Straight Edge Life

I got to thinking tonight (I know, bad idea) and I came up with a plan. I’m going to shoot exclusively with black and white film for a while as an exercise. I’m hoping that it will get me back to my photographic roots. I’ve been thinking about how much damn time I spend looking at the on-camera LCD when I’m shooting digitally and how much I miss by doing that. If I can once again act on a little intuition and faith I might rediscover both how to shoot and how to make the process a little more complete.

When I use that damn lcd to review my images in the field I do too much editing right then and there. I recompose and reshoot based on what I saw in the lcd rather than by what my heart / gut / inspiration directs me to shoot. Some, shit most editing should be done back in the studio after you’ve had a chance to sit and stew for a couple of days. There’s a lot to be said for distance, separation anxiety, and simply a night’s sleep.

There’s also a lot to be said for paying closer attention to your subject rather than your image. You see, shooting almost exclusively digitally for the last three years has done a horrible thing to me, it’s made me forget my confidence in my gear. It’s made me forget about making it second nature. While shooting for the Monitor I knew my gear inside and out and was able to pay complete attention to my subject. Never did I waste time fiddling with my F5. Hell no. Today, now I have the same confidence in my knowledge of my gear, but I’m staying too involved with it between every single frame shot.

I’m not going to say that this LCD / image review thing is the source of all evil. But I definitely need to move away from it for a while. I also need to start shooting for light rather than color. Been a long time since I paid attention to light. I’m glad I’m working well with color, but it’s only one part of a good image. I never thought that my creative process was so delicate. Photography has a soul for me, it does things that no other media can do. I’ll go into that in way more detail sometime. For now let’s just say I’m surprised I lost site of it.

Ok, so this show was made for me. I’ve seen about six episodes and I’m loving it. For one, I’m totally crushing on Abby, the gothy, brainy forensic technician with pig tails. She’s got my favorite girl name (my car’s name too) and she’s hella funny. Actually the entire show is entirely funny. There’s a great dynamic between all of the characters and the episodes and crimes they are solving are complex enough to keep me interested. So watch it will you. Tuesday nights, eight or nine o’clock. CBS I think. I never know. Channel 8 in Eugene.

In other news… I’m moving into a new place soon. Probably next month, depends on the construction schedule. It’s a new apartment with a lot more flexibility than I have in my current pad with an area indoors where I can setup my weight bench and maybe a couple of servers, or a small space for drawing and printing. Not sure yet. I’m psyched. I love arranging a new space. I love to do it every few years, keeps me on my toes.

I’m having a crisis of vision. If I were a writer I would call it writers block. I love photography to the end of the earth, I’m extremely motivated to shoot, I’m getting familiar and comfortable with my equipment again, I’m traveling to new and interesting places. And yet I can find almost nothing I want to shoot. Nothing that inspires me.

I just got back from a very frustrating vacation.

The first bit of the vacation was nice enough. The second bit was hell.

Sometimes I think my vision is hampered by responsibility, by friends, by family, and by all the things that make me feel comfortable and wholesome and a part of society. By all the things that make me complacent. Because I know I shoot well when I’m emotionally cornered or when I’m isolated and challenged. I know I shoot well when I’m single and alone. Angry, frustrated, astounded, amazed. There’s something about this middle class life I’m living that makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me feel so numb.

Every day I wake up and think to myself “is this what it’s going to be like for the next 40 years?”. These goals I’m so diligently chasing, making progress on… these bills I’m paying? These people? Is it all going to be so predictable? Will I be so focused, thus ensuring my boredom for all eternity? Watching insomnia build slowly until I go nuts? Or will something snap and set me free? Because right now… shit, what good is passion if it’s got nowhere to go? What good is a love for photography if I don’t see a thing I want to shoot?

I have a strange curse. I have a love for things good and wholesome and at the same time I have so little ability to handle the boring life it creates.

There is no solution for my lack of vision other than to work my way through it. I’m not about to throw away the life I’m building simply to find inspiration in the chaos of a life I used to live (and subsequently outlived). Inspiration will come.

I’m in the process of editing photos from my trip. Hopefully this weekend at Smith will make up for the lame time I had in yellowstone. I had hoped that Smith would provide some inspiration. Had I not been struggling to get really comfortable with my mamiya, it might have. It’s too early to know if I have anything worth printing. For all those of you who have been asking to see more photos on my site, they are coming soon. Now you know why it’s been taking so long.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days… where next? Do I head up to Glacier National Park for a week? Down to Yellowstone? What about going somewhere I’m already familiar with like Zion? You know… so I can spend more time shooting and less time familiarizing myself with the area? I like the idea of going somewhere new, but then I know I don’t get many chances to get out and shoot for a week at a time and I want to make the best of it. And I certainly haven’t shot everything there is to shoot in Zion. I’m equipped for either for the most part. Hmmm. I’ve got a week to decide.

After class yesterday I wandered down to a local park in search of something, anything, to photograph. I didn’t find much. The park was basically grass with a little bit of taller grass right at the edge of the river. Up a little way on the trail I found these crazy orange flowers poking through a fence. The wind was really bad and I didn’t have a plamp (plant clamp, the photographer’s cool tool) to hold the things steady. I haven’t edited them all yet but I shot enough that one of them is bound to be sharp. It was sort of a bummer though because I didn’t find any bugs to shoot. Well, none besides those in my crusty hotel room. Budget traveling sucks at times. I was very much in the mood to photography bugs last night.

This class kicks ass. George DeWolfe is the man. Not “The Man” in the 1960’s Black Panther sense of the word but in the other cool sense of the word. George knows his stuff and provides pretty much exactly what I would want of any professor of any subject that I’ve ever had. And the class is hella sharp. A lot of old school folks who know the zone system in and out, still shoot in 4×5 and larger but who are also doing a mostly digital workflow. So we’re all very much on the same page. I wanted to take this class to help me make the decision between building a darkroom and buying a printer. The jury is still out, but if today is any indicator of the rest of the week’s classes I’m going to be able to make a damn well informed decision.

Actually, I think saying that DeWolfe knows his stuff is an understatement… he’s more like a part of the team who creates the stuff. He’s a consultant for Adobe, Epson, and a number of others. Ok. Anyways. I’m going to sit here in this fine little cafe (Liquid Planet) and absorb a bit more before I go out looking for dinner. Cool. This class is so much fun.

Alright, a day later and more to say. One of the other cool things about this class is simply being around other photographers. I swear I would consider moving to a place like Missoula simply to be around a thriving community of photographers.

I’m sitting on a bend in the river. It’s a wide and fast river but I do not know it’s name. I wish the evening air were a little cooler. The sound of the river is soothing and I have no doubt that I’ll fall asleep quickly. It’s 9:10 in the evening and down here in the valley it’s getting pretty dark. Idaho and route 12 are gorgeous so far. Nothing at all like the southern part of the state. There are rolling hills that progress into rolling mountains the farther you follow 12 east. I didn’t take many photos today. A few at smith and a few on the way up 12. It’s ok I guess. Today was about distance. Normally that word “distance” might mean more than just the span of miles between my bed last night and tonight; perhaps emotional distance, as I have often used road trips to put a buffer between me and storms at home. There’s something about physical distance that can even calm the storm within. Or hide it. But that’s not what this trip is about. It feels like business as usual. Like going to visit an old friend, when it feels like you saw each other last night, not 8 years ago. I’m at home on the road, and with a camera in my hands. More and more so I’m at home with a laptop and code in front of me as well. I’m glad they play well together. But I digress…

N 46 degrees 08.163 minutes

W 115 degrees 37.574 minutes

That’s where I am. Sketchbook in hand. Tomorrow it’s off to Missoula (a mere 120 miles away) to start my digital fine printing class. After that I’m going to find some fun places to photograph for a week or so and head home. Lots of work waiting for me. I hope this class is good because I’m eager to get out of town and shoot. Maybe this first week is just what I need to do research on where to go next.

Run a website for a while and see if it increases your level of paranoia. Seriously. You’ll be BLOWN AWAY by the number of intrusion attempts made against your network. I’m not talking about random code red attacks from compromised machines, or worms, or random viruses, I’m talking about targeted attacks, where people are jumping from public ip to public ip attempting to guess your usernames and passwords on any available port, service, and protocol. Fuck them. Fuck them for making me paranoid. Fuck them for making me beef up security to the point where my machines are almost unusable by anyone but a system administrator. Yeah, fuck that. You have to do it. You have to protect yourself, but it’s crap.

Between last night and this morning (while I was quietly sleeping on the edge of a river in Idaho) 8 individual intrusion attempts were made against my machine. In less than the time it took me to drive from the Idaho border to Missoula some fucker decided to try and own my server. He failed. But this is the equivalent of someone walking up to your store’s front door and working the lock with a pick 8 times in one night. I don’t mean to flame too much here, but it’s just shit. Hopefully soon laws will be fierce and will help to reduce the casual cracker from doing this kind of shit. Grrrr. Until then I kick the security up another notch.

I’m on a roadtrip. I’ll be updating my travel section as I go. I’m spending a week in Missoula, Montana at a Digital Fine Print class with photographer George DeWolfe. After that I’ll be travelling somewhere in Montana, Washington, Oregon, Utah or California for about a week.

It’s day two of my trip out to Missoula for my week-long digital printing class at the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. I spent the majority of day one waiting in Eugene for the UPS dude to drop of my new lens (18-70mm). By the time I got the lens and hit the road there wasn’t much light left out at Smith Rock. I managed to get a pretty good night’s sleep in the car by putting the rear seat down and sleeping half way in the trunk and halfway in the car. With a little extra padding from a good therm-a-rest and the fact that I’m pretty short (and therefore didn’t have to fold myself in half to fit, it wasn’t all that bad. I woke up at 5:00 and immediately went out shooting. Shooting last night was funky. I felt like a giraffe on roller skates, fumbling though my gear, messing up photos and in all the wrong places for the light. This morning was slightly better. I read a few things in the D100 manual that have helped me understand a little bit about how my camera works. Now it’s just a matter of mileage. Practice makes perfect, right? My whole goal for this trip is to get into a good flow. To be at one with my gear. Anyways… more later. I’m eager to hit the road again.