The Adobe Labs Project Indigo app is a good way to get more true-to-life imagery out of your iPhone camera, especially in low light.
I went into my photo archive and typed in “raw” to try to find more RAW files. That did not work as a searchable term, but it did for whatever reason turn up a picture of my desktop on the night Osama Bin Laden was killed, which means this is post is about desktops now, not the excellent Project Indigo iPhone app.
I’ve taken a few photos like this over the years, documenting my workspaces. The aforementioned assassination happened while I was a grad student in Syracuse, so that was my setup there. The rest, in chronological order:
This is the only existing picture of my desk in my freshman dorm room. I did some homework here. Mostly I played World of Warcraft and lurked /b/ and hung out in video chat rooms with internet friends on a website I’ve forgotten the name of.
I don’t think my phone at the time was taking pictures of this quality. It may be the work of an actual dedicated digital camera. My best guess is I took this photo to show someone I was using the mouse pad they’d gotten me as a high school graduation gift. The same mouse pad is on my desk at work right now. I use it for roughly 45 hours each week.
I moved out of the dorms and into a townhouse with some of my good dudes junior year, so this was my desk in my own beautiful private one-person room for the last two years of undergrad. I used a laptop for most of that time. The big iMac means this was taken shortly before graduation.
It’s safe to say this is the spot I lived in most throughout my 5 years of college.
The Obama picture up top was my grad school apartment desk. This here was my desk at the newspaper where I worked as an intern at the time.
There were five of us renting a house for that 1 year of grad school. I was the only guy in the group. I lived in the one top floor apartment, and paid less for it since it was basically the size of two closets.
I did my most serious schoolwork there, and watched a movie every single day on my 27-inch iMac screen. I was working on a degree in arts journalism, focusing on film criticism, so I’d watch a new movie and take notes and then review it on an old blog just to keep a record and stay sharp. Hopefully nothing there is embarrassing.
I can not BELIEVE I found a photo of this desk. My grad school program ended with a capstone internship in South Carolina, lasting a few weeks while we all covered an arts festival for a newspaper there. It was a summer festival, so they housed us in the empty dorms of an unaffiliated university.
I put “desk” into my photo archive to find all the pictures in this post, and that search turned up a video I took just looking around the room. For posterity I guess. This is a screenshot from that video.
I brought my old laptop with me on this trip and painted all the letter keys black, figuring I’d be writing a ton. It was an opportunity to force myself to learn how to type without looking. It worked, but to this day I have to keep my left pinky on the edge of the keyboard in order to do it. I can type well enough with the fingers on my right hand, but on the left side it’s all pointer pecking.
My first real non-internship non-freelance job was for a weekly newspaper. Two other reporters and I worked out of a satellite office. Specifically, we worked out of a closet in the back of a satellite sales office located in a former piano factory/mall. It was sort of a nonsense situation, but we stuck a picture of the sky to the wall, pretended we had a window, and made the best of it.
This was my desk at the same newspaper’s HQ after they closed the satellite office. It was about a half hour away from all of our beats, so we worked from home most of the time and gathered just a few times a week. I don’t remember how long we worked like this before they laid us all off.
Ah my beautiful corner office in the very best apartment I’ll ever know. My “desk” in our apartment before this one was either the couch of the countertop, so I didn’t include any pictures of that. This was a sweet spot though, right in the middle of the downtown area. Rent has probably doubled since we moved out.
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