The daily commute. I’ve been pushing myself lately to make more pictures wherever I can. While I was working heavily on the watch, it seems my creative juices were at a low ebb, or possibly they were all used up. I’m getting back at it, though. Making myself shoot any time I think of it. There’s never not time to snap a few photos. If if seems like there isn’t, my priorities are out of whack. I used to shoot until I was literally passed out, wake up, take a few frames, and pass out again. Shoot while injured, shoot while dying od dysentery, shoot while on a bus, crashing into a ditch, shoot while digging ourselves out of the ditch. I was going to blather on about james baldwin here (the diff is in git if you’re really curious) but I decided instead to link to this really useful list of “the things you’ll need to write a novel”:http://tobylitt.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/9-things-you-need-to-write-a-novel/ which is remarkably similar to the list of the things you’ll need to do anything creative. The means are different, but eveverything else, yeah. Time, time, time, check. Selfishness, Generosity, check. The means? I hope so. A discipline: Yep. A yearning? Definitely. Tone? Yes. Lots of tone. Photography would be lifeless without tone.
Posted on 2014-11-17T01:53:26Z GMT
The dictionary tells us that shenanigans are when more than three people go to the Mint karaoke bar at any one time. The cold dictionary definition fails to capture the passion, the raw emotion of drinking 5 or 7 shots of fireball and singing “Baby Got Back” in front of your closest friends, and a bunch of people you hope to never see again. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader who is who. Except the car guy I met outside smoking who wouldn’t stop talking about his cars. F that guy. For the record, I sang “Man in Black”, and I only had the one shot of fireball. The rest of mine were regular whiskey. And a couple whiskey colas. You can thank the autofocus that any of these are remotely sharp. Yes, the same autofocus I malign constantly. I shot a shit ton, and got a couple good ones. It’s not how I like to do it, but I needed to do something, anyway.
Posted on 2014-11-13T07:14:16Z GMT
Three weeks ago, it was Sophia’s birthday, and we had the dinner on the night of at AsiaSF, a drag show (edit: not drag, trans*) venue in SOMA. It was a hell of a show, but my camera’s autofocus wasn’t quite up to the light in there. Got some nice photos of most of our party, excepting Jason. The second picture is Sophie taking her birthday shot from one of the performers. The last one is the only decent shot of the performance I got; there were 4 (5?) ladies, and they all did a couple numbers between courses. A super fun evening.
Posted on 2014-11-12T09:33:06Z GMT
So, some pictures got stuck at the top of the queue, because i haven’t been offloading the GoPro, or they didn’t have a place in a bigger post. Anyway, here they are. Life is very good, and very strange. Many things could come along and knock it all down, all out of my control. All I can do is keep shooting. The first pictre was taken the night of my 30th birthday. I’m OLD now. Then, some photos from the first trip to Big Sur, which had me sick in the back of the car with some kind of shitty flu. I took a ton of cold medicine and powered thru (with naps, OLD MAN). The last two pictures were from my trip down to San Diego, for work stuff. The work filled the day so that I was near dead at the end, no energy to even look around the hotel room for crappy picturs I’d ignore later. Which is honestly about where I am now. Except I need to write up where I’m at with the watch over on “that blog”:http://ourglass.watch . I’ve had some pretty good progress.
Posted on 2014-11-10T06:33:10Z GMT
Days like this don’t come along much. Clear blue skies, a friend with a nice boat, and an air show against one of the prettiest skylines in the world. I am a lucky bastard. I mean, fleet week happens often enough that I’ve at least been in the city three times while it was going on, but this was the first time that I got to see the big show. They launched some new navy ship, the president was in town, and it was a beautiful day. The fog threatened and one act canceled, but it rolled right back out, and the jets came in and put on a pretty rad show. For a while, we thought the red-whatevers were actually the Blue angels, but then someone pointed out that the planes were the wrong color, and someone else looked at the schedule, and then things made a little more sense, or at least the wine kicked in. Good wine, too.
Posted on 2014-11-06T08:09:24Z GMT
