Elf Sternberg

I have the mind of a twelve year old boy sometimes. In all my years, I don't think I've ever actually given an "organic, protein-enriched facial." It never struck me as having a point or being particularly pleasant.

Omaha informs me that this is an effective niche market: specialized eyeware for gamers, glasses that match your prescription and correspond to a 3-D game's output. Forgive me for stereotyping, but that model looks like she neither needs prescription lenses nor games extensively, and her expression verges on disdain for her subject. As for the media company, someone should tell their designer that desaturation is so 2009.

Looks like LisaKit's cat has found a hiding place. I should probably stand a small child next to that fort for reference.

If you've ever wondered what it looks like when a starship sinks into the sea, these photos of the Deepwater Horizon listing to one side will give your imagination an eyeball kick.

Nothing I've ever seen in a theater looks quite like that.

I haven't done much photoblogging recently, and I ought to get back up to speed. Here are a few I've taken recently, just for fun.

( Many photos. )

I cleaned out my cell phone and discovered that I had two blurry, unfortunate pictures of the gaggle of Japanese girls who had descended on Westlake Center a couple of weeks ago. It's like sightings of bigfoot:

That disclaimer in the lower right-hand side wasn't there on Friday, so it makes me wonder if maybe Legal got to the artist and the display people and said, "You know, we're going to need a disclaimer."

I guess what the artists is trying to say is that these clothes, whatever they are, are not in the uniform mold of Mr. Potato Head and the millions of clones. But the disclaimer was interesting.

To understand this photo, you have to be familiar with Frank Hayes's song, The Lincoln Park Pirates, which is a protest against a tow truck company in... Chicago, I think.

Anyway, Seattle has recently upgraded to these electronic meters that give out stickers you put on the inside of your window. These stickers often say "Good until... " and a time, up to two hours in the future. The thing about these stickers is that they're good anywhere in Seattle: you're not limited to the one parking spot you paid the meter for. Because the meter doesn't know where you're parked, you can get a parking sticker and the machine will tell you it's "Good until 5:00pm" on a street where it's illegal to park between 3:00pm and 7:00pm.

So, at 3:00pm, when the streets convert over to "all-lanes," the tow trucks go to work.

On the way home, there were Larouchites crawling all over one corner of Westlake Center Square. They tried to get my attention, but I breezed past them.

The Scientologists passing out pamphlets at the other end of the square were at least civil.

I was pleased to see that Metro did not rip out one of my favorite works of public art, Saccadoscopoeia, in order to make space for the new light rail ticket dispensers. Instead, the dispensers have been set up in the middle of the floor in a cluster. Unfortunately, Saccadoscopoeia was not operating today, so I didn't get any good photos. And I have to thank Peter Watts for teaching me what saccades are.

And finally, for the past three weeks when I've been taking the light rail, I've been going down this set of stairs. It says merely "Exit" on the top there. A transit cop at the bottom took pains to tell me that it was an emergency exit only. I actually showed him the photograph and said, "It doesn't say emergency exit. It just says exit." He explained, in not great English, that he had had a talk with the transit people and they insisted that they had agreed this was an emergency exit. In that case, I suggested it be labeled correctly. He agreed. He was remarkably civil about it.

Perhaps I shouldn't mock public art, but I paid for it and if this is the best entertainment value I can get for my tax dollar, then I should do what I can to enhance the experience.

Seattle recently built a complete light rail system from the airport to downtown. It's a lovely system, and I have some photos of it to show you later, but first I want to discuss the Tukwila Station, a huge thing of concrete, steel and glass that looms over the freeway like the home of some well-meaning but clueless Jedi overlord. It has three pieces of public art, and this one to the left amuses me first. You can see it through the glass when you drive past the station and I swear, it looks like nothing less than an uncomfortable scrotum.

This isn't so bad, as public art goes. But you know that post I made awhile back about how certain wavelengths of light give me headaches? See that blue crack running up the length of the lute? Yeah, that's a neon bulb, and it's exactly at that spot. I avoid the station at night if I can.

And finally, there's this thing: a ten-foot high, six-foot in diameter dangling tinkertoy or molecule, each node of which is cut off at some facing to reveal a polished steel flat panel with something "profound" written on it.

The thing is, the quotes are all about the city of Tukwila. Tukwila was probably a nice farming community fifty years ago, but since 1947 the city of Tukwila has been little more than support infrastructure for Seattle International Airport. There's also The Southcenter Shopping District, and aside from those two hubs there's just nothing "there" to Tukwila. It's a wholly artificial city that has become a municipal service arm for the sprawling service corridor around the airport and the low-rent flight-path apartment complexes that have sprung up nearby. It's hard to imagine a more dreary borough. Art about how wonderful it is now is ridiculous.

I remember when I arrived in Tukwila, too. I passed through it to get to where I wanted to go.

I'm still getting used to this camera, even after having it for two years. This morning I was playing with the macro lens and shot this lovely photograph of a bee on a flower. I really like the clarity of it, with the wings so clear and visible. The original (Flickr doesn't usually like me uploading the originals) is even better, but just this sample is good enough to show the result.

This was my first deliberate attempt at creating a high dynamic range photograph, a photo in which several different photos of the same subject taken with different exposure rates are stacked to create a single image with a much higher range of colors than the camera can record with a single image.

While I'm not entirely happy with it, it has an interesting, moody feel to it that I really liked. I was surprised at how deep the darkness feels in this picture, which is not at all what I'd want to convey given the subject matter, but still, kinda nifty. The image is the result of only three photos, taken at the medium, high, and low exposures of a consumer-level Lumix camera, and then processed with the Hugin image processor in HDR mode.

Someday, when I'm rich, I'll have a much nicer camera and I'll be able to play with this more extensively.