gfixler's photostream  

Since this is a photo site, I'll stick with my photo background. I went to art school in FL for Computer Animation, but loved Photography so much, I minored in it, completing more than 2x the required courses, and building a huge, functioning, entirely enclosed darkroom that featured a fully black S-shaped entry hallway (with black curtain doorway), electrical wiring/outlets run under a raised linoleum floor, a formica counter with a built-in stainless steel sink (water stolen via garden hose from a faucet on the back of the building), a drainage tank w/ float-activated sump pump to jettison used water out the window through a 2" PVC tube framework, homemade drying racks built into the sink counter's underbelly, darklights hooked into the enlarger and to a master light switch, and a heavily reinforced basin in the ceiling (the entire ceiling) capable of supporting 2 tons of water for a gravity-based sink feed and print-washing system, which I thankfully never needed to use (thanks outdoor faucet!). I used enviro-friendly chemistry, except for the fixer, which I brought in a bucket to the reclamation tanks in the school's darkrooms.

Thanks to my school's great program, I've been able to work in most formats, including 120 & 220 (Hasselblad), 4x5 (I was able to rent a Sinar F2 for a whole semester for dirt cheap through a deal they had with our school - I loved that thing), digital 4x5 (on loan to our school - $40k at the time!), cibachrome, polaroid, lots of experimental/alternative stuff like lith (some at poster sizes!), cyanotype, salt prints, pinhole, contact, etc. I've developed infrared, B&W, and slide film, color prints w/ the lab's color developer, and have printed from thumbnail scraps up to large poster sizes. I've also rolled my own black and white film. I really miss all of that. My best qualities were composition (balancing form and tone), and Jerry Uelsmann style black-and-white enlarger-only photo composites, though obviously I was never that good :) The things I was worst at were finding interesting things to photograph in the first place, and anything that involved good timing on my part. I always needed to be deliberate and methodical. I was hired to photograph an event once, and didn't get a single good shot. I'm definitely all about the studio.

Now I'm just a poser with a Canon Powershot Elph S230 (3.2 megapixel), and very little time to go out and laze away an afternoon climbing trees or rearranging everything in sight for 'that perfect shot.' I take an interesting picture these days when one falls in my lap. I hope that having a Flickr account will inspire me to keep my eyes open more often for all the interesting views around me. For now, I'll probably just post lots of shots of toys and electronic project crap (another of my too-many hobbies).