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I got myself a stall at the Pyree Markets on Sunday, and framed some of my photos to try and sell some. I’d priced them rather low just in an attempt to try and sell them – only making about $10 off each one ($30 for a framed 8×10″ print isn’t bad people, cmon!)

As you may have guessed, I sold one! Right at the end of the day, after quite a few people walking past and looking at things then just wandering off, a guy walked up and bought a 6×8″ print of my Huskisson photo. It’d cost me about $8 to make, and he paid $15 – bastard asked if there was any discount for cash, geez – so it was on its way.

All in all I made a loss on the day, paying $30 for the stall and making $8 profit on the photo. Oh well, it was a learning experience, and if I hadn’t gone I wouldn’t have known

Ahh, washing day – that day when I realise that all my clothes are too stinky to wear any more times and it’s time to make them clean. That day has come for me, so I must do battle with the posessed washing machine of doom. It’s noisy, it makes the lights flicker because of the dodgy wiring in this house, and the knob thing on it’s busted so you don’t always know where in the cycle you’re starting it!

I’m also trying to come up with a new business name and site/card to go with it – ricetek’s been around as an idea since 2002 – it doesn’t suit the way that I’m going with my life these days. If you know me, I’m working on my skills as a photographer and discovering a lot of things about how I see the world. I ask myself constantly what the story is behind every thing that I see, and how I can portray it to others. Places, things that are there for a reason – whether intentional or forgotten – and the questions that people ask about their lives.

But how to portray all these things? How to tell the story? This is what I’m working on now. Picture a cup – it’s simple – a cup. But what happens to this cup? You put coffee, tea, soft drink, cordial, water, wine, spirits or peanuts in it, and it holds something. Some people’s cups follow them through many different places, times and experiences. The cup of the man in the trenches for a war can serve many purposes. The coffee cup that lives on your desk in your office lives a relatively simple life. When people travel into space, the depths of the ocean, the deserts or the ice fields of the antarctic, they all need something that looks or serves the purposes of a cup. They all have their stories, and telling those stories well is a revealing process for the artist, let alone the viewer.

It’s probably something you don’t think of much, but that’s my job as a photographer. To make you think!

For now, I’m working on the idea of using “Cerdo Rudis” as my business name – Cerdo is latin for artist, and Rudis for “unskilled” or “raw” to signify not only my current skill level, but also the way that I seem to be developing my style. It’s raw, bringing the story out and showing what’s there, opening myself and the subject up to let the viewer of the art see into the depths. It’s hard to explain, but well, it’s me

So now I’ll probably keep ricetek for my personal and weird stuff, maybe my technology side, but cerdo rudis will be my new beginning, allowing me to house my art, and show people what I can do.

Ok, another one just as I typed it

GPS odometer 1355+change

Today was a relatively short day travel-wise, since I started in Goulburn and was heading for canberra – roughly 100km of driving. Nothing terribly exciting to report as far as the travel went, the Federal Highway is pretty boring. I went past Lake George which is rather empty at the moment, so it looks like a giant flat plain.

Canberra’s just like everyone said, designed for the public servants and rather boring. Looking down some of the streets makes me think of what Movie World is like without all the glitz, a manufactured town by boring people for boring people. I would say it doesn’t have personality, but it does. It’s just a really boring one. The streets are nice and wide, very well planned out and so forth, but that just makes it look more empty than it is. There weren’t many people around the place except for old people and students at the tourist places and boring corporate types in the eateries at lunch time.

I walked around parliament house, which is rather… parliamentary. It’s not exciting, and anyone that says it is has to be a politics student or old. I took a few photos, just to see if I could make it un-boring, but I don’t think I achieved that, I’m just not that good.

Meeting up with Mum we stopped at a little italian place for lunch, because I was starving by then – breakfast was coffee and cigarettes. I got the Tattaglia Carbonara, a wonderful mix of bacon, mushrooms and a white wine sauce over fresh pasta – quite tasty. Caesar salad with calamari was mum’s dish, which seemed nice but the seafood didn’t taste too nice to me.

Our next stop was the Canberra Gallery, where we checked out a few different exhibitions including a celebration of 60 years of the Canberra Photographic Society. Some great shots, and a nice group of displays.

Next we went to the War Memorial, which is an impressive structure – as it should be – it’s quite amazing to see our military history. I saw one of my relatives on the giant wall of rememberance, wandered through the exhibits and even saw a photo of another one of my relatives on the Sandakan photo wall. This wall is quite saddening because it shows a photo of each person put to death in the Sandakan Prison camp.

So now I’m sitting on a couch in one of the rooms of the Crowne Casino, pondering what to have for dinner. I guess I’ll just find some nice little place and munch, then toddle around taking photos of things until I get tired

As a PS to this original post, I went out and had a shitty dinner – the WORST lasagne that I’ve ever had, tasted like it was made of last week’s leftover horse meat or something. Went back to the room, hung out, then went out again to grab some stuff out of the car and locked myself out of the room – go me!

Finally, I bought myself a laptop. For a very long time I thought I’d buy a macbook, having some of the best features and build quality out there, but while Mum and Dad were looking for a rice cooker today they toddled over to the electronics section of Harvey Norman and got talking to the computer guy there. Toshiba have just released a new version of their A100 series laptops, with new pricing and so forth.

I was at home, and Dad called me for my opinion on one (he was looking for a new one as well) and I rendered it, saying that it was a damn good buy. I ended up going and having a look, so we bought two.

It’s an Intel Core Duo 2.0Ghz, with a 120Gb SATA HDD, 1gb Ram, Nvidia 7300 Go graphics, 15″ widescreen (1280×800) and all the other usual things (including bluetooth) So far I’ve played EVE Online with it, and done a bunch of other things and it seems to be a quite capable machine, especially since it was only $2500 including a 3 year warranty

The next test is to install linux on it – I’m not sure which distro I’m going to use – it’ll either be gentoo or ubuntu. I’ve been using ubuntu on my desktop for a while, and it “just works” … except for sound. Gentoo might get put on in that case.

Trust No Goblin, an interesting name for a doof, and Mt. Pikapene was the place it was held. I’m going to make this short, because I’m a bit over the whole adventure, but there’s plenty of photoblogging to be done of course

This is a huge post, and even though I hate the LJ “cuts” this one probably deserves it for low bandwidth people and so forth…

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