Monday 7 March 2016

MA-Ness Term 2 Week 10 - Weak being the operative word....

As you can see not much going on on this post it note - thanks to a deluge of snot that started last Sunday afternoon on our return from watching Victim at the Hyde Park Picture House.......



Thankfully the abundance of snot side of things didn't last too long (lying in bed with a tissue stuffed up your nose to stem the tide because you are bored of blowing it is not a good look, nor is it especially healthy I suspect either) but I am still suffering with a sore throat and limbs and joints that feel more achey than if I'd spent all day at the gym - which I haven't for a while as I've been feeling so ropey. So that explains why the post it note for last week is comparatively empty and it mostly consists of my annoyance at having to cancel and rearrange things - things which included going to an phd open day at Leeds Met (I emailed to apologise and also to ask a couple of questions and I have had a positive response and am going to set up another meeting with them) a talk on the rise of the Victorian Underworld at Kirkstall Museum, Show and Tell at Leeds Library, a showing of Rams at the Hyde Park Picture House, a tutorial, a lecture on proposal writing, an appointment in the print room and a dinner date with chums I don't see very often that I was really looking forward to.

Bah to snotty lurgy coughy illnesses and a pox upon them too.

I don't use much photo-editing software as a rule, it doesn't make my heart sing (the measure I use as to how much I want to do something - though it is not to be confused with things that *have* to be done) to sit in front of the computer and mess about with images - other than a bit of cropping/contrast/brightness altering. And until I started cyanotyping that was all I did, I now use photoshop though to boost levels and invert images to make negatives suitable to be used to make cyanotypes - a process which is relatively simple and straightforward. I have also used it to get rid of a 'modern fucking bin' which was otherwise ruining the view of a beautiful avenue of gravestones. 
I have tried to use it a couple of times to put watermark copyright notices on images I'm emailing - I'm increasingly reluctant to post images of mine without this. Last week I spent most of an afternoon getting increasingly frustrated that in spite of following the same instructions I've used before (I have to use them as I do it so infrequently that I can never remember how to do it without them) which has worked successfully, I couldn't get it to do it again.

There was a lot of 'oh ffs just fucking work' frustration on my part - following the same instructions I got it to work on one image but not the other before I gave it up as a bad idea. I emailed off the abstract for another conference with just the one image instead. I shall have another go at this copyrighting malarkey business....I might even just open it in paint and write on it directly. It's probably much easier than photoshop which I find to be extremely unuser friendly and unintuitive.

I find the free as in comes as part of the windows operating system photoediting software much easier to use and aside from inversion it suits my needs admirably. Though part of me worries at my comparative ludditeness and that I could have learnt a bit more about current software over the last few months at college - what other opportunities have I passed by....I'm aware that my time at Leeds College of Art is coming to a close (I have til mid August officially - but then there is the end of year show as well in late October/early November) and how much I still want to learn/do.

Oh well - am still awaiting replies to the abstract proposals I sent last week and I did manage to read a few pages of the Art of Death by Nigel Llewellyn last week too, I also watched a bit of an adaptation of the Woman In White - though I only got about 10 minutes in before I fell asleep. In fact today is the first day in a week that I haven't fallen asleep again by lunchtime.

So last week was massively disrupted by poorliness though I did spend a few minutes playing with a camera and an inexpensive fly eye like lens which creates a sort of kaleidoscope effect and multiplies images. It's a bit fiddly to hold it in front of the camera lens (used digital as it was easier to see on the back of the screen if it was in the right place or not) and attaching it with elastic bands didn't work at all well, but it's less fiddly if you place the camera on a tripod first. It still fecks me off though that cameras are made for righthanded and right eyed people....

Radio 4 Extra is a special treat at the moment - there is an adaptation of the Wilkie Collins story Who Killed Zebedee, an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's beautifully sinister We Have Always Lived In The Castle and the omnibus of the current Womans Hour adaptation of Jane Eyre. Utterly Wonderful.

I'm listening to these whilst trying to get my head round what I need to do this week and what I've got coming up and how to try and balance them all..... Mason has just visited and Mr Rochester is off to fetch the surgeon whilst Jane Eyre staunches the blood from where Mason was bitten.....ooh it's gripping, even if Rochester himself is an entitled selfish knob. 

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