Pix and Quality
Pix! Pix! Pix!
When I was young, I'd watch channel WPIX from New York City on cable. At the time, it was an independent (non-network) station that showed a lot of lousy movies, syndicated sit-coms and cartoons: Gilligan's Island, The Ghost and Mrs Miur, I Love Lucy, I Dream Of Jeannie, Bewitched, etc. (now, these are all TV Land staples).
In the early 80's, when Atari 2600s ruled the world, they had a strange call-in video game ... the lucky contestant (I forget how he was chosen), would get to play a game (usually some variation of Space Invaders) where his only input or control was to fire his space ship's gun by shouting "Pix!" into his phone... the dastardly enemy fighters are descending on us all and all he can do to stop the invasion is to shout "Pix! Pix! Pix! Pix!" for 15 seconds. I don't know if the gun was actually voice activated or if there was a person on the other side, pressing Fire in response. But it didn't matter; the game was a mess. Most kids would just shout "Pixpixpixpixpixpixpix" as fast as they could and the gun would "reload" so slowly that it just kinda fired whenever it could, regardless of what was in front of it - scores were basically random.
And speaking of Pix...
Here on Cleek, I've been posting one picture a day, every day, since I started this blog - something like 85 pictures so far. Why?
When I started this, I wanted to do a kind of abstract photo diary: here's a picture of some junk that I saw today, attach your own story to it. The pictures themselves wouldn't necessarily be high-quality, but they might be interesting. I wouldn't tell you anything about them except the technical details (camera type, etc), unless you asked. You'd get to make up your own little backstory for each of the shots and, over time, of the person who took them (the mythical Cleek). Well, that high concept lasted one day. On the second day, I started digging into my collection of old shots. Then I quickly became concerned about the quality of the shots I put up here, and was reluctant to post many of the kind of snapshots that would turn this blog into what I initially wanted it to become - a collection of unaffected shots of random stuff I found here or there. Since I really don't consider myself much of a photographer, this focus on quality is stressful (boo hoo) - I know I can't produce good shots on demand. In all the time I've been taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures, I've only managed to come with a few dozen that I consider really good, and I've posted a good chunk of them already. And, to get to the point: I'm starting to run low on old "quality" stuff to post; I'm either going to have to stop posting every day (which I don't want to do) or start posting the lightweight shots I originally intended to post. So, this post is a warning - the quality of what I post here is about to take a turn for the worse, from it's already mediocre level. Always fighting tradition, I'm going to sacrifice quality for quantity. Just so ya know...
Pix! Pix! Pix!
When I was young, I'd watch channel WPIX from New York City on cable. At the time, it was an independent (non-network) station that showed a lot of lousy movies, syndicated sit-coms and cartoons: Gilligan's Island, The Ghost and Mrs Miur, I Love Lucy, I Dream Of Jeannie, Bewitched, etc. (now, these are all TV Land staples).
In the early 80's, when Atari 2600s ruled the world, they had a strange call-in video game ... the lucky contestant (I forget how he was chosen), would get to play a game (usually some variation of Space Invaders) where his only input or control was to fire his space ship's gun by shouting "Pix!" into his phone... the dastardly enemy fighters are descending on us all and all he can do to stop the invasion is to shout "Pix! Pix! Pix! Pix!" for 15 seconds. I don't know if the gun was actually voice activated or if there was a person on the other side, pressing Fire in response. But it didn't matter; the game was a mess. Most kids would just shout "Pixpixpixpixpixpixpix" as fast as they could and the gun would "reload" so slowly that it just kinda fired whenever it could, regardless of what was in front of it - scores were basically random.
And speaking of Pix...
Here on Cleek, I've been posting one picture a day, every day, since I started this blog - something like 85 pictures so far. Why?
When I started this, I wanted to do a kind of abstract photo diary: here's a picture of some junk that I saw today, attach your own story to it. The pictures themselves wouldn't necessarily be high-quality, but they might be interesting. I wouldn't tell you anything about them except the technical details (camera type, etc), unless you asked. You'd get to make up your own little backstory for each of the shots and, over time, of the person who took them (the mythical Cleek). Well, that high concept lasted one day. On the second day, I started digging into my collection of old shots. Then I quickly became concerned about the quality of the shots I put up here, and was reluctant to post many of the kind of snapshots that would turn this blog into what I initially wanted it to become - a collection of unaffected shots of random stuff I found here or there. Since I really don't consider myself much of a photographer, this focus on quality is stressful (boo hoo) - I know I can't produce good shots on demand. In all the time I've been taking pictures for the sake of taking pictures, I've only managed to come with a few dozen that I consider really good, and I've posted a good chunk of them already. And, to get to the point: I'm starting to run low on old "quality" stuff to post; I'm either going to have to stop posting every day (which I don't want to do) or start posting the lightweight shots I originally intended to post. So, this post is a warning - the quality of what I post here is about to take a turn for the worse, from it's already mediocre level. Always fighting tradition, I'm going to sacrifice quality for quantity. Just so ya know...
posted by cleek at 11:49 AM
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