blog.tylerball

The Error Project

I’m somewhat of a digital pack-rat. At least, since my experiences with hard drive failure in the past. In my early days of digital photography I would frequently skip over dark or blurry frames and not import them into my computer. They would then be lost after the next application of the format button. Over the years I have realised this is not such a good idea. In fact, Sports Illustrated shooters are told to never use their delete button and keep everything.1 The tiny little LCDs on the back of cameras these days are liars, and may hide something great in a photo you may not notice until you get it into Photoshop.

Today, storage is cheap. Magnetic Hard drives are under a dollar per 10 gigabytes, which makes them practically disposable. Now I never delete anything, I just buy another drive. And with Spotlight I find buying more storage is much less time consuming and cost-effective than trying to think about what happened to that file you may have deleted long ago.

In light of this, instead of deleting these blurry frames, I’ve been throwing them in a folder called “errors” and put a selection of them on Flickr. Some of them are awful blobs of darkness, while others shot off the hip contain some interesting compositional ideas.

An old art teacher used to tell me that the bad pages in a sketchbook are as important and useful as the good ones. The camera is a sketchbook, and so it should be treated just like its paper equivalent.

You can see the entire collection of errors here.

1. Discussed in the last bit of this video.

Review: Star Trek

Originally posted on tylerball.net on May 11th, 2009

It has yet to be proven that you can ‘reboot a franchise’ and completely impress Tyler Ball. Star Trek was very visually satisfying, and I applaud the art directors for making it look slick and the editors for keeping the flow. So why is it that only those who twiddle knobs and draw things the only ones still showing up with talent in the realm of the Hollywood Blockbuster?

I know I shouldn’t expect much from an action film in the writing department, given their recent track record. What happened to the stoic, reserved quality of the science-fiction heyday1 when you could demonstrate the values of friendship, bravery and leadership to the viewers without punching them in the face with it?

But no, our Spocks and Batmen must exist in a vacuum, where laughable lines are delivered without any of the smirk of a Bond or a Tarantino. Hell, even Bond has turned up turned up his sarcasm in recent years so his audiences can be in on the joke. Instead, in our theatre we had laughter at its once iconic dialogue. Is that the goal of the franchise reboot? To make a mockery of the source material? I’m no more a Trekkie any more than an Olympic swimmer, but I get the feeling they take their favourite fiction pretty seriously.

Sure, the original Trek was very cheesy, but I get the feeling the styrofoam aliens and camera-shake photon hits were what everyone loved about the show. In the context of a multi-million dollar, shiny, serious production, this dialog is silly. I found myself longing for some imperfection I could associate these defined characters with, for some lovable puppets instead of the hideous uncanny valley nurses and bar-goers in the film. Hell, they could’ve just kept it 60’s with the human equivalent.

Well, thank Kahn for Simon Pegg, whose gentle unfurling into Scotty on Hoth was welcome. He displayed the sort of experienced nonchalant-ness I expected from his character, contrasting nicely from the silly grimaces on everybody else’s face.

I realise I’m definitely ignoring TNG as a source of inluence, but when I was in my formative years2, I had way too many Legos on the floor to be captivated by that shit. To me that show was ever-furrowed exchanges between Data and Worf, Riker entangled in Troi’s spandex and Picard ordering shit from the bar. I swear they weren’t even on the Bridge for a quarter of the show, just a lot of conversations over plexiglass tableware. Correct my if I’m wrong, because I got my Levar Burton from Reading Rainbow. Also, this movie didn’t concern these characters despite how much better/worse or influential TNG is to the creators of this film.

I blame the holes in this film on two things. Firstly, J.J. Abrams is an over-hyped conceptualizer. I seem to enjoy his concepts3 but his directing style seems to centre on handsome people gritting their teeth at each other. I’ve never been trapped on a fucked-up island, been a spy, ran from Cthulhu or whatever the hell Fringe is. However, I’m not convinced people in those situations use that much enunciation.

Secondly, and more importantly, is that movie studios don’t reboot franchises to drastically redefine genres. They do it to make money for godsakes. J.J. Abrams has proven to be pretty good at making money these past few years, and he was the right choice. You would have thought that he could have made something interesting out of all his conceptualizing.

2 prosthetic Spock ears out of 5, Bilbo Baggins.

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1 Think Alien, Blade Runner, the first two Star Wars films. ↩

2 Like, 6 when it ended. ↩

3 Lost is an example where the concept–at least for the first bit–outweighed the outcome. ↩

Oh, By The Way

I redesigned rebuilt my non-blog portfolio site and also blog (for longer, more proofread things than this, obviously): the tylerball.net to better suit my needs. Indexhibit, simple and streamlined, was a total pain in the ass for syndication and anything other than images with a single line caption. This one is Textpattern, mostly on the recommendation of these chaps and that one of my favourite twittererers wrote the first version. It should allow for more flexibility.

If you’ve got a second, head on over there and check it out. I’d appreciate it.

I Had the weirdest dream last night

All of my friends, along with some young pro skateboarders were in a band. They dressed in a mixture of modern streetwear and Victorian era dandyisms. They played loud, fucked up garage rock in a very small room on the Queen’s University campus. They called themselves Einzhammer which they said was the German word for telephone, but really it isn’t a word in German at all.

The sound was like Black Flag mixed with surf rock, and it was absolutely perfect.