I’ve been sick all week, making what was supposed to be a very productive time into me, sitting on the couch watching marvel movies and the expanse. Rather annoying, but it’s really important to listen to when the body says stop. I’ve been to the hospital more than once because I ignored what my body was telling me. Anyway, this is just a particularly bad head cold, with associated exhaustion and some joint pain and headaches. I’m feeling a little better now, although the pain in my knees is a thing this evening.
The Serra sculpture at SFMOMA, officially Sequence, really loves the 15mm. It’s large and close, so it works. The super-sharpness of the lens isn’t really an asset; here I’m using a preset meant to make the files look like type 55 film, but also tweaked a bit from there (I can’t help myself). For me it’s all about the interplay of light and shapes in that space. It’s hard for me to imagine the machine that bends a 20-foot wide piece of 4” plate like this. Just a massive impossibly violent machine, but very calming on the viewer.
So, this was now more than a month ago, and I can’t seem to catch up. I should post double or something until I get there. Or try not to get sick any more. That might work too.
Here’s today, anyway.
Posted on 2018-10-13T09:30:20Z GMT
Monday, I get to work and there’s a package waiting for me on my desk. I’d actually tried to come pick it up on sunday, to have for the party, but there was some kind of power outage in the building, which meant that my key card couldn’t open the doors. In any case, I survived a day without my lens and made it to work the next day. The power was back on. The package contained a brand new 15mm Voightlander, which if you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen some photos from it already.
What can I say? This is a lens that demands a lot out of the photographer. You get a lot in the frame; more than you expect, even using the external finder. Which means managing composition and arranging the frame is quite difficult. Also, it has a tendency to become a little gimmicky. I found myself reaching for it and… but I’m getting ahead of myself. That was later, in other pictures. For now, let’s say I save it for special occaisions and leave it at that.
The majority of these photos were taken at the new Transbay center, where more recently there has been some hubbub about cracks in the steel. I’m not an expert, so I’m not going to try to guess what’s going on with that. I have a guess, and I swear I’ll tell you if I was right as soon as they say.
Posted on 2018-10-09T07:26:03Z GMT
So, we came back from that camping trip on that saturday in order to be in our own beds and closer to this on sunday. As the title says, it was friend Grant’s birthday, and he had a lot of delicious smoked meat and really good barbecue sauce for us. It’s a rare thing out here in california. I know, it’s a particularly stereotypical thing, for someone from somewhere other to come and say the food is no good, but there really aren’t any restaurants that do barbecue sauce right. Grant ordered all of his from Oklahoma.
Anyway, it was a nice afternoon and evening, and I really was having a nice time relaxing, so not to many photos. The one of the stars, there at the end, was taken looking up from their patio, with the 50mm wide open.
I’m now a month behind again. Anyway, here’s today.
Posted on 2018-10-09T06:59:40Z GMT
I had some things I was thinking about last night when I created this post, but since I didn’t write them down in blog-post form, they’re gone forever. This was the weekend after my birthday (which was on a thursday). We took Friday to drive up to a spot about half an hour outside tahoe, a little private campground that we tried to go to at the beginning of the season, and failed because it wasn’t yet open.
This time it was open, and we set up and had a nice overnight and day sitting on the river. The water there is already really cold (like, got cold being in it for more than a little bit), but I waded around a bunch and took pictures of the pretty light filtering through the trees, and of some cool rocks I saw, and the gold sand in the bottom of the river. I assume it’s not real gold, or a bazillion people would mob the place.
The tree pictures strike me as something that would be a huge effort to get a good print out of, but might actually be worth it. Maybe this weekend? Probably not, free time has been cancelled for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, this is today. (or maybe yesterday at this point).
Posted on 2018-10-03T08:38:08Z GMT
One thing about this feeling like a slump is that it might just be the way I’m feeling. I realized after writing that the other day that I hadn’t even cleared off the camera in a couple weeks, and maybe I just needed to trust the process a little more. These are maybe not my best work but I am getting better at getting close to people, and at just having the camera ready to shoot. Sometimes I still catch it asleep, which is a little frustrating.
I wanted to post every day, but I’ve been building a new keyboard instead. The Infinity Ergodox I use at work is about to have a USB port failure, so I need to repair it, but first I have to rush through this build for the semi-wireless one (there’s a wire connecting the halves but optional for connecting to the machine). It’s mostly wired, and the case bits are coming along nicely.
Anyway, here’s today.
Posted on 2018-09-28T07:51:08Z GMT
