Pixel Darkroom Photography

I’ve always been interested in new technologies. It’s fascinating how quickly things have developed in the last “few” years. When I was in high-school, I once saw a big huge ad for a new Motorola flip phone. It had, of course, a black and white LCD screen but what was so new about it, it was the fact that it was so small. I just did a search on the internet and couldn’t even find a picture of it. A year and a half later, I went to Germany and managed to purchase one (with a contract, of course) for 100 DM (Deutsch Mark, remember the currency before the €uro?) This was a long time ago. Then came the GPRS phones, then colored screen LCD phones and then the camera phone (I’m not sure about the order of these) and pretty soon you could do all kinds of unimaginable things with a small telephone.

Well, I do appreciate this rise in the development of the technology and have a deeper theory behind it, but suffice it so say that up until roughly 200 years ago mankind could only travel as fast as they were able to in 33 AD, let’s say. Man has not been able to travel any faster than it used to during the time when Jesus walked on this earth. In the past century we’ve send people into orbit, we’ve sent people on the Moon (I wasn’t around for that one) and people could watch and hear that live on television.

Today, with a small portable telephone (ok, it’s a cell phone, or a smart phone, or whichever you want to call it) people can do something like the little film below. Unbelievable. This was filmed with the Nokia N8 phone, directed by the McHenry Brothers. It was shot in four our days with the Nokia N8 using no back up cameras, with the streets of London and St Albans being the backdrop to the story about one commuter’s eventful journey to work. Interesting what imagery can be made with a $550 telephone.

Enjoy. Make sure you watch it on HD (yes, that’s vernacular for high definition, from a telephone!)

There are so many things that have changed in your life time and my life time. I have seen technology change on so many levels and I am sure there are bigger changes yet to come. I have seen people come and people go, I have seen countries change, presidents change, dictators go (I am too young to have seen them come, but I’m sure there are some), I have seen regimes change.

One of the things that this cart reminds me of, is a similar cart my grandparents had in Iasi, Romania, where people had to buy propane by the tank to run their stoves. The rest of the house was heated with wood, but the cooking was done with propane. (I think it was propane; I know it was dangerous and we couldn’t play around those tanks). My grandfather had a hard time in his life. After having fought in WWII and living under Communism, life didn’t offer him many possibilities back in Romania. I remember to this day stories he told us about his combat experience, about growing up under an oppressive regime, about moving from the country to a city, stories about my parents.

One thing I remember was from back when he did not have a place to live. I don’t remember all the details, where my grandparents were living and how he came to accomplish this, but he told me he once saw a bird with a straw in its beak. He realized that she was going to build a home for herself and he said “I’m going to do the same.” So he started building a house. It was amazing to see old photographs of the house and the area in the times when it was built. There wasn’t even a road back there, only empty fields and dirt. When I grew up, there was on one side the Botanical Gardens which is basically an amazingly beautiful park and on the other side a full size soccer field for practice, where he had made a gate in the fence and my brothers and I could go and play soccer and run in the sprinklers or run with the dogs. The first house he built, was sort of temporary and was made of some special kind of home made bricks. They lived there for quite some time until they had finished the other house. This other house was the one where the cooking was now done using propane. What a big change from using wood in a stove. The propane came in tanks that were brought by a truck down the road, outside a small shack that served as a convenience store. Some people would line up there and wait for the truck to come. There was this sort of word of mouth announcement that the truck had come and the rest of the people could send someone (kids or grandkids) with a cart and some money to exchange the tanks. I don’t even remember how often this was. It might have been every two weeks, every week, I don’t know. I do remember that we used to carry each other in this two wheeled cart and run in the street with it. It was a fun toy. We fell a lot since it was not meant to carry people, but that didn’t stop us from playing with it. We didn’t have helmets and there wasn’t any big “warning!” sign on it to “keep away from children”.

Then at some point some neighbors had gas pipes installed and there was no more need for them to go exchange tanks. Technology was advancing.

tank cart

New technology… old technology. It’s raining again so I didn’t feel much like going outside. There goes the close up shot for day seventy eight…

2048 megabytes of random access memory

Strobist info: 580 EX via PW at 1/128th very close to the RAM. I used +7 diopter filters on a 50 mm prime. Setup shot here.