ragesoss

cross-processing, vignetting, color gradient, film grain, in a square instant frame

I’m not usually one to get effusive about software, but Vignette, my main camera app on my Android phone, is just awesome.  Every time my phone alerts me to app updates, I get excited at the possibility that there’s a new Vignette feature.  Since I reviewed it in September, Neil and Theresa have added some awesome new ones, really opening up the creative potential of the app.

The most powerful new features are the strip and grid modes, which create composites of four consecutive shots:

A strip of shots with the Holga effect

You can make photobooth-like strips, and you can even do four quarter-frame shots to simulate a Supersampler.  My favorite approach is to use that mode to make a panorama:

Four quarterframes make a lo-fi panorama.

Just the other day, a new update added a double-exposure mode.  I haven’t done much to explore the possibilities with it yet, but here’s my favorite one so far:

a double exposure: Brighton, and portraits of him on the wall

I’ve put up over 200 Vignette-made shots so far since late July, about 2 shots per day.

Whew! It’s a been a hectic few months since I blogged last!

Pittsburgh, our new home

Faith, Brighton and I bought a house and moved to greater Pittsburgh in late May (Glenshaw, to be precise). I have to call Faith “Dr. Honey”, instead of just honey; she has her M.D. now and is serving an anesthesiology residency at UPMC. Pittsburgh is awesome. The people are quite friendly (if rather more sexist and religiously conservative than New Englanders, on average). The “Pittsburgh Left” is both charming and dangerous. And I started a vegetable garden!

I’m not yet finished with my dissertation, but with the necessary move to Pittsburgh and the need to pull in at least some income, my options seemed limited. Academic positions were basically a non-starter. I was looking into jobs as a lab tech or a photographer or an in-home child-care provider, and there are actually some jobs in the Pittsburgh area (moreso than in much of the country). None looked too appealing. But the perfect opportunity opened up for me at perfect time.

I can has job?

In June I took a position with the Wikimedia Foundation: “online facilitator” for their 17 month “Public Policy Initiative“. In short, I’m part of a team focused on creating a Wikipedia Ambassadors program and developing good ways to get professors and their classes involved with improving Wikipedia content. (As a pilot, we’re starting with public policy professors in the U.S., but we hope to expand the scope of the programs we’re starting after the basics are in place.) I tell people I’m the head of the Pittsburgh Office of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you’re a Wikimedian in the Pittsburgh area, let’s get together some time; I’m going to try to start having regular Pittsburgh wiki and free culture meetups, which have never really happened before.

Finally, Wikimania. It deserves a post of its own…