically illustrates the size of each file on your computer.  I hadn’t used this program in a while so it came as a surprise to me when it found me an Adobe Bridge file called filesystem_blobs.MYD that was over 5gb in size.  sleepimage is another file that was about 2gb in size.  Both of these are self-generating and relatively non crucial.  I deleted them and the world is now a more harmonious place!

In my case, I also noticed various .msf files somehow created by Thunderbird (which I don’t use) were taking up room so I got rid of those too!

Remember the days when a 500mb hard drive with 4mb of RAM was almost unbelievable?

To end on a sidenote, if you have a Mac and are tired of embarrassing yourself with the startup chime after you’ve arrived late to class or to a meeting, check out Psst! (free again!), a program that controls the volume of this startup sound. Cool.

Disk Inventory X (free!)
Psst! (free again!)

Getting around in Århus

Pretty much everyone in Denmark (Europe?) rides a bike. Its strange though. I’ve grown up with the mind that the simple act of riding a bike was acting against the establishment – as though the powers that be prefer us in unsafe planet-killing motor-vehicles. But, in a city that has a great bike-loan program and boasts a wide bike lanes, elevated away from hazardous cars and trucks across a virtually flat landscape, I find myself transplanted in a land where my big-fuck-you-by-way-of-pedal-power is pretty well punt blocked. Did I mention that gas costs about twice what we pay in North America?

So being in such a bike-friendly place, I must feel pretty satisfied, right? Mission accomplished, Critical Mass! We won! Right? Not quite. My first impression actually is that cyclists here don’t know how good they have it and kind of take it for granted. Also, given the greater number of cyclists, can you imagine that there are actually traffic problems on bike lanes? All in all, I don’t sense the same sort of camaraderie that North American bike-culture offers. I miss places like Re-Cycles where I can fix my bike by myself using a generous pool of used parts and tools I can’t afford on my own. Hell, with the police auction here being the only real place to get a used bike here, I even miss the Bike Dump and the Salvation Army Thrift Store. It isn’t abnormal for people here to spend $100 on a used bike you’d get in Canada for between $10-40.

How excited I was, then, to finally decide that the dust covered and flat-tired pink and black 12-speed in my apartment basement would become my Danish road racer. After it hadn’t moved in over a month, could a free, fast bike be too good to be true? Yup. Finally, the owner of the bike, my downstairs neighbor reclaimed it. Very doubtful that it will ever get used though! What gives?

RIP.

Unlike in Canada where you’ll find people advocating death penalty for bike thieves, Bike theft is not only rampant here but it is sort of accepted as normal to the point that in some cases, it perpetuates itself. I only got here in August and already I’ve had friends who have been victims of bike theft. Suck it up and buy a new one? No. Most people will just steal someone else in the hopes that the universe will balanced itself. After a while, people will probably find themselves stealing their old bike without even realizing it.

You’ll also find a lot of abandoned bikes with bent wheels and broken spokes on the sidewalks. These are generally picked up by the cops and sold at auction. Still though, who would just ditch their bike – even a stolen one? OK. People in Ottawa ditch bikes too but we’re talking about mass ditching in Denmark. I could probably find 100 ditched bikes a day if I wanted to.

The city centre caters to nearly 100% pedestrian traffic too which is pretty awesome but cobblestones make not a good surface for skateboarding or biking with skinny tires for that matter.

Being sans-bike isn’t the worst thing though. It forces me to take the bus, which is an experience in itself whereby it lets me listen to sick jams and helps get me acquainted with the kids of Gellerup, “a concrete suburb that stands as an example of the 1960s urban development that scars several Danish cities.” Very similar to the banlieues in Paris.

How to make a Soundslide

AKA, how I make a Soundslide.

OK, so I am only on the second one I’ve ever made so maybe I’m no expert but I would be embarrassed if I didn’t intuitively know a thing or two about how this stuff works.

In my first project, I had some trouble with the images and the audio syncing up. Turns out my 32-bit mp3 was too much for poor little Soundslides to handle, so remember, folks(!), when you export your audio, 16-bit audio makes the world go ’round.

Now that that’s settled, here’s a bit of insight on how a beginner (me) produces something using Soundslides. First, you need Soundslides, which you can download for free or buy for $40 (Plus edition for $70). Then, you need a still camera. Got one? Good. Next, you need an audio recorder. This could be anything…you could even record onto a styrofoam cup if you want to go through the trouble of transferring it to a digital format. In these first projects, I’m using a MiniDV camera and an external mic. Pros adhering to the industry standard might understandably prefer the M-Audio MicroTrack II. To be honest though, I’m a little surprised that we aren’t hearing more about installing Podzilla on iPods and using its high-quality recording capabilities. I know this requires a bit of effort as it works best on the obsolete 3G iPod, which I now regret selling after getting a 5G iPod video that doesn’t seem to be keen on properly recording audio in Podzilla. In anycase, using a MiniDV camera might not be the prettiest solution but it does the trick.

After recording your audio (interviews, sound effects, ambient noise, music, etc…), take your recording device and dump the content onto your computer. If you are using a MicroTrack or a 3G iPod, you can just drag but if you’re using MiniDV or MiniDisc, you’ll probably have to record it in real time. I’ll focus on how I do this with the MiniDV camera.

First, plug the right firewire cord (4-pin to 6-pin!) into your camera and your computer, then open up iMovie and create a new project. From here, I could just import both audio and video to iMovie but I think this takes up a lot of unnecessary hard drive space and involves a lot of rendering time. Instead, I use iMovie to control the camera as I record using a nice program called Audio Hijack Pro ($32) in System Audio mode. From there, I clean up the audio in Audacity (free!) and finally, lay the audio out in Garage Band.

When you’re doing this audio work, remember to go at it with a plan about how you want to order the corresponding images or else you might find yourself going back on it later. Lets say you get everything right though! Now’s for the fun part. Open Soundslides and create a new one.

Tell the program which folder your selection of images lives and where your audio file lives. You should try and keep everything in a centralized folder so things don’t get too lost. From there, the program will populate the audio and every image in your folder. Since it will take every image in the folder, keep in mind that if you have 200 images in the folder but you really only plan on using 50 of them, you’ll save yourself lots of time by moving or copying these 50 images into a separate folder. Personally, I like to do this by adding stars and labels to my favorite images in Adobe Bridge.

When everything’s imported properly, you’re free to order the images however you like, choose transitions, captions and a bunch of other stuff. When it’s all done, you can Export it and the final product is saved to a folder called something like “save_for_web.

Interviewing is something I’ve got very little experience in but what I’ve learned so far is that you should try and get your subject to avoid answering questions about him or herself with “I” and that when answering questions about others, your subject should refer to these people by name or title rather than use “he”, “she” or “they”.

So how does it look? Take a look at my first project about my Latvian friend. Rolling Stones, please don’t sue. I think we’re even after you shot a music video outside my apartment at 2am.

La jetée (1962, Chris Marker) as a Soundslide

This influential film has inspired many artists, film and video makers to explore the possibilities of still photography in a more cinematic mode. For better or worse, it even laid the groundwork for 12 Monkeys (1995, Terry Gilliam). Originally narrated in French, the 26-minute film exists in many languages so to facilitate the lowest common denominator, here is part 1/3 of the English version (which I have never seen).

If you want more, the film in its entirety can be found on Google Video. On June 26 of this year, Criterion Collection released it along with Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983) that, if you are so inclined, can be purchased at finer DVD retailers everywhere.

Now, where am I going with this? As much as I enjoy experimental cinema, sci-fi is rarely my bag. La Jetée, however, is pretty significant when we think of how print and photojournalists today are more frequently combining audio and still images into a single device meant to go deeper into a story.

As with many (but not all) things, Magnum has been doing well in this area with the In Motion section of its site. The In Motion podcast is probably among my faves.

Soundslides has been getting a lot of attention over the last year or so. If you’re interested in what I’ve been talking about so far but haven’t heard of this $40 program ($70 for the enhanced version), you should think about downloading the demo and giving it a try. Basically, what it does is give you a (relatively) simple apparatus to combine a folder of images and a single mp3 file that you can output as a pretty looking Flash file with its own play/pause button and optional volume control.

It’s actually quite remarkable. If you want, you can read more about the impact it has had on photojournalism and get more examples of what people have done with it by reading the article “Soundslides and the rise of the audio slideshow“.

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