Brandymore Castle

The post print project is thinking about how mobile devices and networked media "could redefine how we do a couple of very basic things: how we tell stories and how we learn ." ( postprintproject.com ) I'm fascinated with this. I believe story telling is bound to the way our brains evolved and isn't really going to change much no matter what technology does. The networked and mobile space we inhabit could change how we learn and use information. I think it already has. I've been reading Jane Austen's novels as Gutenberg etexts on the iphone. The iphone is passable as a reader. I've not got eyestrain yet. I find it hasn't done anything new, but it has restored reading as a regular activity for me. I hate reading at the computer. I'm too lazy to go to the library (I'd have to drive across town to the central library where all the really good books are). Its just too easy to pick up the iphone, download a new book and start reading. That is dif...

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake. The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, ...

My print from Mokuhankan.com arrived from Japan today. It is a lovely print of turtles swimming carved by David Bull and printed by one of the Mokuhankan printers. You can see it at Hokusai Turtles - Swimming Turtles (I do not want to link to the image). Dave is one of the few people left in the world making wood block prints in the Japanese tradition. You can learn more about him from his woodblock.com website, which is one of the earliest examples of a website showing an artist's works and how they were made (although Dave does not consider himself and artist, but a crafts person). The carving of the water is graceful. I love the way the turtle on the surface, the water pattern and the gray shadow of the submerged turtle create layers. I thought it was more effective than the original carp print (from the lovely Hanga Treasure Chest series) the water design was borrowed from. The visual idea was adapted from Hokusai Manga , the famous collection of books of 'sketches' an...

When it came time for me to move to a DSLR camera, I chose a camera that produces images with an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is the same size as older motion pictures and standard definition televisions. It is also the same aspect ratio offered by most digicams. Having done all my previous photography with a 35mm SLR, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio, the new camera prompted me to think about printing 4:3 aspect ratio photographs. Before deciding to go with a Four Thirds camera, I considered what moving from 3:2 to 4:3 aspect ratio could mean for my photography. In the last five years I had made some drawings and watercolors sized 9 x 12 inches. I noticed that I preferred this size to 8 x 10. It had a more "open" appearance despite having nearly the same aspect ratio as the ubiquitous 8 x 10. The 8 x 10 size always seemed a bit "claustrophobic." I occasionally had prints made 8 x 12 to preserve the 3:2 scene I had composed in the viewfinder, but the mats and frames were ...