Category Archives: photography

Department of Engineering Science

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Department of Engineering Science

This is an old materials engineering handbook that was given to me by a professor upon his retirement from my undergrad university. I believe he rescued it from as it was being retired from the university library. When he was cleaning out his office, he asked a few students to come in, individually, and select two or three books out of his professional library. He’d gotten all the books he wished to keep and wanted to see the rest be put to some use. Though I think he wasn’t entirely sure of all of my selections were so wise (namely, this particular book, as I recall — due to it being sorely outdated by modern experimentation techniques), he let me part with some books that I did indeed find useful.

More importantly, I think, he sent me with a wealth of wisdom about what it means to be a good engineer. The bits of advice he would pass on felt to me like true pages of secret wisdom that had been lost on my generation of engineers. Whether it was proper handwriting technique or that an engineer should maintain a personal library, he knew that teaching students was even more than the technical fundamentals. Being a professional goes far beyond running a set of numbers.

Flickr and Creative Commons

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I’ve never given it much thought as I’ve tried to be consistent, but Flickr allows users to switch back and forth between Creative Commons licenses and traditional copyright, despite this being in violation of the CC license itself. Most of my work has been published under a Attribution- Noncommerical, Share-alike CC license since I first learned about copyleft several years ago. And though I’ve never really considered degrading the license back to full copyright, apparently other people have done so. I don’t know of any legal fights over this (yet), but it seems like it would be a nearly impossible position to defend.

Taking More Pictures Again

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Escape

“Escape” by Jason Coleman – I’ve recently gotten excited (re-excited?) about photography and learning how to take better pictures. Kevin has a great post and some interesting discussion on his blog about his film vs. digital experimentation. I think, for me, one of the key reason why I only want to shoot in digital, regardless of quality, is the ability to let myself make many mistakes to learn from. Were my camera a film, it would sit mostly on a shelf for fear of taking bad photos. I never had much appreciation for photography until digital allowed me to experiment with it. I never had that feeling with film which no matter how simple the camera, always gave me too great a disconnect between action and feedback to meaningfully learn anything.