Sophie is gonna hate this one, because she hates photos of herself, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ she’s in Amsterdam and can’t get mad at me. Or she could, but she won’t be back for a week and by then this post will be pushed way down the page where she won’t see it. Shh don’t tell her.
I thought I had posted these earlier, maybe they’re in a draft post somewhere. This was a saturday after we got back; the occasion was to try out a new book of cocktail recipes they had gotten us for christmas. Vinyl and Booze, and we had a bunch of vinyl and a bunch of fancy cocktail ingredients. I tasted stuff but didn’t have full drinks, because of my gout. Still, fun, and the excuse to get together and listen to music was quite nice. The proposed ratio of one (fancy, mostly hard liquor) drink per side was a bit much for everyone that was having full glasses, but we managed.
The M11 came this week. I bought it at the end of last week and it was shipped ground (dang ebay sellers). But it was whole and as advertised, like new. less than a thousand clicks on the shutter, not a mark on it. I charged up the battery and I’ve been shooting with it since Saturday (friday I was out of commission mostly due to insomnia). So far, so good. I want to make a shutter lag testing rig, just a bit of software to see how long it takes me to react and get a picture. I can test it with cameras that feel fast and feel slow and put numbers to my feelings.
The feeling, right now, is the M11 is fast enough, but that might change at any moment. I haven’t shot any real fast action with it yet. It’s not a sports camera but getting images à la sauvette is not a slow camera game. TBD, and more as it develops.
Posted on 2023-03-27T08:11:02Z GMT
Oh boy, these pictures. Took a lot of doing to get them edited down to what you see here. I started with about 60. Anyway, that’s not really why I’ve been absent around these parts. Just a lot going on. Travel! Friends in town! Parties! All of which will eventually probably end up on this here blog.
Had a bad moment there for a second where nothing was working and I couldn’t figure out why; turns out, the disk my server lives on only has so much capacity, and I blew through that and then some. at 70gb, there was nothing left. The main culprit was a piece of gallery software I no longer use, which had, in the past three years, amassed 60gb in one log file. rm’d that, restarted some things, and robert is your mother’s brother. Killed the gallery processes, while I was at it. I really should look at making a proper setup, separate app hosting and whatnot, but I like my little server. Like a hand raised dairy cow. That I forget to milk sometimes.
About this trip: Puerta Vallarta is a really lovely little spot, although it exists, from what I can tell, purely for tourists. 50 years ago (70 maybe?) it was a sleepy fishing village. Now it’s something else entirely, although there are still some fishermen (and really good seafood besides). We were there with our friends Cason and Ryan, and met some new friends, Tom and Brandon. (there were a bunch of other nice folks we met who’s names I didn’t catch, if that’s you, sorry, I’ll buy you a slushie at blondie’s sometime).
Anyway, as I was saying, these were a bitch to edit. It’s a very pretty place, PV. Lots of white painted buildings, gorgeous sunsets, nice beaches, the whole bit. Even at midday, there are all sorts of interesting textures (see above). Not only that, I was having a good time, in a good groove and managed to shoot a lot. So I had a lot of pictures I liked.
Anyway. I managed to cut it to these 15. If I’d had more time, I probably could have made several different coherent edits of 8 from the top 30ish. I like these because there aren’t any that are what I think of as really plain. Like, I had a couple in the edit that were straight shots of the beach, either at sunset or midday. The sort of thing you’d expect in a photo essay about a beach destination. So I cut ‘em.
Took a long time though, and making the even tighter edit would have taken even longer, and I really just needed to put something out and move on with my life. I’ll show my friends the looser edit, leave this one here, and try to do better next time.
Posted on 2023-03-22T07:59:58Z GMT
These two nights weren’t one after the other, they were instead a couple weeks apart, but the pictures were right next to each other in my editor, and they sort of fit together, I think. Mid-October, these. Both nights I only had the ricoh, the dance club because I was afraid they had a policy on interchangeable lens cameras, and the church photos because I was just walking to the store.
I haven’t quite run out of super epic awesome pictures in the backlog, but I think there’s a whole lot more like this coming. I probably will have a whole dang book of photos of ‘just walking to the store’ or ‘just popping out for lunch’.
Then again, I’m going to Mexico City in a couple days, so I’ll probably get some good stuff there. Mexico is always great. I need to find the photos from Puerta Vallarta last year and edit those… anyway. I’m behind on posting. Nobody cares. I’m going to keep doing it anyway and not worry about it.
Posted on 2023-03-01T08:49:10Z GMT
These photos were the result of being in the right place at the right time. My neighbor Lauren was producing this tour and this was the last show. I think that was her role; the music world is a mystery to me, especially how the business side gets done, but she was running the show. We had met in the months (Years? God time is weird) prior, and had neighborly drinks in her back yard a couple times. Lauren knew I was a photographer, and so when her photog bailed at the last minute, she asked if I wanted to come shoot. Free house show in the city, with an all access pass, put on by one of the coolest people I know? Say less, as the kids say.
There was an opener, Coco and Breezy, but apart from the first pic, I didn’t get a ton of good shots of them. I was mainly there for the headliner, LP Giobbi. I shot for basically her whole set. Up and down the stairs, moving around the stage, doing the whole thing. Two cameras, the Nikon with the 24-120 and the Leica, shooting away for a couple hours. I think I took a cigar break in the middle, went outside and burned one, sat and rested my knees. I am not a kid, and my body makes sure I know it.
Lauren and LP also co-founded a non-profit, Femme House, which is worth mentioning because I think this show was a Femme House show. (Edit to add: pretty sure it was).
FEMME HOUSE fosters more equitable opportunity for women and gender-expansive individuals in the technical and behind the scenes areas of music. We are creating the future producers, mixers, engineers, DJs, artists, and executives of the industry by providing education and scholarships, cultivating community, propagating visual representation, and offering professional development opportunities.
It reminds me a bit of ElixirBridge, which was all about bringing in underrepresented groups into my industry, also through free classes. Femme House is way cooler and has a better web site, but I digress. Anyway.
I did make a classic blunder with these, in that the tour manager (not Lauren, some dude) asked for 50 photos, and I dutifully made an edit of approximately 50 photos (out of about 600 exposures). They were all passable, but really there are only so many photos you can get of someone performing; any more and I’m repeating myself and muddying the record with lesser pictures. The 9 here is probably the edit I should have sent, maybe 15 or 20 max.
I sent them 5o, unfortunately, and I never heard anything and never saw them get used even for a social post. I didn’t feel great about it at the time, not because I recognized my mistake, but because I thought they didn’t like the pictures. I spent the last ten months or so thinking, oh well, screwed the pooch on that one, I guess those photos weren’t any good. Then last night I figured the time had come to look at them and see if I could salvage anything for a blog post. I don’t care what they think: I fucking killed it on this one.
It’s also possible that because this was the last stop on the tour that these photos just didn’t matter or get looked at at all. Maybe they’re vastly different from the visual style of the other tour photos and so didn’t get used; I didn’t have time to look for any of the tour press at the time so I have no idea if these work with the rest. Could be a lot of things. Lauren moved away coincidentally around then and we haven’t had backyard whiskeys since, so I may never know. At least now, through the magic of blogging, these get to be seen.
Posted on 2023-02-16T10:10:11Z GMT
