Camera swap
Oct. 10th, 2005 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tarigwaemirLowell House, on the Feast of St. Francis Borgia
Crazy idea I had at two in the morning while attempting to focus on Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics. How it works:
1. Two people agree to a "swap" and decide on a prearranged day.
2. They go around taking photos of whatever takes their fancy using disposable cameras* until the deadline.
3. They have the film developed and mail the contents of their camera by post within a week of the deadline.**
* Why disposable cameras in this sophisticated digital age? I was thinking about why I enjoyed letter-writing (as opposed to email) and realized that a part of it was the sense that once you mail a letter, your words are somehow irrevocable and irretrievable. Email is archived and quoted, making it easy to reread and to a certain extent mentally revise. But you usually don't see a letter again after you send it (unless you ask for it to be returned). Similarly, a disposable camera also doesn't allow you to take things back. Once you've taken a photo, you've taken a photo. (I always thought that was the neat part about aleatory music: you only have one shot with each performance.)
** Why mail the printed photos and not the camera itself? Well, actually I think it would be more interesting to mail the camera itself: you are leaving it up to the recipient to decide when to see the photos, making it even more like a "message in a bottle" (oh, don't I just drip with artistic pretensions today), but I think it's probably cheaper to mail a pack of photos than a camera. Also, that way, the person sending the photos can scribble little explanations on the back of each photo. I suppose we'll all just have to pledge our word not to take any "bad" photos out of the pile and send everything as is.
I looked up shipping rates, and it shouldn't cost me more than 5-8 USD to mail something out, even overseas. So yes, anyone on the friends list is welcome to swap with me, and I mean anyone. (Yes, even blockmates, even though I see you nearly everyday.) Subject of photos is entirely up to the people swapping and can be as random or as deliberate as you wish.
So, who wants to try this out with me? Leave a comment with your email address (if I don't already have it or can't look it up from your LJ userinfo) and your preferred deadline.
Feel free to grab the idea for your own friends lists since I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first person to come up with the concept.
Yours &c.
Post-script: Oh yes, found via![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sub_divided:
You have a total of 105 friends
You requested to guess 105 entries.
5 were skipped due to invalid content (surprising?).
You made 100 guesses.
You got 95 correct.
Doing the math for you, that means you got 95% correct.
::waves LJ Addicts Anonymous badge::
Crazy idea I had at two in the morning while attempting to focus on Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics. How it works:
1. Two people agree to a "swap" and decide on a prearranged day.
2. They go around taking photos of whatever takes their fancy using disposable cameras* until the deadline.
3. They have the film developed and mail the contents of their camera by post within a week of the deadline.**
* Why disposable cameras in this sophisticated digital age? I was thinking about why I enjoyed letter-writing (as opposed to email) and realized that a part of it was the sense that once you mail a letter, your words are somehow irrevocable and irretrievable. Email is archived and quoted, making it easy to reread and to a certain extent mentally revise. But you usually don't see a letter again after you send it (unless you ask for it to be returned). Similarly, a disposable camera also doesn't allow you to take things back. Once you've taken a photo, you've taken a photo. (I always thought that was the neat part about aleatory music: you only have one shot with each performance.)
** Why mail the printed photos and not the camera itself? Well, actually I think it would be more interesting to mail the camera itself: you are leaving it up to the recipient to decide when to see the photos, making it even more like a "message in a bottle" (oh, don't I just drip with artistic pretensions today), but I think it's probably cheaper to mail a pack of photos than a camera. Also, that way, the person sending the photos can scribble little explanations on the back of each photo. I suppose we'll all just have to pledge our word not to take any "bad" photos out of the pile and send everything as is.
I looked up shipping rates, and it shouldn't cost me more than 5-8 USD to mail something out, even overseas. So yes, anyone on the friends list is welcome to swap with me, and I mean anyone. (Yes, even blockmates, even though I see you nearly everyday.) Subject of photos is entirely up to the people swapping and can be as random or as deliberate as you wish.
So, who wants to try this out with me? Leave a comment with your email address (if I don't already have it or can't look it up from your LJ userinfo) and your preferred deadline.
Feel free to grab the idea for your own friends lists since I'm pretty sure that I'm not the first person to come up with the concept.
Yours &c.
Post-script: Oh yes, found via
sub_divided:You have a total of 105 friends
You requested to guess 105 entries.
5 were skipped due to invalid content (surprising?).
You made 100 guesses.
You got 95 correct.
Doing the math for you, that means you got 95% correct.
::waves LJ Addicts Anonymous badge::
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-10 07:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-10 11:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-11 03:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-10-11 10:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-10-11 10:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-12 12:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-12 05:11 am (UTC)Deadline - um, whenever.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-12 05:25 am (UTC)