Random access humanity? I (finally) upgraded the RAM on our PowerMac G5, and can edit images rather less painfully than has been the case previously.

So, I wonder, what is the weird nexus where RAM and the image of a homeless man trying to sleep in a particularly harsh-looking Los Angeles landscape come together?

For one thing, maybe this was a smart place to sleep: it's daylight, it's a minimally-trafficked zone close to downtown (and downtown's notoriously violent skid row). The local architecture is self-evidently unhuman and inhumane: metal, concrete, a fence, barbed wire and one tiny, frail and utterly destitute man frying on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

Which image is now presented to any who cares to see, thanks to a RAM upgrade. I've been wanting to explore some images I made in Los Angeles more than 15 years ago, but our Mac was showing the beach-ball-of-death rather a lot owing to the budget RAM config I bought a couple years ago (when I was working as a freelance tech writer). Dunno why I didn't bother to upgrade sooner, except, maybe, that the disk-swapping that OS X inherits from BSD is actually pretty good.

So, first image edit. A year-old scan from a print... think I should get a new neg scanner (my Nikon film scanner's stepper motor died, even thought it wasn't much used) and try to get images like this from the 'source file.' BTW, I loved the way these giant storage tanks looked near mid-day (the shadows of their spiral ladders were wonderful) and often would take a lunch break or cruise them on way to an assignment and approached them as if I were Ansel Adams looking at Half Dome. One day I saw this guy, and it altered forever how I looked at the 'big tanks'...
Comments 10:05:04 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures