Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

Bien sûr, Je ne parle pas Français, Je suis un Americain!

I can say this phrase in near-perfect French. Like Magritte’s painting of a pipe, it has more than one layer of irony.

This is not a pipe.

I took four years of French when I was a kid. Two years in grade school – 4th & 5th grades, and two years in high school. Because I had to have two years of a foreign language, and I was a lazy slacker, I took the same two years of French over again. This was pulled off because between grade school and high school my family moved from Illinois to Texas. The Texas schools had no idea I had already been through the course and gave me credit for doing it again.

I haven’t spoken a lick of French since. The ability to read it hasn’t vanished, but there are always mystery words. If I listen hard I can understand spoken French now and then. For example if there is a hockey game on Canadian radio en Français I can mostly follow along. But if my life depended upon saying something in French right now I’d be a goner. It would be au revoir Chuck!

Something has come up lately that has me studying French again (too early to share, as details are sketchy, but be patient!) so I’m looking for suggestions for online or offline lessons. I’ve been playing with livemocha a bit, and may just spring for their course… but I’m open to suggestions.

Or even direct help from any of you Francophones out there!

My work in laser cut vinyl.

The digital.forest logotype

This is my work.

That’s a double entedre of sorts as it is also, for the moment, my employer, but what I’m talking about here is this logotype. Back when dinosaurs in neon-colored Member’s Only jackets roamed the earth, I was a Graphic Designer. I designed this at the request of my friend, Chris Kilbourn, who started d.f back in 1994. For posterity, here is the back-story of its creation; (Kilbo can fill in any details I’ve forgotten in the comments)…

When I was a professional designer I kept sketchbooks. Usually hard-bound books of blank heavy paper. I doodled and wrote in them constantly, usually with a black felt-tip pen. )I hate ball-points, and pencil doesn’t hold up well to wear.) I’ve kept all sorts of bad habits over the years but losing this good habit of doodling I regret deeply.

Several years prior to doing this logo for d.f I had done a whole corporate identity for a housing development called “Pine Lake Glen” on the Issaquah/Sammamish plateau. Back then it was a lot like the area I live now; high ground in the Cascade Foothills, with a few horse properties and widely scattered houses. It was just beginning to be developed. Now it is a bustling surburbia with a Starbucks on every corner, and expensive SUVs plying the driveways and parking lots. In my sketchbooks at the time I doodled a lot of trees coming up with the look for PLG. I settled on a set of three, which I had created with a paintbrush. I’ve often thought about driving up to the plateau and seeing if the signage I designed is still there, some 20+ years later.

When Chris asked me to design the d.f logo I remembered all those trees I had drawn years before and dug out my sketchbook. Sure enough, at some point I had made the perfect “tree”, with a fat loose-ended marker that had a wonderfully frenetic, organic shape. It would contrast well with the circuit-board motif I planned to mate with it to capture the incongruous combination of thoughts that is digital.forest. The typeface may look familiar to anyone who has ever driven the Autobahn: it is the condensed variant of the Deutsches Institut für Normung face created for highway signage. You know… all roads lead to:
All roads lead to Ausfarht!

I prepared other designs, but I knew this was “the one” as soon as I completed it. I presented a range of offerings to Chris but he saw the beauty in this one and went with it. I created some great letterhead, and some truly amazing translucent business cards (which d.f sadly no longer uses.) We’ve kept the overall design in the intervening sixteen years, and like a good logo should, it has stood the test of time. Recently we went through an office remodel. It took forever, and frankly drove many of us nuts, but one highlight was revealed at the end. Out in the lobby, highly visible as you step out of the elevators is my work embedded in the floor in laser-cut vinyl:

Though I’m leaving digital.forest the identity I created for it sixteen years ago will always remain. As an artist, it is always satisfying seeing your work… at work.

Car Photo of the Day: Name the car, by the engine.

Name the car, by the engine.

Yesteryday’s CPotD title brought me a wave of spam comments unlike any other I’ve ever seen! While I dig out from the pile here’s an unusual engine, in an unusual car, can you figure out what the latter is from looking only at the former? If you think you know the answer, have a go in the comments section.

Car Photo of the Day: Automotive Upskirt

There was a great moment in the famous Top Gear comparison between the Aston Martin DB5 and the E-type Jaguar, where Richard Hammond likens the view through the Jag’s bonnet louvers to catching a glimpse up a woman’s skirt. So here I present to you a little car porn for your Friday afternoon. The filth you see between the slats is an intake manifold and a glimpse of the three Skinner’s Union HD8 carbs. Car spotters can try and guess the year of the Jaguar if they’re good.

For a bit of Friday fun, here’s the Top Gear video:

Part one…

“Passports to a world SO COOL, that people there burn Guardian Furniture Supplements, just to keep warm.”
“The Moss gearbox, which was from the 1940s. Changing gear with it was a bit like… um… stirring coal.”
“Their engines were designed, not to save the planet, but to get ’round it as quickly as possible.”
“Lots of grip, and when you run out… lots of fun!”

Part two, where Hammond says his famous line:

The Virtual Storefront for My Automotive Photography

Now you too can buy this image.

After years of consideration I’ve finally decided to take the advice of many friends and fans and offer some of my automotive photographs for sale. I have no illusions of this being a means to making a living, but if all goes well I’ll be able to buy a lens or two.

I’m using a service called SmugMug, that allows you to order prints, mounted prints, and framed prints which will be shipped to an address of your choosing. You can pay online securely using a credit card, and select shipping methods and whatnot. Given that print sizes may not match the file size you are also given the option to crop the photo to fit. There are also a few bits of merchandise for sale with images on them, as well as digital downloads for use on screen and print

I’m still working behind the scenes to get the store ready, so the shelves are not stocked properly, and some items my not remain in the inventory for long. I suspect I’ll be thinning the herd soon. Captions and keywords need to be edited too, but feel free to wander the aisles and check out the merchandise.

Having purchased a few prints myself for office decor, I think the sweet spot for size is between 14″ and 24″ on the larger side of the photo. This will become larger as I populate the galleries with newer photos from my G1 camera. I enabled the “camera info” tagging on the photos so if you see “Panasonic DMC-G1” in the info area the images should scale quite large. My older Olympus cameras made images that will likely start falling apart quality-wise at anything larger than 20″. Eventually I’ll remove all but the best images from the older cameras.

Prices are largely determined by the costs, but I’m open to feedback, especially from my core followers here on my website. For you guys I’ve arranged a “Grand Opening Discount” of 33% off anything and everything (except shipping), just use the coupon code “CheapChuckPics” at checkout.

The URL for the store is: http://photos.goolsbee.org.

Let me know what you think.

Car Photo of the Day: This was once considered high tech.

Sure, this is not exactly a stunning photo, but I didn’t make it with art in mind. I was intrigued by this hanging bag on the firewall of this Alfa (sorry, no guessing games today… the answer is stamped right on the photo!) and had to capture it. Given the car Mitch Katz’ Alfa’s vintage is the same as my E-type, 1965, it is interesting to compare the industrial materials used for items such as this. In the years prior, Jaguar used glass jars mounted to the firewall, though in 1964 they changed to plastic (though the fuel filter bowl remained glass.) The Alfa engineers chose to make this funny bag to perform a similar function, complete with grommets for mounting. You would never see something like this, or Jaguar’s glass containers today. Sometimes it is the minor, behind the skin touches, that also lend charm to these old cars.

Here is a photo of the Alfa’s entire engine bay. Lovely little car!

Car Photo of the Day: Galería de los Pícaros

This La Carrera Panamerica car was photographed on the Going to the Sun Rally a few years ago. One of those sort of shots I love to make over and over again because they just look… awesome.

This one is badly lit we were northbound mid-morning, so the sun was in the wrong spot. It is also just a bit off to the left side of the frame, losing just enough of the car off the right side to annoy the hell out of me. Still, it is a wild looking car, and the image has a sort of je ne sais quoi quality to it… let’s call it “roguish.”

Making these sorts of photos involves setting up a camera for mid-fast shooting (fast enough to keep the car sharp, slow enough to blur the background just a bit), then holding the camera as low as I dare, with an outstretched arm, out the open passenger door of the E-type. I hold down the shutter and fire four frames per-second or so and pan the camera to (hopefully) keep the subject car in-frame as my driver blows by in a roar of hot metal and burning hydrocarbons. One of these days I’m going to lose a camera, or maybe finger.

It will be for me like van Gogh’s ear; a willing sacrifice for my art.

For all you car-spotters: recognize the rig?