Oooh, look at all the pretty pictures...

Not a gallery. Do not even think it. More like cutting-room floor sweepings. Vague tidbits. Not art. Some aren't even mine. So there. Also none of the link texts should be inferred to be titles except in a vague descriptive or nomenclature sense.

(note: most of these are big, some pointlessly so. Maybe I'll optimize or put up thumbnails or something someday.)

(Near-)Total Fiction

GIMP is a nice environment for total fabrication of stuff. Layering, alpha channels, lots of good filters with source code attached, etc. X's miserable font support shows up a lot in this kind of work, but I never spend long looking for a perfect font anyway.

gfbird.png: Too simple to deserve a title of any sort. I stuck this on my page a long while ago, after playing with a scanner a little. The frame is (obviously) from a Garfield strip of a few years back. The head pasted in there is Robert F. Agrella, president of Santa Rosa Junior College. Agrella earned the animosity of most of the computer literates on campus for repeatedly obstructing attempts to modernize the campus computing resources; the most pronounced of these was his participation (and complacency) in the decision to deal with the campus' single overloaded publicUNIX machine (a 486-66 Linux box, by far the best-running and long-suffering machine I've ever known) by blocking student access to campus machines. Very clever. A year later he spent a hundred grand in college funds hiring private investigators to go through instructors' desks and computers to try to find the source of some public letters criticizing his administrative abilities. Okay, now go look at the picture.
snsphere: Another one undeserving of a title. I did this with povray way back when, as a means of showing off to the Sonoma.Net graphics-person that Linux boxes could do art, and do raytracing a lot faster than his PowerMac. I don't think he ever appreciated it, personally. Someday, I'll find some context at work where I can actually use this image. I hope. (the picture, BTW, is roughly a clone of a demo scene distributed with povray)
Frog Squishy Ball: This was sitting near the scanner one day.
skrubly's blender header: Another GIMP project. Took a lot of time, as it happened. Made it for a friend, who had/has a page containing a lot of stories he made for Blender, a sort of art/literature/demo competition held now and then in IRC. The text in the background is from one of his entries, as displayed (and then xv-grabbed) in an xterm.

Originally Photographs

About half the graphics I make start at some point with a photograph. They're easy to distinguish, since (a) I'm not especially clever at graphics editing or rendering, and (b) I often like the photographs enough not to change them around much. But it varies.

untitled: For my SO's birthday I got her a Quickcam, to go with her new computer. One of the first things to be learned from a Quickcam is that (a) nobody is as photogenic in front of a digital camera as a camera operated by a human, (b) especially when the thing is taking the pictures automatically, and (c) even more especially when that person is my SO. So flattering pictures are rare. One thing I've noticed about these cameras -- why does no one smile when they use computers? It's like everyone with a camera on their machine is on the toilet after a week of a cheese-intensive diet. This was some mucking around with the GIMP, mostly. Those familiar with the GIMP will recognize the relatively few steps that went into it. But I rather like it this way. :)
Devin's Head Explodes: Probably belongs under the heading of "Stupid Gimp Tricks." The photo caption would have to read, approximately, "Standing in line with some friends, Carraway's head spontaneously exploded. Witnesses were treated at nearby hospitals."
Watercolor waterbirds (dark and bright): A couple of coots (those all-black waterfowl with white bills) in the UCD arboretum. Done with some plasma-multiplication and palette manipulation tweaking in the GIMP. Here's the original.

Still (un- or barely-edited) Photographs

I'm about as good (read: not very) a photographer as a graphics editor. My biggest lack is the ability to see what the camera will; or more properly, what the camera can given the lengthy vagaries and options of film and lens and developing. The camera, FWIW, is a cheap 35mm Pentax SLR. Most of these went through some amount of color/contrast adjustment on their way through the GIMP. This isn't really because I felt it was necessary for the pictures as because my scanner (UMAX S-6E, the cheapest there was on the Linux-supported scanners list) is an unmitigated pile of shit which depresses midtones and tints everything a nasty green color.

bne.jpg: Photgraph taken by one friend of mine of two other friends. Also a curiously colorized version thereof.
Diagonal Hen: Photo I took in the UC Davis arboretum. This picture would rank as utterly stupid were it not for the diagonality. I shall have to try that with other pictures.
Sun on Tower, #1 and #2: Two photos of the watertower in the UC Davis arboretum. These are the kind of pictures that seem to get put on posters that sell a lot of copies to office decorators, the ones that favor bright colors over artistic qualities (hence the use in office buildings, which tend to be symphonies in grey and/or beige). Nice lines in the clouds, though.
Two Cock Mallards: A couple of ducks, looking across some water. Not shown is the hen they were looking at.
Lay/Beth/Face (larger version) Under shawl and differently so.: My longtime g/f Beth in black and white. Beth's soft and rounded in most every contour, and it makes her hard to photograph, since the manmade world tends towards straight lines and mechanical angles. Sometime I hope to shoot her in late summer at the Eel River in California, where there are broad patches of river which dry up, leaving countless wondeful rounded stones all the way from pebbles to boulders.
Dead leaves (oversized desktop-wallpaper version): An attempt at using up the last exposure on a roll of tmax; it turned out better than expected, in a simple sort of way. Fairly sharp for a silhouette shot, though the scan blurs it some. The odd texturing of the background is in the original photo -- it's a sheet of tarp-plastic, which does nice things for the background.
Derf/Rearview: A friend seen in the rearview mirror of his car. I was disappointed with this, but he seemed to like it, and I admit there's a sort of unrealized compositional attractiveness to it which just didn't come out the way I wanted it. The car was moving at around 70mph, which accounts for many of the problems, though not my inadequate compensations.
Derf/Right Face, Derf/Full Face, Derf/Right Face (narrow), Intensity Composite: Same friend, different occasion. I'm not sure why, but he's one of my two or three favorite photographic subjects. He has an overawing air of crudity and malcontent which is all many people ever see, physically -- I find compelling the depth of intelligence and feeling, even passion, which lies just beneath that surface.
Eric (zoom shift): There's a term for this type of photo, but I don't recall what it is. I initially tried a bunch of various GIMP effects on it, and noticed that while it could be made less like itself, the real effects stayed the same. So this is the original.
Freddy's Place: An old wooden sign that hung over a hog pen for some 20 years. The file's a bit big, but it was important to keep as much sharpness of detail as possible.
Old Rocket #1 and #2: Another item which has hung near the above sign for about the same length of time. No, the object is not a rocket in any respect other than a resemblance of shape.
Wall Branches: This picture was a total disappointment until I made one physical alteration. Suddenly it became powerful.
Grass and Dog: A dog from the same farm, lying on the grass. Characteristic only in the angle and contrast, but it's still a nice simple picture I was happy with.
Cliff/Hiker Slice (full frame), another: Three (well, two and a quarter) shots taken near the top of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin county, California. Both hikers were students in my Literature of the Wilderness course at UC Davis in (I think) 1997. Some forty or so students followed the circumambulatory route taken by Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums, following much the same path and procedures with much less real comprehension of the meanings of it all. Tam is a great mountain. I have no recollection of whom the hikers actually are, though they're welcome to contact me so I can credit them.

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