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This weekend, I went on another trip with Lee Bergthold, this time up around Independence, CA, in the Owens Valley. This is the fourth trip I’ve been on in about five years. These trips are always a lot of fun, because we’re always doing things our parents told us not to do, like explore abandoned mines. We can do this because Lee has a lot of experience with the backcountry. This was a small group this time, only Lee, myself, and two other people. But we got to see some great stuff, and I took a lot of pictures (though all on film, so you’ll have to wait until I scan them by the end of the week to see them). I’m glad I went because this is the kind of photography I have a lot of fun with. This is what got me into photography in the first place. And when you go to a commercial photo school that demands perfection, it can be pretty easy to forget that you’re supposed to be having fun.

So here’s one shot that I took with a cheap little digital/video camera in the Alabama Hills on the way back yesterday (if I can get the video files converted and edited, I’ll add a short mpeg clip to this entry as well):

And for those of you with Google Earth, here’s a KMZ file that marks the points of interest. Photos from some of these places will be up in about a week. Declaration_Mine_070525.kmz

The New York chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers has extended this year’s Image07 competition entry deadline to May 14th. It costs $25 an image to enter, and pretty much the only rule is that it has to be a picture shot after January 1, 2006. I’m entering two photos this year, both seen on this website. The first is the image of Lee Bergthold and two of his fellow campers walking along Soda Lake near the Zzyzx Research Center in California’s Mojave Desert, taken on January 29, 2006. The second is the blog’s header image, taken on US 160 in Monument Valley, Arizona, on June 29, 2006. Both images were shot with a Zeiss Distagon 50mm f/4 lens attached to a Hasselblad 503cw medium format camera. The Zzyzx image was shot on Kodak T-Max 100 film, and the Monument Valley image was shot on Fuji Astia 100 film.

Today I’m sharing a picture I took about 18 months ago. The lovely Rachel Gomez and I took a trip up to San Francisco just to get out of Santa Barbara for a little while back in October of 2005. Something that struck me at the time was that she–as a Portraiture major–shot most of her assignments on film, and she brought her digital camera on the trip, whereas I–as a Commercial/Advertising major (I had not yet switched to the Industrial/Scientific program)–shot most of my assignments digitally, and I brought one of my many film cameras. I suppose that’s not really important. I just thought it was interesting at the time. Anyway, I shot about 2 rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 on the trip, and this is probably my favorite of them all. I was shooting with a slightly damaged Vivitar 20mm f/3.8 lens attached to a Minolta SR-T 101 small format camera, and this was somewhere in the Haight-Ashbury district. Rachel’s interpretation is the 9th image in the Travel gallery on her website.

For my inaugural entry, I am contributing something I wrote a few days ago.

So way back in November, I shot portraits of recipients of these awards that my mother’s employer gives to their clientele for making improvements in their own lives. My mother is a psychologist and she works for a non-profit social services organization, so I have to exercise some discretion when discussing it.

Anyway, at the time, I wasn’t very happy to be doing this. It was a pro bono thing, and I just didn’t want to be there. But I told myself on the day that I would be professional and do my best. But of course, being Mr. Perfectionist Artiste, I absolutely hated how the pictures came out, and working on them became difficult.

Now that I’m going through them again, I’m finding that I’m actually in love with these pictures now. They’re not the super fantastic pictures Mr. Perfectionist Artiste only wants to see, but they have this quality of character to them… It’s hard to describe. It’s in the expressions of the people. Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment.” There’s this vibrant personality to almost every one of them. I’m amazed at what I have and didn’t see in the moment because I was too wrapped up in my own conditions. There’s a quirk in someone’s smile, or a strange way they’re carrying themself. It shows little, yet reveals much, and it’s beautiful. Even the deer-caught-in-the-headlights people are revealing something.

So… what to do about Mr. Perfectionist Artiste? Thinking about what work of mine I appreciate immediately, and what takes me about 6 months to appreciate, the stuff I like immediately is the stuff where I was much more open to whatever might happen in the moment, or when my results came pretty dang close to what I had envisioned beforehand. The stuff that takes me 6 months to appreciate is the stuff where I had envisioned something that just wasn’t workable for whatever reason, but I wasn’t willing to let go. So the lesson here is not to do that. Having a vision for what you want the completed image to be is good, but it requires flexibility, which is not one of Mr. Perfectionist Artiste’s virtues. Flexibility is the key in this case.