This was back in the halcyon days, when there was no Delta in the US, and in fact it was months away in any case. Everybody I knew was getting jabbed and so we could safely hang out again. The first priority was to get out to Oklahoma and see my family. On that same trip, I got to see a bunch of my OKC friends; this is one of those nights. I’m working through the backlog, and since I’ve published a lot of landscape-y shots lately, I figured I could break it up with some portraits.
On impulse, I pulled down my copy of The Decisive Moment to page through and re-read the essay at the beginning. “Twenty-five years have passed since I started to look through my viewfinder. But I regard myself as an amateur, though I am no longer a dilettante.” The photos inside, still teaching me things. I’m 100% a ‘decisive moment’ photographer, which really means I was born about 50 years too late. I guess as long as I’m applying it within the context of now, and not trying to replicate Bresson’s or Winogrand’s photographs, then it should all come out fine, yeah?
Something I’ve been thinking about lately, that I got from a guy on youtube: the reward is the pictures. Most of this stuff, it’s going to be here on the blog for a while, and the very best, the ones that are part of a project, will make it into a print-on-demand book that then is printed tens of times, if that (there are, to my knowledge, three copies of my last book in existence). So, making the pictures better be enough.
I shot these, I’m pretty sure, with the Mitakon Speedmaster, a 50mm 0.95 lens. Definitely some softness and veiling flare to several of them. It’s also possible that I switched back to my Summilux when we got back to the house for the after party, just looking at these. Also possible, givent they allow smoking inside, that the veiling flare and loss of detail is just what the conditions allowed in that club that night. I need to play with that lens some more, is what I’m saying. I also have a version of it in 35mm X mount, for my fuji. I also really like that lens? They’re both interesting to use in daylight, wide open with ND filters.
Anyway: next post will probably be landscapes from oklahoma, from this same trip, since the last trip I didn’t get out at all.
Posted on 2022-01-18T08:49:23Z GMT
Drive, then fly. Palm Springs is a weird little town. There are these huge mountains, snow on top, and it seems like every single architect that’s worked there in the past century or so has asked themselves, how can I block the view the most? How can I take the best thing about this place, all this great nature, and get in its way?
I’m not mad about it. Most places are either like that or empty. LA, on the other side of the mountains, is like that. I dunno, something about the scale of Palm Springs is off. These were all shot the day after the last post, getting to the airport and getting on a plane to Oklahoma. Which didn’t seem like the best idea even then.
I’ll save you the suspense, though: we made it through the whole trip without getting COVID, mostly because we didn’t do a lot and wore n95 masks when we had to be inside and/or around people. I didn’t get to see my family because they all had omicron, and same for my friends. Going to a bar to see who I run into, which is normally a favorite home activity of mine, was out of the question.
Even with all that caution, I feel like I’ve used up all the reserves of good luck I might’ve had stored. Going to just stay home for a while, let this wave pass. I’ve got plenty of photos on the backlog to post…
Posted on 2022-01-07T09:31:12Z GMT
“You should blog more,” the windmills told me. Not really, I’m not Tony Pierce. But I should. There’s a huge mountain of backlog again, although somehow I’ve been posting some of it and not removing it from at least some of the stashes I have around; big, loose edits I generally do when I import stuff, so it gets synced to lightroom cloud. So it’s a bunch of work to figure out what’s been posted, but I know these haven’t, I just shot them yesterday.
Speaking of lightroom and clouds, there’s a new feature in lightroom’s selective edits panel, that lets you magically select the sky. It made editing these a ton easier, lemme tell you.
I shot these while we were ill-advisedly driving on Dec 23rd, christmas’ eve eve. 12 hours for what is normally an eight hour drive; we were going to fly home, but tickets were super expensive; we started looking at nearby airports and included socal, so there we were, chasing a $600 discount. Should have just flown, losing a day and gas and hotel at both ends and it’s pretty much a wash. at least I got some good pictures? Sophie drove while it was light, and I drove in the dark. Her night vision is great, and it makes her nervous when I shoot and drive, so it works out.
What else? we’re in OKC for xmas and a few days. Not seeing many people because COVID OMICRON, and the people we do see will be seen outside. Both of us are at three shots and a recent case of delta, so probably at peak immunity for this wave anyway. Not that means much, but layered on all the caution we can muster while still living our lives? I think it stands as reasonable.
Sorry for the typos, I’ve been up since two timezones ago yesterday morning and only got 4 hours of sleep in the hotel last night for unfun reasons. I really wish there was a way to know when you’re booking online if the beds are actually comfy? like I don’t care about most amenities, but that would be nice. I’m not asking for a Kluft (one of which I tried, after asking the matress salesperson his favorite; I almost fell asleep on it instantly, as if it was drugged; for $20k it better come with drugs). A decently up to date holiday inn has a fine bed that I can sleep many hours on. Not last night.
At least today was pretty easy, brain-wise. just had to be in the right places at the right time, not take off my mask on any planes, not even for the lovely in flight coca-cola, which is somehow better than other coke. Just up and down and out, a little light reading, a little Train to Busan which I’ll probably finish watching tomorrow.
I did enjoy driving this time, though. Even though the conditions after the sun went down were pretty bad. It was raining the whole time I was driving basically, real downpour for a lot of it, lots of traffic. Not the worst driving conditions or the worst traffic on an interstate in the middle of nowhere, but both were top 5 for sure. I like situations like that though, it’s just you and the road really, and a place you’ve got to get to. Mind wanders, and you think about old stuff and new stuff; how towns are settled or how boundary conditions affect mask sealing or whatever comes to mind. It’s like being a little high? but also not at all high, because if you stop concentrating on the important things at all, you die?
I think it’s sort of because the stuff that’s at the forefront is so rote, the background thoughts are more noticable? or possibly it’s the shower thought phenomenon, where there’s a bunch of white noise and other sensory input, and it’s feeding the creative background machine somehow? I don’t know.
I’ve babbled enough, and I need sleep. I might come back and try to knock this into something more sensible tomorrow.
Posted on 2021-12-25T08:20:01Z GMT
I don’t think I’ve previously published these, if I have, you’ll have to excuse me. These are from when we went to Colorado to house-sit; at the end of that trip we rented an AirBnB in Breckenridge and drove up. There was a light snowstorm that started coming down as we left Denver; coming over the pass felt a little hairy, but not nearly as bad as it looks. I’ve certainly driven in worse conditions.
Some Oklahoma friends came and met us in Denver, and drove up as well. This was our substitute trip for what would have been a euro vacation for Sophia’s birthday; we’d planned on a big trip that year because we hadn’t been able to go anywhere more foreign than NYC in 2019. We all isolated for two weeks and got negative tests, we were so careful. There were a lot of unknowns for us; at the time, I don’t think we knew even that fomite transmission had been mostly ruled out. Vaccines were sometime in the future, if at all. In any case, we did it, because the risk of not going was on balance worse than staying put. I think a lot of people reached that point some time last year.
People are bad at assessing risk and at the same time there comes a point when abstinence isn’t an option, you just figure out what the best mitigation strategies are to do what needs to be done, and go with that. I don’t know why I feel the need to justify myself, a lot of people were doing a lot worse than isolating in various places away from home last fall. So I’ll stop.
And anyway. Mountains. Incredible snow-capped peaks.
We were there before the lifts were officially open, so it was quiet, just us and the snow.
Posted on 2021-10-07T07:12:24Z GMT
I think the San Pablo project is over, or at least dormant; I think about it now in the past tense, and the best ideas I’ve had for the work in the last while was to do something else, branched off from the set of rules that was the project, more or less. I don’t think I’ve got a book’s worth of photos; I don’t even know if I’ve got a small gallery show. I need to sort of take a look and see what there is.
This was a night where we went out to get burgers, at a place called Al’s that google tells me is still in business. I found out earlier today the bowling alley, Albany Bowl, is closed. This was almost two years ago, so I’m not super surprised. The whole deal with bowling is being inside, and there’s not a lot of that going around. At least restaurants were able to do takeout/delivery and go less into debt staying open.
Anyway, still working through the backlog. I’m bouncing around a bit because there are actually several backlogs, as it turns out, with photos from lots of different things that happened, that I edited and then sat on, for whatever reason. They’re good photos, Bront, so I’m going to go ahead and put them here. That’s what blogs are for.
Posted on 2021-08-10T07:53:08Z GMT
