7-17-2010 957 Cardoso Lane: A Quiet Center for Simple Happiness

For all the years that mattered I grew up with Cory Brinkman. I recall watching absolute shit music videos on his satellite television, reading EGM, and staying up until all hours of the morning. His house is a very simple happy area. Big field. Generous and friendly parents. The most affectionate and well behaved pets I have ever met. Extraordinary in a quiet way.

One of the first things I ever did with my digital camera was light painting with Cory and some other friends in his big field. Drawing stick figures. Chasing each other with flashlights. Not much concept behind it, but looking at the images afterward together was magic. Now it's tradition. Hanging out at Cory's house anywhere near darkness requires a tripod and remote out.

The dog is new. I had forgotten its name, Pepper, and had the startling realization that I felt worse about forgetting Peppers name than I would have about forgetting a humans name. Pepper is a water dog. Exercise for Pepper entails full tilt sprints after a tennis ball, down the big hill, directly into the pond. The impact is tremendous, resulting in 8-10 feet high, 15 foot long explosions of water. I got caught in the splash zone without realizing that could be a possibility, as I was on the other side of the pond.

Also, bees. Beekeeping for Dummies. Tom Brinkman decided to raise bees for the honey, which just goes to prove what I said about the Brinkman household being a quiet center for simple happiness.

7-16-2010 Nevada City, Distorted and Devilish

Howdy howdy. Talked to more realtors today. Getting sick of talking instead of shooting, but that is an aside. We shall see where this leads. Headed up to Nevada City with my mother to re-shoot her cabin, I'm trying to get in to real estate offices meetings for brief presentations and I would need some examples of my work for that to be useful.

Spent all day spent. Awake enough while I was attempting to sell myself on the altar of real estate, but something sapped me. Bah. Talk of being tired is tiresome in itself. Didn't take my camera kayaking because I still don't trust the environment involved not to destroy my beloved. Need a waterproof casing.

The images come from around my moms cabin. Picked up on something sinister. The bottom right was the first image, the one that defined the rest. The twisted version of typical domestic things got somewhere, maybe it still has some place to go. Feeling heavy on Clark Ashton Smith/H.P. Lovecraft's ideas of areas being twisted and malign by default. Not to say that this area is nasty, though the cabin sits on cliffs that were carved by placer mining techniques. This soil has been grievously disturbed and the old things inside it have been exposed.
I just heard what I believe to be a shotgun blast in the valley below.
Goodnight.

7-13-2010 Small Trips for Wide Angles

Today was today was today was a library and Kinkos day. Today was supposed to be a lets-go-talk-to-real-estate-agents-and-get-them-to-use-my-services day, but I wasn't ready. Had do design a brochure and get a price check on business card printing. Yet they still aren't printed. Huh. Bigger plans for tomorrow then.

I still have wide angle fever. In an effort to show my mother how much the 10mm can fit in a frame, I accidentally shot my entire ceiling. Decided that carrying lenses in cases on my belt is not stupid or nerdy, it's just damn useful. Used all of the lenses I brought with me when I went to the library. Tried to take a rad photo journalistic shot of some occurrence involving the fire department and a tacoma parked in an off ramp, but I was a few seconds late.

My lamp attracts bugs and those bugs attract spiders. Can't open my damn window because the screen is too old and scared to hold out the gnashing amalgamation of ferocious spiders and their victims. At least I got this cool photograph of a spider with my dog trotting around in the background for the trouble.

7-12-2010 The All-Mighty 10mm

Arriving home today was a strangely foreboding and exciting event. I wasn't sure if my dog would be alive. I was also unsure if my new photography equipment had arrived. As it turns out both were present and found where they were expected to be, my dog in her kennel and the equipment on my desk.

I ordered a new 10mm f/2.8 Sigma lens, along with a new battery and CF card. I still owe my father 200$ for the lens. The reason for the lens purchase is my new real estate job, but that doesn't mean I can't use it for other things right? Bet your ass that's right. This lens is a piece of work. The minimum focusing distance is something like an inch. You can jam it right up in someones face and the photograph the camera captures still has some background information.

These images are of spaces around my house. I kept getting my limbs in the shots on accident, I had no idea how exciting that would be. Tomorrow I start talking to real estate agents, convincing them that my speed and quality is worth their time and dime; which is, in its own dim way, mildly exciting.

7-9-2010 Nintendo, Beer, and Movies in Arcata; a Return to Form

Leaving Fort Bragg we opted to take Highway 1 north instead of Highway 20 back to Willits and the 101 North. There was some debate as to whether this saved us time, though this debate was rendered unimportant by the general superior scenery of Highway 1. Our ultimate destination was Arcata and we arrived without incident.

A strange sensation overtook me as I entered the house I had lived in for two years. A type of not quite nostalgia, or maybe confused deja vu. Regardless, things soon returned to normal; video games, endless movies, and beer. I'm not one to care about my reputation or worry to significantly about what I say, but there is some other type of comfort here, a truly high level of familiarity.

There is a playground in this neighborhood, little sister Julia insisted that we venture out. By the time we left the house, it was extremely late. Dark. Damn near impossible to focus. The trick I learned as a concert photographer of focusing on the shiny metal parts of drum kits and guitars was mostly useless, there wasn't enough light to cause such reflections off of the playground equipment. So I decided to increase my flash exposure compensation to it's maximum level and do some camera tossing.

7-8-2010 Fort Bragg; Bicycles vs Vomit

The foul mood left in my mind by Cabo San Lucas was soon washed away on the first day of another trip. Many, many reasons for this shift in mentality. Traveling north with my good old friend Roxane, to see another older friend Nathan visiting from Idaho, toward other friends and excellent places in Humboldt County. Yesterday we camped with Nathan and his family in Fort Bragg, one of the most beautiful damn places on the face of the Earth. The place is a combination of the steep coasts of Norway, the hills of Ireland, and the redwoods of the Pacific Northwest. In short, my favorite places wedged into one.

All the photographs are from areas around the campground. Nathan gave Roxane a piggyback ride and proceeded to ride a bike. In order to get a focused image of this clearly miraculous spectacle I had to sprint next to the bike and leap through the air while shooting. Useful maneuver really. Guess there used to be a dock or marina at the beach there, given all the ironworks and wooden posts protruding from the beach there. It's a very black beach, surrounded by sandstone cliffs. I implored Nathan to throw a chunk of said cliffs at a spot designated by me in order to better understand thrill of slinging dirt clods at hard surfaces. It only kind of worked.

I've never camped quite the way the Nathans family does. I don't recall that much vodka, beer or tequila with my parents at Crater Lake or Mount Lassen. Perhaps my surprise at the high concentration of such fluids at Fort Bragg is what explains the generally vomit themed course of my night.

Mexico: The First through the Fifth, an awful backlog

I was in Mexico for a wedding from the July 1st to the 5th. It was not a particularly pleasant experience. My cousin Matt on my moms side decided to get married near Cabo San Lucas, which if you know one thing about, it's that Cabo is a particularly rotten tourist trap. Tourist sinkhole? Tourist heroin? Tourist bear trap laced with tourist AIDS.
I'll stick with that.

Resorts make me uncomfortable, the way my family typically travels is by going somewhere we know people. That is what made Ireland such a pleasant experience when I was nine, and staying with a few different families in Norway when I was fourteen changed a part of me for the better. This is the main reason that this trip to Mexico was crap. We stayed in a monstrous resort called the "Westin." There is a small chunk of it pictured on the bottom right with my father enjoying one of many complimentary margaritas. Couldn't even talk to my damn girlfriend, cheap ass "resort," makes you pay to use their computers.

The guy "dancing," (re: simultaneously breaking his hips, pelvis and thigh bones) was taken after the wedding ceremony during the hey-everybody-lets-drink-like-sieves-and-bellow-our-favorite-songs part of the evening. He has known me my whole life. Nice guy.

The two black and white images were taken in San Jose del Cabo, about twenty miles north of San Lucas. I would say that San Jose is a way cooler city than San Lucas, but I refused to set foot in San Lucas as long as the wedding didn't force me to. There seemed to actually be some non-tourist life there. The only times I enjoyed myself were away from our resort, typically dinners. We had a few nights in San Jose, some incredible food, and a few possibly genuine experiences. The zebra print seemed to be a condition spreading from this goofy boutique onto any concrete that touched it or its out buildings. The single story re-bar cement structure is ubiquitous in many parts of Central and Southern America. This one caught my eye because I wasn't entirely sure if it was being built or destroyed. I shared this buildings ambivalence during my stay in Mexico, as if I was in some ultra polite purgatory.