Recently in photography

Last Sunday at one in the afternoon, a local Grand Rapids guy named Rob Bliss and a handful of friends started to dump paper airplanes off of downtown buildings. By the time they finished, one hundred thousand planes had descended on the nearly 20,000 people crowding the streets below. While the planes were raining down, loudspeakers blared a refrain from "Olsen Olsen," a song by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. Some of the people in the crowd hummed along; others played the tune on instruments that they had brought for the event.

The plane launch was part of Grand Rapids ArtPrize, an "open art contest" offering nearly half a million dollars in prizes to the most popular entrants as determined by public vote. Sara, the kids, and I have been loving ArtPrize, discussing what we like and don't like, what effect certain pieces have on us, and even how we should, or wish to, define art. The contest has provoked a lot of discussion among friends and neighbors, too. Some people seem almost offended by it, as if it demeans art in some way, while others are reveling in the "anything goes" nature of the competition.

There is a lot more I could say about both the paper-airplane stunt and ArtPrize in general, but I haven't fully formulated my thoughts about them, so I'm going to hold off for now. Instead, I'll leave you with a few pictures of downtown Grand Rapids last Sunday. Click on the thumbnails to get larger versions (without leaving the page).

In mid-October I received an email from a friend of mine, asking if I could fill in for him at the Future of Web Design conference in New York City. He was scheduled to lead a workshop on November 3 and give a presentation the next day, Election Day.

Of course, I jumped at the chance. And, of course, I panicked soon thereafter. The workshop (3 1/2 hours) and presentation (30 minutes) required a lot of preparation in a short amount of time. But somehow I managed, and the workshop went better than I could have hoped. The presentation didn't go quite as well, but that's okay. Without going into too much detail, I'll just say that it was a terrific learning experience (and if you're really interested, you can read all about it on my techie blog, Learning jQuery).

After Tuesday's conference, I was too exhausted to join the rest of the speakers and attendees at the "after-party," so I took a long walk back to my hotel, checked out early, and took the F train to Queens, where I stayed overnight with my dear friends Nicole and Julian and baby Dash and watched the election results come in. It was such a treat to be able to unwind with friends and share this amazing moment in our nation's history with them. It couldn't match spending that time with my family, but it was the next best thing.

Here are a few pictures I took during my brief visit. Click on them to see a larger version.

I just saw a page full of photographs that people have taken of themselves with album covers obscuring parts of their bodies to make the pictures on the albums look like extensions of themselves. Some are amusing, some hilarious, and some downright creepy.

Apparently there are quite a few people doing this sort of thing, with a quickly growing group of "sleeveface" photographers on flickr.com and elsewhere.

(via FreshArrival)

Actually, some of the photos are not exactly new, but they're new on the website, and I like how "slew" rhymes with "new" in the same way that I like how "slough" rhymes with "enough," so enough already with the lengthy introduction and on to the photos.

Some of the pictures have my kids in them:

Others feature friends' kids:

Still others are of a recent wedding:

Looks like they're all portraits.

Last week I took my camera to Calvin College and snapped a few photos on campus. It was a lovely day, and the leaves were peaking, so I thought I'd share a few of the pics on this here blog.

On Thursday night my family and I attended a beautiful wedding on the beach of Lake Michigan. The bride was a former student of mine, our kids' babysitter, and a dear friend, so I was especially anxious about being entrusted with the role of "official" photographer. I wanted to make sure that the bride and groom had a photographic record of the event that at least approximated what they remembered.

The night before the wedding I recharged the digital camera's battery and packed a film camera and an extra set of batteries, just in case something disastrous happened. I unloaded all the photos from the 6GB Hitachi microdrive and set it carefully back into the camera. Two 256MB CF cards would serve as backup. I felt pretty confident that everything would go smoothly.

The beach setting was gorgeous, and the bride and groom and all the attendants and families were gracious as I took some formal shots before the ceremony. Other than a few drops of rain, everything went off without a hitch—unless you count the one involving the bride and groom. The reception, too, was lovely, even during the 30 minutes or so of rain when the guests scrambled back to the cottage for cover.

But then something strange happened. The camera stopped working. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't snap any more pictures. When I looked at the LED screen, I saw a blinking "CHA." Could it mean the camera needed to be charged? No. It would have shown a blinking battery indicator. Was the memory card full? It was too unlikely that I'd filled 6GB in the few hours I was taking pictures. I pulled the card out and threw in a backup. Everything worked fine with the new card, which was a relief. But what was the problem with the other one? I'd have to wait until the next day to find out.

The next day I plugged the card into my computer to take a look at the files and transfer them over to my hard drive. I clicked on the folder containing the photos. Nothing happened. I clicked again. An error message popped up. The folder was unreadable; files were either corrupted or missing. Uh oh. The pit that had been forming in my stomach thrusted its way into my throat.

A quick check of the drive's properties showed that 4GB of its space had been filled. Clearly there was something on it. Little good it would do me, though, if I couldn't open the folder. Dragging the drive's contents over to the computer's hard drive didn't work either. So, I went to Google and searched for file recovery. The results were promising, as it looked like I was far from alone in my plight and a number of companies had created software to bring back files from the dead.

The first software I downloaded, a freeware program, balked about halfway through the scan of the microdrive and stopped working altogether in subsequent tries. The second and third programs allowed for the downloading of a demo version that would show me what they could recover but wouldn't let me save the files until I shelled out some bucks. Neither of them worked.

I decided to try one more before giving up, mostly because a couple other web sites had recommended it. The program, PHOTORECOVERY by LC Technology, operated the same way as the second and third programs, so I downloaded it and ran the scan, feeling not the least bit hopeful. To my surprise, though, it started showing the very first pictures I had taken with the microdrive— pictures that I had already deleted months ago. But the first program had shown a few pictures, too, before it crashed.

PHOTORECOVERY kept going and going. And going. I let it continue scanning in the background, and when I looked at it again a couple hours later it had completed its scouring of the drive and found over 1,600 photos. I zipped back to the LC Technology website, paid my $40, and scanned the microdrive again. This time, as it found the photos, it saved them to the hard drive folder of my choice. The photos were restored. All of them. Every photo from the wedding, and every other photo that I had ever taken with that memory card. For the first time since the ordeal began, I smiled.

I'm still not sure what corrupted the files in the first place, but after I got all the pictures off, I reformatted the microdrive from within the camera, and everything seems to be working fine again. A few websites recommend reformatting memory cards every once in a while anyway (keeping in mind that it erases everything currently on the card and makes it a LOT harder to recover those files later). Apparently, reformatting every so often helps avoid the kind of file corruption that happened with mine. The good news, though, is that if your photo files ever do get corrupted, or if you accidentally delete them, and you really, really need them, there is a good chance that you'll be able to get them back—with a little perseverance and luck.

The most vexing advantage of digital photography is that it allows me to take 400 pictures on a six-day vacation. One day I will be able to sort through all of them. For now, here are a few snapshots of our trip to San Francisco and environs.

"Signs" as in street signs or store signs; "Wonders" as in one wonders what the person who wrote that or painted that was thinking, or if the person was thinking at all.

I took these photos while walking around downtown Grand Rapids the other day.

Grand Rapids can be really gorgeous this time of year, with an eyeful of yellows and oranges and reds wherever you look. It's hard not to take pictures these days. Maybe in a way I'm trying to store up some color for the long, bleak winter that lies ahead.

Click on the pictures to see the full versions.

Yesterday I took my camera along to work in the off chance that I would have time to snap some pictures of people milling around outside during lunchtime with all the booths set up for Celebration on the Grand, the last hurrah of the summer in downtown Grand Rapids.

But since the bus dropped me off a half hour before work started, I decided to slow down the usual 10-minute walk and snap a few on my way to the office. Here is what I came up with.

Click on the pictures to see the full versions.