I’m late posting, again. Something about last week was just keeping me down, and also I didn’t want to spend much time at the computer… I was short of things to post, or so I thought, and so I spent a lot of time running around doing stuff, or at least trying to do stuff, and one thing led to another and then I was out of town on the weekend, and here 7 days have passed since I’ve posted (there’s something about promising indefinitely to post every day that dooms me).
This was sometime last month, I think? Robin is this amazing creative genius and his partner Kathryn is important to the olive oil world in ways I don’t entirely understand. Warm, fun, good people, and they just bought a house practically across the street from Sophie and me. “just” is relative, in this case; I think they actually moved in in december, but with all the difficulties of moving and settling in it took quite a while for them to have the capacity to host, I think.
The collection of guests was interesting and eclectic. Food people, journalists, doctors (PhD and MD if memory serves) small children, and more than one errant photographer. There was a spread that was as good as any I’ve seen at a backyard barbecue. The kids (and more than some of the adults) were super into picking avocados off the tree in the yard.
One last thing: you may have noticed that these don’t have black borders but still look like color film photos… that’s because I had them scanned at the lab, and the lab can’t get the extra little bit of margin to get the borders with the full roll scanner. I’m fine with it, actually, because if I decided to make prints I’ll have to scan anyway, and I can include the border then. And it’s hours and hours of work that I don’t have to do.
Robin and an a child with the avocado picker
clouds that threatened but ultimately did not dampen
Sophie. This picture works both in black and white and color, but I was shooting color film.
Posted on 2018-06-19T07:37:29Z GMT
these are from the same day as my last post from niles, just a roll that took me a long time to get processed. I think i was only shooting color in the 6x9 at the time, and it was certainly before i put together the film darkroom here.
as it happens, I was in niles today, again, coming back from camping. We camped west of san jose, up in the hills at some county park that chris and angela found. The campground is what’s known as a ‘walk in’, as in you have to haul all your eqipment some distance from the parking lot. It was quite the hill, too. We were camping with the aforementioned brumfelds, and some friends of theirs, I believe journey and Marco? good people, and relaxation was had all around. I figured out how to use a stainless steel water bottle as a waveguide to boost my cell signal, and read a bit more of Death Comes for the Archbishop which is a really lovely book set at a pace altogether orthogonal from what I normally read.
Anyway, one of our camping traditions is to stop for pizza at broncho billie’s in niles, when it’s anywhere near the route home. It’s really amazing pizza, a combination of doughy on the inside and crisp on the outside, with generous toppings and sauce. It is, without question, one of my favorite pizzas, but probably also because of the ritual that surrounds it. Coming back from camping, having done the work of breaking camp on coffee and protein bars, we’re always hungry when we get to the place. I always get the Bull Durham, which is every meat topping they have. So good.
I’m off this week, in preparation for the new job starting a week from wednesday. I plan to build the bike frame, or at least make some progress on it; I need to make at least one fixture to make it come together properly. Also, I have a whole ton of scanning to get through.
Here’s today, anyway.
Posted on 2018-06-11T08:35:16Z GMT
This is the last of the black and white work that I have scanned at the moment; I have a bunch more in various stages of getting into the computer. Three rolls unprocessed, three that need to be scanned, and one half roll in the camera that I’m exctied about.
Anyway, these are sort of random. Yesterday, I was going to talk about the mood in the city, but it doesn’t quite feel right with these photos. maybe later, after the new film is scanned.
Fletcher in his natural habitat, playing a tabletop game. 
Gym? I’ll show you a gym. 
Saibh, with her hat. I’m not sure it wasn’t a doll’s hat before this photo. 
SF. No idea what I was doing there. Maybe this was from the passenger’s seat in the car?
Posted on 2018-06-08T07:20:10Z GMT
This is where i find myself; on the street, in SF, taking pictures of things, not people. it’s not really street photography so much as a sort of urban landscape. There’s this idea of the street photograph as a well-dressed pretty lady in a perfect shaft of sunlight; this is not that. Neither is it getting right in the face of the subject. I’m terribly shy out in the real world, even among people I know sometimes.
But there is still a lot going on, even within those bounds, with the attempt to have respect for the people and things you photograph. Not to say that other people’s approaches don’t do that, I’m only going by feeling here. It’s hard to get involved with people enough to know them well enough to make good pictures of them. You can meet someone and take their picture, have a conversation, and sometimes you get lucky and it’s a real moment, and other times you’re left with a bunch of wrong impressions. The clarity and quality of the images has no bearing on the truth that theymight portray. of course, truth is old fashioned. now it’s all about narrative. what’s the story?
/231/0001.jpg)
/231/0002.jpg)
/231/0003.jpg)
/231/0004.jpg)
/231/0005.jpg)
Posted on 2018-06-07T06:56:32Z GMT
The san pablo project is weird in that it has physical boundaries; all the pictures taken on the street or sidewalk or in businesses that are on it. These rules are somewhat arbitrary, but they keep me from tossing in every good picture that somehow tenuously relates to the road or the history. If I gave myself a 50-yard margin around the road, the last picture would count, too, but that feels like cheating. I still like it, and it was scanned and probably shot within a couple days of these other ones.
That’s another thing about shooting film. Unless the photos were all shot on the same day, and I have something to remind me of when they happened, there’s no way to know when a given photo was taken. So we’re not super chronological here, is what I’m trying to tell you.
Posted on 2018-06-06T08:00:05Z GMT
