Last night’s photography session was an eye-opener. I haven’t taken a lot of low-light pictures with a digital camera, and I learned a few things about how mine behaves. The best picture I got was of the nearby freeway:
I have a picture with trees and a bunch of stars, and another long exposure (10+ minutes) with star trails, but there’s so much digital noise from the CCD that they’re not really very good to look at, nor are they fixable via software—at least not in any reasonable amount of time.
I played Spore for a while last night, and got to the tribal stage. Here is my creature, the aptly-named Sporlon:
His magic mouth-rings allow his lower lip to pass through them. In case you were wondering.
As promised, here are some pictures of the books I’ve been working on lately.
Some notes about these books:
- The are covered in bookcloth, a much less expensive alternative to leather. Especially when you’re practicing.
- They have folded corners. I can also do library corners, tabbed corners, and pleated corners.
- Each of these books was covered using a different method, allowing me to find the best way of making books that works for me.
- I did all the typesetting and printing of the book blocks. I can only blame myself if pages get sewn in out of order.
- I use Wausau Exact Opaque paper, Natural color. It starts out 11×17 and is 24/60lb text. This paper has a long grain, so I get it chopped in half to make short grain 8.5×11 paper, which I then fold in half to make 8.5×5.5 books with the paper grain aligned with the spine (for durability and longevity). Plain white paper is too bright in a book, IMHO.
I recently found some screw presses on Rockler and will use them to make my own book press, laying press, and plough.
I was in Edinburgh in August 2001 during their big festival and saw a really cool street band playing. I kicked myself for not finding out who they were, or buying one of their CDs. Tonight, while watching a PBS special on traveling in Scotland, I saw them again! On TV! Someone has to know who these guys are! Please help if you can!
This is the picture I took in 2001, scanned from slide film:
Here are some pictures from tonight’s PBS show:
If you know who this band is, please tell me so I can buy all their CDs!
Here is a video of the band from the TV show (15.7Mb).