Instantaneous Influence With a Delay
The image above is from a walk this past weekend at a bog in northern Illinois. I made a decent number of photographs on Saturday, but this is the only one to which I was immediately drawn. I like the image in and of itself, but also that it represents the sort of immediate power other people's work can have on one's own in a very immediate way.
For the last week I've been slowly working my way through Sam Abell's book The Photographic Life (on Amazon here: http://amzn.to/GV1cvS). Slowly because it's better that way, giving each photograph and paragraph of text plenty of time to be fully appreciated.
When I was in college, I was studying commercial photography at Ohio University. Every year there's a special day called VisCom Day when a number of guest speakers come in to give talks, show work, review portfolios and so-on. It's wonderful. The last time I was able to go was (I believe) in the spring of 2003. Sam Abell was there and he gave the equivalent lecture of his book. He did an excellent job, I enjoyed the lecture thoroughly, but at the time it did not seem to make a lasting impression.
At the time, I was quite enthralled by all things commercial photography and didn't feel I could relate much to documentary photography. I temporarily forgot all about the lecture.
A few years later, however, I was in Chicago and happened through a bookstore that had a copy of the book in stock. I don't know why that happened to be the right time and place, but I felt that I pretty much had to buy the book. There was no way I was going to leave the shop without it. Upon getting it home, I began to look through it. I read it and looked at the photographs once, then again, and again and again and again. Over the course of the next year, the full significance of hit finally landed. The lecture from years before, the presence of the man in the room, and the sum total of the book's contents all came together to illuminate and change my whole concept of photography.
Every time I read it through, I feel renewed. I also find myself a bit more influenced by his visual style each time around. Most often, it helps me look at color work in a more constructive way. I've long loved the way his color work tends to use a darker palette of tones than most color work one sees. It's more subtle, more veiled. He does with color what I've long aimed to do with black and white.
Which brings me back to the photo above. I know, I know, it's not exactly colorful, but it *is* in color and jumped out at me immediately while standing on a floating dock. His colors came to mind and stuck. Flipping it upside down after the fact is the sort of thing I've long done with reflection shots, but the shot likely wouldn't have come together at all in the first place without having recently fed my brain with the Sam Abell book. It reactivated some portion of my visual sensibility with immediate results.
This is why we need to read, why we need to look at art and listen to music and watch films and do whatever else stimulates us. Doing so keeps our minds awake and causes us to stretch and grow our perceptions. Like our muscles, if we want to get any real results from our creativity, we've got to exercise it and keep it properly nourished. If we don't, the best we can expect is slow atrophy and diminishing results.
What's your go-to brain food?
Finally, a real-ish update
So here I am, finally offering a real update. Lots of random things to note, so I'll put together a range of goings-on and observations in the form of a bulleted list:
- The US is huge. Was everything always this far apart?
- I sent off my Canon 5D Mk II for repair, had the motherboard replaced for a reasonable cost, and had it back in my hands 72 hours after sending payment. +1 for Canon repair services.
- American men really need to stop urinating on the toilet seats in public restrooms.
- I got my Kindle and notebooks back after losing them at the airport. My sincere thanks to Jessica's mother, the CPD, and Korean Air for that.
- I spent 10 days in Ohio visiting family and it was wonderful. It will be much less than 3 years before my next visit.
- I don't especially miss teaching, but I do miss my coworkers and some of my students. I was fortunate to be in the company of so many good people and awesome kids at my school in Taiwan.
- There was snow on the first day back in Chicago, I wore a winter coat for about 3 days, and then this insane instant summer thing happened and haven't worn more than a hooded sweatshirt since. This weather makes no sense.
This is, of course, a very brief, very incomplete list. I'll be back to post more and will be adding a lot of photos as the spring goes on. I have my digital camera again and now have a scanner on hand so I can begin working in earnest on the backlog of unprinted negatives from the last 3 years.
Times are good.
I’m back
I'm back in the US, somewhere outside Chicago. Overall, the trip back was uneventful, though a bit drawn out and very tiring. I did, however, manage to lose a folio containing my Kindle, a sketchbook, and a notebook. Monday will be spent trying to track it down. It would up somewhere at the airport - hopefully someone turned it in. More updates coming soon.
Why hello, morning, you’ve come so soon.
Unrelated image that I just happen to like this morning.
At the time of beginning work on this post, it's 8:30 AM. This is not considered getting up early, in general, but it must be considered relative to when one gets to bed. I work evenings, usually getting off of work around 9:00 PM. I usually get to sleep at around 2:30 AM after reading for a while after my shower. Getting up at 8:00 as I did today leaves me in the neighborhood of 5.5 hours of sleep. This is on the low side, though clearly doable. I don't work until 2:00, so I could still go back to sleep, but I'm not going to.
Why? Because I'm tired of being lazy in the morning, that's why.
Monday of this week was my 30th birthday. I've been waiting for it consciously for months. Not that I really wanted it to roll around, but more that I knew it was about to. Turning 30 is strange. A one-third-life mini-crisis for some, for me it was mostly accompanied by a fairly wide-ranging crystallization/clarification of desires, values, and plans during the prior two months. I know far more clearly now what I want and how I intend to go about getting it than I did, say, five months ago when I was in Japan feeling frustrated with my lack of photographic inspiration.
I suppose this post has something to do both with turning 30 and the year turning from 2011 to 2012. I don't really believe in new year's resolutions, as such, but this year some personal resolutions happened to fall closely enough to the new year (largely due to my birthday falling on 2 January) that I may have created some by default.
To get back to getting to my core point, I know better what I want and how to get it, and that means working on personal change. You don't get the change you want in your life without first working on changing your habits and your paradigms a bit. Other types of change may also be necessary, but those two usually do the trick for the most part.
As much as I know I don't like to get up early, at least the part that involves getting out of bed when I really don't want to and trying to start my day when my body is begging me to lie down again, once I've gotten going I tend to love being up. My mind is clear, the distractions of the day tend to have not cropped up yet, and (especially relevant to doing photo walks) the morning tends to be quite beautiful.
My work life has dictated that I get up very early at times. Photographic assisting, for example, often has me up at 5:00 AM so I can meet a 7:00 call time. When I worked at a restaurant, I had to get up around the same time to go unload the weekly truck at 6:00 AM every Monday. Once I even had a factory job that had me working a 10 hour shift (mandatory overtime) that started at 4:00 AM, requiring me to get up around 2:30.
So really, getting up at 8:00 shouldn't be so bad, right? The thing that makes it tricky is that nobody else is requiring me to do it. I'm making myself do it in the name of positive change that is going to require a lot of work. Being lazy in the morning is easy, and aside from the counter-productivity of it, it tends to feel nice, too. Getting up early in the interest of personal development and (hopefully) starting architecture school in a year and a half? Decidedly less easy.
Change is hard, but good. Hard work is also hard (duh), but also good. I have to remind myself of this when the alarm goes off, of the fact that getting up early today has some manner of effect on the person I'm trying to become, on the future I'm trying to build, and even the quality of the life I'm going to live today. If I do a good job of keeping that in mind, the rest becomes notably easier.
Site reorganization in progress
Having realized that I don’t like the way this site is organized, I am redoing it. The root pixelpost blog will go away, the wordpress blog will be moved to root, and will absorb the photoblog function formerly filled by the pixelpost blog. Stay tuned for changes, and please visit http://www.aleatorist.net as I work to update and revive a site that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention over the last couple of years. I will put a redirect page at the current address of the blog, but please update your bookmarks appropriately if necessary.
People: They’re What’s for (Thanksgiving) Dinner
There are two things I'm thinking of that will really change one's relationship with food more than most things. One, working in food service. Two, living abroad. What changes your relationship with food will also necessarily change your relationship with food-centric holidays. Firmly in slot number one in the ranking of such holidays is, of course, Thanksgiving.
I worked as a cook in a large chain seafood restaurant (think crimson crustacean) for a period of two years. I started out as a fry cook and steadily worked my way up to the point where I was running the line. That job taught me a lot about how to deal with prolonged, highly-intense rush times (essentially how not to go crazy) and how to make disparaging talk for fun. More importantly, though, it made me comfortable with and interested in cooking. Despite the harsh reality of spending long hours in a hot, thankless, low-paying job cooking mediocre food for thousands of people day after day after day, it somehow flipped the internal switch that made me to want to cook. Within the first year, I found myself being far more interested in holiday cooking than I ever had been before. My appreciation of Thanksgiving, in particular, grew deeper as I began to understand everything that went into all those wonderful family dinners over the years.
This will be my third consecutive Thanksgiving away from my family, and that certainly hasn't been easy. In 2009, I spent it alone. It was boring, it was depressing, it was not among the best or happiest of holidays I have known. Put simply, it stunk. 2011 will be spent quietly with my girlfriend and maybe a few friends here in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. There will be lots of good food (not much of it the traditional sort, however), a goodly portion of wine, and probably a long string of movies watched from the couch.
Living abroad changes one's concept of food, and that factors into one's experience of Thanksgiving in a big way.
Think of your favorite Thanksgiving foods. If you're from outside the US (that is, most of the world), or don't like Thanksgiving for whatever reason, just humor me and use your imagination. What comes to mind? Turkey? Of course turkey, but white meat or dark? Giblets in the dressing or no? "Real" cranberry sauce or the kind from the can? What are your side dishes? And what of pie? Etc etc etc: I just want you to really think about the food of Thanksgiving.
Pretty much all of your favorite Thanksgiving foods lie beyond the scope of what I can readily get here in Taiwan. The same was true in Korea, where I was last year. Even where ingredients can be had, ovens in Asia are about like hens teeth. Sure, there are toaster ovens, but have you ever tried to cook a turkey in a toaster oven that's half the bird's size?
For Thanksgiving last year (the one I skipped earlier), a bunch of us expats in Changwon, South Korea, got together and had a massive feast. This feast included a 26 pound turkey that was cooked in the only expat-owned standard-sized oven (half-sized by normal measurements, massive for Korea) of which I was aware in the city. We actually had to jury-rig the oven to fit the turkey in and have it clear of the heating elements despite having to take out the rack. I digress. It was a potluck dinner with dozens of people. So much food, even the leftovers were worthy of legend. Many of the dishes hinged upon rare ingredients (cans of pie filling, for example) purchased through friends at the local US military base or found at a handful of specialty stores around town. Every dish required some amount of improvisation at the very least, and many of them representing personal bests in inventiveness.
What made that Thanksgiving so special wasn't the food itself, but rather everyone coming together around it. All of us on the other side of the world from our homes, all of us acting as a sort of family for one another, and the food forming the common ground. There wasn't my mother's sweet potato dish or my father's oyster casserole or the usual two bowls of dressing (one with giblets, one without), but there were dozens of friends, a gigantic pot of mulled wine, and overall more food than the ravenous crowd could handle.
It reminded me that, while Thanksgiving is a holiday heavily centered around food, it's the people that matter. Yes, I just typed that unbelievably cheesy-sounding remark and had to force myself to do it, but managed to get it out because it's true.
I ate kimchi for breakfast today. Every day I walk past several stands selling various forms of stinky tofu. I often have dreams in which I'm stuffing my face at American fast-food chains (Taco Bell, in particular). My gustatory realm has been turned on its head through living abroad, and come Thanksgiving I will be craving turkey and pie with notable intensity. More than the food, though, I'll be missing the people. People are why my first Thanksgiving in Korea was a sad affair, why my second was so memorable, and why this year's Thanksgiving abroad will be the best yet.
Remembering, Growing (a fragment)
Tonight I developed another batch of 4x5 film. I'm down to about three batches worth and that'll go pretty quickly. From the start of my recent developing sessions, the negatives have looked good, but they haven't been spot-on. I knew they could be better, so I thought about it and today I extended my development by about 20 percent. Now my negatives are precisely where I want them to be. They look perfect to me, in that I know from experience what an excellent negative looks like. Different photographers will define such a negative differently, of course, but I know mine by instinct at this point and it was heartening to see some of my negatives from Japan come out of development looking so perfectly perfect. The earlier negatives are still very good, but these are another round of refinement better.
I'm remembering a lot of bits and pieces of knowledge relating to large format that I haven't used in years. It feels good, and the results are giving me renewed creative energy. I've gotten back to where I was once before in this manner of working, and am now working to move beyond.
Growing feels good.
Backlog: Photos in Limbo
As of last night, frustration with water temperature boiled over (har!), and I developed a batch of 4x5 film. I had to cut my developing time by half, but the resulting negatives look great and it is very nice to be seeing new negatives again. Heartened, I have already scheduled more developing sessions throughout the week.
Over the last year, I've been pretty bad about developing film. I have close to 200 rolls of personal work that is on undeveloped 35mm and 120 film. I also have now about 100 sheets of undeveloped 4x5 film. Now that the weather is cooling off (and my "cold" water temperature along with it), I am getting serious about working through the backlog. Sure, I'll have to wait until I get back home to send the color stuff to a lab, but that represents a minor fraction of the overall mass of film that sits in my drawer.
These are photographs in limbo. I've made the exposures, I've developed some of the film, but even once I have the negatives, they still don't really exist yet. I do not presently have a darkroom, and with another international move looming just a handful of months away, it would not make any sense for me to invest in a scanner right now. Not being able to finish these images, it's sometimes difficult to find motivation to see things through and work on developing the film. I am making headway on it, however, and the more I do it, the more excited I get.
That excitement is key. As with anything, if you can get excited about it, it's a heck of a lot easier to put in the hard work to get it done. Even though I can't print the negatives right now (or scan them to put online), seeing the negatives when they come out of the soup really makes me excited. I remember where I was when I made the photographs, what I was thinking about, what I was feeling, what the weather was like, even what music I was listening to. There are whole fields of memory that exist, connected with these images. Being reminded of those memories goes a long way towards creating strong motivation to hang out in the dark and play with chemicals.
What’s in The Bag: 4×5 Kit
Disclaimer: equipment doesn't matter. Well, it does matter, of course, but not in the way a lot of people think it does. Equipment does not a photographer make. You can be an amazing photographer with crappy equipment and (and this happens all the time) you can be a completely terrible photographer who happens to be using the best available equipment. Your gear is not your ability.
With that out of the way….time for GEAR!!! I can't deny a fascination with what other photographers use and why they choose the tools they do. Show me a great photographer, and first and foremost I want to see his images. After that, though, I'd like a peek in his bag.
Along those lines, today I'd like to give you an illustrated, annotated tour of my 4x5 camera kit.
Continue reading for all the details!
Got a camera? Use it.
On the left, my EOS 3 with Sigma 50/1.4. On the right, Elan 7 with Canon 50/1.4.
An old sentiment that bears repeating: the best camera is the one you use.
I used to take this as meaning that the best camera is the one you already have. I like it in that sense and generally agree. However, because of an excursion a few mornings ago I've come to appreciate it in a different sense.
That is, I now appreciate it in the sense of the best camera being the one you use like hell. A top of the line DSLR isn't going to be anything more than a glorified paperweight if, at heart, you prefer you're grandfather's old Yashicamat. A disposable 35mm camera that gets used up is infinitely better than a medium format rig that collects dust.
One night earlier this week, I woke up after a couple hours sleep with the onset of a massive allergy attack. From deep sleep to sneezing fit in a handful of seconds flat. I took an allergy pill, wrote some emails, but by the time I stopped sneezing I was very awake.
So, I decided to go for a walk.
I have about 10 cameras on hand, ranging from weird half-frames from the '60s to a 4x5 and a full-frame DSLR. The camera I picked up was a Canon Elan 7. One of the buttons on the back has been glued back on, the AF is fairly slow and likes to pretend it can't lock onto a lot of pretty average subjects, and it has a built-in flash (I hate built-in flashes).
It does have good points, too, though. It's fairly compact, especially without the vertical grip (which I removed mid-walk after I picked up a couple CR123A batteries at a 7-Eleven). It's light. I don't have a scale on hand, but I suspect it comes in at less than a third the weight of my EOS 3 w/PB-E1.
Small and light is nice, of course, but there's something that keeps me coming back to this camera when I have another 35mm SLR that's superior overall. That is, the smaller, lighter camera is also hilariously quiet.
I once had a Leica M3. It was a gorgeous camera that I wanted to love but mostly used it to discover that I'm not really a rangefinder guy. Even the Summilux 50mm f/1.4 wasn't enough to sway me. What I'm getting to is that the Leica, famed for being quiet (among other things), wasn't appreciably quieter than this SLR is.
Running on minimal sleep, in a quiet mood, and heading out just before sunrise, the Elan was perfect. I put on my old EF 50mm f/1.4 and grabbed a few rolls of color negative film. Pockets stuffed with canisters, I went out.
I couldn't have chosen a better camera had I access to a hundred different models. I used it like hell, came home satisfied, and got some sleep.
On paper, the camera in question doesn't measure up so well against the EOS 3 or the 1-series Canon film bodies, though it certainly is respectable overall and a definite step up from lower-end models. What it looks like on paper doesn't amount to anything, though, because you don't use it on paper. If you have a camera and only use it in theory, it's not the right camera for you.
But if you want to use it, if it compels you to use it, if using it gives you want you want, then it's a good camera. It may even be the best camera.
Chances are, whatever camera you have is (at least sometimes) the best camera. Go pick it up and use it. Use it like hell.