blahg blahg blahg: The online home of Colin Frangos » Cool design

My New Aluminum Baby

Colin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:22:33 +0000

Electrical Guitar #334. All aluminum, hollowbody, with alumitone pickups.

I’ve only owned it for a few hours now, but it’s easily the nicest guitar I’ve ever touched. It’s incredibly easy to play, very resonant, and solidly built. And it looks great. This model is the DD, because it was originally built for Dwayne Dennison of the Jesus Lizard. I actually chose it because I wanted to switch to playing a hollowbody, but DD’s taste is undeniable, and doesn’t hurt the cool factor.

Alright – back to playing it.

North Vietnamese Propaganda Posters

Colin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:15:03 +0000

We picked up a bunch of these posters in Saigon.

The first one is the original artwork for a poster made sometime during the war. The others are reproductions of posters dating from during the war, with one more recent (the 1990s, I believe).

Pictures from an exhibitionist.

3 Miles of Interesting Old Objects

Colin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:18:10 +0000

The Alameda Antiques Faire is one of those stellar local events that makes me love the bay area. It takes place out on one of the landing strips of the old Alameda naval base – the only open space big enough to hold the 800+ booths. You can find pretty much anything there – old medical equipment, beautiful crystal wear, punitive modernist furniture, tin toys, musical equipment, Chinese artifacts, cider presses – if it’s over 25 years old and someone collects it, there’s a good chance you’ll see it here, jumbled in next to some other epochal curiosities.

Since I just got a slick new camera (Canon 5D mII), where better to take it for a test run?

BORDERLINE GEEK TALK FOLLOWS (scroll down if allergic): I decided to shoot everything as jpeg on the auto setting, with minimal editing outside of the camera (I did one batch process with some sharpening before scaling the image down, and cropped about 5 of them). I did this not just because I’m lazy, but because I wanted to make a direct comparison to snapshots taken with other cameras I own. Obviously the advantage goes to the SLR with the giant CMOS and high quality lens, but I wanted to see the relative difference.

I quite like the results, as evidenced by the 161 pictures below (in no particular order):

Pictures from an exhibitionist.