my method

Several people have asked me recently "how do you get pictures like that?" or "What lens do you use?" or the like. I usually answer in my most serious voice: "Magic."

The truth is, I have a certain technique that I use that I've developed over the years (almost ten years doing photography, now). I've spent a lot of time studying light. I've read every book of technique I could get my hands on. But the true technique is not found in a book; it is what happens when everything action is completely unpremeditated; there is no camera, there is no lens, no thoughts of exposure or aperture; there is only the picture.

Of course, to achieve this Zen state, there's a lot of practice and fumbling and mistakes. The best photographers are humble, generous sorts, because everyone has, at least once, dropped some piece of equipment worth more than their car. I'm kind of a klutz. I dropped a lens last saturday (and no, that won't date this little essay, because I do stupid shit often and still make good pictures). It is always looking through the viewfinder. I forget everything else in the whole world.

To get there is a matter of a lot of practice. I used to shoot with an all manual leica, and it was the simplest most perfect camera ever. If I could just stick a sensor behind that thing that would spit out raw files, I would be obscenely happy. Leica, unfortunately f'ed up their digital camera so bad I found it almost unusable. I really have to be digital for two reasons: Time and money.

So, that out of the way, there are some technical things that I do differently, at least somewhat. I always shoot with a fairly large aperture and high ISO. I own three different 50mm f/1.2 lenses, for different cameras (I have owned in the past a total of nine or ten lenses in 50mm focal length, not counting zooms or lenses in the similar 40mm length). I used to always meter with an incident light meter, set a manual exposure, and roll through a scene; now I use aperture priority because my camera has a meter inside. It works most of the time.

I use manual focus a lot; enough that I have a dedicated manual lens. with af there is a tendency to not move the camera around; the focus points are where some designgeneer put them, and not where you want them.

I can't say much more that I do, really; I play around a lot with composition and angle. Find interesting things to photograph. People are the most interesting to me. All of them. that's all.

the hundredth post

No flash needed, of any kind. I'll rock with javascript and a steady hand, thanks. more photos of the parade on the OKCityblog. I'm still working on the photos from the race, from last night. These are all from the parade night.

photos from booze cruise

photos from strange days...

I've felt really weird over the last week. I bonked my head, quit my job (for good this time), had totally wild nights and good days, and I feel wonderful for all of it.

Quitting my job was probably the best thing I've done since I started the job. If you're not doing what you want to be doing with your life, fucking stop that shit. Do better things.

There was this bonfire, lots of people, fire:


And yes, I know this is a cliche. Oh well. Reagan and Lauren:
Erin hit a nail right before getting to sauced friday:
Curt (sorry if that's the wrong spelling), and I have no idea where he got that hat:

Ash, new in town:

And then with the wig and glasses, the random costumery this guy finds, I don't know:


Then there was the cupping on saturday, a coffee tasting. It was interesting, although I have to say that whenever I'm on the sport to come up with words for taste, I draw a blank. It was cool though. Part of the random goodness of the week.

My weekend

Finally over. I'm sort of still waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were, but the disaster might be over (as I write that, I knock the wood of my desk firmly).

It started well enough- got off work, came home, and apparently picked up my friend Traci to go into town for booze cruise. I say apparently because I can't remember. This is reconstructed memory and could be wrong. We get to Regan's house and start biking from there to get Vietnamese food. While on the way or the return, I'm not sure which, I was riding no-handed, and because of the damage I did to my bike last weekend with my car rack, it was a little more unstable than I'm used to and the front wheel did something funny and I went down.

I landed on my right side. That wasn't a problem; my right side is as tough as my left, and my left is as tough as many. No, the problem is that no matter how tough you are, the concrete always wins against your skull. For illustration, see the photo in my previous post.

In my memory, there is a big blank between leaving El Reno on Friday and early Saturday morning. If we include vague memories and flashes, my memory goes to about 6 in the evening, and picks up again at 2am. Traci and Reagan told me that for about two hours after the wreck, I was babbling the same two minutes of conversation:

"How did I get here? I fell? Has someone checked for a concussion?..." and then a restart two minutes later, as everything that was happening to me failed to get into long term memory.

Thanks to Reagan and Traci, though. They've got to be saints or angels, taking care of me like that.

So, I got home around 6am- Traci drove my car to her house out in choctaw, and then I drove myself home from there. Can't blame her for driving the first leg, as I wasn't terribly lucid for most of the night. I checked my eyes one last time, not because I couldn't remember them being fine, but because I was paranoid about going to sleep and slipping into a coma. I was fine, went to sleep.

That's not the end of the story. I woke up sore but mostly all right. I figured I should go back out, show everyone that I was fine, etc. This was a bad idea.

I drove to sauced with my bike on the back of the car. Went in, got a slice, chatted a little bit, found out there was something going on at the conseratory, a club way north on western. I finished my slice, said to myself "hell, why not?"

So I'm riding up there on my bike. I see a place that looks open, says Bar on the sign, but I get closer and realize it says "Make Up Bar" and despite the lights being on (should have been my first clue, most bars here black out their windows) they were closed. So I'm leaving the parking lot, and there's a couple lights out, and I hadn't truned on my headlight yet, and out of nowhere, this curb/island is in front of me, maybe two feet wide, and I hit it hard. I hit the pavement harder.

As I'm falling, I have time to think. I say to myself at least I'm wearing a helmet this time, but it's too bad there's nobody here to see. Just before I hit the concrete, I think, yeah, there's nobody to pick me up either.

Impact.

I laid there for a minute, inventorying myself, realizing my neck hurt, but if it was broken, I was fucked anyway. I screamed a great gutteral curse, and sat up. The kind of word Tom Waits gargles in the morning after he brushes his teeth. With thorns. I stand up with no less effort, but a lot less whining, and go on to the club. What else?

The club was dead. More than dead, it was goth night. I went in, found out there's no live acts, and gave up for good. Rode back to sauced, and on the way, I lost my hat. The hat was in my back pocket while I was wearing my helmet. Gone. So I made myself scarce too.

But sunday was solid. I slept in, woke up in pain, ans sat around for most of the day. Spent a few hours at coffee slingers drinking the best coffee in town, and that helped a lot. I'm still limping around a bit, but its cool. My neck is sore, it hurts to laugh still, but I'm alive.

wear a helmet

I'm fine though, really.

OKC needs a city blog. essays, photos, video, music, all things good about this city. There are amazingly good things here, a rich seam of characters and stories and projects and goodwill begging to be told. from a pitch I wrote to one of the people running the city sentinel:

What I am proposing is an Oklahoma City news blog, with breaking news stories, video, photo essays, and features built for the web. Oklahoma City is severely lacking good online content of the kind that draws lots of hits. I just looked at the Oklahoman online; what they're doing is trying to be a newspaper and a television station on a different pipe. It lacks focus on real day-to-day life. There's very little good multimedia, local stories, there is a flavor of reporting that often gets overlooked in a normal paper but that fits very well with the average internet user, because the constraints on the storytelling are very different on the internet. Local markets, community events, characters famous and infamous, there is a rich seam of stories begging to be told. Nobody is doing it here at all. There is a huge vacuum of good web content. Your organization is small and flexible, and I think could manage the translation.

What I mean by 'for the web': Text online can be both longer and shorter than in media; a little blurb can inform sometimes as well as a several column story. At the same time, it's possible to put out a 5000 word character portrait right next to that same little blurb. Videos with talking heads suck, everybody knows that, anything longer than about five minutes loses people online, so what is required is a quick, abrupt documentary verité. Don't dress it up, just tell the story. Be funny, be original, and genuine, that goes for everything. Photos are great alone, but do even better with audio, which gives context in place of a caption.

The great thing about the internet, well, two great things about the internet: It is the most perfect and cheap printing press (copy machine) ever, and it reduces organization cost to zero. You have almost infinite space to do the story justice, and the more content you create, the more ad revenue you get; more stories mean more space; it's no good to bombard people with floating banners and flashing garish animations, but there are spots in a style where ads fit well and don't hurt the content. If the content is good, people will come, and come back, and spread the word themselves, and even send in news and photos.

To see the news tonight, the world is falling apart. We need an antidote to that. A viable alternative. I'm telling you all this because maybe you know people who might be interested in working on this with me? The onerous, terrible part: I'll have to sell ads. The amazing, wonderful part: the overhead is as close to zero as it could possibly be. We don't need an office, server space is cheap, all we have to do is keep maybe three or four people paid well enough. But they have to be three or four intensely creative passionate people. people who can keep up with long hours and no sleep and real insanity. You know anybody like that besides me?

photos from friday night

So, if anybody manages to find this, Hi. I took a lot of pictures tonight/this morning. If it looks like some people are here more, it's because lot of the ones from tonight were blurry (low light, bad focusing screen in my camera, etc), and I liked these best. Even a couple here blurry. In other words, it has nothing to do with what I think of you and everything with what I think of these pictures. (There were actually more people around than it might seem from these photos, and yes, I have pictures of them, but they're shitty. The pictures. The people are awesome).

Karaoke=Madness+Awesome

Pile O' Bikes. Do I really need these captions?