More Children Orbiting My World

November 30, 2006

Ethan, one of my oldest friends (18 years… yikes), just had a son with his lovely wife Jen!

I don’t have any pictures yet, although I spoke to Papa moments ago and all are well. Above is a picture of Ethan taken at last summer’s Early Eighties Party, logging onto the house wireless network from the barn in the backyard - really spooked my Dad!

Anyway, congratulations to Ethan and Jen on the arrival of Phineas!

Best to all three of you,
Jim

p.s. - I’m an idiot. I was thinking that I didn’t have any pictures of Jen lying around, but duh! I went to their wedding last April! Wake up, stupid!

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Busted!

November 29, 2006

Picower Center, 12:30pm

Whilst making my way back to the office from lunch I stopped a couple of times to grab some images. A loading dock here, the side of a building there. The usual.One of my locations was a sensitive area. Not terribly so, but still enough to provoke the curiosity of a concerned party. Mercifully the gentleman was very pleasant about it and just wanted to know what was up. I guess my fantasy of having a paranoid operative rip the memory card from my camera and swallow it will have to wait.

It is an increasing concern, though, for a photographer such as I who likes to look for images in urban landscapes. You never know what’s a touchy area and what isn’t. It sounds selfish, but how did 9/11 affect me (besides the horror, heartbreak, fear, angst, anger, disappointment, lost hope, confusion, etc.)? It made being an architectural photographer that much more difficult. I would never be able to do the portfolio on Logan Airport that I did back in college. Even the idea is hilarious - I would show up late (10pm-ish) to avoid getting people in my shots and walk back and forth through the terminals taking pictures. I can’t imagine doing such a thing now.

I’m even starting to wonder if it’s a good idea to scan and post them on the website.

Maybe I’ll start making up names for my locations. The James M. Long International Airport has a nice ring to it.

p.s. I had every intention of posting the offending images, but they didn’t come out very well. Next time.

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Lebanon Late Night

November 29, 2006

Green Line Pedestrian Underpass, Cambridge

10:45pm

This working ’til 10 at the mall thing is going to be interesting. I already knew that the place would be dead and the entire staff (myself included) would be making hrumph-y speeches about how ridiculous it is that we have to be there that late. In fact, it was totally absurd. The good news is that I sold a Nikon D50/two lens package, which certainly helps keep my mood up.My friend in Beirut gave me a call last night. The above photograph was taken while I was talking to him. Things are a bit tense there at the moment with everyone in Lebanon sick to death of the government for one reason or other. It is a terrible thing to listen to - he’s not particularly worried about civil unrest, but there is always that back-of-the-mind concern. I continually have to monitor the situation and weigh the sanity of my return trip carefully. At the moment, all systems go. But that could change at the drop of a hat (as we saw this past summer).

On the subway I started to think about Plan B in the event of a non-refundable ticket, as I had on my last trip. Direct flights from America are impossible, so there’s always a layover somewhere. I had already planned on asking for a cost comparison of flying through Paris and anywhere but Paris, as I simply can’t stand the thought of changing through de Gaulle airport again.

What if I got that close and determined that the best thing to do was not use the Beirut portion of the ticket? Would it be so terrible to find a last-minute hostel, live on the cheap, and photograph wherever I ended up? Sounds a little crazy, sure, but if I buy a good travel guide on my connection city as soon as I get my ticket - what are the options?

Must review this possibility a bit more.

Hmm.

 

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Website! Big Roof Picture!

November 28, 2006

Click the image for a larger version -
It’s worth the trouble, if I may say so myself.

After a bit of back-and-forth with the good folks over at GlowHost I now have my new website up and running. It will be a heavily revised version of my old website, chock full of photography and other interesting stuff. Currently it is nothing more than a simple placeholder with the above image, but that’s a start!

I have also been getting surprisingly nice reviews of that image, which admittedly caught me a little off guard. This one was a fairly academic excercise - the second outing with the new Mamiya RB67 that I had purchased to raise the bar on my image quality. The first two rolls were a total bust as I had forgotten many of the steps involved in using such a camera.

Anyway, this fall we had a ton of those great days with no humidity, blue skies, and wonderful clouds. Perfect days for shooting. I snuck up to the roof of my office and fired away, making sure to get all the steps right. I also wanted to see what my depth of field would be, what kind of things I had to watch out for, etc.

This was the best of the bunch. It looks great printed out formally, but I guess the little web-sized version isn’t so bad.

Posted in: MIT, photo 1 Comment »

Two Images

November 27, 2006

Near Shaw’s Supermarket, 9pm last night.

I worked Friday at the mall, and suffice to say it was anticlimactic. All of the big business happens in the wee hours of morning, and I was scheduled from noon on. I made 1/6 of what the manager - who worked basically alone from 6am ’til noon - raked in. My $1900 in sales looked pretty feeble against his $13,000 intake. I almost wish I could say that I just sucked and everyone made more than me, but this was not the case.

We just got screwed, period.

While I was bitter for the better part of Friday night and Saturday morning, I have gotten over it and thank the lord that I didn’t take the part-timer at Kinko’s - for all the problems working extra hours at Chain Camera Store brings, it’s certainly better money than that dumpy copy place.

Out my friends’ back door, Friday.

Other than that, things were very quiet. I spent Thanksgiving laying on the couch and eating re-heated lasagna. Lots of napping. Weekend much the same. I did cash in on one “Black Friday” deal and set up a new RAID for myself to store all my negative scans on - redundant hard drive means no messy CD or DVD backups. Hooray!With that, I will admit that this is as exciting as my life is at the moment.

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Pascal Programming

November 23, 2006

Please be sure to follow the link at the right to photographer Pascal Beaudenon’s site. He has published some unbelievably beautiful panoramic photographs of Lebanon that deserve a wider audience. My big regret is that I have never seen a print, just these tiny little web examples, nor have I seen the book that he’s published - although it is still available for purchase, apparently.

hint hint.

My first impulse is to go and photograph these places, but damn. I seem to do better at architecture, and would anything I tried only be an effort to top Mr. Beaudenon? Is this possible? Somehow I doubt it. His images are fantastic.

Anyway, go have a look. I’ll still be here when you return.

Posted in: photo chatter 4 Comments »

Tango to the Turkey Tetrazzini

November 22, 2006

Some building in Cambridge, taken last night

This year I’m afraid I will not be joining the usual family Thanksgiving wingding. Instead I’ll be semi-comatose at a friend’s place under the pretense of taking care of their cats. The cats will probably end up feeding me instead of the other way around - I don’t plan on moving off the couch all that much. Perhaps I’ll give my friends a 5-DVD changer as an early Christmas present so that I can just lay there for 10 hours at a stretch without having to get up.

I had, for a brief little moment, thought about using the day to my advantage and going out and photographing. That notion lasted for all of about 45 seconds.

Ah, well.

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Big Deal

November 21, 2006

I was looking through the photo archives for a suitable replacement until LadyPotter gives me a higher-res copy of the fabulous picture she took of me at The Gates. Didn’t find anything that I really felt like posting under my profile, but I did come across this little jem that I had forgotten about:

Ah, youth.

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Practice Makes Perfect

November 21, 2006

One of my big projects this fall/winter has been to practice, practice, practice. I realized after the Lebanon trip that despite good intentions I was woefully out of shape visually and needed to really get hopping if I was going to make this all work. I vowed to take my little digital with me every day and shoot on-the-go. This has worked well for the most part.

I also made a point of leaving early for work and getting off the subway a few stops early - this would cause me to wander through any old part of Boston and look for images. For example, the above image of the Museum of Science was taken while heading to work at the Cambridgeside Galleria.

Brings forth an interesting question, though. What does the above image have to do with the Museum of Science? There is nothing about the image to connect it with this insitution. Did it matter that it was the Museum of Science?

Does it matter that it’s Lebanon?

Here is where the really, really hard work - and very tough decisions - come in. It’s no secret that one of the coolest things about shooting in Lebanon is the fact that, well, it’s Lebanon. Am I interested in representing Lebanon? If yes, how do I inject more clues into my work to make this more obvious? Do I have to?

If no, why don’t I save myself all the trouble and airfare and take a train to some random American city instead? My kind of photography can really be pulled off just about anywhere. In the back of my mind I have always thought: you give me one city block, and I’ll bring back a solid portfolio of 15 images.

But so what? Am I becoming a soulless architectural photographer, conveying only form and light without injecting any sense of actual place? Do my feelings on the place come through? If I hate being somewhere, should the audience know that? Does lovingly depicting a place you love count for anything, or have I only made things easier for myself? Should I give it all up and take moody self-portraits?

OK, scratch the last one. But I’ve got a lot of thinking to do. I look over the growing collection of little images I’ve been making (about 100 now) and keep wondering where this is headed. The obvious solution is to bring myself to totally uncomfortable locations and see what it yields. I don’t mean dangerous, but places that don’t spring to mind when I am thinking of locations. Dumpy little houses instead of sexy new architecture. Something. Anything.

Or maybe I just keep practicing until something else emerges (which has already begun, heh heh).

Hmm.

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