Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Serenity (Firefly) You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 81% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 81% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 50% Moya (Farscape) 50% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 44% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 31% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 31% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 25% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 25% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 19%

Another piece, one that I'll play around with a little more, from my gallery space on DeviantArt. Let's call this one of the gifts of poverty. Maybe.



What I would really like, among so many other things many of which I would like even more, is access to a darkroom, but I can't afford that, so I have to rely on Osco, which means assembly line service. For example, I brought in a shot I took along Broadway of a neo-baroque building whose ornamentation was brought out by the shadows cast by the setting sun and they developed it as if I had shot it at noon, "compensating" by lightening the image until they had washed almost all of the color out of it. One might imagine that the sight of a clearly shining street lamp in the picture would have tipped off the developer that this image had obviously been shot later in the day, but she was probably too rushed to notice. The image was ruined.



Further, as is so often the case, my handicap gets in the way. I can't drive, which means that even if I could afford a tripod, I would have trouble taking it everywhere I went - try carrying even a small object in your hands for a few miles and see how heavy it gets. You'll be surprised. This becomes a nuisance, because low light conditions are common in Chicago. That doesn't always keep me from getting a shot - if one finds something to brace oneself against, sometimes one can steady oneself enough to compensate for long exposures - but again, a lot of blurring occurs. These factors have left me with a wealth of ruined pictures which I'm loath to just throw out.



But the good news is that with the scanner comes an earlier release of Photoshop, and what would have been wasted shots proved, very often, to be a good starting point for image manipulation. Had I the money for my own darkroom, if I had motorized transportation to help me get around - then I'd probably have had lots and lots of nice, clean, crisp, well developed shots and no urge to repair them with software that in some ways, proved unsatisfactory, leading me in simple frustration to acknowledge the unreality of the whole process in the final result, pushing the images in the direction of surrealism or outright abstraction. Had I a little more money, I suppose that I might have gotten a later, better release, ... and so it goes.



Not that I wouldn't rather be gainfully employed, of course, but it is always a pleasant surprise when one is blessed by one's bad luck.

In case anybody should later find himself wondering what a 360 blog used to look like, since they seem to be on their way out right now, clicking onto the following screen shots of my old place (Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox at its original location on Yahoo 360) might help satisfy a little curiosity.

Screenshots - 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

If you'd like to see those slices assembled into a whole of sorts, I have a page where I do that. I'll probably post some more pages over on one of my Googlegroups, just for ... old times' sake? Something like that.

Note inserted: October 27. As good as my word, and I'm sure you were in suspense over that, right? I'll add these as they come in

Pages from my old blog- 2 3 4 5 6 7

If you popped over here from the Oct.22 post on Joseph Dunphy's Soapbox, now is the time to go back.