bulloney

First, the requisite "All the are appreciated and thanks for stopping by!" and usual "I haven't been spending much time on here of late" etc etc.  Fact is, I spend so much time in front of a computer for work, I barely log in to anything when I get home.  Gotta have a life away from the monitor and spend some time out in the big blue room with the bright yelllow light, right?

I just took a look at my 'stats' and thought it would be worth noting a few numbers I found interesting.  I joined the site around this time in 2006, so over the course of 9 years I have: 15,421 pageviews. 460 deviations (counting scraps - does anyone ever use those anymore?), 79,167 deviation views. 

The first image that popped on me, rather unexpectedly, was Liechtenstein Squared.  I really should put a higher resolution of this up, I'm sure it would still pull some traffic 639 views and 23 fav.  I think Settler's Legacy was the one that replaced it for top hit count, and is currently 565 views and 23

   

Leadenhall market, a film image from my 2010 trip to London, has passed 3000 views (3032 with 75 .  Generally, there's a fav a little quicker than every-other-day (0.62), 24 deviations are viewed a day, and just under 5 per day visit my front page.  Silent Entreaty for some reason would not view, so I just re-uploaded the file and would have expected it to again challenge for top title except it is now so far behind at 843 views and 42 fav.  And since I'm going back through an old hard drive expect some more dated shots to pop up as I make my way to 500 deviations....

The Last Great Goulais Bonfire is still one of the shots I'm most proud of and like showing off. Right off the camera, no edits required.  I'll always dangle this one as one of my best.  Hot Seat is up there too, with 773 views, 37 favs.


     


Russian Mourning 1235 views, 34 and Spilled Blood 449 views 9 fav, two companion shots from my first visit to St Petersburg, have always been near the top of the hit list, and for a long time Russian Mourning was the top in hits and comments.

 


To hopefully pump numbers on a few I personally like but that haven't got much in the way of attention: Chartres, Miasma, Texture, Clear Evening, Doppelganger, and How Much for that Kitty in the Window.
         


And, last but not least, a shout out to David davincipoppalag as one of the DA community's friendliest and nicest members. Always a pleasure to get your thoughts, my friend!

I'm out to go for a walk and catch the end of Laidback Luke's DJ set over at the EDM music show going on a mile or so west of my place.  Really, I don't even need to walk closer since I can hear perfectly well from my balcony, but its a nice night out so why not.

Until next time, take care and happy shooting!

Sheldon S.
"BuLL.oney"

Well, a year and a half since I wrote a new journal entry.  So much has changed, yet much is still the same.  Where to begin?

I took a look at my stats and saw that my "deviations were viewed 50,162 times".  A great big "Thank you" to everyone who's visited and is visiting!!    I don't have much free time anymore to keep up with messages (I know I know I'm not the greatest at keeping up in the first place...!) but please know that I want to reciprocate to every visitor I get and greatly appreciate the comments you leave and the you make.  Consider this journal a standing "Thanks for the " comment on your page if I don't get to it in my twice-a-year splurge of message clearing

Last summer was interesting to say the least.  The biggest item involved a change of jobs to a new company and (slightly) different field.  I was a technical guru & go-to for a North American heavyweight with instant name recognition to people all over industry, I am now a "traveling salesman" with a (much) smaller specialty provider involved in projects worldwide but who needs to be 'introduced' at nearly every stop I make.  Still in the steel industry, but in a completely different side of it.  I am in learning mode and will be for some time; having to refer nearly every technical question to our metallurgists is a whole-scale paradigm shift to me since I've mostly been the answer person the last few years.  It's a definite change and taking some getting used to, but it has its own aspects and I'm looking forward to developing my new skills and knowledge base.

Last summer also involved some significant hardware upgrades.  I still have & use my older laptop, but seeing as it is 2006 vintage I picked up a new one with more juice which can run newer software.  I must say I'm not a fan of the new versions of Windows and Office... I hadn't done an OS upgrade and was still running XP and Office 2000, while my work computers were XP and Office 2003.  (My old company wasn't big on upgrading their software)  Give me back my classic menu structure and dropdown menus!  I can (literally) make Excel 2003 sing and dance, but I am having a hell of a time finding where commands are in the new version.  Some 'progress' is bupkiss. Especially default font at 11pt.  Really?

My trusty Pentax K10D had an incident, and the cost of repairing it was painful enough to merit a switchover to the most recent (at the time) body Pentax had, a K-5.  There are a few design items on the new one I'm not impressed with and the hand-feel isn't quite as comfortable, but the performance jump is huge, as it should be for a three generation newer model.  I no longer worry about visible noise on ISO400 and it has opened up my options considerably.  The last picture the D took was the group picture of my former team members together for the final time just before some retirements and my departure, so you could literally say that our smiles "broke the camera".  And that, folks, is why I work better behind the lens than in front of it!

I'm having some difficulty deciding exactly what to include in my book, I feel that the themes I would do are incomplete but perhaps that's just my inner critic talking.  Part of the problem is that during the summer I discovered that I am missing virtually all negatives from pictures taken in 2008.  That is pretty significant as you can guess from my journal at the time bulloney.deviantart.com/journa… and covers the negatives for a shoot with EH bulloney.deviantart.com/art/EH… (that one actually is a dSLR image, I never scanned any of the film shots), trip to St Petersburg bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Ts… and Riga bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Cl…, trip to London bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Be… and Paris bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Dr…, and a week in Orlando bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Ca…). Also missing are a large chunk of my 2007 ones (Winnipeg bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Oh… and Prairie in August / harvest season bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Sp…)... turns out that's what was in the one box the movers lost during my move to Toronto.  I still have 4x6 prints of most of the 'good' ones in my sheets and can sort-of salvage with those but they won't be high enough quality for the full-page images some of them deserve, and there are a lot (particularly from Winnipeg) that I never did put into my 'showoff' binders and are utterly lost.  I will admit that I had a bad day when I was tearing apart my apartment and storage boxes looking for them when suddenly the little lightbulb went on over my head....  Sucks, but these things happen.

Back to a happier note, my sister Denise has made some significant progress promoting her photography.  Her shots still make mine look like I just picked up a camera despite how far I've come over the years.  One of her images is shortlisted as a finalist for a public installation in the town of Banff, Alberta.  She is up against two other works, and online voting is open to the month of Feb, so please vote for her! banff.ca/index.aspx?NID=863   Though she doesn't really keep up her DA page Lunisi it still has a few of the shots, and she'd love it if you checked out her (work-in-progress) Facebook page www.facebook.com/LunisiPhotogr…

I actually haven't been too active myself lately on DA.  Did a couple of uploads last night for the first time in months, I'd have to say that the new submission process is a bit more streamlined.  I particularly like the drag & drop option, a boon to me since I have a rather complicated filing structure... I've done a lot of negative scanning in the past months and my target is to have five of those cleaned and uploaded by the end of the month.  Did a bit of shooting over the summer and got a few half-decent shots if I do say so myself.  Finally finished off and developed a film that's been in one of my cameras since last summer and found some awesome pictures from the wedding I shot last year bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Th… that I'd forgotten I'd taken.  I've been trying new applications for my photographic skills, and some of the photos I've submitted to news sites have been 'editor pick' so I think I'm doing something right.  Also did a recent 'house shoot' for a coworker who is selling her place, she told me yesterday that interest has picked up significantly since her realtor posted the new pictures I took for them.  So its safe to say I have a lot of backlog to work on, which is a good thing.


Anyway, enough of the navel gazing!  I gots work to do........

Isil Z'ha Venii,
B.


P.S.: "More like this" can go fluff.  What's with having those thumbs twice the size of the "others in gallery" links when most of them are still works by the same artist?!

For those not up on "Canada" news, there's a major event in Toronto today.  Possibly one of the biggest in modern Canadian history - the funeral of Jack Layton, the leader of the Opposition and head of the NDP party who unexpectedly lost his battle with cancer and died earlier this week.

I'm shooting around the area today, so don't have time to write much now.

Full details on the event are best found at cbc.ca/news

Anyway, here's the first portion of my shots from this morning:
www.facebook.com/media/set/?se…

I'll clean some up and post them on here later.  

B.

Actually, its not.  Its just a line I heard in the Bullet For My Valentine song on Octane this morning that I can't get out of my head.   

But it is apropos in a way...


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Ah. You seek meaning.  Then listen to the music, and not the song.


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Time to make an update.  Again, nearly a year between entries, as the last one was in September.  More time has passed, more things have happened.  And through it all, Insh'Allah.

I'll explain that in a moment.  First, a few general updates.

If you look through my gallery (THAT'S A HINT BY THE WAY! ) you'll notice I've done a bit of travelling since I last made any major comments on here.  Actually, a ridiculous amount of travelling.  My airline miles and hotel points are through the roof, and my credit card is screaming in agony.  Let's see, since Canadian Thanksgiving in October:

* 10 days in Australia
* 4 two-to-four day work trips to Little Rock, Arkansas
* 1 weekender to Memphis and area during one of those
* 5? times in Toronto & area (including an interesting New Year's Eve) totalling roughly 3 weeks
* 10 days in London & Kent
* 4 days in Calgary at Christmas
* An awesome May two-four weekend in Bermuda
* Detroit and back in a day... phew.

Throw in my Mom coming to Sault for a couple weeks to watch the Canadian Women's Curling Championships / Scotties Tournament of Hearts (see bulloney.deviantart.com/art/Is… and bulloney.deviantart.com/art/At… ) in February, and to say that I've been unsettled for a while would be an understatement.

I haven't done the math for it, but I'd estimate that I've been averaging living out of my backpack roughly one day in four, probably closer to one day in three at times.  And every other week in May.


Well, to further enhance that, add to it: Living addressless in hotels for most of the last two weeks while waiting for my furniture to make the trip from Sault Ste Marie to my new home in.... Toronto.


Yes, Toronto.  The Big Smoke.  T-dot.  The (self-proclaimed) Center of Canada.  Tranna.  T.O.  The 416.  Current visiting place of the "G20" world leaders and (from the news reports anyways) a gazillion protesting hooligans.

Its been a long time coming, and a long complicated story.  Short version: a gentleman decided to retire in our sales office in Southern Ontario, I applied, and I got the job.  That's really all that needs be said.


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I am Grey.
I stand between the candle and the star.
We are Grey.
We stand between the darkness and the light.


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Also, after browsing my gallery (HINT HINT) one might notice that my focus is changing towards more 'people' shoots.  Its mostly uncharted territory for me, and I've had some great opportunities in the last while.  Tried to get together with a few Sooites but that didn't work out (maybe we can get together in July when I'm up... i'll msg you on FB) Now that I'm in Toronto, where there are a heckuvalot more people to take pictures of, there will be quite a bit more of those popping up.  Especially since its summer, its nice out, I live by a park downtown on Lakeshore Ave....

So, who wants to go for a shoot?


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The universe began with a word. But which came first: the word or the thought behind the word? You can't create language without thought, and you can't conceive a thought without language, so which created the other, and thus created the universe?


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Back to my earlier comment on "Insh'Allah"... I once read an article that this term is one of the most common and yet misunderstood, and therefore frustrating, phrases that a traveller would come across when going through the Middle East.  (I haven't. Yet.)

From Wiktionary:
Arabic < interjection >
1. God willing; if it is God's will; if God wills it
2. it is to be hoped; I hope; we hope so

The first definition listed above is the most appropriate for my thoughts at the moment.  Though they all say roughly the same thing, the three definitions have subtly different meanings.  Heavy shades of grey.  Examples: "I will win the $50 million lottery this Friday, Insh'Allah." (highly unlikely)  "I'll buy a new car, Insh'Allah."  (Possible, but not really probable)  "We'll make it through this traffic and arrive on time, Insh'Allah." (probable, but there is some doubt... though sometimes that is actually translates to a polite way of saying 'good luck with that!' )  "Did our team win the game last night?  Insh'Allah."  (I dunno, but whatever happened is what happened)  "My friend's child will be born healthy, Insh'Allah." (I hope that this is what happens - more towards the second definition).  The same words invoke hope, doubt, acceptance, belief, disagreement, and faith; it is surprising how versatile suc a simple phrase can be.

Going back to my last journal, I made a comment and invoked this phrase.  Well, now that it has happened, I can say that a move out of Sault Ste Marie is what I was obliquely referring to at the time.  My eight years there had good times, bad times, and others in between, but the time for a change was ripe.


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I believe that when we leave a place a part of it goes with us and part of us remains. Go anywhere in these halls, when it is quiet and just listen. After a while you will hear the echoes of all of our conversations, every thought and word we've exchanged. Long after we are gone, our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains. But I will admit that the part of me that going will very much miss the part of you that is staying.


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Finally, it must be said that the last week or so has seen a lot of big news for other close friends of mine as well.  (I shocked a coworker by having good news to report so often!)  One just had a baby daughter, her second child.  One had the brewhouse he is a founding partner of 'back home' in Quebec win the Platinum prize at the Mondiale de la Biere in Montreal, the top prize of the city's international beer festival.  (He brings some back after every trip, it is good stuff.  They're called "A La Fut".  Check it out: www.alafut.com/ )  One quit our company quite unexpectedly to move back to the Toronto area and help his father establish a new engineering firm.  One was promoted out of the union and into the managerial ranks.  Several are retiring over the next week.

I seem to be in a nexus with so many key things happening to so many different people that I know at once.  If I were still in Sault, I might think that the place was falling apart around me... (well, in the case of my old apartment that wouldn't be overly far from the truth... but I digress) And that there is so much good news... well, its a change.  I wish the best to everyone.


Isil'Zha Venii

Sheldon S.
(BuLL.oney)