And by soul, I mean art. And by art, I mean my photographs.
The next St. Paul Art Crawl fast approaches - the 25th, 26th and 27th of April in fact. Now I’m not people-friendly enough to actually open my doors to let strangers paw through our goods and make small chit-chat whilst eating expensive foreign cheese and drinking San Pellegrino, but part of the reason we moved here was so that I’d be right on the art crawl circuit.
So instead I’ll be setting up a small display to hang on our front door with some of my nicer pieces1, with a slew of business cards and a link to my shop. And I’d love for you, dear reader, to be on the ground floor of the Pavleck Art movement!
Indeed, I’m quite serious. I have a lot of money and time invested into my little photography side business, and I’d like to see if I have what it takes to make it with the big dogs. So I’ve setup an Etsy.com shop, and I implore you to check it out. There isn’t much there now, but I plan to add more to it over the weekend. I’d like to know what you think of my prices, especially - to high? To low? To purple?
When you’re done there, feel free to check out Pavleck.Com proper, and if you are really daring, feel free to crawl through the thousands of photos I have up on my Flickr site2. I’d like to know what else you think I should put up for sale, and if you have any other ideas.
In fact, I’m so into this idea, that I’ll make ya a deal - if you give me some nice constructive criticism I will reward you! I’ll be ordering a lot of prints over the next several weeks, and I will give you one! A signed, framed photograph of my choosing3 will make it to your door! And they aren’t you’re average HP inkjet print either. Printed via a laser photographic process on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, it ensures a vibrant print that won’t fade, yellow, or bleed. They’ll last longer then me. I’ll contact you via email when it’s ready to go out, so be sure to leave a valid email address when you post. And if you’re post is really good, it might even be a limited edition run, that will never again be printed.4
Now let me have it! While you’re doing that, I’ll be busy mucking about trying to pretty up the main site and add some personalization to the Etsy site.5
Footnotes listed in the above post:
So stop on by the Rossmor building during the art crawl - we’re on the 5th floor [↩]
Screwing around with a capture program and I decided to make a movie out of it. This is, roughly, a day at work. I say roughly, because it’s really only 6 hours or so. It’s made from 675 images taken at 30 seconds intervals starting at 10am. Then it was lumped together as a movie, and here ya go. I plan on setting up a better one tomorrow, and doing it at 10 or 15 second intervals to make it a little bit longer.
National Geographic has an eerie article about how the prairies of North Dakota have been seeing a rapid decline for decades now. The eeriest part though, are the pictures. Great piece.
Yes, yes you heard correctly. The final “In The Loop” is taping tonight - and if you don’t have tickets, you’re screwed - they’ve been sold out for over a week now. The final episode of the season is titled “The Year According to You” - it’s a year in review. The good, the bad, and everything in between - especially the things that the media might have overlooked. Remember anything? Let them know. I’m sure it will be a wonderful show as always, and then after words we’ll be at Fujiya where I’m toasting the end of the season with a 1.8 liter bottle of Sake AND meeting JACC and whatever rowdy crowd he brings.
It is a slight pain for me this time around - there will be 5 cameras videotaping the show for posterity’s sake and as such I have to get in during the rehearsal to take a lot of my ‘money’ shots. So it will be a looooong night for me. But that’s fine, it’s the last one and I have a short day working from home tomorrow to recover with.
So come for the show, stay for the Sake, and if you didn’t hear last weeks, then listen now.
As has been reported time and time again today, you can now edit photos inside of Flickr. The online photo editing suite Picnik has been integrated within Flickr. To access it, just hit the new ‘Edit Photo’ button. Picnik will ask for permission to access your photos, click ‘Ok’ and you’re in!
Once inside you have a fairly impressive suite of tools available to help edit your photos - the initial ‘Edit’ screen lets you fix things and features options such as “Auto-Fix”, Rotate, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, etc and a Fun tab called Create that allows you to play with your photos by converting them into black and white, sepia, night vision, creating a heat map and other fun options. It definitely won’t replace a heavier editing suite such as Light Room1 or Photoshop, but if you’re looking for a simple fix to remove red-eye or to make it look like your photo is a sketch, this is a perfect choice!
Footnotes listed in the above post:
Light Room is my new Go To tool for photo editing - it has a few quirks you need to get used to, but it rocks! [↩]
So it truly did snow. Right smack downtown we received about 5 glorious inches of it - and there’s more scheduled for tomorrow.
I did take some pictures looking out of the loft, which I forgot to upload and will do so when I get home. I was going to walk around taking photos, but it was cold and windy and the snow was falling pretty heavily so I said pffft, screw it - back to Team Fortress 2!
But yes, terribly sorry about not uploading a picture. Sometimes it can seem like such a pain - download to my PC, upload to my Flickr account, blah blah blah - I just wish something would do it automagically. Oh wait, there is - Eye-Fi is a recent innovation and one people have been singing the praises of. It combines a 2GB Secure-Digital flash storage card and a WiFi connection all in one wonderfully orange package. You can upload the photos to your PC or you can send them to 1 of 15 photo sharing sites - such as Flickr. The card holds onto new photos until it senses that the WiFi connection you’ve setup is available, and then sends just the newest untransferred photos on over. Don’t want the world seeing all your photos? Configure them to upload as ‘private’ and there you go. Convenience on go! I could really use it and *gasp* don’t ya know, it sells on Amazon and is conveniently on my Wish List! Oh, and with it I’ll need an SD to Compact Flash adapter too. Now get going - Christmas is only a few weeks away!
The St. Paul Winter Carnival is selling shares of stock this year. No, not stock like you’d see on NASDAQ, but a stock in the festival. It’s called the Stock in a Block program and for just $122 “the public can help keep the Carnival “cool” by buying stock in a block of ice. Five dollars from each stock sale will go to the Dorothy Day Center in Saint Paul to help provide warm meals for fellow community members in need.”1
The third to last taping of “In The Loop” happened yesterday - once again to another packed audience. So packed that we had turn several people away - I think it’s catching on!
The topic, quite timely mind you, was Flip Flopping. While based mainly on the current political flip flopping (Oh, hi Mr. Romney) it also covered personal flip flopping and when a flip flop can be good - including the ex-Catholic father whose entire life was changed when he left his small home town and went to college, and about a large and ‘evil’ corporation doing a few things that aren’t quite so evil.
The music was phenomenal as always, if not more so. The Smarts departed from their usual jazzy tunes and delved into the realm of Ska and the host Jeff Horwich even did some rapping.
Haven’t been to “In The Loop” yet? You’re seriously missing out! Dubbed the Prairie Home Companion for the Gen X crowd, it thrives on listener participation - each show is comprised of your ideas and features your words. The buzz is getting around, and you really should read the Loophole, the In The Loop blog and RSVP for one (or both) of the 2 remaining shows for this season. Feel like getting more involved? Join the insight network and get invites to our round table discussions where we tightly focus on topics and get your input and anecdotes.
And as usual, here are a few shots from the show - or check them out over at Flickr.
Recently, as you all know, I built a new PC. It uses a 3Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4Gb of ram. It’s a mighty machine and plays games incredibly. More importantly, it makes short work of photo editing, even when I apply multiple changes to RAW images.
I think with the copious time I have during the holiday weeks coming up I’ll start re-reading my photo editing books and see if I can’t pick it up. I’m already a member of several stock websites, and I know several people in my building that shoot weddings - perhaps I can spark up a deal.
I take some half decent photos, but with some photoshop treatment they could become exceptional photos.
This weeks topic at In The Loop was Charity: What Gives? Did you know that the US is #1 when it comes to donating money, but only #8 when it comes to donating time? Listen to this weeks show Sunday 6pm on MPR (91.1FM for those of us in the Twin Cities - Find your station). There are only 3 more episodes left this season - don’t miss what’s being called “The Prairie Home Companion for Generation X”! We’re taking next week off, so the next taping will be on November 29th. Then it’s December 6th and December 13th. Sign up and come give us your opinion. Curious as to what an episode of In The Loop is like? Listen to last weeks show, Bullying for Grown-Ups - the most packed show we’ve had to date!
It’s time for the Pavleck.Com Weekend edition. A lot is going on and I’ll make you privy to it all!
First up, it’s that time once again - the St. Paul Art Crawl kicks off tonight at 6pm. I’ll be walking around my building checking out (and buying) some of the art the incredibly talented people in Twin Town can put together - will I see you there? I’m really hoping to!
See if you can find me or my work called “All my exes live on canvas” (A play on an old country song). It may or may not be there. The fun is figuring it out!
But yes, terribly sorry about not uploading a picture. Sometimes it can seem like such a pain - download to my PC, upload to 
The 
