5-26-2011 Roast Pig and Running Children

From two separate events. Open House at Franklin Elementary, and the Mesa Memorial.

I remember Open Houses as being messy and chaotic. An excuse to go play on the undersized kindergarten playground. Mess about on the big field at night calling each other dirty names. This open house was not much different than that. The teacher I went with had a type of scavenger hunt worksheet for her kids to do, simultaneously showing their parents the things they made and learned. Every year in her class they focus on a specific country, the bottom left image is a painting of some scene in India. Pretty cool idea really.
Top left is kids playing some variant of wall ball. I remember this game faintly, you have to throw a tennis ball at a the wall. Then when it bounces off the wall everybody tries to catch it. Only if you flub the catch, you have to touch the wall before they can hit the wall with the ball. If you fail in that they get to throw the ball at your butt, execution style against the wall. Very fun to watch, particularly when there are way too many kids playing.

Images on the right are from the Mesa Memorial, an event my Aunt and Uncle on my mom's side of the family do every Memorial Day weekend. That's Fernando up there, hacking away at a roast pig with an axe. It's a tradition. Behind Fernando is Sommer (of Ramona Lou fame) with her boyfriend Graham. Had a damn fine time with those two.
Bottom right image is what I feel to be the best street photography style photograph I've ever taken. Look at what is going on there! So many looks and types of body language. Everybody figuring out who to talk to, where to go. It fascinates me.
I don't even care that it wasn't taken on a street. I feel that street photography is simply about people in semi-public places. Interacting, or simply being. But there is always an expectation of allure in the "street" photo, being curious to find out what is really going on.
That is all.

5-20-2011 My Father is Now Older

Cute kids and old dudes. I guess.

05-13-2011 Midnight Ketchup Cravings at the Gates of Hell

SO. PHOTOS.

Last weekend my ride or die FRIEND Anthony and I went back to Humboldt to retrieve some belongings at our old house and help shut the place down. We had some glorious times there, I feel that we shut it down with a right proper rambunction, without messing up any of the things we had repaired/cleaned already.

Got to see all my old crusty lookin friends because I planned the trip around a show at THEBIGTREE. Which is a good name for the place as I forgot the address. Still working on finishing the edits on most of the concert stuff. Trying to decide what to do with my really disorganized photo presence online. AH WELL.

The photos of the clearly drunk and awesome guy on the top right and bottom are my good friend Ross. He is an engineer. He had just graduated. His department gave him a ring of power to wear on his pinky. His new found powers clearly went straight to his head.

Maaaaaaan. I feel like I had a ton of profound knowledges to drop all over about my experience and how it was good to reconnect with old friends and stomp around. Oh damn well.

5-6-2011 Eddie Adcock Brings the Noize

This here is Eddi Adcock. He apparently played his banjo as doctors were working on his brain http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjX6ErmKY14. Damn. I think I remember them saying that the operation was about a year ago. While his triple bypass was more like five years ago. Given all the patching up this man has endured, and how skillfully he played last week, I have come to the conclusion that he is in fact a machine.

A banjo playing machine.

And while it is no small coincidence that all the good photos I took were of Eddie, mostly the reason I focused on him was the superior lighting on his wizened face. Most of the other players, his wife and my mothers dobro teacher among them, were positioned on parts of the stage with much worse lighting.

This show was at Constable Jacks in my hometown of Newcastle. Not sure if it was the spice of the gator burger lingering in my mouth, the delicious beer sloshing around in my brain and belly, or if I was simply in a good mood, but I officially fell in love with Newcastle that night.

5-3-2011 Robot Slaves Bring Me Sugar Candy

It must be subconscious. Whenever I do fashion photography, I end up doing skate photography soon after. All the other times it was within the same week, by chance. Not this time. I finished the HIGH FASHION photoshoot and thought to myself "Well what the hell am I gonna do now?" So I went to the skate park to see what I could see. Just what about fine clothing reminds me of juvenile delinquents? I've got to get to the bottom of this.

Anyway. There's Olivia! Up there! Olivia is the easiest person to take photos of, I just point my lens her way and tell her to wiggle. I know to stop when my buffer is full. Shooting with her at Ramona Lou is great fun. No stress or worries. It's basically hanging out with people I really dig, only there is a mild objective to our time together. Fantastic. Experimented with the presentation a bit. I think it worked out pretty damn well. It increases the efficiency of my workflow, decreases the raw amount of data to upload, and gives the viewer a better feeling for the outfits.

Meet up with Archie at the skate park. Taking photos at the skate park is how I met Archie in the first damn place! Huh. Think on that. So some guys were playing skate (horse with boards in lieu of balls) near the entrance. It was way too crowded to get anything worthwhile; also I ignored my telephoto when setting out for Ramona Lou. Maybe coulda gotten some good facial expressions if I had brought the tele. So I climbed the retaining wall and got some really extreme angle composites. The only ones that worked out were Archies. I'm not even being biased. I guess I was only there for about 20-30 minutes, makes sense that I didn't come away with much that works.

3-20-2011 Todays Episode is brought to you by the letter X for Xenophobia

My mothers volleyball team made the playoffs, then got crushed. I came along to practice poorly lit sports photography as I have a potential freelancing opportunity developing. So the volleyball images are pretty damn noisy, but I might be ok with that in a journalistic setting. It's a more functional environment you know?

It was funny being back to the park where my mom's league plays. I spent many days there as a boy. Playing zelda on my gameboy in the corner, climbing trees. The complex with the courts is strangely austere, I always wondered what it's flawless stucco was hiding. I took the bird photos on a walk around the pond at the park next to the complex. Couldn't get the geese to fly regardless of how much I chased them. The bastards.

3-19-2011 You Are A Big Squishy Brain

Chris Walstad had a party event last night at a house that isn't his own. These are photos of that. There were some knowledgeable photography people there. One of them chastised me for capturing in black and white and I defended myself with some bullshit about not wanting a big workflow for simple party photographs.

Wouldn't you just know that I wanted more control when I was editing these. Curse words. OH WELL.

Before teh partaaay my buddy Anton and I babysat/wrestled a child for a few hours. He has the most amazing collection of one liners ever "Lets kick each other and beat people up, "I'll destroy your neck so you choke," "You can't shoot missiles at him because he will go invisible because he is a double crackhead." Moral of the story is, you can never be as rad as you were when you were five.

AND a nonotthought first, VIDEO. Taken on my terrible phone. I get a visceral thrill out of how terrible its optics/processor/senors are.