Graphic Recording

I didn't know it, but all my life I've engaged in "graphic recording" when it came to exploring new ideas or learning. I never went as far as the artists who made a series of recordings for the sustainable agriculture and food conference, but my subjects were technical, and I was a technical kid growing up, so my "confections," as Tufte calls them, were more mathematical, graphical and textual in nature. I used them to illustrate things to myself, like working out visually how cycles represent waveforms in musical instruments. Now, I see them as graphic recordings. I was a bit ashamed of them, since I thought it meant that I wasn't a good learner and tried to suppress or limit them. That was a mistake.

The drawings are simply wonderful and I got put onto them by Brenda Dawson who tweeted about the graphical recordings made for the March 29 2009 conference
Inaugural National Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability at the University of California, Davis. How much better a "presentation" these graphic recordings make than a PowerPoint presentation!

These drawings are a lot like my vision for an information system, called Strands, which would be as thick and filled with complexity as the Talmud and as visually expressive as these graphic recordings. If only the web could be like this. When I think of Twitter and Tabloo, if they could be combined, I think we'd be close. Tabloo enables users to create visual narratives (through the structure and relationship, size and aspects of images) and Twitter enables users to create conversations out of small fragments of thought flowing continually.

Mokuhankan Print Arrived

My print from Mokuhankan.com arrived from Japan today. It is a lovely print of turtles swimming carved by David Bull and printed by one of the Mokuhankan printers. You can see it at Hokusai Turtles - Swimming Turtles (I do not want to link to the image). Dave is one of the few people left in the world making wood block prints in the Japanese tradition. You can learn more about him from his woodblock.com website, which is one of the earliest examples of a website showing an artist's works and how they were made (although Dave does not consider himself and artist, but a crafts person).

The carving of the water is graceful. I love the way the turtle on the surface, the water pattern and the gray shadow of the submerged turtle create layers. I thought it was more effective than the original carp print (from the lovely Hanga Treasure Chest series) the water design was borrowed from.

The visual idea was adapted from Hokusai Manga, the famous collection of books of 'sketches' and designs issued in the early 1800's, according to Dave.

You can explore the Mokuhankan catalog by clicking on the little advertisement I run to support Dave's project to give wood block print makers a place to sell their works.

Printing 4/3 Aspect Ratio Photographs

When it came time for me to move to a DSLR camera, I chose a camera that produces images with an aspect ratio of 4:3, which is the same size as older motion pictures and standard definition televisions. It is also the same aspect ratio offered by most digicams. Having done all my previous photography with a 35mm SLR, which has a 3:2 aspect ratio, the new camera prompted me to think about printing 4:3 aspect ratio photographs.

Before deciding to go with a Four Thirds camera, I considered what moving from 3:2 to 4:3 aspect ratio could mean for my photography. In the last five years I had made some drawings and watercolors sized 9 x 12 inches. I noticed that I preferred this size to 8 x 10. It had a more "open" appearance despite having nearly the same aspect ratio as the ubiquitous 8 x 10. The 8 x 10 size always seemed a bit "claustrophobic." I occasionally had prints made 8 x 12 to preserve the 3:2 scene I had composed in the viewfinder, but the mats and frames were difficult to find, so I generally printed 8 x 10.

After getting the 4:3 camera I had some 9 x 12 prints made. The 9 x 12 inch size fits the 4:3 aspect ratio perfectly. Mats and frames in the size is widely available in the United States from art supply and craft stores. A couple of sources are http://www.matcutter.com/ and http://www.redimat.com/ as well as http://lightimpressionsdirect.com where I last bought some nice wood frames and archival mats.

I recommend you find a mat supplier who uses archival cores. I've had the core yellow in some supposedly archival mats bought at the local craft store, while my mats from Light Impressions have stayed perfectly white over the same time.

I discovered I prefer to print 4:3 format images at 9 x 12" print size over the traditional 8 x 10" size. The mat and frame suppliers are even picking up on the idea this size is useful for prints from digital cameras. You should be able to get prints made in this size from online photo printers like Adorama, Mpix, etc. The situation may be different outside the United States where metric sized papers are the only ones widely available.