Nikon 060818

I found a CD labeled with handwritten marker “NIKON 060818”. I used to save and back up my photos every few weeks by fitting as much stuff as I could onto a 4.7gb DVD disc. The DVD seemed at first to offer exponentially more space than the 640mb and 700mb CDs it usurped. But I quickly found ways to fill those disks faster and faster.

Here is one picture I found on that disk. I think there is a story to be written here:

The empty water bottle was left by man as he reported to work in this unmarked office building. To call it an office building might bestow undeserved prestige upon the structure. It looks like an oversized trailer. Few people know what goes on behind 55-11, but we assume the business conducted here is fully known to the casually dressed individuals who enter this door but seem never to reëmerge. They have keys and arrive punctually on the hour, every hour, allowing themselves in without knocking on the door or announcing themselves. The man who discarded the empty water bottle may have done so because consumption of beverages is not permitted in the structure, or because he was confused about what to place in the garbage and what to leave for recycling.

The grey area on the door, under the blinded window, once had a sign announcing the name of a company or an individual.

The newspapers, discarded but not crumpled up by their litterers, were read and thirsted upon for news specifically used by individuals behind involved in the mysterious operation that goes on behind this white door.

Or maybe there is no story here. But I like the picture. It has hard lines and sagging weaknesses.

Sorting through other images on this old DVD I find little of any merit. A lot of images look like I got them in the spirit of ideas I was saving for later, or places to remind myself to revisit.

This shot I remember as it happened. At Calvary on an August, 2006, afternoon I was surprised to see a young woman confidently march barefoot through the yard. It is uncommon to see much of anybody at Old Calvary except for groundskeepers and the very occasional gravesite visitor. I wanted to stop this girl and ask what special interest she had in Calvary. But I am not smooth like that. The best I could do was get this photo, filtered through NIK’s “Glamour Glow.”

Also on this DVD I found a small set from a favorite experiment of mine, in which I captured photographed the screen of an old decrepit Magnavox 27″ television I had owned since 1991. Using a webcam I managed to grab some screamingly deranged images. Somewhere around here is a DVD that would have been filled with thousands of images from that webcam/Magnavox fixation. I let the webcam snap shots of that TV for long hours. Somehow the disk got lost or corrupted. So that was a waste of time. I waste a lot of time in these things I do.

Wow, speaking of wasting time. Adding that frivolous little photo essay above was supposed to be easy. I switched from the estimable Menalto Gallery 2 to jAlbum a while back. I have not made regular use of jAlbum since purchasing it. If I had then maybe I would be more nimble with navigating around its idiosyncracies. Gallery was just so easy, you know? Every time I dig in to jAlbum to throw together a little bullshit photo essay it ends up taking hours — with a fair amount of that time spent nearly giving up, or going for a walk outside to ease the aggravation. When I choose the album web root it warns that it can’t access the site, even though I can and jAlbum should be able to as well. Then it warns that it is going to overwrite site root. I hit “OK” anyway and it does not overwrite site root as threatened. Having to insert the album via the iframe tag is annoying but it is a compromise I can live with if it allows search engines to index individual image pages. That won’t actually happen with the above photo set but it does with other jAlbum stuff at px.sorabji.com, which uses a primitive looking but SEO-friendly theme. But there’s another annoyance with jAlbum. Unlike the great Menalto Gallery in jAlbum it is not possible to use different themes for subalbums. On the other hand it comes with the advantage (I guess) of allowing one to publish to multiple sites and locations from one piece of software. And it generates actual flat HTML pages, not PHP scripts disguised as such through mod_rewrite. Complicated HTML pages with oceans of CSS and JavaScript hooks can be vulnerable to hacks just like PHP scripts. but the risks seem farther afield than dynamic platforms. Menalto Gallery at least appeared to be trustworthy on the security front, though, with independent security audits and such to vouch for the program’s security. But that software is abandoned.

WordPress photo galleries all suck. Having wasted plenty of time and money on them and I think I can say that some authority. They all seem to be based on the same BWG plugin from forever ago, and they all are crafted as if SEO does not matter, almost like someone’s mission was to make sure images were invisible to search engines. They are also ridiculously difficult to move from one WordPress install to another.

I only care some of the time about SEO for images. But it happens to be one of the many things Gallery 2 did very well.

Bah, boring, keyboard-gnashing rant over. It’s just that my life feels like it is in constant combat with software that doesn’t work, services that cannot be relied upon, all while the people who write the code chuckle at the frustration their paying customers go through. We live in an age of perpetual obsolescence and the forced ritual of continuous updates.

I have no real need for this DVD, or the dozens of others which fill a CD/DVD folder to beyond its capacity. Everything on those discs is in cloud storage or on multiple hard drives and a RAID here. I’ll keep the discs around anyway. It’s what I do. I digitally hoard. Or as I more elegantly describe the behavior: The Art of Accumulation.

Here, for no reason, is a filtered image of an advertisement for Jessie Diamond and the Thousand, an apparently defunct act which I assume did not actually comprise a thousand individuals. Seen in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in August, 2006, it is one of several photos I got of that area just as gentrification commenced.