The Twilight Report

In January of 2015 I decided, as an exercise, to post one film photograph every day for the entire year. They go on my The Facebook and my blogity blog, but not the LJ version. The idea was to get used to working with film again on a regular basis. I called it ‘film 365’ for the number of days in the year obviously. (A sampling of the results can be seen here). (The entire collection is here). Originally it was only going to be a one year thing, but in January of 2016 I noticed that there were going to be 366 days in 2016 so I could do it again and call it ‘film 366’. Obviously.

Lena wrote the holiday letter as usual and I said I would pick out some photographs. Only when I started looking at my pickys, I noticed a lot of them were of old rusty tin cans and brick walls where the paint was coming off. And I realized most of them while interesting photographs for me weren't really of the “here we are standing in front of this tourist attriaction” sort that you expect in a year end summary holiday letter. We used a couple of mine, but mostly we shiped a letter with her photographs. I am okay with that. Instead of the holiday letter I write my year end summary here, with an overview of some of my favorite photographs. Some are my favorite because they are a pleasing composition. Some of them because they elicit an interesting observation. Some of them just because.

A lot of ink has been spilled on the subject of what a terrible year 2016 has been on account of various elections and how many celebrities have died. Actually for us 2016 has been a pretty good year. Lena has gotten a job where she is being paid, and jettisoned the one where he boss was not paying her. I got a raise. We've had several pretty nice vacations here in the states and off in Europe. I am sad to see a few celebrities go, but it does not feel espeically personal. A couple of elections didn't go the way I expected or wanted to, but the actual consequences don't start to really set in until 2017. Which is what this comes down to. Next year, 2017, is going to be the shitty one. I am optamistic that we will get through it.

With that all said. Once again. In no particular order, except for “random”:

(lime photographing flowers ≈ 110) This is my favorite portrait of my wife that I took this year. I was shooting redscale, which is where you expose film on the wrong side and you get this red shift. If you under expose redscale you get too much red, but if you overexpose, you get some other colors. Which is what I did here. It was also magic hour, which helped.

I am going to post a few more next week. For those interested, you can see the whole lot here:

• www.wdlabs.com/twilight/tag/film366

Yesterday I cut our last release of our product for the year. The version is 1.16.17. The first number in the triplet is always 1. Not sure why. The second number in the triplet refers to the year, in this case 2016. The third indicates that it is the 17th release this year. Actually it will be only the 16th given that one release was canceled. We are supposed to do a release every two weeks. So we ought to have 26 releases every year. What happened to the other nine releases? Well sometimes we delay a release because of a holiday. 4th of July week is usually bad to release on because many people are on vacation. In December I don't ever try to schedule more than one release because of Christmas. Still. We delay a lot of releases because people can't get their shit together in time, and we have to delay a release in the testing phase.