What a month. January kickstarted with an epic storm, knocked out our power for a couple of days, sent me in a frantic search for my backups when my LaCie with all my images wouldn’t startup again. And to top it all up, our internet was reduced to an old school ISDN upload speeds during the whole month of January while I managed to travel to Hyderabad, Brussels and Kharkiv all in one go. What a month. And the race for adventure continues in February.
I owe N. and I.A. a post on Kharkiv and Hyderabad and the vote is still out on which city is safer to travel but first things first.
SiP goes 53
I failed epic 52 and by the looks of it, I am on a trajectory of failure for 53 as well. Wait but why. I do have a plan. Yet life is throwing some wrenches in that plan.
M., Casetta and Blaster are taking the spotlights.
I am still struggling with the format I want to apply to my data stream in 2019 for SiP goes 53. It goes well with the Dataism of this week featured person. Are we the slow evolving natural algorithm of Lady M. (mice analogue algorithm has a much higher frequency of us humans, so the definition of slow is up for grabs), the cassette data stream of Lady C. or beatboxing Blaster.
Time will tell. Both in my photographic challenge and our Homo Sapiens adventure. Stay tuned. At least for my photographic adventure.
We got SiP goes Korea up and running this week (big thank you, Suné), we have a year-end coming down at us with light speed, and Queen Viktualia has to run a little Queendom.
Not to mention her little young one, Princess Delicatessa.
This week’s word on SiP goes 52 is Trust. And I am seriously late. Quite a few words to finish. And a few other projects to get on the tracks like SiP goes Korea (yeah, how cool is it to have your own work exhibited on the other side of the globe).
Awesome, no?
As seen on IG
Now there is more to this sweet Unicorn. Who does not want to be a mythical character and who does not want to be a 1B valued startup company. Another definition of Unicorn.
That said
My creative challenge this week was not so much how to trust a Unicorn. That tagline stuck with me. Trust me. I am a Unicorn., Soon it turned into how I could shoot not one but at least three (and maybe four) Unicorns, ready to post. A creative challenge in its own. The rest of the week will see if I managed. Or not.
Last but not least
I am taking a Big Bad Unicornlook at all my social accounts and you may want to subscribe to my new FB page (ot not). Anyway, here it is.
Today I reshoot an image that has always been special to me.
One of those images you remember.
That stick with you.
A transformational one.
Low Key.
When I first shot Padmé in November 2012 and posted the shot on IG as the Phantom of the Opera, it was the first of a series of really close up low key portraits. I remember discovering the technique of low key photography on a youtube video I was looking at, and I had to try it on my little friends.
And Padmé was the first.
When I was looking for inspiration this morning for this weeks word at SiP, my eye fell on little Padmé and I knew I wanted to see if I could reshoot her portrait.
A technical challenge combined with a creative one.
Inner Monologue.
The whole reasoning on how I got to her you can read on the SiP blog. I left out the inner monologue on the sad events in Syria and the troubled times we are living in, although the dark red of her grandson may have a not so subtle influence on the image, after all.
I must say I am not unhappy with the results.
For sure, I will evolve.
Grow stronger and become better.
And maybe in six years time, I have to do a reshoot of Padmé.
Maybe.
For now, I need to get some football pictures edited.
The season has started.
I am having a little backlog here.
I was supposed to share some of our adventures in Paris, keep you posted on some of the other words we are exploring at StuckInPlastic and share we are heading to Hamburg in a good two weeks time for the second SiP exhibition of the year as part of the Floating Bricks event. Unfortunate I have been suffering like some of you this epic Batman Flu and I am now officially heading into week five where I am still not 100% completely “frisk”.(*)
No worries, our local family doctor told us it can take up to seven weeks to be completely frisk again. Only two more weeks to go with ups and downs and a pretty annoying cough. Should be completly recovered for our next toy photography safari in Paris later this spring. Or is it summer.
H3N2
This year’s flu season was a tough one.
Impacting the worldwide community of flu sensitive sapiens at large. Not a real pandemic, as a pandemic only applies to new virus strains but for sure a bad flu year that got me coughing like an old smoker (and hey, I am close to 10 years of no smoking now – another post in the making) and made me humble in understanding how fasts pandemics can hit us.
Luckily it is just the flu.
Albeit a bad flu.
With a cool name. H3N2.
Not to be mistaken with his bad ass sibling H2N3.
Has anyone seen C3PO or R3D2?
Our H2N3 patient sharing our intergalactic world of opportunity, or should I say community.
So, I am having a little backlog here.
Wildstyle Build
Last week I embarked on a new experiment with free building amongst a lot of kids which I tagged on IG with bravery.
Issar from Awesome Projects called me and asked if was interested in a little LEGO project.
How can one say no to such a question?
After a few calls back and forth we landed he was looking for a live build.
Those that know me (that is all of you), will shiver and timber on having me out and about amidst a large group of kids without being fully in control.
I am after all a more solitary toy photographer and not a team builder that builds LEGO with and or amidst a large group of kids.
LEGO Heron City
Creative challenge accepted, and I went ahead with my Master Builder (Birk) to build a World of Imagination.
Not just any world.
A LEGO Heron City World of Imagination.
A LEGO Heron City World of Opportunity
A pretty large freestyle build or should we call this one Wildstyle build that took us the better of two days.
A build that also needed to be a sweet lasting memory of the community event that HERON City organized for all their kids.
A build to last.
Communities
The reason why I wanted to share this story here today with you (and me, as I see this as my personal star trek captains log agenda) was not so much about how cool it was to build for Big Inc. HERON City (super cool btw – thank you), but for the community of kids that during these two days were part of my building experience.
The Feedback
The girl that kept on bringing me pieces from the LEGO play pits I needed to include. The boy that absolutely wanted to put Captain Hook in the lava. No matter what, he was ready for it. The sister that kept on telling her little brother to not touch the build, but secretly touched it herself. The girl that asked me why I was mixing Batman with Minecraft and The Simpsons. Because we can! The hundreds of parents that asked me what I was doing (building LEGO) … The kids that were shy, but smiled big time when I asked if they build themselves. The look on the face of that one guy when I said it was the first time I build in LEGO. And the happiness in the eyes of that little girl when I “fixed” her car. A big pink piece to keep it all together made her smile.
We are building LEGO.
I have to admit my anxiety levels were tested when I had adults trying to shake the build in the last few hours when we reached readiness, to see how strong it was, but overall these two days were just plain awesome.
A community that organized a community event for the next generation to come and play and I could be part of it and build something special to give back to that community. Thank You.
Communities rock.
B.
The Post Scriptums
PS. Next time, Issar, we need to execute the collaborative plan we discussed. That is going to be even more awesome community experience. A true community build.
PPS. For me, Sapiens is a small intergalactic community we should take care off. No point having the bullies on the playground fighting with each other. If Trump, Putin or Xi are not behaving as community role models, they should be put in the corner of the class. We have more important intergalactic fish to fry.
PPS. Frisk is one of the Swedish words for being healthy.
2018 is well underway.
January is running to an end.
And I have been rethinking my workflow a little.
Still very much work in progress, but I will be consolidating some of my little projects here on this blog and in my little portfolio.
No revolution.
Just a logical evolution of my creative journey.
Me2 got his own blog a long time ago. Then came that little collective called Stuck In Plastic, and it has been difficult to get all the adventures connected.
I have shared a lot of my plastic adventures last year on the SiP blog.
Neglected Me2’s blog and struggled along the way to keep up my promise to post here once a week.
I will continue to actively post on SiP. And I will add some more personal musings on all things plastic here and actually start consolidating Me2 adventures and plastic explorations here on my blog. Evolution.
Fifty-two and a little.
And that brings me to this year creative challenge we embarked on over at SiP. Fifty-two words to explore. Fifty-two odd images. Fifty-two weeks.
And this is week four.
And yes.
I managed so far to keep up the pace and follow the rhythm.
And this weeks word is fitness.
For those who know me, I am struggling with keeping up appearances at the local fitness club.
For sure I would need to get rid of a good 4K to have a full mens sana in corpore sano approach.
But hey, the next challenge will be the mens sana then.
Fitness.
So back to fitness.
After considering shooting some images in the fitness above the Diner (more on that later), I am happy I did not go that road, as Lynn did a fantastic job on that.
So I did what I always do when I am looking for inspiration and went to Wikipedia.
Fitness (often denoted w or ω in population genetics models) is the quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology.
Ouch. And it does not get easier.
It can be defined either with respect to a genotype or to a phenotype in a given environment. In either case, it describes individual reproductive success and is equal to the average contribution to the gene pool of the next generation that is made by individuals of the specified genotype or phenotype. The fitness of a genotype is manifested through its phenotype, which is also affected by the developmental environment. The fitness of a given phenotype can also be different in different selective environments.
Darwinian Fitness
I have to admit I had no clue what phenotypes are. But luckily Wikipedia had a nice introductory article on genetics. If you want to know more about phenotypes and a good refresher on genetics, I warmly recommend the read.
With asexual reproduction, it is sufficient to assign fitnesses to genotypes. With sexual reproduction, genotypes are scrambled every generation. In this case, fitness values can be assigned to alleles by averaging over possible genetic backgrounds. Natural selection tends to make alleles with higher fitness more common over time, resulting in Darwinian evolution.
And that is where it clicked.
The evolution of (plastic) men into space.
A new take on the evolution of Sapiens (the species, not the book).
The interplanetary species as part of our “Darwinian fitness” program.
To boldly go …
The evolution of little plastic space cowboys
About Space Cowboys
I created the evolution of Me2 as the invite for my 40th birthday (a long time ago) and I thought it was a good exercise to try it again.
I had the idea and wanted to execute on it.
There are some flaws in the picture, but I also wanted to execute the idea in a short period of time. And the flaws actually contribute to the Darwinian fitness program. I kinda like it.
Seattle (/siˈætəl/see-at-əl) is a coastal seaport city on the wbest coast of the U.S. in the state of Washington. With an estimated 652,405 residents as of 2013, downtown Seattle is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest region of North America and the fastest-growing major city in the United States (did we mention the Seattle metropolitan area has approximate 3.6 million inhabitants including some of the world most famous geeks and AFOLs alike).
The city is situated on a narrow isthmus between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, about 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of the Canada–United States border. A major gateway for trade with Asia, Seattle is the 8th largest port in the United States and 9th largest in North America in terms of container handling and the very first city to hold the very first fine art LEGO photography exhibition in the Bryan Ohno Gallery.
A city with a Space Needle, a Ferris Wheel and new Friends.
A month has gone by since we were in Seattle for the grand opening of the In LEGO, We Connect exhibition (the very first one) and only now could we take a break, pause the rollercoaster and share some cityscapes for you to enjoy this fine Sunday together with the chocolate*.
Happy Easter !
Boris
(*) Easter Egg Chocolate can seriously damage your health. Only use in sufficient qualities and indulge in the cacao.
