Perspectives? More like Photos

Last night was portrait night, or a really wild ass night, or a depressing fucker, or a wild debauch, all depending on your perspective. Crying girls, a night in the drunk tank, someone got neck punched, someone else got shot down, couple people got laid (I assume), someone went 59mph on rollers, it goes on and on. Me, I took it mellow, took some pictures, and passed out on a couch. I'm feeling lazy, so here's photos. If you want more details, call someone who knows.

Crane go Boom

Crane accident at the Dean Mcgee Eye institute's new construction. No injuries reported at this time, however the operator did have to call home for a spare pair of pants to be brought to the site.



Seriously, it's a good thing that nobody got hurt, and I can't help but think it's probably a indicator of good procedure somewhere that nobody was stupid enough to be underneath the running crane. As for the causes, could be operator error, could be equipment malfunction, I don't know. Five minutes from now it'll be old news.

Update: My dad (a pipe weldor with ~40 years on construction sites) tells me that it was almost definitely operator error. The main line was pulled too tight, the cable snapped, everything jumps and goes slack, at which point the lack of tension causes the jib to fall. It was a huge stroke of luck, according to dad, that the crane came down in an empty area, and also that the operator is alive.

another cool montage

Warning: this thing does contain some explicit images, so if boobs offend you, f off until you grow up, ok? On with the show:



Found via 1854, the blog of the British journal of photography. Appearently somebody is trying to get this banned or unbanned at a festival across the pond. That story is here. Cool work, anyway.

your camera does matter

OK, so I'm tired of all this bullshit on the web about how your camera doesn't matter, no need for that 4000 dollar setup, etc. Then there was this crap (which I got via kottke, a pretty good blog usually) about how the old masters, those before autofocus and autoexposure had it about the same as anyone with a point and shoot. The photographers he mentions for the most part shot with Leicas, cameras renowned for their speed, quality, and ability to work in low light even with the ISO 400 films of the time. (The author of that piece confuses old color emulsions, which were very slow, with black and white, which have been reasonable since the mid nineteen thirties). Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my personal heroes, whom he mentions by name, was famous for almost always using a 50mm f/2 lens and ISO 400 Tri-x, moderately fast film with incredible tonalities possible.

I'm not saying it's impossible to make good photos with cheap or lesser cameras. I'm even using some of the shots from my old G9 in the book I'm trying to produce. But telling people to buck up and try harder in the face of the crap that is the consumer camera market right now, well, that's bullshit. The factors that are comparable are not the important ones to photographers. The important things are all related to creative control and perspective. The reason little digital cameras mostly suck is you have little control over how the thing sees; it's very hard to fit your vision into a little screen. Here's a list of the things that do matter, though:

1. Format size. This comes before every other consideration, as it is a defining characteristic of how the camera will work, its weight, how the image is printed, how depth of field is established, all sorts of things. Bigger gives higher technical image quality, and smaller means better ease of use. My personal choice is the 24x36mm rectangle- a good balance between optical and tonal qualities and the ability to move around. Notice I say here "format" and not "megapixels"; the difference being that format is very important and megapixels aren't anymore.

2. Shutter Lag. THIS WAS ALMOST NUMBER ONE. That's because it's so often overlooked and it's perhaps the most important to the most photographers (potential and actual). A camera's shutter lag needs to be small, less than one tenth of a second, for it to be remotely useful in getting a moment, which for me is all of photography. Most crappy (P&S) cameras, you could press the shutter button, go have lunch, come back, start a pot of coffee for the afternoon, and then, finally, the camera will make the exposure. Completely unacceptable. In most old manual cameras, this wasn't a problem, because the mechanical path from the shutter to the button was short and fast.

3. Focal Length. You may say that for a given photographer, they will have many lenses, but many tend toward one end of the spectrum or another- James Nachtwey uses wide angles a lot, Cartier-Bresson preferred the fifty (normal in his preferred 35mm format), paparazzi live and die by their telephoto lenses, and if you ask ten photographers, you'll get ten answers, all unique. I'm a normal and wider kind of photographer, 50 and 20.

4. Minimum F/stop- This determines the most amount of light that the lens can allow to pass through. I cart around a huge honking 50mm f/1.2, which gathers light somewhat akin to a radio telescope collecting signal, but that's because I work in dark rooms with sketchy nonexistent lighting a lot. For most people, f/2 is plenty for most situations.

OK, so for most point and shoots, the lenses suck, the format sucks, the viewing sucks, and the shutter lag is longer than a smoke break. It's a miracle these things make pictures at all. You almost have to be a savant to get anything good out of them. To the people out there that know better, please stop bullshitting amateurs into thinking that their camreras are capable machines, because more than likely the machine sucks and they haven't a hope of getting better with it.

PS- Ken Rockwell, while being a little odd a lot of the time, has a lot of good smart things to say about photography and cameras, so long as you know he's joking half of the time. The other guy makes some good points, too, but really, if the camera didn't matter, we'd all be painters. Now go take some pictures.

Sunday Sunday Sunday

Today was a good day in paradise. Started out sleeping in a bit, then went to brunch/coffee/movie with Lori:

The brunch we were going to go to (the guatemalan on classen) is closed sundays, or at least it was closed today, so we went to cafe do brasil, where I got my chorizo fix over eggs and a side of Mimosa. Coffee at coffeeslingers, mostly to kill time, and then onto the movie, Taken, which was awesome- the most realistic fight scenes I can recall in a movie. Brutal, fast paced, and it could've ended about five minutes before it did. No need to sugar coat the ending, Hollywood.

Then, with Lori off to study something boring, I was free to go shoot golden hour on 23rd street. I had to go around twice to get the photo of the capitol.

These same people are always hanging out on that bench in the corner. I don't know if they live in the apartments out of frame to the left or they're homeless and that's just their spot.

Homage to Eugene Atget. Wig shop. It was always a little but of a surprise to hit the end of a roll so quickly; about half an hour walking and 141 pictures.






So, I walked from Robinson to Classen, dropped off the four rolls I'd shot at Walgreens, and went to grab a bite while they were being run. I have my doubts about the usability of these photo cd scans; fine for web, but I'm going to need to scan them better to make prints. Might just not bother next time and scan everything at home. Then again it does make blogging a lot easier.

Lacking the will to blog

Right now, I should tell the story of the excellent day I had shooting with Jeremy Charles, or rather him shooting and me assisting, but I think I can may be just say that it was a good time, picked up a few new tricks for my lighting bag, and it was nice to be able to talk to someone about photography who's been where I'm at and receive a little encouragement. Also, I had a moment to grab a few photos of the first band, who's name I forget. This is why I usually take notes of these things. Anyway, Photos (now with black borders!):

photos of the random

Edit to add: photo of me by the inimitable Tara, the girl with the glasses in the second pic.

Why I quit my job/ What Happened today

So, it's been a long ass day. I got up and I was sore from a fall last night, I'm still stiff, actually, but that's another story.

I got up and went to work, and for once I was pretty on time, or at least I was there earlier than the other two people in my office. I go back to the processor to turn it on, and there were a couple pieces out of it, so I opened the lid and took a look at the tanks, and the rinse baths were a bit frothy. If you know anything about processors, or about photography in general, It's not a good thing for your rinse baths to be opaque, and also not a good thing for them to be frothy. The froth turned out to be rinse aid, which is strange and unnecessary, but whatever. I digress.

So, I see the processor in this state and I'm a little upset. You've got to understand, this is a quarter of a mil sitting there let to rot. Not only that, but the utility of it, its ability to make prints, was seriously degraded. Maybe I'm crazy. But I was a little pissed. So, I tell everyone we really need to drain and clean the machine, and then we can get back to printing, it'll take a day, but the prints will be better and the machine won't in danger of breaking down imminently.

As background, I've worked on these machines before, and I have a pretty intimate understanding of the chemistry involved. If you want, you can look it up, I'm not in the mood to explain it here. There's no need for the rinse aid in the final baths, because the prints are dired with hot air right away. Which I tried to explain to the office manager (or whatever keith is), but he wasn't having any of it. By this time I'd been to get cleaning supplies, pulled the rinse bath rollers, and cleaned the first set. I put the machine back together and went outside for a smoke.

I'm outside, then, with one of the other people I work with, Haley (not Luna). Keith, the office manager, comes over and starts talking about the machine, and I try to explain to him that really the machine should be thouroughly cleaned once a month, and he goes off on me. Says he just got off the phone with some so-and so from tech support who told him it only needed it every six months, and moreover my experience didn't matter because I'd never worked on this machine, and I said to him, fine, let's just let it drop, no reason to be angry. So he yells at me some more, and I tell him to let it go some more, and seemed like about ten times we went back and fourth like that, and finally I tell him, fine, find another photographer. And I turned on my heel and grabbed my shit and I was gone.

Since then, I've had a pretty chill day. I went to sauced and had some coffee, shot some photos for the 23rd st project (coming soon, next post, I swear), and built a bike for a pretty girl. The girl is attached to a guy, but sometimes it's nice to build something just because you can, because it's something positive in an otherwise shit day. Maybe the photos are good though.

Also, if you know anyone looking for an experienced photographer, photo assistant, fine printer, entry-level web programmer, locksmith, or portugese translator, I'm available.

First day of 23rd st. Project

So today was the first day of working on the 23rd street project; just a walk up and down with my leica to see what I saw, and to try to get a handle on what the project would and could be.



So, as I was walking and talking to Grant, I was also thinking. Grant graciously came along to watch my back. I have this tendency to concentrate so much on what I'm photographing that I walk out into the road to get the right angle, and not notice oncoming cars. So it's good to have someone along who isn't trying to line up things visually, much less conceptualize a new project at the same time.



The project as I see it now can go a couple of ways; I can see it happening fairly quickly, couple weeks of work, but the idea, the interesting thing to me thus far, is that 23rd street is the border between two really distinct neighborhoods, and that contrast causes all this crazy activity, lots of bums, shops, empty storefronts, crazy shit. It's a busy area.



But also there's the possibility of following the street for a while, six months to a year, to see what happens, because as midtown wraps up to the south and paseo continues to develop to the north, there's no way all these buildings will stay run down; they're going to become prime real estate soon; it's already happening to a few little strips.



I like the idea of this photo essay as a series of intense contrasts; the tension between the neighborhoods from the north and the south, the new shops and their new customers and the old bums and winos and just the plain residents (somehoe nobody has yet targeted the down-and-out demographic, except maybe Byron's liquor). It's probably an avenue I'll pursue (or at least be thinking about while I'm shooting.



Edit to add: Film scanning is a bitch. I think I'm probably going to just shoot this with my canon digi, just to save myself the hassle and the expense of film. OK, croudsource an answer: what do you think? Is the film look in the above pics worth the hassle? (shitty scans, I know; part of the cost would be a new scanner).

So yesterday was a fucker of a day. After I said all that about loving life on the road and how I'd rather be doing my job than carousing and womanizing and drinking (still basically true), I had a fucker of an afternoon.

It was made worse by the fact that I had a great morning- I was shooting really well, not too tired or too sore in the shoulders. Well, there was a bit of technical difficulty at the beginning (I had changed my manual ip to try to get my comp working on their network, and voila, it worked, but then the guys out front couldn't connect to me. Never mind they could've found me in the network browser). But being a little pissed just sharpened me up, and I hit all the marks just right. That I also have to make up the marks as I go, or rather intuit them (an important philosophical difference, but we have to many parentheticals already) makes no difference.



Then the afternoon came. Groups of dancers, first duo/trios, and then gradually increasing until there were 30 on the floor. So, just as we were getting into the groups of 6-8, one of the pins bent in on my card reader and I was in trouble. So, I sent the guys out front, my boss, an IM asking for help. I get no response, and in short order I had worked through my extra cards. So, I ran out to their area, and in the process, missed a dance routine. Threw me off the rest of the afternoon. Got heated there for a second and I was tempeted to walk off from the whole thing, but my better nature prevailed, and I'm still employed. that is, they didn't fire me for a mistake, and I didn't walk off mad.

Then dinner, and my boss was in hot water for us leaving "early." Early being maybe 15 minutes to beat the crowd. Oh well, now nobody in the whole crew gives a shit, we're only doing this job for the money anyway. Why won't people figure out that giving subordinates shit just pisses them off and gets you less work, of lower quality? Foster a good work environment, and good things happen. Positive reinforcement. When your buisiness depends on creative people, all that bad emotion can really fuck up their day, which in turn screws your product.

Enough rambling, back to work for me.

Why am I awake at this ungodly hour? It's saturday morning. I should be drunk, passed out with my arms around some beautiful woman I don't deserve. I should have partied all night with my friends.

Instead, I'm here in a town in north carolina in a town who's name I can't spell right (albamarle? albermar? something). Today, I'm going to go and sit in a chair for hours on end, and take pictures. This instead of waking up with said woman, making breakfast and nursing a hangover all day, orange juice, eggs, coffee, maybe a mid-afternoon bike ride.

No, today I'll shoot more than 10,000 pictures. I'll hear the same 50 songs repeated about twice, some more than others, and some more annoyingly than others (I never did like Annie). I'll hold up the 5 pound camera setup for most of that time, a 12-13 hour day, with a short break for lunch. I'll be exhausted and ache at the end and probably have one dinner choice, because everything else in town shuts down at 8.

The strangest part? I prefer this to staying at home. I'd rather be out here on the edge of what I can do, busting my ass, trying to do something nearly impossible (produce good art on demand, several hundred times in a day? that's so absurd it's beyond consideration, but here we are). This is difficult, but it's the life I've been missing out on in a lot of ways, going different places, doing photography, a little suffering but much joy.

Other than the people in what I'm already thinking of as my old life, there's nothing I miss. With the exception of the hypothetical pretty lady, who 9/10ths of the time I'm texting from the road anyway. What's wrong with me?

just a few phots from the road

I'm in albemarle NC and I can't sleep. Insomnia-blogging. not much to say right now. might think of more later and give it another post.

video from last night

some bike tricks and a couple falls from Matt Mills on Vimeo.

Oh noes! Tornadoes!

So, i kind of wasn't going to blog this, it being old news and all, but I wanted to at least share the pictures. Funny story: for the pictures of everybody crouded together in the bathroom, that was for the second cell that passed over us, the one that wasn't really anything to worry about.

My first day in the office was actually good. Doing sysadin-like duties already, although I don't really think I qualify for the title yet. Or at least I was doing them until the power went out. Point for twitter- I found out about the storm a little ahead of everyone else on twitter. Then I sat there for twenty minutes trying to find decent radar coverage (not really possible on the internet, unless you get a live feed from the tv stations, which is easier to get from, say, a TV).

a weekend in kentucky

So I started my new job for reals last weekend, and it was strange, like everything else in my life. The traveling was some of the easiest I've done. Nothing went wrong (in an unfixable way, at least). Like I said, the things that are usually difficult, like morning coffee or lunch, were handled with ease. For those not in the know: my new job is taking pictures of dance competitions. to the tune of 20k images a weekend.

The hard part wasn't really taking the photos, either, although I can tell already that my timing and camera handling is going to get a lot better (this coming from someone who didn't think that was possible). This is a good thing.

(There was some bs here that I cut out, because some shit shouldn't see the light of day. not while it's half baked at least. suffice to say that dance competitions are hard to fit into my worldview; they are, in a word, problematic).

At the end of the day, the girls probably mostly have a great time dancing, and enjoy having quality pictures of what they love doing. I can dig on that. Thinking of it that way, it's hard to hold onto my objections. At the end of the day, I'm a professional. I do the job, nobody gets hurt because of it, maybe some people enjoy what I produce even. That's fine with me.

The abbreviated quest for coffee

So I woke up at about 4:30 this morning, local time. I sat around for a little bit, then decided to get my ass in gear and shower and clean off two days of road dirt and sleep. Every time I needed something, there it was in my bag. Even Q-tips, even my phone charger.

So, fresh, dressed, I pulled out my laptop and read a bunch of feeds, all the usual blogs. At this point I thought I'd try to go and find coffee, usually an exercise frought with difficulty not least because of my level of awareness.

Out the room door and down the stairs of the convenient downtown hotel. and into the lobby. I already knew that the continental breakfast didn't start until 7am on saturday (seriously, the majority of travel is business and on the weekend; some people have to be out the door earlier). I had little hope, then, of finding coffee in the lobby. I found the usual breakfast nook empty, per expectations, but as I was snapping a photo of it, the desk clerk came around the corner and I asked her: Where can I get coffee?

That angel, that wonderful woman, told me that she was making it right then, that it would be out momentarily. F'ing amazing. So I stood around for a minute or two, then she came back with an airpot. Awesome.

That's this trip so far in a nutshell. I'm a professional working with professionals. Everybody's doing their job, there haven't been any disasters yet. (As I type that I knock the wood of the desk). And today, I get to the best part; for six or eight hours, I'm going to sit in a chair and take pictures.

It's not enough; I'm still gonna have to push my own work, keep making my own pictures, but it's a start. I think I'm gonna like this job.

First off, I'm writing this in a bit of a rush, scratching off that last to do item from my list before I hit the door. The Regular Wednesday sesh was a lot of fun; not only did we hit the litter box, but we rode around and hit some spots as well. Down by the chase building, a little bricktown love, and then we rocked up the monster hill. It's the only monster in town, another sign that OKC isn't a real city. Anyway, photos:








I love how everyone's starting to get the no handed shit down pat, or at least look good for the thirtieth of a second I need to get the photos. Nice to see hornbeck in town, too, and on his new whip no less.

So anyway, that's all folks, I'm out. I'm going to try to shoot and post from the road, we'll see how well that works. I'll be twittering, at least. On the flip side.

posting before I dash off to the office, to ride to kentucky...

This is where I want to live when I grow up:

This will be my corner store. Wait, are those apartments above that store? Can I change my mind about the house thing? Awesome.

not usually a fan of flash...

But the volume knob here is pretty badass. Actually yesterday I was talking mad shit on flash for web design because it usually sucks and just does the same stuff that you can do faster and better in javascript... but this I have no idea how I'd do, and it's a cool effect.

comments are broken

I'll fix them soon, I promise. Right now I have to go teach.

New Furniture...

So I got a new couch today, courtesy of Grant (hi grant). The best way to get me to clean is to move furniture, and/or get new furniture. Something about rearranging everything makes me want to organize all my crap and throw away all the various detritus I collect over time. So, after sleeping through the super bowl, I started to work.

The room actually seemed to get worse for the first couple hours, so I paused, laid on the new loveseat and listened to tom waits, which for some reason motivated me. Nighthawks at the Diner for anyone who cares.

I don't throw away all of my junk; I'm enough of a romantic that some stuff I keep around for sentimental value alone. I have bits and pieces of most of the cameras I've owned over the years for example. The ones that weren't stolen, that is. Certain pictures, too, I just can't part with or throw away prints of, even if they're a little damaged. The tech stuff I'm pretty good about trashing once it's past its prime. So, because it's such a rare occurrence, I give you my room, as clean as it gets:



Also yesterday, I had my first gig with Take Two productions, and let me say it's nice to work with professionals. I was running the wider of the two video cameras, something I've never done before (all my video experience has been single-camera work, documentary, and as cheap as possible). It took me a few numbers, but I got the hang of it. It didn't help that I was on an hour and a half of sleep; I probably would have been a bit quicker on the uptake, a little smoother, if I had been able to sleep saturday night. Or at night at all; It's 5am and my super nap ended around 9pm.

Anyway, I might end up preferring to run video on these gigs, given that I get more work from take 2; there's less pressure. We'll see. I haven't done stills for them yet, and I'd like to try that too; It's more in my bones to do stills. This site isn't "videographermattmills" for a reason. Anyway, my newly clean and cleared bed is calling my name.