Cameras! Yay!

I fell in love with photography about two years ago, in college, during Photo 1 (mandatory "introduction to photography" course you have when you do arts&lettres). That course gave us (in 37 hours) phototheory, the rules of shooting using black&white film, negative processing and photo printing. That course was total heaven. I loved spending hours in the dark room or hours roaming the streets, looking for subjects that would fulfill the requierements. i just loved it to bits. But, as is inevitable, the course ended (i got a great score in that class, actually :D) and i went on with life.

Back in early April, about a week after i had left my job at the factory, i went through a bit of a blue phase. I harboured the idea of fleeing to New York, to see a friend that i missed a lot at that moment. Upon thinking this idea through, i realised that it wouldn't be a good idea and that it just wouldn't help the situation. Instead, with the money, i bought a Nikon SLR. I rediscovered my love of photography. Since early April, i can often be seen with my camera, just shooting.

With love of photography coming back, i started hunting for other photographic tools to bring visions to fruition. Two days ago, in a thrift store, i came upon two total jewels. First one, a "Time" camera. It's a total plastic camera, that shoots 35mm film. I gather that it was given to Time Magazine subscribers as a gift. It has a 50mm lens that seems rather dodgy, and four aperture choices with descriptive icons (5.6 (cloudy), 8 (partly cloudy), 11 (sun shining, but not too much) and 16 (sun!!)). It was 2$CDN, so i bought it.
Second jewel, a not-so-dated Polaroid One Step CloseUp camera. It shoots 600 film and it was 5$. SOLD!

I loaded the Time camera with Superia X-Tra 400 film. I still have twelve shots to go, so i'll know in a while what the beast can do. As for the Polaroid, it's just marvelous. It works great.

So voilà, two great thingies for 7$ Gotta love thrift shops!

fields, endless fields

I'm kinda going through a blue period. Once again, i wonder what i'm going to do with my life, what am i gonna study, where am i going, etc. For a while, i thought that film studies would seriously end the evergoing questionning of what i want to do. Problem is, i will get in film studies only in a year and i'm already thinking: gee, i'm not sure i want to do that...

The best thing would be to find something that would merge all my major interests: photo, video, graphic design (and object design) with some form of a textual. In that respect, going to study either studio arts OR graphic design would probably be two viable solutions (if i can get it, that is).

In sculpture class, back in sherbrooke, i was always trying to speak without words. Studying visual arts put my brain in an entirely different mode, where instead of having flashes of poetry or of other type of writing, i would get visual flashes, for sculptures. Instead of jotting down ideas for verses, i would sketch down ideas for installations. In some respect, this worked very well. But the program wasn't very stimulating and the rest of my life there was hell, so i just did one term then came back here (go through the archive, i'm sure i wrote the whole story somewhere in here). When i left, the advisor of the program was shocked that i would even consider leaving visual arts. "You belong here," she said to me. "You have something to give, you have potential in the field." And when i was in Sherbrooke, before things got real bad, i was envisioning my future this way: 1. Finishing the certificate, 2. At the same time, do the prerequisite math course to get in Industrial Design, 3. Study Industrial Design. And now that i've been back to hometown 7 months now, i wonder, where has my plans for industrial design gone? I still love idea of it, i still love design, so i figure, why not? uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

so i guess everybody's right. once i chose a field, i will not question anymore and just go with it.

the thing is, you have to chose a field first.

rejoice!

hola peeps,

i hadn't updated this little hunka love in about two months, but i was changing isp and wasn't feeling very chatty. but i'm back here, rejoice!

i have started working on a personal site now. so in a little bit of time, i'll have my little house under the net, featuring photos, drawings and other crap. rejoice!

so i shall leave you at that (whoever is reading this!) and expect plenty for the months to come!

wisdom on the radio

while i was brushing my teeth, a couple of minutes ago, i was told the way to happiness by Gabriel Setlakwe, one of the mascots of the Setlakwe furniture store chain. it goes something like this:

"do you know what happiness is to you? happiness to you is coming back home from work and having your favourite easy chair waiting for you"

why, thank you Gabriel...

painting the urge/the urge of painting

it doesn't take much. i paint for a while then i quit for no reason, saying that there's no way in hell i'm ever gonna pick up a brush again. then weeks pass, i get inspired, i sketch my ideas... and then, boom, i see something that really awakens my urge to paint.

i had this idea for a character that would run throught a series of paintings (and maybe drawings, yes!). his name is albert and he has a computer screen for a head. the first thing i sketched with this character is called Albert 125 (yes, always the first name with a number), a bucolic fable about Albert visiting Nature. but then, it just stayed latent, waiting patiently in my sketch book for about a month now.

today - breathrough. i came upon two very interesting and really cool websites that woke up my urge to pick up the brush. (urls at the end of this post). not that i want to copy their style or something like that, but it gave me the little technical detail that was puzzling me about painting the Albert series (and other stuff). i guess that's what my arts teachers meant by learning by viewing.

here goes for the URLs:

Toothpaste for Dinner
natalie dee: huffing it up, every weekday

do enjoy please.

employment

i have a pretty odd job history. i have to have a job that fits me or else i just cannot stand it. it gets visceral. so if i hate a job for whatever reason, i'll start throwing up, getting ill for real just to avoid going to work, in effect just amplifying the effect of the non-liked job. that's how it happened before. i wonder if i was just actually making it worse than it actually was.

since coming back here in january, i've had two jobs. the bookstore job, that i began in late november, coming back to town on the weekends to work there and going back to the city for university (univercity? ha ha, kiss me, i'm clever). i left that job in mid-february because i had gotten a production job at a semiconductor facility of a multinational that i am not going to name. that job would have made me earn enough money to go back to school this september instead of september 2005. things were okay during the training. boring job, niiiiiice paycheck so it balanced out... but then, after training i was transfered to my assigned team-and-work-shift... weekend-night shift. so that's two twelve hours shifts during the night (midnight to noon) on saturday and sunday and then two normal night shift returns during the week. that's how things got bad. i was already rather at odds with the workplace and the people i worked with, but then, with the working during the night, things got really complicated. turns out i'm one of those people who can't work night shifts. it was sending me right into depression relapse. after three weeks, i was a replica of how i was when clinically-depressed two years ago. that's one bad bad side effect.

i called the woman who organised our training to see if i could be transfered to another team or something like that. during our training, that woman kept on telling us that they were there for us, that if we needed anything, if we had a problem, we just had to go talk with them and they would try and help us. so i called the woman about my problem with night-working, left her a message, asking her to call me back and explaining the situation quickly. then went to bed (it was 9 in the morning and i was working that night). she didn't call back. the person who called back however was my director (the boss of the area), with a transcript of the message i had left the woman (can you say breach of confidentiality?) and basically saying: "hello Olivier, this is ******, YOUR DIRECTOR. i got a message from ********* saying that you had troubles with night working... well my reply to you will be that if you have a problem with night working it is your problem, we never switch people from teams. well, we do, but only after nine months. so in your case, the dog is dead, haha. if you have a question, call me back at ***-****". i called back, got an aswerphone, left a message really explaining the case and stating that if there was no available solution, then i was quitting right after my shift of that night. he didn't call back that day.

then i went to work. during first break, i went to the vending machines to get something to drink. some man came and asked me: "are you Olivier?" so of course i said yes. him replying: "well, good, 'cause we have papers to sign, you and me". turns out this was the weekday night shift director and then weekend night shift director had transmitted the whole "case of Olivier" to him during the day. so we signed the papers and after the shift, i was done working for that company. total worked weeks: 7.

i'm back to being unemployed now. but i started looking. i gave my resumé to a really cool design jewelry and accessories store. (trust me, they are really cool. the other day, they were playing Massive Attack. in my town... wow ). after giving my resumé to them, i was convinced they weren't going to call back. the woman-owner of the place called me back the same day asking me to come in for an interview. interview was yesterday. went rather well. then i came back and the woman called again, asking me to come in for a "working on the sales floor test". so i went back, same day as the interview. it went quite well. but i'll know if i nailed it or not only sometimes "before tuesday at 8pm", because there's another candidate (a girl...) for the same job and same type of shift as me... i guess that if it's meant to be, i'll get it. if not there's going to be something else waiting.

that's the state of employment for me, for now...

AssPrint

a few things scare me at the gym where i train. the histrionic personal trainers, who, when off duty, wear shirts saying "MisterHard, accepted by women all across the globe"; the fact that they created their own line of training clothes (so far, nothing freaky), line of clothing they called "BareButt" (see where i'm going with this?); the buff dudes who seem to do more talking than training; the overweight girls who wear pants with PRINCESS printed on their asses...

i completely understand that sex sells. but it seems so silly to me. probably because i'm gay and all that histrionic seductive (inductive?) lingo is meant for male-female relationship. still, the bulk of it just screams: "I'M TRYING TOO HARD" or "LOOKIE HERE! I'M FAKE!"

just to prove my point, the gym hosted a gala recently (or they will host it soon, i don't remember the date of the thing. i didn't pay attention. mainly because i don't care) that they titled: "Barbies and Kens"

eh.