I just got home from a trip back home with my family.  During that time, my son really started to come out more and really engage people.  He learned to ‘talk’ for extended periods of time and smiled almost everytime he saw his grandfather.  It was amazing to watch it happen and to be sharing these experiences with my family….

This picture was taken while going to his first pumpkin patch for Halloween.  The focus is a little soft for my taste but I love that I captured him during one of his first smiles.  He’d been starting to do it more often by then and now I realize that he might have already mastered the skill by the time this photo was taken.  Maybe.  I’ll take gas induced facial spasm too.

This was taken with the D700 using my 85mm F1.4 AIS lens.

This is an image taken from a photo shoot for Maria Breaux’s latest film called Mother Country due out next year.  The premise of the movie is a man who undergoes a personal transformation while walking from Austin to Los Angeles…a journey motivated by a peer pressured drive by and a wrongful death.   This image was meant to convey a sense of arrival, change and transformation as well as the vast open horizon of potential of new possibilities.

Her current film that is out is called Lucha. The film is set in 1982 against the backdrop of the insurgency in El Salvador, Lucha traces the plight of two women in love whose only respite from the battles raging against their oppressive government is the solace found in each other’s arms.

I used the Nikon D700 and my trusty 85mm F1.4 ais Nikon lens for this capture.

Some friends of mine are getting hitched early next year and they asked for some photos to put up on a wedding website and they wanted something industrial and edgy.  What I tried to do here though was capture my opinion of them by trying to communicate how crazy cool these guys are and stylish as they are kind.  I was going for a retro hot so-cal style and their personalities just did the rest.  I feel like you could walk up to these two and just ask them a question on anything and they’d give you the coolest answer and you’d walk away smiling.

This was shot on the Nikon D700 with a 28mm F2.8.  There was some photoshopping involved with my goal to blow out the color more to give it that flare.  That being said, the color of the building was pretty similar and it was a beautiful bright day.  Makes you wonder why anyone would paint a building this color…must be hard to keep clean and bright.

Flying by night.

The beautiful thing about SF is that you can walk around and see people doing different things but they all have the same look in their eyes.  I’ve really been enjoying the versatility of shooting in lower light conditions with this camera…its really pushing me over the edge towards the D700.

This was shot with the Nikon D700 and the 85mm F1.4.  No image correction involved besides cropping.  I guess for digital shots I’ll have to start saying what edits were done …. that might get annoying.

This is a still from an independent film out of SF called Faith Based Charity by Director Maria Breaux.  The woman on the bed had lost her sick mother whom she had been taking care of most of her life.  This other woman was meant to try to bring her out of her depression.  I just loved the look in her face and the patterns in the kimono.

This was shot with my Nikon F3HP and 50mm f1.4 ai lens on ilford delta 100 asa film.

The haunting face of feeding time

I’ve been delving into photography for the last 10 years and of that time of off and on devotion, I’ve been adamant of my stance against embracing digital.  This was mostly because I worked with computers and didn’t want to spend my off hours in front of the screen again doing photoshop.  I had great excuses; the medium isn’t comparable, digital is too expensive for a decent body, the low light conditions are horrible to manage on a digital….all those excuses go out the window.

I’ve had the fortune of becoming friends with someone I respect as a person as well as a coworker and fellow photographer.  I also had the joy have sharing the same addiction to all toys photographic, as we both have a deep love for film and manual cameras.  That love has been betrayed when he purchased a Nikon D700.  Full frame.  Great integration with my manual prime lenses.  Intuitive controls and features.  Better integration with my SB-600 flash unit than my F3HP.  Sonofabitch….

Some of the many things stacking up against the fans of the film medium lately is the ease with which we can view the shots we take.  Everything is too expensive now.  Chemistry.  Darkroom space.  Disappearing film and enlargement paper.  Because of a few of these reasons, I have not been shooting nearly as often as I wish.  It also makes the approach of doing the shoot, scan, posting something that now seems to be ‘work’.  I feel lazy for saying it.  I feel like I’m not giving forth the right amount of effort it should take to capture something and share it with people I want to share it with.

So here is the point of this post.  I am recommitting myself to sticking with my film preference as my main medium, but I am now admitting that I will also throw in the occasional digital image with my posts.

I know this really only matters to an audience of one: me.  That said, I feel like I needed to write it down as an admission to myself so I can come to terms with myself.

Here is a digital shot I took of my new son.  Also another reason why I haven’t been shooting much, but also the main reason I will be shooting more again.   This was shot with the Nikon D700 using my 28mm F2.8 AIS lens.

Sunset at Playa Montezuma

One of the best things of seeing a new place is the sense of wonderment you get when you see something.  Something that is commonplace to those people that see it more than a few times will obviously give the newcomer a different feel.  I’m not stating a secret.  This is pretty common knowledge. But what I think about when I try to capture the image of that moment in time, is the communication of that same emotion I feel at the time.  It’s my philosophy that a photographer’s goal in life is to learn all the skills/techniques possible to best communicate an emotion through the visual image.  I want my viewer to feel what I felt when I saw the scene I’m taking or notice the same things.

This image taken in Playa Montezuma in Costa Rica is about 76% there.  I think I was able to capture the blending of waves and clouds into the same horizon to give that sense of the eternal renewal…one just becomes the other endlessly.  I also tried to set the tone of the image as dreamlike, as if you were just about to enter the next phase of reality.  I think there were a few things I could have done to make the shot that much better but you sometimes play roulette with slide film and a manual camera.  I shot this using Fuji Velvia 50ASA film on my Leica M6 TTL with a 35mm F2 Summicron lens.

I think buddha would have smoked a kush.

I captured an image while on a vacation to Tagaytay, Philippines. It’s a wonderful place, an island in a lake that is basically the crater of a volcano.  There was a lookout point way up on the edge of this crater that looked out onto this phenomenal place where this Buddha statue was perched, overlooking the view.  It isn’t so much the Buddha statue that attracted my eye to this scene, but the way the clouds seemed to surround the head of the Buddha as I stood on that particular angle.  I used Fuji Velvia 50ASA film with a polarizing filter on my Nikon F3HP with my 85mm F1.4 AIS manual lens.   I wanted to capture the detail of the cloud, the deep blue of the sky and the image itself.  It overwhelmed me with a sense of peace and laughter at the same time.

Out of a crack in the wall

I never really did a lot of cross processing until around this point.  Most of my attempts have produced a washed out look that was not really doing it for me until a set I did while out in the Stinson Beach area.  I don’t know if it was the blaring hot sun that produced a massive amount of light or if it was cross processed differently but I was pretty happy with this and a few others.  I like this one in particular because the flowers were very pretty and healthy as they grew out from between a crack in the wall and sidewalk.   Beauty really is in unexpected places and I am glad it does…makes one always keep his eyes open.

simple pleasures

stim⋅u⋅lus
/ˈstɪmyələs/
–noun, plural -li  /-ˌlaɪ/
1. something that incites to action or exertion or quickens action, feeling, thought, etc.: The approval of others is a potent stimulus.

As January posts an unemployment rate of 7.6% and the clamor for things to be done is reaching its height thus far, I fear that the desperation will cause people to fool themselves into thinking that the Economic Stimulus plan is the silver bullet to end all their fears.  That is a huge mistake.   I’ve been reading that there is a lot of argument over whether this will actually help or further sink the economy but what isn’t being mentioned is that it really is more of a choice of doing something or doing the same nothing.  Here’s a link to a Newsweek post on the matter.  Yes this is a huge risk.  It has so many dependencies on it, mostly that the American people and corporations will reverse the fear from the Economic Sinking Ship and take the steps towards rethinking the ways they do things.  Right now, its like watching the rats run to the part of the ship that isn’t sinking into the sea.

Panic.  Fear.  Flight.

This sort of reactionary behavior will not facilitate the possibility of leading ourselves off this ship and live to build a better craft.  Industries need to rethink how they do things to not find themselves in this position.  The people of the land need to rethink the way they live their lives and spend.

The other dependency is the need for the American people to move away from the Baby-Boomer mentality and move towards the Millennial mind set.  Namely, the shift from a top-down paradigm to problem solving to the collaborative, something characteristic of the Millennials.   Most of the articles you find on the comparison is about the differences in the workplace and the buying habits of the 2 groups.  But if you look at the characteristics of each generation, you see that Obama’s effort is dependent on either the existing mindset to move towards the spirit of collaboration and balance or that the Millennials step up and create solutions to the problems of their forefathers.   Some people have called characterized this generation as lazy with a false sense of entitlement.  I don’t believe that.  I believe their priorities are based on their group mentality and social awareness that does not make much sense to a generation where priorities were set by an authoritarian and materialistic society.

But to my original point, this Stimulus is meant to try to facilitate an environment where the solutions will come from the collective strength of the people…not from the head of the government or corporation.  Obama is leading by example in his efforts to reach out to all members of government to assist in rebuilding the Government machine.  At least, he’s trying to attempt to change the way things have been done thus far.  Govt is broken.  The people must help facilitate change from the outside.

The last thing we want to see is a country that is impoverished and falling apart.  To put an illustration to this post, I chose to post a photo of an older homeless man that I met on the streets of SF.  This is someone’s father, uncle, brother, lover or friend.  It could be you.