Fake cross-processing

I've been cross-processing film the old-fashioned way (developing slide film in print film's chemicals) for over a decade. If you're not familiar with the look, think of some album covers from the early 90s with a severe green shift in color and blown-out highlights. It's probably cross-processed film, or a close photoshop approximation.

(I have a whole set of genuine x-pro work posted on Filckr for some more examples.)

Given the scarcity of film, and the difficulty of finding a lab that will actually do cross-processing (Allied in St. Louis, for your locals), I thought I'd try my hand at faking the look with photoshop using this tutorial (plus some of my own tweaks). This is the closest I've gotten to the real thing so far:

Test design, V 2.0

I hope my geeky/bloggy/meta posts aren't boring people to tears. This is my "tentative" new design. Tentative as in "I'll never have this damn design change done."



I'm really taking my time on this, rather than slapping something together. Yep, that's what I'm telling myself. I'm learning to accept that I'm not a fast worker, plus I haven't had much time to work on it the last few days. I'm still hating the banner, but generally, I hate all my banners. I dunno, it looks kind of "early web." I was going for minimalist, not web 1.0, but oh well...

Back to the coding board.

Is authenticity overrated?

I am the James Frey of blogging. Not everything I write here is true. All of it is exactly how I remember it, though.

I've changed names, dates, details for fear that someone might recognize herself in what I've written. Not that often, but often enough that I don't feel guilty about it anymore. If anything, I feel guilty that I should feel guilty. Being 100% honest isn't always a smart thing, but it seems to be part of the blogger code: to be "real." What is this "realness?" I feel very real, even if I'm not spilling my guts every morning.

I'm usually spilling coffee.

Which opens another can of worms. Not only is there this unspoken rule to be honest, but to spill, spill, spill. I've never been comfortable with this whole diary concept, not even when I was fifteen and for Christmas my mom bought me a pink journal with a lock on the cover.

This is true, maybe. It could have been red.

I never used that journal.

This is definitely true. I found it going through some things a while back, sitting unopened in a box with old textbooks -- also unopened.

(Not true, but I need a punch line.)

Do you ever lie on your blog? Even a little?

Hair, the sequel!

I've had a bottle of Clairol sitting in the bathroom cabinet for over three months now. It's been twice that long since I've colored my hair. Yep, for the first time in years I'm growing virgin hair. Unfortunately, virgin hair spiked with gray. I don't have a problem with gray hair, per se, but that old axiom holds true in this case: I like it on other people, but not on me. If I grew more than a few random spirals, and could manage a decent Cruella DeVille streak, I'd be totally embrace it. However, gray hair just makes me look dirty.

So without further ado, here's a wholly unnecessary history of my hair color(s): bottled and otherwise:

Birth to age seven: auburn. (Actually, as a newborn it was coal black, but most of the pictures from early childhood show me with reddish hair). My mom said my hair looked like a copper penny, and many times I've tried to bet that exact shade back with less than successful results. Copper penny meet Bozo the clown.

Middle school: Poop brown, dirt brown, whatever... and long enough to tuck in the waistband of my jeans until an unfortunate accident with a pair of scissors and my mom's hairstylist friend who thought mullets looked great on sixth grade girls.

High school:: My first time experimenting with hair color via a spritzer bottle of Sun-In, completely ignoring the warnings that it might turn dark hair orange.

Early 90s: Bozo meets Angela from My So Called Life

Sometime around 1997-98: Various shades of magenta to deep violet. My hair is dark enough that it didn't really show all that much, and most of it rubbed off on the pillow cases.

1999: Highlights, done by a woman probably named Madge who still believed in the crochet hook and bathing cap method.

2001: Bright, screaming, Ariel from The Little Mermaid red. Honestly, that's one of the things I remember doing during the 9/11 tragedy -- dyeing my hair.

2003: Black. BIG MISTAKE! I cannot stress this enough: Do not color your own hair black. Even if the box says "temporary," you'll spend many hours trying to wash that stuff out of your hair, and will inevitably pay someone (who offers you Sangria and chocolates, which is a nice touch, by the way) to do it for you.

2004: Leftover black with expensive highlights. (No Madge with crochet hooks this time.)

2005-present: various shades of basic to dark brown, mostly to cover gray. Periods of rootage.

I just wrote my 300th post

The last one, I mean. This is actually 301, but the last one doesn't count. Come to think of it, a good third of my posts don't count.

Am I the only one just not excited about blogging anymore? Call it spring fever or whatever, but sitting down to write just doesn't thrill me like it should. Right now I'm dealing with not one, but two plumbing emergencies and this is the first time I've sat down to write all evening, I don't know how you guys do it: find the humor in everyday challenges. I just want to punch bunnies or something.

My usual remedy for blog ennui is to change my site's design (working on it, kind of). Instead I should be trying to improve my writing, but the hope is a having a flashy new site and maybe no one will notice the crappy posting. Taking a break isn't an option for me, because in all my other creative endeavors, taking a break led to quitting entirely. So spiffing up the design it is...

I've been trying to create a three-column template. I know how, but it seems every time I try, I wind up with a sidebar here, a sidebar there, one over there, one on my left foot... Never the main content flanked by two columns of clicky things. I'm sure I'm missing a step somewhere. It doesn't help that as I've been working on this, someone outside keeps screaming -- the kind of scream that it's hard to tell whether it's human or animal, and I'm too chicken to investigate.

At least the "Yeah, boy!" guys are gone. Without digging into the archives -- and maybe two of you will remember this -- every night a couple summers ago someone outside my bedroom window, "Yeah, boy!" A drunken hoot or two later it was a drawn out, "Wooooo!" It was like living in a beer commercial.

Question

Do you want to see more or less photography stuff on this site? I have a photoblog, so it's unnecessary, but if that's what's been going on in my life, it's likely it'll end up here as well. (Besides, the photoblog was created specifically for lo-fi, Holga and Polaroid photography -- though I've deviated from that a few times.)

So? I say this having planned out yet another photography post for tomorrow.

A phone! With a camera!

Yay, my new phone came sometime yesterday afternoon. I haven't had a new cell phone in something like five years, and the sanitary napkin phone has definitely seen better days.

It's not a fancy, smart phone... just a regular Razr like everyone else has, but it's a major step up from the piece of crap that had taken too many spills down the stairs. (And one swim in the bathroom sink.)

I can't stop taking pictures with it. I think somewhere ripping the box open and attempting to set up an address book, I forgot it was a phone. No, I haven't uploaded any of those photos to Flickr, but here's a bad webcam shot in place of a bad camera phone shot:

Friday Top Five: Truncated version

I did my first "real" template modification this week, rather than slapping a banner on a pre-made one and changing a few colors. I started with Minima, which is the easiest to modify, and made it wider, gave it a background and a couple other tweaks. Blogger Buster was much help. I hate the banner, though, so I really want to work on that over the weekend. I'm hoping to have something like this, maybe:



With a less crappy banner, of course. I made a "test blog" that only I have access to. I should have done that a long time ago.

Yay! I'm finally getting a new cellphone today. That means I won't have to talk into something that looks like a maxi-pad anymore. It's not my dream Blackberry, but I don't have enough of a life to justify buying a Blackberry, I've decided.

Drool: New season of Project Runway starts this July. This almost makes up for HBO waiting until fall to premiere new episodes of Big Love.

Earworm of the week" "Blackbird" by the Beatles. I've been listening to the Beatles a lot, lately. Neither of my parents were fans, in fact, my dad is a staunch Beatles hater. (This is beside the point, but think of my dad as the Italian Archie Bunker, chair and all.) So basically, I'm really late in discovering the most influential rock band in the known universe.

I'm my own time machine

Crap I found while doing a little "spring cleaning:"

One pair of denim gauchos. Yes, I said denim gauchos.

The January 2002 issue of Shutterbug. (3 megapixel cameras. How retro.)

A Jogbra. I have a Jogbra! Yay! I can go jogging now without giving myself a black eye!

One pair of jeans with exponentially more spandex than denim. (Unlike the gauchos) Stacy and Clinton's casual Friday nightmare. (Screw them. They're really, really, comfortable, like jammies with belt loops.)

A bag of candy left over from Christmas, 2004. Christmas candy doesn't go bad, does it?

Infrared film, we hardly knew ye

I wish I could show this picture full size, but it wants to break my blog:



Taken sometime around 2001-02 (looks like it was Christmas time) with Kodak's color infrared red that, sadly, has gone the way of the dodo. I wish I'd used it more, but at about $30 a roll, calling it steep would be an understatement. Very difficult to expose, if I recall. Even more difficult than their black and white infrared film.