Micah Walter

I am sitting in the Brooklyn apartment mulling over my weekly course schedule at MICA. It looks pretty reasonable. One of the main reasons I applied to MICA was because it looked to have the most flexible and independent curriculum. This was really important to me for a number of reasons. First, I am a freelancer at heart, and I like to be able to manage my own time and make my own schedule. It just works for me. I can procrastinate all I want and then hit it at the last minute, or I can get a jump start and take the afternoon off. I really like this sort of flexibility and it has been working well for a while now.

At MICA you are essentially required to take one “Graduate Liberal Arts” course per semester. This is usually in the form of a lecture type class, and most of them are offered once a week. The other course you have to sit in on is the Thesis/Seminar course which meets once a week in the evenings. This year they have also added something called Core Practicum, which also meets once a week in the evening. I am not really sure what Core Practicum is at this point. It sounds like an Apple OS-X technology, but we shall see!

So, here is my currently planned weekly schedule.

Monday - Philosophy and Pedagogy Something Something ( I can never remember the name ). 9am-12:30pm
Monday - Grad Photo Seminar - 7pm-10pm

Tuesday - Teaching Internship ( Electronic Media and Culture ) 4pm-10pm
Wednesday - Core Practicum 3pm-5:45pm

So you can see I really only need to be on campus Monday through Wednesday. The rest of the time I can spend out in the field shooting, or at the computer doing image processing, or in my bed catching up on sleep. It’s mostly up to me.

I also like the fact that Tuesday and Wednesday are evening/afternoon schedules. This means I can get up in the AM and do whatever I need to get done for the day. I am best at doing busy work and desk stuff early in the morning, and in the evening I interact with people much much better. So this should be a good fit. I just hope I don’t fall asleep in my one AM class on Mondays!

Another nice thing is that the Wednesday class is over at a reasonable hour which means if I want I can high-tail it back to Brooklyn in time for Letterman.

This just in… I just saw this on WIRED. It’s freekin incredible, and you can do it yourself at home. All you need is the short list of computer supplies, a 50/50 mirror, and some wood… oh and a really amazing 3D movie by someone as talented as Bjork.

Check out the video, and let me know if you build one!

Robin Williams had a line in the movie The World According To Garp, where he says “gradual school is where kids go and then gradually realize that they don’t want to go to school anymore.”

On Monday I had my orientation to MICA. It was pretty exhausting. The funny thing is that I didn’t really do anything. I mostly sat and listened and walked around campus with a tour guide.

It was really nice though. Eventually I got to meet most of the students in my program and we had a pretty decent time at the after party at Joe^2.

I received my ID card, and made my request for a loan refund check. I also finally got all my of my classes figured out and scheduled.

In the end I decided to shoot for a Graduate Teaching Internship and take the accompanying course called Philosophy and Pedagogy Something Something…. If I complete this course and two internships I will receive a certificate when I graduate.

I also was able to secure an internship for the semester for the undergrad foundation course called EMAC, or Electronic Media and Culture. Looks like I’ll be showing kids how to open their files in P-shop!

I have a good deal to say about the whole experience and my thoughts about the program at this point, but I am so slammed with real life work at the moment, that I will have to “get back at ya.”

Late….

Monday is the new student orientation at MICA. It looks to be an all day affair. I will be traveling back to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon and just staying until Tuesday morning ( it’s a long doggie related story ). I am thrilled to be starting this program in just a weeks time!. It has really been a long time coming and I just can’t wait to get started and immersed in the college atmosphere once again–well sort of.

Here is the schedule as it stands for Monday

9:00 AM - Sign In/Breakfast
9:30 AM - Orientation Welcome from the President of the school and a few others….
10:15 AM - Overview of Campus Resources for Grad Students
10:30 AM - The Grad Lab
10:45 AM - Career Development, Grants, Fellowships, Talkn about money here folks!
11:00 AM - Campus Tours

12:30 PM - Annual Graduate Luncheon ( wonder if they will be serving “luncheon meat” )
2:00 PM - Graduate Student Union, Health and Safety, Teaching Internship Program
3:00 PM - Meet with Grad Program Assistants
6:00 PM - Dinner with Program Director

10:00 PM - Club Charles with Julian?

Hey everyone, I have been blogging for the most part over at my new social network called Entropy Art. This site was set up as a way to document the next two years of my life which will be spent mostly pursuing an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In Baltimore, Maryland.

Since most of my daily thoughts have been winding up on that page, I think I should just not blog here for a while and point you all to the new site. I may eventually start this one back up, but for now, this site will just be an access point to my work and archives, etc….

I will keep all the content up here for reference, and decide what to do with it al when the time comes…

Hope to see you over at Entropy Art. Be sure to sign up and participate in any way that you wish!

-m

I am continually impressed by what I can make with my iPhone’s built in camera. This shot above was taken in the evening on my way back home from the Life Cafe ( my new hangout ). I rested the camera on part of the chain link fence that surrounds the park and I got a nice clear shot. The light was just right, so it made for a nice wide view of these kids playing soccer.

In Aperture I basically did nothing to the mage before opening it up in Silver Efex Pro. In Silver Efex I just used my sort of standard settings that I have been working with. High Structure, Agfa 400, and Copper Tone.

There are a few more frames from my walk home on Flickr if you are interested; all part of my Brooklyn Notebook.

Yes, that is the name I have temporarily picked for my Aperture Edit plugin. I spent a little more time working on it yesterday. I’m mostly in the learning stages, trying to figure out how to access Aperture’s information within the plugin framework. It looks pretty easy actually. So, I started laying out a UI and then began thinking about what I want this thing to actually do.

The concept I have at the moment is to build a plugin for Aperture that allows you to graphically create your own “scripts.” On the right side of the UI there will be a drop down menu of all of the possible functions you can use in your script. These are essentially the Core Image Units and whatever other image processing routines I want to include.

So, you would pick one and it would present you with whatever options that function may have, like sliders for values, etc. It would also show a preview of how the function will affect your image. If you click “OK”, it will add the function to a list that you can later edit. The idea is that you can save these “lists” or scripts for use with other images in the future, and you will be able to apply them in batch mode to whatever images you choose in Aperture.

I have some other ideas for this as well, but this is the core concept. So the first steps are to get a handle on how Aperture’s SDK passes data around, and how to show some images in the UI. Baby steps….

-m

These are mostly what I would refer to as “Happy Snaps,” but I thoroughly enjoyed taking a bunch of pictures yesterday while showing Kendra’s sister around New York. It was her first time here and we al had a great time. The line to get up to the top of the Empire State Building was probably the worst part of the day, but the payoff was good. I turned my mostly mundane shots of the cityscape at sunset to pictures I actually kinda like using Silver Efex Pro. Again, this is my favorite tool/add-on for Aperture at the moment.

I have sort of dialed in my usual settings using a combo of the High Structure preset, Agfa 400 film and Toning with the Copper Toning setting ( number 10 ). I created a preset with all of these in place so I can basically do a once click conversion. On occasion I will add a control point here or there to burn or dodge where needed. It works PERFECTLY!!!!

With the low res iPhone, one can’t expect to have perfection ALL the time. In this example, I can start to see that my additional image processing is starting to add up and is making my nice little snapshot of lower Manhattan, as seen from the Smith and 9th St. station, begin to look a little weird. Weird isn’t really what I am after these days. Classic, maybe, but weird, not so much….

Lately I am finding myself using one of two cameras, and sometimes both. I either walk out the door with my Canon 20D and 17-35 f/2.8 lens, or I just pack my iPhone. Seriously. My DSLR kit consists of a wide assortment of lenses, flashes and accessories, but these days I am sort of in to the one lens one camera kit option. If it’s night, I take a small Canon 220 flash, but that’s about it.

I have also really been in to using Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro for converting images into black and white. It’s an amazing application and it’s available as a plugin for Aperture. So, I am in heaven.

The above shot was taken with my iPhone and converted with my favorite settings in Silver Efex, and then below I have a few shots from the 20D taken the following day.

I’m loving living part time in Brooklyn and part time in Baltimore. The possibilities are seemingly endless right now. Eventually I will need to focus on some issues at hand, but right now, I am really enjoying being a pseudo-street photographer!