Michael R. Barrick's blog

Your eyes don't work like you (likely) think they work. As you look at the world your eyes and brain are constantly adjusting to different light levels, different light temperatures, changing the focus, and ignoring lens distortions and other anomalies.

A portion of my "day-job" photography involves making images of art installations at the gallery where I work and affiliated galleries where we participate in presentations. What I do to make these images look "right" goes unnoticed, because it's designed to. I only want you to see in the image what you would see with your eyes in the gallery. However, doing that with a camera is not as straightforward as point-and-shoot.

I do love me a good publication photo credit. Look at all those pages!

The Spaces Between: Contemporary Art from Havana [ISBN 978-1-908966-54-4], London, UK.

Once again I am (hopelessly) in the running for the Vancouver Nightlife Awards.  I got the e-mail that voting had opened and took a look to see who was in the running this year for the photographers and was actually surprised to see my name. No one said, "boo" to me this year about it, I don't even know who nominated me this time. Nonetheless, there I am.

So you can go vote for me if you like at http://awards.clubzone.com/

New site updates since the March 5 update:

I was working on a scan I made from a large-format 8" x 10" positive today and it got me to thinking about the "resolution" of large-format film. Depending on the grain of the film an 8" x 10" negative/positive original has a "native resolution" of somewhere between three and seven GIGA-pixels, in rough terms. Food for thought...

A short lesson in why freaking out about a "chemical" because it is "derived from" something nasty (or nasty-sounding) or is "similar to" some other chemical, or contains an element or component that would be nasty in some other compound is completely meaningless.

Here's what's new since the last site update:

In this tiny park in Nanaimo, which is actually the site of Nanaimo's original cemetery and called "Nanaimo Pioneer Cemetary Park", is the only grave on Canadian soil of a casualty of the Crimean War of 1854-56. The didactic plaque embedded into the wall reads...