except it wasn't so much a beautiful day

I took some astoundingly mediocre photos yesterday walking the tracks by the Allegheny. Here they are!








Then I picked some raspberries and went home to make a tasty lemoncello cocktail and forget about my dwindling creativity.




I'll toss the rest of these on flickr sometime. Today I'm going to an outdoor accordion party. I reckon I'll have fun things to shoot there. Look forward to that, why don't you?!

For something entirely unrelated to photography, here's a map of the route I ran a few days ago.


View where i ran today in a larger map

Phenomenon

A friend pointed something out to me that I hadn't noticed before. I went through all my old deviantart photos and he was quite right. I put boys in corners.
















I found quite a few more than this, but I think this is enough to make my point. What's my point? I don't know, probably that I'm a genius. Or I have some subconscious aversions to putting men in the center of my frame.

My Long Overdue Change of Scenery

I haven't been shooting at all lately because I've been busy relocating from Southside to Lawrenceville, but today I'm dedicating the whole day to wandering around my new part of town with my camera. Last night I got the Nikon out, cleaned the sensor, re-read the manual, and tooled around my dark apartment wishing I hadn't missed dusk. But I got a few shots before breakfast (oatmeal, soymilk, and way too strong coffee) to toss up here to prove that I'm really really really going to try to get back to doing what it is that I like to do.

Here they be. They are all lovely things which can be seen without leaving the apartment. I was wearing jammies.

Fresh From Mechanimal

Jason Bannister has made tiny lions.




And a tiny man on a tiny camel.

Southside

On a good day, Southside is so pretty.




Even at night, if you know where not to go, it's lovely.




Or if you have an escape plan.


And you know the exit routes.




And how to access them.


Even so, its a part of town that will grow on you in the wrong way.




Anyway, I'm ready to leave. The rest of this photo set will be available for yinz on flickr sometime later this week.

On Vacations

I found a CD full of scans of photos that I shot with my Nikon N65 in 2005. I actually think they look quite nice as a group of images, so I'm tossing them on Flickr for yinz. I'm not going to edit them, I really like the way they look as originals.

This one appears to have been shot whilst riding the top of a Jeep.



In addition to that, there's images of life and death, men and beasts and lots of nice light.

Please have a look at the whole set on Flickr.

A Nod to the Past

Since I started taking photos in 2003 I've made lots of mistakes. I had to learn the hard way to back up my files twice. So I've lost countless thousands of images that I can never look at again; piles and piles of photos that I won't be able to edit from their original image, like the one you see above. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again some more. Fool me three times and I probably ought not even have a camera. I know now to back everything up, and not just to one location.

I've recently uncovered a gigantic cache of all my journals from age twelve to age twenty. I read them all in a night. I also found a good amount of forgotten photos that I'll probably never share because they're not any good, but they certainly jogged my memory. There was also a box of letters from my several years that I valued the art of written correspondence. It's a good thing I have artifacts; there's so much I wouldn't remember on my own, without something to look at.

Getting to the point now, I'm sorting through all my photos from deviantart, which are the only scraps of the four or five years of digital photography that weren't completely lost due to stupid hard drive crashes. They're not good but they're all I have to look at of my beginning years playing with a camera. I'm tired of people finding me via deviantart and judging my work based on what they see there. So I'm saving all those tiny shoddy files to my external and demolishing the whole portfolio. Then I'll pick out all the images that are important to me and put them on flickr, all with their own explanation of their signifigance.

Then I think I'll be ready to get back to actually comitting myself to improving.

Here, for expample, is a portrait from April 18th, 2005. It's out of focus, small, dusty, and poorly framed. It's a photo of my friend, Marcelo, who lives in Chile. This is the kind of portrait which takes one to the presice moment it was shot as opposed to being a more basic image which reminds you of the subject in general. We all have photos like that. I think they're usually crap photos that do that to us; make us relive the time before and after the shutter opened.



A friend of mine told me about the time he was twenty-five and burned every recorded memory of himself, in order to start completely over. I don't particulary want to do that. I would, however, like to scrutinize all of it one last time, put it all back in a box, and press on.

Keep an eye out on flickr.