I'm walking to my car. Up ahead, a small girl grabs her mom, points at me in disgust and yells "EEWWW look who's here!" No one else is in sight.

Robert

I got shocked! Bad! 3 times! Once by a live wire! Whaaa!

The second time brought tears to my eyes! I'm fine now though.

Kate

I've probably been having too much fun playing around with these old photos lately. Yesterday I figured out how to make an animated gif file. I wouldn't be surprised if this is all I do for days on end.

Several more exposed pieces of light sensitive photo paper from work. When cropped like polaroids, they begin to look like landscapes.

I'm in front of a large box full of objects labeled Vogel gift! Funny, i can picture the apt these came from!

Kate

Robert came to visit

Two paintings that Robert gave me in exchange for photographing his new body of work this past weekend. I'll be posting the whole collection soon.

Trouble at work...

This photopaper after it's come out of the processor. It's supposed to be completely white. Somehow, I let a little light hit it.

From Kate

My birthday gift from Kate. It came from a potter at the Ann Arbor Arts Festival this past week.

Today has been a great day, even though I've been working. The fact that I'm pushing thirty hasn't sunk in yet. I went back to look at a comment I left on Antonio Curosone's post about his birthday. It's funny to think how light hearted I was. I wrote:

Getting old is double sided blade. On one hand you gain experience and get better every day you’re alive. On the other hand, you increasingly loose touch with the youth culture you were a part of. I’m roughly the same age as you (26) and am still an undergrad! (Design major — I took a non-conventional educational path) So breathe easy my friend. Have a great day!

—
Nice words from my friends:

Happy Birthday, Kevin. I wish you many more successful and enjoyable yrs.
Johnnie Lewis

Happy birthday you grizzley shit kicker.
Robert

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
ppy birthday.
hope all is well,
Brian

hbd. dw.
John

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABYCAKES!! I hope u r having a good day at work n that u enjoy ur lunch outside! 7 hours until u get a birthday kiss from me!
Kate

I LUV YOU TOO MY BIRTHDAY BOY! HAPPY 28TH! DAD SAYS LUV AND MISS & HAPPY B DAY. XXXOOO THE FOLKS @ 2 CONCETE POST
Mom

Happy happy birthday big buddy. Love you too my son. Have a great day.
Pappy

Old photo of young baby

Today I've been scanning and retouching old photos. This baby is by far, one of the most peculiar I've seen. Judging from the age, I'd say the photographer probably put the baby to sleep with the extremely long exposure time.

im drunk as a skunk, re-wriiting this script, dressed up in a sailor uniform

Bradley

A spread from the book. Each page needed scanned separately (because the scanner bed can only accomdate 11" x 17"), and then stitched together in Photoshop.

umma-f-607_1858

I was asked to scan a book a very old book. The paper was so dry and brittle, that a little bit of flaking was unavoidable. I hate being put in that kind of position. It's ironic that some of the material was lost through the archiving process.

One thing I forgot to mention in our conversation about weed: The Amish are known for smoking the herb. I like to think I collect knowledge. You ever see the Amish in McDonalds with mystified faces? Stoned out of their minds.

Robert

umdental_293_1961

Three students from the UofM School of Dentistry. The photo was from 1961. I've been scanning and color correcting mountains of photos like these for the last two days.

I'm not sure if being a stud machine is worth all of that work. If there were a practical motivation like being an Alpine bike messenger, then maybe.

Aaron W.

Milk makes my butt fart.

Pete VanBeck

7.07.09

Eighteen years in a travelin' band, seen a lot of one night stands, but still i find my self so very much alone... For some reason songs like that remind me of getting squirrels caught in my bike spokes.

Chris Best

7.07.09

space station

In 2 min, look south east in the sky. For 5 min the space station will be visible—it'll look like a shooting star. If it isn't too cloudy.

Kate

7.8.09

The Great Gallery

Canyonlands National Park, Utah. I'd like to see this sometime.

Something interesting once in a while

It's a quiet day at work. Tomorrow is the Fourth of July. Sometimes I work with really interesting images.

Firth of Forth bridge

Gmail allows custom colors... finally

I'm really happy about this. It took a long time before Gmail provided us with themes. Now, in addition to themes, we have the freedom to deviate even further from that terribly underdeveloped aesthetic system that Google has forced onto us for all to long.

Learning to write

Writing is hard for me, and that's one of the reasons I started this blog—to practice putting my ideas into words. I was checking out Edward Tufte's site tonight, and found this book about sentence structure by his wife Virginia. I think I'll buy it and daydream about reading it, just like I did with The Quantitive Display of Information.

Trial and error

I spent about three hours color correcting this photo yesterday. It seems our monitors are somewhat out of calibration with our large-format LightJet printer. The frustrations come from tweaking colors in Photoshop, saving two or three versions for print, printing the files on the LightJet, processing the paper, trimming the paper off the roll, and then holding the print next to the original and realizing your color corrections are not even close.