Photos / Picture-Rama 2

The Basics

Picture-Rama 2 is an on-going photography project that Admiral has been working on since September 26th, 2006. It is a complete, unaltered collection of every picture that he has ever taken with his second digital camera. Not a single image has been manipulated. Not a single image has been omitted. Even the order in which they were taken is the same order they play back to the viewer.

The images Admiral has taken have been compiled into a movie that runs at a steady 12 frames per second. They were not specially timed to match the music, that would be a pain. A serious pain. The current songs that Admiral has selected to go with the project just go particularly well to the images.

Come back for updates frequently, Admiral tries to keep the project up to date as possible; every time he takes 30 or more pictures, he tries to do another recompile and stick it up on the web.

This year however, Admiral has been hit by some digital tragedy; Two if his relatively new Western Digital hard drives failed on him, taking the whole project with them for the time being. Data recovery services have been contacted and there is currently(as of 2010-01-31) some work being done to retrieve the data, but the situation is still looking rather grimm.

Beginnings

Picture-Rama was a project that Admiral started on March 9th 2004, but at that point, he had no idea what he was going to be doing with the project, or even that it was a project at all yet. He just new that he had a new digital camera, and that rocked.

Admiral also knew that at some point in the future, these days would be knows as "The Digital Dark-ages" because of the current trends of storing data in lossy compression formats, and typical human stupidity in losing or accidentally deleting files.

Admiral fixed his new camera's settings to the highest quality of JPEG it had, and left it there for the remainder of the project. Not only did he take the images at the highest quality to retain as much visual quality as possible, but he promised himself that he would never delete or alter a single one of the original files as they came off of the camera. The files would be stored in a pristine archive after they were taken, and that archive would be backed up in triplicate. For posterity. Or something.

So, here Admiral had all of these images. Lots and lots of them. About a thousand of them, at the time he started. "What am I going to do with all of these images?" he wondered. "Oh, I know! Since I'm actually writing this in the present day of the project looking back on it in the past, I'll just say that I thought it up on the spot." he typed. Thus was the beginning, and it was great.

The first compile of the Picture-Rama was just under 54 seconds long, and a total trip to watch. More compiles followed, and as Admiral's image library grew, so did the length of the piece. Eventually, the image sequence out-grew the length of the original song that had been coupled with the piece, and new audio tracks were arduously selected and placed with it to maintain the fast-paced flickering of the images.

Picture-Rama 1 ended some time near the end of the summer of 2006, when the camera Admiral used to take pictures for the project was no longer able to focus. The malfunction of the focus mechanism was a result of the cumulative physical trauma it had encountered while traveling in Admiral's pocket for over 2 years. A very, very rowdy 2 years. Picture-Rama 1 was dead. Long live Picture-Rama!