Pie Palace

As much as I pooh-poohed this year’s theme at Burning Man, I’m sorry that I’m not going. For all those who aren’t:

Here are my pics from Lumiere 2008. There are three broad categories: light painting, long exposures, and conventional photos.

Light painting

Let’s get this out of the way straight off: I don’t like using flash outside of a shoot. It’s bright, it’s obnoxious, and I find it hard to control.

A poor man’s flash is a flashlight and a long exposure. My flashlight was a crappy little LED jobby that dangles at the end of my keychain. It isn’t very bright, but over a long exposure, it does the trick:

I set my camera up on a tripod, got out the flashlight, opened the shutter (1/2 sec), and sprayed light all over the robot. Because I could direct the flashlight, I was able to get highlights on its chest and face without drawing attention to the surrounding frame. The picture isn’t fantastic, but I’m pleased that the painting highlighted the areas that I care about.

On a similar vein, there’s a tree with hanging lanterns. Since I knew that the lanterns were going to be blown out in any image I took, I left the shutter open long enough to paint the tree trunk, base, and foreground leaves with the flashlight. I was hoping that there would be enough light thrown out by my fellow festival goers that some interesting patterns would be thrown onto the sensor. I was in luck: the streak on the foreground and the flash on the mid left add two interesting features. I also lucked out with the lady in the blue sweater – the vivid light blue adds a splash of colour to the pic, and her pink baby sling is almost the same colour is the extinguished lantern beside her. Not intentional elements, but they add to the quality of the pic.

Long exposures

I took the long exposures of the paper baggy labyrinth. There were dozens of people wandering through it, so a short exposure would have caught too many people. Since I’m not a fan of photography without consent, I went for long (15s+) exposures so they’d disappear into the background. The labyrinth was under a set of bright lights, meaning that I had a chance of picking up detail.

[caption id="attachment_660" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Heftily cropped labyrinth from afar"][/caption]

I cropped these two so tightly because of the angle: most of the frame was filled with grass at the bottom, and orange sky at the top. None too interesting, so those part of the images ended up in the bit bucket.

The first year I went to Lumiere, I took a picture very similar to this. For some reason, the ordered rings of baggies centered in the right catch my eye. I’ll have to bring a ladder next year to get a more aerial view. I like the streaks and ghostly people.

Conventional Photos

And now, dear reader, you witness my idiocy. Something I knew I should have nailed down my ISO, exposure, and exposure adjustment (ie overexpose by 1.3 stops) before the fire dancers started performing. Did I? No. Did I stick on my 50mm lens and leave it on for the whole performance? No – I fiddled around with a much slower telephoto. Did I trim my flash and use it to improve the colour balance between the dancers and the flame? No.

The pictures aren’t bad, they just aren’t as good as they could have been. The ISO was higher than necessary (with the 50mm lens I should have been shooting at 200 instead of 800), but the duration (.6sec) was perfect. I probably could have dropped the duration down to .4 and caught more of the dancer’s face:

[caption id="attachment_664" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Fire Weaver doing poi"][/caption]

The remaining sundries are decent. If anything, these pictures make me question my lens. The 50mm Pentax lens left weird green ghosts opposite some of the flame. On top of that, the damn thing seemed to lose focus and spend forever hunting around. If I was gutsier, I’d try manually focusing (or letting the camera choose its focal point), but I don’t have the cajones to entrust a once-in-a-year event to my crappy eyes or my camera’s choices.

We Canadians are a snippy bunch.

From: Bork <xxxxxx@gmail.com>
To: Erigami <xxxxxx@piepalace.ca>, Bob <xxxxxx@elsewhere.ca>, and others
Subject: Burningman
	
I've got some friends out this way who are interested in going.  I'm going
to push off my trip to Europe for a year and return to BM instead.  Anyone
interested in joining me this year?
	
This year's theme is the American Dream!

Response 1:

From: Erigami <xxxxxx@piepalace.ca>
To: Bork <xxxxxx@gmail.com> Bob <xxxxxx@elsewhere.ca>, and others
Subject: Re: Burningman
	
Which is why I'm not going!

Response 2:

From: Bob <xxxxxx@elsewhere.ca>
To: Bork <xxxxxx@gmail.com>, <xxxxxx@piepalace.ca>, and others
Subject: Re: Burningman
	
Erigami said:
> Which is why I'm not going! 
	
Precisely my first response.  

Centretowners will have noticed “swap boxes” cropping up around town recently. I don’t know who puts them up, but they’re kind of fun. I have yet to find anything of interest in them, but I always look (and I usually try to leave something).

Most of the ones that I’ve seen have just been fun (and occasionally anti-consumerist). The most recent (seen outside of Invisible Cinema, and across from Venus Envy) took a decidedly political bent. It’s the “Mayor Larry Budget Edition (Running Ottawa Like a Business – Nortel!)“, with “Mayor Larry swapped libraries for a tax freeze. What’ll you swap?” painted on the side.

The piece de resistance has to be the “Ye Olde Apothecary” installed outside of Section off of Bank Street (across from the inappropriately located Telus building). It featured a series of vials in a case, with captions painted in the background “to attract a mate… essence of mayoral swagger“, “for virility, cat scrotum“, and “for charm, pompousness and obscurity harvested from local hipsters.” By the time I got to it (about a week after I first saw it), the front had been smashed in and the vials were gone.

I was considering heading out to Nevada this year for Burning Man. Then I looked at their theme for this year: the American Dream. I have nothing against our neighbours to the south, but the blurb makes the whole idea sound awful:

What has America achieved that you admire? What has it done or failed to do that fills you with dismay? What is laudatory? What is ludicrous? Put blame aside, let humor thrive, and dare to contemplate a larger question: What can America, this stumbling, roused, half-conscious giant, still contribute to the world?

I really don’t care about the national identity of the most self-obsessed country on the planet. I don’t go to Burning Man to worshop american self-adulation, I go their to spend time with some phenominally creative people, and see what people can do when they do what they love. In my mind, that transcends national identity.

2008 was going to be my last pilgramage to the Playa for a few years. I wanted another visit before embarking on the more adult (and cash-hungry) part of my life. But the theme really puts me off. Bastards.

Other years have had fun themes: the Floating World, Psyche, the Seven Ages. Why do they have to pick 2008 to say “Forget creativity for creativity’s sake, we’re hopping onto election year hype and making Burning Man more mainstream”?

I’m back from the burning heat of the Black Rock Desert. Burning Man was good, but I won’t go into detail about that now. Instead, I’d just like to thank Darrell and MG for keeping an eye on Pie Palace while I was away.

I am surprised to learn that Elizabeth May got 2/3 of the vote in the Green Party leadership race. Good for her. I am also surprised that none of the folks I was expecting to win did well in the Federal Council race. As a Green Party volunteer I’m disappointed that my picks didn’t win, but I will keep working hard for the Party.

I know a number of David’s supporter’s read this blog, so I’d like to give them a pep-talk (ten days late): You fought a good fight, and you did a good job. Elizabeth May has 30 years of media exposure, whereas David is a complete newcomer to the national scene. A vote for Elizabeth was not a vote against David, or his vision of a more inclusive Green Party; it’s just an indication that Greens know who she is. David is still the best candidate for Ottawa-Centre, and his vision is the best road for our Party to follow. I hope that the Party will invite David to stand as one of the Deputy Leaders, it sounds like David would accept.

Update: Whups. I noticed that I missed an important word in the last paragraph. It’s added with bold. It kind of made my call for unity sound like a call for disunity. Doh!

Tonight, the Man burns. Even though I’m nowhere near an internet connection, I’m reaching forward in time to give you this little packet of bytes from the playa. It’s a pin that I designed as a gift for fellow burners. I lengthened the Man’s arms a little bit, which was a slight mistake, but it looks pretty good on a silver background.

I’m away at Burning Man for the next two weeks. I have a few canned posts for your reading pleasure.

Many years ago, New Scientist ran a story about Theo Jensen, and his hobby. He likes to build skeletons out of PVC tubing, and then articulate them so that they move on their own. His most impressive peices are powered by the wind, and wander weirdly about the landscape.

I would love to build one of these suckers for Burning Man, but, given that plans aren’t available and that time is running a little short, I’ll have to make do with our platform/lighthouse.

Update: I forgot to mention that MG, PiePalace’s intrepid jet-setting correspondent was responsible for bringing that link to the editorial board’s attention. Bad editorial board! Bad!

Neat! A European Burning Man. Now I have another reason to visit the continent of the ancestors.