Cleaning house

 

As we come up to our final move to our charming, slightly messed up wee apartment in the big city, I have preversely decided it is the time to organize my photographs.

Every once in awhile I decide it is time to organize my photographs on my computer. It is a big job.

It is too big a job.

Here is the size of the job:

In the backyard of my parents' house in California there was a dirt hill that led down to a chainlink fence and then further down to the backyard of the neighbors below us. At ten years old or so, my friend Todd and I decided to dig, with little hand trowels, into the side of the hill to make an underground fort. We would have tunnels in there, different rooms to explore, maybe even a pool in one quiet, cool, cavernous underground chamber.

After a few weeks we had blisters and a kind of indentation in the hill.

This is the size of the job.

Still, it's interesting. I have about 100 files on my desktop full of various collections of pictures, some sort of specific, but many called something like "July" to denote all the pictures I worked on during some July. I don't know which July, one of them. They come around every 12 months or so. I actually have a similar folder to that now that I call "France Working", but I've been working a lot, so I had to make a new file called "France Working 2". They're both crammed with pictures, some finished, some not, some never to be.

I went through my first file, and that wasn't too bad because it was the file I made from the last time I decided to oragnize all my files. My goal was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I have much of both! These in this first file were already separated and so, presumably, just good, finished pictures.

Me and past me have different opinions! So I separated out the good pictures. And then I moved onto the next folder. This was called "Sources Fall".

There was a lot of neat stuff in there! 

And there was a lot of interesting things I could do with some of these pictures. Like, remember Clerkmanifestoland? I had an image of a little shop tent there that just needed a few corrections. 

Half an hour later, check this out:

The original was nice, but this is much better.

Also, it helped me realize something.

I am never going to be able to dig an underground pool.

Cheese

 

We are coming to the last week of our time in this beach apartment in Theoule Sur Mer. Tomorrow we go to the big city where our real, long term apartment is, for one last overnight prep visit. Then next week we'll close up this wonderful, ramshackle, and slightly abandoned place on the beach for our final move.

I'm a little sad. 

I may have been dragging my feet a little too.

It's not that I'm not excited to begin this new, leisured life in a gloriously beautiful city in the south of France, but this wild transition through Japan and into an uncertain future where anything is possible now becomes... life, anchored in what we chose, in our retiree budget, and in all the months and years going by. Possibility becomes reality. 

I am ready though. As much as I love it here in Theoule it certainly has its limits with its two particular grocery stores, one a chain, and one fancy, and its two closed for the season bakeries. And my inclination to burrow into my little home projects of photo editing, videogames, and general dissolution has begun to fully assert itself in these cold, wild days full of rain and storms. A life settled in the big city may curiously allow for more of the traveller's lifestyle of exploration and adventure that we moved here for. 

And also, it's about time I lived around the corner from a cheese shop.

Documenting my surroundings

 

As ever here on clerkmanifesto I am documenting my surroundings, in one way or another.

Because my surroundings are currently The South of France, lately, you are probably often saying: "Well that's pretty."

Yes, I should probably make a point of going outside more.

Colors of the south of France

 

I have been doing a lot of experimentation with colors, especially here in my photographs of the Cote D'Azur, and though I have liked some of them a lot, I am usually left frustrated with the erratic nature of the AI editors and the sometimes infuriating communication process in trying to get anything like what I want.

I use AI so much in my picture editing I almost forgot I have photoshop.

And I sort of vaguely know how to use it!

So off I went to my Photoshop and...

I only sort of know how to use it. But it's a start:

Yearbook photos

 

I have been working on these yearbook pages and they go just as I planned, until I look more closely and realise that there are just a few small problems that I can't seem to fix. So while I have nine or ten of these, full of interesting details, there's always some weak point that leaves me unsatisfied.

So I give up.

But I do kind of like this one Minnesota homage:

Interesting and other stories

 

Two condensations

 

Age appropriate

 

Yesterday I said I would be letting the dioramas speak for themselves, but I do want to step in to note this significant arcana change:  I have aged up my cartoon character to a level rather more commensurate with, well, me, retired in the South of France. I think my character might have even gone a little past my age sometimes, but that's okay, I can grow into him, and he seems about right today.

Stories in boxes

 

We had hoped to have a restful interlude in our old Theoule Sur Mer apartment, watching the Winter on the water for several days, but some family health issues combined with the constant details of establishing ourselves in France and preparing our apartment are keeping us too relentlessly on the move. It's not great, but things are moving along in the right direction, and there are still moments everyday in these lovely places that feel like extraordinary hallucinations.

In my downtime I keep a constant stream of story boxes on the boil, a process that has about eight or nine steps to it, and at the end of an inbetween day like today leaves me with ten new ones finished. We'll be back to the city tomorrow and then maybe home here the next day after that, so I'll be running diorama stories here for the next few posts without much explanation since they tell their stories just as well on their own.

That said, we'll start with a little housekeeping, these being some earlier less articulate experimental versions from the past few days that haven't had their moment in the sun:

Three more souvenirs

 

And again

I am currently in one of those phases where I am making things faster than I can name them, organize them, or, certainly, present them here. But while I could offer up dozens of pictures today, which may be its own kind of fun, I like them too much at this early stage for that. I am reluctant to cast away their preciousness to me. So I'd prefer to offer just a couple of new images today and let myself find my way through all this work over the next days. These days are complicated anyway by another transition trip to our new apartment to get our Internet in and hopefully get some way along with making our kitchen equipped.

I will then let these two pictures tell their own stories:

 

Too many possibilities

 

I referenced all this yesterday, when I spoke of a new leap in complex artificial intelligence image generators, and therefore in the burst of images I excitedly make with them, but this leap might have finally scrambled my brain.

It is not a situation of "What can I do with this?" but rather "What can't I do with this?" Yes, there are things that this techno wonder can't do, things it gets wrong, things it does not do well, but they are hard to get to! And along the way, in the experiments mostly with past work, but also with new work, I am piling up so many amazing things to show you that I hardly know where to begin.

When I first began with this I worked with style changes of my photos, which were a leap better than earlier iterations, though not a total revolution, but I hardly understood the wealth of what I could be doing.

I'm not sure I understand it yet.

I started with image descriptions, characters, text, and famous people, and it was so good at all of that I had to try it out on my dioramas.

I'm currently stuck in the dioramas because they're pretty close to everything I've been aiming for and almost every one I try ends up in a delightful surprise. It's not perfect, but it is now possible the last bits could be done in edits, and even still, these are already far ahead of my earlier ones. And though I'm pretty sure I'm just scratching the surface here, I feel I'd better trot out some examples before I'm positively buried under my creations.