I’m happy to report that my new camera arrived today, so I can keep boring you indefinitely with more photos… of course, that’s not the point. I’m not myself without it; not just without the camera, but without the act of taking pictures. I get depressed, moody. Easily tired. Someone asked me recently why I’m always taking photos, and I sort of drew a blank, like I always do. Then, they rescued me. “Do you do it just for the Art of it?” they said. Yes, that’s exactly why I do it. That, and I can’t not do it. I need to be taking pictures, in some fundamental way. Everything goes kind of flat and shitty when I’m not taking pictures regularly; it’s as if the act of photographing turns the world up a notch. Making photographs, making art, brings me joy, but not the kind sunshine and puppies and laughter kind. It’s more like water. It’s just not possible to go on without it. One is ephemeral, experiential. The other is hard and certain, something you make with your own hands. It is a sword that will cut god, a path to buddha-nature. Enough already. Have some photos. Goodnight.
Posted on 2014-04-04T06:37:28Z GMT
I don’t know if it’s me, or what, but I always seem to find myself in these beautiful places. Everything sort of falls together, and then I take a picture. What is my subject? Is it the everyday? Is it me, being a crazy person? Is it the world, not making any sense? If there were a feeling I was trying to convey, maybe it would be that moment of realizing how lost you are, and looking around to get your bearings. It’s probably none of that. I have been drinking. There was wine, and then there was whiskey… well, at least tomorrow is Thursday.
Posted on 2014-04-03T05:25:35Z GMT
The phenomenon when the earth’s light is reflected on the crescent or new moon. It’s also pretty spectacular. This was the night of Chris’s birthday party, down in Santa Cruz. When looking it up to make sure it was one word instead of two, I found “this cool article”:http://http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/12apr_earthshine/ from nasa. Totally worth reading for the description of what earthshine would look like from the dark side of the moon.
Posted on 2014-04-01T05:10:29Z GMT
This post has been through a a bunch of iterations about something that has nothing to do with the photos, so I figured I’d just post the photos.
Posted on 2014-03-28T08:55:00Z GMT
Reading On Being a Photographer (OBaP, for short). It’s a good, if probelmatic book. It’s stronly opinionated about what is and isn’t a good photograph, and how they are made. It’s helped greatly by the fact that the two authors are generally dead on. There’s a lot in there that is about half rhetorical trickery and half untrue. They completely miss the point of photography after, say, John Szarkowski’s tenure at MOMA, and of a lot of the legitimate criticisms of photography. The book oozes the subtext of two old men yelling at kids “Get off my Lawn!” That said, the descriptions of working methods, how to do the work of being a photographer, are invaluable, and would have saved me about 5 years of learning if someone had put the book in my hand 10 (12?) years ago. It’s way more practical than “the mind’s eye”:http://www.amazon.com/Henri-Cartier-Bresson-The-Minds-Eye/dp/0893818755, but not as good as “beauty in photography”:http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams-Photography-Defense-Traditional/dp/0893813680. I’m only halfway through, but I think I’ll finish it this time (last time I started it I couldn’t get over the old man tone of the thing). Totally worthwhile. I’ve got about three weeks, wall clock time, until I can replace my camera. Call it a month, by the time it ships to me. This is the longest I’ve been without a camera since I started photographing seriously in 1998. Even when I got hit by the car, breaking my 5d, I had a loaner. It’s really weird. It doesn’t help that I was in the middle of discovering a new subject, the ‘signs’ project. One of the problems with OBaP: they think you can’t go out without a subject in mind and find one. It’s simply not true. It really seems absurd if you think about it, that you couldn’t dicsover something visual by working visually. It just requires a lot of patience. Now I’ve finally found something new to shoot, and it’s really exciting. I can’t wait till I’ve got something to shoot it with again.
