About reverendkomissar / Tom Dobrowolsky  

Having consigned myself to continuing, voluntary quasi-poverty, I started the PhD Program in the Built Environment in Autumn 2007 at the University of Washington in Seattle. The elevator ride description of my research interests: urban geography, public space & landscape communication, "urban literacy", and the landscapes as text. I take pictures and write about my travels for both research and for fun. If they don't throw me out of the academy, I hope to make a living out of traveling, bending my own schedule, and working with students.

*** Vanity, Doodlings, and Other Photography

In addition to posting images of built/urban landscapes, I also use my account to post things of a more personal nature: marginalia I've drawn, foods and funny things, parody and mockery, and whatever else visual that I want to show off.

Even more importantly, I like to post vanity shots of me in fabulous outfits. I don't fancy the term crossdresser as I believe everybody should wear whatever the hell they want without worrying about stifling sex/gender rules. Personally and more internally, I am transgendered and genderqueer. That means that some days I am a butch girl while other days I am a chickified guy; mostly, I am somewhere in between. So I can change motor oil while wearing a frock and heels. Fortunately, I have gotten over any gender-crossing discomfort long, long ago and have happily been living out my gender-blurring narrative, internally and externally.

As a general request, please don't add me to your contact list if your photo page is nothing but cock shots or your personal porn archives and masturbatorium. I may like cock as much as the next bi, but I'm here for the creative pictures not for the porn. I certainly will not reciprocate and you will be blocked.


*** Equipments and apparatuses

I primarily use a Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 for hard core photography. Adding to the stock 18-75mm lens, I recently picked up a fixed 50mm so that I can have less flexibility in framing compositions via optics alone. My hypothesis is that this will cause me to walk around more and view subjects from more angles.

I also still use my previous Canon A60. Its convenient size allows me to tote it around unobtrusively for off-the-cuff snapshots. I am currently assembling pieces to construct a camera of my own design. It will use a sealed box, the CCD from one of the better cheesy USB web cams, a Canon FD lens flange, and either my Canon FD 50mm lens or the Vivitar 75-210mm zoom. And if that works, I'm going to put together a USB digital Holga.

Recently, I've been geotagging my images using a GPS logger and software/scripts, some of which I wrote, to automate the process. Drop me a line if you are interested.


*** Thoughts on Flickr Video

I initially had somewhat mixed feelings about Flickr allowing people to post videos up to 90 seconds in length. On the one hand, I'd hate to see it become YouTube II. On the other hand, I've always felt that it was somewhat dumb that both sites limited themselves to monomedia. If this is the way Flickr's headed, I'd also like to see support for media's red-headed stepchild: audio.

Perhaps it is more of a reflection of the media work that I do currently, and have done in the past, but to me media has always been multi-. I've always been in favor of interfiling books, CDs, DVDs, etc. in libraries. Moreover, the very name Flickr is charmingly evocative of "moving images" and "talkies", moreso than it evokes still photography, in which case it would have been more aptly named F-stop.

In any case, video on Flickr: I'm all for it. Purists, whatevs... bring it on... bring it all on!

*** Read my other blather:

urbanarchives.org/wordpress
seattlest.com/authors.php?author=seattle_tom
urbanarchives.org/fstop/adaptations
www.linkedin.com/in/reverendkomissar