Photoblog Relaunch
“Failed to Find a Place for the Imported File”
I just got this error in Lightroom today for the first time, and I panicked a bit, thinking it was a failing hard drive, something wrong with the USB port in my camera, or something wrong with my SD card. Other people posted the problem online, and it seemed to be solved by using a card reader instead of going straight from the camera.
But it turns out I’m just an idiot.
If anybody happens to be Googling around for “failed to find a place for the imported file,” because you’re having issues when importing photos directly from your camera, change the battery in it. The battery apparently had just enough juice for the computer to recognize it as a drive, but not enough to initiate any communication (or something). Weird. I popped in a fresh battery and all my photos imported just fine.
Me too! Me too!
I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing my own “take a picture every day for a year” project, a project that every camera owner on the planet (or at least on Flickr) seems to be tackling lately. I always talk myself out of it. I mean, I ran Moonplantation (my old photoblog) for just a couple months, which I only updated three times a week, and it almost became a job. I stressed out over producing photos for it, even though my shooting schedule was self-imposed and completely arbitrary. I’m not entirely sure why other people choose to do 365 photo projects, but here is why I’m finally going to commit to my own.
My friend Ben (one of the most amazing artists I know) has been interning at a local studio for several months now. He’s been doing so much drawing not for himself lately that he’s burning out and has started to devote an hour a day to drawing whatever the hell he wants to draw. It doesn’t have to impress anybody, an editor doesn’t have to approve it, it’s not going to be seen by anybody (except for maybe a couple friends, if they ask). Ben and I had a several-hour-long talk about creativity and the creative process the other night (which wasn’t as pretentious as it sounds) in which he brought this up. I also mentioned that I had been entertaining the idea of taking a photo a day. He was probably more enthusiastic about it than I was, and there are several reasons I ended up getting very excited about the project.
First of all, I’m getting to be a better photographer all the time. Actually, when I look back at the stuff I was shooting just a year ago, I’m unbelievably embarrassed of it. The thing is, I’ve progressed without a real conscious effort on my part. I took over 11,000 photos in 2009 — more than three times what I shot in 2007 and 2008 combined — and that was WITHOUT making an effort to have my camera with me at all times. I absolutely cannot become a worse photographer over the next year, and by forcing myself to take photos, whether I want to or not, is not only going to speed this process up, but will change how I approach photography entirely; it will put me in the habit of not even thinking about whether or not I should grab my camera when I step out the door, I will just always have it. When the year is up, I will have long since been placed in that mindset, and will continue to carry the camera with me without it being a “rule.”
But I think more important than getting better at what I do, it’s the changing of my approach to photography. My friends would say “How hard can it be to take a photo a day? You just push a button. Just take a fucking picture a day and be done with it.” It’s NOT that simple, because my brain does not work that way. There are maybe a lot of people with cameras that don’t have a problem taking a picture, any picture, and throwing it on a blog. I cannot just take a picture. When I put a camera up to my eye, there are a million things going through my head, particularly if I’m shooting a person. Most of it I can’t really put into words or explain, but a lot of it is, “Can I make this person look how they want to look in photos? If I put this online, everybody that sees it is going to judge me and my skill. Am I good enough? Is this photo going to be worth showing to people at all? Am I even going to like it? If I don’t like the photo, how can the person I’m shooting like it? I hate snapshots, this can’t look like a snapshot. I hate art, this can’t look like art,” and on and on. There’s this trepidation, nearly every time I push the shutter. It’s often even worse when I get home and get them onto the computer: “These are awful. I’m a fucking idiot. Photography is bullshit. What a fucking waste of time.” I think forcing myself to take a picture every day, and showing it to people, whether or not I think it is representative of my skill, will help ease this issue I have, and make me more comfortable with the fact that not everything I shoot is going to be incredible, while at the same time building the confidence in myself that I am a competent enough photographer that most of what I shoot should have at least a little photographic merit.
The difference between Moonplantation and my year project is that for Moonplantation I made three photos a week. For this project I only need to take a photo a day. Then, in instances where I actually want to make a photo, it should come more easily to me. Hopefully, I want to write a little bit about each photo as well, whether or not I enjoyed taking it, whether or not I like the final result, etc etc, as a sort of director’s commentary.
So blah blah blah, I can’t really explain this that well, but I tried. The point is, I’m going to take a photo every day for a year, beginning tomorrow, to in some way document an entire year of my life (tomorrow’s my birthday, I turn 28).
I’ll post a link here tomorrow when the first image goes up.
State-Sponsored Discrimination!
I was reading online about some racially-motivated assault, and I was trying to imagine the feeling of having to live with the understanding that some people dislike you just because you exist. You know, trying to imagine I’m not a 20-something white American male from a middle-class family; humanity’s most generic creation. My empathy experiment didn’t get very far, because, short of the one time I went to a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, I’ve never really felt displaced. So yeah, I have a very limited world view, but I did remember this exercise my third or fourth grade teacher organized, and looking back on it, it’s kinda funny.
We were learning about discrimination, and to demonstrate, the class was split into left and right-handed kids. Left-handed kids would be second-class citizens for the day. Unfortunately, the left-handed kids in the classroom consisted of me and maybe one or two other students (anybody that was in that class with me… which is probably just Ray, I think it was me and Kevin Phung). We had to wear an arm band or some sort of other identifier, and we had to be last in line at lunch, we were the last to be allowed to go to recess, etc etc. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I was, what, eight years old? I wasn’t traumatized, but that’s kinda fucked up. The funny thing is, the experiment was never reversed! The left-handed kids were just shit on for a day and that was that. By the end of the day, everybody had learned a valuable lesson: It pays to be a part of the majority, and god help you if you’re not.
BlackBerry Diptych
You wouldn’t believe how often I try — and completely fail — to produce usable results on my BlackBerry’s shitty camera. I like this, though, after slathering on a thick blanket of Photoshop.
Koston Sighting… Almost
I was sorting through some old photography magazines to decide which were going in the garbage and discovered my December issue of The Skateboard Mag, which I thought had just been lost in the mail. So I was flipping through it and one ad immediately caught my eye. Not because it was an impressive photo, or a really impressive trick, or because it was a company I like *cough*… but because I recognized the spot. Because it’s literally a block down from my apartment. Crazy! This might not be a big deal to somebody who’s grown up in Portland and is used to being in skating distance of Burnside (or Nike SB, for that matter), but this sort of thing will probably continue to blow my mind for a while. Especially since it wasn’t Joe Schmoe. It was Koston.
I had to throw my fisheye on and head down the street to take a shot of it. If this building wasn’t in the way, you’d have direct line of sight to my apartment.
It’s interesting to note that there’s a railing there now (and I think there always has been, because I’ve recognized it as an otherwise skateable gap before), so they either dismantled the rail for the photo or, if I’m mistaken about it always having been there, the rail was put up in response to a blitzkrieg photo/skate session. I should just go walk around my neighborhood more, I guess.
A Path: Apathy
There was a time in my life, from late high school and for several years afterward, where I embraced a philosophy of my own design, which I called “aggressive apathy.” The idea was that not only did you not give a shit about what everybody else on the planet concerned themselves with, you went out of your way to not give a shit. Here’s an example: For the first several weeks after GW Bush was elected president, a couple friends and I went out of our way to not learn who was elected. That was not an easy task, but several of us pulled it off for quite a while. I was 18, the US had elected a new president, and I intentionally did not know who it was.
Because, really, how would knowing who the president was affect my life at all? Or affect anything? It didn’t, and I loved my philosophy. I even wrote a short essay in its defense, which was widely panned by my mom and a friend who had recently decided politics were really cool.
So fast forward a couple years and I’m a little older and maybe a little wiser, and I’d dropped aggressive apathy in favor of aggressively caring about shit, because that’s what smart people do. Though I had previously been an atheist out of apathy, I was now atheist for a reason and Christians were all idiots and fuck all Republicans because Republican invariably means Christian and Christians are the badguys and everything’s either black or white and I needed to pick sides in all things. I read a bazillion books from prominent atheist authors, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc, and thought I’d gotten everything pretty well figured out. My Facebook profile made things easier by giving me labels to slap on myself. Liberal. Atheist. Opinionated as fuck, and if we disagree, we argue until we agree that I am right. That was basically how things went for a couple years.
Then I joined Reddit, where there’s a fairly large and vitriolic atheist community, and I subscribed to their forum and read their articles and discussions daily. The problem is, the community as a whole is so fucking over the top, it’s a parody of itself. Everybody in there discussing religion and gods and blah blah blah are all condescending, elitist pseudo-intellectuals, parroting the same few talking points over and over and basically running a very simple argument completely into the ground. And then some. It slowly started to dawn on me: “Oh, fuck. I’m one of these people.”
But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, because election season was in full swing and I was busy frothing at the mouth whenever Republicans were on-screen and found myself identifying with politicians that have absolutely nothing in common with me, don’t even care who the fuck I am or what I want out of my life, and, aside from possibly sharing a few progressive ideas with me, are most likely terrible, terrible people. I loved Kucinich, but he was clearly too fringy, and who cares about who most closely represents you or your ideas if they can’t win, because it’s not about principles but winning, so I hopped on the Obama bandwagon pretty early on. Me and everybody else my age. I got swept up in the whole mess, attended his speech in Portland (with a million other people), argued with the Clinton supporters and, just like with my militant atheist days, generally made an ass out of myself.
When you’re this high on yourself, you come down pretty hard. Nina and I watched on election night as McCain conceded the presidency, and there was a brief moment of elation where I thought “Wow, I was a part of something really important here,” while people celebrated up and down Burnside street. Then it was more like, “…okay, now what?”
After he got sworn in and immediately started disappointing all the progressives that deluded themselves into thinking this guy was anything more than a moderate, I was over it. Just that quickly. It’s just politics as usual from this point on, and now that we all believe we made some sort of difference, everything goes back to normal. You know what difference it made when I voted for John Kerry in 2004? None. You know what difference it made when I voted for Obama in 2008? None. What was the point of all that passion, time, and energy? There wasn’t one. I was just tricked into taking sides in every single aspect of my life, and that is so completely unlike me, I’m embarrassed for it. When people split into factions, I’ve always created my own faction. When teams were chosen on the playground, I chose not to play, because fuck teams. In high school I didn’t believe in school spirit, and I have no pride as an American. These things are accidental by-products of my birth. I didn’t choose to be born in America any more than I chose to be born on the west side of my town, rather than the east side of my town, which dictated what high school I would attend. The shitty thing is, the things I was spending my time choosing — and choosing to be proud of — ultimately bore no consequence. Does it make any difference in my life or anybody else’s that I believe there is no god? No. Did it make any difference if I convinced a single supporter of Hillary Clinton to vote for Obama? Fuck no. What a fucking waste of time.
Since then I’ve started to develop an almost physical aversion to “heavy” talk. As soon as things start to sway political or religious now, I find my eyes rolling involuntarily. When people try to trick me into discussions like this, I will state something simply and briefly (if at all), and be done with it (I often try to change the subject, or ignore the conversation entirely). Does this make my opinions any less valid to me? No. I believe there is no god, and I believe that if you believe there is a god you are wrong. I believe that humans have an inherent right to healthcare, and that free market economies do not work. If you disagree with me, I believe you are wrong. Will I tell you you’re wrong? Most likely not. See, I quit giving a fuck. But not like “aggressive apathy.” The key now seems to be that I don’t care that I don’t care.
I have more important things to worry about. Like, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with my life, since I’m approaching 30 and don’t have a plan, or even a plan for a plan. This is partially a result of another thing I’ve come to realize in recent months: Every three years or so, I can look back at myself and say “Wow, I was a fucking idiot.” It happened at 25, it happened around 21, it happened around 18, and clearly it’s happening again. It just took me this long to realize that in three years from now I’ll be thinking “Wow, I was a fucking idiot,” so I’ve quit taking myself so goddamn seriously.
It’s very liberating when you finally realize you’re a fucking idiot. It’s probably the best start I’ve had in years.
More Reverse Macro Crap
I found a fly in our apartment this morning (which is weird considering it’s almost January), so I caught him in a mason jar and threw him in the freezer while I set up my camera gear. After about 15 minutes, I took him out of the freezer and dumped him onto a sheet of white paper on the computer desk and placed my flashes on each side of him. I moved him into position with a pen, took a couple test exposures, and after a couple minutes he started to thaw. They’re still pretty slow after they’ve come to, so I was able to get several shots of him standing before he decided to start walking around the desk.
I threw up the most symmetrical one (which more or less matched the style of the ladybug I also shot with this technique — sans freezing) on my Flickr, but I’ve included a couple more for the blog, just because I think bugs look neat up close.
From left to right: Fly passed out, fly coming to and starting to stand, fly conscious but probably confused as hell, FLY AWAKENS BOTH PHYSICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY.
When I was done, being the enlightened guy I am, I picked him up and set him free out on my windowsill, where, considering this is Portland in late December, he probably promptly died. An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade.
My First Photo Contest
I completely forgot to mention anything about this, so I figured I would for posterity. There’s a local non-profit that holds photo contests to raise funds/awareness of other local non-profits. First place in their contests is a D90 (the new version of my current camera), so I had been watching them for a while, entertaining the idea of entering one of their contests. Every time it came down to it though, I’d choke and not shoot anything. Finally, after three or four of their contests in which I was not impressed with the winners, I decided “I can win this contest,” and set out to win it.
The theme was “fruits of our labors.” I originally came up with some bullshit like an aged hand pulling an apple off a tree. Stupid, yes, but judges like that sort of dumb shit. I talked about it with Cameron a bit and he had the idea of having this guy in our building eat a peach, and take pictures of that. I approached the guy, Tom, about it, and he was flattered that I wanted to take his picture. Tom’s got a very rugged Clint Eastwood sorta look to him, so I figured it’d work well. Unfortunately, we put it off until we were out of peach season, so we had to settle on a pear, which didn’t work as well. I liked the results when I got home, but when it came time to actually submit it to the contest, I again choked, decided it wasn’t good enough, and almost didn’t enter again. I finally opted to just submit it, though I was no longer really proud of it, and waited to see what happened.
I didn’t win. I got an “honorable mention” just underneath the terrible third place entry, but it netted me a $75 check, so I’m not complaining. I bought Tom a nice cigar for his help. The entry has been sitting over on my Flickr for a while (though it’s a slightly different edit), so you’ve probably seen it, but I thought I’d write this up to make it official.
Where I Live, Where I’m From, Where I’m Spending Christmas
