This week saw processing of all The Metaning pages – adding scanned text boxes, tweaking rotation of the images, and setting up the exporting process to build the final retina quality images.

The originals of these are around 50mb out of the camera, and then converted to photoshop files at full size, with text boxes added, they come in at a round 450mb, per page. It’s a lot of process to set up, but once done the actual construction of the ePub is more or less automated.

I’m still playing the waiting game on the Nervous Spaces ePub, but hopefully that will be sorted soon. Once this is out of the way, I can get the final part of Surfing The Deathline done, and then the bulk of the final half of my grant year will be dedicated to sculpture.

This week saw the arrival of yet another piece of kit – yeah it does seem to be a repeating theme – an Adonit Jot Touch 4. This thing’s a neat aluminium bodied stylus for the iPad, which communicates pressure sensitivity over Bluetooth. With 2048 levels of pressure, it more or less turns the iPad into a Wacom cintique. So as a result, I’ve basically reduced my “carry everywhere” kit from an A4 sketchbook, 2 pencils, an eraser and a paperback book, to an iPad Air and a pen.

The other major milestone is that I finished the Nervous Spaces ebook, and uploaded it to Apple’s iBooks store. So now we play the waiting game as Apple review it for “quality assurance”.

The week wrapped up with a final photo shoot of The Metaning, using the double-polarised technique. After painstaking effort to square up the camera to the wall so all four corners of the image would be in equal focus, it finally came together. The shoot was done in a couple of hours, and next week should see the entire ePub 3 version completed, now that I’ve got the process down from the Nervous Spaces book.

Nervous Spaces is a documentation of the body of work exhibited in 2010 at the Xavier Artspace, St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, Sydney.

This EPUB version is available on the iTunes / iBooks Store, and can be read on Mac or iPad.

Preview / Buy

A week on more admin and housecleaning type stuff. All of the text bubbles for The Metaning have been scanned and isolated, ready to be used in digital versions – that should let me photograph the work without adding the actual speech bubbles, and then composite them in to get an iBooks as we’ll as hardcover versions done and on sale. At the moment the goal is to get the work onto the iBooks store before the Xmas break.

Thursday night I’m at an exhibition where one of my student works from ACP is being exhibited. In fact, I’m in a park typing this right now as I wait to go to the gallery – seriously loving the new iPad :)

Later on – The week ended with building a new eBook version of the Nervous Spaces book, which should be available soon. The exhibition print was the one I’d hoped would be printed, so I’ll get to pick it up soon.

A student exhibition for course participants at the Australian Centre for Photography.

Exhibited Works:

• Fish Noir 12

This week has been about fine-tuning the positioning of the studio camera setup for photographing The Metaning, as well as processing photos from last week’s derby bout – all 700 plus of them. The other big time suck was on setting up and integrating a new piece of kit – a new iPad Air. Something that’s really impressive about it is the ability to display photographs on a large and high quality screen – which means if I want to show stuff to galleries, I don’t have to get them to use a computer etc. The touchscreen keyboard is pretty amazing – I find I can type just as fast, if not faster on it than I can on a regular one.

Some other good news, one of my works is going to be printed for the Australian Centre of Photography term 3 student exhibition. Opening night is Thursday.

Monday started with the first texts of the Cross-Polarisation setup. To say it was a success is an understatement. The technique is an absolute triumph. The linked image has a comparison of the same lighting positions using just the polarising filter on the camera, vs the camera filter & polarising gels in front of the lights. As can be seen, all the ink lines are jet black, and all the surface sheen is gone from the areas of flat black. Especially apparent is the difference in the Magnart on the left vs the right.

Tuesday saw the start of the start of the rubber cement tests for speech bubbles, and sadly, I’m not sure it’s going to work out. There’s quite a lot of over-gooing around the edges of the speech bubbles, and erasing it isn’t working as well as I’d hoped. I may have to switch to spray adhesive, which is also acid free, but possibly more brittle when dry.

On Friday I went to Sculpture By The Sea, which as always, has a wonderful mix of works. There’s the formalist steel pieces, the “big” things, site specific works, more or less every genre of sculpture. I’m continuing my thoughts about how to best set up my work for next year’s exhibition.

Saturday was spent at the grand final of Sydney Roller Derby League. Here’s a selection of pics from the first ,grand final bout:

And some from the bout to decide third place.