Atheist Poncho

new blog

2006-11-08T23:13:00.000-08:00

NOw that I'm back from europe I think I'll be posting only on my other blog which is atheistponcho.com

despite the fact that it takes a little bit longer to post (and I might scrap teh crazy lightbox feature in future posts, because it's a lot to make it work.) anyhow I'm exhausted and not typing properly anymore.

I processed some film today and did a terrible job scanning it. so go take a loook it's on the new blog complete with fancy viewing software...WOW!!!... sorry that "wow" is much bigger and bolder than I had anticipated but there's no going back now.

-Ryan

Slides

2006-10-25T17:19:00.000-07:00

severin has a killer film scanner, not all of these are clean but, thought I'd post a few slides.

vienna/portraits

2006-10-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

I'm in Vienna. Severin has been kind enough to let me crash at his place. He has a computer that can process raws so I dug through my hard drive and pulled up some random portraits.

poland

2006-10-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

IN poland just looking through the hard drive grabed a few photos off some from france some from finland some from amsterdam. nothing fancy.

paris...still

2006-09-30T14:33:00.000-07:00

OK so i'm still in paris but I'm leaving on monday! for where who really knows yet. I got some film back from the lab here and have some shots of Charlotte who has been nice enough to host me here in paris. I have some more news my future roommate has signed the lease for our new apartment. It's located at broadview and gerrard in Toronto. So I should be moving in there shortly after I return. -Ryan

paris stage and monitors

2006-09-25T05:24:00.000-07:00

in paris there are stages and big borther is watching all the plays.

paris

2006-09-22T18:52:00.000-07:00

I've been in paris the lqst few days staying with my friend charlotte. no photos to show really, they're stuck on my hard drvie. got some film processed qt the lab here. also have a shot of my cousins daughter. here qre q couple shots from itqly one is the cliche shot of the vatican stairs. pardon the shitty scan, will have them scanned better apon return: -ryan

end of india end of italy.

2006-09-12T04:02:00.000-07:00

OK I'm in italy and about to leave for france. I've been touring around and doing a lot of kite surfing with the dutch. Not much web surfing.

-ryan

India 0.6

2006-08-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here are a wack load of photos

India 0.5

2006-08-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm in Haridwar and I have lots of photos but alas the internet is far too slow to upload so I'll have to save them for another day. But I thought I may as well copy and paste a brief history of the area to give you (the infamous reader) a mental image of what this place is like.

Wikipedia says:

"

Haridwar pronunciation (help·info) (also known as Hardwar) is a holy city in the Haridwar District in the state of Uttaranchal in northern India. Literally meaning Gateway to God, Haridwar is considered one of the seven holiest places according to Hindus, as the devas are said to have left their footprints there.

The spot where the immortal nectar fell when it was carried in a Kumba after the famed churning of the oceans at the time of creation of the universe is known as Brahma Kund. Hindus all over the world flock to this place to have a holy dip to attain salvation from their sins of birth. The dusk arathi performed at Hari- Ki- Pairi (known for a footprint of Vishnu on a stone in a wall) is a spectacular sight full of emotions of sound and colour never to be missed by any visitors. This is the second most holiest pilgrimage site after Varanasi for Hindus all over the globe. Here pilgrims float diyas on the Ganges, to commemorate their deceased ancestors. The city also stands as a gateway to three other important pilgrimage destinations: Rishikesh, Badrinath, and Kedarnath. In Haridwar there is a big statue of Shiva at the fork of the river."

Wow how exciting eh.,. so Nick and I have been touring around a bit today (although in now seems dark outside since we entered this internet cafe...curious..) and this is really a beautiful city. to associate it with anything I've seen before I'd have to say the animated disney film Alladin. the roof tops are all connected and there are monkeys all over the place, also we're right at the foot of the Himalayas so the view is pretty amazing. Tomorrow I think we're going to head up to Rishikesh (the yoga capital of the world) in the mountains. Should be a pretty good time... now I'm going to go outside and negotiate a fee (hopefully 20 rupees) with an auto rickshaw and enjoy the open air of the indian roads.

-Ryan

India 0.4 (more photos)

2006-08-11T04:58:00.000-07:00

more photos.

India 0.3 (we won)

2006-08-11T01:57:00.000-07:00

I dont have time to write much today, but we just won first place at the imagine cup for our short film!! Here are some photos!! First we spent the day 2 days ago at the taj on the inside! wowo pretty amazing place. Since then we came back to Delhi and have won first place in short film. we're staying in an amazing hotel!! I've been sleeping on a king sized bed> so life is hard.. but tomorrow microsoft cuts us off and we're on our own. Off in the the Indian backcountry.

getting kicked out of press room.....bye

-Ryan.

check out nicks blog too.

India 0.2

2006-08-08T23:47:00.000-07:00

OK soooo Day 2/3 here have been pretty good. In the past two days Meg, NIck, Sam, and myself have started and completed our film entry for the 36 hour film competition here at the Imagine Cup. It should be up on our website soon "Paperheartfilm.com". In the mean time I have included some photos from our shoot in this entry. So for the on site contest the criteria was that we had to do a documentry about the imagine cup. So we thought long and hard about this and decided to do somehting a little more interesting than your standard documentry. We thought of this idea to follow around this fictional participent in the contest. He's a student in the algorithm category. But he is no ordinary student. This young man suffers from an ailment which has created many problems for him. He happens to take the physical form of a cardboard box. This idea is loosly based on a film I made in highschool which can be found here. If anything I would call our on site project a prequel to the one made in highschool obviously this character has aged and now holds a managerial role in a algorithm related company. So in the shooting of the on site I took the role of "Director of Photographer" as you can see me standing at the tajmahal on camera with our character in the frame. We knew we wanted to shoot there but we figured that security wouldn't allow us on the grounds with a massive box man. SOOO we talked to some of the locals/our microsoft appointed security guards and we were told that we could get to the back of the great palace right on the river bed. This served as a wonderful location. But because this location is pretty rural we drew quite the crowd including a small boy who raced towards us on a giant camel. An employee for microsoft named Laura was following us during the course of our film being shot and while we were shooting many children who had been down by the river crowded her and she seemed to have some fun with them. So we finished shooting and headed back to the all inclusive hotel palace where we are staying behind our giant walls and security check point areas. So we took the car back to the hotel and finsihed the movie (not without problems of course, like our computer short circuting and sparks flying out of the firewire port frying our dv decks). We finished in the end and screened the short film to our fellow competitiors and we all had a good time. Today is stress free so if you need to find me I'll be in this room for microsoft employees only (which I'm about to get kicked out of due to my lack of credentials) or lounging by the pool. Tomorrow we return to Delhi.

-Ryan.

India 0.1

2006-08-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

OK so I flew to India and am here now. Wait, lets go back a step and show the process. So I get to Toronto hop on the plane (after getting my flight changed so I can stay for two months in europe for september, and october) and sit a\down shoot some shots of myself. Then get some shots of teh run way then next thing you know we're in zurich. That's what that crazy perspective is, the swiss liek their perspective. Then we took off and were in teh air again for another 8 hours. then we get into India and the madness begins! We are struck by a mad house of people with signs in the airport, we find teh imagine cup people from microsoft. they bring us outside and right away we're bombarded by honking and people running around one guy is standing on top of a truck there's a pack of wild dogs biting at eachother, pure madness. we pile into a little van coach and after some honking and screaming the driver gets us onto the road. The roads here are insane. There were 6 people on top of a truck full of grain just hanging off teh edges of teh roof, people everywhere. we take this bus to dinner at a little hotel in Delhi, where we meet up with the rest of our team and have a bite to eat before driving for another 5 hours down the "highway" (not a highway by any standerds) we spot a lot of wild cows and camels pulling carts more wild dogs people sleeping on bikes. we watch the sun rise and get to the hotel here in agra. The juxtoposition is stagering. Microsoft has rented out this whole palace of a hotel for the imagine cup, however outside our walls are thousands of people living on teh streets, the lack of wealth distribution is amazing, but despite that everyone seems happy. and who can blame them so far this country is beautiful.

-Ryan.

Last Day in Canada

2006-08-04T11:56:00.000-07:00

So today is pretty much my last day here in this lovel land we call Canada. My flight for India is tomorrow and from there who knows where I'll end up.

On another note I've been living with Nick for the last few days and we got a nice thunder storm and would you believe the photo I got of a bolt of lightning.

Anyhow I've got to get back to my packing here. Good bye Canada, and your lightning, welcome INdia and your monsoons.

Monday May 29th, 2006 the day the transit strook.

2006-05-29T20:27:00.000-07:00

I woke up today to find out that the infamous "TTC" was on strike. I attempted to cover the action as best I could but I had some errends to run too. So to start the day I left my home and walked by the subway station. Usually quite busy with people today it seemed quite vacant. hmmm how odd.

So then I stroled down to the hardware store where I had a conversation with a stranger about her sore throat. The transit strike was a secondary concern and despire the inconvenience these people in hardware land didn't seem too concerned, they were too busy searching for their specialty items.

After finishing my business at teh hardware store I met up with my friend Jeff. We decided it would be a good idea to investigate this transit buisness and at teh same time have a healthy walk down to queen and bathurst area to have lunch and buy some records and concert tickets.

Shortly after leaving his house we stoped at teh bank where I took a shot of the date flanked by a mural of a street car, you'd think I was getting paid for material like this. After that we went on
our way and decided to stop and purchase some fresh cherries. Boy were they ever good. I noted the the streets seemed busier than normal with foot traffic, but it was 32 degrees out after all. No one was cursing the name of the transit people or anyhting like that. To the best of my knowledge at this point no animals had been sacraficed to the transit gods. So we countinued our walk, now happier of course having some cherries to waste our time chewing and swallowing (except the pits of course). After awhile we got close to the street car yard where they keep all the street cars. As suspected it was a "media frenzy" I mean reporters everywhere, I was being trampled alive by men in press uniforms who were flying in from every direction. I real wild thing to witness. Luckily I got this shot here really showing
the madness that was taking place.
So at this point we said "I've had enough of this press mayhem, and decided to start our trek down queen street with records and lunch being our inspiration for the difficult walk ahead. We saw other walkers some walked by ambiguous passage ways. Which can be seen here. It wasn't much longer after that, that we heard the rumbling of some tracks behind us. It was a streetcar and it was in action. We jumped and laughed and there was rejoice in the streets. I thought to myself "this must have been what the people of iraq felt like when those statues of
Saddam started coming down." Oh what a happy moment it was. Although that feeling was short lived, soon to be replaced by the realisation that we nolonger had a cause to be walking for. Transit was now a viable option, but that didn't stop us. We treked on paying no mind to the electric dinosaurs that now roamed our streets.

Well finally we reached our destination and I bought some tickets to dungen for their show next tuesday and jeff bought a cd (which you left in my back pack, meet me at the subway station tomorrow to get it back).

After that we went to the "Shanghai Cowgirl" restaurant where I had a burger and fries and jeff had some garlic break and onion rings. We discussed all sorts of intelectual topics and got looks from our fellow diners obviously assuming we were nasa scientists or some other highly regarded person of science and luxury.

After that we decided that eating out was expensive and continued our trek on foot. We walked all the way to the grocery store where we bought all sorts of fine dineries. then I went home
and decided to write a blog about my transit investigation.

Conclusion, transit is a pretty interesting topic to talk about with your friends, unless you're in a hardware store, where everyone knows there's no room for small talk, that's how people get hurt.

Standing on top of a hill

2006-05-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

uv famousness

uv in your pocket.

2006-05-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

A little bit of spectral analysis.

India

2006-05-27T22:45:00.000-07:00

I'm leaving for India at the end of july so I thought I would start a blog/photo blog to document my 3 month trip. I guess this is post number 1. I didn't know how to start, so I've already started, I hope you like what you see.

-Ryan.