matt's pictures

drop party 2025

2026-01-19 09:53:07Z

These photos have been a long time coming, at least partially because I’ve been having a really hard time letting go of them. I wanted badly for them to be something else, but eventually I have to realize that they’re not, and that’s OK, and move on.

I can make excuses, like the light was difficult, and I was using a camera that, it turns out, was eating about 10% of the files it was supposed to be recording due to a faulty memory card, but really this is more about my feelings around the pictures. I didn’t discover the missing images until very recently, when some from a different party dissapeared and I ran PhotoRec on the card. And the light: that’s why these are in black and white, the color just didn’t make any sense.

It’s weird lately, like I just haven’t felt like shooting that much? Could just be the winter getting to me, but could be the hangover of a year where a lot happened. The last project took years to get anywhere and then years to materialize into a single copy of a book (which isn’t technically done), so maybe I should just cut myself some slack between projects? I don’t know.

I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I’m gonna blog what I’ve got.

day of the dead 2024

2026-01-03 11:42:04Z

I know I said I was declaring bankruptcy on all my 2024 photos, but I saw this little photoset and it jived with something I was thinking the other day, namely, why don’t I do black and white any more? It used to be a big part of my practice, but then someone told me digital black and white wasn’t real, and I kind of was buying everything they told me wholesale (a lot of it was very good and helpful) so I basically just haven’t done if for the last sixish years. I’ve done some film black and white and enjoyed it, but no digital.

All that to say, I think there is a time and place for it. Like, I understand what they were saying, that it goes against the essential quality of the thing, but also one of the essential qualities, for me, is the flexibility a raw file has once I get it into lightroom. In some ways digital black and white is better than film or a monochrome sensor, because I can use color filters after the fact to realize tonal control (oldheads will know this as the Zone System).

These specific photos were Dia de los Muertos 2024, the parade part in the mission. I showed up a little late and didn’t stay super long, it was cold and I wasn’t feeling super sure of myself. The light wasn’t super great, a mix of sodium arc and tungsten that doesn’t expose well and colors just look bad. This is part of why they sat there for such a long time. But tonight, I decided to try them in black and white, almost in passing, and the quick conversion was enough to get me to do a little more work on them, get them to a bloggable state.

kawan's bday 2025

2026-01-02 10:07:37Z

New year, same me. On of my resolutions or intentions this year is to get off my ass and do more photography. As if last year’s fallow periods were my fault. Doesn’t matter, I still feel better when I’m making pictures. And part of that is getting rid of the backlog. So I’ve declared bankruptcy for anything that happened before new years day 2025 and moved on to things that happened last year. This was the first event I went to that I haven’t already blogged (I think I put up the NYE pics a while back).

A lot of people do year in review type things during this dead week between Christmas and new years, and, in short, 2025 was hard. I went from stage 4 to stage 5 renal failure, went on dialysis, had two surgeries, one for my Gall bladder and one to put in the dialysis port. I had to take a bunch of time off work for each of those, missed an important trip, and also had no energy from ~may until they got my iron deficiency taken care of in August. And then I broke both arms in September.

All that to say: it could be much worse. My work has unlimited PTO and both of my managers were very understanding of the various issues. I have really good health insurance, which covers 100% of my dialysis and transplant care. I have a lot of support, from Sophie and from all my friends. Finally: it’s still not scheduled, but I have a transplant in the works, so fingers crossed I may be able to close the books on all of this in a few months.

I think that’s it? Oh yeah, these specific pictures. Kawan’s birthday party, last year. A little over 10 months ago. House just packed with cool people, I didn’t get good coverage at all (note the only one sort of OK pic of the birthday boy). Still, these are nice, and I think reflect the feelings of the day.

Casey's Picnic at Shakespeare Garden

2025-12-02 07:54:58Z

Doing the end of the year catch up again, only this time I’m catching up for two years. This was October 2024, so I didn’t really manage to get caught up last year… at least this is still a going concern.

These are from my friend Casey’s birthday celebration in 2024; I missed her party this year due to having two broken arms at the wrong time (there is no right time). Casey is an amazing human, throws wonderful whimsical parties that, through bad luck and bad timing, I miss about two thirds of. So it goes.

I think it might’ve been Fleet Week? Traffic getting into the city, tons of boats on the bay, planes doing aerobatics, it fits. I think we brought a couple bottles of champagne? And since it was a birthday party, a gift. Real nice day in the park.

city at night

2025-11-27 10:24:09Z

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated. This is just a ‘proof of life’ post, if a bunch of photos from January 2024 can be called that. I have to go to bed, but there’s been a reason for the longer-than-usual hiatus, and we’re not out of the woods yet. I’ll try to write more later.

Cynthia and Marilyn

2025-09-30 06:33:46Z

I took these… almost two years ago now? They were supposed to be for a photo project, https://www.1in6by2030.com/, but I didn’t really have enough to submit for the prompt, which was something about retiring versus continuing to work. It was winter, in Santa Fe, and mostly I worked my normal job while house sitting for my friend Ben (sorry about your pepper plant, man). But the pictures aren’t bad, and deserve a moment in the spotlight.

Anyway. Blog is migrated to the new setup, old setup is done and dusted. Few bugs still outstanding, haven’t gotten RSS working quite right yet, not sure why. Need to do real deployment and logging, currently it’s pretty duct-tape-and-string type of setup. Ah well. None of that really matters.

LoveLab Reunion Dinner

2025-05-24 05:17:11Z

I’m gonna be honest, I thought I worked these up and posted them months ago. I definitely looked at them, but that whole edit somehow didn’t make it to lightroom. Anyway.

Working at warp speed to get ready for Yerevan in 12 days. The reason I went back and found these in the first place is I’m trying to put together a little book of my Driftwood work from the last year. I’d really like to have something with people in it to show folks there, so they can get a sense of what I do. Also I’d like to have something everyone who’s been to one of these can also get.

So yeah, this was the Reunion dinner, which usually happens in the fall after Driftwood. This was the second or third time doing it, and it was really great to hang with everyone. We went to Sausage Factory, had a great meal, took MUNI back to the hotel, and then we went to afters where cameras weren’t allowed. Or maybe I didn’t feel like carrying mine any more. Not sure. I mean, it was just a fairly normal oontz oontz party, but the light is always terrible in clubs. The ROI of risking the $$$ camera just isn’t there.

santa fe xmas 2023

2025-05-01 09:06:03Z

These have been awaiting final edits and posting for (counts)… 16 months, more or less. Taken two calendar years ago, when we went to visit Sophie’s family in Santa Fe. Good trip. I remember running around the neighborhood to get the photos of the mountains at sunset two days in a row.

I’m working on getting prepared for the trip to Armenia. Made a gear list that I’ll probably cut down (one system? two? gear doubt is self-doubt projected on objects). Really I need two or three lenses; a wide, normal, and a short tele. On the moto trip I used mostly the 24-70. But since I’m doing portraits I really want the 105/1.4, and I don’t want to not bring the Leica. The 21 and the 35 for environmental portraits, and maybe the noctilux? I don’t know. I mean, I know what I use and I know what works well, I should just take that (meaning the summilux 50). The ‘what ifs?’ will drive me nuts otherwise. So probably the Summilux.

There’s a bunch of other stuff I don’t usually think about when packing that I probably also won’t worry too much about this time. I’ve written about this before. Anyway.

wine and then cotatiage

2025-04-28 08:30:39Z

This was January 2024. I went to the top of the backlog, the oldest pictures, got rid of a couple stragglers from 2023 (although there’s some stuff from our Christmas in Santa Fe I need to see if I ever posted and put those up if I haven’t) and anyway these were what was at the top. Met Cason, Ryan, Joseph (not pictured but I’m pretty sure he was there) and Nayara out at Pangloss in Sonoma, had wine and things, and then went back where C&R were staying in Cotati. They were renting a little cottage in a friend’s yard, and we sat by a fire and listened to music and watched the stars. Miss those guys.

Anyway. I kinda realized that if I want to get through the backlog of posts I need to be posting, and I don’t have to have a little essay with every post. Nobody reads them, I think?

gumbyfest, sept 2024

2025-04-25 07:35:13Z

The one annual party that celebrates the best dog. There was art, poetry, jewelery, rock bands, live coding, and one surprise serenade at the end. Good party.

kawan and helen engangement surprise

2025-04-25 07:30:50Z

This is just another quick one. The surprise was last September, so no danger in spoiling it for anyone that should know. I, on the other hand, should know better than to sit on photos for (checks notes) seven months.

I do love this like genuine surprise on both of their faces… I think Kawan was surprised he actually pulled off the surprise party. Helen, the one who was surprised, is just shocked to see all of us after the hike they’d been on. Just a moment of pure joy. Anyway.

retreat 2025

2025-04-19 05:15:47Z

This is probably the last Driftwood post for a while; I’m going to miss Drop Party this year, and by the time the drift itself happens, I might be in recovery for the kidney transplant surgery. So.

I don’t think I’ve got an essay in me tonight. Enjoy the pics and we’ll be back at it next week.

driftwood 2024

2025-04-16 06:48:38Z

For those that don’t know, Driftwood is an annual gathering out in the Delta, on Bradford Island. Reachable by car ferry, there’s no running water or very much electricity; we sort of bootstrap the whole thing with stuff we bring in. A lot of people contribute various things, like hauling in porta potties, or a generator, or they help organize. I bring my cameras. The point, although we call it a ‘festival’, is to get together and make art with a bunch of cool people.

Look, I know this is a lot of pictures. Driftwood has expanded from a weekend to four days. So there’s a lot of stuff that happens. The big edit was like 120 pictures. So. I did cut quite a few.

There are communal dinners, music late into the night, camping, swimming in the Delta. We sit out on the dock/in the water during the day, when it’s hot, and then come back to Jack’s plot (it’s also Jack’s dock) for dinner and music and dancing. Originally, the whole thing was powered off Jack’s solar array, but in recent years upgrades to our PA system have required more watts than he has on tap at night. There are batteries, but not quite enough of them.

Because Sophie helps organize, we went out on Thursday. This year, me and Sophie rented an RV, sort of experimentally, because AC is nice. It was a pretty big hassle though, and I don’t know that we’ll be doing it again. The ferry plus the drive out there was just a lot. Although, getting there and basically being set up in 15 minutes, instead of having to set up a tent was pretty nice. There was an amount of other setup to do, of course. Lights, rugs, DJ booth, you know, just the essentials.

The second day, there was a really amazing sunset, complete with double rainbow. I got a picture of it, but pictures of rainbows never really do it justice, so you’ll just have to trust me. I did get a bunch of the sunset that night from the top of the levee, though. Jack and Benny both came up in one of the carts to see.

I really should take field notes at these things, I have no idea what order these photos should go in. The whole experience was magical and amazing, even with the rain the second day. In fact, it made the whole thing a little less hot; it can be really unbearable sometimes, you know?

There were a lot of moments I didn’t get pictures of, because I too was lost in the moment. Joseph put down some foam and blankets and pillows in the back of his truck, and parked it so it was close to the music, where people could chill and look up at the stars. That was a good one. Or when someone brought watermelon down to the dock to share just as it was getting hot. Or like, probably a hundred other little moments.

Anyway. Here are the rest of the pictures.

Kate and Sam's, January 2024

2025-04-11 08:39:27Z

These are from a trip up to Portland January 2024; we went up to see our friends Sam and Kate. I know I said the Driftwood pics were soon, but they’re not quite ready. I need to show them to some people before I can let them out the door. Anyway, this trip.

The air from the plane was, for some reason, super clear; it feels like it’s never this good. I took a bunch of photos out of the window on the way, and really liked this one.

I’m also not at all sure where the light in this photo was coming from. Maybe the city? Maybe another city, like Sac? No idea.

It was supposed to be a nice and simple little weekend jaunt. Go up, drink some wine, eat delicious food, and fly home. We got there, and it started snowing over night; by 10 in the morning the power had gone out and the whole city was basically shut down. We had cheese and crackers and wrapped ourselves in blankets, trying not to freeze. Sam made Caccio e Pepe for dinner, and I realized I was starving. I had been reading Moby Dick all day, got through the first lowering, and that’s where I still am in that book. Somehow, reading it while stuck in on a cold winter’s day was right, and since then the mood hasn’t struck me. I do love that if you just read the first several chapters, it’s a buddy comedy between Ishmael and Queequeg. Nothing bad could happen to our buddies, right?

Anyway. The power came on in the night and the house warmed up; we were all able to shower and charge our devices back to full when we woke up in the morning. Then we went wine tasting in downtown Portland. Neat place, big Burgundies. All the waiters could do this neat trick with the stacked glasses that apparently everyone that comes in has to get a picture of. Yes, I am also guilty.

And then that night, I decided to walk a little bit around the neighborhood. I think I was nominally searching for an open store to sell me a soda or gatorade, but really it was a little cabin fever and a need to move around a bit. Hard to sit still.

jeff's bday last year

2025-04-07 08:39:23Z

Here is one of the ways doing photography the way I do is worse than just sharing the pictures on instagram on the day: these were photos from Jeff’s birthday gathering over a year ago. Some stuff is timeless and important and some stuff is just friends gathering for nice drinks. I think they also went out to the bar after this but even at this point I wasn’t drinking, so we demured and I think I drove home? Anyway.

I probably need a system for like, knowing if something is super important or not, because having year old pics just now getting published is a little embarrassing. On the other hand, at least I’m getting there eventually.

I do have a reason for starting to get these out. There’s only so much time, and dying with thousands of unpublished photos couldn’t be me. No sir. No Vivian Maier here.

Many more posts coming. Like a lot.

drop party 2024

2025-04-06 05:25:38Z

OK so, the setup is this: one night party, setup saturday, strike sunday morning after a few hours sleep. Completely transform an office waiting room into a lounge/dance floor/art space for the duration of the party. We brought in rugs and cushions, projectors, lights, big fabric hanging bits, art from previous iterations of the party, and a dozen or so cool people.

There was also the matter of the music; DJ OTHA (also known as Joseph, the man in the fetching hat) spun like a 4 hour set after opener Vizlicious. Joseph’s marathon sets are always pretty awesome, but this one was really special: https://soundcloud.com/josephotha/joseph-otha-live-drop-party-2024.

I think that’s all? Except to say: dang I’m a lucky dude. Just having all these incredibly kind, creative people around me is really awesome.

hanging out in Santa Rosa

2025-04-05 08:33:20Z

This was last year, the night before the Drop Party (those pics are on deck). Had one of my once-a-month cigars with friends (which I’ve since quit altogether, because of the transplant requirements). Went over to some friends’ back yard, I think I’d met them once before at some other LoveLab function (the dinner? Drift? something) and it was a nice relaxing evening.

Just posting these because they’re nice and easy. Drop Party is on deck, I just need to make the final edits.

days like this dance party at lake merritt

2025-04-02 09:12:08Z

these photos were taken a couple weeks ago now, at a weekly dance party that started back in 2020 called Days Like This. Friday night, 5-9:30, just impeccable vibes. really great fun. The first couple were from before, we went to Coach and had sushi before dancing.

despite the fact that the break dancing is the majority of the pictures here, it only really lasted a couple songs. We got to the party late, around 8ish, danced for a while, and then I took a bunch of pictures. I found myself screwing around with the focus modes, trying to find the right one. I think I landed on the 3d-tracking mode? Honestly modern AF is black magic to me, and I’m probably going to spend a little time learning it, because it’s a neat trick to have when the situation arises. 8 frames a second doesn’t hurt, either.

I am woefully behind on editing photos, I still haven’t gotten through the stuff from Driftwood and that was back in August. Had something of a block about it, unfortunately. The photo sets are large and mean a lot to me so I want to get them right (whatever that means) and so I want to do them when I have time to just sit with them but I never do; there’s no increment of time large enough to really digest that many photos into a coherent set.

I am making progress, though. I have a method I think of as the ‘bangers only’ method. When I’m doing my initial selects, I do a pass and bring anything that might work once I’ve punched it up a bit, and then I do a pass toning all of those (global exposure, white balance, etc) and then often this is where my process stalls. I’ll have 60 or 100 photos in a collection, from several days of work, and I’ll have to choose from those, and I just can’t say no to any of them.

That’s where the next step comes in; I have to say ‘yes’ to the picture to get it past this step. No ‘maybe’, no ‘if I squint’, just the ones that are definitely good by my judgement. That usually helps. I got this set down from 50 to 15 in like five minutes (it helped that there were a couple blurry sequences and obvious winners in there). Driftwood 2024, the edit went from 120 to 49 very quickly. I need to do this for the Retreat photos as well, and then hopefully I’ll have both of those posts out soonish. I’m also thinking about doing a book? Maybe? DW 2024 and Retreat 2025. Maybe.

LA and back one weekend

2025-02-20 08:31:16Z

There was an event I wanted to go to on a Saturday down in Little Armenia, we didn’t have anything else going, so I booked a hotel near the thing and we drove down saturday, went to the event, and came back on sunday. What was the event? Who knows, I didn’t take any pictures there (it was a Q&A for this project by Anush Babajanyan). Anyway, the clouds both ways were spectacular. The second day the whole day we were chasing rainbows.

A lot of people hate the 5 because it’s boring and long and there’s nothing to see but farms for a couple hundred miles. I understand that perspective because I also have felt that way at times. I think it’s actually a very interesting road once you look at it the right way, though. The interaction of the mountains either side of the central valley, the textures and shapes, all that green… Really what’s not to like besides five hours in the car?

Of course, the weather isn’t always benign; I’ve definitely come over these same passes in bumper-to-bumper traffic which is a different kind of misery. I don’t think that’s the road’s fault though.

a rainy night in minneapolis

2025-02-07 09:38:31Z

These are actually from the night before the previous post. I’m trying to get ahead of the trend and give up entirely on linearity. I had looked at flights and arriving one day earlier plus a hotel was quite a bit cheaper, so I went for it. I feel like at the time I might’ve also been scheduling with the possibility that Sophie would come along. I don’t remember, it was last year and a while ago.

Downtown minneapolis was very strange. The 10 story condo seemed to have taken over from all other life forms, and they were all shiny and neat, except where a few of them were still under construction. I wonder how many winters all these new transplants will face before they give up and move somewhere warmer? When I lived there, we didn’t stay through a whole one. Moved in the late spring to West St. Paul, started the third grade, learned my times tables up to I think 6’s, had more than one recess cancelled because it was too cold (less than 10ºF), and moved to Oklahoma in December. The wind was cold inside the dang truck. Terrible cold. You’ve heard of lake effects? This is a place that is swiss-cheesed with lakes. Anyway, I digress.

In the middle of summer, that is to say June, it was passing fair and nice. The Football stadium, as I said, looked like an incursion from an alternate reality, or an alien spaceship had landed and the aliens had decided, on balance, to decamp for somewhere warmer. If they’d waited a bit I’m sure they could have bought a nice condo.

Other than the odd stadium, the downtown was quiet on a Friday evening. I walked around for maybe an hour, then the rain started coming down, and I went back into my motel to watch the first presidential debates. Talk about things going non-linear on us, huh?

kiran and akhil's rehearsal dinner

2025-02-06 07:51:10Z

Finally getting to these (checks notes) about six months after I meant to. This was a killer party, lots of good food and music. I kind of wasn’t on my game that night? I’d gotten a bad haircut and had a weird day wandering around Minneapolis. It didn’t matter that much, there was also a real wedding photographer there, so I was able to mostly relax and enjoy. I think this was the trip I really started to notice my like, normal energy levels starting to flag also? Like normally I would have been going to the after party and staying out all night with everyone but I just couldn’t, this time.

I have a shit ton of stuff in the backlog like this, just waiting to be posted (more than a year’s worth at this point). I also have two book projects in full swing, both the San Pablo book and the Big Empty work. Need to get a bunch of it out the door soon, as I feel like a lot of things are just going to keep happening and it’s going to be all I can do to keep up.

Love this kid’s energy. Just like, no rules, this is the best seat in the house right in the middle of the dance floor, and I’m gonna sit here and eat my dinner.

I also haven’t posted the really strange architecture from this trip, wandering around the city near my hotel the night before (maybe I’ll do those next? who knows). The big football stadium that resembled nothing so much as a crashed spaceship or an intrusion from a neighboring dimension. Anyway, I digress.

The aunties and the uncles were also a riot. What a great crowd.

rug trip

2024-12-03 07:00:27Z

a thing that happens when you carry your camera everywhere: sometimes the clouds are really cool and your trip to pick up a rug for the living room becomes a little photo essay.

Yosemite, March 2024

2024-11-27 06:58:10Z

This trip was back in the early spring, I think we were hanging out and it came up that Kawan had never been? Anyway, it was as magical as it always was, plus the added benefit of good company. I don’t have an essay in me about this weekend, sorry. Enjoy the pix though.

sf and back

2024-11-21 08:18:11Z

I remember this drive across the bridge; it was cloudy in the east bay, and then after Yerba Buena island, the fog closed in around me and all I could see were the cars around me and the structure of the bridge. I thought about ‘casual domain shear’, which was an idea from the last half-good Neal Stephenson book, Anathem. Basically, if you’re sufficiently isolated from some part of physical reality, time runs differently; in the book there are monks that use this phenomenon (and other monks that talk about it ad nauseam, I said it was half-good).

Of course, we all know when you’re stuck in traffic, time is very plastic. It seems to take forever to get nowhere at all, and once you’ve arrived something about the experience makes all that time sort of vanish from your memory, as if the whole thing was an illusion. I certainly don’t remember anything else about this traffic jam; looking at my calendar for that day, I was going to the mission to get a haircut.

Anyway. It’s winter again, and even if the weather is bad it’s still beautiful. Many times the light is flat and the pictures are bad. I promise not to share those.

porto porto porto

2024-11-19 08:45:11Z

Saudade means a profound longing or lonelyness, the emotion you feel for someone you love is a long ways a way, in time, space, or emotion. You say, when you’re leaving your beloved, ‘Vou ter saudade de voce’ when you’re leaving, probably not on a trip, but when you know you won’t see them again for a while. It can be sad, but it’s also an expression of love.

Like I said, we were kind of staying in the tourist quarter, near the river, but the last day or two we wandered into town a little more; I went to a cigar shop and bought real Habanos, Cuban cigars, and the weather oscillated between clouds and sun. I think I was starting to get worn down from being on the road at that point.

And then, we went home.

porto again

2024-11-17 10:21:41Z

These pick up right where the pictures from yesterday left off. I had just walked by the guy in the bear suit playing bass, it was our second day in town and we were just walking around the tourist area near the Ponte Louis I, the arch bridge in a couple of these pictures. Lots of locals hanging around too, although it was obviously a destination and not as much a place people live.

The top of the bridge was maybe 100m longer than the bottom, and connected higher elevations of each side. The hills of Porto were steep enough around the river that there were stairs and a funicular that I didn’t get to ride (too crowded, didn’t want COVID). But the bridge was nice, top and bottom.

Went across, dodging the bright yellow trams, and took a cable car ride down to the side of the river. Nice way to see the city, good views all around. When we got to the end, we went to a little food hall, where there was a Brazilian spot serving Pao de quejio, brazilian cheese bread. It’s so good, and so cheesy.

I think after that we looked around at a bunch of little stalls in a street market that was set up, nothing I really wanted to buy though, so I didn’t. Took the tram back up the hill, walked back across to the Porto side of the river; at least according to the map, Porto is on the north side, and it’s another town on the other side. Our rental was up the hill a bit, just around the corner from some spectacular views.

We did end up taking kind of the long way home, wandering up into town, past some more modern shops and cafes. It’s a nice town, Porto. A bunch of people have said it’s similar to SF, in that both are tourist destinations, both are very hilly, both are on the west coast and enjoy a mediterranean climate. It’s also actually several cities bisected by a body of water, the bay here and the River Douro there. Neither is the biggest city on their respective coasts, both have a larger city to the south that starts with L (LA/Lisbon).

I think that’s where the similarities end, though? Porto is a very different geography really, away from the river it’s a plateau. The architecture couldn’t be more different; the building we stayed in was older than California. They speak Portugese, and when I tried to speak it, I think there was some confusion because I speak the Brazilian form and not theirs. Tons of walking, just way more than is possible in any city in the US save like, New York.

Good city though. Plenty of good wine, coffee and food. I’ve got one more set of photos and then it’s on to the next thing that happened. I have no idea what that is now, but I will soon.

porto 2023

2024-11-16 07:42:26Z

Been a while since I rapped at ya… These are from last fall, because I have once again let my backlog get way ahead of me… there are so many things from this year that I haven’t posted. Porto I didn’t post yet because it’s hard to edit down to something coherent and postable, but here I am posting anyway. Probably will be 2-3 posts? I’m trying.

This was kind of my half of our big trip last year; we try to go on a trip in the fall, and 22/23 were both europe, with Sun and Bass, a music festival, for the first week, and the second week usually somewhere else: previously Florence. I already posted the Sun n Bass photos a while back, but never got around to these, mostly because it’s a lot to get through and I always had a quick win that I could post and get on with things, and then… a lot of other things happened.

The first thing that happened is that I got serious about finishing San Pablo. I made a final edit, printed work prints, stared at them for two months, and finally sequenced them in what I’ve been calling ‘vibe order’. Then I put them in a really simply laid out photo book and had that printed through Blurb.

Then I decided for this fall, to take a cross country motorcycle trip instead of flying to Europe. That took a couple of months to prepare for, and a bunch of stuff that would normally live on here ended up over there. I may copy those posts over, or I may make a static site for it, not sure. I need to stop sending buttondown $30/mo to not send emails, for sure though.

I did that, published a newsletter post every day I was out, and then when I got back re-formatted everything into a magazine that I still need to to quite a bit of work to. I think I don’t like the way I designed it at all, and I might make it a small landscape book instead. Anyway.

Enough words for now. More Porto next time.

driftwood retreat 2024

2024-06-07 07:48:47Z

I had a teacher in high school who’s biggest pet peeve was the phrase ‘first annual’, because, she said, if it was the first, then there was no way for it to be annual. An annual event, in her mind, was something that happened over and over again, every year. So first annual was something of an oxymoron.

That said, I’m not sure she was right. It’s not wrong to say first of an annual series, if you intend to make it happen again. At worst, it’s a little aspirational. I don’t think that’s that much of a crime? Anyway, this was the first annual Driftwood Retreat I alluded to in the last post.

It was at a house somewhere in the Sierra Foothills, south of Tahoe. Not actually super far from here for a drive; I think we got out there in about three hours? but also we avoided traffic by leaving at 10am. I took my then-new Noctilux with me, and shot with it a bunch all weekend. Protip: if you are shooting and your main light comes from a digital projector, make sure your shutter speed is slower than the refresh rate. I shot some of these under a projected light at 1/200th of a second, and it caused all sorts of issues.

Some of the other photos I made black and white just because I feel like it. Either it was very dark or the light was monochromatic or blown out in one channel (which also happens when there’s only one color of light) and I don’t feel like taming the weirdness. The ones that can be color are.

Anyway, the retreat: a bunch of people came together to make music and art and meals together, away from all our normal worries and cares. Very chill vibes, good company, good times. There was a table big enough to lay out all the San Pablo work prints on, the first time I got to see the whole thing at once. Still working on the order for that, but I should be moving into book design soon.

Gonna push publish and go to bed.

world's largest factory floor

2024-06-06 04:37:59Z

These were from some months ago, driving out through the delta and across the central valley. The Driftwood spring retreat was out in the foothills, in a spot that was pretty ideal for a dozen or so people to descend and party it up. But first we had to get there.

Someone once told me the framing in the title, that California’s central valley wasn’t a collection of farms but a factory for turning the water from the sierrra snowpack into food. As we drove through it this time it was hard not to see it that way, as a vast organism of production. Incredible amounts of labor shape and reshape the landscape. Even the delta we started the trip in is a collection of man made dikes and islands.

Anyway. I should mention here that if you like this sort of thing, Matt does a travellogue, I’m going to be taking a trip later this year, in September, and sending out a pop-up newsletter to go with it. https://bigempty.photos/ if you’d like to sign up for that; the first issue in the archive has a little more background.

pi(e) day at casey's

2024-05-12 04:48:14Z

This was a party I was something like four years late to. That is, Casey has it every year, and every year on 3/14 since the first one I was invited to, something prevented me from going. COVID lockdown was the first year (although the party happened, I had a small fever that morning from something and stayed away out of an abundance of caution), I think the next year I was somewhere for work, etc etc. I’m very lucky that my friends tolerate me, I know. This year I forgot yet again, and scheduled a trip to Texas that week, but as luck would have it I was landing at SFO in time to go directly to the party.

Touched down, texted Sophie the wrong address from my cab, got there and was greeted by just the nicest, warmest group of folks you could want after a couple days away from home. And I want to say soup? And pie. A lot of pie.

Sophie texted to say she was there and I went down and she wasn’t and we figured out she was at the wrong place, and so got her headed to the right place, went down again, let her in and went to park the car while she went up to get some wine to relieve the effects of San Francisco rush hour.

We sat, we talked, pie was had. And I marked my dang calendar for next year.

drama clouds, working on things

2024-05-07 04:45:27Z

Shot these one day back in… December? Went up to Santa Rosa to meet Cason and Ryan for brunch at the Flamingo. I had the edit ready a couple weeks ago and then forgot about it. Been working on the San Pablo edit. I had some vague vibes-based categories and then got some help from my friend Michela to put them in order… unfortunately it kind of fell flat when I looked at it again with Sophie. I think the groupings made it too much of the same thing all at once. So now they’re shuffled together again and I need to try to sequence them again.

Speaking of putting things in order, I’m also working on a bunch of different stuff for the motorcycle trip this fall. I picked up ten yards of high-viz yellow (if you’ve seen the yellow I use in most of my bags, it’s that) to make some saddlebags, and I’m trying to figure out what camping gear and other things to take. I realized it would be a much better trip if I didn’t do it out-and-back, instead shipping the bike to Minnesota and taking the full time just to make my way back home. I need to get a different set of tires on the new moto, and probably half a dozen other things I’m forgetting.

I’m also thinking about doing some kind of email newsletter while I’m on the road, maybe a few editions before then. Modeled after Craig Mod’s walking practice. The road versions will be photos and field notes from that day; if I made a couple posts before then it’d be preparation, what I’m taking, how I’m routing, stuff like that. It’d be difficult to do I think, but pretty rewarding to have that record at the end. And I know at least some people would like to be able to follow along, so there’s that. But I have to come up with a name for it and pick a newsletter platform that isn’t for fascists, but I have a couple to pick from.

Anyway, these clouds: just sort of bursting with energy. There’s a pattern here in the bay where it’ll rain for the first part of the day, and then gradually it’ll kind of clear up, but in the middle of the day the clouds do this wild thing. In other places, you see clouds like this before the weather comes in, but here it’s often the opposite. A quirk of living out here on the west coast, I suppose. Surrounded by mountains and ocean.

eclipse 2024

2024-04-12 20:36:10Z

I’ll try to write more about this later, but people have been asking where are my pictures from the eclipse, so here they are…

along the santa fe river

2024-04-08 05:24:19Z

So we got to Santa Fe and had lunch with the family that was gathered in town. I’ll post those photos eventually maybe, but I’m feeling these right now. After lunch, there was a storm moving in, to dump a couple inches of snow on the town (more up on the mountain). Incredible light. So I grabbed the nikon and ran down to the river.

OK, maybe I didn’t run. Walked quickly. But the clouds! Wild clouds. I really love Santa Fe, just for the light they get there. I mean, also the green chile and the people and the art and the smell of the desert, especially after the rain. Mountains, love mountains too.

The weather there though seems to come in wild rages; cold and wind and clouds bursting across the landscape. I was out for half an hour, walking along the banks of the river and up on the trail. I started and the clouds were pretty far off; by the time I was heading back, they were overhead and the first flurries were falling. It felt a bit like the late summer/early fall monsoons in that way, coming in fast.

This storm actually didn’t even stick for very long. It wasn’t cold enough I don’t think? Sure felt cold, despite my layers.

cities from above

2024-04-07 21:40:49Z

well it’s after midnight again (it’s literally always after midnight), and it’s time to blog… I started this post like a week ago, and then couldn’t decide what pictures to post. still hitting stumbling blocks I’ve set up for myself. The edits are too big, so the posts would be too big. I’m forgetting the first rule of blogging, which is always be blogging. The second rule, which I’m also breaking, is talking about not blogging (getting distracted by whys instead of doing the damn thing. well. anyway.

These are from the flight down to LA when we were going to Santa Fe over xmas break. I’m pretty sure I haven’t posted them? I did allow myself the liberty of slightly cropping these first two. I know, it’s kinda blasphemous, but when you’re in a banking aircraft shooting out of a tiny window, it’s a lot to keep track of the horizon. Pilots even have a special little gyro they watch instead of watching for the actual horizon.

Then we flew over LA, where there was much traffic and I was glad, once again, to not be in it. The next flight was over huge stretches of empty desert. The Mohave, Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, just the harshest, most beautiful places, but nothing to see at night. And then we were in Santa Fe to see family. More on that later.

last drink n draw of 2023

2024-03-26 08:04:52Z

these happen every week, I just happen to go to them much less often. you might think ‘matt, these are serious draw-ers to go and do this every week’ and you couldn’t be more wrong. some of them are very good at their own style and have a lot of ability, I would never describe it as a serious endeavor. more like a social hour with some strongly encouraged creativity.

Each week, there’s a sheet that goes around as people arrive, and everyone writes down at least one thing to draw; things like ‘mystery liquids’ or ‘how math makes you feel’ or ‘feelin puffy’. I personally am pretty bad at drawing, but it’s fun to try to think of something within my abilities to fulfill the prompts.

Also, and this can’t be overstated, everyone there is just really rad? like encouraging and nice and strange in the best ways. Kawan, Kevin, Akhil, Auguste, uh… everyone else who’s names I don’t know or remember because my mind is like a collander that doesn’t hold names until I’ve heard them 50 times or can look them up online…

This one was the first night I had my new-ish 105 1.4 for the Z. Technically it’s for an F mount, but with the FTZ adapter it’s great on my Z too. I think all of these were with it? Snappy focus, very shallow depth of field, but sharp as hell too. Really dig this lens. It also helps that I figured out some of the AF on the Z8; letting face detect do its thing is super helpful most of the time. It even works in manual focus if you set the camera right, who knew?

I went in to see the woman singing at one point, and the person singing was just puring their heart into it. Just really emoting to a room of like, 10 people, only half of whom were watching. I took a few photos, and showed them to Kawan; he said something along the lines of “How did you see that? I was just there standing next to you, and I didn’t see that.” I mean, part of it is the lens for sure, but part of it is choosing the right moments. And, not to toot my own horn too much, but I’ve been doing this in some capacity for more than a quarter century at this point. If I couldn’t pull a rabbit out of my hat at least some of the time, it’d be time to hang that hat up.

Speaking of rabbits out of hats… I need to go to bed. I should figure out how to do these during the day, maybe I’d find that easier? When I’m not so exhausted? Nah, I always write best when I’m fighting to stay awake. It’s like a natural deadline, just means I have to push a bit.

quantity

2024-03-22 07:08:33Z

Today’s today in tabs had as its kicker a link to a list of “things that don’t work.” I won’t link to it because it has a certain smell about it, a smell of mixing things that are obviously true with things that are just one guy’s opinion and some that are just plain wrong. I read a few of the other things on the site and there’s a nasty undercurrent to the dude’s writing. That kind of smell. Anyway.

One of the obviously true things on his list of things that don’t work was “quality over quantity” (again that smell, generalities when talking about something specific). But the specific thing is this: you don’t make good art by just making one thing, you make it by making a bunch of stuff. Austin Kleon has it as “Quantity leads to quality” (my emphasis) which is a much better way to formulate it. Anyway.

All that to say, I’m gonna try to blog more? I certainly have the pictures. While there may be some stinkers in there, the practice is good for me. I definitely feel my writing get better and words come more easily as I do it more. Daily would be great but I’m not going to make that, there’s too much going on.

These are all from a couple days last november, before thanksgiving. I don’t know why I grouped them, but there they were in my edits. Just walking around the neighborhood.

Sidenote: when I see stuff that’s obviously just someone’s opinion stated as fact, I fall back on the line from The Big Lebowski: “Yeah, well, ya know, that’s just like, uh, your opinion, man.” I didn’t really mark it until I read Jeff Bridges’ book The Dude and the Zen Master, where there’s a whole chapter with that as the title, about non-attachment. The conceit of the book is a little hokey, but there’s some good stuff in there.

TEKNO (Zero Fucks XMAS)

2024-03-19 08:30:35Z

I think this was after the other christmas party? Anyway. A fun show. Helen came for a bit, I think we stayed a bit later… Kawan was doing something or out of town, I don’t remember. Anyway, this is a party that Zero Fucks have put on for a couple of years, a corporate themed rave, complete with bonuses, keynotes, suits, and HR-bots. Fun and weird and a nice substitute for actually going to an office christmas party.

jeff and franc's xmas party

2024-03-19 07:34:00Z

I had to cut about 20 images that were basically variatons on the big group picture from this edit. I know, it’s a christmas party and I’m only now, in March, getting around to publishing the photos. What can I say. I either transmit them on the spot via my phone, or I do it months and months later, after agonizing over the edit for far too long.

Actually this weekend we were back at this apartment, this time for Jeff’s birthday, and I might post those soon, because I want to show off my new lens. I got a Noctilux!

Fun party though, good group of folks. I should really have a word with them about indirect lighting; top down is so unflattering most of the time. Couple lamps on dimmers, some art on the walls, maybe. Anyway. Onward!

day of the dead (SF Mission), 2023

2024-03-08 02:44:03Z

So, I was getting ready to leave to go to chicago, texted Kawan to see if he was going to drink and draw, and he said, no, I’m going to miss it tonight, it’s Day of The Dead in the city. I was instantly like, I should go and photograph that, even though I hadn’t packed and leave for chicago the next day. Yeah, these photos happened before the ones it the last post.

So I got to the mission about 7, 7:30, and start walking south on Valencia. I don’t really see much until I get to close to the 24th street BART station. I came to the tail end of a parade, there was a group of dancers (next photo).

Then I followed the crowds down 24th st, towards the park where there were other things still happening; art and live music and ofrendas (altars with pictures and other things that remind us of the dead, usually specific people). Food and flowers and pictures, candles and other lights.

Then I ran around a bunch and took the rest of the pictures here.

chicago, last november

2024-02-29 09:06:29Z

These are in vibes order, again. Lot of verticality in this edit. Had a really nice time the weekend these were taken, stayed at Hunter and Jason’s place. Great view out of their windows, pity there wasn’t a decent photographer there to get a shot of it.

Anyway. Had a real nice portfolio review earlier this week, looking at the san pablo work, working on mashing it into a shape to start shopping it around as a book and maybe an exhibition. Sets that work together, colors, leitmotifs. I’ll have to make some prints, too, if there’s a show. Gallery show? Me? Maybe. Have to find a gallery.

Farmed out the work prints earlier today, anyway. Going to be an interesting exercise to see if I can make it work.

kawan's 222 celebration

2024-02-24 17:40:03Z

I have just enough time to throw these online and then run out the door. An awesome celebration! I might write about it later. Or not! we’ll see.

Ok, it’s later! Here’s Sophie’s mix. https://soundcloud.com/sophia-mills/live-elis-feb-22-2024 . ~~Dunno if any of the other dj’s recorded their set.~~ Helen’s (iam3lectron’s) set is here: https://www.mixcloud.com/iam3lectron/222fest-live-elis-helladeep-set/ UPDATE 2: DEMONICA’s set is here: https://www.mixcloud.com/MonikaDee/222-fest-live-at-elis-demonika-set/

cagliari

2024-02-21 09:25:47Z

So last fall, while I was in Sardinia, I took a little side trip. The festival we were at was at the north end of the island, in a little town called San Teodoro. From there, I took a bus to the train station in Olbia, and the train took me all the way across the island. I don’t want to belabor the point, but I could take a bus and train, about 6 hours total, to get to a place that was about a three hour drive away. Whole island has the population of less than the greater bay area, and yet somehow high speed rail in california ‘doesn’t make sense’? They’ve played us for fools.

Anyway. These aren’t in any particular order, I exported them in numerical order and then they got randomized when I uploaded them. No big deal. I was in the town for a total of like 24 hours? And there’s 25 pictures, so pretty good. I don’t know why when I do something like this I shoot like it’s National Geographic back when they were decent. Walk and shoot, walk and shoot. Wait, look, shoot some more.

Unlike those guys (almost to a person, guys, and if you want to see the seeds of their self-destruction, well, there’s one), I don’t have any patience or, as it turns out, time. Where they could sit on a single corner for days to wait for one shot, I move around probably too fast. Impatient, maybe, but also there’s so much to see, especially in a new place. This goes back to what I was saying about not slowing down and working a subject a while back. Knowing I only have a certain number of hours left in a day definitely plays a part.

There’s also a little alarm bell, a little flag in my head that goes off when some things happen that says ‘this is important! something is happening! take a lot of pictures of it!’ and for some reason the 20 minutes after takeoff and the 20 minutes before landing in an airplane are always flagged. Big landmarks, definitely flagged. Times Square in New York, I could photograph there for days (and have, I go basically every time I’m in NYC, it’s a sickness).

Something I’m thinking about for San Pablo though. I started out with the thesis, handed to me on a silver platter by Robin, that it was the most interesting street in the Bay Area, more so than Market or Polk in SF or Telegraph in Oakland/Berkeley. But the place I’ve ended up is that any street (any place) becomes interesting the more you look at it, and also it becomes harder and harder to pin down what you’re talking about.

This town was cool though, not super touristy in the bad way, good vibes, nice light even at night. Nothing shouty, but nothing terrible either. Lots of hills.

driftwood 2023

2024-02-10 05:46:48Z

For some reason, I decided to do a sort of cleanse this year for driftwood; I only took my “pool toy” (a nikonos V underwater camera rated to 5 atmospheres of pressure), a film rangefinder, and my little Ricoh GR. Owing to the film and different (some might say chaotic) camera assortment, all of these are out of order. Or, at best, in vibes only order.

This year was a bit of an expansion; we had maybe 15 people at peak? 20? There is no census at driftwood. It was, as usual, a few days on the water with just music and good people.

driftwood 2022: the lost roll

2024-02-06 08:39:20Z

so somehow, these photos from 2022 driftwood went missing and didn’t get developed with the rest. When I had the film run for last year (2023) I threw in a bunch of random rolls that had been sitting around for quite a while (some for over a decade), and these were in there.

in any case, I’m working on the rest of those pictures, the ones from the most recent driftwood. Trying to decided if I should tell my internal critic to shove it and just publish a 30-picture edit. Maybe. Maybe another day of staring at the grid will let me cut another couple, and really shake out a nice 15-picture edit.

see, this is why I need to work with a photo editor on San Pablo. I’ve got a big edit of about 500 and a closer edit of about 150, and this is really where the rubber meets the book sequencing. Figuring out what goes where and how it all fits toghether is a whole thing by itself. For my first two books, I did it my self, over the course of months. Big stacks of work prints. Actually the first book kind of sequenced itself, just fell into place like magic. The second one was harder, and this one is going to be even more so, because it’s also shot over a longer time period.

Anyway. just didn’t want to let these go before I published the ones from last year. Better late than never.

sun and bass again (2023)

2024-01-16 10:57:46Z

I never used to worry about repeating myself, because I thought it wasn’t possible to take the same photograph more than once, in a “can’t step in the same river twice” kind of way. Even two photos taken very close to the same time and same place will be different by infinitesimal details, and in those details, I thought, there would be enough difference to fill up a lifetime of photography.

There’s definitely a part of me that recognizes that, and also sees that even though I have a routine, and do some of the same things over and over again, my approach changes, and in the case of these photos, I’m a different person than I was when I was taking the photos the first year.

That last point might seem trite, but it’s worth some emphasis in the light of my last post. The idea that the photographs are a trail of evidence left by the photographer of their own personality, a cryptic map of their psychology.

“I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.”

I am affected by what I see, and that feeds back into the pictures. Anyway. I’ll quote Ulysses basically for any reason, love that poem. “Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men who strove with gods.” I’ve also been reading Moby Dick since last Friday, maybe that’s why I’m thinking of ancient mariners.

So for these pictures, this year, I used the new camera, the Nikon Z8, with all my Leica M lenses. There were some growing pains (turns out for non-CPU lenses the Z8’s meter is finicky), but it definitely allowed me to do different things than last year, when I relied mostly on the point-and-shoot Ricoh GRIIIx. I also wasn’t trying super hard to make a record of any one thing, again, just shooting what was interesting at the time.

I don’t know about other photographers, but once that pressure is off, I can relax and just make honest pictures. I’m not trying to make any great statements about anything; it’s more a kind of sense making, trying to understand the world by making art about it. Of course now I’m making a post-hoc justification for how I work based on how I feel now, I wasn’t thinking about any of this while I was shooting. Of course, that new understanding will feed back into the work I do from here on, and so maybe I don’t need to worry about repeating myself, still? Let’s not and pretend we never did.

a little jaunt in Rome

2024-01-12 09:08:45Z

I almost titled this one ‘posting hole’ for reasons that will become obvious once you scroll down. I made that post last week and then promptly got busy not posting any more. I did, as you can see, find the missing photos from our fall trip to Italy and Portugal. These are from our brief stay in Rome, arriving late in the evening and leaving the next afternoon.

I have some notes here towards an essay about how I don’t want to end up like W. Eugene Smith in Pittsburgh. Smith was, if not the inventor of the picture-story, then one of the first real masters of it. Incredible pictures, you should look him up. Country Doctor and Minamata and also here’s a good essay on his work in general. Anyway, in the middle of his career, freed from his contract with LIFE magazine, he took a job to spend 3 weeks in the city of Pittsburgh, produce some photos for a book that was already in process.

Instead, he ended up staying for two years. At the end, he owed everybody money, the people that had initially hired him had moved on, his relationship with his photo agency had turned sour (it may have ended altogether, it’s been a while since I had photo history class). He was lost in the vastness of what he’d uncovered, just like, scratching the surface and seeing what he thought was the real Pittsburgh and trying to get it down on film.

I think, when confronted with a story where there was no through line, no simple message, his little tool kit of classic storytelling (classic may not be the right word? but I’m thinking in contrast to, say, Winogrand’s nihilism or Robert Frank’s, well frankness) just fell apart. It was too big for him; not the city but the multiplicity of stories, the necessarily fractured view that trying to take in a whole city brings. He wasn’t able to deal with the contradictions inherent in a place with that many people. I say ‘deal with’ but I really mean put together a photo essay in the narrative mode he was used to from the city at all. That kind of storytelling just can’t be applied with that broad of a subject matter, there are too many things working at cross purposes. Imposing a narrative at that scale, or trying to find one latently, just like, shooting and hoping to get something other than your own projected self, is just impossible.

Is this sounding familiar? Because it’s also me, trying to make San Pablo work for the last five and a half years. I started out thinking it would be a couple weeks of shooting, and then it stretched out, and suddenly I was a bit lost, lacking a compass. Probably didn’t have a firm point of view, from which to really see what I was looking for. That said: the photos are also a record of what I was feeling at the time, the way I responded to the place. If you get enough pictures, or maybe just the right ones, you can kind of get a feel for the person who was taking them, a reverse-psychogeography. It’s a latent image, not something you try for but something you see in review.

There are a lot of approaches to bigger subjects (a comparison of, say, Robert Frank’s approach versus, say, William Eggleston’s, might be interesting), but obsessively continuing year after year isn’t one of them. So anyway, that’s what I’m working on. A final edit, working through the years until I’ve got all the San Pablo together, and then I’ll hopefully have a book. Or, I will have a book, but hopefully it’ll be something worthwhile.

Hope you liked the holes.

2024, here we go

2024-01-03 08:00:39Z

somewhat inauspicious start to the year today, I’m typing without my left index finger because it’s got some kind of infection, the antibiotics taking their sweet time to take it out. hopefully I’ll be back up to full strength soon. I have a heck of a backlog here (as always). I started writing a year in review of last year of just the places I travelled to and lost steam by the time I got to June. I probably am just going to give up on that since posts about last year as a whole are no longer timely. this has never been a news blog, despite my aspirations and what my highschool journalism teacher drummed into me.

I realized looking at these photos though, which are from roughly October, that I’m missing some stuff from Sardinia and Porto. I need to chase though down. I probably have them edited (initial selects in photo mechanic) and just forgot the final step of dragging them into lightroom.

My current workflow is a little convoluted, mostly because lightroom is slow and bad at organizing photos en masse and the other tool I use, Photo Mechanic Pro, is not a developing tool. So I do an ‘ingest’ step with Photo Mechanic, and that’s when I usually do a round of initial selects. just page through the photos in the loupe view and hit 3 (number on the keyboard, marks the ‘star rating’ in the EXIF) on anything that I think has potential. Then I can filter the light table view by star rating and select the ones that I’ve just marked. Then I drag those into lightroom (select all, drag to the lightroom icon) and in LR I can do the exposure, color adjustment, and dodging and burning.

Of course, I have ADHD, every step in the pipeline there is prone to me walking away and not coming back for some months. Shooting is a constant, but other than that I offload from my SD cards as I can remember to. Used to be an every day ritual, now it’s once every other week. I just don’t shoot as much.

Anyway. this was supposed to be just a quick post, drop some photos and go to bed.

oregon coast, 2021

2023-12-15 10:58:09Z

something like october 2021? I know, I know. I was looking through my collections in Lightroom and realized I may not have ever published these? I wish I had an image search that was just for stuff I’ve published here. Anyway.

This trip was a weird low point for me; I’m pretty sure I’d started at [REDACTED] and kinda hated my life. I had a gout flare while we were there, which didn’t help anything. I think I was still on a lower dose of the Allopurinol. So I probably had the kind of shame spiral about the photos from this trip that I did about other things, just had a lot of bad feelings around them and never got to giving them a proper edit.

These are all my in-laws, the Lewis clan. A fun bunch. Even though it was rainy, we had a good time; sat around and played card games, walked to the ocean, all that. Went for a drive before the gout set in, that’s where all the moody seashore pictures are from. I think I tripped and fell at one point, and that was what set off the flare. I don’t remember but I might’ve spent a whole day of the trip in bed? That sounds crazy but it is the kind of thing I did when I was having flare ups often. Haven’t had one in quite a while, fingers crossed.

Even with that, it was still a nice trip. Nice airbnb, good company, good food. Had to be wheeled through the terminal on the way home, but I did buy another Pendleton cardigan (turns out they’re made in china now, unfortunately).

This may be too many pictures of a brooding coastline, but I didn’t have time or energy to pick between what’s here. This is only half of what was in the looser edit, at least.

forest textures

2023-12-14 10:16:57Z

once again posting old shit. this was last… march? before it dried out in the spring. Roy’s. I was there with Damaris, Grant, Sophie’s mom, and of course Sophie. Good day in the woods.

I’ve been neglecting my photography. building lots of things though; finished the keyboard i’m typing this on (typos are my fault, the board is great), mostly finished another small bag, shaped a couple knife blanks and hardened them. doing stuff for christmas and for myself. The house is a mess. Now that I’ve spent three days neglecting it I’ll have to spend two getting it back in shape. Laundry. Dishes. That sort of thing. If I time it right tomorrow I’ll still have a couple hours to go and finish that bag. Then I need to start designing the next one, which is a big departure for me. A backpack, for a big honkin’ lens. Not mine.

In fact, I think started thinking about this backpack on this day, back in March. So, if you want a bag from me, that’s the kind of lead time I have. About 9 months to start patterning and prototyping.

That may get worse here pretty soon. Gonna have some things going on in 2024 that will oblige me to convalesce. Take it very easy. I’m going to be getting a new kidney, and at some point they’ll also have to take the old ones out. Yes, I know that’s not normal. Anyway, the hope is that after all that, plus recovery, plus an amount of exercise, I’ll have some measure of my old energy and strength back. No more gout, for one.

Anyway. This is a very wordy post! don’t get used to it. or do. maybe I’ll write about the experience of getting a transplant. maybe do some kind of photo thing with it. we’ll see.

comings and goings

2023-12-05 10:10:18Z

I had these edited last thursday, exported, and then forgot about them. This was the week before we left for europe for vacation. Anyway, just before that happened, Kawan came back to town. Not just for a visit this time, but really moving back. It’s really great to have him around, at least as much as we manage to see each other, being like, busy people with Important Things™ to do like having a job so we can sleep indoors and making silly art or other interesting objects.

I feel like I used to see people more often? Maybe this is the last bit of pandemic recovery, re-finding my social calendar. People matter, and I miss seeing a lot of them. Towards that end, tomorrow there’s an Odd Salon, which is always a highlight, just a bunch of delightful folks. Anyway, if you actually want to hang out, get @ me.

ok gonna push publish and go to bed bye

first sunday in july

2023-11-27 10:04:21Z

A lot of the time, moving through the world, I just think, like, oh, that’s interesting, take a single frame, and move on. It’s one of my worst/best habits, because really I end up with like, pictures of fences and random signs and things that aren’t part of any story. Also, a single frame is almost never the photo. Or at least the first one isn’t.

I may have talked about this before, but there’s this thing called ‘working the subject’ where you take one picture, move around, take several more, different compositions, points of focus, and really nail down what attracted you to take the picture in the first place. If you think of photography as asking questions, this is the first one: why did I want to take a picture of that?

But/and, I also find it natural and normal to work this way; take a moment, compose a single photo, get it, and move on. I don’t think either way of working is less valid, but I do know the overall quality of my work goes up when I work a subject a little. That’s the way I see it, anyway. There’s a braggadocio school that says you should only need one shot, but we can dispense with the macho bullshit, just between you and me, right? Like, maybe someone is good enough to get it in one. Or maybe they stopped at one and just have no idea where a little exploration would have taken them.

Really, for me, it’s a bad habit I learned early on, when I only had one roll of film at a time, or one a week to shoot. Film was expensive, processing was also expensive, at least until I discovered the magic of the 11-reel developing can in college. That and bulk rolling black and white film changed everything. Not worrying about running out was incredibly freeing. But sometimes I still fall back into that scarcity mindset.

It’s not film or even hard drive space that’s scarce these days, but my time. Do I have time to pause and take 20 photos of an unpainted picket fence? Probably; at 4.5 frames a second (max speed for the Leica), that’s less than 5 seconds. Really working, though, it’s closer to two minutes. It might not be 20 photos, but 10 wouldn’t be out of the question. When I intellectualize it, think about it and put it into words, it doesn’t sound like much at all.

Of course, I don’t work with words when I make pictures, and there’s the rub. I’m just feeling my way through all this. The scarcity mindset is a trauma response of sorts; doesn’t just go away. I’m not a psych, so I don’t know what to do with that, other than keep shooting and try to remember that there’s plenty of time and space for what I need to do.

amsterdam, the last part

2023-11-24 07:41:22Z

I usually try to break these up, but it’s turkey day, and I don’t have anything else really queued up at the moment. I ran through these and cut out all the really boring ones, just for you, dear reader. Amsterdam is a weird little town, at least in the hot center where we were staying. I may have explained this before, but I was there because Sophie’s work brought her out, and I found a deal on a multi-city ticket; with the free hotel it ended up not costing very much at all. Working east coast hours meant I had the mornings to sleep in and the dinner hour hardly starts when I would sign off. Really quite pleasant.

But back to the town, and its weirdness: the tourists were kind of the worst? I’m pretty sure I talked about how bad the sidewalks were in the mornings. But also: every dutch person I met had an air of practicality, of business. Well, except the poor waitstaff at ever restaurant, who were just Tired.

There’s something to that, the weird dichotomy of excess and practicality. I don’t know. Lots of bikes, too.

A bridge made of 3d printed stainless steel. Red light district.

amsterdam, part the second

2023-11-23 10:58:19Z

This is almost just a dump of the photos. Almost. My friend Ash recently reported a story from the border, where they’re just dumping people (asylum seekers, but people first) on the side of the road, exposed to the elements. Freezing cold, no supplies from their captors. Local volunteers are bringing meals and water. Just a really terrible situation.

And anyway, Ash also writes for the NPPA; inasmuch as someone can have a column in an e-newsletter, they have a column. And in it, they asked for pictures of better, happier things. Amsterdam in the midsummer isn’t exactly a warm hug, but it is nicer than all of that.

Anyway. Like I alluded to in the last post, I’m trying to catch up now that it’s the end of the year. There are so many photos I never posted, not just of this year but of the last decade. Some kind of problem. But anyway, for now, the focus is on what I shot this year. Still got everything that happened in Italy and Portugal, and everything since. Are they events? just random photos? I don’t know.

I really need to make a tighter edit of these, but this is where I got to in the several months since the trip. I think if I had a thesis, some core of meaning, I could put together a really tight 10 images. Amsterdam in Bikes, maybe.

It’s thanksgiving, by about two hours. Pies are baked. I should be in bed. I think that’s all the words I have in me for now. I’ll probably get better at it as I get back in the habit of doing this.

Today’s poem: The Laughing Heart, Charles Bukowski. I may or may not make that a regular bottom-of-the-post feature, I only know like five poems. but that one is a good one.

how to blog when the world is burning

2023-11-22 09:28:07Z

just push publish. I once again have a large backlog to get through. bunch of trips, bunch of things have happened. Anyway. Probably more Amsterdam soon. in the meantime, while everything is bad, take the joy where you can.

amsterdam, pt 1

2023-10-11 06:49:33Z

I’ve been sitting on this edit since sardinia, trying to get it into a shape that works as a single post, but really, I was in Amsterdam for a week, a lot happened, and also I’m a little bit letting myself try to make a perfect post rather than just post already, nobody cares if every post isn’t perfect. It’s just a blog. So it’s gonna be four-ish posts, unless someone complains, in which case I’ll post every photo individually, out of spite.

Also, and this is true, I usually have a couple tabs open in my browser with this here blog up, just to remind me while I’m flipping through tabs that it would be good to pay some attention to this space, usually in the form of a new post. But for the last few weeks, at least since I got back from Italy/Portugal (that’s gonna be a lot of posts), I haven’t had the page open at all. So my ADHD ass hasn’t had the reminder to keep it real here.

Anyway, Amsterdam: hell of a town. I worked all day monday and tuesday, and then hopped on a direct flight. I arrived some time in the… morning? I think? and took the train into the center of town. I love when names of things are obviously a linguistic use-path; the central train station and transit hub is known simply as “Centraal.” Beautiful train station I immediately failed to exit, because I didn’t see the ticket machines at the airport and just got on the train. I was already jet-lagged. I managed to buy a ticket on my phone and get out, and the hotel I was crashing at was just across a canal, next to another canal. I know, I just described half the city (the other half being at the intersection of two or more canals).

The whole reason for this trip was Sophie was there for work, so the hotel was paid for and rather nice; it was chosen for its proximity to the office she was commuting to, but that also put it right on the edge of the Red Light district, which was… certainly something. I mean, just very gross before about 10am, when the street cleaners would come through. The thing is, it’s not just the girls in the windows, it’s a huge concentration of tourist bars and shops and the like. Like the French Quarter in New Orleans, or sixth street in Austin, maybe. I mean, there’s also the coffeeshops which don’t sell coffee (they’re for weed and mushrooms), but weed and ‘shrooms are practically part of a balanced diet next to the amount of binge drinking that had to be happening.

But anyway, back to my reasons for the trip. I really just wanted to get a feel for the city, hit one or two big museums, and that was about it. It doesn’t take much to get me on a plane. I walked around a bunch and took pictures. Tried and failed to find cuban cigars. I worked from the room and also the lobby of the hotel, where they had an excellent espresso machine. That and melatonin and my jet lag was gone in record time.

In Ted Lasso, the episode where they go play a match in Amsterdam, the character Roy Kent complains that the whole city feels a little fake, like it’s a set for a movie or something. And I kind of understand that feeling; something about the sameness of the buildings, and the improbable angles they tilt at just gives the whole place a sheen of unreality. It didn’t help that I was staying in the most touristy spot in like all of Europe, either. I’m sure there’s some historical reason the buildings are all the same brick, just like there’s a reason all the houses in Santa Fe have to be the same color (one of five, I think).

There might’ve been a point to all that, but I’m not sure. The giant fish head mosaic would probably agree.

nyc, june 2023

2023-09-16 11:37:11Z

one thing led to another and then there I was, in downtown brooklyn. It was pride weekend, by chance, but I decided to avoid the crowds and mostly just chilled for the four days I was there. I got in late on Thursday, took the train in from JFK, walked from javits to my airbnb (rip, airbnb in nyc, it was great while it lasted). Then got up and went to EMPEX NYC, the nominal reason for my visit. Well, that and it made the hop to AMS shorter and easier (and those photos are also coming, I just got to these first because… reasons).

New York in the springtime. This was the trip that I finally took friend Emmie’s advice and acquainted myself with the bodega sandwich. I don’t think I had a single slice of pizza the whole trip? The sandwiches, they are good. My sleep schedule was mostly fucked the whole time, falling asleep at like 3am and waking up in the early afternoon, so that affected it somewhat, and then also there was the problem that there just weren’t any slice places nearby where I was staying.

Made the trip into Manhattan to see the Popcorn and some Tabs discord folks, had a nice little picnic in Washington Square Park. There was some sort of Hare Krishna thing going on, felt weird and a little cult-y, especially the drum circle. Sitting on the grass on the other side of the park from the gathering was nice, though.

Then we wandered to a local watering hole, had some drinks, went and had dinner at some Thai place that was probably fine but I honestly don’t remember that much of (it’s been three months, a lot has happened). Then we stood in line for ice cream somewhere else in SoHo, which was really good but I have almost no idea where we were; everyone I was hanging out was a neighborhood veteran and it was my first time anywhere near NYU.

Then back to brooklyn, and it’s wild how a couple blocks from the tall skinny billionaire’s nests it’s just brownstones and apartments. I was in a fourth floor walk up, tiny one bedroom that belonged to someone in musical theater who was, sort of ironically, in wine country in california for the same dates I was in NYC. A lot of stairs, but otherwise a fine place to sleep and stow my gear. I worked on monday and then I was off again, to Amsterdam and another layer of jet lag….

drop party

2023-09-12 16:47:26Z

This was what, late in june? Lots of ‘drops’ at this thing, paint, beats, etc etc. IYKYK. Very good, chill backyard vibes. Joseph played a set that went until the neighbor came over and yelled at us, at which point we packed it in. Austin painted (with some help by other partygoers). I took photos with the Ricoh accidentally in jpeg for the first half, realized my error for the darker parts, but the noise is still pretty crunchy after the sun went down.

yosemite out and back again

2023-09-10 07:43:04Z

This was what, three weeks ago? getting dangerously close to the fluid present, in any case. Sophie was out of town this weekend, off to do work things on the east coast, and I had a weekend free to do whatever I wanted. I realized it would be a perfect time to do a quick overnight in the sierras, see what Yosemite had to offer. I had a new camera to break in and get used to, and time to burn.

So after brunch and a stop for gallon jugs of water, I started driving east. There are a couple ways to get out there, the northern route on 120, which takes you to tioga pass and switchebacks down to the valley proper or the southern route, which goes through Merced to 140. I was headed for some campgrounds on 140 that are first-come first-serve, hoping to get lucky.

And, as luck would have it, there was one tiny spot open at the first campground I stopped at. Just big enough for my little two person tent and a chair, basically. I got my tent set up and went down to the river to put my feet in the water. I sat there and read my book, there being no cell signal, for maybe an hour, and then got up to go back to the tent and sit there and watch the clouds.

Unfortunately, instead of being high and pretty and harmless, they were a storm coming in. I rushed to get the fly on the tent and hopped inside. Then I had to get back out and re-tie the fly down to bigger rocks; the wind was gusting to maybe 30mph in the canyon, just wild. I sat in the noise of the wind and the rain, waited for it to blow out. Just sitting, alone, in the middle of the storm, can’t see out of the tent because the rain fly went all the way to the ground.

Got up in pretty bad shape, as my ground pad wasn’t holding air; made some coffee and some breakfast. Freeze dried biscuits and gravy, which is actually really palatable. Drove for a half an hour and I was in the park. Walked around, saw some things. Took a bus to a trailhead, hiked up to mirror lake, which is neither mirrored nor a lake; really a wide spot in Tenaya Creek. A nice hike though, with options that kind of get you away from the crowds.

Then, after a quick stop to buy gummy bears (the best gummy bears in the world are hte ones in the gift shop in Yosemite National Park, I don’t know how they do it, it’s some local confectioner), I drove home.

that's a good tree

2023-09-09 04:24:01Z

It’s 6am Central European Daylight Time, day four of the trip, and the jet lag has really caught up with me. I’ve been awake since 3:30 or so local time. Really just processing some photos to kill some time, and hope I can get back to sleep again.

Took these on a walk up into some park or another. It was supposed to be a little piece of a 6 mile loop that included redwoods, but we went to the wrong trailhead, didn’t bother looking at the map, and ended up making the walk rather short as a consequence. While we were walking, I had the idea for a blog that would have killed in 2003 or so: “That’s a good tree,” a blog that just had posts of individual pictures of trees that I saw, with the caption “That’s a good tree.”

Of course, it’s 20 years after that would have been fun, and in 2oo3, digital cameras were in their infancy; for what I just spent on a top of the line body and lens, you could get maybe six whole megapixels, with slightly worse than slide film dynamic range.

Then, before we got in the car to head home, we walked across the road and I took this panorama, with the fog rolling over the hills in SF, Tam on the right, and yes, another good tree. It’ll print something like 80 inches wide, which might be interesting. We’ll see when I’m back to my big printer.

thurdsay for sanity

2023-09-01 08:27:23Z

Sometimes, when work is more or less just me, working on a problem for a long time, it’s good for my head to get out of the house. I think this week I was also solo, Sophie was somewhere; Chicago? Amsterdam? I don’t remember. Anyway. “It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” to steal a sentence. SFMOMA has a nice cafe, and a couple little nooks scattered throughout the museum that are great for this, as they also have decent wifi and the 5G coverage is excellent. I’m a museum member, so I get in free (well, something like $150/year).

I’m not worried about spoiling the uncrowded space, nobody reads blogs.

But it’s great, I can work for a little bit, go look at some art if I get restless, get a coffee from the cafe, whatever I feel like. I’m always really productive because of the slight pressure of not wanting people to see me goofing off on my phone or whatever. There’s also the “I can do that later” thought that helps; I’m in a rad place, I should either be looking at the rad art or doing work, not scrolling.

And then, the city is there for me when the workday is done. I think this day I went to NOPA? I was alone, and I wanted a fancy burger, but made a game time decision to have bolognese.

Still haven’t been back for that burger.

re-photography (sort of)

2023-08-24 07:54:49Z

re-photography, as a genre, is usually about finding an old photograph, going to where it was taken, and making a new picture. It’s a study in changes over time. Some of these aren’t that, exactly, but I’m quite sure they’re a in a long line of pictures of the same subjects, things that have been photographed ad infinitum, just over and over and over.

So anyway, it was thursday, I had to mail the camera back the next day, and I hadn’t planned anything. But for some reason I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, finally drifted off around 4am, and then woke up to my alarm and realized I was going to be completely useless if I actually tried to work. So, instead, I took a sick day and went back to sleep. Woke up around one and decided to make use of the time I had. I called a lift and had it drop me off near chrissy field.

there’s definitely something about photographers that makes us want to both go to see the big stuff, the landmarks, the most interesting parts of the world, while also wanting to do something different. Go to a place that’s literally one of the most photographed objects in the world, and try to find something new or interesting to look at. It helps when the light is ‘bad’ because all the obvious sweeping views are cut off at the knees.

It also helped that I had a bunch of focal lengths to play with; 15, 21, and 50mm, with the 15 doing a lot more work than I’m used to doing with it. through-the-lens viewing is rad. I don’t want to be too anal retentive about most things, but my compositions are usually very precise. or at least I want things in the picture to be there I put them, not cut off weirdly at the edges.

But sometimes in the end you go out to the stupid place everyone else goes and you take the stupid picture you’ve seen a million times, just to get it out of your system, like a song stuck in your head. And along the way, since you’ve got the camera out, maybe you see a few other interesting things. Maybe the bad light is just mood, from the right angle. sometimes, just getting the camera out and putting it to your eye is enough to get the brain in gear.

of course, I don’t think anything here is terribly original. It’s not like I’m the first person to notice how cool the symmetry of the girders under the arch section of the bridge is, or the surface texture of the rust on these old anchor chains. Still: there are many like it, these are mine.

another art party

2023-08-08 08:40:30Z

Akhil does these pretty regularly; because of weird blog time dilation, this one is getting posted a month after the last one, but the parties themselves were more like 6 months apart. This one was a little more low-key; I knew maybe half the people, and we rode bikes to get there because it’s mad close. Close enough that when I realized I’d forgotten my cigar at home, I went back to get it. I showed three pictures; one from amsterdam (I know, I’ll start blogging those next) and two from running around shooting with the z8. I just really liked that camera.

I used the Z8 with a leica M mount adapter to shoot all of these; it did really well in pretty tricky lighting. Nothing is perfect (and no digital camera will ever have the highlight detail of color negative film, unfortunately), but this is great. The manual focus lenses also performed pretty well; I was worried the screen wouldn’t have the resolution to really nail focus, but all of this was wide open, and all of these are what I would call ‘acceptable’.

Which brings me to the big reveal, and why I’m publishing these now instead of something else: I don’t think I’m gonna be a Leica guy any more. On the internet, we joke about types of guys, there’s a wife guy, there’s the flashlight guy, and in photography circles, there’s the ‘leica man’. He drinks the finest coffees, he has only the best glass. Does he take photographs? Probably not! Can you tell I’ve never really liked that association? Love the cameras, hate the baggage that comes with them. Well. Sometimes love the cameras.

The M11, I was cautiously optimistic at first, but the slow to turn on thing just reminds me every time I pick it up that it’s not really up to snuff. I’m a quick draw artist, gotta get the picture now. if it’s on and ready it’s pretty capable, but I think I need some time away from it, because it’s not ready too much of the time. Hopefully Leica will address the boot time with a firmware update and I can come back to it, or maybe they’ll have a -p model that doesn’t have the silly always-open shutter. Maybe both! Who knows.

Anyway, good party. There were a couple musical acts, a couple short films. Very chill. I think there was a reading of some description that I didn’t get because I was outside smoking. My fault, sounded like a good story from where I was.

And then, I rode home.

shooting from the driver's seat

2023-07-29 21:16:02Z

Couple days ago (thursday?) I had to go into the city to pick up an air compressor. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a big shop tool. Powers other kinds of tools, like nail guns and die grinders and pretty much everything else. Nice to have around the shop. Anyway, I looked at the route and instead of taking me across the bay bridge, like I’m used to, it said that it was 10 minutes faster to go through marin, to 101, and then south over the Golden Gate. So that’s what I did.

Now normally, I would look at a set of directions like that and say, oh, it’s probably not worth saving ten minutes, or, surely it can’t be that much better, but this time, I’d just gotten a rented camera in the mail. I’m trying out the Nikon Z8 over the weekend, and so a creative ‘shortcut’ was just what the doctor ordered.

The z8 is a remarkable camera. The autofocus system is incredible, but also incredibly complex. I never really got into all the focus tracking continuous blah blah, even back when I shot an F5, so this thing might as well be an alien space ship from that perspective. When I put it in single point servo mode, though, it’s incredibly fast and accurate.

These pictures were all shot with that camera and the 40mm f/2 nikkor. This sample I like a bit better than the one that I rented with the Z7 when I tried that camera. From a moving car, sometimes things are a little blurry. I’ve always liked shooting from the car, driving or not, and this camera does it really well.

Everything about it is fast as fuck. turns on fast (looking at you, Leica), switches between back lcd and viewfinder fast, shoots 20 dang frames a second if you’re into that sort of thing. The exposure meter hysteresis, the time it takes to react to big swings in light values, is also super fast. This is important when the camera is in your lap, and you try to quick-draw to get a picture of something you’re passing on the road.

After this little jaunt, I put on an adapter that lets me use the camera with my m-mount lenses, and it’s actually also really good with those, just like, manually focusing. I wish there was some kind of focus confirmation, instead of just the edge detection it has. Maybe there is and I haven’t found that setting yet! who knows.

Anyway, yeah. more as it develops… probably back to leicaposting soon.

kj's ikebana class

2023-07-26 08:30:32Z

I wrote a thing about this class but I hate it (sometimes I am a bad writer!) and so here are some photos of my friend KJ’s ikebana flower arranging class. This was when I was in OKC last march, for Jason’s thing.

Trying not to think too hard and just push publish.

little walks for my little remaining mental health

2023-07-21 08:08:54Z

Been trying to get out on walks more often lately, not just like, the half mile to the little bodega I like, but longer peregrinations. This wasn’t recent, was in fact last year. The little walks, though, they do seem to help.

I haven’t been neglecting this here web site on purpose, I promise. A lot is going on, and also I seem to once again be in that place where I can’t make any photos I don’t hate. the long dark tea time of the soul. It’ll pass, and then I’ll look back at the stuff I was doing now, and be like, that wasn’t bad at all. Or maybe it is and I’ve finally lost the plot. Can’t lose it if you never had it, I suppose.

dolo, last year

2023-07-02 19:58:38Z

Some people would have had a day like this, taken one or two group selfies, posted them to instagram, and called it a day. I, on the other hand, took maybe a hundred pictures, waited six months, made selects from them, let them sit another two months, killed the duds (photos that just don’t work for whatever reason), did proper toning and exposure adjustment on the rest, and then now I’m posting them to my own damn web site.

Instagram is not my friend and it’s probably not yours either; this site, to steal a line from my friend Robin, “… doesn’t collect any information about you or your reading. It aspires to the speed and privacy of the written page.” That’s why it’s fast, despite using the biggest images I can get away with. There’s no bullshit loading that you don’t see. Anyway. Here are some nice pictures from a lovely day in the park with friends, sometime last year.

Some people might say, matt, why you gotta go so hard, and to them I say: I don’t know any other way to be. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do the thing. I picked up the camera when I was fourteen and I’ve been taking pictures seriously ever since.

art party at akhil's

2023-06-08 07:47:20Z

This was a great party. It had everything: a pitch deck for a sci-fi show, kimonos, live bands, a pot of soup (maybe it was chili?), hand drawn illustrations, comics, and photos by yours truly. On the walls, that is. Also I shot some pictures too. Ahkil (above, center) knows how to throw ‘em.

While I was there, everybody who had brought an art that wasn’t performance got to get up and say a few words. I said: “My photos are mostly about being in the right place at the right time. Perfection only lasts a moment. Anyway I’m glad to be here with you all right now.” I can’t think of a better way to sum up my work. Right place, right time. Serendipity by another name. Or maybe it’s finding what here and now is the right place and time for? Mostly it’s just a matter of looking and seeing.

This guy was really good: Byron Mayhew. Great guitar playing, good singing, original songs. Great energy.

Then there was the second band, John Turkey’s Nightmares. Solid rock ‘n’ roll. Less of a singer/songwriter vibe and more of a energetic explosion. Everybody was dancing about halfway into their set.

Here is a link to an installation photo of my stuff. 24x36” prints from my designjet. I just barely remembered to grab a photo of the photos at the end of the night, and it’s a little motion blurred, so it’s a link for the curious not a bloggable picture. We Have Standards.

Teotihuacán (cdmx 3, el penultimo dia)

2023-05-27 05:21:22Z

When I was in college, I had a professor that did a bunch of field work in Northern Mexico, I want to say in Chihuahua, but it may have been one of the other states. Anyway, besides relating to us what most of the people there really wanted in life (clear title to their land), he alsa told us that in the bars there, you never order ‘ultimo’ for the last drink of the night, because that would be the last drink ever.

Now this was the same guy that came up with the coyote-pendejo spectrum, and placed himself at the bottom intentionally, so maybe take that with a grain of salt, but I do like the idea. The implication, on the last real day of the trip, that there will be another. These photos, appropriately, are from the second to last day of this trip. It was the last day of substance, for sure.

Teotihuacán is a complex of three large pyramids, and many smaller temples and sites of archeological importance. I won’t bore you with a history lesson, except to say that the folks that built them saw their whole civilization collapse. It was the 6th largest city in the world at its peak, more than just a religious center or burial monument like the ones in Egypt.

Anyway, all of that was a long time ago, and now it’s a place where you can visit and be awed and a little sad that it’s all gone. We took an uber to the main entrance, and immediately got sold a tour on quad bikes, which was actually a pretty decent way to get around. They took us to some fun little shops, I bought sophie a gift, then we parked the quads and walked into the actual preserve, where there are no motor vehicles for the tourists.

It’s a big place. I don’t know if the pyramids are larger than the ones at Giza, but the walk is definitely longer. We walked from the back gate to the Pyramid of the Moon, by way of the Pyramid of the Sun, and then to the temple at the other end of the compound, which you get to by crossing a dozen pre-columbian staircases, up and down, both ways. My travelling companions were both fine. Me, that hasn’t seen the inside of a gym nor had a season of travel and being out-of-doors in far too long, well, I was pretty wiped.

We spent too long, well, went around to see everything we wanted to see, and by the time we got back to the quads, the last place on the quad tour was closed. The dude took us to the bus stop, where we decided discretion is the better part of getting back to the hotel and ordered an uber again. While we waited I drank a liter of gatorade and then another half a liter of water. Little bit dehydrated. The ride home was pretty uneventful; good light, sunset. The sign that pointed to Cairo, maybe not mocking me, but for sure a sign of something.

mexico city, pt 2

2023-05-21 00:59:33Z

Part two not day two; the days have run together. Pretty sure this was mostly Sunday, though. Something I meant to say in my essay yesterday but didn’t because I’m a bad writer (or rather at least someone who just publishes his first drafts) is just how green of a city the DF is. Huge parks, lots of trees. More than other cities? Definitely more green than NYC.

We visited a history museum, and it was pretty fascinating to see they way they tell the story; I studied the Mexican revolution in college (one of the three profs in my political science department did his doctoral work in Chihuahua), but of course I was reading english language, and thus american-slanted versions of the whole story. A set of facts isn’t a story, and so the story they told with basically the same facts was interesting.

For example, the Porfiriato, the post-french king nominal republic that is told in US history as a dictatorship in all but name, is regarded as a period of relative peace and prosperity, at least by the museum wall texts. I do wonder if there’s as much controversy over them there as there is here? Like the wall texts in many US museums that referred to my ancestors as ‘savages,’ sometimes adding ‘noble’. Not a huge fan of those myself.

After the museum, there was a nice walk through a park. The museum had a no food/drink policy, so immediately after getting out we were all dying of thirst. I drank a liter of gatorade and another half of water while we wandered towards lunch. Which was in the wildest food court I’ve ever been in. Outdoors, but with a bazillion umbrellas sort of interlocked like a Greek phalanx’s shields. Pleasantly shady underneath. So, outdoors-but-sheltered, and then the kicker: there was table service! Really, can’t be beat. Delicious food, too.

Then we got into a car and sped across the city. Well, relatively across the city. I don’t know. Our colleague Moses keeps an apartment there with his fiance, and they have access to a rooftop pool. They found out that we were in town and invited us over for an afternoon party at the pool. It was a great time; really lovely folks, I got to meet a bunch of the family etc. Beers were drank, cigars were smoked. I had forgotten my bathing suit, so our host offered to run across the street to wal-mart to get one. They brought back the biggest pair of trunks WalMart sold, and it was… barely big enough to get on. No pictures because I embarass myself enough as it is.

Then, a truly spectacular sunset, complete with stratocumulus clouds forming over other, distant parts of the city. I had a real hard time editing the pictures of the view down to just these two. If you held a gun to my head and made me pick between these two? not sure I could.

Anyway, on our last day, we went to Teotihuacan. But that’s the next post…

mexico city, pt 1

2023-05-18 07:18:54Z

So, this is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my last post: editing is hard, so I’m splitting the photos from my four (five?) day trip to Mexico City across three posts. I don’t even feel bad about it.

Any reportage like this is necessarily just a tiny fraction of a moment in the life of a city. W Eugene Smith, the famous, the legend, went to make a story about Pittsburgh. Initially, he was supposed to shoot for a month, come back with 100 pictures. He ended up staying for two years. He still considered it incomplete at the end.

No shade on Pittsburgh, it’s a fine city and I was happy to live near it during part of my childhood. But it’s a small city. And if that took one of the best documentary photographers to ever live a couple years to come away feeling like he hadn’t done the subject justice, then there’s no way I’m going to get anything but a tiny whiff of a place as big as Mexico City.

What was that like? Well, it was like every other place I’ve been in Mexico, but more. The Monument to the Revolution (next two images) was definitely built by people that had seen pyramids and were unafraid to build very large monuments. Very cool to go up in and see the view from the top. Friend/co-worker Maria was also there, which helped quite a lot as she’s fluent in spanish and I can never seem to not mix in portuguese. Also on the trip but not with us that evening was Josh, who’s been my boss’ boss for two jobs now, and Todd, who was speaking at a conference (which was also the nominal reason for the trip; the extra days were on our own dime and well worth it).

Also, just a lot of people? Think of Tokyo, or New York: millions of people living right up next to each other, doing every kind of human activity possible. There were definitely more and less dense areas, and the area we were staying in (Coyoacán) was definitely like, a nice part of town. Gardens and parks and good food, plus a nice plaza with those wolf (coyote?) statues in the fountain. Couple good coffee shops within walking distance of the hotel, that sort of thing. Also: great tacos. Everywhere I’ve been in Mexico that wasn’t a tourist spot has had its own unique take on tacos, and they’re all delicious.

These photos go through the first full day, plus the following morning (I think? the timeline is a little fuzzy and I didn’t keep field notes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). I know I took that photo of the tree in the morning, and then we went off and did stuff. But that’s in the next post.

a two hour tour

2023-05-08 07:36:37Z

these are from last year, possibly the first time I came down to Santa Barbara for work, but maybe the second time. Not really sure. A bunch of the team came in at the same time so we could all meet each other and work in the same room for a bit. Coincidentally, I’m in SB right now for the same reason, 13 months later. I dragged my personal laptop down here just so I could blog while I was away from home. That’s not true I also brought it for Netflix. Anyway.

Had a thought today, as I was in the plane while we descended over the pacific. The approach to SBA is partly over water, and affords really nice views of the shore backed up by mountains. There was a perfect distance where the sky and the land and the sea were all even, and the photo naturally worked. The whole flight was one of those where the photos just jumped at me, so look out for those some time soon. Or later. Because the right distance is important.

When I’m taking a photo, I have to visualize, that is, kind of imagine what it’ll look like as a finished image. It’s mostly emotional, a response to the potential of the scene. It’s also something I have to be careful with, because the emotions I feel, as a person taking a picture, can be out of joint with the situation, but that’s another essay. So I take pictures by feeling.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.

The Waking, Theodore Roetke

And anyway, I also edit by feeling, at least at first. What makes it into the first broad set of selects is a simple ‘yes’. I take that and then refine it later. This set of pictures started out as 60, and you see here 12. So it’s not a small amount of work to decide what goes into any given post. This is where proper distance comes in.

As I’m editing, it’s important to see what’s in the picture, not what I wanted to see when I was taking it. It’s best if I can’t remember the previsualization at all. That way I can select the photos based on what works. BUT. If I try to do this too soon after a shoot, it’s a lot harder to let go of the things that I thought would be really good while shooting. It’s a kind of attachment that is hard to let go of.

In professional circles, they have the luxury of another person to do the photo editing. Sometimes several people. Photographer takes the pictures, sends in everything (or maybe a set of selects, I’ve never really worked with a photo editor). The editor can then assemble the photos into a story. They can do this quickly, because they’re not burdened with the emotions from shooting.

Me though, I work alone. Mostly because I don’t want to pay someone to edit my photos; the perspective of a good photo editor, just like an editor for writing, is invaluable. I’m about to start on a new project, and I might see about finding an editor to work with for it. Might be better for it.

a walk in a storm

2023-05-04 08:04:35Z

These are from the trip to OKC last month; I was staying in Mesta Park (well, not the park but the neighborhood). Decided to walk and get some dinner, and there was a huge storm cloud off to the east. If you’re not familiar with the weather in the middle, you might think that was cause for alarm, but almost as sure as water flowing down hill, storms in Oklahoma move west to east. This one was odd in that it was moving mostly to the south, but with a slight drift east also. I didn’t get rained on at all.

I should probably make a list of stuff to post here. I had a bunch of ideas for posts, photos I could put up, but that was a week ago and I have no idea what they were. I have a few photos from more recently, and probably a ton on the camera, and the stuff from mexico city, which will probably be two posts even though I know it would be better to make a really tight edit and put them all out in one post. One for the city and one for the pyramids seems fair, right? And then there’s a bunch of stuff in the backlog I haven’t touched. So. yeah.

I used to use the quick collection as a ‘stack’ to pull from, but now I don’t have that luxury. I have to make my own stack. I think the improvements to ingestion are probably worth it, but remembering stuff is hard. maybe I should make a blog notebook of ideas for things to write and photo sets I should post? They never line up that well, but maybe I could make the themes overlap a little.

It is a little weird to be blogging in the year of our lord 2023. It’s just an easy way to share photos that doesn’t involve becoming someone else’s product. I suppose I could do a newsletter? but nah, email sucks.

Driftwood 2022

2023-04-27 01:17:12Z

What can I say about Driftwood, year two? It was kind of perfect, in that way that throwing the same party all over again never is. I suppose the setup is part of it, so I’ll start there. In the hottest part of the year, out on the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta (“The Delta” to its friends), we all got together again for a weekend of swimming in and floating on the water, music and friends and good times.

To get there, you drive onto a car ferry because there’s no bridge. There was cell phone signal this year, but it’s pretty far removed from the world. Haul in your water, food, ice, tent, floaties, party favors, and haul out your trash. Our friend Jack has a plot on Bradford Island he graciously lets us come out to.

Jack’s place burned over the winter; the outhouse he had was gone, and a lot of his infrastructure was damaged, but he still had some solar, and threw up a new bathroom in a better spot. It was a lot clearer this year. kind of bigger open space, as opposed to just having a little area cleared. The main structure he had, an elevated deck and cabin, also made it through the fire, so we still had a place to cook and put up the PA.

It was also the first time Sophia played a set in ‘public’. Half an hour, in front of a dozen people, but I think it counts. She played for… 45 minutes? But all recordings of sets at Driftwood are cursed, so you’ll just have to imagine a 45 minute drum and bass set. Or you can go to this SoundCloud Mix where she recreated it later.

Speaking of cursed recordings, OTHA played for four? six? hours after that, just a truly epic journey of a set. We laughed, we cried, we sat and stared at the stars. Then, his hard drive crashed. Possibly after we left the island, I’m not clear on the finer points of it all. Technology. So you’ll also have to imagine the rest, too.

the new camera (M11)

2023-04-21 08:02:09Z

Just a quick post; these are from the first day I had the new camera (Leica M11) and took it out in the world a little. My little walk for sanity, as I’ve come to think of it. I’ve had it a month now, and I’ve got some opinions. With one notable exception, everything is better than the M10 was. Resolution, obviously, but that’s not even that important to me; I’ve had enough pixels since the d700 gave me 12MP. The battery is bigger, such that a whole day’s shooting will likely only require one. The menus are simplified, easy to use, and the wifi connection to my phone seems more reliable, too. The optical viewfinder is the same, excellent, the just best rangefinder. Live View is more responsive, both on the back display and through the Visoflex EVF (More on that in a minute). The shutter lag is the same, or at least I can’t tell a difference; if the camera is ready, and you’re fast enough, it’ll get the shot.

That is the camera’s one flaw though, that you have to make sure it’s awake. you turn it on and have to wait 3-5 seconds for it to be ready to take a picture, and what’s worse, the shutter opens and the viewfinder lines light up but it actually needs another half second to be ready. 3 seconds is an eternity. And the wake from sleep is also slow, on the order of 2ish seconds. Leica: please, dear god, figure your shit out. Nikon, canon, sony, even my dang Ricoh GR3, all get this right, ready to go in under half a second. The nikon is ready to shoot faster than I can roll my finger from the on switch to the shutter button. I feel like this is something I could fix with a couple weeks with the source code ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

A could other minor things: the internal memory is nice to have and has already saved my bacon once. I only took one card with me to OKC for a week, and that card started acting up on day one. 64gb, as it turns out, is plenty for a week in Oklahoma. ~~The rear screen glass is nothing special; I can say this because mine is already cracked.~~ Edit: turns out it was a screen protector the previous owner installed, which I discovered after my screen protector also cracked. Moral of the story: screen protectors suck.

a few landscapes on the way to OKC

2023-04-11 03:03:49Z

I wrote an essay to go with these last night, describing the parade of small indignities that happened while I was in transit, crossing SEVERAL MOUNTAIN RANGES in the time it took to watch a couple movies, but I decided I’ll just keep those to myself. Who cares? I’m here, the thing I was here for went fine today, and I’ve got a week to hang out.

Dad was looking at my blog earlier today and he thought there weren’t enough landscapes. I felt OK about that, but also I don’t just take photos of people, so here. A bunch of photos of not-people.

third wall salon

2023-04-06 05:32:45Z

This was one of those nights that it was just such a privilege to be there. Picking up the camera and using it opens strange and wonderful doors, and this was one of them. Marisa, founder of Third Wall, above and below, is a total rock star, someone I know through Odd Salon, and puts on this thing. I had little to no idea what it was, but saw on facebook they were hoping to get someone to come and take some still pictures, and someone to take some video, and I was happy to volunteer.

Marisa is a real rock star, incredible voice and energy, trained as an operatic voice if I recall correctly. It was her show, her idea, although this was the first one they’d had since 2019. The same family that hosted the last one was hosting this one, but they had since moved house.

Anyway. The idea was: back in the day a lot of music happened in ‘salons’ with live players, sometimes even the composers themselves, demoing new ideas, fragments, etc. And everybody had a whole cultural context in which the pieces were experienced; they knew the history of the players and the composers, who was sleeping with who, who studied with who else, etc etc.

So what Third Wall events are is introducing some of that context with the music played by people that also know that history. The theme for this one was “Unrequited,” about, you guessed it, unrequited love. Really, a fascinating way to spend an evening. I don’t know when the next one will be but they have an instagram.

drink n draw and after

2023-04-02 22:55:17Z

These were taken last fall, at the last drink n draw I went to. I think I’ve talked about it before? anyway, always good energy at these. I should go to them more, but thursday is also the day SFMOMA is open late, so I’m usually in the city. Still.

Yeah, this has been sitting in drafts for two days, time to post it and move on. The world is weird and getting weirder by the minute.

c&r come for drinks and vinyl

2023-03-27 08:11:02Z

Sophie is gonna hate this one, because she hates photos of herself, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ she’s in Amsterdam and can’t get mad at me. Or she could, but she won’t be back for a week and by then this post will be pushed way down the page where she won’t see it. Shh don’t tell her.

I thought I had posted these earlier, maybe they’re in a draft post somewhere. This was a saturday after we got back; the occasion was to try out a new book of cocktail recipes they had gotten us for christmas. Vinyl and Booze, and we had a bunch of vinyl and a bunch of fancy cocktail ingredients. I tasted stuff but didn’t have full drinks, because of my gout. Still, fun, and the excuse to get together and listen to music was quite nice. The proposed ratio of one (fancy, mostly hard liquor) drink per side was a bit much for everyone that was having full glasses, but we managed.

The M11 came this week. I bought it at the end of last week and it was shipped ground (dang ebay sellers). But it was whole and as advertised, like new. less than a thousand clicks on the shutter, not a mark on it. I charged up the battery and I’ve been shooting with it since Saturday (friday I was out of commission mostly due to insomnia). So far, so good. I want to make a shutter lag testing rig, just a bit of software to see how long it takes me to react and get a picture. I can test it with cameras that feel fast and feel slow and put numbers to my feelings.

The feeling, right now, is the M11 is fast enough, but that might change at any moment. I haven’t shot any real fast action with it yet. It’s not a sports camera but getting images à la sauvette is not a slow camera game. TBD, and more as it develops.

probably too many pictures of Puerta Vallarta, Feb 2022

2023-03-22 07:59:58Z

Oh boy, these pictures. Took a lot of doing to get them edited down to what you see here. I started with about 60. Anyway, that’s not really why I’ve been absent around these parts. Just a lot going on. Travel! Friends in town! Parties! All of which will eventually probably end up on this here blog.

Had a bad moment there for a second where nothing was working and I couldn’t figure out why; turns out, the disk my server lives on only has so much capacity, and I blew through that and then some. at 70gb, there was nothing left. The main culprit was a piece of gallery software I no longer use, which had, in the past three years, amassed 60gb in one log file. rm‘d that, restarted some things, and robert is your mother’s brother. Killed the gallery processes, while I was at it. I really should look at making a proper setup, separate app hosting and whatnot, but I like my little server. Like a hand raised dairy cow. That I forget to milk sometimes.

About this trip: Puerta Vallarta is a really lovely little spot, although it exists, from what I can tell, purely for tourists. 50 years ago (70 maybe?) it was a sleepy fishing village. Now it’s something else entirely, although there are still some fishermen (and really good seafood besides). We were there with our friends Cason and Ryan, and met some new friends, Tom and Brandon. (there were a bunch of other nice folks we met who’s names I didn’t catch, if that’s you, sorry, I’ll buy you a slushie at blondie’s sometime).

Anyway, as I was saying, these were a bitch to edit. It’s a very pretty place, PV. Lots of white painted buildings, gorgeous sunsets, nice beaches, the whole bit. Even at midday, there are all sorts of interesting textures (see above). Not only that, I was having a good time, in a good groove and managed to shoot a lot. So I had a lot of pictures I liked.

Anyway. I managed to cut it to these 15. If I’d had more time, I probably could have made several different coherent edits of 8 from the top 30ish. I like these because there aren’t any that are what I think of as really plain. Like, I had a couple in the edit that were straight shots of the beach, either at sunset or midday. The sort of thing you’d expect in a photo essay about a beach destination. So I cut ‘em.

Took a long time though, and making the even tighter edit would have taken even longer, and I really just needed to put something out and move on with my life. I’ll show my friends the looser edit, leave this one here, and try to do better next time.

one camera, two nights

2023-03-01 08:49:10Z

These two nights weren’t one after the other, they were instead a couple weeks apart, but the pictures were right next to each other in my editor, and they sort of fit together, I think. Mid-October, these. Both nights I only had the ricoh, the dance club because I was afraid they had a policy on interchangeable lens cameras, and the church photos because I was just walking to the store.

I haven’t quite run out of super epic awesome pictures in the backlog, but I think there’s a whole lot more like this coming. I probably will have a whole dang book of photos of ‘just walking to the store’ or ‘just popping out for lunch’.

Then again, I’m going to Mexico City in a couple days, so I’ll probably get some good stuff there. Mexico is always great. I need to find the photos from Puerta Vallarta last year and edit those… anyway. I’m behind on posting. Nobody cares. I’m going to keep doing it anyway and not worry about it.

pke august 2021

2023-02-20 09:12:16Z

dang it’s been a long time. PKE (Phixed Kings Expeditions) is cool but somehow I only make it out to one once every other year or so. buncha kids who get out of bed early on a saturday or sunday and go ride 60 or 70 (sometimes 100!) miles. This one was pretty flat but I still ended up dropping and getting to the end like half an hour after everyone. I’m moderately cursed, I’ve been to two or three of them but always the morning of I can’t find some important article of bike gear. This time it was my shoes. Rode clipless pedals in street shoes for like 65 miles.

Like their name suggests, they’re mostly fixed gear riders, which I respect, but I can’t keep up on my fixie; this ride I think I had the gravel bike. The only reason I ride a gravel bike is I like squishy tires. This was a fun ride but by the end I could barely sit on my saddle. Somehow I’m always doing things I’m not in shape for.

Anyway. Not a ton to say. Eighteen months ago? I’ll do something recent next, promise.

LP Giobbi (with coco and breezy) last april

2023-02-16 10:10:11Z

These photos were the result of being in the right place at the right time. My neighbor Lauren was producing this tour and this was the last show. I think that was her role; the music world is a mystery to me, especially how the business side gets done, but she was running the show. We had met in the months (Years? God time is weird) prior, and had neighborly drinks in her back yard a couple times. Lauren knew I was a photographer, and so when her photog bailed at the last minute, she asked if I wanted to come shoot. Free house show in the city, with an all access pass, put on by one of the coolest people I know? Say less, as the kids say.

There was an opener, Coco and Breezy, but apart from the first pic, I didn’t get a ton of good shots of them. I was mainly there for the headliner, LP Giobbi. I shot for basically her whole set. Up and down the stairs, moving around the stage, doing the whole thing. Two cameras, the Nikon with the 24-120 and the Leica, shooting away for a couple hours. I think I took a cigar break in the middle, went outside and burned one, sat and rested my knees. I am not a kid, and my body makes sure I know it.

Lauren and LP also co-founded a non-profit, Femme House, which is worth mentioning because I think this show was a Femme House show. (Edit to add: pretty sure it was).

FEMME HOUSE fosters more equitable opportunity for women and gender-expansive individuals in the technical and behind the scenes areas of music. We are creating the future producers, mixers, engineers, DJs, artists, and executives of the industry by providing education and scholarships, cultivating community, propagating visual representation, and offering professional development opportunities.

It reminds me a bit of ElixirBridge, which was all about bringing in underrepresented groups into my industry, also through free classes. Femme House is way cooler and has a better web site, but I digress. Anyway.

I did make a classic blunder with these, in that the tour manager (not Lauren, some dude) asked for 50 photos, and I dutifully made an edit of approximately 50 photos (out of about 600 exposures). They were all passable, but really there are only so many photos you can get of someone performing; any more and I’m repeating myself and muddying the record with lesser pictures. The 9 here is probably the edit I should have sent, maybe 15 or 20 max.

I sent them 5o, unfortunately, and I never heard anything and never saw them get used even for a social post. I didn’t feel great about it at the time, not because I recognized my mistake, but because I thought they didn’t like the pictures. I spent the last ten months or so thinking, oh well, screwed the pooch on that one, I guess those photos weren’t any good. Then last night I figured the time had come to look at them and see if I could salvage anything for a blog post. I don’t care what they think: I fucking killed it on this one.

It’s also possible that because this was the last stop on the tour that these photos just didn’t matter or get looked at at all. Maybe they’re vastly different from the visual style of the other tour photos and so didn’t get used; I didn’t have time to look for any of the tour press at the time so I have no idea if these work with the rest. Could be a lot of things. Lauren moved away coincidentally around then and we haven’t had backyard whiskeys since, so I may never know. At least now, through the magic of blogging, these get to be seen.

photos from after a ball game 2021

2023-02-14 07:19:18Z

I took these one evening after a ball game my then current employer had taken us all to, “us all” being like four or five people? Giants won if I recall correctly. I think we walked all the way to Rickhouse? Anyway. There were drinks. A good time was had. It all came crashing down a few weeks later when they fired me out of the blue, just as I was getting some traction with typescript. Like I said, 2021 was a rough one.

Just pushing publish, trying not to second guess myself too much.

how long will it take

2023-02-05 09:20:19Z

The photos in this post, by the way, are completely unrelated to the text except that I took them at the beginning of September, four months ago, and I'm just now posting them. They're from ElixirConf, in Denver for 2022. This one: leaving Oakland, with Mount Tam just visible in the distance.

I’ve talked about making stuff in the past but something that’s always confounded me is just how long it takes to get anything done. If I had to define a process for ‘how to make anything’, it’d look something like this:

design the shape of the thing
figure out the parts you’ll need to make the thing
buy the parts you can, make what you can’t
assemble the parts into the thing

Anyone who’s made stuff knows that any one of these steps can take an unlimited amount of time. And step three is actually fractal; any given part can be made up of its own parts. In my bags, usually there’s a complex front piece that has pockets, and organizers in those pockets; the organizers are made of of several pieces of fabric in turn, et cetera.

On the way to the conference hotel, there was a random sandstorm. Didn't happen again, but probably helped the sunsets.

Anyway, I’m what’s known as a chaos muppet. Think Fozzie the bear versus Bert or Animal versus Kermit. It could be the ADHD, or it could just be me (the fuzzy line between disorder and personality is a different essay). And I’ve always thought I paid some penalties for that, in terms of getting stuff done. Like, if only I was organized, I would be able to just move through the steps in an orderly fashion, and turn out finished products (bags, photos, blog posts, what have you) by rote, no problem.

One of the things I love about youtube is some real geniuses of different trades have channels and produce videos about making stuff. There’s folks like Quinn Dunki machining on home setups not dissimilar to my studio, all the way up to big production shops like Adam Booth. Some are explicitly instructional, like Ron Covell (he of the metalworking books, his channel is Bob Ross for sheet metal I swear), and some are more ‘this is what we’re doing in the shop’ but with enough detail that if you’re conversant you can figure out how to reproduce what they do.

I took a version of this picture every day; this was the best one.

Paul Brodie is one of the latter. Just a really excellent fabricator, who had a business building custom bike frames, was apparently renowned for such, and is now in retirement up in Canada, doing one off custom work on bikes and motorcycles. “Build whole engines from scratch” levels of fabrication. Brodie’s shop is immaculate, organized to a T. He’s the picture of an order muppet, and he has every tool he could want at his disposal. Lathe and mill and all sorts of jigs accumulated over years of making things out of metal; TIG and MIG welders, as well as Oxy/Acetalene torch equipment, and plenty of material in his stock racks. It’s not a huge shop, but plenty of space to do the work he does.

He recently posted a video of making a fender mount for a rare Honda race bike. Well, it was a kit bike that was raced or something, that part doesn’t matter. The fender mount was a single piece of sheet aluminum, bent in a big radius to go around the tire, plus some smaller bits of tubing with little welded bosses to make it meet with the mounting points. At the end of the video, he had a little bit where he was like, “Guess how long it took me to make this?” because it was a client project, he had tracked his hours.

My initial guess was 8 hours. Not only is he in a good shop, but he’s old, and contrary to what you might think, older craftsmen move faster. There’s an economy of movement and lack of going down wrong paths that means they don’t have to like, redo work or stand and think about the order of assembly or anything, it’s just ‘the way it worked last time’ to do any given task. The big reveal, at least to me, was that it took him 19 hours to build this one fender mount. So I guess I should just take it easy on myself. How long will it take? As long as it needs.

new year's eve 2023

2023-02-03 00:17:12Z

So this is from the second party of our new year’s. We had a couple friends over earlier in the evening, and those pictures may or may not be on the other camera, but I downloaded these first. The friends party was over and we were supposed to be getting in bed because there was a morning plane to Albuquerque that we were supposed to be on, and the whole week of adventure after that.

Instead, when Sophie texted our neighbor to wish them a happy new year, they said, we’re having a party, come over. So we did. There was a fire outside and karaoke inside, along with a bunch of potluck dishes, and punch that was mostly booze with sugar to cover it up. It was actually really nice to get to hang out, even though we paid for it the next day.

These are in black and white and still a bit motion blurred, in case you’re wondering, because my little pocket camera was at ISO 8000 and shutter speeds were in the 1/4 to 1/2 second range. I’m good at hand-holding but I can’t make the world be still.

last day out in Florence

2023-01-31 09:31:03Z

this wasn’t the last day of the trip, but it was the last day I was out and about; I tested positive for covid on returning to our room that night and so spent the rest of the trip isolating. I went to Boboli Gardens on the recommendation of someone from the Tabs supporters’ discord server, and it was a great place to spend an afternoon. In hindsight, choosing to be outside all day, and not close to anyone (no crowds), was a good call.

I feel like I could narrate the whole experience, but I also feel like it’s mostly here in the photos? Sometimes it’s nice to just let them do the talking.

one thing I will note, a lot of these obelisks had these little turtles at the base, holding them up. No idea what the symbolism is there, although I do remember the ‘turtles all the way down’ anecdote from Stephen Hawking, and of course discworld’s turtles.

And that’s it for the vacation photos, at least for that trip. A bunch of other things have happened since then, don’t worry. The posting will continue.

day off, fall 2021

2023-01-28 00:54:34Z

think this was when I was between jobs one of several times. There’s a part of me that wants to abandon all these really old photos, declare a sort of backlog bankruptcy and have a clean slate. Then there’s a bloody minded part of me that says post every photo. Both of those voices, if they were those cartoon embodied conscious, would be devils, one on each shoulder. I know how I got to a place where my backlog was almost two years long (2021 was a real bastard) but I don’t think there’s anything for it but to keep posting.

Edit to add: I remembered the occasion for these photos. It was the first day the cable cars reopened in San Francisco, and I was off, so I decided to go and do a slightly touristy thing while I had time. They’re a fully ridiculous way to travel, but at the same time fairly enjoyable. Better than walking up those steep hills.

first day in florence

2023-01-27 08:43:27Z

The first day we had to spend in florence, as opposed to just stopping to sleep there before rushing onward to Sardinia, was kind of a slow start. I was alone, because Sophie had caught some kind of bug and stayed in the hotel to rest. 7 days of raving was bound to catch up to us. I felt fine, so I went out walking. Brought her back some breakfast, and then continued on my way.

I wandered around and took bad photos of narrow streets in deep shadow close to our bnb. Got myself some breakfast, coffee and a croissant in a little cafe that was arty and pretentious in a way they never seem to be here any more; local art on the walls, a few benches and simple concrete tables. Very good coffee, like everywhere that served espresso in Italy. I sat in the little cafe and tried to make a plan for the day, a plan which I mostly threw out the window. The second cappuccino finally got my brain into gear and I was off, ready to actually move and groove. See the sights, take some photos.

I started by walking towards the Duomo, ate a really good ham sandwich at a place down the street from the place everyone was in line for, and just generally wandered in that area for a bit. Lot of high end shops, expensive watches and jewelry, fashion houses that have an outpost in Florence, that sort of thing. I was not in a mood to shop, not particularly, but the people watching is always pretty good in these areas.

Did I do anything else of note that day? Wandered, bought groceries, went back to our airbnb, which was right by the main train station. Sophie wasn’t feeling well still, and a test confirmed: it was COVID. There was a couch in our room, so I slept there and tried to isolate. I’d also gotten my bivalve booster a couple weeks before, so thought I might be safe. Turns out I was just a couple days behind her.

The long essay (about how long it takes to build something) is coming. It currently has that problem that a lot of my anecdotes have, in that it doesn’t have a neat ending. My friend Alex used to say, when I’d tell a story like that, that I should end it with ‘then I found five dollars,’ so people a) know it’s over and b) think there was a point to my meandering. The point really is just the meandering, though, and nothing else. Once, I did find $5 in the street, and sent him a picture of it. I think I laughed about that for a whole day.

Roy's with Kawan

2023-01-24 09:12:27Z

Still whittling down the last few images for the first day in Florence post, currently at 27 images, which is too many by my reckoning. These are from 2021, I don’t remember why we were out wandering, but I do remember it was a hot day. We stepped into the grove at Roy’s and it was like ten degrees cooler under the shade of those big trees.

rome, even more briefly

2023-01-21 11:16:34Z

Back to the Italy photos for a few more posts. I haven’t been slacking on blogging, but instead of posting I’ve been working on an overhaul of the edit page. Just spent some time getting websockets to work on the server. Now I’m going to go to bed. Please enjoy these photos of Rome, the day we couldn’t get into the pantheon because they only do tickets in advance and we were also very tired. Florence is next, and maybe an essay about just how fucking long it takes to get anything done at all if you care about the output.

the Quixotic Adventure

2023-01-12 09:20:02Z

I might be a little bit nuts. Last week, I went on a trip, my favorite kind of trip. Fly to Albuquerque, get picked up, ride to santa fe, sleep six hours, pick up a rental car, drive to oklahoma. Sleep 7 hours, hang out with my Dad for the first time in a year. Hang out with my friend KJ, also first time in at least a year. Sleep four hours. Drive to texas, stop in a rest area and sleep half an hour. Drive the rest of the way back to Santa Fe, arriving after the rental car place closes. Go sleep for 8 hours, return the rental car key, have breakfast, drive to abq again, get on a plane, and fly home. if that sounds like a whirlwind, it definitely was. I spent more time in transit in those five days than I did sleeping, and at least 17 hours driving.

A normal person would have thought ‘three days in santa fe, great! I can have all the green chile breakfast burritos I want.’ Me, though, I thought, ‘huh, that’s only an 8 hour drive from OKC, I can get a car and see people there too.’

On the drive east, I was thinking of it as “Matt’s Quixotic Adventure” because, firstly, there are a lot of windmills in eastern new mexico and the texas panhandle, which I learned is called the llano estacado, and not a lot besides that. There are signs for the big steak in Amarillo, roadside attractions, and one large cross. A lot of cows in one spot, and a lot of grass (the brown kind you don’t smoke). If you’re lucky, there are good clouds; sometimes, if you’re luckier, you’ll see herds of antelope on the western edge of the Llano.

Also, COVID ruined a bunch of our travel plans last year. Our visit to Oklahoma City to see relatives for 2021/2022 Winter break was marred by a couple different exposures that meant I didn’t get to see anyone we’d come to see. Sophie was a little luckier, but only because we saw her family on day one of the trip, outside, on an unseasonably warm day. Then, this last thanksgiving, Sophie’s mom got COVID and had to cancel her trip out to see us. So this trip (5 days start to finish) was to make up for all that and see everyone for at least a few hours.

But something else about this trip appealed to me, and that’s the very thin margins it operated on. This occurred to me on the drive west, as I was leaving Oklahoma City on four hours’ sleep. The whole trip was like a Rube Goldberg machine, where if everything goes just right, there aren’t any problems and it’s sort of amazing to see the toast get buttered or whatever at the end of all the steps.

What actually happened was there was a drift away from the plan, minute by minute. For example, the second day, I got the car and then went to Meow Wolf with Sophie, dropped her off at her mom’s place, then got on the road maybe half an hour later than I wanted to. That drive was pretty uneventful; good clouds, a nice sunset (see pictures). I lost an hour when I crossed the border into Texas (because time zones). Smooth sailing and I got to my Dad’s house around 11:30pm instead of 10. I sat in the living room for a minute, and after we talked for just a minute, he said, “Oh, you’re that tired, let’s just go to bed,” and I was so exhausted I just did.

Before I know it, it’s 36 hours later and I’m back out at the edge of what’s possible, driving into the night, vents blowing cold air, tense from all the adrenaline metabolites and cortisol and caffeine and b vitamins and whatever the hell ‘taurine‘ is.

It’s not a good place to be, but it’s a place I feel at home. I’m fully aware of how silly it is. The silliness is part of what appeals to me, too. I could easily have planned a trip that had more days in it (except I don’t have more time off to use), but something about adding those extra margins, padding for safety, would have removed all the fun. Well, not all the fun, because the parts where I got to see family and friends were the point of the trip and fun in and of themselves, but adding that extra edge just makes the time I had with them a little bit brighter. Feels sharper, somehow. It’s not to see if I’m ‘up to the challenge’ or anything macho, it’s just to see what happens. The edges are where the interesting things happen, after all.

party the next morning

2023-01-02 08:06:14Z

and then sometimes on the last night of a week of partying, something magic happens. We met up with some folks from home-ish that Sophie had met out at a show in San Francisco. They invited us back to theirs for a little more party.

We were walking up the hill away from the club as the sun was coming up. Their rental pad was close, and we came in and chilled for a while. Someone put some music on, people were mugging for my camera, and luckily the auto-features did thir thing, because I was in no state to do other than push the button and laugh.

What else am I supposed to do when golden hour comes to me?

Evening party, Sun and Bass (and a sunrise)

2022-12-29 08:10:30Z

Yeah, we’re still working our way through these. Evening party. Leaning into the blur, trying to get a feeling more than a precise record. And then somehow it was sunrise? Good times.

in yosemite valley, end of june

2022-12-26 23:13:49Z

Trying to avoid the cliches here. There are so. many. But also, it’s an incredibly beautiful place. These were all with the rented rig, a GFX 50sii. Incredible dynamic range. 8 or ten stops into the shadows still has details. Anyway. enough camera faffing. Photos!

The bridge on the right of the frame was in deep shadow, but I was able to dodge it out and balance the frame; it was _black_ in the original frame.

No idea what these people were looking at. just wandering in the meadow next to el cap.

tunnel view (lol)

It's been a year

2022-12-22 11:03:26Z

So, I have a problem. Last year, I posted on this here blog 25 times. At the same time, I basically stopped posting elsewhere; my instagram feed hasn’t had a new post (as opposed to a story that dissappears in 24 hours) in 9 months. Twitter is dead to me, and has been since the space grifter tendered his offer. My last post is a meme that says “JUST WALK OUT” and “REAL WINNERS QUIT“. Other people’s servers seem like a dead end. But the problem is I really want to share more pictures with the world.

It’s like this: I take a lot of photos. Almost every day, certainly every time I leave the house, I take a camera with me, and photos happen. Sometimes there are people in them, sometimes not. I do this because I am compelled to, not for any other reason. I’ve done it for so long now that I’m a bit lost when I forget and leave my camera at home. Some of the people in the photos are people I care about, sometimes they’re just people I come across, but either way, I think there’s some responsibility built into the act of making a photograph, at least for me. Gotta share that shit. At least the good ones.

AND. And, I have a huge backlog, more than 18 months at this point. I’ve posted on this here blog 25 times this year, and the pile keeps growing growing and growing. I don’t think I can manage to post every day, but I think that’s OK because I don’t do something worth sharing every day. Rusty does his newsletter four times a week, and it’s his full time job. I’m not comparing my work to his (see the preview image and old friend li’s practice guide), but I feel like setting expectations at less than a full time job seems reasonable.

So: next year, two posts a week. Monday? Thursday? Who knows? will there be long essays? Just photos? photos with captions? I haven’t decided! Will it count if I just put up a picture of a crab? No! but almost everything else would. I might even do single image posts. A picture, a caption, BOOM, that’s half the week. Maybe I’ll get really spicy and add comments. Remember blog comments? Sometimes they were great! They never were on my blog, but maybe this time.

All of the photos in this post are from a trip we took to Yosemite last June that was supposed to be over the 4th, but ended up not making it that long; half our group got covid just prior to the trip, so it was just me and Sophie. I rented a GFX 50sii, which was amazing and I'll probably do another post later with photos from in the park. Unbelievable amounts of shadow detail and clarity. Really [liked](https://matt.pictures/post/a_good_shoot) working [with it](https://matt.pictures/post/pride_lasers).

sun and base day party

2022-12-02 07:58:42Z

It took me a while to ‘find a way in’ visually, during the festival. I wasn’t there trying super hard the whole time, but it took 3 or 4 days to get to a place where I felt like I was capturing some of the real frenetic energy of the music and the dancing with my photos. I was stuck on the idea that I could somehow do it just with composition and subject, but of course there’s also light and time and timing.

Even after the workshop in July, that was mostly about blur (and I need to post some of those photos and talk about it, there were some real revelations there), it still took me a while to relax and just do the thing that was in front of me. Letting go of what I think the picture should be in a technical sense (well exposed, focused, sharp), and making pictures with some emotional content. After noodling about it for the last four months, I’m no longer sure the only emotion in a picture is in the blurry parts, as the workshop had it, but it’s a very powerful tool.

These have been sitting here as a draft for two weeks, and I’m not sure I have that much more to say about them. Just going to push publish and move on to the next set.

Reviewing the Ricoh GR3x (Arrival in Sardinia)

2022-11-07 09:16:50Z

So, first off, my use case isn’t the typical GR3 user. There are lots of people out there reviewing it as a street photography camera, a discrete shooter, and things of this nature, and I feel like the subject has been beaten to death. While I do some work that could sort of be called ‘street’, it’s more in the genre of walks with a camera, and I live where that happens in the street. I’ve discovered lately that I have no interest in not being seen.

My perspective on the camera, then, is how well it works as a camera to take with me when I don’t want to drag the whole bag along. I’ve tried a number of these cameras in the past (most recently the Sony RX100 IV) and usually I end up between somewhat and very disappointed in them. I keep coming back though, because those pro bodies I like, the Leicas and Nikons, are fucking heavy. Also, a secondary use of the camera is to take into environments where $10k of kit probably shouldn’t, like the beach, and places it can’t, like clubs that don’t allow interchangeable lens cameras.

Things I was excited about getting the camera: The 40mm (equivalent) focal length is probably my favorite? It can look like what you need it to, basically, although if what you need is a 200mm tele, you’re out of luck. I never have anything longer than 120 on me unless I know I’m going after birds (which is rare, because I hate schlepping an extra 5kg of lens). Also, it’s the same focal length as two other compacts I love: the Rollei 35 T and the Minolta CLE (the CLE can use any M lens, but I only ever use it with a 40mm).

Other than that? I was hopeful that it would ‘click’, but there are a couple areas I was worried about:

Focus: I needn’t have worried about this one. It has several modes, and in decent to fair light (down to a comfortably lit interior, let’s say) it’s plenty snappy. There was a bit of a learning curve, and I feel like learning the different modes is a good use of your time with this camera.
Depth: At f/2.8, I didn’t know if I would be able to have a narrow enough plane of focus for my taste. I think it works, but I’d be happier with f/2. Pretty please, Ricoh?
Startup time: This is often a pain with small cameras. Not so with the Ricoh. It’s faster to go from off to taking a picture than my M10-P. (Slower than the champ, my Nikon D750).
Shutter lag: it’s as near to instant as I can tell with my various Mark 1 senses. I didn’t use it for any super fast action (no race cars, no sportsing), but I think it’d be fine for that, if you can get close enough.
Battery life: people online will tell you 200 shots on a battery as if that’s small. For this kind of camera, it’s perfect, and a spare battery will fit in any pocket. Also, I feel like I got more than that from a battery, but they are brand new still.

It does the thing; I could tell within about half an hour of shooting with it that it was going to work for me. Along the way I hit a couple bumps, though. I didn’t know how to engage manual focus when I was shooting the Aurora from our transatlantic flight, so all those pictures are blurry. It took me a little bit to figure out how to adjust shutter and aperture in manual mode. Other than that? It’s a good little camera. I was reminded, working with it, of the sensation of shooting with my F5 when it was new. Just a clean, well thought out instrument that does the job it’s made for. No excuses, no compromises for size (except not having a viewfinder).

One last note, on pocketability: It does fit into a pants pocket. HOWEVER, it’s pretty noticeable. Is that a camera in your pocket or do you need to see a doctor? Goes better in a small bag or jacket pocket; I carried mine, for most of the trip, in a small sling, along with my kindle, a couple spare batteries, sunglasses, money, phone, maybe some bug spray? And kept my pockets empty, so I didn’t have to remember to take stuff out when I was going in the ocean. Beaches, man.

All photos taken with the Ricoh on Sardinia, way back in September. Various settings, who cares? A range of ISOs, mostly shooting with the lens at maximum aperture because that’s how I feel like doing it right now. More pictures with the same camera for the next couple posts, as it’s the only one I used the whole time on the island.

Rome for a few hours

2022-10-28 07:20:33Z

Woke up early-ish in our hotel in Florence, had what was probably the best breakfast of the trip (they had a pancake machine and real maple syrup), and took a city bus down to the Florence train station, Santa Maria Novella. We purchased tickets from a nice lady and had just enough time to grab some food before our train left for Rome. I want to say it was about two hours on the train, just sort of sinking into our jetlag and exhaustion. It was going to be a long day.

The first thing we did was stash our larger bags. Sophie and I both had packed relatively light for two weeks away from home, just a carry on and personal item (camera bag for me, backpack for her). But lugging even that much luggage around the city seemed like a real pain, and there are plenty of luggage storage spots that’ll hang onto your bags for a small fee right by the train station. Once that was stashed, we set off walking.

The original plan was to walk quite a long way, to try to stay awake as long as possible. We sat down at a cafe in Rome and got some espressos, and immediately felt tired. The coffee picture was taken at 6am California time, or about 2pm in rome. Our flight out of Fiumicino was later, like 8pm, so we had time to see a few things. We ventured inside a church that had us go through a metal detector that didn’t care at all about my cameras; I was hauling the whole kit, since I didn’t want to leave the real valuables in a luggage storage spot of unknown provenance. They didn’t seem to care or even want to look in my bag when it made the thing beep. I must’ve looked pretty harmless or very jet lagged or both.

Inside the church, there were a lot of incredible works of art, just amazing, and not a ton of light. This wasn’t one of the big main churches, just one that was sort of in our path. There is an unbelievable amount of wealth in rome, just centuries of the church paying for people to make cool shit and then gild it with gold from faraway lands.

After the church, we walked another 20ish minutes, slowly, to the Colosseum. It’s possible we could’ve ridden the metro and been there in just a few minutes, but remember, time to kill (on checking, now, I think the metro station may have been under construction? hard to say for sure). So we walked through a pretty scruffy park and there were other ruins, less famous, fenced off there. It came into view from kind of the top of a hill. Lots of tourists, huge line to get it, so we decided, at least for this trip, to just walk around. It was super hot anyway.

Walking around, about 3/4 of the way, both myself and Sophie hit a wall, and just sat in the shade for a minute drinking water. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor and majority rules, we hopped a taxi back to the train station. The taxi driver dropped us off a couple blocks from the station because from the direction of the Colosseum the traffic was kind of impossible. Which turned out to be a stroke of luck, because we sat down at the first pasta joint we saw and ordered what looked good, plus a beer for me and a wine for Sophie, just for safety. And the food was really good, like pretty much every other meal we had while we were in Italy. Seriously, they export their tomatoes, but they keep the best stuff for domestic consumption.

Then, back into the train station, tickets on the Leonardo Express to Fiumicino. I think we both dozed a bit on the train, and then while we were in the airport, I lost my hat shuffling things in my bag. We bought a bottle of champs in the terminal so we’d have something for breakfast, and I had to put it in my bigger bag, which had my hat; after that point, the hat was not seen. RIP cubs hat with the neon logo. Anyway, our flight was on time for a change, so we left Rome at around 9 and landed in Olbia around 10. Someone Sophie knew on from the festival group on Facebook gave us a ride from there to San Teodoro, where the festival was held. Finally got to our airbnb around 11 and crashed pretty hard.

Next: festival and probably finally review the tiny camera…

Getting there (Italy pt 1)

2022-10-25 08:29:53Z

So, after Point Reyes and my birthday on Tuesday, I basically did laundry and started packing again, this time for two weeks away in Italy. A for-real vacation for the first time in a while. Two years? Maybe three? 2020 we went to Colorado in the fall, but that was a working trip, where we were just isolated somewhere else and doing our jobs remotely. I don’t recall a vacation in 2021. NYC in 2019 might be the last one? Anyway. New camera came wednesday of that week, and I have some thoughts, which I’m gonna share at a later date. It came on the trip.

We went to the airport mid-afternoon, for a 7something departure, SFO to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Florence, where we were stopping overnight. I’m sure Frankfurt is a lovely town, but Florence is a short train ride from Rome, and for some reason the tickets were cheaper (and our hotel, too). It made a sort of sense when we were planning, anyway.

I really do love the international terminal’s departures hall. Just a big airy space. People going somewhere, people coming from somewhere. Also, I never knew that SFO has an out-of-doors patio at the far end of the G terminal, but it was right by our gate, so we took the opportunity to get a couple last breaths of fresh air and sunlight.

Anyway, we boarded and were delayed, but finally took off. I sat there, reading for quite a while, and then I looked out the window and noticed some odd lights: it took me a moment to realize, in my sleep-deprived state, that it was the Aurora. I’d never seen it in person before. Of course, I only had the tiny camera, and didn’t yet know how to lock it to infinity, so the resulting pictures are even blurrier than they would be normally. Still, it’s something.

Arrived in Frankfurt, got our passports stamped for entry into the EU, and ran for our flight to Florence, only to see that it too was delayed, and then it was delayed again. Finally, we boarded, flew another hour, and landed at sunset in Florence (beautiful, but through a dirty window; the pictures look like they were taken with vaseline on the lens). Wandered out to find the Taxi stand and the queue, waited another 30 minutes, and got to our hotel just in time to get dinner.

Then the next day, we had breakfast and set off for a day in Rome. Next time!

Drink n Draw, July 2021

2022-10-11 07:34:45Z

This was summer 2021, after everyone got vaccinated but before Delta came and took away our hopes and dreams. Drink and Draw is a little get together for creative folks to be creative in an easygoing space. I haven’t been in a while, but the format is probably the same now; they’re announced on insta @drinkndraw.elis.

Anyway, at the start, everybody throws out a prompt, and someone makes a list of all of them. Then you just sit there and chat and draw the prompts and have drinks and food and sometimes there’s a dog. I’m a terrible draw-er but it’s still fun to see what people come up with, to figure out interesting ways to interpret the prompts, and just have fun being creative with folks.

Pausing on the recent for a little bit while I live with the next photos off the queue from my month-ish of travel. It’s nice to get a little distance from the photos. At least, that’s what I tell myself to justify a year+ of backlog that I haven’t posted. Also, I feel like the next post is going to be somewhat camera-reviewy, which makes me cringe reading it back to myself. but I spent a long time agonizing over this new camera, and really ended up liking it, and I think there are things about it not covered in the endless algorithm optimized reviews that are already out there. So, a review.

Oh, look at the time, seems I’m all out of words. Go read Tony’s blog, he’s better at words anyway.

Point Reyes at Sunset

2022-10-05 06:01:12Z

So we set out from James and Janelle’s, heading due west on back roads. Pretty quickly we were in the middle of nowhere, practically. North of Petaluma and west of 101 is ranch and wine country. Lots of big hills that don’t quite make mountains. We got to the 1 at Tomales, and followed it south.

There are a half dozen little towns you pass through on the way down the eastern side of Tomales Bay; little places that may have once subsisted on fishing industry, but now seem to exist mostly for people to visit. That’s not a bad thing; it’s a gem of a little bay, and the rolling hills make for an excellent drive, even on the sunday of a big holiday weekend. The traffic wasn’t bad, but there were a lot of tourists hitting the open restaurants.

For no particular reason (OK, a very peculiar one unrelated to anything here), I’ve been thinking about dowsing the last couple of days. You know, the thing where someone gets a forked stick, or sometimes two bent wires, and they walk around and find where to dig for a well. You might be thinking, “Surely that must be fake, and there’s no way hard-headed Matt believes in such nonsense,” but you’d be wrong. You see, I have the knack for dowsing myself.

I don’t remember how it started. I think we’d seen some show on the history channel about it, and the person in the show had used bent wires, L shaped, one in each hand, with the long part of the L being maybe 18” and sticking out in front. My dad said, yeah, some folk have the knack and some don’t. Your Great Uncle Shorty, (or some other relative, I don’t recall) he could dowse.” Well, one of us realized we had a surplus of wire coat hangers and pliers.

Next thing we knew, all three of us were out in the back yard pacing around. The first time the wires crossed in my hand ( and every time after, too) it felt as though some force was pushing on them, and there was no way for me to stop them. We had well water, despite living in a house in the middle of a suburb of 35,000; the house predated the development of the area by a few years. The wires would always cross when I walked over where the pipes fed from the wellhouse to the house proper. Eyes closed, eyes open. Weird, inexplicable, not terribly useful skill, in the days of ground penetrating radar and sonar and whatnot.

I tell that story because it feels a little bit like the process of making pictures for me. Like there’s this inexplicable force between me and the image. Sometimes I go out with my camera (bend coat hanger rods) and look for the pictures (the water) and can’t find it, other times it’s there and I can’t stop it. There are a lot of easy explanations that flatten an essentially inexplicable experience; if you try to examine it too closely it disappears.

I’ve talked recently about good days shooting, and this is kind of like that. I think what I was talking about in that post was a kind of mastery, of getting the thing right. A dowser day, a day like this sunday afternoon, is more like something rolling down the hill. It’s a thing that happens as a side effect of pointing the camera at stuff and pushing the button. “In the moment of aiming, the [camera] turns like a dowser’s wand” (to steal a paraphrase from Tom Waits) and even though it feels like you haven’t done anything, the pictures happen.

OK, enough blather. I probably should have tried for a tighter edit; maybe one less boat? I had so many of that long beach that I cut, and other images of pretty much everything you see here. This edit started out at like 40 pictures. Anyway. Next: Matt goes to Europe and reviews a camera (maybe).

Marin County, points north

2022-10-02 07:22:18Z

Most of september, I lived out of my suitcase. Labor day weekend, I was flying back from Denver. I had been there at a conference, technically in Aurora. The night before had been a late one; there was an open bar that had Laphoriag, and it only takes a couple (three?) these days to give me a wicked hangover. But that’s not what this is about, nor is it about the 3am Mcd’s I may have had. I managed to get up in the morning and get myself together, get to the airport. By the time I got through security, I’d drank a liter of water and one of gatorade, and I was feeling somewhat human.

Of course, that meant that as soon as we got to cruising altitude, I was asleep. Turns out that was a good thing, lots of clouds over the Rockies, not a ton to see. I woke up as we were passing over the eastern sierra, snapped a pic of the fires over Yosemite, and tried to wake up to march through the airport.

Somehow, I either took a wrong turn or something, but my plane went to terminal 1, and I ended up walking all the way to the exit in Terminal 2. Maybe I was still a bit hungover. At least I only had carry-on luggage; I walked out the door and Sophie pulled up about two minutes later, and we were off. I had kinda thought I’d go home, maybe take a shower and grab some clean clothes, but things were already in motion, and there wasn’t time.

Sophie drove straight from the airport north, across the bridge and onto the 101. I don’t remember the town name, but we were headed somewhere in Marin, where our friends James and Janelle have a place with a pool. Cason and Ryan were already there, having a good time and texting us, telling us to hurry.

I feel like I got there, cracked a beer, and hopped in the pool, but there was probably more to it than that. They definitely showed us around the place. It was dark, when we got there, but it was also still like 80º. This was one of the last really hot weekends, so the water was fine. I was able to run laundry, shower, and fall asleep in a nice warm bed.

Sunday, we went to the grocery store and got some essentials, burgers and chips and that sort of thing. Just sort of had a lazy day most of the morning, besides the grocery run. James grilled the burgers for a late lunch, just a perfect Labor Day weekend. Then, I’d decided ahead of time that I wanted to go shoot pictures around sunset in Point Reyes, because it was my birthday weekend. So we took the car and headed west, in that direction. But those photos will be in the next post.

A very Bay Area comple of days with Christa and Allie

2022-08-26 08:22:52Z

I just felt like posting something, and scrolled through the stuff in my backlog (which I keep in Lightroom’s ‘Quick Collection’). This was the first set that really kind of hung together.

This was last year, about this time (roughly August). I had just gotten fired from my job, and decided I should take some time off, and as it happened Christa was visiting, so it kinda worked out. We met and took the ferry to Oakland, probably got dinner, or I drove her to Allie’s? I don’t remember, she might’ve stayed with us for part of it too. Next day, we went to the Bay Model (not pictured, talk about drab lighting inside but fascinating to look at). Then an afternoon walking around the de Young with Allie, dinner in the Sunset, Uke on the couch, and a hike on the last day.

Some or all of that may be out of order, it was a long time ago. I’m pretty sure Christa has visited twice since then? or maybe I was in NYC twice and she was here once? Anyway, there are a lot more photos on the backlog. A whole years worth, almost. Remember when I did short posts, just one or two photos? Yeah, me neither.

Mariposa Grove Hike

2022-08-10 19:53:28Z

Just pushing publish, it’s a BLAWG POST, not HAMLET

One long day in Yosemite

2022-08-10 19:50:17Z

(This post brought to you by the Tabs discord, and my inability to write about anything right now)

a good shoot

2022-07-11 07:13:41Z

Sometimes, when I go out to shoot pictures, everything goes wrong. I start by forgetting I had the camera in self timer the last time I was shooting, so I miss the first picture. Then I get off a couple frames, and realize the ISO is also set to eleventy-million. Then the autofocus hunts when I’m trying to get a picture of something fleeting, like someone walking slowly through the frame; I realize the focus point has fucked off to the corner of the frame somehow.

Once I get in a funk like this, it’s important to realize that nothing good can happen and I should just stop; but “can’t stop won’t stop forgot how to stop” isn’t just my twitter bio. Sometimes such a shoot can be redeemed by stopping, taking a break, perhaps a shot of whiskey, and moving on. A reset for the mind.

W. Eugene Smith, when he was shooting in steel factories for Time Magazine (when Time meant something, that is), would stop in the middle of the damn place, have his assistant produce a portable record player, and sit and have a whiskey, if the shooting wasn’t going well.

All that to say, sometimes, a shoot is the opposite. The camera is always ready; the light is at the right angle, and I’m on the right side of the street to use it. The modes are right, the autofocus does its job and gets out of the way.

More than that, though. I’m seeing clearly and responding to what’s in front of me. When I compose, I remember to glance at the frame edges and think about what’s there, at least a little bit, to make sure I’m not cutting anything off accidentally (doing it on purpose is fine). I’m adjusting depth of field to fit the composition. There’s a kind of focus of intent that spreads out to all the different factors you have to manage to make a good picture; on the good days, it feels like I’m doing the one thing I was put here on earth for.

Or maybe, sometimes, it feels like nothing. Last sunday, I had the good kind of session. I was just walking and found a groove. I wasn’t reviewing images as I shot, except to check exposure occasionally. I had a feeling I was doing pretty well, but years of shooting film (which was really two decades ago now, jeez I’m getting old) sort of burned out trying to guess if the pictures were good while the shoot is still happening. Sometimes there is a good vibe, though, that you don’t look too closely at, for fear of scaring it off.

Then, you get home and you’ve shot 80 pictures, and 20 of them are good enough to blog. you know how wild that is? Normally a 5% hit rate (one or two per roll of 36, in the old days) was good.

I don’t know that there’s a point to this, other than to mark how wonderful it is when it happens. I don’t have any secrets for accessing this higher plateau of art making. It’s mostly a matter of doing the thing and being there when the time comes.

Photography (and painting, and sculpture) is a business of millimeters and milliseconds. Writing probably too, especially poetry (“For he’s the super realist…”) Either you’re at the right place at the right time or you’re not. The margin for error is brutally small, and the photo, in the end, is binary: either it works or it doesn’t.

On the best days, I am a gambler with loaded dice. All the chance elements turn my way, and I come by at just the right moment, with the right lens on, and make the pictures.

Pride lasers

2022-06-26 20:45:05Z

Went down to Embarcadero last night, just to check this out. I’ve rented a camera for the next week, a Fuji GFX 50sii, trying to figure out what’s next. It’s surprisingly good at what it does. Slow. Big. Bonkers high ISO performance though; some of these are at ISO10k and pushed three stops, and looks totally decent. 50 megapixels. Not sure I need ‘em, but it sure is nice.

Unfortunately, it’s a little slow. Not as bad as the z7 I rented, although I’m becoming convinced that it was broken or configured badly in some way. Still, a little too slow for my tastes. Perfect for this kind of work, though. Mostly static, easy to lock focus on. We’re going to Yosemite later this week, which it’ll also be great for.

Kawan and Sophie, skating

2022-06-18 05:24:21Z

Still in last yeah, just wanted to throw something up because I haven’t been posting. My quick collection overfloweth, and this starts to bring down the numbers. Also, I’m playing with Robin’s new protocol. It’s interesting, but there are some rough edges. It doesn’t natively support images, and you might be thinking, Matt, why would you play with something that doesn’t support pictures? I’m working on getting that in, that’s why.

It’s friday, it’s late, I’m gonna push publish and go to the bar. Enjoy the photos.

the optimistic period

2022-06-03 08:25:00Z

Still trying to get used to this new keyboard. A keyboard.io model 100. it’s pretty nice, but I feel like i’m typing uphill. sorta weird. anywho…

Took these photos late last summer, when I found myself downtown a lot, for unspecified reasons. ask me about it over drinks some time, if we ever can have drinks together again. the optimism of the end of summer 2021 really was foolish in hindsight, but can you blame us? we were cooped up inside for something like 18 months. by that time everyone had had at least one scare pre-vaccine where they thought they might’ve gotten it. The accumulated stress of it got to be too much. of course, eventually the varaiants came for us and just completely squashed that optimism.

For a while though, maybe 6 weeks, there were bright, sunny days, where I got out and rode my bike almost every day, where I took my camera on lunch walks to see the blue sky. I gotta say, it’s something I really miss, so much so that I’ve considered getting a co-working desk downtown, just so I can go a place that isn’t my basement to work. As it is, I spend a lot of my hours in the chair I’m in right now. It’s a nice chair, but I can’t stand up all the way. The ceiling is 6 feet, and I’m 6’2”. But, there’s the ongoing pandemic to consider, and I don’t really care to go somewhere where I’ll be accumulating more risk.

anyway. next time, I promise I’ll talk about something more upbeat.

over the desert southwest

2022-05-30 22:45:15Z

Took these flying home from that trip to OKC last year. Honestly I’m still processing all the shit that happened in 2021, and 2022 is half over. 2022 is definitely a rebuilding year; take apart your bones and put ‘em back together. Make a new life out of the parts on hand, maybe. So much is broken, but we’re still here. Now I’m just rambling free associations.

That’s all, except to say I never really noticed just how much falloff this lens (my 50mm summilux) has. Maybe I went a bit too far with the contrast expansion? ah well, it’s a blog, who cares? As the blogfather said, “hit publish and forget about it”.

at the Smith house

2022-04-16 20:35:31Z

Yeah, yeah. I’m a year behind ‘the current moment’ (este momento, agora, hoje). I think the concept of being behind the moment is unbelievably sweaty. There’s an amount of urgency to some photo work, that is, news pictures, mainly. News is New. but I haven’t done news work in a long time, and maybe it’s time to let go of that neurosis?

This week (the current one, April 2022) was a good one. I spoke at Odd Salon Underdog, and realized at the end of the show, when they were announcing the next show, that I won’t make the last show. I’m on the road that week. I don’t mind, the show we put together was great.

If you don’t know about Odd Salon, it’s 6 speakers, ~10 minutes each, who tell stories from the odd corners of History, Science, Art, and adventure. I spoke about the photographer Atget; there were other talks about America’s First Suicide Hotline, the town of Rough and Ready, CA, Notker the Stammerer (a beloved monk who invented early music notation and wrote beautiful poetry), how Notre Dame (the one in South Bend) beat the KKK with potaties, and Mary Seacole (a nurse from Jamaica who travelled the world, including to the Crimean War). Friend Casey was the curator for the evening, and did such an amazing job weaving together all those stories.

Anyway. photos. more later.

parking lots, roads, and clouds

2022-02-03 09:35:20Z

I have a hundred things I should be doing, so naturally I’m finding some time to procrastinate instead, and throw up some photos from last June in Oklahoma. I have the schema designed for the parametric bags, so the data portion of the bag-o-matic is ready to go. There’s a ton of UI to build around it, just for the back end part, and I have to figure out how to pack all these irregular shapes onto 24” paper, because that’s the size of printer I could find. Prints on roll paper though, so at least I can go as long as needed in one dimension.

Anyway, photos. It was midsummer in oklahoma when I took these. The sky always puts on a show there. So much was weirdly unfinished, kind of on pause. I was definitely working the questions this trip. I think maybe I talked about those over in my newsletter, but as they’re proprietary to the workshop I learned them in, I won’t blab too much here. (Also don’t worry about the newsletter, it’s more or less dead. Blogs are the future!). Actually, it’s late, I’ma just push post and go to bed.

it's tuesday, lemon

2022-01-26 08:42:39Z

What a week, huh? I started it sunday, realizing that all my 2021 pictures were just sitting on my desktop, not copied to my backup storage or to the cloud. Then I realized that my network adapter stopped working when I upgraded my OS maybe a month ago. So, I got a new adapter, got things backed up, and while I was at it, found the missing pictures from 2008 (the whole year failed to copy to my backup drive when I was initially migrating to it way back in 2018, and I only noticed recently).

Whenever I plug in the old hard drives, there’s always a bit of faffing about, looking at old pictures. There are versions of things that have gotten corrupted, sometimes in interesting ways. Like you can tell some bits got flipped in one spot in the raw file, and then the file from there on is color shifted. it’s weird, and most of the time just a pain in the ass. Luckily, it only seems to happen to old nikon files, and I always have two copies, so all the ones that have gone to the storage appliance are good. For now. Bitrot will come for us all eventually.

Anyway, I also realized that with the OS upgrade my displays weren’t calibrated any more, and spent a good half an hour fixing that. So hopefully the colors and tones look good, and if they don’t, maybe calibrate your screen?

Looking at the old photos gave me an idea for a feature, though. Import and edit a folder and tell the story of what was happening as I remember it, kind of like a blog post after the fact (or 15 years after or whatever). Does that sound interesting? Or maybe just like, the most compelling single photo from the old stuff, without explanation. Maybe nobody but me cares about these old photos any more. That’s possible, too.

These photos (in this post) aren’t of anything, per se. Just four random ones off the top of the backlog that I didn’t want to let pass without posting. Will probably post something more interesting or narrative on the next post (or maybe it’ll be a bunch of parking lots in Oklahoma from last spring, I have that post almost prepped too).

Oklahoma City, last May

2022-01-18 08:49:23Z

This was back in the halcyon days, when there was no Delta in the US, and in fact it was months away in any case. Everybody I knew was getting jabbed and so we could safely hang out again. The first priority was to get out to Oklahoma and see my family. On that same trip, I got to see a bunch of my OKC friends; this is one of those nights. I’m working through the backlog, and since I’ve published a lot of landscape-y shots lately, I figured I could break it up with some portraits.

On impulse, I pulled down my copy of The Decisive Moment to page through and re-read the essay at the beginning. “Twenty-five years have passed since I started to look through my viewfinder. But I regard myself as an amateur, though I am no longer a dilettante.” The photos inside, still teaching me things. I’m 100% a ‘decisive moment’ photographer, which really means I was born about 50 years too late. I guess as long as I’m applying it within the context of now, and not trying to replicate Bresson’s or Winogrand’s photographs, then it should all come out fine, yeah?

Something I’ve been thinking about lately, that I got from a guy on youtube: the reward is the pictures. Most of this stuff, it’s going to be here on the blog for a while, and the very best, the ones that are part of a project, will make it into a print-on-demand book that then is printed tens of times, if that (there are, to my knowledge, three copies of my last book in existence). So, making the pictures better be enough.

I shot these, I’m pretty sure, with the Mitakon Speedmaster, a 50mm 0.95 lens. Definitely some softness and veiling flare to several of them. It’s also possible that I switched back to my Summilux when we got back to the house for the after party, just looking at these. Also possible, givent they allow smoking inside, that the veiling flare and loss of detail is just what the conditions allowed in that club that night. I need to play with that lens some more, is what I’m saying. I also have a version of it in 35mm X mount, for my fuji. I also really like that lens? They’re both interesting to use in daylight, wide open with ND filters.

Anyway: next post will probably be landscapes from oklahoma, from this same trip, since the last trip I didn’t get out at all.

Leaving Palm Springs

2022-01-07 09:31:12Z

Drive, then fly. Palm Springs is a weird little town. There are these huge mountains, snow on top, and it seems like every single architect that’s worked there in the past century or so has asked themselves, how can I block the view the most? How can I take the best thing about this place, all this great nature, and get in its way?

I’m not mad about it. Most places are either like that or empty. LA, on the other side of the mountains, is like that. I dunno, something about the scale of Palm Springs is off. These were all shot the day after the last post, getting to the airport and getting on a plane to Oklahoma. Which didn’t seem like the best idea even then.

I’ll save you the suspense, though: we made it through the whole trip without getting COVID, mostly because we didn’t do a lot and wore n95 masks when we had to be inside and/or around people. I didn’t get to see my family because they all had omicron, and same for my friends. Going to a bar to see who I run into, which is normally a favorite home activity of mine, was out of the question.

Even with all that caution, I feel like I’ve used up all the reserves of good luck I might’ve had stored. Going to just stay home for a while, let this wave pass. I’ve got plenty of photos on the backlog to post…

5 time (winter light)

2021-12-25 08:20:01Z

“You should blog more,” the windmills told me. Not really, I’m not Tony Pierce. But I should. There’s a huge mountain of backlog again, although somehow I’ve been posting some of it and not removing it from at least some of the stashes I have around; big, loose edits I generally do when I import stuff, so it gets synced to lightroom cloud. So it’s a bunch of work to figure out what’s been posted, but I know these haven’t, I just shot them yesterday.

Speaking of lightroom and clouds, there’s a new feature in lightroom’s selective edits panel, that lets you magically select the sky. It made editing these a ton easier, lemme tell you.

I shot these while we were ill-advisedly driving on Dec 23rd, christmas’ eve eve. 12 hours for what is normally an eight hour drive; we were going to fly home, but tickets were super expensive; we started looking at nearby airports and included socal, so there we were, chasing a $600 discount. Should have just flown, losing a day and gas and hotel at both ends and it’s pretty much a wash. at least I got some good pictures? Sophie drove while it was light, and I drove in the dark. Her night vision is great, and it makes her nervous when I shoot and drive, so it works out.

What else? we’re in OKC for xmas and a few days. Not seeing many people because COVID OMICRON, and the people we do see will be seen outside. Both of us are at three shots and a recent case of delta, so probably at peak immunity for this wave anyway. Not that means much, but layered on all the caution we can muster while still living our lives? I think it stands as reasonable.

Sorry for the typos, I’ve been up since two timezones ago yesterday morning and only got 4 hours of sleep in the hotel last night for unfun reasons. I really wish there was a way to know when you’re booking online if the beds are actually comfy? like I don’t care about most amenities, but that would be nice. I’m not asking for a Kluft (one of which I tried, after asking the matress salesperson his favorite; I almost fell asleep on it instantly, as if it was drugged; for $20k it better come with drugs). A decently up to date holiday inn has a fine bed that I can sleep many hours on. Not last night.

At least today was pretty easy, brain-wise. just had to be in the right places at the right time, not take off my mask on any planes, not even for the lovely in flight coca-cola, which is somehow better than other coke. Just up and down and out, a little light reading, a little Train to Busan which I’ll probably finish watching tomorrow.

I did enjoy driving this time, though. Even though the conditions after the sun went down were pretty bad. It was raining the whole time I was driving basically, real downpour for a lot of it, lots of traffic. Not the worst driving conditions or the worst traffic on an interstate in the middle of nowhere, but both were top 5 for sure. I like situations like that though, it’s just you and the road really, and a place you’ve got to get to. Mind wanders, and you think about old stuff and new stuff; how towns are settled or how boundary conditions affect mask sealing or whatever comes to mind. It’s like being a little high? but also not at all high, because if you stop concentrating on the important things at all, you die?

I think it’s sort of because the stuff that’s at the forefront is so rote, the background thoughts are more noticable? or possibly it’s the shower thought phenomenon, where there’s a bunch of white noise and other sensory input, and it’s feeding the creative background machine somehow? I don’t know.

I’ve babbled enough, and I need sleep. I might come back and try to knock this into something more sensible tomorrow.

More Mountains

2021-10-07 07:12:24Z

I don’t think I’ve previously published these, if I have, you’ll have to excuse me. These are from when we went to Colorado to house-sit; at the end of that trip we rented an AirBnB in Breckenridge and drove up. There was a light snowstorm that started coming down as we left Denver; coming over the pass felt a little hairy, but not nearly as bad as it looks. I’ve certainly driven in worse conditions.

Some Oklahoma friends came and met us in Denver, and drove up as well. This was our substitute trip for what would have been a euro vacation for Sophia’s birthday; we’d planned on a big trip that year because we hadn’t been able to go anywhere more foreign than NYC in 2019. We all isolated for two weeks and got negative tests, we were so careful. There were a lot of unknowns for us; at the time, I don’t think we knew even that fomite transmission had been mostly ruled out. Vaccines were sometime in the future, if at all. In any case, we did it, because the risk of not going was on balance worse than staying put. I think a lot of people reached that point some time last year.

People are bad at assessing risk and at the same time there comes a point when abstinence isn’t an option, you just figure out what the best mitigation strategies are to do what needs to be done, and go with that. I don’t know why I feel the need to justify myself, a lot of people were doing a lot worse than isolating in various places away from home last fall. So I’ll stop.

And anyway. Mountains. Incredible snow-capped peaks.

We were there before the lifts were officially open, so it was quiet, just us and the snow.

San Pablo, late 2019

2021-08-10 07:53:08Z

I think the San Pablo project is over, or at least dormant; I think about it now in the past tense, and the best ideas I’ve had for the work in the last while was to do something else, branched off from the set of rules that was the project, more or less. I don’t think I’ve got a book’s worth of photos; I don’t even know if I’ve got a small gallery show. I need to sort of take a look and see what there is.

This was a night where we went out to get burgers, at a place called Al’s that google tells me is still in business. I found out earlier today the bowling alley, Albany Bowl, is closed. This was almost two years ago, so I’m not super surprised. The whole deal with bowling is being inside, and there’s not a lot of that going around. At least restaurants were able to do takeout/delivery and go less into debt staying open.

Anyway, still working through the backlog. I’m bouncing around a bit because there are actually several backlogs, as it turns out, with photos from lots of different things that happened, that I edited and then sat on, for whatever reason. They’re good photos, Bront, so I’m going to go ahead and put them here. That’s what blogs are for.

four from the top of the queue

2021-07-29 07:40:38Z

I think these are going to be in random order again, posting from my ipad so it’s a little different. i’m not gonna worry about it. Two nice portraits, taking hanging out on Kawan and Carlee’s porch last January, which I somehow still hadn’t gotten to. Plus the light on the clouds, also his porch. Then, finally, the new span of the bay bridge, seen from the nice little overlook at the end of the cycle/pedestrian walkway. It’s a good bit of exercise to get out there on the bike.

To everyone who’s photo I’ve taken over the last several months, they’re coming. Probably out of order, probably long overdue, but they’re coming.

Driftwood Invitational Festival, 2021

2021-07-28 02:49:59Z

Holdup. Wait. Stop. Lemme back up. For years, my friend Joseph has been talking about this great place he knew, out where his friend, Jack, had a piece of mostly undeveloped land in the delta, which is what locals call the area east of where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers come together. The first time I heard about this was probably two years ago? Everybody liked the idea of throwing a party out there, maybe a small festival, camping, cooking out. Starlight, loud music, good friends, swim in the river during the day, that sort of thing. I think the plan at the time was to make it happen the next summer.

We all know what happened instead, the next summer.

This summer, though, the year of our lord 2021, the stars aligned; everyone was able to get vaccinated, Jack’s place was still standing, and he’d even put in some improvements. Solar, a shower, tomato plants that weren’t quite ripe (but growing like crazy in that heat). The place is about two hours from our house, not including waiting on the car ferry to the island. Jack had also mowed down the field around his little shack/deck arrangement where most of the action was focused, so there were nice spots for all of us to pitch our tents.

We camped, we swam in the delta, we partied. The pictures cover that probably better than I could with a long essay about it, so I’m going to let them.

Edit to add: this was, without doubt, the healing moment I needed after 18 months of pandemic lockdown. Thanks Jack, Joseph, Austin, Benny, Hannah, Carla, Mike, Chris, and of course, Sophie, for coming together and making it happen.

a long hike that didn’t go very far

2021-07-21 05:32:00Z

been a while since I did this, things started happening and they didn’t stop this time. The backog, as it stands, is at 450 pictures, maybe 7 months of shooting around. That’s a loose edit, mind; if I post half of those I’ll be surprised.

These are from a trip out to Roy’s Redwoods back in January, to hang out with Damaris and see the camera spike I made her in action. The spike is basically a 12” stainless steel rod, sharpened at one end, and with a 1/4-20 threaded hole at the other. Also, it has a handle for stepping on, to stick it in the ground. It allows a photographer to get very close to the ground very easily, especially when combined with a compact ball head. If anyone else wants one, now that I have my lathe making one is actually super easy. this one involved a really sketch setup in the drill press, and grinding the point.

There’s something about those woods in the winter, when everything is alive and moving, that is really kind of magical. I went there weekend before last with another friend (pictures TK in probably another 6 months at this rate), and it was great? a nice nature hike. Green and cool and everything you want. But during the winter, when it’s still wet, maybe even raining on you while you’re there? Magical.

Of course, part of it is the sort of “not hiking” hiking Damaris does. It’s very slow; you go a few feet, stop, set up your camera, take pictures of something else, rinse, repeat, until you get tired of it or it’s lunchtime or whatever. How to do Nothing vibes. Stopping and noticing what’s under a log. Putting it back carefully, so whoever lives there isn’t too disturbed.

The photos are once again in random order, and I can’t bring myself to care. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Sonoma on a Sunday Afternoon

2021-05-30 03:47:46Z

These uploaded in random order, and I’m kind of OK with it. Ordering is hard, and ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, we went to sonoma, got some wine, ate some delicious food. That’s it, that’s the post.

Yosemite post-vax trip

2021-05-06 08:33:25Z

El Capitan, just visible through the trees.

A couple weeks ago, to celebrate being fully vaccinated, I took a couple days off of work to do some stuff I haven’t been doing because of the pandemic. A couple of weeks prior, I was idly playing with the map to see what destinations were within a day’s drive, and I realized that yosemite was only three and a half hour’s drive, totally doable in a long day. Get up at 5am, drive in and get there by 10, hike around in the valley during the day, catch sunset from Tunnel View, and drive back. Home by midnight.

The falls, from a distance, before lunch.

This tree photo is a little deceptive; the rock wall in the background is maybe a mile away, and at least a couple thousand feet tall. Watch for devious trees.

The day before, I realized it would be a lot better if I had a travelling companion. I find that when I go places completely alone, I don’t make as much of an effort. Like, nobody will know, right? But with someone there, anyone, it provides a little extra pressure to actually do the thing. There’s a term for this in ADHD circles, ‘body doubling’, which I do not like, but it’s a thing. Anyway, I texted a bunch of folks (ok, 3) and my friend Damaris was available and said yes. Damaris is great. She came with not just with the gentle pressure of her presence, but with her own enthusiasm for the trip, and a boatload of knowledge about the plants and animals in the park. Maybe that enthusiasm is a normal thing on a day trip to one of the most beautiful places on earth, but it was appreciated none the less.

Magnolia, I think? Not used to them being huge trees.

Another image that fails to really capture the scale. All of the trees on that rock are full sized; that's 1000ft of cliff face, roughly.

So, that thursday morning, I got up superfuckingearly, at a time that reasonable people don’t even consider, showered, made a coffee, and grabbed all my kit. I took both my nikon and the leica, a tripod, the 50 summicron and a 300mm nikkor which I shot with basically all day on each camera. I also had the voightlander 15 and the 35 in the bag, for the leica. But first, there was a lot of driving.

Damaris speaks Raven well enough that this guy chittered at her for maybe 10 minutes, while we were walking to the falls.

Lovely fractal patterns in the bark.

First, up to [redacted] to pick up Damaris, then back, 580 over the coast range, getting spit out at Altamont into the central valley, where the course always meanders a bit, briefly touching the 5, then to some other road, then finally to 120, just following the map. Apparently the 120 pass wasn’t open but the entrance to the park there was. There was 1 car in front of ours paying to enter; no line at all really.

Somehow, this is getting closer.

This was as far as I made it last time I was in the park, september 2019. I was re-learning to walk at the time.

We stopped at the first turn off that had a view of the valley. There was a view of Half Dome over the rise, but it was a little too hazy to result in a good photo; I could have turned it black and white and jacked up the contrast, but I decided against it. After the fact, of course; in the moment, I snapped a few photos, hand-held, and we moved on; the real action, so to speak, was further in.

One of the few spots I busted out the 15mm. Rectilinear get rekt.

‘the real action’ was a traffic jam and a stop for facilities; where we stopped, like everywhere else in the valley, was covered up in beautiful views; we walked out to the river, and took photos. There’s not a bad place to stop in the whole park.

Since I had skipped breakfast, and it was getting on towards lunch, our next stop was to eat. Limited concessions were open, but that included a fresh baked pizza for each of us.

Yeah, I know I talked shit about converting to black and white, and I generally avoid it. But this one just worked so nice.

I believe this is Bridal Veil falls? The one you can see from Tunnel view. Speaking of...

Once fed, we hit the gift shop, as it was right there. The best gummy bears in the world are the ones in Yosemite, so I always stop and get some. Then, we drove a little ways back up the valley, to the trail that leads to the base of Yosemite Falls. Calling it a hike and a trail is a little grandiose; a nice stroll, with a little scrambling over wet rocks at one end, if you want. The last time I was in the park, even that was a bit too much; I was just post ankle surgery (remember #anklewatch?). I’ve subtracted surgery recovery but added gouty arthritis, which I’m getting treated but doesn’t go away over night.

Damaris, shooting the valley.

My best photo of the valley, 1s at f/16, with w 6 stop ND filter to make it work.

Anyway, after the falls, I noticed the clouds were building, and there was a chance that they’d cover everything up before sunset, so we decided discretion was the better part of valor, and got in the car and drove up to Tunnel View, with the sun in the right part of the sky (behind us) to get some really spectacular light. The clouds kept shifting and changing, and I climbed up above the tunnel, so I could basically sit there and watch things develop. I say ‘climbed’ but really it was some light scrambling on rock. 5.5 on YDS, I’d say, maybe a 5.6 moment in there.

Real big wall climbers, I think climbing the Nose? Which is, looking it up, a 5.14A free climb (world class climbers, in other words). If you do some aid climbing, free climbing only the required sections, that goes down to a 5.9, approachable by us mere mortals.

The lake here was only visible for about 5 seconds as we came around a bend. I was able to get the camera up, awake, and get two exposures off before it disappeared completely. Oh, and I was driving, too.

At that point, I’d done all I’d set out to do for the day, and then some. So, we got in the car and headed homeward.I think next time, I’m gonna take a pad and do some bouldering.

porch hangs w/Kawan (and the new lens)

2021-04-08 08:13:45Z

First let's take a selfie (I unironically love selfies, sorry not sorry)

So, two weeks ago now, I had a new lens in one hand, and my phone in the other. Sophie hates having her picture taken, and the real reason I got the 50mm f/0.95 was to take pictures of people, and dammit, it was Friday, I wanted to see people. So I texted Kawan, who now lives a very short distance away, to see if he was down for hangs. He was free, we were free, there’s ample outdoor space, so we went.

The lens is for sure soft, but here that's not a bad thing so much.

We came over by bike; I brought some nice scotch to share, and we had had a couple each, on the porch, and were beginning to think about food. Then, we heard a buzzing in the air.

A drone appeared, with no pilot in sight. For a minute, we watched it flying around, and were pretty solidly creeped out (says the guy who carries a camera all the time)

Luckily, it was just the neighbor, blowing off some steam after work.

Sophie plays us some music.

moscone, three weeks ago

2021-04-07 08:24:15Z

Sophie got an appointment three weeks ago, to get her shot, so we went into the city and did the thing. Quick, efficient, nice. I was pretty much done with work for the day, so went with her to see what the city was like. I’ve worked in and around this area for years at a time, so it was interesting to see it so empty on a Friday afternoon. Not that it was a ghost town, but it was maybe 20% of what I would see there any time between 2013 and 2020 on any given day.

The area around the entrances and exits was a little busier, but nothing compared to the middle of Salesforce or Oracle or one of those events. Just a constant trickle of people coming into the huge building, and another trickle of them leaving. Some SF parking authority people directing traffic, and volunteers outside, directing people. It was really cool how normal and functional it all seemed. Is this something we can expect from government services? shit that just works?

I have to agree with some of the people I’ve seen with takes on twitter, that once people have a sample of free healthcare they’re going to want it all the time. It makes so much sense from so many angles, not least of which is the human angle: more, better care for people that need it the most.

The last post, I forgot to explain: I’d been posting pictures from last fall, but then I imported a bunch more recent things, and ended up working them up instead of continuing. This blog has been fully nonlinear for a while though, and I didn’t think it merited more than a passing remark, and then I forgot to even put that in the text. So here it is.

Tomorrow, I go to get my second shot. I’m pretty happy to be getting it, both because I’m tired of being reasonable and because it provides more coverage for people that can’t get it. Tired of being reasonable like: Sacramento is halfway to a lot of fun things in the Sierras, and since I have to go there anyway to get stabbed, I might as well go on to the mountains, catch the sunset, hang out, and then drive home later at night. But. The reasonable thing is, of course, to come directly home. But.

I think what’s going to happen is I’ll get my shot, come home, maybe go to the fabric store, and save the day trip to the sierras until I’m fully covered in two weeks. a little more planning will net me a lot more trip, anyway. Speaking of net, it’s time I went to sleep. Enjoy the rest of the pix.

betraying a recency bias

2021-04-05 08:02:16Z

Last weekend, some friends and I went out to the state park by Mt Diablo (pretty sure it contains the mountain), had a nice picnic, and caught up for the first time in a while. I was playing around with the new lens a bit here; shooting at f/2 I think, because this was before the ND filter came in the mail.

Things about this lens: despite quite a bit of tinkering, the focus may still be off. Focusing a f/0.95 lens wide open is no joke; I think it’s a task best left for through-the-lens viewing. The focus ring turns quite a lot, giving very fine control, but working very close in, like the photo of the dog (Finley, a Good Boy), it’s possible to be off enough that focus is missed entirely. You can try bracketing, but it’s a real crapshoot with this lens. The backlash in the helical is more than the margin of error.

Also, on my sample at least, the color is very strange. A bit flat, which is some of what I’m seeing (and I’ll get to that flatness in a moment), but also with a strong green cast that I don’t understand. The microcontrast is poor, and the sort of global contrast is also poor. It’s a spherical lens when I’ve gotten quite used to molded aspherics in everything. Of course stopped to f/4, it’s fine, because everything looks fine at f/4.

All that said, I think it does have its place in the arsenal. Low light, high contrast situations, like shooting at night in a club, or on the street at night; it does flare badly if it’s exposed to the sun, and the built-in hood is so bad I acutaly cut it off my lens, but/and that can be good sometimes. Using this lens is an aesthetic choice you have to apply judiciously.

I did figure out with this lens that I should have an ND filter for my regular 50, so I can use it wide open in daylight too. I’ve been carrying it around like that for a week now, and it’s been really interesting. I always like shooting wide open, or at least I thing the pictures that come out of it are more interesting. It makes me pick what’s going to be sharp, what the focus of the picture should be. Again, probably an aesthetic choice, use at your own discretion.

settled in colorado / new lens

2021-03-26 08:28:02Z

Still photos from last fall. We arrived in Colorado, where my mother in law lives, and stayed there for the night; an added benefit of going there is we were able to pod up with her and Sophie got to spend some time with her mom. The next day, we moved into the empty house we were watching, and met the dog and cat we were taking care of. The house was nice; spacious, big yard, nice kitchen. There was an amount of smoke, but the park right next to the house was usually tolerable, and really quite nice in terms of a big open space to have easy access to.

I got a new lens this week, the Mitakon 50mm f/0.95. It’s a superspeed lens that has a very large aperture, allowing a lot of light in. I think it’s probably on the level of the first 1.0 noctilux in terms of bokeh and sharpness (having shot not at all with the leica lens, and not much with this one yet). It took me several hours over the last few days to get the lens calibrated; there’s an adjustment for the rangefinder coupling that’s done with shims, and there’s also a somewhat fiddly adjustment to get it to go to infinity; after a lot of messing around, it’s finally dialed in. I might do a video about the adjustment, as much to record it for myself as for, like, the rest of the world. I’m definitely going to do some more thorough review of the lens, because it’s new and shiny and I’ll definitely have opinions after a month with it.

this week has been long and tiring. I need a three day weekend. But no. The work will continue until morale improves.

I don’t know what was said in the moment before this photo was taken, but it’s priceless.

over the sierras, past the great basin, into more smoke

2021-03-23 06:56:56Z

So, mid September, the opportunity fell in our laps to get out of the Bay for a bit, just when it was looking like the smoke was going to hang around for another month at least. Looking back, we were absurdly cautious. We drove, so no airports; food from drive throughs wherever possible, so no sharing air; we were house and dog sitting for some friends who were taking a rafting trip down the colorado for a month, so we had a place all to ourselves. I talked about the trip a bit before but these are all new photos at least on the blog.

Even with all that, the trip out was something else. I don’t know what your memories of last fall were, but mine will be of the whole western united states on fire. Not a few brush fires here and there; columns of smoke that could be seen hundreds of miles away. Pyrocumulus clouds bursting with drama. Air filters inside, and KN95 masks to walk the dog. Real end times feelings.

The route we took was out I-80, through Salt Lake. Because of the time of day we always leave, we always get to the Bonneville salt flats at night, and don’t get to see much of them. This trip, on the way back, we timed it so we got there at midday. It was early November, but there will be salt flat pictures up here eventually. I just have to go and find them.

There are 10 more pictures but I don’t think I have any more words tonight. Enjoy.

Tahoe, last september

2021-03-22 01:15:55Z

Last fall, in the middle of the smoky season, (which was simultaneously 6 months and three lifetimes ago), we had a long weekend around my birthday and took a road trip to Tahoe. This wasn’t a normal road trip with, like, roadside stops for ice cream and the worlds largest ball of string; this was strictly drive to an AirBnB with a key code and stay there; we made a grocery run once there, and sat on a rather nice deck for most of the trip. There was also some smoke there, which wasn’t great, but at least there was different things, thinly visible behind everything.

I am woefully behind on posting, I guess? The timeliness of the posts is totally in my own head, though, and not a product of an actual need to get the photos out. No reason to rush, or to need to be timely. It’s my web site, and I’ll do what I want.

A job listing popped up recently, for a staff photographer at the Chronicle. It’d be a dream job for me, but of course, it’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to work up to, after time at a smaller daily, or working as a stringer. I’ve done none of that, having refused to take a really shitty work for hire contract almost 15 years ago, and failed subsequently to find steady photo work after the 2008 financial crisis, I landed on a backup plan to the backup plan, which turned out to be pretty OK money wise but not super fulfilling otherwise. Hence the blog, the side projects, everything. I might apply, even though my qualifications are thin; it’d be good for me.

Probably nothing will happen, and I’ll end up doing something completely unexpected in 6 months. We’ll see. At least the top post on here isn’t a pepper grinder any more.

I made a pepper grinder

2021-03-13 21:06:12Z

So, as some of my longtime friends know, I’m hard on my personal effects, be they the string of watches I wear, the cameras I carry, my bikes, my tools, my phone, laptops, everything. This extends to the kitchen, where the average life of a glass is about a year. Pots and pans tend to be a little banged up, before I switched to aeropress I was always needing a new glass carafe for my french press coffee. Damn I miss french press sometimes. Anyway.

I’ve also been through a number of pepper grinders, the last of which was both really nice (consistent, ground pepper quickly, needed no batteries) and not so nice (plastic) and broke after only a few months. I took it apart and looked at it, and saw that I could replace all the plastic parts with aluminum, quickly mocked up a design in my head, and bought some material to turn the parts on the lathe. I also did a repair on the plastic, to keep us in fresh ground pepper in the mean time.

Fast forward a month. I’ve got all the tooling I think I need, and I’m in the shower, thinking through the kinda complex design I came up with initially. It had two flanges, a main body, and a cap, and I didn’t know exactly how the shaft that connected the burrs to the top would connect. The flanges would have required cutting a bunch of internal and external threads, and just a lot more work in general. And then, there in the shower, I realize: I can just weld a little threaded rod to the end of the shaft, and then not need all the complicated extra flanges; the cap could just spin on the main body and be held in place with nuts above and below.

So, even if you can’t understand my description, you can kinda see that the second one is a lot simpler. It was simple enough I was confident I could make it. That same day, I started cutting material. I cut the main body out, drilling and then boring out to 1.5” about half way down my work piece. I also cut the little shoulder on the top that the cap rides on. Then, I parted off at the right length, flipped the part with a soda can shim over the finished surface, and started boring the bottom.

Innuendo aside, it was a pretty straightforward process. I had to cut a succession of steps, one to hold the outside of the steel burrs I had, and one to hold the little adjuster bar that was from the bottom of the old mill. In the middle of all this, I ordered a better boring bar from littlemachineshop.com (which I love, because they always have good quality import tools), which made the second side and the cap a lot easier.

Then, a minor disaster: I wanted to hurry up and finish, so I was rushing through cutting the cap out. Got the initial work done, but my parting blade wasn’t cooperating, so I decided to cut it with my band saw and then face it. My parting is pretty bad, I usually have to face the parts after anyway. Facing means making a cut perpendicular to the axis of rotation, on the end of the spinning part, often to clean up a cut made some other way.

So I take it out of the lathe, put it in the vice, and start cutting it with the saw. The band saw is balky and doesn’t like the 2” round. Rushing, not getting things in position, etc. Also, at this point, it’s midnight, so I’m tired and making dumb mistakes. The blade pops out, I put it back in, keep sawing. finally, the part comes off.

I take it back over to the lathe and start to cut. It’s really rough; almost immediately, the part snags, and because I’m only holding the thin side, it’s ripped out of the jaws, and ends up in the chip tray (the metal that comes off from machining operations is called chips; the chip tray collects some of them; much of machining is dealing with chips). The part is bent, ruined. I give up for the night.

The next day, on lunch, I start cutting on a new lid. I have just enough material, and at least the drilling parts of the work only take maybe 20 minutes. That evening, I get the boring and parting done, flip it, carefully true it up, and face it off without incident.

Then, finally, I was ready to assemble it. I was a little surprised that it went together on the first try. Everything fit; all my measurements had been within tolerance, and after a quick washing, I loaded it up with pepper. Works great, doubles as a bludgeon. Very tough.

The next day (today, the day I’m writing this, I looked at the simple nut on the top, and decided it would be better if it were a bigger sort of knob (the technical term is “thumb nut”), that could be operated without tools. So I went back down to the lathe and made one in about 25 miuntes. And that’s the grinder we have now. Hopefully I won’t break this one, but if I do, I can fix it.

just a walk around the block

2021-02-21 10:36:52Z

So, I was having a cigar, screwing around on twitter, and I tweeted:

Man I miss taking pictures. Just, like, walking around on a long lunch on a Tuesday, led around by the light.
— photomattmills (@photomattmills) February 21, 2021

And well, I was sitting there and I realized that there was nothing stopping me from going on a little walk right then and there, so I did. Grabbed my camera and went on a little stroll. My left ankle and knee complained most of the way, but overall I’m really glad I went somewhere and did something. Vaccination and a bit more personal freedom and leeway can’t come soon enough.

In other news, I launched the bag website recently, to almost no fanfare at all. I don’t really know what to do to drum up customers… not my area really. I should talk to other people that make niche goods maybe.

Anyway. There are a lot of RVs parked in the hood now. I hope they’re OK, whoever might be living in them. Going to push publish and go to sleep.

left the house today, took some pics

2021-02-07 09:27:24Z

I was going to stay home and nap today, but fate threw a good excuse to go walk around the mission for an hour today (double masked and keeping my distance from everyone, naturally). It’s been a while since I was out in the world. Five thousand steps according to my watch. Maybe the longest I’ve walked in a year? It’s been a while. I kinda wish I’d gone further. I used to do 10 or 15 miles in a day, no problem. Solvitur Ambulando, I’ve always thought.

The Mission was much as it always was; rumors of a dead san francisco are greatly exaggerated. Valencia had a couple blocks closed off, and a lot of the restaurants had ‘outdoor seating’ with varying degrees of ‘outdoor’ for each of them in the unused parking spaces. None were the fully enclosed spots like I’ve seen in photos from other cities, but I’m still not about to sit down that close to other people. I kept walking.

Trying to work on the backlog of tasks, but these pictures were fresh, and I kinda like them. Getting out the superwide was a good choice; something to break up the monotony of the 50mm which I love, and won’t ever really be done with, but/and I definitely needed to take the wide view today.

The pandemic is about to enter its second year here. The early days were hard; not knowing what was safe and what wasn’t; it was maybe a month into things before the CDC was recommending mask wearing? We were worried enough that we wiped down our groceries, because nobody knew if fomite transmission was a thing (and we all suddenly knew that word). People figured out new things to do; I figured out recipes to try to relieve the boredom, we had movie sundays, where several households would start a movie at the same time, and we’d chat on discord.

Then, people started figuring out ways to see each other somewhat safely. Abstinence is a bad model for public health, and the good news is we could meet outside, in a park, with six feet between households. Lots of people picked up new hobbies; bread baking, cooking, netflix watching. I re-did this web site, kept fucking up my ankle, my knee, and finding myself unable to walk for periods of days, and hobbling around a lot. I guess that’s what happens when you cut off physical therapy too soon after surgery, but what was I going to do? Go, and breathe someone else’s air for an hour twice a week? No thank you.

anyway, at this point, we’ve figured out what’s permissible and what isn’t. Stuff outside, with the six feet rule, is fine (ish). Avoid crowds, though; the more people in an area, the more likely someone is there, spreading the virus but asymptomatic. Don’t go inside someone else’s building, unless they’re in your pod; pods are less than six people. This last is broken a lot, because people have to eat, and grocery stores are full of other people. Even with restricted occupancy, you’re definitely sharing air. If you do ‘break the rules’, self-isolate for two weeks, do not pass go, don’t collect $200.

It was a nice day after a load of crappy ones. Winter has been especially harsh this year. I always get a bit down in January. The holidays aren’t as bad, buoyed as they are (normally) by family and food and giving and receiving presents. It’s not yet spring, but it’s getting warmer.

talk about bags; unrelated pictures from 2019

2020-12-20 19:00:44Z

First photo is a ringer; it’s my friend’s dog Cherry. Been doing a lot of sewing work lately. I’ve got a new smaller EDC bag mostly ready for trials, as soon as I’m allowed to leave the house and take pictures. Just big enough for my leica, a couple of lenses, and maybe a snack and water bottle. I sort of have felt mildly embarrassed when I’m out somewhere, tell people I make bags, and the one I’m carrying isn’t one of mine. “No, this is just an old Domke,” isn’t a very fun answer, so I’m making one to fit that bag-shaped space. Scratching my own itch, so to speak.

Another thing that just happened: I acquired the cheapest walking foot sewing machine, a TuffSew Super Deluxe. I didn’t buy new, but got it for $100 on craigslist. The foot only lifts about 1/4”, the maximum stitch length is about 6mm, and if that mixing of units didn’t put you off, the noise from the machine just might. It’s a machine that lets the whole house know, SOMEONE IS SEWING SOMETHING. It did punch through 9 layers of 1000 denier nylon canvas without issue, once I got the threading right, and oiled it in all the spots that move. Oh and corrected the belt tension and fucked up one of the cams that times the feed dogs, and then fixed that. I may have to move some things around to make room for it, but that’s later today.

Oh, and: the stitch length lever on it doesn’t have like, markings or a way to set and hold a stitch length, so I need to devise something for that; I may see if I can get some Sailrite parts for it, since they’re the same OEM they share the same casting and a lot of parts. The Sailrite machines are at least finished here in the US, and are probably a lot smoother. Like any offset manufacturing, there are quality and finish specifications; the degree to which fit and finish affects the final product is pretty drastic. Part of why I screwed up that cam is I was trying to add a tiny bit of play in the machine, as it was adjusted so tightly that it was almost binding up from internal forces.

Anyway. As soon as I finish this bag, I’m going to start work on the web site for the three bags I intend to sell. There are three base designs, and basically those are a jumping off point. Customizable fabric, size, accessories, all made to order. The little one I’m making for myself will be the cheapest, probably in the $750 range. I haven’t decided yet. The Dyneema isn’t cheap, and neither is anything else I put into these, including my time. That’ll be at mills.studio which is a working domain that displays “…” and nothing else. A work in progress.

Speaking of, it’s time to cook breakfast.

unwritten rules (how not to blog)

2020-12-09 08:18:43Z

These are a little random, but they’re what’s next on the queue. I’ve always had a couple rules, unwritten, that I find myself following without thinking. One of them is that the things stay in chronological order, whatever I have in what passes for a stack to be published, and I put out the oldest first.

Another unwritten rule: Never publish the same picture twice. This is probably the worst idea from like a self-promotion or advertising angle; good thing I’m doing neither of those. I don’t know why I do this, other than the fact that I’m constantly producing images; less so the last nine months, but I still have enough of a work backlog that I’m good for images till… sometime next year. or until things start happening again and I start generating new stuff I care about more.rr

The last one: no drafts, no timed posts. This is more a function of the barebones software I use. I technically can do draft posts now, and have occasionally, but more often than not I look at what I’ve written, say fuck it, and push publish. life is too short to worry about what’s in a little personal blog that nobody really reads.

odd salon HERO

2020-12-05 09:16:04Z

I remember this salon, rather well. Second to last in 2019. Great story about the sword master Musashi; I was too busy listening to get a good photo of Michael.

I’ve been raising money for Odd Salon over here. They’re a great organization, and while they’re not feeding people or engaging in direct mutual aid, I’d argue that the core mission of teaching people in an engaging way is just as essential. Maslow is bullshit; people need the arts in their lives to really be living (and if getting up in front of a rowdy crowd and giving them a history lesson, to capacity crowds once a month isn’t art, then I don’t know what is). Of course, survival first, but if you can, do.

Things are about to get dire again, if they aren’t already. We’ll be up to one 9/11 a day by mid-december if things don’t level off (and they won’t). Trump did this. The republicans in the Senate also did this. I’m not about to forgive and forget.

Stay safe out there. Wear your mask if you have to leave home, but really think about it before you do. Can it wait a day? Two? Try it out. Remember surviving another day is its own victory when the enemy is a death cult bent on killing us all.

Bar in the before times

2020-12-04 08:44:24Z

Remember saturdays? When you would go to the bar and just run into cool people? Yeah. This one bled over into sunday, into the bar shutting down, into us standing outside with folks while everyone smoked and waited for their rides to show up. No, mom, I wasn’t smoking. I only smoke cigars, and those only to celebrate special occasions.

It’s December now, and the light is all but gone. When I get up from my desk to pause at 4, right before plunging into the last couple hours of my day, it’s all but dark outside. No time for an after-work walk, or an evening bike ride (unless I want to ride in the cold and dark, which used to appeal to me but doesn’t as much, now).

Things are going to get worse, before they get better. But they will get better dammit! There are old people, and shitty people, who don’t want it to be true, but we’re living in the first days of a better world. We humans made a working vaccine for a virus that didn’t exist 13 months ago (well, in humans) out of fragments of RNA in two days. Someone sequenced the vaccine, and they emailed the damn sequence, and two days of work later, what is now the Oxford vaccine was effectively done. Of course, there’s no way to know such a thing will work until it goes through trials, but we also did that in record time.

What I’m saying is, despite reactionary movements, despite setbacks, despite a whole political party determined to kill us all, we’re still here. First days of a better world.

Big and Empty

2020-10-20 07:04:49Z

Is Robert Adams still alive? (He is) Driving along the front range on I-25, I could really see the attraction to the area, which was and really still is his home turf. It’s spectacular in scale, and the juxtaposition of the tiny scale of the ‘development’ done here next to the mountains that do not care is sublime; it is a ratio that is just out of our ability to understand.

The impulse persists, though. to try to put a frame around it, even (especially) at 70MPH. The smaller, man-made junk on these rises that go on for miles and miles; the smoke from the fires.

I dunno. We’re out here. We came to get away from the smoke in CA, and there’s a huge fire (biggest in state history) about 5 miles from where we were staying for the last month. The prevailing wind was sometimes in our favor, sometimes not. We were isolating/social distancing in a house owned by a friend of the family; they had a dog that needed watching, and their dates and ours aligned pretty well.

We were already coming to Colorado to celebrate Sophie’s birthday. It’s a big one, and even in the pandemic, we figured we could get away with a small gathering, as long as everyone is isolating properly before (we’re also going to all get tested before we meet, as an additional precaution). Then, of course, we’re going to go back to Cali and sit in our house and isolate for two weeks; followed by the regular social distance / pods we were doing before. It’s not zero risk, but it’s also not a ton more than sitting at home (by my reckoning; I am not an immunologist, please carefully consider your options and risk factors).

I still have complicated feels, even doing all the right things. I guess it’s like any form of security. It’s not a binary, but rather a continuum. My personal threat model for this is “don’t kill anybody” and second “try not to die.” Mask wearing is non-optional in public settings; private gatherings are small, intentional, and book ended by long periods (at least two weeks) of social distancing. We’re following all the rules, or at least as many as we can and still do the thing.

We also spent the first month of lockdown not entering a building not our own house. As we found out about mask wearing, got sufficient masks that fit well enough, we added the grocery store to that list. And I’ve blogged about going camping up in the hills, after that even. Going into a store, as long as everyone is masked, seems decently safe. You won’t catch me going inside a bar or restaurant until this is really over. Isolation in time and space, and try not to die.

That’s it for now. We’re away from the smoke, finally, in an airbnb. I should be sleeping. good night.

orange sky 2

2020-09-09 23:43:02Z

There may be a nuanced discussion to have about the difference between, say, the fire management policies of the state of california and the ongoing effects of climate change; the difference between a black swan event (I think this is number 3 or 4 of those for this year) and leading indications of trends. I’m not the guy to write those essays; I think, at this point, they’re a difference without a distinction, or vice versa. We’ve been fucking up for a while, and the time to change was 10 years ago, and now we must do everything we can (we is intentional; collective action is the only way out of this).

In case anyone is wondering: I walked around for about half an hour to shoot these, and then we drove out to the emeryville marina for the last couple. White balance was set to Lightroom’s Tungsten preset, as that struck a nice balance between too orange to see what’s going on, and what it really looked like. Shot mostly wide open, mostly on my trusty Summilux.

first slowly, then all at once

2020-09-09 15:55:16Z

Context: I took these 20 minutes ago, outside my house. It’s 8:53am local, which means the sun should be up AND THE SKY SHOULD NOT BE ORANGE. I believe the technical term for this situation is ‘fucked’, or barring that, ‘entirely fucked’. We may be well and truly FUBAR’d.

full narrative collapse

2020-08-25 07:58:57Z

On some old pickup trucks, there was an option to lock the differential for use when in four wheel drive*. The idea being that one tire might slip where the others wouldn’t. You couldn’t use it for very long without unlocking, because the difference in the way the wheels spun would put twist in the axles, first loading up the drivetrain with spring tension and then causing something to break (at the right forces, any piece of steel is a spring, for at least a little bit).

But/And! impassable territory became passable, just barely. Drive, hit a rough passage, lock it down, drive a little, unlock, coast, lock, repeat, until you get past the obstacle.

That’s sort of how I feel about this here blog. when this blog is going well, there is a rhythm to it, a sort of A follows B follows C that kinda works. A smooth narrative from post to post, and sometimes I can keep that going for quite a while. But the world doesn’t fit a smooth narrative. Plans are lists of things that don’t happen. No smooth narratives here.

Let’s not think too hard about the metaphor. I’m not sure it actually extends to the territory being rough, all right? Sometimes it’s just that I get distracted by other projects, and they take over my time. Despite my efforts to never sleep, it’s still limited.

Halloween, in the beforetimes

2020-08-17 08:43:42Z

At some point in the last few weeks (maybe a month ago? time is a soup in a blender), I found a folder of images that was everything I shot from just after the trip to new york all the way through the beginning of december. So, starting from the top, here’s some stuff from Halloween night.

These are with the 35/1.4 voightlander, and I hadn’t noticed it being appreciably soft wide open, but these do have some glow. The close up portrait is nice, but the others… well, my technical game is always improving.

Current projects moving in one way or another:

Briefcase Bag - Doing a muslin in cordura before I use the expensive stuff. All cut, doing the assembly now. I’m not actually doing any new techniques, just recombining old tricks and a slightly different shape. Dimensions to fit a 16”MBP, in case I ever get around to buying one.
Books - So I have almost half a dozen possible book projects, three of which spring to mind immediately, so those are probably what I’ll go with. There’s the Brazil retrospective (15 years later! god I’m old), there’s the NY synthesis book (just called “The Questions,” probably), and the Dinner Club book, which I haven’t even tried to make an edit for.
Lathe Purchase - This is to support some of the other things I’d like to do, in particular make fixtures for a bike frame jig, and cut the tubes.

Backburnered projects:

The bike frame itself. I got to a point with my welding that I could get all the way around a joint with no blowouts consistently, and decided to conserve some material for when I was able to start up again after I make the frame jig.
San Pablo. Had to give it a rest. It may start back up, or it may not, but in the mean time, I’ll probably cast about for a new photo-project to work on. Open to suggestions.

covid scare

2020-08-14 09:23:39Z

yeah. So two weeks ago, we went camping for the second time in the Pandemic, this time with a couple friends, Cason and Ryan. We picked a spot up in the sierras, where there was a lake nearby that we thought we’d be able to swim in. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out; the lake was a bit gross, with a lot of foulness from various fowl. But, as luck would have it, there was another place to get in the water, in the river we’d crossed twice to get up to the campsite; we’d noticed it and the people there on the way in, so we decided to check it out.

As you might be able to tell from the pictures, it was really great. Access was a little difficult, I can’t imagine getting down to the water if I was only on one leg, but then again I managed a lot on one leg there for a while, so who knows? Anyway, there was a large local contingent, but we kept a good medium distance most of the time, and figured it was outside so it was probably good enough.

So, we get home, everything is fine, I develop and scan all the film and post the photos to facebook, because that’s primarily where our friends who came with us are, and for some reason that’s just where I went with them first. On that post, I wrote:

Photos from the weekend camping trip. Mostly from the river. Ryan, Cason, Sophia, and a few others that I don’t have links to on here. I know travel is dangerous right now, and I could be an unwitting hazard for others; this was managed with as little close contact and going inside of buildings as possible. Probably as much risk going to the grocery store, spread over a weekend. Distance maintained from the people not in our camp; masks when needed (always when inside).

Honestly? The absolute best thing to do is still to just stay home. But I don’t think that’s sustainable even in the medium term; it’s the same line they give you in abstinence based sex ed, and look how well that works. Our government has completely failed us, and we’re not going to get any relief until 2021 at least (vaccine, new government). So, in the interim, we’ve gotta figure out how to live in this world, manage the risks, and not go crazy trying.

And then, of course, five days later, I get a fever and body aches and I start to wonder if my luck has finally run out. I quarantined in our spare room, and slept most of tuesday; started to feel better that evening, made crappy scans of a bunch of negatives with my phone, and felt mostly better wednesday. I still took the day off, because I was still kinda tired, slept, and also just frankly worried I might be dying. I went and got a rapid COVID test, which was negative, and was insanely relieved. I then spent a while worrying about false negatives, but as it turns out the test I took is about as good as the slower tests. Why aren’t we rolling those out everywhere, instead of having people wait days and days? I don’t know.

Anyway, yeah. Moral of the story is probably “Don’t Panic.” Or maybe this is another one of my stories without any point, that I just felt like telling. maybe I needed a lot of text to excuse posting a lot of photos with this one.

we live in the future update: it’s now 1:15 in the morning as I’m writing, and the lab processed my other test, the one I got on tuesday, and uploaded the result to onemedical, who updated me with the app. also negative! pass by failing, yay!

Comet C/2020 f3 (NEOWISE)

2020-07-21 08:46:26Z

had a lucky streak tonight, and everything lined up so that I was able to see and photograph comet C/2020 f3 (NEOWISE) that’s almost at peak (closest point to earth anyway). No line at the grocery store, dinner was done and eaten in time for me to check the location a friend had given, realize it was almost an hour away, get my gear together, and drive out to it.

Then when we were there, a cop drove by the road we were parked on, came over the loudspeaker, and told everyone they had to re-park on the main road; it’s like, come on man, this happens once every seven thousand years. But whatever, he has a gun and can shoot me if he feels like it, so I move the car, grab the gear, and walk back to the same ledge, where the cop proceeds to periodically shine his stupid searchlights at us. Ugh. At least I had a lens hood.

Spent about 20 or 30 minutes photographing. I really should have done a bunch of 1-second exposures and stacked them for the long lens; I had to do some work in photoshop to remove the slight star trails. Also, the second image is a mosaic of 3 frames, so it won’t line up perfectly with a star chart because the frames were tens of seconds apart. There is what appears to be a meteorite next to the little dipper’s handle, too. A nice bonus.

walking during the early onset period

2020-07-06 00:37:03Z

So this was early in the process. If we’re all Wile E. Coyote, running off a cliff, this was the moment the ground was no longer there, but nobody had yet noticed. For reference, we’re now in free fall, hoping the shovel we’re holding will buy us some time (we = the USA, and the poorly coordinated response). Couldn’t just pay people to stay home for 6 weeks and wear masks when we go out for groceries, could we? That would be to easy. I’m not shouting. You’re shouting. No, you calm down.

I mean, we pay farmers not to grow food to control markets; this is exactly the same thing (except that people are also starving).

Anyway. I was doing a lot of walks in the first part of the lockdown. Solo, and with Sophie. I posted some of the pictures at the time, right when I migrated to this new blogging software and redesigned everything.

I have a lot of stuff I’d like to work on, not sure which direction to go in. There’s a new bag design I’m kicking around, a bit of a riff on the Domke J series satchels (with better closure, organization, and most of all, rain-proofing). There’s the ever present bike work, but I’m waiting on materials to come in for the fixture, and also I need the lathe to cut the tubing.

There’s also a couple book projects to work on; I want to take all the dinner club photos I took over the years and make a little chapbook. I also feel like the San Pablo stuff is coming to a close. I don’t know if it’s in a place that’s good or done but I know I’m not feeling like working on it any more. The world has moved on, and it’s time for some other project. So I’ll be working on an edit for that, to see if there’s enough to make something out of or if I just file it away for further work later. We’ll see.

false vacuum collapse

2020-06-27 10:52:20Z

blogger’s note: I wrote this two weeks ago, late at night, and thought I’d come back to it in the morning, and then the protests in Minneapolis boiled over into the rest of the country, and now we’re talking seriously about police abolition. Never thought I’d see it. To be clear, it’s a wonderful first step, and something I didn’t probably make clear below is that these kind of moments aren’t always bad as in buried at the bottom of a hole in the ground; but unpredictable, for sure.

Dan Hon, over on twitter, keeps saying “Slowly, then all at once.” Everything seems to be humming along, approaching a new normal, and then a bunch of stuff happens and the bottom falls out of the world. So: There’s this idea out of Quantum Mechanics that says that the ground state of the universe, the quantum vacuum between particles, is not a true ground, that it isn’t really the ‘bottom’. The properties of that vacuum determine a lot of things about our world, like the fact that particles stick together to form atoms, atoms make bonds, etc etc. Real literal fabric of the universe, here.

And, well, it’s possible that fabric is not stable, that we’re in what’s called a local minima. Imagine a waterfall. Now, imagine, some way down, there is a ledge, and on that ledge, over eons, there forms a pool. Water can hang out in the pool, and be pretty stable seeming. If someone jumps into it though, a lot of water will splash over, and continue hurtling towards the ground.

Or, better yet, think of a big hole in the ground, maybe 10 feet deep and wide. It’s freshly dug, and the walls seem solid. Anyone who’s ever worked down in such a hole will tell you it isn’t. It seems OK because it’s in a little ledge of stability. When a car drives by or someone steps on the edge, adding energy to the system, it can kick the it out of the region of stability, racing down to a new ground state; in this case, you better hope nobody was in the hole (on a real construction site, they use trench plates braced against the sides to prevent such accidents).

And so other systems can exhibit the same behavior. The quantum vacuum may or may not be at a true ground state, and even if it isn’t, it might take more energy than the whole universe will ever have to kick it over. It’s something that keeps a very specific brand of nerd up at night (never me; I lack the maths skill to really be frightened).

Normal society is a sort of ground state, too. All the different systems that surround us and do stuff like cut down trees to produce toilet paper, deliver our mail, stock the shelves at the grocery store, those are all sort of the result of the system working (there are negative effects of the system ‘working’ too, which we call structural violence, but that’s another essay).

So COVID-19 is a shock to that system. The first round of quarantine, the first 6 weeks or so, were the first new local minima. People baked bread and sewed masks and put up with the difficulties of isolation and waited. Many world governments used this time to get a handle on testing and tracing and are doing OK. America didn’t. We have an idiot in charge. So we’re right now kicking off a cascade into a new, lower state that may or may not be a real ground state. Anti-police protests in Minneapolis. Anti-mask protests by people that want to start a second civil war (look for the dudes in the hawaiian shirts and don’t trust them).

update, two weeks after the first draft: Turns out the free fall isn’t out of our hands. The de-funding of the Minneapolis force is just a beginning. Shit, I’m hopeful. How long can we maintain this? How far can we go? Prison abolition? Reparations? Open borders? I haven’t been able to go out to the protests for medical reasons (I have a couple COVID-19 risk factors) but I’ve been donating and doing what I can from home.

update, three weeks later: I went to a protest! it was great! I decided that I cared more about showing up than my personal safety, and did as much as I could to mitigate the danger. photos are unrelated San Pablo and my hood.

the last night out (zero fucks)

2020-06-25 09:39:29Z

Ye olde insomnia again, so here I am, blogging at 2:30 in the morning. Fell asleep on the couch at like 8, moved to the bed shortly thereafter, work up just after midnight. Some day I’ll learn.

These photos were at the last Zero Fucks show, shortly before the quarantine came down. It was after many workplaces had gone work from home, and it wasn’t super crowded because I think people were already starting to stay in. I always love going to the shows they put on, it’s such a good vibe; even this one was pretty great.

The surge is well underway here. Maybe not in the bay, but the US at large is back on that hockey stick growth in terms of new cases. Completely fucked. We should probably cancel the rest of the summer, everybody go back to staying inside as much as possible. Of course, our government is shit, and won’t lift a finger to help us, even as more people have died from COVID than two Vietnam wars. We’re gonna have to do several politically impossible things if our liberal democracy is going to make it through this. 1) has to be UBI, so people don’t have to go back to jobs that will cause more death. 2) has to be the dismantling of the police, because anything else would be inhumane. 3) is probably remove the president from office, by ballot box or by general strike, demanding his resignation (and his VP; Pence is probably worse).

I have a whole post written about moments like this, how you can’t tell what will happen once you break out of local minima in complex systems, but it’ll have to wait. Maybe tomorrow.

pushing off the top of the backlog

2020-06-24 07:50:16Z

lot of irons in the fire at the moment. Protest photos, and the ethics thereof; a whole essay on why software sucks sometimes; a stack of photos from mid-march on. These were on the third of march, election day. I voted for Warren, for the record.

So, while all those things are still getting sorted and falling into place, I figured I should just push out a blog post. Some photos, a little update. Things are moving, here. Knee is mostly better, ankles have good and bad days. They still haven’t arrested the cops that killed Breonna Taylor, but we’re still in the streets (It took prosecutors a year to file charges against Oscar Grant’s killer, for reference). But/and: Just heard SF public schools is following Oakland’s lead and ending their relationship with SFPD. It’s not all bad news. We can do better, be better, and we will.

So what am I doing? While I was having trouble getting around, I was mostly trying to spread good information (protest tactics, anti-racism resources) mostly via twitter, and also donating money to a lot of stuff that came over the transom. I didn’t tweet too much about that, seemed too much like bragging to my midwestern upbringing. I’ve been taking comfort in little bits of poetry that come back to me, bits of Ulysses and Lays of Ancient Rome (“How can man die better than facing fearful odds…”) and others too. Roethke and Baldwin, too.

Now that I am getting around a little better, I went to a protest last Friday at the port, and it was amazing. I’ll probably write more about it when I actually post the photos. Don’t know when that’ll be.

the things don’t stop happening

2020-06-09 06:14:42Z

I don’t know if it’s obvious from my posts here in the past, so I’m gonna say it here anyway: Black Lives Matter. Abolish the Police, tear down all the prisons, pay reparations to the descendants of slaves that built this country. And open the borders. And make all the billionaires give back what they stole. Maybe then we can stop protesting.

God I need to get out and shoot. The things! They continue to happen!

What else? I came across this old post where I said “A state of profound weirdness has become the new normal.” It really is an almost perfect blog post, but I really underestimated how weird things would get.

I’m almost out of pictures in the pre-covid period, maybe one or two more posts. Gonna have to get shooting for real, before I catch up to the present.

The best time to start is now.

Kawan’s birthday in the afternoon

2020-05-22 09:57:23Z

Remember parties? This was a good one. Kawan’s place in the mission is really rad. It’s a regular 1-bedroom, but instead of like, a living room, he has a studio. Great big windows, tons of light. Also, and I feel like I say this every year, but he has a lot of rad people hanging around.

It’ll be a long time before we can have a carefree gathering like this again. For the time being, not partying counts as partying, in the Andrew WK sense of the word. There’s a whole treatise on partying in the texts of WK as mystical monism, but it is very late and I do not have the strength. Maybe after I finally write that false vacuum/local minima essay I’ve been threatening.

it already monday

2020-05-18 08:36:50Z

These were just like, a random Friday (except the last one, which I shot from the car earlier that week). We just decided to gather at a local bar, grabbed our going-out stuff, and went. I think we even rode bikes to the first bar? Ah, the memories.

I joke, but only a little. I did get to leave the house this weekend; after complaining about it friday, I switched from the ankle boot to a brace which lets me have a normal gait, but is less protective, and that’s made a huge difference in my mobility. I can actually just walk around the house a bit, unload the dishwasher, etc. We went to a little parklet in a friend’s neighborhood, saturday, so at this rate those photos will be out in about… two months. We all sat over 6 feet apart, but it was nice to sit in the sun with some friends, at least for a little bit.

Today was a banner day: I got to look at a potential space to rent for light industrial work, so I can move the welder and metalwork out of my current space, and maybe even the sewing table? Or maybe the electronics. It’s somewhat out of my hands, but it would be really nice, if it works out.

Also today: we went for a drive, over the Richmond Bridge, to the Marin Headlands, which were closed to vehicles, and then to almost the top of Twin Peaks, where there was also a road closure and a bunch of people trying to park and walk. We paused at intervals and took pictures from the car. It wasn’t going on a nature hike or anything, but it was pretty nice after being inside the house for two weeks.

Terrible Lizards

2020-05-17 08:42:04Z

So, sometime in february, we visited the animal sanctuary WildCare, in San Rafael, which is Marin County, for those that don’t live in the Bay Area. They take in animals of all stripes, many found injured and in need of veterinary care, and rehabilitate the ones they can, and the ones that can’t be released, they keep at their facility. They serve as ambassadors for what the sanctuary does. I think I’ve talked about them before, but I really can’t remember.

While we were there, we got to see the Peregrine they have. I was trying to take a picture, and through the viewfinder, I couldn’t see the fence really. So when the bird decided to go from one perch to another by flying right at me, I jumped right back. Raptors are terrifying when they’re zooming through the air at you. That’s the original meaning of the ‘terrible lizard’, the dinosaur: scary, as in it’ll claw your eyes out.

Not Vlad though. Vlad is the vulture in the first and last pictures. Calm, regal, really a nice bird. Eats carrion, mostly, found as a little chick and someone hand-fed him until they couldn’t handle him, and then turned him over to WildCare (if I’m remembering the story correctly, which I may not be). So, he doesn’t have any of the fear of people, or other learned behaviors that would allow him to survive in the wild. Protip: if you see a baby bird on the ground, don’t touch it. Its parents will often come and get it. If you’re concerned for it, it looks injured, look up your local wildlife rescue, give them a call. They’ll know what to do.

odds and ends

2020-05-16 09:05:09Z

The hard part of the quarantine is certainly coming to a middle. At first, and even before social distancing, I was plagued by the implications of the numbers. If the infections reached saturation, and the death rates held, it was going to be something like 2 million people dead. A lot of stiffs. And while we haven’t really done shit but stay home, we don’t currently have 2 million dead people causing cascade failures of our cemetery and mortuary industries, so that’s one thing I worried about. There have been rumors of mass graves in some places (maybe more than rumors, but I’m not going to chase them down). So for about two days the thought of mass graves plagued me, but I was able to let that go, and then I thought of other ways in which the world was going to fall apart. That lasted another couple days, but then lockdown settled into a routine, and I was fine. Ish.

I was taking walks, I was exercising, wearing a mask as soon as everybody realized they were maybe effective. Things were as OK as they could be; I was cooking a lot, doing recipes I’d gotten of youtube. Then, I decided I needed to add some leg exercises to my routine. I did some squats. Like 10 of them. Next day, I’m having some knee pain, and it gets worse all day. The doc over zoom the next morning said sometimes inflammation is like that. So, I’m hobbling around on one leg, and a couple days later, the ankle on the other leg decides it’s had enough and resigns in protest. That was two weeks ago.

The knee really is a lot better now; I’m not having issues with it on the stairs any more. The ankle is still not right, and won’t be, I suspect, for another week at least. Everything is at a low ebb. Can’t stop Won’t stop, though.

(I did post a small note about this a week ago, but as it’s turned into A Thing, I decided I’d record the whole mess for posterity. These photos have nothing to do with the text, they’re just the three randos that were on top of the queue).

Odd Salon Fearless

2020-05-11 05:21:25Z

took these in february, at the penultimate salon this year. It was a great show, and I found myself once again drawn to the margins. There’s so much going on at a show that’s essential to its existence, but not on the stage. The ticket takers at the door, the merch table, the people running AV. Fearless was a really good show, and you can see the videos on Odd Salon’s Youtube.

san pablo, chapter something

2020-05-08 07:34:49Z

I keep saying what this project needs is portraits. San Pablo is people, and for a long time, I thought of myself almost exclusively as portrait photographer, shooting what’s known as environmental portraits. People are invariably more interesting than stuff, I thought. and also, the project has seemed a little rudderless. Like “Now what?” So, portraits make sense. But.

but. I keep going out and shooting these abstractions. These things that are definitely not portraits (or are they? some feeble art-school thought whispers). I’ll get myself together to go out to shoot, and just completely freeze when I think about approaching people. In New York, I didn’t have this problem. Here, for some reason, I do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

And, they definitely work on some level. It turns out my documentary photo project on the socioeconomic inequality in America through the lens of this one weird street is actually a weird art project about the same weird street? There are projects that require fighting, and leveling up, and do the thing you set out to do. The bike frame project is that for sure. One thing I’ve learned over the years, though, is sometimes you have to go with the grain of the material you’re using.

I remember there was this project I did in college. Speaking of bikes, it was about a local program that did free bike repair, called RecycleABike or something. Great people, taught me a lot about wrenching. But the photos from the workshop weren’t gelling into something I could use. So I decided to do something I’d been wanting to do, but hadn’t thought was ‘right’ or ‘documentary enough’. I brought a bunch of the people into the studio, took portraits against a white psych (one at a time), and did interviews at the same time, all in little 45 minute sessions. Took me maybe a week, and the whole project was done. Felt amazing.

Does this need to be a documentary project? Does the primary limitation I’ve set for myself need to be front and center in the final edit? The ‘grain’ of this project, so far, is not that of the standard sense of place stuff I was thinking it would be. I’ve read a lot of novelists’ accounts of writing, and finding somewhere along the way an unexpected turn in the story. This isn’t that, but it’s the same energy. The work is telling me something.

(I will note that I wrote this twice; the first version was swallowed by me accidentally hitting the back button. I think I got most of it, although the part about novelists was in the middle, and I concluded talking about a couple other projects that turned on me that way. seems fine now.)

begin broadcast day

2020-05-07 16:28:18Z

So, a couple days ago, I started writing what was going to be the first post on here in about a week. I got a good three paragraphs into an essay on the pain scale they give you when you go to the doctor, and then I was like, ‘I’m tired, let’s go sleep’ and well, you know the rest, because that post didn’t happen. It’s in my drafts.

In the meantime, bear with me as I’m have some difficulty moving around the house, which makes getting to my computer in the basement to do image editing, especially at the end of the day like I’ve been doing, kind of difficult. I keep running out of spoons. Really, the last year or so of not having decent mobility a lot of the time has been a drag. Hopefully, in a week or so, the tendons in my left ankle and right knee will be done being mad at me, and normal service will resume.

Zero Fucks Masquerade

2020-04-29 08:13:47Z

Last week was kind of a shit show, don’t know if you could tell from the blogging, but I was kind of a mess. Bad sleep, unable to focus on doing stuff during the day, one particularly bad panic episode that saw me going to three stores and driving through the parking lot of a fourth to get new locks for the house (which was a thing I needed to do anyway, one of our spare keys went missing, but probably not quite so rushed). The calm distance from the first three or four weeks of social distance is gone, and I’m just treading water at the moment.

All that said, continuing to shelter in place is the right thing to do. Many more people will die if we don’t. It’s nuts to think that some states are talking about opening up as early as next week, (fact check me; I don’t actually know any of the dates, but Oklahoma and Georgia, my home state and the place of my birth, respectively, are making asses of themselves).

I’m doing a little better this week, trying to manage my sleep better, at least. The world is pretty messed up right now, and it’s easy to fall in to despair. But I can’t think of a time where that wasn’t true, either. I was reminded, by a friend, of the end of Ulysses:

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.

I have an essay to work up about local minima and false vacuum; I think there are parallels to our current situation; the current situation is a local minima, and the new ground state is out there, waiting to happen. Anyway, the whole essay should happen sometime this week, if I can give it a polish and push publish.

close to home

2020-04-25 10:54:17Z

These were just after we got back, I think. Datestamp is the fourth of January, which makes some sense. When we got home, the cat went out to a party, and we spent a good part of the next day finding him, so between the road stress and the stress of the cat missing, that little break at the end of the year wasn’t, really.

Still working on the design, although now the links have color again.

Self portrait. I promise I’m not trying to tense up in this photo, that’s just kinda how I look taking a picture sometimes? I’ve got a lot of pictures to work through, but I think they’ll go pretty quickly at this point; the first 2.5 months of the year had a rhythm, and I’m not sure how many posts I can wring out of that before we’re down to what I’m getting on my exercise walks now. We’ll see.

Getting home

2020-04-22 05:48:07Z

not much to say. just letting things marinate. Haven’t been sleeping terribly well, what with the lockdown and the pandemic. Not getting out of the house is hard when that’s a main coping mechanism. I totally get it, I understand the reasons; doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve been going on a couple walks a week, as a sort of minimum viable exercise. I’m going to have to branch out soon, or start taking the bike instead; the photos on the route I’ve been taking are getting a little stale. Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep.

Anyway, these photos are from the last day of our road trip home. A milk run from Needles to Oakland, about 8 hours according to google maps, which is about what I remember. There was snow crossing the first set of mountains, which was pretty wild, as they’re usually pretty hot and barren. Right time of year for a freak storm, but it’d passed a couple days ahead of us. Then the surrealist masterpiece, the 5, most of the day. We were still driving after dark, coming over the coast range on 680, I think.

Arizona and the Grand Canyon

2020-04-20 07:51:24Z

These were shot in the no-time between christmas and new years, as we wended our way home. Day 2 of 3 days driving, although the last day was only about 6 hours.

I don’t have any writing that’s like… fully baked at the moment. I’m thinking about some things, though. Blogging seems, overall, a much more positive way to spend my energy online. There’s no real feedback mechanism, unfortunately. I could add likes and comments pretty easily, but I don’t wanna. I think one of the things blogging is helps with is breaking some of the small feedback loops in favor of bigger ones.

Producing work, consistently, on a scale of months and years, is something that separates the real from the dilettantes (maybe. or maybe you take one perfect picture once. don’t ask me, I can’t tell you). Anyway, I’m going to have to ruminate on that and work it into a thesis, but there’s something to not being part of anyone else’s feed, just producing my own. Different priorities. The impossibility of going viral (well, much reduced). Anyway, yeah, that’s a sketch of what might become a whole essay.

goodbye, holly dog

2020-04-17 08:48:38Z

Holly was a good dog. She loved belly rubs, hikes with her people, and didn’t care a bit if it was raining. She always remembered me when I came to visit, even that one time we didn’t see each other for like a couple years. Holly still knew that I was good for maybe one more pet. A friend to everyone, even the deer she like to bark at in her people’s back yard.

I don’t normally do this kind of post, but normally, to process grief, I can be around people. So here we are.

Yeah, regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. Or next week, probably.

headed home

2020-04-16 06:48:27Z

So I did some work on the design of the site; I’m still not like 100% on it, but I think it’s a lot better now than it was before. Text way to the right but also left-justified is a look, but we’ll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

There is something really nice about getting on the road. Even though I don’t have the endurance for driving that I once did; there was a time when I could get in the car and drive for 20 hours, easy. Now, I’m doing good to get 6 in a day. This day, to start, we had to detour through Lawton, to get Sophia’s keys, which she’d left in the car of a friend the night before, and subsequently he’d gone home to Lawton. All in all, it really only lost us like an hour, so 9 hours that day instead of 8.

pictures first (leaving OKC)

2020-04-15 06:33:52Z

yeah, just like the title says. Putting the pictures first in the post, as a stopgap to putting them first in the design. Going to start playing around with sizes and arrangements pretty soon. Need a Visual Heirarchy, some differentiation between text types and sizes, some good colors, etc. Good does not have to be a thousand line CSS file. I’m hoping for like a hundred? Anyway, not a lot to say today. Trouble sleeping the last few nights, already took a melatonin to try to knock myself out.

I might do some truly egregious things here before the design settles. Accents. Background colors. Who knows?

(the photos: taken one of the nights in OKC. Good crowd. Nice of the clouds to put on a show as I was driving in).

Christmas Day with the Outlaws

2020-04-13 09:30:56Z

This was a long time ago, seems like, and far away, but it did happen, and hopefully not the last time. The first photo is all of the ‘outlaws’: those who married into this particular family gathering, including myself. I will note, now, that I’ve had a tab open with Robin’s newsletter. In my head, I keep coming back to two passages:

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

and

There’s a kind of grit required to get through creative failure, whether that’s commercial rejection or just your own frustration with yourself; you might be acquainted with it. This crisis demands another, deeper kind of grit, because this crisis whispers in your ear:

Even if you succeed, it won’t matter. That thing you do, it is not life and death, and everything now is life or death, one or the other, with nothing in between. Your pampered preoccupation is utterly trivial. It took a pandemic to make you see it, but it’s been true all along.

That little snake voice, the one that says “You don’t matter, your feeble attempts at art making mean nothing, they’re bad anyway,” is an emotion I know all too well. You don’t toil at a thing in relative obscurity for as long as I have without having those thoughts. It’s really part of why I can be so shy when I’m out with the camera; it’s easy to think that what I’m doing doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t bother people with it.

The workshop I went to last October had one of the questions aimed at this, sort of. The last day, the fifth question was: If today was your last 24 hours on earth, you’re leaving on a space capsule, and you only get to take with you the pictures you take now, what do you take? Now after we’d done the exercises, we were talking about the uses of the questions, and I asked, “How often are you doing ‘last 24’?” Sara, the instructor, said without hesitation,“All the time.”

And if you think about it, it kinda makes sense: all the time, it could be your last 24 hours to make art, to look and see, and be in the world. So to be thinking, is what I’m doing important enough to take with me? If it is, then dammit, there’s room for me to be here making it. Somewhere, probably instagram, I saw a poem that included the line “You are allowed to occupy space,” and that’s maybe something I didn’t always feel entitled to? It’s true, though: even though the world doesn’t always want to give it to you, it’s OK to be here and do your thing.

So, remember your Baldwin (emphasis mine):

For nothing is fixed,
forever, forever, forever,
it is not fixed;
the earth is always shifting,
the light is always changing,
the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
Generations do not cease to be born,
and we are responsible to them
because we are the only witnesses they have.
The sea rises, the light fails,
lovers cling to each other,
and children cling to us.
The moment we cease to hold each other,
the moment we break faith with one another,
the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

Meow Wolf and Santa Fe stop

2020-04-10 09:10:40Z

Our first stop on the road trip was Sophia’s Dad’s house in Santa Fe, or rather, a little bit outside of town? We were completely exhausted, but managed to make it there in one piece, and then in the morning, we had just one of the best meals you can have anywhere: a breakfast burrito from The Pantry, in Santa Fe. Alice, a friend of Sohpie’s from elementary school, joined us, and we had an interesting discussion about the mediated realities we see online. Maybe you had to be there.

{insert cliche here about feeding bodies, feeding minds that I don’t have the energy for because it’s 2am}

Meow Wolf is an art installation, but it’s also a story told as a house and a music venue and tourist trap? and also really weird. Just bananas. If the gift shop stocked more XL stuff, I’d have at least one new hoodie, and probably a t-shirt, but oh well. If you get a chance, go. It’s worth an afternoon to get the experience. I’m actually also looking forward to revisiting to check out all the detail, which I’ll be doing next time I pass through. Just lavish amounts of attention paid to story and character of all these objects and rooms.

After Santa Fe, we got a good night’s sleep (which we needed, still really tired from the 18 hour day on the road the day before) and had a milk run getting into OKC the following evening.

not to bore you with technical details, but I’m putting this here so I can remember as much as anything else: Why am I wrapping all the images in headline (H1) tags?

funny story: Markdown, which is sort of a shorthand-HTML language, has what we in the business call “significant line breaks,” which means that when you press the enter key, it does stuff. It also makes assumptions about block elements versus inline elements that aren’t, like, 100% true, but that play into this. The long and the short of it is that if you have image tags all by their lonesome, Markdown assumes they need to be part of a block element, and wraps them in a <p> tag.

Now, this would be fine if I wanted my paragraphs and my pictures to have the same style, but I do not. Paragraphs should be narrow for readability, and pictures should be big, for the same reasons (also cf. Shelah Wilson, one of my college profs, “More is More”). So, a workaround that took me years to figure out, that you can have for free: wrap your images in H1 tags, like so: # [alt text](image url here). Headlines are block elements. H1 is one I almost never use, and I can avoid it and scale H2, H3, etc to fit my needs. So I’ll probably never style it.

So there: today’s tip in working around the limitations of Markdown.

new blog, pt 2, this time with feeling

2020-04-07 07:22:13Z

or at least some real explanation. So I’ve been using a system called Jekyll to publish the blog for many years. It’s a great system for a narrow range of uses; if you’re writing from a computer, and have minimal image needs, and know git and the command line reasonably well, it’s easy and intuitive to set up and use on a little server somewhere on the internet. Since it generated static files, it’s very fast once deployed. It also helped that at the time it was written in my language-of-choice, and could use my flavor of templating language (textile, although I’ve since switched to markdown).

So here I am, 7 years later. I do most of my writing and image processing on my iPad, saving the big computer for things like heavy photoshop and ‘real’ work. Not that photo-editing and writing aren’t real, but they don’t need the big iron. (Yes I am totally a nerd that thinks of his computer as Big Iron, like a gun in an old country song). Actually, probably nothing I do really needs a ton of processing power; I always want for more but what I know I need instead, from years in the trenches of writing it, is software that is more optimized for my needs; this is pointed especially at the super laggy desktop versions of Lightroom.

So we come back to this here blog. I could compose it by hand in HTML, but we’re not banging rocks together here. I’m a damn software developer, I make rocks think for a living. Seriously, like I was saying above, what I need is a piece of software tailored to my needs. Now, all software is eventually tech debt, and really you should avoid writing it as much as practicable, but dammit, I wanted to blog from the iPad.

Since I started using jekyll, the world has moved on. I changed jobs roughly once a year, picked up some skills, then some more, then forgot a lot of it, specializing in a language called Elixir. Elixir has a few things going for it, mostly heavily technical, but the sum of those technical parts is it’s very reliable, and very fast. Something like an order of magnitude (that’s 10 times faster for those at home) faster than Ruby programs doing roughly the same thing (YMMV, benchmarks are not actual usage, etc etc). I built a system in 2015 to speed up a part of a system at {undisclosed employer} and it was a ton faster and everyone was happy. A month later, we got to looking at the memory usage graph, and saw a weird sawtooth pattern. The processes were dying every 36 hours or so because the box was running out of memory, and nobody had noticed for a month. The reason being the reliability I was talking about. The process dies, and the system that runs the code (called a ‘virtual machine’) just restarts it, and because of the rest of the architecture of the system, nothing was lost.

But Jekyll was working for me, and until recently, I basically thought, you know it’s just barely possible to blog from the iPad, if I make a big effort, I can do it. And I think a few of the posts since last September were part of that struggle. It was clunky. It was slow. It required 5 different apps, including ssh’ing into my server, to make it go, but it went.

And then, I didn’t blog for a while. Lots of reasons. The Ankle that took me out for several months. Travel, which should result in a ton of blogging, just didn’t. Maybe I was tired, but it didn’t help that I was fighting the tooling. It’s a poor craftsman that blames his tools, of course, but a worse one that doesn’t recognize when there’s room for a better hammer.

So, a couple weeks ago, I started work on this, a new, streamlined blog, and a couple days ago, it went live. The first new post directly precedes this one. Old posts were imported, but old links have been broken. Sorry. It’s a pretty simple web app, with a login and some forms that create database entities that correspond pretty much exactly to what you see on the screen: posts and design and pictures. The pictures also got an improvement: they’re sized to fit your screen, instead of a static width. The visual design as a whole is a work in progress; changes coming there. I may add more features. Don’t expect comments.

(the photos in this post are from the first day of the road trip when we went home over the holidays; we drove to Santa Fe in one day, about 18 hours from door to door; the sunrise and sunset were great. I know, more sunrise/sunset, more golden hours, whatever. They’re next in the queue.)

new blog who dis

2020-04-06 07:15:47Z

So this is just a quick little test to kick the tires before I go to bed… hopefully this works…

(edit to add: it did! after a few quick tweaks…)

a few things from new york

2020-03-24 08:44:55Z

working on a new engine for this here blog, but in the meantime, here are some photos I took while I was in NYC last october; they’re just the top of the ‘to be posted pile’. I’m still thinking about some of the things I learned in that workshop.

walking home on san pablo

2020-01-27 05:23:10Z

I need to redesign this whole thing… blog needs a polish, for sure. I put together a newsletter, but tinyletter kind of sucks for sharing photos. There’s a limit on the width of 600 pixels, or roughly nothing. I tried to figure out ways around it, but in the end it really doesn’t work. Photos just don’t look as good small. More is more.

the inherent problems of sunsets

2019-12-04 07:47:00Z

Yes, a post full of sunsets. This was also mid-september, around when my parents were here. The second one is a stitched pano, from two images. At least I’m not committing the sin of HDR.

muir woods and beach

2019-11-23 23:27:21Z

This was… sometime towards the end of September? I was freshly out of the boot, but still not walking a ton. My parents came to town and wanted to see Muir woods, or maybe I suggested going? Doesn’t matter. Nature hike, relatively flat and nice. Short, too. Less than a mile. We got done there and had a little steam left, so we went over to Muir Beach, too. It was overcast by the time we got there, but still really pretty/nice. The ocean, with no memory.

weekend in paso

2019-10-31 07:43:25Z

This might’ve been the weekend after the trip to Yosemite? We’ve been running all over the last couple months, but I think it’s going to settle down til Christmas, at least.

odd salon EPIPHANY

2019-10-29 07:30:39Z

I think I was still in the boot for this? I don’t actually remember, but I was not on crutches, I’m sure. Anyway, not a ton of pictures, since I was still struggling. But a few. Have to start somewhere.

EDIT: added the last image, which I missed. Can’t forget Pancho Villa!

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https://images.matt.pictures/odd_salon_epiphany/143/0001-2.jpg” alt=”photos” />

the road to recovery

2019-10-28 07:10:25Z

So yeah, had a bit of an interval there where I wasn’t taking a lot of photos. Not the whole four months of injury/surgery/recovery, but for sure the two after surgery, and not a lot of the larger project (which I talked about a little in my last newsletter) at all, since it requires quite a bit of walking around. There are people that would have pushed through the injury to get to a place where they were still making work, but I’m not one of them. I’m really fortunate that I had the support of my dear wife through all of this, or I doubt I’d be anything but a shambles, still.

toured the mormon temple

2019-10-05 07:53:30Z

This was shortly after my initial ankle injury but before I was really taking it seriously; it was sprained at this point, but not really painful to walk on, so walk I did. It was later that week that everything came undone and I went to the doc for the initial consult.

three randos

2019-10-05 07:45:52Z

Another three photos. I just spent the better part of half an hour trying to salvage a pano of a beautiful Jaguar I saw in Berkeley, an XK 140 of unknown but probably 1950s vintage. After spending all that time on it (playing with software is wonderfully soothing if not productive), I took a mental step back, looked at it, realized it wasn’t really saying anything worthwhile, just a shiny thing parked on the curb, and so I axed it. You’re welcome.

may dinner club finally

2019-10-04 21:01:41Z

Some photos from last May that I didn’t want to disappear down the memory hole.

yosemite photo dump

2019-09-13 07:52:06Z

Like I said https://twitter.com/photomattmills/status/1172295823629008896”>on Twitter, I’ve declared backlog bankruptcy. These are from last weekend, in and around and on the way to Yosemite National Park.

I’ll probably just post photosets that I like from what I’ve got? like, the edits from what was in the camera got me about 90 photos, but that’s not a ton of actual posts. I also saved the older edits, so I can dip into those if I want.

Looking at the photos i’ve taken recently: I’ve got my work cut out for me, getting ready for New York. Out of practice. Too much time spent convalescing. It’ll come back.

tokyo subway journey

2019-08-20 14:13:27Z

File this entry in the same place as the last one; utterly mundane wonders, or maybe astounding normalcy. I’m sure in the right circles, the Tokyo subway/train system is justly famous and known. The experience of it, even when a bit exhausted and yeah, a little tipsy, is quite impressive. I think for some reason we changed trains twice on this trip? seems like it should have been a straight shot, but it’s possible we wandered a bit underground and gotten on the wrong place. Or perhaps I’m looking at the sequence wrong.

shibuya crossing on a monday evening

2019-08-17 19:31:49Z

Just moving between places in Tokyo. There’s so much happening there at any given instant. This was just another Monday evening, you know? but I guess someone else’s quotidian bullshit can be amazing and wild if you go halfway around the world. This crowd was a nice change from the Halloween night crowd, which was called a riot by the local police. (I for one don’t think it can be a riot without any broken windows, at least; this was just TOO MANY PEOPLE in one place)

drinks up high

2019-08-15 22:08:18Z

So, I found the rest of the Tokyo pictures. Turns out a bunch of stuff that I’d already blogged was still in LR mobile, and for some reason I thought it was sorted wrong. So, yesterday’s post was actually from the end of the backlog, not that it matters here and now, 6 months after the fact.

back in Oakland after the trip

2019-08-14 21:17:18Z

So these were from sometime after the trip. No idea why I was walking in this particular spot, or what I was doing that day. it’s a little weird.

walking in tokyo again

2019-07-27 10:34:09Z

Home stretch now… the blogging for the trip, which I’d wanted to do while in situ, has ended up taking the better part of 10 months. Life does not stop happening when you’re not on the road, unfortunately; there’s been a real lull the last 7 weeks or so around here. I injured my ankle may 31st, sort of several things compounding until I ended up at the orthopedist, diagnosed with an entirely torn tendon, and some kind of cartilage issue. Surgery is next week. My creative output hasn’t been nothing in that time; I’ve taken a lot of pictures, still, finished one bag three weeks late, did a pop-up photo booth in the style of Richard Avedon, designed another bag, and thought a lot about what I’m going to do when I have full use of my right leg again.

meiji shrine

2019-06-13 06:27:51Z

I’ve been staring at this edit for hours, and really it’s time to just push it out and move on.

wandering last day in Tokyo

2019-06-03 05:38:22Z

I do a lot of wandering when left to my own devices; I like the random chance of choosing a path at semi-random, as I did this day. Walked from one district in Tokyo to another, through the old Imperial gardens (I think; The big park between Shinjuku and Shibuya). This was the first part of that walk; the gardens get their own post.

cuponoodles museum -- ferris wheel -- some nice buildings

2019-05-28 07:15:02Z

Something like day 9 of 10 here; our last full day in Tokyo was the day after this. We went to the cup-o-noodles museum, which was kind of equal parts fascinating and weirdly hero-worshiping of the founder/inventor of instant ramen, Momofuku Ando. One thing I didn’t get a picture of because I was starving, was the sort of food court area that had different noodle dishes from all over the world you could sample; I had like 3 different kinds of noodles, all delicious.

in search of food and other things

2019-05-23 07:22:17Z

So, after we exited the TeamLab building, we were pretty hungry and the building next to it was kind of a mall, so we wandered in in search of food. The mall was a little weird, oddly empty, but I have no idea what qualifies as normal there. The whole thing was like they’d seen the inside of an Olive Garden once, described it to their designer, and said “Go nuts on it.” Faux aging paint jobs, fake marble, tile floors, the whole deal, but executed with this precision and workmanship that made it kind of alien?

teamlab borderless

2019-05-22 07:16:38Z

Projections and lights and mirrors. Interactive, sometimes. I can’t say it was a place made for instagram, in the vein of the Museum of Ice Cream, since it was kind of difficult to photograph in all that dark, projector filled space. Still, neat. I can tell that the place was designed so that you really had to see what the creators wanted you to see.

Anyway. Working on trying to find financing to buy another Leica. Shooting with it doesn’t endear me to it, but working on these files sure does. I don’t know how, exactly, to make this work, because consumer financing at the point of sale has ridiculous interest rates; highway robbery by another name. If I had a business entity, it’s possible I could lease it, and that’s a bit more reasonable. Might look into that a bit more.

tokyo at night

2019-05-20 08:44:49Z

So, after the robots, we came out and it was nighttime, and I don’t really remember what happened. I think we probably walked somewhere and got some food and went back to the hotel. The pictures seem to indicate we walked through Shinjuku some more, getting closer and closer to the hotel.

too many robots (robot restaurant)

2019-05-17 05:02:24Z

Maybe this isn’t too many robots. I was thinking I needed to cut this down some, but decided to throw out a twitter poll and see if I needed to. The people have spoken, so here are 34 pictures of the act inside the Robot Restaurant.

The place is not really a restaurant. There is technically food, and while I’m sure, in that Japanese way, just like food from 7-11, it’s perfectly fine, it’s not a place you go for food. There are good drinks, strong. How can I describe it? It’s sort of like what happened to opera when they mixed in rock to make rock opera, but done to Kabuki theater and then with a shit ton of LEDs and shiny costumes and sort of real robots? Wild stories of nature versus technology, silly dancing, and a fire breathing dragon, briefly. Everything is dialed to 11, and then multiplied. I could hardly keep up, and I was sitting the whole time.

And then there was a brief calm period, with rave dancers and lasers. Then, to giant silver robots came out and danced. Then, just because obviously that wasn’t enough, there was a fish show. No, not Phish. Fish. Well, an aquatic themed dance number, complete with more giant platforms with drums and dancers. Really, a hell of a show.

getting around Tokyo

2019-05-15 07:50:34Z

This was that same day, just making our way from one place to another. The byways of Tokyo were something else. The city seemed to have a good handle on ways for people to get around, as if it weren’t designed just for cars, but rather, for people on bikes or on foot as well. That said, there was always traffic, of all types. Always people moving around.

citizens square and Metropolitan Building

2019-05-13 08:22:09Z

The first photo is actually of the view from our hotel window; really harsh light after sleeping in. This was definitely the day the doldrums set in for me; we just kind of wandered a bit, didn’t do a lot– wait, no. That was the first couple hours. Then we went to the robot restaurant, which is another post entirely, and for which I may have to once again pull out the slideshow functionality I was using earlier. This part of the day was very harsh light that I somehow forced to cooperate in a few places.

halloween night in Tokyo

2019-05-10 23:55:27Z

So this is a little bit later that night, going to the big square in Shibuya. We didn’t really get to see it that night; the whole place was cordoned and under police control after riots earlier in the evening. The funny thing was: there could have been a riot across the street and I don’t thing we’d have been able to tell the difference. Just a bazillion bodies jammed in next to each other.

welcome (back) to tokyo

2019-05-09 06:28:07Z

I feel like there may have been a nap or something when we got into town, after checking in to our accidentally swanky hotel (when you book on the internet, it’s hard to tell sometimes). In any case, by the time we left it was dark outside.

fuji and back to Tokyo

2019-04-30 15:52:41Z

I was going to rant about a thing, but decided on balance that I should just chill. These are photos from getting back to Tokyo and making our way to the overly fancy hotel. We weren’t the only tourists out in Shinjuku.

kyoto in the morning

2019-04-26 08:23:56Z

I’m not naturally a morning person, but something about crossing the dateline made me much more of one, at least for the first week. Even after being out relatively late the night before, we were up super early and got ourselves together to go back to Tokyo. A little walk, some cutesy bikes, and a coffee shop that catered to tourist enough that they served a really good scrambled egg. Don’t ask me to remember the name, although I could probably find it on google maps.

kyoto at night (pt 2)

2019-04-23 07:05:04Z

So, jumping forward a few weeks, to just after the last japan post. There was a bunch of stuff that happened that mid-day, including wandering around a mall looking for food, and I’m pretty sure there was a nap, and then we went for a second night walk. We may have found some whiskey. I know we did, later in Tokyo, but that’s getting out of order, something we obviously don’t do here.

sophias birthday karaoke @ the mint

2019-04-20 03:36:06Z

Posting when I’m moderately more coherent than I usually am… what can I say, the thoughts that come out at 1am are a little disjointed. It’s a blog. There’s no peer review, no editor. There’s rarely a proofreader. Anybody can hang a little piece of content on the internet to call their own; that some of it is rough and a lot of it is crap goes with the territory. BUT, the extraordinary freedom that comes with that is really great; you get people being their truest, most honest. The ideas don’t always join up but the photos, being mainly about a feeling, usually still work.

street with the 15mm

2019-04-18 08:06:48Z

Working on it. There’s these, then a night of karaoke, and then a bunch of pictures from Kyoto. I haven’t been taking many pictures the last couple weeks. To tell the truth, I feel like I haven’t been leaving the house a ton. I was sick there for a week and then this week I’ve kinda kept the schedule clear, just to get some rest (he says, typing a blog post at 1am after working on projects since 10pm).

shortly before japan

2019-04-09 08:29:30Z

This would have been something like 3 or 4 days before we left for Japan? So that makes me almost six months behind the moment on posting. Ah well. I really like the first image, all those different faces kind of lined up. The second one has two of the performers we were there to see, I think they were friends of friends of Christa’s? The projector had like a bazillion dead pixels; the lines in the smoke-filled bar were kind of better than the projection.

shadows in the city

2019-03-25 07:11:39Z

I think I may have a weird mental block around the Leica. I did a little shooting this weekend with the Fuji again, and it was a lot easier to work with. I think actually the thing that made it easier is autofocus. Call me lazy, but I think it’s actually faster than I can focus. When I was younger, I could almost always beat the AF, but maybe I’ve lost a step, or the talent has atrophied. Either way, here I am. People move around a lot, and also they are often closer than 2.5 feet from the camera, and I noticed that too. I took three lenses and only used one, the 35mm ‘Fujicron,’ which is a 50mm full frame equivalent (roughly ~52.5mmE, but who’s counting?). It’s an excellent lens.

I need to shoot more portraits

2019-03-18 07:15:27Z

I need to shoot more portraits. I know I’ve said that before, but dang. All this street stuff and the not-street kinda landscape-y stuff has dulled my portrait sense. For a while there, it was like a superpower. Gotten soft, I suppose.

palace hotel strike

2019-03-14 07:56:00Z

This was also last fall, and while I generally avoid posting pictures of people’s faces protesting, I don’t think there’s a good reason to do that here. It’s in one of the most heavily photographed areas of San Francisco, and there were tons of other people around shooting video and stills and posting them to whatever social network. It’s been months, and the strike is won. That out of the way…

marking time

2019-03-14 07:30:18Z

Just wanted to get some photos up here. I still have big plans for this space, fancy front-end things that will make it a better experience for all involved, but for now, I really want to just post some photos and get on with it. These are from last October, when it was warm and sunny and I had to trek to the city every day.

the bear at the ferry building

2019-02-21 08:19:59Z

If it’s not one thing, it’s 12, huh? Been a bit of a rough start to the year, but here I am, finally getting into a rhythm, maybe. Been thinking about this blog a lot, what it could be, what I use it for, all that.

editing

2019-01-25 09:06:06Z

I’ve decided part of working through this backlog, since it’s gotten so big, will be cutting images a lot more than I have been. That’s not to say that things aren’t still going to be super random here for a bit, but there will be less of it.

I have a job and other news

2019-01-18 09:13:37Z

I got a job! As of the 28th, I’ll be back at Weedmaps, doing backend Elixir again. I’m really stoked to be working there again, and also working from home (not commuting!) again. The BART really is a drag.

crowds in the city

2019-01-10 08:16:36Z

Every day, just a lot of people. I don’t know, it didn’t seem this bad today, but it’s possible the cold weather is keeping people indoors. This week is filled up with things, and so is the weekend. Can’t stop won’t stop forgot how to stop

environmental-ish portraits

2019-01-08 10:15:49Z

I think this might’ve been the night of Allie’s birthday, but according to this edit (and my somewhat blurry memory) I failed to get a decent picture of the birthday girl. I did take all these pictures that I like and am tempted to crop. But, when I do that, they don’t seem to work as well any more. The environment around them adds character. Actually the one of Sophie I’m not tempted to crop, but the other two, I am. But I tried that, and they don’t work.

street stuff from months ago

2019-01-07 08:48:30Z

You can probably guess how tempted I was to remove that big gulp from the first image; pretty sorely, actually, until I realized it actually added a little verisimilitude and character. These photos are again just the first few off the queue that I didn’t hate and delete immediately with some minimal developing sprinkled over them.

soma and around

2019-01-04 09:07:58Z

The middle picture is actually Oakland, which doesn’t super matter. Just thought you’d like to know.

a big ship

2019-01-04 09:02:21Z

Super literal, I know, but now they’re off the queue and on the blog.

looking around with the 15mm

2019-01-02 10:45:12Z

Yeah, I know, I haven’t posted in two months. Some things happened, and I was a bit distracted from blogging for a while. Things just keep on happening, as they say, but it’s no longer a satisfactory excuse for neglecting the blog. The backlog continues to grow, since no matter what I do, I’m still always shooting. So, here’s the top of the backlog, as it is.

Fushimi Inari Shrine

2018-11-07 19:25:41Z

This post was kind of hard to write, because I edited and edited, but had a lot of trouble cutting it down to the required number of images. If I put more than about 10 in a given post, the page takes forever to load. So instead, I did something I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. I made an embedded slideshow. It’s meant to have some animations, and captions, and I need to write the script that will atuo-generate one of these, and maybe I’ll get around to adding those eventually, but I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of done here. It’s just a blog after all. Hand-rolled artisanal slideshow.

Edit: the slideshow broke when I migrated to new blogging software, so here are all the pictures. –MM, 08/2o23

golden temple

2018-10-31 08:10:18Z

End of day 2. I thought, for some reason, going to this temple, that the ‘golden’ part was a figure of speech. I was wrong. The crowds were pretty prodigious, but the whole thing is sort of a visual non-sequitur.

nishiki market and the bengal cat cafe

2018-10-31 04:31:48Z

After all that walking, we decided we needed a nice, refreshing stroll. We met up with our friends that we’re traveling with and walked around the Nishiki market, which is a big sort of open-air mall, but not just your typical stores like a Zara or the local Sacs equivalent, but fish also stalls and sushi on conveyor places and vintage stores and hand-made stamps (you bet we bought a couple stamps). Just all of commerce, packed in to one huge pedestrian area, multiple covered open air walkways.

kyoto in the morning

2018-10-31 03:58:32Z

First morning, Kyoto. We woke up early, rolled over, and went back to sleep. So far this trip, jet lag hasn’t been too bad, but we’ve been in a state of continual tiredness that is probably at least partially because of the interruption to our poor circadian rhythms. Anyway…

kyoto 1st evening

2018-10-30 08:59:41Z

the first day in kyoto was really a half day; we arrived about 3 in the afternoon, and took a taxi from the station to our hotel. did a decent bit of walking, found a little beer bar and had some snacks. lots more walking, to a Ramen place where we ordered from a machine and ate like kings.

tokyo breakfast walk

2018-10-30 07:38:39Z

This was the moring of our transit day to tokyo; all those blog posts were in my future, but you don’t get very far without coffee when jet-lagged, so we went to a nearby cafe that Sophia had bird-dogged and I had just a really lovely pastry and americano. It was situated on a small river, which you can see in the second and third photos.

train; tokyo station; later that night

2018-10-28 04:44:30Z

I didn’t get any pictures right after getting off the plane; if you’ve ever gotten off a big international flight, it was exactly like that. If you’ve never had the experience, imagine a bunch of boring hallways, where you go and hand over some forms to bored officials, and they look at you sternly and then stamp your passport. The only real difference this time was the lettering on the signs was half in a new language (most signs are in English and Japanese).

lax; clouds over the pacific; landfall

2018-10-28 03:47:12Z

I don’t know why people complain about LAX; we may have been in a newer terminal, but it seemed pretty nice relative to some airports I’ve been in (looking at you, Guadalajara). Even versus SFO the only thing I can complain about is the wait time in the food court was pretty long.

obsessed

2018-10-15 07:56:57Z

I started this post two days ago, and then forgot about it. Been working on a million things at once trying to get ready for Japan in 10! Days! Everything I’m working on now is bonus material, not required for the main quest.

gorgeous sky

2018-10-14 08:16:37Z

The first photo was taken 9 minutes before the second two. I think I like the third one best. There’s something nice about the context provided by all those wires. Anyway. This post is just some pretty pictures. Hope your weekend is going well. I ran errands all day, put together a casserole to bake for brunch, and have been working on my welding technique this evening. Took a bunch of photos out of the edit that I don’t like now. I suppose that’s the danger of waiting a month. There’s a likelihood I just won’t care about a certain photo or even set of them when the time comes to post.

moar 15mm

2018-10-13 10:04:36Z

I realize two of these are basically the same picture (the middle two), and I really should just pick one, but it’s 3am and I’m trying to get to bed. The last one demanded, loudly, that it be left in color. Still playing with the film presets, which I always swore were silly, but they’re really not bad when you’re trying to crank something out. It’s hard for it to not still look like one of my pictures anyway.

serra at SFMOMA

2018-10-13 09:30:20Z

I’ve been sick all week, making what was supposed to be a very productive time into me, sitting on the couch watching marvel movies and the expanse. Rather annoying, but it’s really important to listen to when the body says stop. I’ve been to the hospital more than once because I ignored what my body was telling me. Anyway, this is just a particularly bad head cold, with associated exhaustion and some joint pain and headaches. I’m feeling a little better now, although the pain in my knees is a thing this evening.

transbay terminal and environs

2018-10-09 07:26:03Z

Monday, I get to work and there’s a package waiting for me on my desk. I’d actually tried to come pick it up on sunday, to have for the party, but there was some kind of power outage in the building, which meant that my key card couldn’t open the doors. In any case, I survived a day without my lens and made it to work the next day. The power was back on. The package contained a brand new 15mm Voightlander, which if you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen some photos from it already.

grants birthday bbq

2018-10-09 06:59:40Z

So, we came back from that camping trip on that saturday in order to be in our own beds and closer to this on sunday. As the title says, it was friend Grant’s birthday, and he had a lot of delicious smoked meat and really good barbecue sauce for us. It’s a rare thing out here in california. I know, it’s a particularly stereotypical thing, for someone from somewhere other to come and say the food is no good, but there really aren’t any restaurants that do barbecue sauce right. Grant ordered all of his from Oklahoma.

camping birthday weekend

2018-10-03 08:38:08Z

I had some things I was thinking about last night when I created this post, but since I didn’t write them down in blog-post form, they’re gone forever. This was the weekend after my birthday (which was on a thursday). We took Friday to drive up to a spot about half an hour outside tahoe, a little private campground that we tried to go to at the beginning of the season, and failed because it wasn’t yet open.

various streets various cities

2018-09-28 07:51:08Z

One thing about this feeling like a slump is that it might just be the way I’m feeling. I realized after writing that the other day that I hadn’t even cleared off the camera in a couple weeks, and maybe I just needed to trust the process a little more. These are maybe not my best work but I am getting better at getting close to people, and at just having the camera ready to shoot. Sometimes I still catch it asleep, which is a little frustrating.

odd salon explore

2018-09-24 06:12:32Z

Three weeks ago, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at Odd Salon for the second time. The theme for the night was Explore, and there was an emphasis on non-white-western-male explorers, and different kinds of explorers. My talk was on the surface a classic sea-fairing tale, “40,000 miles and a century early: The treasure Voyages of Zheng He.” There’s a video online here which I refuse to watch on the grounds that I went through it once already. Someone tell me if it’s okay to look. The main thrust of the argument wasn’t just that he was a great admiral that went all that way, but that he also exercised this continual escalation, from one thing to the next in his life, to see how much he could do.

street photos on a tuesday

2018-09-20 06:18:00Z

Nothing profound to say this time, except that I’m running on 4 hours of sleep and I’m going to bed right now. Good night.

brunch and the lockpicking gospel

2018-09-18 05:45:38Z

So this was definitely also Labor day, I think; or maybe the day before. It was just before my odd salon talk. MaryAlice hit us up and asked if we wanted to brunch, and I happened to be awake and said yes, and got Sophie up, and away we went to Oakland Grill.

new baby fiadh flynn-curran

2018-09-14 07:26:33Z

Last weekend? Last week sometime? no, I remember, it was labor day, and we went to the only open sushi joint in greater oakland to pick up a meal and take it to the folks with the weeks-old baby. They’re still in the thick of it, with the baby not sleeping through the night, or really for more than a couple hours at a stretch. Sounds miserable if you ask me.

andrew wk show at the fillmore

2018-09-07 14:49:12Z

This was, as I said on the socials, an amazing show. For real one of the best live shows I’ve ever been to. The amazing part: I had a photo pass, so I was in the photo pit right by the stage for the first three songs; that’s why a lot of these are really close. The magic of the bird site, I suppose; I tweeted at him asking for a pass, and he (or more likely his social media person) replied within a few minutes in the partier direction.

One nice surprise is that his whole band is just as energetic as he was, and also all of them got some nice moments to shine too. Really nice touches.

We got home and I passed out, but I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t sleep, so I got up to edit. My ears are still ringing, but I’m happy. A good way to spend a birthday.

volunteering at the food bank

2018-09-06 06:55:35Z

This was a week ago, and some of you may have seen a couple of these on instagram, but here they are again, in the proper format and color-corrected to my liking (mostly). So, the company I work at does volunteering as part of an effort to give back to the community; we’re part of the Pledge 1% member companies; and we’re trying to do that with time.

rad last june

2018-09-04 06:02:38Z

So, this was probably the June edition of Radical Art Directors, which is really a meetup of a bunch of artists more than art directors; there are about half working artists and half people like me that do a day job to support all of this. It’s a good event, pretty much always, and good to get together with artistic peers and talk about stuff. Sometimes there’s structured discussion around the topics, and sometimes it’s just pretty free-form. These are rad people.

wedding reception

2018-09-02 07:29:44Z

The reception, I mean, what can I say, it was a wedding. Lots of fun. lots of drinking, everyone seems really happy. The legally required scenes all happened: the best man toast, the maid of honor toast, the cutting of the cake, the dances. I covered it all as well as I could.

yesterday and today

2018-08-31 06:00:10Z

So it’s been… three whole days? and here I am with my second blog post with photos I’ve shot in the last 48 hours. That should tell you all you need to know about how I feel about the new rig, but here, an analogy, because why the hell not:

boston and points north

2018-08-30 08:11:52Z

I always was a sucker for the moon, even super tiny in the frame.

getting ready and doing the deed

2018-08-29 06:56:26Z

This was actually quite a lot of fun. I think two more posts of this stuff and then we’re all done: reception and afterparty. I shot a lot of pictures. People like pictures, so I’m gonna put ‘em all up.

m10p - second first impressions

2018-08-28 07:05:35Z

I’ve had the camera now for just over 12 hours, and I have to say I’m liking it a lot so far. This is important, because as you may remember, I wasn’t a huge fan of it the last time; I had a rental last Xmas and ended up sending it back early because I just didn’t click with it. But, then 6 months of shooting with the CLE happened, and also I looked back at that week of shooting, and really decided I liked what shooting a rangefinder did for my photography. So, I consulted the photo gods and took out a chunk of my 401k and did the deed.

black and white in the city

2018-08-28 06:44:45Z

Just pushing these off the top of the queue… I’ve got a ton more wedding things, but I figured I’d break things up. These are from before the wedding, shooting with the little film camera. I’m also going to put together a little post of photos from the new whip here soon. Like right now.

lobster bake in maine

2018-08-21 05:16:42Z

For a rehearsal dinner, we had a really nice cookout, Maine style. The lobsters we were eating, young lobsters, according to our hosts, were $5/lb. I know, here, I have a picture of someone pouring boiling water into a sink, but the locals called it a ‘bake’. Don’t ask me, I’m not from there. We ate with bibs and then there were wet naps and then, for desert, there were big dangerous sparklers. You know, not the kind you used to get as a small child, but the kind you were jealous of the teenagers having? Ah, memories.

happy hour one friday

2018-08-20 00:21:34Z

I’m now roughly a month behind again; I’m not sure what night this was, but I think it was the week before Fletcher’s wedding. There’s a good reason for that: I’ve been between computers for the better part of two weeks, and my folks were in town, and before that I was actually in Boston for the wedding. And I’ve been sick since wednesday with some kind of sinus infection. So yeah.

sfmoma in the afternoon light

2018-08-14 06:46:34Z

Three verticals in one post? What is the world coming too?

odd salon eccentric

2018-08-06 06:42:26Z

Odd Salon eccentric: what can I say? I didn’t get photos of half the show, somehow; I feel like I was there but for some reason, I only got half the speakers on film. Maybe I changed rolls halfway and there’s a black and white roll waiting to be developed.

priceless 2018

2018-08-01 07:47:33Z

So, imagine this: you and 1000 almost-complete-strangers, plus the friends that you trust to look after your cat and a few people you’ve seen at parties, descend on a town in the lower parts of the eastern sierra with PA gear and floaties… that’s priceless. Not to say it was un-organized; the people running the show were quite efficient, actually. It’s a lot of people crammed into a camp made for maybe 2/3rds that number.

wandering between jobs

2018-07-27 06:41:01Z

So I didn’t actually end up with a ton of free time between jobs; there was a lot of stuff I needed to get done in that week and a half. But I did have one day where all I did was just walk around and take photos. This was the first part of that day. I’m not sure why the month-old roll took so long to get processed, but it did.

streets again

2018-07-17 06:59:57Z

Again, taking the same photo over and over. again, looking at the street. feels like I’m getting really in tune with the film camera after these last couple weeks. its wants and needs and places it likes to go. The night shots in particular were a bit of a surprise. I took them at whatever slow shutter speed I figured I needed, and expected them to be blurry. but here we are, and they’re pretty OK.

grilled cheese made on a grill

2018-07-16 06:39:27Z

I’m not going to lie, this is a lot of pictures. I could do a tighter edit, but I really like all of these, and there was almost no work on my part. I shot them, I ran the film here, and then I took them and had them scanned at Photoworks SF, and that’s pretty much it. I didn’t even do the fancy deluxe scans, I did the 5x7 scans. They’re perfect for throwing the pictures up here on the interwebs. No, they’re not paying me.

repetition (again)

2018-07-14 06:39:41Z

Just a little post, with a few things to say. I’ve been walking the same streets a lot lately (which may have been evident by the two posts about the mission, or all the odd salon posts, etc). And there’s a vein in photographic thought that echoes the popular sentiment: that if you’re not doing something new, you’re not doing something worthwhile. St Winogrand said something along the lines of “I never want to take the same picture twice.”

journey to the mission

2018-07-09 06:23:17Z

This was getting to one of the many things that happen around 16th and mission; I have no idea what I was doing there, and I’m too tired to go look it up. I just finished sorting through the roughly 12000 photos I took in 2017, looking for more San Pablo work. I found quite a bit, and realized in the sorting that 2017 was a hell of a year. A whole crapton of things happened.

odd moments

2018-06-28 06:36:45Z

I’m grouping these together because I feel like it, and because I can. They’re from two recent Odd Salon events. There’s a kind of coverage that one of the regulars (maybe a fellow?), Alexander, does very well: the long lens, close portraits of all the speakers (if I knew what his web site was, I’d link it here). I tried my hand doing that, and found that I was much more interested in watching the talks. So now, when I have my camera, I might shoot a couple pictures of whoever is speaking, but I’m also just as interested in all the things that happen around the event.

RAD volume 6

2018-06-26 06:08:47Z

This was the second one of these I went to, and the first one I’ve taken any pictures at (that I recall; the last one was last november). It was just this incredible, engaged group that was gathered to talk about art that was happening in the media right then; Childish Gambino’s This is America had just dropped, as had Dirty Computer and one other thing I can’t remember; I think most people talked about the first two. Good discussion, but you really had to be there.

dropping in to the mission

2018-06-25 06:53:45Z

This was one of those days on my way to somewhere, when I found myself with some time to kill in the mission. Time to kill, and distance to cover, I suppose. It’s nice to get there during the golden hour, just to see what’s happening. The next post will be about something, I promise. But for now, we’re just in this liminal space.

sunday with friends

2018-06-21 06:44:34Z

This was maybe a month ago? again, I could look at my calendar and try to figure it out, but meh. This is a real different post than the last one, but I think it’s just as valuable. It’s important to remember what we have, and what we’re fighting for. Truth and beauty in the people around us. Anyway.

today's anti-fash action

2018-06-19 22:38:36Z

Just got back from this, posting from the phone. Me and about 1000 other people showed up and blocked the road in front of the ICE offices in San Francisco. It may even still be going; the cops were just directing traffic around the crowd; they didn’t seem keen on trying to break it up.

robin's housewarming

2018-06-19 07:37:29Z

I’m late posting, again. Something about last week was just keeping me down, and also I didn’t want to spend much time at the computer… I was short of things to post, or so I thought, and so I spent a lot of time running around doing stuff, or at least trying to do stuff, and one thing led to another and then I was out of town on the weekend, and here 7 days have passed since I’ve posted (there’s something about promising indefinitely to post every day that dooms me).

Robin and an a child with the avocado picker

clouds that threatened but ultimately did not dampen

Sophie. This picture works both in black and white and color, but I was shooting color film.

niles on film

2018-06-11 08:35:16Z

these are from the same day as my last post from niles, just a roll that took me a long time to get processed. I think i was only shooting color in the 6x9 at the time, and it was certainly before i put together the film darkroom here.

a few more black and white photos

2018-06-08 07:20:10Z

This is the last of the black and white work that I have scanned at the moment; I have a bunch more in various stages of getting into the computer. Three rolls unprocessed, three that need to be scanned, and one half roll in the camera that I’m exctied about.

sf not street photos (totally street photos)

2018-06-07 06:56:32Z

This is where i find myself; on the street, in SF, taking pictures of things, not people. it’s not really street photography so much as a sort of urban landscape. There’s this idea of the street photograph as a well-dressed pretty lady in a perfect shaft of sunlight; this is not that. Neither is it getting right in the face of the subject. I’m terribly shy out in the real world, even among people I know sometimes.

san pablo and nearby

2018-06-06 08:00:05Z

The san pablo project is weird in that it has physical boundaries; all the pictures taken on the street or sidewalk or in businesses that are on it. These rules are somewhat arbitrary, but they keep me from tossing in every good picture that somehow tenuously relates to the road or the history. If I gave myself a 50-yard margin around the road, the last picture would count, too, but that feels like cheating. I still like it, and it was scanned and probably shot within a couple days of these other ones.

dinner club april-ish

2018-06-05 06:00:04Z

I think this was April? Might have been early May. Wasn’t June, that just started. Hella grainy; this is P3200 exposed at 3200, and then scanned with a little too much sharpening in the scanner software. I can’t really be bothered to re-scan (if you knew what a headache scanning is, you’d agree).

semi-architectural

2018-05-30 20:13:40Z

Been doing this work for a while, and the other day Mike called it out on twitter as ‘architectural stuff,’ and I suppose it is, in that it’s pictures with a lot of buildings. It doesn’t really bear a lot of resemblance to real architectural photography, though. It’s more urban lanscape-y and an attempt to see where we are right now.

M10 revisited

2018-05-29 06:24:11Z

I’ve been sort of debating the whole film thing, and really the things that appeal to me about it are not really the film aspect as much as the form factor of shooting with a rangefinder. I don’t like scanning or developing film, but I do like shooting with the CLE, and to an extent, I like the tonality I get out of the film cameras, too, although that’s a toss up; as I’ve said, it’s something I can do with the digital files if I want, but it’s also pushing against the strengths of the material.

sfmoma and moscone west on the big film

2018-05-25 06:55:14Z

Working on these was a struggle. Lightroom kept crashing while I was spotting dust, and there was a lot of dust. I think it was the confluence of several factors: I had a bazillion desktop apps open, and like the title says, these are scanned from huge negatives, at a really high DPI. They’re 400MB tiffs. So, I closed a bunch of the apps I had open and then it started working better.

street photos again.

2018-05-22 05:02:02Z

I dunno. Haven’t blogged in almost a week, but the backlog is still low. Shooting film is super slow, what can I say? I’ve got some rolls to develop sitting here right now; and a bunch of stuff scanned that I need to get spotted.

a day of playing 'what's next?'

2018-05-15 07:05:32Z

This was one of those days where the fun just doesn’t want to stop. Everybody just kept deciding to keep going, order another round, get another bite to eat, move on together to the next location. There may have been a split to nap in the mid-afternoon, but we all rallied at Temescal Brewing after. There may have been some cycling after beers, who can say. By the end, by the last picture, it was dark and time to go home and chill. Luckily, it’s downhill from there to the house.

inbetween things

2018-05-14 08:43:11Z

Did a bunch of film scans this evening, and I have to say I’m not super happy with what I’m getting from the 35mm work. I’m going to go through the motions of developing what I’ve already shot and looking at it honestly, but I’m not super positive about it. A lot of the things I like from the work coming out of the 6x9 camera just aren’t there in the smaller format. Maybe the 40mm 1.4 will be the silver bullet to make it all magical again, but I’m not holding my breath.

game night at fletch's

2018-05-10 05:52:42Z

These were from the first batch I did here at home, and they have a ton of dust and water spots (partially because my basement is dusty, and partially because I don’t have anything to clean them with prior to scanning). A little cleanup and they’re presentable. The last image in particular, was pretty hard to work on; I thought for a minute there might be starts in the background, but no, it was just dust that happened to look like a familiar constellation.

damaris' birthday in film

2018-05-07 19:11:09Z

So these are the film photos from the same time we were there as this post, but this time with the texas leica (as opposed to the almost leica I just got in the mail, which, more on that later). There’s definitely something to the film work that I didn’t even realize I was missing in the digital versions.

odd salon abandoned (close portraits from far away)

2018-05-07 06:45:40Z

So this was only two weeks ago, pretty far down from my typical 2-6 months to get something posted (if you haven’t seen some pictures you were expecting from me from before, say, a month ago, they’re not happening here; reach out and I might be able to do something). I don’t know why, but I found these really hard to edit. The color in the location is hard, and I threw my hands up on that and went black and white. But I’m also emotionally invested in this event, I suppose, and I want to do a good job.

olive oil dinner with @boldfoodco and @fatgoldoliveoil

2018-05-04 06:39:49Z

So, a couple of weeks ago I got the chance to attend a dinner by chef Muffie Fulton, in collaboration with Kathryn Tomajan of Fat Gold. This is not a review; both of the geniuses behind Fat Gold are friends, and besides, I’m not qualified to judge food like this. It was an evening of molecular gastronomy, in which all the things I thought I knew were turned upside down and all the food was surprising and kind of amazing. Liquid Nitrogen! Blow torches! Sous Vide!

sonoma clouds and sundry

2018-05-03 06:43:12Z

this was a trip that we took up to Sonoma to pick up a club shipment and attend a tasting event where they had all these little bite sized pairings to go with the wine. Lovely food and drink. Pangloss was the name of the place. All the people there are as nice as you might expect from a place who’s owner has enough of a sense of humor and love of Voltaire to name a joint Pangloss.

bookends

2018-05-02 06:21:20Z

This would have been a post of a bunch of photos from the second to last time I went to Odd Salon, but I decided I didn’t like any of them, so here are the first and last pictures I did that night. I think they’re OK.

30 posts!

2018-05-01 06:33:13Z

I made it! this post, half an hour before midnight on the last day of the month, makes 30 posts, or an average of one a day for the month of April. Woot! Here’s a rainbow to celebrate (this was actually the next photo on the queue, by a quirk of serendipity). The clouds were actually just the view in the opposite direction, a couple minutes later. Done!

more denver

2018-05-01 06:29:15Z

I think I may have posted one or more of these to insta, but here they are in my space, processed (a little) on my machine. I was in denver for Elixirdaze, a conference about elixir in a place where there’s legal weed. Get it? Daze? Anyway, I got out a little while I was there, saw some things, ran an elixirbridge, etc. Sophie came, and I didn’t get a single good photo of her. Ah well.

approaching denver

2018-05-01 05:52:34Z

Love this approach. Sometimes I’m lucky and the wind and the clouds are right and it’s just really beautiful.

niles again

2018-05-01 05:32:03Z

Last day of april, down to the last hour and half. I didn’t make a post a day, but I made one almost every weekday, and that’s something.

been scanning film

2018-04-27 08:59:04Z

like the title says, I’ve been scanning a bunch of film tonight. Shot some today too, hopefully a few of those are good. this whole blogging every day has me short on things to post. I’ve got a couple big events lined up, odd salon with the 500mm and a fancy olive oil themed dinner, and a few little things, but the big pile of unpublished mess is no more. There’s probably stuff in the archive that I could go fish for, like I did the post about trees. The trip out to see the trees was really memorable, but there’s not a ton from last fall I want to go digging for or that I’m excited about. The past is passed. Onward!

a bunch of (pretty) trees

2018-04-26 06:38:33Z

Also pictures of some things that aren’t trees. This was last fall, right after my birthday, when my folks came to town. For some reason, I never blogged these photos. We drove out to Sequoia National Park one of the days, and got to see the biggest (by volume and weight) tree in the world.

expose for the highlights

2018-04-25 21:42:06Z

The adage for shooting slide film was always “expose for the highlights, develop for the shadows,” because slides had the same problem digital sensors had, even with many stops less dynamic range. The highlights, once gone, are super gone. Gone forever. The shadows, you could burn in while printing and get extra out of them.

kawan's birthday 2018

2018-04-24 08:11:42Z

End of February. Winter doldrums were getting kicked out for some spring energy. I ate before I went, something I don’t even remember, and then there was a lot of food and booze when I got there, always a good sign. It was a most excellent party, with dancing and champagne and every single person there was really rad. Which makes sense, since Kawan is one of the raddest dudes I know.

dinner club at allies (with special guest mabel)

2018-04-23 01:34:00Z

I think this was february? (checks date in photo metadata, without which I would only know it was “sometime in the past”) yep for sure february. the 19th. There was lasagna and a dog and stories. I may be being slightly silly.

to the top of mt diablo

2018-04-22 02:47:20Z

phone blogging, sorry if these are a little weird. we woke up hungover this morning, but sophie went out for coffee and said ‘we should go for a drive.’ i instantly texted back ‘mt. diablo’. it’s been on my todo list since roughly 2015 (whenever Charlie mentioned it in his newsletter back when there were like three people doing tinyletter).

night in the city and the cat

2018-04-20 06:26:01Z

The cat comes first, of course.

damaris' birthday 2018

2018-04-19 08:29:49Z

This was something like two months ago? Shortly after I got back from Irvine, anyway. It was Damaris’ birthday, and there were a bunch of folks over at their house to celebrate. Really fun time.

another post with a sunset

2018-04-17 07:06:27Z

The process for these posts is mostly what’s next in the queue, but sometimes, there’s not enough to hang together as a story. I used to care about that, but I don’t think I do any more. These aren’t picture stories; they’re just blog posts.

one shot: laguna beach at night

2018-04-16 18:41:45Z

middle of the trip, maybe thursday, we tried to get away from Irvine for a minute, ended up going to Laguna Beach, this sleepy little beach town maybe 20 traffic-free minutes from where we were staying. A moment to take a breath in a week otherwise jam-packed with work.

beach hike to tide pools

2018-04-16 07:00:43Z

So this was actually the day before the last post, but last friday I just wanted to look at something pretty for the weekend. Anyway, this was a long time coming; to see the tide pools you have to go at low tide, and we had to shoot for a weekend day. So, after I missed the last time, we decided to shoot for a weekend, and this was the next available one. Low tide at something like 2:30 in the afternoon. I’m sure I could look it up, but it doesn’t super matter.

flying through a sunrise

2018-04-13 06:21:27Z

This was the start of the last Super Sprint, which is what my company calls bringing our mostly-remote team into the office every quarter or so to work in a focused environment, with all the engineers and stakeholders in a room. It’s pretty intense.

the crane thing

2018-04-12 06:55:48Z

So for a while there I thought I was doing a project on construction in the city. In the end, I decided it was boring and abandoned it, simply because I wasn’t getting close enough to the subject. You can only shoot one or two kinds of pictures from the outside of a construction site. I did a passable job getting photos of the early parts of the construction of the transbay terminal, since that was right on the walk from where casual carpool drops to the office I worked in at the time.

poetry then wolfhound then a little walk

2018-04-11 06:22:53Z

Didn’t have much time at the reading; we got there a little late. I was inexplicably tired, and was thinking about bailing, but came at the last second anyway. I think Sophie might have encouraged me to come. This was Christine’s thing, I think; at least, she was MC’ing. It was really quite fun, and I ended up liking more of the poets than I thought.

kareem's onesie party

2018-04-11 05:56:45Z

My friend Kareem throws these every other year or so, always a good crowd of people there. This was mid-January, so it was still a bit chilly outside. Appropriate weather for onesies.

wildcare bird sanctuary

2018-04-10 05:29:46Z

This was a super brief visit to WildCare, where things were pretty chill at the end of a Saturday. Looking at the Pelican, and having spent no small amount of my younger years staring at dinosaur skeletons, drawings, simulations, and the movie Jurrassic Park, I don’t know how anyone can not see that these are 100% dinosaurs. They don’t move like reptiles. They’re not even shaped like reptiles.

out of the city

2018-04-08 23:13:45Z

Pictures while a passenger in the car. This night there was a lot of traffic for some reason. Took us almost an hour just to get out of town, in one of those weird later-at-night traffic jams that happen sometimes for seemingly no reason on a thursday.

project san pablo at night

2018-04-08 03:15:10Z

We’re finally caught up to the current year; this set of photos was taken January 9th, just after new years’. Mike wanted to get dinner, I wanted to go climbing, we split the difference and went for a walk up SAN PABLO (getting dinner along the way).

berkeley rose garden / stair walk

2018-04-07 09:29:50Z

This was, I think, the day before Thanksgiving? Sophie’s mom and also Serena were in town, and we had an afternoon to kill. She’s been around here enough that all the regular tourist stuff was played out, so we did something more local-ish. The stair walks are from a book, Secret Stairs: East Bay. I believe it’s a series, even. Anyway, there are detailed instructions for how to find the trail for what amounts to an urban hike. This one starts and ends at the Berkeley Rose Garden.

PROJECT SAN PABLO update (and a photo of Sophie)

2018-04-07 08:24:04Z

Still working on this, despite the radio silence and despite the lack of coherent narrative. There’s something about it that won’t let me go. I just keep shooting, hoping to find something. A lot of times, I’ll work this way for months and months (I think this project is nearing the year mark).

photos from the ride for sanity last week

2018-04-05 07:25:07Z

Sometimes I do this; just take a day off, call in sick, and do whatever. Last thursday I woke up to my alarm and the knowledge that there was no way I was going to be a functional code monkey that day, so I called (actually slacked) in sick, and put in my time, and went back to sleep for four more hours.

a walk home in november and a bee

2018-04-05 06:48:00Z

the bee is from October; the photos from the walk home were from something in the mission, no idea what. Looks like I was getting there right at moonrise and then left after dark. Not sure what I was doing there to be honest.

marigny social club crawfish boil

2018-04-04 05:12:43Z

Still in March of last year now. We’ll take a jump forward soon, I swear. Anyway, these are from my friend Caleb’s semi-annual crawfish boil, that goes under his Marigny Social Club banner. Fucker can cook, is what I’m sayin. I only made it for the very last pot (and took the last beer too) because I’m an idiot and decided to take public transit to get there, got lost in the park and took almost an hour to get from the muni station to the actual location of the boil. Everything was delicious, and I seem to remember getting a ride back to the east bay. good times.

the lunch walks of yesteryear

2018-04-04 05:00:48Z

I used to walk somewhere for lunch almost every day. When I worked in the city, I never had my shit together well enough to take a lunch and save $15/day, so I’d get out of the office to go get a slice of pizza or burrito or something, and get a little fresh air along the way. I suppose part of the reason I didn’t mind it is my job was hella boring most of the time and any excuse to get away was a good one. I paid money to get out of the office, and lunch was incidental.

some sort of celebration last march

2018-04-04 00:05:03Z

I started out this month saying I wanted to do two posts a day, and here it is the third, and I’m only posting my second post for the month. Gotta up my game if I’m gonna get anywhere near my goal.

old sf street photos

2018-04-02 06:54:42Z

So offloading the photos from the sony from the show the other night (which I took since the venue had a no-pro-cameras policy), I discovered there were a bunch of photos from 2015 still on the card. Got a few posts of that lined up.

skating polly / go team

2018-03-29 07:00:30Z

went to this show tuesday night, and oh my god skating polly has gotten a lot better since the last time I saw them, way back in 2012. I remember then thinking “These kids really rock, not just for 12 year olds or whatever,” and now they’ve grown and refined their sound a crapton. Wild and energetic and angry and everything I want in a punk band. I should note that this could have been a lot more photos; it was espcially hard to edit these for some reason.

Go Team was new to me, but just a lot of fun, in a nice unironic way. Good stage presence from all the members, a lot going on. Audience participation (I got to yell my star sign into a mic, and it was being filmed and when I realized that moment will probably be on the internet forever I almost spontaneously combusted on the spot).

These are black and white because color in clubs is bullshit. Most of these just don’t work as color; the meter on the little camera I had couldn’t keep up or something. Black and white is better anyway.

kawan's open studio

2018-02-22 00:16:32Z

This was some weeks ago now, even though I worked up the photos that evening. It’s a lovely place to spend an afternoon. Kawan is the artist who did all the work in the pictures. He’s also the subject of the last picture, and just really kind and generous. His studio is his house, and he just opened it up and shared all his rad art books and art with whoever happened to drop by and see him that afternoon. Check out his Nieman Lab predidiction for media in 2018… more zines! I’m 100% behind this.

a very long night

2018-02-06 07:06:03Z

Yes, all of this really happened. It was a magic night, where we were determined to rage even if nobody around was really into the party. Hit like 4 bars, including the Hilo, which was lame and slow on a thursday, and then went back to KJ’s for the afterparty, where KJ painted flowers and gave me good advice. I think we were up till like 5? I don’t know how that happened. But it did.

bunker club

2018-01-12 08:19:30Z

This was my first night hanging out back in OKC over the holidays; it would have been Boxing day. Bunker Club is a new place since the last time I was there, a real nice atom-punk bar; 50s retro theme. Call it nostalgia for the 80s nostalgia for the 50s, viewed through a drunken fun house mirror.

rando game

2018-01-09 07:28:41Z

You know that game where you look around you and guess who is the spy? If you can’t guess who it is, it’s you. There’s a party version of the game, but it’s called ‘Rando’. A party is defined by the quality of its randos (to steal a great line from busblog). You know, the guy that has that awesome story from that time about the thing, or brings the host’s favorite type of liquor or is just witty as shit. Well, I was at this party and looked around, and sure enough, I was one of the randos. This is a good enough crowd where there were several and all hella interesting.

the two xmas parties

2018-01-04 06:29:25Z

So, I was messing around with my old XPro, and discovered that I’d shot the 2016 Apcera party on it and then forgot about it. I downloaded the pictures, and then saw that I had 2017’s party to post too, and well here we are. These were both open bar affairs, so please excuse the blurryness in some of these, the whiskey was very good both years.

surprising my folks for xmas

2017-12-26 06:59:37Z

So today, instead of going to hang out with some lovely people in oakland, I got on a succession of planes and didn’t tweet about it or facebook or instagram. I was flying over some of my favorite parts of the country, southern Utah and the Colorado Rockies (not to be confused with the baseball team). Unfortunately, the flight gods were not kind, and there was a kid sitting next to me that was afraid of flying, so I only got to open the window in brief moments when he was absorbed in his movie.

second batch of leica photos

2017-12-23 17:54:11Z

Another 2 days, and 20 more photos. I gotta say, I love the lens on this camera. Summicron wide open is just a really nice look. The fine detail you get out of this system is just unbelievable. That said, highlights are still garbage and the meter is so bad; not just a little bad but super inconsistent. My guess is that they’ve biased it to underexpose to compensate for the highlight issue. My conclusion so far is that there’s nothing I can’t do with my Fuji by using it in aperture priority and shooting with lower ISOs.

first pictures from the rented leica

2017-12-21 07:09:08Z

So the first 24 with this camera have been a little rough. You might say it’s a little peculiar. I’m not used to an exposure meter that’s center-weighted (and don’t tell me to use the live view). It takes kind of a long time to wake from sleep. The truth is, though, for all it’s problems, I really like it.

dinner club picnic

2017-12-12 06:59:35Z

So, yesterday, when I finished scanning these and started looking at them, I got so excited about them I started texting them to everybody in them. Sort of forgot about the whole Instagram thing and just sent them out. Sorry, Edgar and Annie, for blowing up your phones. Then I remembered, and dutifully posted the top one.

photos from the texas leica

2017-12-09 08:52:56Z

These are all from last summer, June and July, when my mom was here, and not. I’d just gotten the Fuji, and was super excited to shoot with it. I put 10 or 12 rolls of film through it, and had them souped at a local lab, SF Photoworks. Then, because their scanning prices are just silly, I bought a scanner and started scanning them all in myself. I may have said this before, but I really like the images I get out of this camera. I really don’t like the process of scanning images. The epson software sucks and is slow; the film holders are fiddly and kinda shitty.

fat gold harvest

2017-11-26 10:22:13Z

Two of my friends, Kathryn and Robin, just started an olive oil business this year, Fat Gold (peep that domain, yowsers). The farm is about 45 minutes east of town, in Sunol. It’s an area of rich rolling alluvium, with lots of small farms and other interesting things that there aren’t room for here in the city. Kathryn is a veteran of the olive oil industry as an award-winning miller. Robin is the author of 2.5 books (counting Scheme as a novella) and is his best self when slightly annoyed on an overloaded tractor.

mom was here

2017-10-22 20:39:39Z

apparently I forgot to post these? Anyway, my mom came to town to hang out for her birthday, which is also the week of the fourth of july. Good times.

photos out a plane window of smoke

2017-10-14 07:33:58Z

I photographed the milky way from an airplane, bitches. This probably beats the time I took photos under startlight. These were all on the way back from Santa Ana, where I was working for a week to meet all the new comrades and get a feel for how they do things at Weedmaps.

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pride parade 2017

2017-10-11 19:28:46Z

A lot of pictures in this one, and I’m not sorry. Pride is such a visually overwhelming spectacle.

in the redwoods

2017-09-11 01:59:08Z

This was the day we went to San Anselmo and took a little walk through the redwoods. Those black borders? Do not adjust your screen, there is nothing wrong; these are film pictures, shot on the massive 6x9 camera I picked up a while back.

KJ and Maxine at SFMOMA

2017-09-03 00:13:50Z

A lot of pictures in this one. The title is a lie, or at least the first two pictures are from the night they got here, not the next day. This was a really nice visit; we went to the museum on Friday, then up to the woods on saturday (where I shot film and have to find those photos for the next post) and then we did pride on sunday. A well-rounded weekend.

walk down embarcadero

2017-09-02 22:11:11Z

I don’t remember why we were going down this way, exactly, but this was one evening some time ago.

on showing up

2017-08-18 19:15:16Z

Note: the following does not apply to those who can’t go to protests for whatever reason; disability, PTSD, the need to avoid the authorities. I’m talking to my able-bodied fellow white folks.

dinner club last may

2017-08-11 06:08:11Z

So, this was, what, 3 moths ago? I’m getting more behind instead of less, and that’s nobody’s fault but my own. I don’t have any deadlines, and I don’t have any reasons to rush. I used to try to get the photos out the morning after the party, but now? There’s no rush.

walking in the city

2017-08-06 09:04:41Z

I don’t really do this kind of work as much anymore, I need to get back to it. It’s really rewarding for not a lot of effort; just keeping my camera on me, for the most part. There was an incident which scared me off of it for a while, but that shouldn’t stop me, it’s not my first confrontation. Anyway, next time, some nice candid portraits from a dinner club.

picnic by lake merritt

2017-06-22 08:24:30Z

So this must have been three months or so ago, one of the first real warm weekends. I’d just had my eyes lasered, had to wear sunglasses the whole time. The pictures, perhaps in sympathy to my postoperative photophobia, were a little over exposed. Nothing I couldn’t handle in post.

three pictures in the city

2017-06-11 19:08:47Z

Photos, not really about anything. These were walking to lunch, someday months ago now.

cmay in the bay

2017-05-22 07:09:43Z

So, about three months ago, Christa was in town, and I took a bunch of pictures, in and around getting sick at the worst possible moment (having a houseguest). We did a day of touristy things; for some reason it was stupidly hard to get into the city but once we’d managed that it was a lot of fun. Then I got some sort of cold that I foolishly tried to power through and failed, so sat at home for a day.

magmaconf 2017

2017-05-19 00:43:30Z

So this was, what, a month and a half ago? Long enough, anyway, that I feel bad for taking this long to get to the pictures. They’ve been in my loose edit folder since the plane ride home, and have just sat there this whole time.

the things I wish I carried

2017-04-27 21:08:54Z

beach walk Roatan

2017-04-24 17:10:23Z

Two days ago now, I decided to go for a long walk down the beach. Adam, my friend that grew up here, said that the beach was contiguous, that you could walk the whole way to West Bay (not to be confused with west end, where we’re staying).

sunset at sundowners

2017-04-19 18:28:24Z

I’m not sure what order these will show up in. after a couple of days’ recovery from the trip, i finally got off my ass to take some photos. we were at this bar, sundowner’s, which is known for its sunsets. and about half an hour before the main event, i parked myself in a lounger right on the water, and shot these with the 14mm on the Fuji.

in the street with the x-pro 2

2017-04-05 22:31:28Z

on that last post, sophie chastised me for saying I wasn’t going to write a camera review, and then doing it anyway. What I meant was it wasn’t meant to be a thorough exercise in putting the camera through it’s paces, but more my first impressions. Now that I’ve had the thing a few weeks, I have more impressions.

photo walk with the new X-Pro2

2017-03-07 16:11:23Z

So, last Saturday, on a whim, I went to the camera store. Not just any camera store, but easily the best one I’ve been to here in the bay area: Looking Glass Photo, over just off San Pablo. The Fuji reps were there, hanging out with a pile of cameras and lenses for people to play with. They even had the GFX, the new medium format (some part of me dies, calling something less than 6x4.5 medium format, but I digress). So, I got to play with the X-Pro, which was another frontrunner for my next camera, and decided that waiting 6 months and paying triple the price really wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. So I bought it.

a walk with two johns

2017-03-03 02:10:08Z

yesterday (yes, a post about something that happened less than two months ago), I met up with Hornbeck and jrecursive to shoot some photos and hang out, talk shop. I shot a combination of from the hip and looking through he viewfinder, but most of these were shot at eye level.

de young

2017-02-20 02:38:21Z

mobile posting again. i might fill this in with descriptions later –matt

protest at SFO

2017-01-30 01:53:27Z

Usually I don’t do this, but posting from my phone. Peaceful so far, and we arrived to find they were letting those currently held go. Lots of chanting, lots of good signs. Cops, as always. anyway, I figured I should share these ASAP and worry about a long post later. Stay safe out there.

evening and the way home

2017-01-02 05:11:31Z

So, last but not least, we went to the beach and hung out in the warm sun with some cheese and crackers and beverages. There, I hiked about 20 minutes to get to the last of the tufa pictures. I know, I should have waited 6 hours, gotten them in golden hour light, but who has time for that?

around the lake day 1

2017-01-02 03:51:34Z

This was the first full day, from the morning. We stopped at the big overlook again, and took more photos from there. Again, I’m a little sad to not have the film from that session, since I seem to remember shooting a lot on it. From there, we went to a spot where you could hike out to the shore, and then along it as well. That proved fairly difficult.

bridgeport in the morning

2016-12-31 23:58:03Z

These are the rest of the pictures from that early morning in Bridgeport; I should have probably spent the first half hour driving out to the lake, but I figured I might as well spend some time in the town, and it ended up being worthwhile. There were no people when I first out at first light, but by the time the sun actually came over the mountains, there were a fair number, and a bakery right on main street had opened, and sold me a ham and cheese pastry.

mono lake part one

2016-12-31 07:56:29Z

We came into Bridgeport through the pass north of 120, I disremember which road it was. Stopped at an overlook, maybe half way down, that had a good view of the valley we’d been coming down, out of the sierras. Switchbacks the whole way, and I was driving, so didn’t take too many photos (since I’ve nearly killed myself doing that, I only take the risk when I’m alone).

olivia and roger's pizza oven

2016-11-28 07:55:36Z

This was just a delightful way to spend an August afternoon. Roger and Olivia had me, Sophia, and some friends of theirs from out of town over just after their tomato harvest for pizzas. Everything except the cheese was fresh made that day, all top notch. Naturally, I ate way too much and got sleepy. Nothing else to be done.

good morning

2016-11-14 18:04:53Z

Blogger’s note: I wrote this yesterday morning, and then got distracted looking for a link, and then work really got going. So, A double good morning to you.

3 unrelated photos

2016-11-03 18:57:13Z

A short post without much to say for itself, while I’m waiting for my laundry to dry here in the city. This, to balance out the super long post I made two days ago. I shut off my facebook last night. We’ll see if I turn it back on or not, but this is an indefinite hiatus, brought on by their attempt to push me into Messenger and off the web.

colorado for cynthia's 70th

2016-11-01 11:02:18Z

So, these are a couple months old at this point. It was Cynthia’s 70th birthday. We celebrated over a long weekend in Estes Park, Colorado, staying in a house up on the hill. It was really a beautiful place and my inherited family is really good company. Since this is a photo heavy post, I’m gonna let the captions tell the story

four off the top of the queue

2016-11-01 10:13:24Z

It’s been a busy month or two. There have now been 3(?) dinner clubs. I’ve taken trips to Colorado, Mono Lake, and now I’m in NYC. I’ve written a big part of a two-day curriculum in Elixir, and I’m teaching it in two weeks. I started building a laptop when mine was down for two weeks. I did another version of the watch, this time with expansion headers instead of any of the other things I’ve been worried about including.

first dinner club

2016-09-20 04:32:48Z

This is a thing we’re doing monthly, just to get together with friends. The menu this time was marinated grilled chicken tacos, and probably something else that I don’t remember because tacos. It was a lovely evening filled with friends.

the next 8 pictures off the queue

2016-09-15 20:17:46Z

So, this may be the last of the random posts. I started using my calendar , so I’ve been doing a lot more sort of structured activities; show up, do something, take some pictures, and go home. Usually with drinking. It would be thoroughly impossible to get done all the stuff I’ve done in the past month without it. A toolbox for my time, wherein I get organized and can do more. And ignore it when I need to.

street photos, street fair

2016-09-08 16:02:26Z

Playing catch up as usual. This is just the next 8 photos off the stack; the ones from the street are from some indeterminate afternoon a month and a half ago, and then there are the photos from the Alameda Art walk. Of course I had to take a photo of the “No Photos” lady. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

Times Square and going home

2016-09-04 05:00:05Z

So, the last thing that happened that day, after the museums, after a nice dinner of Thai food, I walked back to my hotel through Times Square. I was tired enough at this point that half of the things that were happening didn’t even register. I shot just sort of habitually, automatically, but I’m glad I did.

Highline and into the night (nyc in many posts 3)

2016-08-31 18:20:06Z

Still the same day, still walking. I sort of wandered by the Stonewall, which, if you don’t know, go educate yourself. I’d already had my ration of beer, so I didn’t stop in, but it’s a capsule of what a lot of NYC was like: little pockets of history and deep meaning, layered with new growth.

nyc in many posts 2

2016-08-15 04:33:11Z

This was another walk, the one that separated ICP from the Whitney, which I got to with about an hour and a half before they closed. I didn’t take many pictures inside, pictures of museums all look the same to me. The street, though, the street is always moving, always changing. In New York, there wasn’t just a feeling of newness, but this feeling of many layers of history built up over time. That feeling of deeper history was one of the things I really liked. Another thing I liked: not everybody works in tech. Like, apart from the conference I was at, I didn’t meet a single engineer the whole time. Legit.

nyc in many posts

2016-08-08 20:23:12Z

You know how Ulysses, the doorstop/book by Joyce, not the poem, you know how it encompasses a single day, but several years worth of adventure were packed into it? I feel like that was my first day in New York City. So much happened, so many pictures.

camping film pics

2016-07-12 03:14:05Z

These are the other photos from camping; at the last moment, packing, I decided to take my small boulder of a film camera, the Mamiya RB67. It’s older than I am and weighs 20 lbs with the mirror prism. It’s just on the edge of too heavy to handhold. It’s also all those trite things people say about shooting with larger cameras: slow, contemplative. I found myself seeing pictures, and then grabbing the camera and shooting them.

strandbeest at the exploratorium with @donttrythis

2016-07-11 15:58:18Z

Strandbeest - n. Walking sculpture of the type invented by Theo Jansen.

an evening at black butte lake

2016-07-07 04:45:56Z

The campsite at Orland Buttes, on Black Butte Lake, is really something special. Bathrooms with showers, running water, flushing toilets, all the modern amenities you may not get at some lesser campsites. The lake itself is about 20 feet below where it historically was, from my super unscientific ‘look at the shoreline for a while’ method. The water is relatively clean, even on a holiday weekend, and all of the other people there were fairly chill.

a traffic jam caused by google

2016-07-06 02:05:44Z

So, on the way to camping, Sophie and I came upon a large traffic snare. Instead of just sitting there in the jam, google maps directed us to take some side roads, a thing that it’s done in the past when I’ve hit this sort of traffic. The detours are usually interesting, at least, a break from the monotony of the interstate.

annie and adam's new digs

2016-07-05 20:53:57Z

This was a sort of unintentional party. We were supposed to be getting ready to go camping, but decided to go out for dinner with a bunch of folks, including Annie and Adam who’ve just moved into a new place. Then we decided another round sounded good. Then another, and then we decided we should all go back to the new place and check it out, with a stop at 7/11 for beer and supplies (I had a random gummy bear craving, so sue me).

yesterday's photos

2016-06-09 23:17:54Z

So yesterday I finally figured out what the motor drive was for: it’s for getting more pictures, faster than your finger can go. I know some of these are similar, and that I should probably cut a few, but that takes time that I don’t have. I know I should point the camera a bit lower, looking at all of these. Anyway, I just wanted to get up a post, so people know that I’m not dead and the blog is still active. Still shooting.

driving through the sierras

2016-03-10 17:44:10Z

Road trippin’. Hard to get started, although my habit of going out the night before may be to blame. Roughly ten hours on the road, eight in a hotel bed, and I’m still tired. At least tonight we’re sleeping somewhere without a checkout time.

3rd st closure

2016-03-03 17:08:11Z

Last night, I was walking down third to get to Garaje. Normally I wouldn’t go that far for dinner, but I had time to kill. I got to mission and third to find third completely blocked, including the sidewalk. The police seemed to have their hands full dealing with irate conference goers and drunk people (but I repeat myself), so I didn’t ask them what was going on. I went around, New Montgomery to Howard. I walked down a mostly empty third street sidewalk, and found that the cops were turning people back at Folsom too. The whole street empty, traffic backed up on third from being redirected.

behind the new sfmoma

2016-03-02 02:15:12Z

somewhere between tresspass and wandering, just waiting for my ride. i’m super excited for this thing to finally open, may 4th (so the security gaurd told me). i’ve had a membership the whole time we’ve lived here, even while it was closed for this expansion. people who think the new building isn’t gorgeous: you haven’t looked at it.

a small shift in perspective

2016-02-22 06:43:01Z

This is a set of photos that I shot the other day, after having lunch with sophia. The first photo is just something I shot on the way, and quite liked. The second two I shot after, walking on that broad area above the falls at Buena Vista gardens. I thought to myself, “What a nice change in perspective,” and followed that with trying to think of how to change perspectives when I was walking down the street? I remembered the flippy screen on my camera did live view and I could use it as a waist level finder. It worked surprisingly well. Not exactly like having a waist level groundglass, more like a sport finder, where you know mostly where the camera is pointed, and what’s in the frame.

monterrey bay aquarium

2016-01-31 01:26:43Z

These photos are from today! I’m trying this new thing where I blog from my phone. So if this looks weird, that’s why. We’re in a bar having a beer and resting our feet. Enjoy the photos!

goruck gr1 is a bad bag

2016-01-20 06:53:28Z

My EDC, for illustration, and because I can. Is it so much to ask of a bag to hold this stuff?

chinatown + northbeach walk

2016-01-15 21:47:49Z

I work about ten minutes’ walk from columbus av., which forms a border between the two neighborhoods. Lunchtime, friday, I decided to go on a bit of a walk, take some pictures. It’s a rich vein, one of those places you could make a decent essay just walking around, taking in surface impressions for a couple weeks. There’s a whole project to be done just on the tourists, but I’m not sure I have the fortitude to be around them for that long. On the other hand, they’re fair game.

kareem's onesie party

2016-01-04 07:03:51Z

What can I say? I’m really tardy getting these photos up, but it was such a good time I have to share. They know how to throw a good party.

mountains and plains, coming into denver

2016-01-02 21:56:51Z

I flew home to see my folks just after christmas. There was a cheap flight I found at the last minute, probably a glitch, but it went through, so I went. They were happy to see me and I wished I’d had more time to spend with them, but there’s never enough time.

monkey forest and points north

2015-12-21 08:42:18Z

So this was our last day doing stuff in Ubud. The Ubud Monkey forest is half cultural preserve and half wildlife preserve, although its success at either seems dubious. It is good at extracting money from tourists, though. I sound really cynical, but in reality, it was a pretty good experience, wandering through a forest with ancient temples; the swarms of monkeys were funny, and left us alone entirely. There were warnings not to take food in, so we were careful not to.

in defense of prime lenses

2015-12-15 07:19:46Z

note: this started out as a lens review, and there was a paragraph in the middle that wanted to be a whole essay on why fixed focal length lenses are better, artistically, than zooms. So I let it be that, and cut out the review parts. Sharpness is a bourgeois concept, and we will not speak of it further.

a breakthrough in the construction work

2015-12-15 06:54:38Z

So, onto the breakthrough, the big idea, what have you: I realized I’ve been showing too much with the construction pictures. I had this impulse to get it all in, to show the whole, giant job site, as if that was the way to convey the scale of it. Unfortunately, none of those pictures really worked. There was something missing, and the compositions were never good enough. Then, last week, I was looking at Peter Turnley’s book on paris, French Kiss, and realized that the compositions shouldn’t be perfect, and that you can’t show everything. You have to cut some of it out.

ubud continued

2015-12-10 06:11:47Z

So, second day in Ubud, we did considerably more walking. Markets, some temples, lots of tourists. The first three pictures are what most of the town was like. Stores selling things to tourists. There were some shops on the outside of town that sold statuary and furniture, but I’m not convinced those weren’t also for export. We walked, we drank beer, we walked some more. Didn’t buy anything but food and potables (potent and otherwise).

the ongoing construction project (and a sunset)

2015-12-07 08:01:29Z

I think I’ve mentioned it here before a couple times. I’m doing a series of pictures of the construction site around the new transbay terminal. I also thought I should break up the monotony of beautiful island photos. The mood and the scene really has something working there, but I think it’ll fall flat unless I get more photos of the people doing the work. The real meat of photographic legwork is getting access and gaining trust. That and schlepping gear. I’ve got a lot of that still to do.

bali part 3

2015-12-05 08:10:00Z

Like I said in the last post, our second destination in Bali was the town of Ubud. We picked an AirBnB based on reviews and price, and hoped for the best. The first picture is the access to the house; it was down a trail through the rice fields outside of town. I knew rice was a grass, but I’d never seen it up close. When it’s not ready for harvest, it looks like any other grass (botanists, please don’t correct me; I don’t care). So, a few hundred yards from the road, and a little hard to find. That said, once there out hosts were just great. We dropped our things and headed into town for lunch.

bali part 2, or last day of luxury

2015-11-30 20:55:02Z

So this was our last day in the nice spa that Sophie booked us; a really beautiful spot that I was just aching to get out of. It’s one thing to be pampered for a couple days, but completely another to tarry too long. Our last full day we got some very nice massages, ate fried food made to satisfy australians, and rested on the beach. Most of the jet lag had worn off, except that we were still waking up with the sunrise. Afternoon naps did help, though. We never did find out the story of that ship that was run aground, maybe half a mile out to sea, but I seem to see ships like that a lot; there was one in mexico, as well.

ratatat in SF

2015-11-30 06:52:24Z

So, in my last post I was complaining about having too much to do. I should have maybe been more careful what I wished for. I had a bit of an accident; I fractured my tibial plateau, for those at home that can’t read an MRI. I was practicing for my DMV exam on my motorcycle and bumped the throttle; next thing I knew I was in the bushes. I’d love to continue learning to ride when I’m healed, but really, I have too many other things going at once to give riding the attention it needs not to kill me.

apcera halloween

2015-11-01 07:07:34Z

Technically, this was Friday before halloween, but it was a good time to party. They had a costume contest, and good food, sweets. Then those of us that live in the east bay headed over to Cato’s for some beers and late dinner. 7-10 of us crowded around a table talking and drinking and eating tatchos (natchos, but tater tots instead of chips). Good times.

florence and the machine

2015-10-23 06:41:10Z

Just went to this concert, and it was a lot of fun. I tried to post these from the phone, but ran into some odd ssh issues that I still can’t figure out. Could be the beer. Anyway, photos:

cruise to st francis

2015-10-19 06:38:46Z

So, earlier today, I was at something of a loose end as to what to do with myself, and I found out our friends Peggy and cris were going to go on a little cruise. At first it was going to be to Tiburon, but when we got to the boat, it seemed a bit choppy for that crossing, so we went to the St. Francis Yacht club instead. It’s a nice place.

up kearny st

2015-10-10 00:53:12Z

I was going to talk about something smart here, but I used up all my smarts this week. I tackled a huge problem at work, and in doing so became the local expert on that thing. I built a keyboard and a Tv-b-Gone. I started thinking about laptop enclosures and hinges and how to fabricate them from what I have on hand, plus some hardware (springs and bolts!).

a very long day

2015-09-05 22:48:36Z

Thursday was a very long day. 24 hours on our personal clocks, plus we lost a day to the international date line. Plus sleep on planes, plus airplane food. Jet lag hasn’t been too bad. The beach is wonderful, and the ocean is warm.

street from last week

2015-09-01 19:25:32Z

https://images.matt.pictures/street_from_last_week/353/street-last-week-0001.jpg” alt=”Alt text” /> https://images.matt.pictures/street_from_last_week/353/street-last-week-0002.jpg” alt=”Alt text” /> https://images.matt.pictures/street_from_last_week/353/street-last-week-0003.jpg” alt=”Alt text” /> https://images.matt.pictures/street_from_last_week/353/street-last-week-0004.jpg” alt=”Alt text” />

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some scenic local pictures

2015-08-28 07:14:21Z

These were mostly last sunday, except the last one, which was saturday. A lovely evening hanging out on the roof deck with our neighbors from down the hall. The street picture, I just had to put up somewhere. The neighbors, though: one is a painter, and the other makes jewelry, of the fine art variety, in all different sorts of metals. Cool folks, both of them.

https://images.matt.pictures/some_scenic_local_pictures/354/senics-0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/some_scenic_local_pictures/354/senics-0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/some_scenic_local_pictures/354/senics-0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/some_scenic_local_pictures/354/senics-0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/some_scenic_local_pictures/354/senics-0005.jpg’ />

bleacher company picnic

2015-08-26 23:33:10Z

I know, I’ve been here a week and a half, and they’re having the company picnic already? I’m pretty lucky like that. The week I joind GoPro, for example, they had their IPO and a giant party, as well. Anyway, these are my new coworkers.

https://images.matt.pictures/bleacher_company_picnic/355/br-picnic-0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bleacher_company_picnic/355/br-picnic-0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bleacher_company_picnic/355/br-picnic-0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bleacher_company_picnic/355/br-picnic-0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bleacher_company_picnic/355/br-picnic-0005.jpg’ />

weekend in tahoe

2015-08-25 02:23:59Z

The title says weekend, but really it was more like one long day. I stayed at work till a reasonable time and then got on the BART. I don’t remember why, but I couldn’t take off that afternoon (it may have been before I knew I was changing jobs, and had extra PTO). In any case, Sophie, her mother, and her mom’s friend Sally went on ahead in their tiny Yaris, and I drove the Land Rover by myself, across the central valley and into the mountains. We spent that evening on the patio of our AirBnB, drinking wine and or beer. The next morning, we went to Ernie’s Cafe, something of a local institution. Then we drove around the lake all day. That night, I cooked french fries, and Sophia cooked steaks. For desert, we had wine and conversation. There may have even been a nap in there. This last weekend, I rode a motorcycle for the fist time. It was a range day for the motorcycle safety class I’m taking. Man, that’s a lot of fun. The class starts with the very basics; how to safely start the bike, walk the bike across the range under power in first, feathering the clutch, then short little jumps, then longer jumps, then around the oval; every exercise built on everything I’d learned so far, and by the end of the day I felt pretty good, doing the countersteering exercise. I need to work on looking through the corners, and braking with both brakes. And throttle control. Really, everything. There’s definitely something to motorcycle riding though, beyond the risk involved. Something about the coordination of all the things you have to do– concentrate on any one and before you know it you’ve messed up somehow. But you focus on none of them, and everything just flows. I’m sure after a bit more parctice, all of that will be second nature and not require Zen concentration. Like driving was at first, so many things to manage. Anything like that is bound to seem complex. Then your left foot learns where neutral is, and your right hand learns where the throttle really kicks in, and the left hand learns how to find the friction zone. Gearheads talk about becoming one with the machine… I thought it was bullshit, but it’s definitely a thing I’ve felt on my bicycle, so it seems natural on a motorcycle too. Also, I keep thinking about riding into the mountains, into the night.

https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/weekend_in_tahoe/356/tahoe-summer-0010.jpg’ />

last from santa fe

2015-08-19 16:43:45Z

Sinced I got these off the camera yesterday, figured I could post them today. It was a good trip, filled with memories and delicious burritos from The Pantry. We were staying out towards Cerillos, on a friend of a friend’s family vacation home. A really beautiful spot. The storms coming in over the valley at sunset were amazing. I was a little suprised at how big Cerillos has gotten. Boom town, maybe from the movie business that came through, maybe because of the light rail between SF and ABQ. I’m not sure, but it seemed like there were a few too many kitch stores for the long run. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with that little place, next time I visit. Hopefully it won’t take 7 years next time.

https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_from_santa_fe/357/new-commute-0008.jpg’ />

new job new commute

2015-08-18 17:10:54Z

So, in case you haven’t heard, I started a new job this week, at “Bleacher Report”:http://bleacherreport.com . New job, new commute. Shiny new Macbook Pro. Anyway, I wanted to put up some photos from this morning, and the one at the end from last night, walking to the apple store to get a padded sleeve for the new rig. The sony is mostly dead, I need to see about getting it repaired. That siad, it has emboldened me to get out shooting more with the Nikon. And to post more, because as Sophie keeps telling me, people like pictures.

https://images.matt.pictures/new_job_new_commute/358/new-commute-0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/new_job_new_commute/358/new-commute-0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/new_job_new_commute/358/new-commute-0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/new_job_new_commute/358/new-commute-0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/new_job_new_commute/358/new-commute-0005.jpg’ />

tinsley island

2015-08-12 22:21:01Z

This was what, like 3, 4 weeks ago now? something like that. A really enjoyable couple days out on the California delta. I was just getting used to the sony at that point. Good camera, fast, does OK in low light. It’s not terribly durable; my frame of reference is a professional DSLR like the D750 I have, though. I think it might just be in that category of camera that everyone else has, that needs to be in a padded case when it’s not in use. I’ve dented a couple corners and filled it with sunscreen, destroying the flippy LCD. I’ve removed it, making the camera a little slimmer, but I wish it’d been a little more durable to begin with. It’s an excellent carry-around camera, and amazing for street shooting. The experimental post I made the other day was all shot with it. It’s small, silent, and produces really good results in decent light. So, even if this one bites it, I may buy another just like it. And a pouch to protect it.

https://images.matt.pictures/tinsley_island/359/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/tinsley_island/359/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/tinsley_island/359/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/tinsley_island/359/0004.jpg’ />

haight and a sign in civic center

2015-08-07 03:57:13Z

Today was great; I got to meet a bunch of cool hardware folks (and “one novelist”:http://robinsloan.com) at “@genmon’s”:http://interconnected.org/home/ hardware-ish coffee. Lots of good ideas flying around, and everybody seemed to like the “watch”:http://ourglass.watch . Some other fellows had an interesting museum-y thing, and another guy had a bunch of little gadgets he’d made based on the electric imp. I’ll update this with a link to Matt’s post when he puts it up, with actual names. I was too busy sort of absorbing all the good ideas to really take it in. But: Look at that photo of Tom. Sunburnt as hell and not a single fuck given.

https://images.matt.pictures/haight_and_a_sign_in_civic_center/360/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/haight_and_a_sign_in_civic_center/360/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/haight_and_a_sign_in_civic_center/360/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/haight_and_a_sign_in_civic_center/360/0005.jpg’ />

market street mini-essay

2015-08-06 01:50:53Z

Ah, market street north of third: the real heart of the city, beating with activity. I love this part of town the most; it’s the most inhospitible to sanity but also the most alive place in the whole city. You get a sense of the scale of the place here, like no other. This is somewhat experimental, as I edited the photos on my phone. I may hate it and delete it later.

https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20142658530_4c69dce909_h.jpg” alt=”See shop and women”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20304470226_44790c896e_h.jpg” alt=”meter maid car”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20142699508_061d6eb999_h.jpg” alt=”vendor”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20336769501_fb5c2b4ea2_h.jpg” alt=”guy staring, hotel”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20304467336_3478ae8cbd_h.jpg” alt=”Arcade on market”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20144087759_95e38a6fa7_h.jpg” alt=”wheelchair man and dude on phone”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20337078201_448675ac63_h.jpg” alt=”girls in the market”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20322584092_9ec59f380b_h.jpg” alt=”tourists on bench”> https://images.matt.pictures/market_street_mini-essay/361/20142701228_8e44c378b8_h.jpg” alt=”Ferry Building, looking towards treasure island”>

evenings and cats

2015-08-05 06:42:56Z

These are more or less random, just things that happened. No narrative, no metanarrative. They’re all with the new camera, a Sony R100v4. It’s really really good for a pocket camera. Like, way better than my first couple dslrs, in every way but maybe durability. It’s already got quite a few dings. We’ll see.

https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/evenings_and_cats/362/0007.jpg’ />

the week of magma conf

2015-08-02 06:20:47Z

I know I should break this into several posts or whatever, but I really don’t have the time or patience. I also feel a little bad about these photos, in that I hung out with a ton more people than are pictured here, and none of them are in any of my pictures, because I was kinda busy getting to know them and talking about exciting stuff that wasn’t photography. Also, it’s hard to carry an SLR in swim shorts. I was going to name a bunch of names here, but I’d be sure to miss someone and I don’t want to do that. So: If I talked to you, it’s safe to assume that I valued that interaction. Everyone there was pretty rad, from the organizers to the other speakers to the attendees. Things that happened, in no particular order: I got lost (several times). I broke my watch, then broke the programmer, then gave my talk anyway. We walked to a black sand beach over the hill, and went in the water untill the jellyfish came. Swimming in safer waters. Swimming in a pool, most days; afternoon naps. Many, many good ideas were floated, and some of them maybe even ran with (Use rust! build hardware! Change the future, and do what you can to include everyone in it!) Midnight tacos were had. I spoke to a room of ~100 people about how to build their own smart watch. I sat all day at the airport, because I got the cheapest ticket and then couldn’t change it. I was chased out of the Guadelajara airport by mosquitos, only to return hours later, and finally get home. That about covers it.

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lakes in the eastern sierra

2015-07-06 05:36:15Z

There’s an idea that’s been rattling around all day today: The photograph as anecdote. That is to say, they’re not really evidence, but just a thing someone saw one time. It dovetails nicely with things I think/believe about truth, objectivity and the possibility that they don’t exist in photography. “A photograph is neither true, nor false, just as a sentence is neither red nor blue.” A smartass will go print a red/blue text on a color printer, but you get the point: Photographs are not vehicles for truth. They are vehicles for telling stories. The story here: I got on a plane bound for Santa Fe from SFO. I tried to sleep for the first twenty minutes or so of the flight, then resigned myself to being awake, and started looking out the window. I’ve always been addicted to these views, snapping pictures whenever I can see anything at all. This time, it was a bit shocking. Tiny mountain lakes, no snow, and every reservoir has at least a bathtub ring, some that look so wide and have been there so long it’s getting hard to distinguish them from the landscape. All visible from 27,000ft. We landed, and as you could maybe tell from the previous post, Santa Fe has been good. But these pictures need to get out there. maybe next I’ll post my stuff from pride, something upbeat. We’ll see.

https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0010.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0011.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/lakes_in_the_eastern_sierra/364/0012.jpg’ />

santa fe again

2015-07-05 15:36:02Z

In Santa Fe again. A lot of memories here, and a lot of things that have changed since I was here last, some seven or eight years ago. It’s still an amazing place. I keep getting these flashes of memory as we drive by places; the car dealership one of my friends got arrested in front of, supposedly because he was hitting all the cars as he walked by, going home from the bar. Burrito Spot and all those times after last call. Breakfast at the Pantry. Wandering past roads I used to live down. I dont know if this is supposed to make me feel old or what, but I do. Drink one for the things that are gone, and enjoy what’s here, that’s all I can do. Yes, these are photos from last night. No, this does not mean I’m abandoning five months of photos. I’m on the road, and the majority of those photos are at home. Felt like blogging these.

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happy hour on into friday night

2015-07-02 07:43:39Z

I looked at the date on these, and realized I’m 5 months behind posting photos. It occurs to me at this point that maybe I need an easier way post them? Anyway, yeah. Some Friday night happy hour that stretched late, spanned a couple parties, bars, and an apartment. Mostly notable for the walking and the drinking.

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epic retro time

2015-07-01 06:40:32Z

This wasn’t the last LK2 retro, but it kind of feels like it was. It’s certainly the most memorable. We walked all the way to the Biergarten in Hayes Valley, talked about wat was going on, drank beer and ate pretzels. Somewhere, someone has a timelapse taken from the fence of the whole thing. (This has been another Matt Mills zen story, with no real point.)

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daily surroundings

2015-06-01 07:18:39Z

These are just more semi-random street pictures. The first two are probabably destined to be part of the ongoing “MacArthur” project, should it ever take more than a vague form. The rest are from the neighborhood around the office. I’m guilty of taking #4 something like 50% of the time I walk on that side of the road, although they’re all somewhat different, due to foreground, lighting, composition, etc. I’ve been thinking a lot about motivation. How do I keep going? So far, it’s been enough to keep pushing the button and putting the photos up here. There’s some external validation, when I post photos of people and they like them, that helps a lot. But really, I don’t know. It’s an open question.

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photos from the mission

2015-05-20 07:32:39Z

The Mission is still my favorite neighborhood in SF. Noe Valley is where the hipsters have gone, but the mission still has some grit and dirt. Some non-white non-tech people, people not like me. Bars you could get stabbed in, cash only. Several of the world’s best burrito joints. Yeah, what’s not to like?.

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5 off the queue

2015-05-18 06:21:53Z

Yes, I’m alive. The blog is not yet dead, even though I see many other bloggers hanging up their keyboards. I could use a different, slicker, easier platform. I could just stick all my photos up on flicker. But then where would I ramble on aimlessly? Anyway, here are the first five photos out of my quick collection. They’re not related, except they were shot in this order, within a couple days of each other.

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on the shore of lake tahoe

2015-04-26 18:26:42Z

Which isn’t where I remember it, the last time I was here. Seems it’s gone about 30 yards further in. The weather while we were there was grey and cold and rainy, but not enough. It should have snowed the whole time. Stupid Climate Change.

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a very long bus ride to Tahoe

2015-04-24 22:31:50Z

In february, Soph’s company had their annual offsite in Tahoe. The whole company and their families go for a weekend of fun. There’s skiing, snowboarding, spas, food, drinking, the whole bit. So, on friday, the weekend of, we all got on a big bus loaded down with a lot of booze and a lot of nerds, and off we went. If you’ve been on this kind of bus trip (and who hasn’t?), you know they’re always chronically late, beset by delays, and can be fairly miserable. This was at least well-organized, and well stocked with booze. We set off at the appointed time for what should have been a four hour drive. We immediately hit traffic on the Bay Bridge. Fairly smooth sailing from there to Sacramento or so, with just a case of motion sickness. Then, we started getting into the mountains and the traffic started getting worse. Since it was a bus full of nerds, we all had google maps out the whole way and knew the delay was coming. We drank whiskey and waited, and then, past one checkpoint, we tried to get some guys who were putting on chains for $20 to put them on the bus, and nobody would. So, some of the passengers ended up helping the driver get the chains on to get past the second checkpoint. This all added about 2 hours, plus the stop-and-go traffic the whole time. We were supposed to be there by dinner time; it ended up being around 9:30. We were on the bus to Tahoe for something like 7 hours. We ran out of whiskey, beer and toilet paper (not in that order). We ran out of snackfood. The bus didn’t break down, though, and we made it over the pass. Finally. And the hotel was gorgeous.

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all the time

2015-04-23 22:09:43Z

Every day. Take the camera out, take some pictures. Nobody pays me. There’s no gallery. There’s just a blog. A blog with typos. and poor grammar. Written whenever I’m exhausted, published when I’m tired of re-writing my thoughts. Some days I’m tired. Some days I only take one or two pictures. Others, I shoot hundreds. The odds of getting a good picture are only slightyly improved on the days with hundreds. It’s more about putting in the work. If I take the time to look carefully, see what’s in front of the camera, that matters more than the frames exposed. I look, I get closer to whatever it was I wanted to shoot. Put the files away on a hard drive for a month, two, to fogret the feeling of tripping the shutter. Editing is hard; editing with emotion is a lot harder. When I look, finally, I’m often surprised by how good the photos are; I’m one of those people who procrastinates because I think I’ll be dissapointed. These photos are from days like that. Where I don’t have project or a direction, but I’m moving in the direction if my intuition. Putting in the work. Skill not talent, someting you have to do to keep it up. Practice pushing the button, keep doing it until I can’t any more.

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Work in Progress: MacArthur BART

2015-04-13 06:23:59Z

There are many BART stations, but this is the one that I pass through the most. It’s also fiarly interesting; a good mix of young professionals, locals, schoolkids going to the city, people catching the shuttle to Kaiser. I don’t know what direction this is going in, and I’m totally not done. It’s a Work in Progress. It’s also the first idea that landed in my lap after I got the new camera. I may abandon it if time doesn’t allow me to give it the depth that it needs. Right now I’ve got a place, but that’s not enough for a subject. There’s gotta be a person in the story, someone not me, because I’m not enough of a narcisist to talk about myself all the time (says the blogger). In other news, many many things are afoot. I have to say no to pretty much anything else that comes down the pipe for the next 4-6 months. I’ve a new version of the watch in the works, various trips, Maker Faire (where I’ll be wandering around trying to keep my jaw off the floor), and of course, big things going on at the day job. Of course, now that I’ve said that, half of it may fall through. We’ll see.

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superb owl party

2015-04-10 07:48:14Z

Ah, the delberate typo pun. I don’t remember what we did in 2014 for the Super Bowl, but this year we partied with some friends, Kareem and Lauren. Those are some legit wings in the first photo. Good times.

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14 pictures of januamiee

2015-04-09 05:18:56Z

The title does not contain a typo; Our friend Amiee has her birthday in January, hates it, and has instead claimed the whole month. It’s not a bad idea. I’d do it myself, except my birthday is rad, and it’s impossible to make a passable portmanteau with “Matt” and “September.” I tried to edit these down to bare essentials, but I got to this number, and my wife was like “Just publish them all,” and I was like, OK, wife, you are right. People do like looking at pictures.

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commute again and again

2015-04-08 07:32:17Z

Like I said, some pictures that weren’t even possible before; the fourth one, especially. Incredible speed, and incredible sensitivity in this camera. I love it. The next edit, I promise, is all people. People are way more interesting than scenery. Also: I shot them in a dimly lit bar, which was doubly fun.

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street with the new camera

2015-04-07 06:35:39Z

The first few weeks of the new camera where all about things that previously I couldn’t shoot. Anything dark, anything moving, and pretty much anything at all once I got going. I shot 200 pictures of basically nothing the first day. I kept up that pace for at least a week. If I had somethign to shoot, it was even more. A lot of pictures. I’m beginning to come to grips with what that means. I’m going to have to blog a lot more. Maybe be a bit less cautious. Post with wild abandon. If you hate the picutes, there’ll be another post along, shortly, to replace them at the top of the feed.

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#rubykaraoke a while back

2015-04-07 05:54:10Z

There’s a traditon among my people, that is to say rubyists, and further, those in the n+1 friends circle of people who’ve worked for Engine Yard. It is, in short, to get shitty and sing ridiculous karaoke. It’s a good time. PJ is often an instigator; but this time we also had Zach and Sarah, and Seemant came out for what seemed like the first time in a while. Oh, and of course Yerhot. Yes, this also means I’m almost three months behind on pictures, in a time when I’ve been shooting more than ever. So, I’m going to try to blog a bit more now… we’ll see how that goes.

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a session with Baxter or a camera test

2015-03-05 07:58:07Z

Yeah, I know. A couple nice short posts, and then WHAM, a dozen pictures. These were taken with the rental camera, the tryout weekend. I got to Chris and Angela’s house around 10am, we wer going to hang out, have a picnic and hike a bit. Sophie wasn’t feeling well that morning, but I still wanted to go, and when I got there, they told me to please take as many pictures as I liked of Baxter, so I did. He’s just turning one; at the time of the photos he would have been ten or eleven months at the time of the photos. We had a picnic at an old farmhouse, now run by the state park that owns this section of the coast. There were giant bushes with warrens under them, big old trees, a really good spot. Then, we walked along that coast for a bit. Our destination was a fern grotto on the beach. But first: beautiful windswept beaches where humans aren’t allowed and birds rule. The birds would run forward as the waves receeded and pick at the sand, and then run back up the beach, away from the wave. Walking along cliff, all we could do was look down. When we got to the fern grotto, we rested and snacked while Baxter played with rocks, and then walked back, at which point I was fairly tired. I know this because the photos slow down somewhat. The camera test: As I’ve said already, I’m in love with this camera. The D750 is a really amazing tool. While walking back, I saw a bird flying the opposite direction, towards us. I was able to raise the camera, zoom, and get 3 in focus frames as it passed. It also meant I got the photo of the unicyclist on the cliff. That speed helped a lot when shooting the kid, too. Kids aren’t bird-fast, but they do change constantly, and unlike adults, they’re completely unpredictable. It was also nice to use focal lengths other than 50mm. I may have overused the wide angle end a bit, but it works for some of these.

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back in the city

2015-03-05 07:34:19Z

Came back to work for a few days, not many people around. In case you’re wondering, I’m doing a ton of posts to get them out of the way, to try to catch up to at least last month.

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niles after xmas

2015-03-05 07:29:53Z

Just a couple photos, from going to Niles to meet up with Ben and Jenn. I think we also went wine tasting with them? There’s no evidence, at least not good enough for this blog.

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OK photos

2015-03-05 07:22:07Z

These are somewhat out of order, but I wanted the two verticals together. I was in Oklahoma for 13 days in December, then we came back here to have a chill xmas an new year. It was good to see everyone, including the folks I didn’t get photos of. Sorry! I was really frustrated with the old camera at this point, and had just about given up. With this post, we’re now approaching this year! SO. FAR. BEHIND.

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acrobat on silks at the company party

2015-02-16 09:22:33Z

This was just days before we went to Oklahoma. My company’s xmas party, which was pretty rad. There wasn’t much going on, visually, apart from this. I mean, I have some portraits, but they’re not great. Monochromatic stage lighting is hard as hell to work with. That difficulty is the reason that these are all in black and white. The dominant channel (whatever color the light is) will blow out, and the rest will be ok. You can save this with black and white conversion, with the added benefit that it more closely matches what I see when I’m shooting a scene like this. Something the event organizers did wonderfully with this event: they had at least one really visual element in the evening. It may be because we’re a very media-centric company, or it may just be a stroke of luck that we didn’t have some rock band instead. I was stoked, in any case, that someting cool was going down. Later in the evening, there was much drinking and dancing, even by me, but all those photos are blurry. These make a nice set, though.

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ronan's birthday breakfast

2015-02-15 07:39:43Z

Early December, and I’m skipping a few pictures only to maybe come back to them later. This was when Mary was in town, too, although I didn’t get a decent photo of her (a failure on my part). Anyway, this was the day I learned about Buckfast. This is a tonic wine for winos, I guess. In the words of Ronan, “If you drink the whole bottle, you’re going to do some crime.” I tried it, but didn’t get enough to even cause jaywalking.

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apcera xmas party 2014

2015-02-12 06:48:51Z

Cool folks, good times. This was another of those evenings that I don’t super remember for some reason, probably related to the open bar. Anyway, photos.

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the de Young is an amazing place

2015-02-10 07:49:27Z

Lots of photos in this one, because it’s an awesome place, and the photos are nice. Also, I broke out photoshop on these, to get the skies in a couple of them burned in. It’s been long enough since I used photoshop that all the tools are in slightly different places than I remember, but it’s really snappy on this machine at least. I’m babbling. Seriously, if you can, get to the de Young and have a walk around the sculpture garden, at least. The Turrell skyskape has to be experienced, as does seeing the building up close. There are a bunch of amazing sculptures, as well as a nice cafe. There’s also a Japanese tea garden which is quite nice. A fine place to spend an afternoon walking around.

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thanksgiving in the sunset

2015-02-10 07:09:40Z

Yes, I know thanksgiving was almost three months ago. I’m rushing to catch up, and also I was more than a little sad that I didn’t get more pictures. It was in some ways a repeat of the year before, but that just meant a good time with good people, overeating and running to the store to buy more beer several times. The last trip, I got to the store and they’d closed. On the walk there and back, though, there was this great fog over the neighborhood. I was glad for the walk.

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take the long way home

2015-01-30 05:39:44Z

I don’t always steal my post titles from Tom Waits songs, but when I do, it’s because these pictures all came from taking the long way home. I’ve been experimenting with my commute, seeing what route is the most enjoyable. So far, MUNI to the transbay bus is the best, but the perambulations help. Actually, I think these are from just before thanksgiving, when Sophia’s mom was in town. I was wandering a bit, but I was also trying to get to a restaurant in north beach. Some semi-touristy place, staffed by rude old men. Good food though.

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macarthur bart

2015-01-27 04:16:53Z

Bunch of grey mornings, scattered through the last month or so. It occurs to me that you could do a really interesting piece centered around this BART station. And by you I mean me, but you could too. Nothing stopping either of us really, except everything else we’ve got to do with our lives. Going to work, building things, coming home, building other things, sleep, blogging, eating. But I’m there almost every day, for at least 5-10 minutes. The light changes enough day to day that it’s never definitely any time; start shooting now, wrap up in 6 months, and you’ve got a little feature. That is, if you can sneak it in between pizzas and lines of code and sewing and soldering. And by you I mean me.

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like crewdson but not as staged

2015-01-26 07:40:46Z

With these pictures, and a lot of the work I’ve been doing recently, the serious pictures, as opposed to the stuff that I see type work, I was looking for a certain kind of light, a mood, a suggestion of possibilities. It looks, to me, like some of the Crewdson I remember liking in the early oughts. Only, I’m not using the production budget of a middling music video, with a small army of crew to make it happen. I’m just taking advantage of the fact that both Oakland and SF have changed their lighting to LEDs, which are a nice white light, and exploring that space. It’s dark and mostly empty, but that’s bound to change.

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got my words back

2015-01-12 04:25:41Z

I expected this weekend to be sort of hard and boring. I rented a camera, to see if I liked it. Instead, I fell in love with the camera, and found a part of myself that I dind’t realize was missing. This is my review of the Nikon D750. It goes like this: I’ve spent over half my life at this point looking through a camera of one kind or another. The camera has always been my way of understanding the world. So, when I said on instagram that “It’s like I’d lost half my vocabulary and now I’ve got it back,” I meant exactly that. It’s that feeling of walking into a room and turning a light on, or putting on glasses and suddenly remembering that trees have leaves again. Except, of course, all of the cognitive processes are thing that don’t have words, so it’s hard to even know that they’re gone. Anyway, definitely getting one of these as soon as possible. I’m suddenly bullish on SLRs again. I shot all of these photos on the way home. Every time I see a picture, I can get it with this camera. The weak link in the equation is once again me. Am I too slow? Is the camera set weird? Otherwise, it’s bang on. So, where before I would see a picture and not be able to get to the camera in time, with this, I can get the shot. Realizing this, I see a lot more. The world moves, and I move with it, dancing. The camera isn’t perfect. The shutter button is a hair trigger, so a half press doesn’t feel much different than a full press, but that is probably a matter of getting used to it. The focus modes aren’t super clear, but again, that’s probably a learning experience. There’s noting else to complain about. ISOs up to 8000 are really quite good. The photos here have been pushed another three stops in post. I’d use 12800 without hesitation. The AF is AMAZING. That picture with the birds? I could barely see them, but it nailed it. That’s all, except to say that I’m super stoked to buy one of these, so much so that I’m not going to bother renting the D810 to try. It’s heavier and a touch slower. Not that I’d notice the difference in real shooting, but I’ve found the right machine. Why fuck around?

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mels birthday

2015-01-05 05:57:18Z

I am again two months behind. Oh well. This was a fine evening in very dim lighting. As someone who sometimes shoots under just starlight, I shouldn’t have been deterred, but I kept stumbling with the autofocus, and it’s very frustrating. The first two photos were all I could manage. The third is from a walk the night before, to get to some restaurant (of which I can only remember the good company of our friend Otto and amazing fried chicken).

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finally blogging again

2015-01-04 02:53:44Z

Haven’t blogged in a while. I meant to over the holiday, and didn’t get around to it. Resting, thinking really hard. Not a lot else going on. The watch project is going really well. I’ve nothing to show for it yet, but the next version is going to be really interesting. Totally new design. On the photo front, I’ve once again gogtten myself a backlog of several months. I’ve had a couple ideas for projects floating around, but I’m waiting to get a new camera. The fuji has been great for the last several years, but it’s gotten a little slow. Either that or the kind of photos I’m taking need a bit more. I miss a good fast camera.

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let the color be crazy

2014-12-08 08:00:26Z

For these photos, I did my best to white balance, but with all the mixed lighting, there’s no way to get it perfect. I still like the result. This was just a walk to meet Sophia, one day after work. The city is just fascinating after dark.

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Views from the 1, moving up the coast

2014-12-08 07:21:36Z

The California coast is one of the most amazing places. I’m glad I was there, for at least a bit. I said to someone on twitter today (“@monicabyrne13”:https://twitter.com/monicabyrne13, “who’s book”:http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Road-Monica-Byrne-ebook/dp/B00GVZZL7A/ you should read, and who is awesome) that I’m almost always jealous of people that are somewhere else, as long as somewhere else isn’t somewhere I’ve been long enough to be disenchanted by. It’s really hard to hold still, with so much wonder in the world. Larry Ellison, of Oracle, has a house somewhere on this coast, probably one of the most expensive houses in the world. I’m not interested in a house on these hills, nor in amassing the fortune required to buy one. I’m happy to move through them, and see them, and move on. I’ve got a lot going on here in the next year or so, but after that, I may have to hit the road again. There is too much to see.

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anniversary in the woods

2014-12-01 16:15:59Z

This was our second first anniversary, which also conicides with what it says on our marriage certificate. Sophia got us a cabin down in Big Sur, on the river there. Pretty nice place. We arrived late, in the rain, but the lady that checked us in acted like she’d be there all night, even though I’m fairly sure we were her last check-in. We drove up a fairly steep dirt road about a hundred yards, and unloaded a few things. As it turned out, we didn’t need to bring most of the stuff; the cabin was pretty well-appointed. We were happy for the firewood, even though it wasn’t actually seasoned. That first night, we plugged things in and read for a while; we were both exhausted from long weeks of work. In the morning, we laid in bed late, and then cooked breakfast over our camp-stove, complete with mimosas. The sun started to peek through the trees, and we walked down to the river. Then, we went and had a nice long nap. A day of nothing, out of reach of cell phones, email, and the internet. I love you guys, but it was nice to be disconnected for a bit, with just Sophie. We had some amazing steaks for dinner; somehow safeway had amazing meat for once. And fries, and then a fire to sit by. Then we went to bed. It was pretty much perfect.

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halloween was a bit odd

2014-11-21 06:15:44Z

I mean, the other devs and their room mate were in adult onesies modeled after their spirit animals (self-chosen). I wore my blurry bear t-shirt, because I’d be to hot in a onesie. Then, on the way back from lunch, there was a photo studio, so I took a few shots. Then, on the street, a guy in a creepy mask, standing and staring. So, not much different than any other day. Just with costumes.

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pictures from the bart

2014-11-17 01:53:26Z

The daily commute. I’ve been pushing myself lately to make more pictures wherever I can. While I was working heavily on the watch, it seems my creative juices were at a low ebb, or possibly they were all used up. I’m getting back at it, though. Making myself shoot any time I think of it. There’s never not time to snap a few photos. If if seems like there isn’t, my priorities are out of whack. I used to shoot until I was literally passed out, wake up, take a few frames, and pass out again. Shoot while injured, shoot while dying od dysentery, shoot while on a bus, crashing into a ditch, shoot while digging ourselves out of the ditch. I was going to blather on about james baldwin here (the diff is in git if you’re really curious) but I decided instead to link to this really useful list of “the things you’ll need to write a novel”:http://tobylitt.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/9-things-you-need-to-write-a-novel/ which is remarkably similar to the list of the things you’ll need to do anything creative. The means are different, but eveverything else, yeah. Time, time, time, check. Selfishness, Generosity, check. The means? I hope so. A discipline: Yep. A yearning? Definitely. Tone? Yes. Lots of tone. Photography would be lifeless without tone.

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many karaoke shenanigans

2014-11-13 07:14:16Z

The dictionary tells us that shenanigans are when more than three people go to the Mint karaoke bar at any one time. The cold dictionary definition fails to capture the passion, the raw emotion of drinking 5 or 7 shots of fireball and singing “Baby Got Back” in front of your closest friends, and a bunch of people you hope to never see again. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader who is who. Except the car guy I met outside smoking who wouldn’t stop talking about his cars. F that guy. For the record, I sang “Man in Black”, and I only had the one shot of fireball. The rest of mine were regular whiskey. And a couple whiskey colas. You can thank the autofocus that any of these are remotely sharp. Yes, the same autofocus I malign constantly. I shot a shit ton, and got a couple good ones. It’s not how I like to do it, but I needed to do something, anyway.

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Sophie's spectacular birthday dinner

2014-11-12 09:33:06Z

Three weeks ago, it was Sophia’s birthday, and we had the dinner on the night of at AsiaSF, a drag show (edit: not drag, trans*) venue in SOMA. It was a hell of a show, but my camera’s autofocus wasn’t quite up to the light in there. Got some nice photos of most of our party, excepting Jason. The second picture is Sophie taking her birthday shot from one of the performers. The last one is the only decent shot of the performance I got; there were 4 (5?) ladies, and they all did a couple numbers between courses. A super fun evening.

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loose ends

2014-11-10 06:33:10Z

So, some pictures got stuck at the top of the queue, because i haven’t been offloading the GoPro, or they didn’t have a place in a bigger post. Anyway, here they are. Life is very good, and very strange. Many things could come along and knock it all down, all out of my control. All I can do is keep shooting. The first pictre was taken the night of my 30th birthday. I’m OLD now. Then, some photos from the first trip to Big Sur, which had me sick in the back of the car with some kind of shitty flu. I took a ton of cold medicine and powered thru (with naps, OLD MAN). The last two pictures were from my trip down to San Diego, for work stuff. The work filled the day so that I was near dead at the end, no energy to even look around the hotel room for crappy picturs I’d ignore later. Which is honestly about where I am now. Except I need to write up where I’m at with the watch over on “that blog”:http://ourglass.watch . I’ve had some pretty good progress.

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fleet week air show

2014-11-06 08:09:24Z

Days like this don’t come along much. Clear blue skies, a friend with a nice boat, and an air show against one of the prettiest skylines in the world. I am a lucky bastard. I mean, fleet week happens often enough that I’ve at least been in the city three times while it was going on, but this was the first time that I got to see the big show. They launched some new navy ship, the president was in town, and it was a beautiful day. The fog threatened and one act canceled, but it rolled right back out, and the jets came in and put on a pretty rad show. For a while, we thought the red-whatevers were actually the Blue angels, but then someone pointed out that the planes were the wrong color, and someone else looked at the schedule, and then things made a little more sense, or at least the wine kicked in. Good wine, too.

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work happy hour

2014-10-27 04:21:19Z

I don’t normally post about work, but when I do, it’s because it involved some large quantity of alcohol, usually away from the office… see, for example, the support meetups of yesteryear, or the offsite in Tahoe, or stuff like that. This was a good one. Not too crazy, so I wasn’t dying the next day, but enjoyable. Pool playing and drinking good whiskey and good people.

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big sur

2014-10-22 05:55:39Z

A couple weeks ago, our friends Demetrius ands Christine took us down route one to see the sights. Have I said how awesome it is here? How rad it is to know good people? Yeah, I probably have. Anyway, the first part of the day was alittle gray, so B&W it is. There was a guy panhandling, playing guitar, with a rabbit on his head. If I recall correctly, he was playing a couple phrases from “Little Bunny Foo Foo” over and over again. The sun came out in the afternoon, and the blue of the sea was like some platonic ideal of blue. Not just perfect, but the idea from which all other blueness derives its meaning. What can you do, then, but have a couple really great meals? Pizza for a late lunch at big sur bakery (totally worth the drive), and then seafood in Monterey. I am really stupid lucky.

https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/big_sur/405/0010.jpg’ />

ian's housewarming

2014-10-10 08:10:25Z

This was about 3 weeks ago? Maybe 4? Anyway, Ian and Stephanie moved recently, close enough that we sometimes run into each other walkiing home from Bart. The housewarming was a lot of people I didn’t know, so I did what I usually do: get drunk and take a bunch of pictures. It was a lot of fun. Note that I didn’t do a ton of processing on these; just applied a contrast curve and convert to B/W.

https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ian’s_housewarming/406/0006.jpg’ />

this guy

2014-10-09 06:24:04Z

Man, this guy. Pennypacker. Yes, his real last name. This was on his last day at work, before leaving for some start up.

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another commute

2014-10-09 05:45:24Z

It appears as though the cranes are spreading to the East Bay now. It’s only a matter of time till we all have to decamp for portland; there’ll only be room for cranes left. I do hope that by continuing this daily photography, a subject will emerge. There are a lot of things that I end up photographing over and over and over; the light changes, the fog rolls in, and I’m still shooting. That said, all this could be all terribly banal bullshit. When I’m at my most self doubting, that’s all I can see. I’m not sure if the repitition or the persistence will work, either. We’ll see, won’t we? I don’t have it in me to quit.

https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_commute/408/0006.jpg’ />

ferry day, some weeks ago

2014-10-08 03:09:17Z

Trying to get back to normal blogging. Been sick, off and on, for the last few weeks. I went to the hospital last night, they gave me fluids, said it was something viral, nothing they could really do, and sent me home. Anyway, I’ve got a ton of pictures that I need to get out there.

https://images.matt.pictures/ferry_day,_some_weeks_ago/409/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ferry_day,_some_weeks_ago/409/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ferry_day,_some_weeks_ago/409/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/ferry_day,_some_weeks_ago/409/0004.jpg’ />

rumors of my death, greatly exaggerated

2014-09-25 04:23:06Z

I’ve spent the last couple days feeling like death. There’s a flu-like something going around. Anyway, I’m alive, despite lack of posting here, lack of work, etc. etc. I’ve been looking at these too long, so I cut out the redundant ones, and I’m just putting them up onto the page. Death Valley was magnificent. For-real beautiful. I’ll let the pictures tell the story.

https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0010.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0011.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0012.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0013.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0014.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0015.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0016.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0017.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rumors_of_my_death,_greatly_exaggerated/410/0018.jpg’ />

manzanar, and before, and after

2014-09-18 06:42:29Z

So, day 2, I wake up after not the most restful night. I’d spent about 3 hours sleeping in the hammock, and when that got too cold, I moved to the tent, which was warmer, but really uncomfortable, as I hadn’t brought a ground pad. I went into town, got some breakfast, and decided I just wanted to get moving. So, I started off down the road. I’d expected it to be a shitty 2 lane affair, but found an expansive four lane highway for a lot of the journey south. I put a lot of miles under me in the first few hours, and the country was no less amazing than what I’d seen the day before. I shot out the window, while driving. It’s not nearly as dangerous as it sounds, when you’re the only car on a four lane road. It’s also not terribly productive, but I can’t stop myself. Then, I came to “Manzanar”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manzanar. the middle three pictures are all from there. It’s one of the things we as a country should be ashamed of. It’s a pretty long list of things. Like a good tourist, I stopped, took my pictures, and moved on. It is worth remembering, though.

https://images.matt.pictures/manzanar,_and_before,_and_after/411/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/manzanar,_and_before,_and_after/411/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/manzanar,_and_before,_and_after/411/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/manzanar,_and_before,_and_after/411/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/manzanar,_and_before,_and_after/411/0005.jpg’ />

mono lake

2014-09-17 05:32:22Z

Looking back, I wish I’d spent more time at mono lake. I’d spent the whole firs tday stopping, though, and really wanted to move on. These photos are all from all the stopping. Still, really amazingly beautiful.

https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/mono_lake/412/0007.jpg’ />

pass part 2

2014-09-16 06:18:17Z

Anybody get the pun in the title? Passe-Partout? no? just me? ah well, I’m allowed to be a little goofy after the day I’ve had. this is the second part of the pass, where it got really amazing. For some reason I can only see these pictures with a ton of contrast, in black and white. Sorry if they’re a little over wrought. It was sublime. Wilderness and danger all around, but pulling me further on. Of course, on the road, there was only a little danger, inherent in driving a winding two lane road.

https://images.matt.pictures/pass_part_2/413/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/pass_part_2/413/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/pass_part_2/413/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/pass_part_2/413/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/pass_part_2/413/0005.jpg’ />

rim of the world

2014-09-15 06:04:21Z

So, over labor day weekend, I went on a nice little road trip out to death valley and back. To make things interesting, I decided to go out through Yosemite. There’s a road to the north of the main valley, Route 120, which goes to Mono Lake. I’m breaking this up into smaller bits so I can process the photos slow enough to do a good job, and not take 6 months to come up with a one post edit. This isn’t a magazine. I took these photos from an overlook called “The Rim of the World,” where there was a very large fire last year. Hundreds of thousands of acres on fire. It was pretty unreal. There are hapier pictures coming, lakes and mountains and desert, but I had to start somewhere.

https://images.matt.pictures/rim_of_the_world/414/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rim_of_the_world/414/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/rim_of_the_world/414/0003.jpg’ />

another day

2014-09-06 20:45:03Z

These are from what, a week ago? The day I visited twitter, and the day before I lit out for the hills. The view from their deck is pretty nice. I know thee aren’t Death valley landscapes. Those are coming, soon enough.

https://images.matt.pictures/another_day/415/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_day/415/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_day/415/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/another_day/415/0004.jpg’ />

not today

2014-09-06 18:53:35Z

Well, that little experiment lasted, didn’t it? Anyway, driving through the desert with no internet put a dent in the posting, and work this week has neen pretty busy, so I haven’t had an ounce of energy to spare. I turn 30 today. Four years ago, I was in “Egypt, at the Pyramids”:http://matt.pictures/2010/09/06/the-great-pyramid-of-giza.html. I wasn’t going to go to the pyramids; it cost $40 or something like that, and I was short on funds. Plus, I hate tourist traps. But, my parents sent me some money, and so I went. I was glad I did. Here is a photo of phoes that I took on my road trip to Death Valley. They didn’t go with the landscapes that are coming later, bu I couldn’t bring myself to cut them.

https://images.matt.pictures/not_today/416/0001.jpg’ />

today 8 26

2014-08-27 06:51:01Z

I deleted over 1000 lines of code today. That was the easy part. I worked on the watch on lunch; board rev 2.2 is at the fabricator. I fixed some things at work, made some other things work better, then I came home. I shopped, I cooked, I cleaned (although not as much as my lovely wife). I used a trick I learned from a cartoon to make my sauce less salty. Archer, thanks. Now it’s time to sleep.

https://images.matt.pictures/today_8_26/417/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_8_26/417/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_8_26/417/0003.jpg’ />

vlad's app party

2014-08-26 08:17:58Z

This was what, sometime in April? Vlad is a friend from the internet, I think, and he’s definitely ‘from the internet’. His birthday party was app themed. My app was “in development” because I’m terrible at costumes. My wife, the genius, went as a polaroid app, and took pictures and printed them on demand. There was an instagram, a draw something, an ATM app, a recipe app… you get the picture.

https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/vlad’s_app_party/418/0006.jpg’ />

today, 8/25/2014

2014-08-26 08:12:14Z

The weekend was cray. 12 hours of work on saturday on the watch board, and 8 hours of drinking on sunday. There was no time to blog. Still, if this is a four day a week enterprise, that’s not too bad. I may also start posting some things from the backlog, beacuse my daily grind is a lot of the same old construction, busses, and sidewalks.

https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/25/2014/419/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/25/2014/419/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/25/2014/419/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/25/2014/419/0004.jpg’ />

today again

2014-08-22 06:14:34Z

It seems like it’s today every day. I tend to lose steam towards the end of the week, because work + watch dev + photography is a lot of stuff to do. I thought today was wednesday until late in the afternoon. I’m glad tomorrow is Friday.

https://images.matt.pictures/today_again/420/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_again/420/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_again/420/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_again/420/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today_again/420/0005.jpg’ />

yesterday and today

2014-08-21 06:24:25Z

So, I missed a day. I did a lot of programming in the last 48 hours, and I probably could have done a post last night, but I couldn’t think of doing anything. I actually couldn’t think at all. One of the reasons I got so backlogged was being to rigid about rules. So here’s yesterday and today.

https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/yesterday_and_today/421/0006.jpg’ />

today, 8/18

2014-08-19 05:58:12Z

Today was a lot of gray, outside. Inside, I did a lot of work, catching up for being distracted by the news last week. I have a feeling it’s only going to get worse for a while (weeks? months?), before it gets better. On the plus side, I made a ton of headway in a complex domain. I ran into a friend walking home from the BART, and we caught up andd talked about things for a few blocks. A turned-off TV asked me “RU OK?” and I am. Then we got to see some other friends, just home from Ireland. They brought me whiskey, which I’m now saving for a special occaision.

https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/18/422/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/18/422/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/18/422/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/18/422/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_8/18/422/0005.jpg’ />

today, today

2014-08-18 05:48:48Z

Before you get to the blog post, you are aware of “what’s happening in Ferguson, MO”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Michael_Brown#Aftermath , right? Good. If not, go read some news. I should note that the wikipedia article is out of date, and leaves out a lot of details. Everything has gone to hell again tonight, by all accounts. I’m going to try someting, because the mountain of images I have to edit and post here isn’t getting any smaller, and I’m not going to stop shooting, either. So, I’m going to try to post all of the images from today, today. Today was a barbeque and a walk to CVS. Met a bunch of cool folks at the barbeque. Soph made her mac and cheese, not pictured, but good all the same. It was, overall, a success. Then there was the epic journey for benadryl. Well, a 15 minute walk, at least. The LED streetligts are weird; looks like Gregory Crewdson designed them for one of his shoots. That’s all I can do right now.

https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/today,_today/423/0007.jpg’ />

bike through the golden gate park

2014-08-04 06:24:41Z

Fog and gray and dark. I’ve been shooting more lately, socially, sort of the way I used to. I’m dicsovering my camera is absolute shit in those sitations I used to love; slow auto focus, slow to wake up, just slow. I was going to replace it soon, but it seems it’ll be a few more months. At least my car is paid off, so I can save pretty quickly. For all the people that only follow this blog, and might have been wondering, I’m still here. Still kickin’. Trying to post more frequently. The backlog is still there, waiting. The projects are going, slowly. We’ll see.

https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/bike_through_the_golden_gate_park/424/0006.jpg’ />

coffee

2014-07-25 05:30:51Z

Just a nice photo I took two months ago, getting coffee with the old team.

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Coding induced temporary aphasia

2014-07-24 06:29:48Z

This was the night I was supposed to get on the bart, but was so distracted and out of it from work, I got on the bus and came home instead. Coding induced temporary aphasia. Sophia and some other folks were already at the bar, so I walked. Nice sunset light, why not?

https://images.matt.pictures/coding_induced_temporary_aphasia/426/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/coding_induced_temporary_aphasia/426/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/coding_induced_temporary_aphasia/426/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/coding_induced_temporary_aphasia/426/0004.jpg’ />

the yips

2014-07-24 06:18:57Z

There’s a component to my photography that’s all about just trying to see what’s in front of me, the beautiful, the strange, whatever. People us fishing or hunting analogies; but really it’s a physical sport, looking for and catching these things. Can you see the line in time to get your camera to your eye? Is your muscle memory tuned to remember where the buttons are, the knobs turned right as you’re getting ready to shoot? Lately, and I’m not sure why, but all the accrued skill that I have seems to have taken leave, and I haven’t made any really signifigant photographs in months. It’s possible that my concentration is just elsewhere, focused on the watch project, and my other skills are deteriorating. I don’t think it works that way, but maybe it does. Spend to much time in an analytical mindset, and the ‘relaxed concentration’, the zen modes, seem to go away. Maybe I just need to get out and shoot some more. Ferry tomorrow, we’ll see if that helps.

https://images.matt.pictures/the_yips/427/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_yips/427/0002.jpg’ />

a lot of cranes

2014-07-18 04:52:47Z

My adopted home has, ove the past year, gotten a construction habit. Maybe I just didn’t notice it when I was visiting. There are a shit ton of them.

https://images.matt.pictures/a_lot_of_cranes/428/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/a_lot_of_cranes/428/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/a_lot_of_cranes/428/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/a_lot_of_cranes/428/0004.jpg’ />

brunch in style

2014-07-15 17:09:05Z

Man, Portal. This was many moons ago, and I don’t remember the specifics. One of the problems of a two month delay between shooting pictures and getting them put up here is that the little details sort of slip away. Maybe I should take notes or something, keep a daybook. Anyway, what I do remember is that it was a good afternoon, sitting in the sun for hours after a great meal with good people all around.

https://images.matt.pictures/brunch_in_style/429/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/brunch_in_style/429/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/brunch_in_style/429/0003.jpg’ />

more on scale

2014-07-15 05:49:11Z

I may or may not have talked about this before, but there’s a whole lot of my photography that’s a love affair with the city. It is a place full of wonders, and ad the same time a place that can crush you for a simple case of bad luck. It is a big place, and getting bigger by the minute. These photos are some of my exploration of that, I suppose. All but the last one, which was good in a completely different way. You may have noticed I’ve been neglecting this blog; it’s beacuse I’ve been working on “another project”:http://unnaturaldiphthongs.com/. While that isn’t done, it is at least in a good state for now. I’m waiting on boards and parts and tools to make version two. I won’t bore you with details, except to say you’ve probably never seen a toaster oven used “this way”:http://hackaday.com/2012/03/08/toaster-oven-reflow-soldering-roundup/ before.

https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/more_on_scale/430/0004.jpg’ />

last photos from austin

2014-06-02 06:02:21Z

So, the watch project continues apace; I’ve thrown out the initial design, that was based on the “OSWatch”:http://oswatch.org/index.php ; I may still use some of his code, but for now my efforts are in getting a prototype up and running. I blabbed about the project on twitter, and a friend suggested I look at the RFduino, an arduino-compatible module that has a built-in bluetooth module. It’s a pretty sweet little chip, except for the small problem that the bootloader is closed-source. I’ve decided to let that be a problem for another day, and run with it. note: this post has been sitting, unpublished, for a month and a half. oops.

https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_austin/431/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_austin/431/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_austin/431/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_austin/431/0004.jpg’ />

the scale of the thing

2014-05-20 06:17:12Z

A friend of mine pointed out on twitter that an “arbitrary set,” in mathematics, is possibly infinite. I kind of like the idea that the sea of hipsters in austin that night was infinite. I certainly couldn’t see an edge. Anyway, before all that, there are some nice pictures of the folks I was with, Quin and Serena and Soph. You may have noticed a bit of a gap in the posting here. It’s been for very nerdy reasons. I saw a link on the “Adafruit”:http://adafruit.com blog about the “Open Source Watch”:http://oswatch.org/index.php and knew right away that I wanted to build one. Not just build one, but go one better, make it more extensible, and clean up the rough edges. There’s nothing more personal to me than the watch that I wear; I’ve been wearing one for the better part 25 years, after pestering my mom to buy me one sometime around age 4. It’s not just a status symbol, a beautiful toy; a watch is a hand-hold on reality. It says “This is now,” and “It’s only been 5 minutes,” and “I really did sleep 5 hours on that plane,” and “T-minus 5…” Then there’s the maker’s credo, that you don’t own something until you can hack on it. It’s beyond the skills of a lot of people to do surface mount soldering or board layout or the half dozen other skills required to build a watch for the 21st century. None of it is terribly hard by itself, but it’s all over, different bits of knowledge to cobble together from different parts of the web. Once it’s done and you can program it over bluetooth or plug it into a USB, something wonderful happens. Everyone can hack it. I don’t want a watch for the future, I want a watch for right now. Somthing that gives you a better grip on reality. It says: “You’re here, right now, and this is wh ere you can go.” The author swears this was going to be a dry feature list and blow-by-blow of the design process, but it’s late and he’s feeling inspired – Ed.

https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_scale_of_the_thing/432/0010.jpg’ />

an arbitrary set of hipsters in austin

2014-05-08 19:24:24Z

So, Austin. Hipsters. It’s a thing. Except for the first photo, I don’t know who any of these people are. First one is Sophia getting her Scissortail tattoo. The rest, you know as much about them as I do. My memory of the evening is a little fuzzy, you might say. At least there are pictures.

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clouds, for reasons

2014-05-07 06:59:42Z

I know I promised pictures of the wild hipster here next, but tonight ended up being a long fight with laundry and the kitchen sink. My arms are tired, and so are my hands. So here are some nice pictures of clouds, which I don’t have to think about too hard.

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another borrowed camera, another vacation

2014-05-06 05:37:07Z

I dealt O.K. with not having a camera most of the time. I kinda had to, as with the move and everthing, I simply couldn’t afford a new one. I carried my nikon, made a few pictures here and there, and mostly just waited. Then, there was another trip. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do a real trip with just my iphone, a film camera, and a few rolls of film, so I rented another camera, this time the Fuji XT-1. The first couple hours were a complete love-fest. It’s a great little camera, and I do mean little. Smaller than my Xpro by a smidge. The EVF, the main thing I was worried about, wasn’t laggy at all, it seemed, and fine enough to make compositions on. Signifigantly better than the EVF of the Xpro. Also, ergonomically, it’s a slam dunk. I was able to get it up and running in about five minutes of fiddling: turn off auto review, turn off beeping, turn on RAW, forget and then remember to turn off the focus assist light. After a little while, I set up the custom screen setting. There are half a dozen or so things I like to know at a glance; the battery level, the exposure setting and ISO, focus distance, exposure comp, stuff like that. No histograms. No gridlines. Anyway, I shot with the camera over a long weekend. Not enough to really live with it, but long enough to get a feel for it, anyway. When it came down to it, there really wasn’t enough difference for me to justify buying one over another Xpro. I liked it, but there wasn’t a signifigant difference in the things that mattered to me. First is shutter lag; they’re both excellent as long as you’re prefocused. Focus itself is a bit faster on the newer body, of course, but not fast enough to make a difference outside a sports stadium (and incidentally, the only long lens I own is manual). In low light, the XT was a bit better, maybe a stop, but it’s hard to say without doing a side by side test. The real killer is the viewfinder. Yes, the EVF is really good, better than any I’ve used so far. It still lags a little bit; optical viewfinders never do. Also, I really like the rangefinder style. You get a little more around the edges, yes, and there’s a bit of parralax error, but that helps. Somehow it makes visualization more real. More about the vacation in the next post, were there will be actual photos of hipsters in austin.

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just a small post

2014-05-02 07:16:40Z

My wife told me this morning that she’d finally understood my waking up process. She said it was like the whole world outside was on fire, and I was sitting there, just saying to myself, “Fuck it.” This is it exactly. For the first half an hour I’m awake, if that half hour is before 10 in the morning, I wouldn’t care if the whole world burned if I could get a few more hours (minutes?) of sleep. There’s a little part of me, though, that is always thinging about looking for a fire extinguisher somewhere. Eventually that part wins out, and I go face the day as well as I can. Or sometimes it doesn’t, I go back to sleep, and have a mental health day. I need those, I suppose, to assure myself that the world isn’t actually burning.

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amiee and sarahs sorta birthday

2014-04-30 05:12:15Z

Get back from Yosemite. Shower. Nap? maybe. Go to the party for Amiee and Sarah’s approximate birthday party. Approximate, because it was somewhere between their two birthdays, if I recall correctly. I know this is a lot of photos, but I was having a hard time picking, and Sophia pointed to my copy of Salgado’s Genesis, a 500 page tome of a book, and says, “Why choose? He didn’t.” She’s right. So, here are nearly all the pictures that were fit to publish.

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yosemite coda

2014-04-28 04:31:22Z

There’s a moment in every trip where I know it’s over, and the rest is just making my way home. I always wish the trip would last longer. No matter how long I’ve been on the road, it always seems that I’m just getting my footing, and then I have to leave.

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Valentine's Dinner at the Ahwahnee

2014-04-24 05:28:13Z

What can I say about this meal? It was a year from the date I proposed to Sophia, and we both wanted to do something special. We couldn’t have picked a better venue. The Ahwahnee is a magical place, where they roast ribeyes to perfection, and can tell you exactly the right wine to have with your meal. It may have been the several hours of hiking talking, but the food was nothing short of amazing. The space was huge and well laid out; a sort of classic hunting lodge turned fancypants restaurant. Of course, the best space and food on earth can be boring if you’re there alone; I was buoyed further by the good company of my wife, of course, and also our travelling companions, Demetrius and Christine. They were the ones who guided us around all day, and who’d thought of the dinner in the first place. A really special evening with great folks. If that’s not the highlight of the trip, I don’t know what is.

scenes around the valley

2014-04-23 06:16:58Z

I know I’ve said scenery is boring, and maybe that’s true, but these 5 work well together. Boring, white skies, as if I were using ortho film, but you can’t change the weather. We drove and walked over some interesting ground durning the day that day.

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in color, in daylight

2014-04-22 06:07:37Z

well, these aren’t dramatic nature photos so much. really, these are as close as i get to regular tourist photos.

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closeups of a river

2014-04-21 04:03:50Z

I did these mostly because it was a grey, cold day in the valley. You can’t predict the weather. so, I did what I’d always been taught to do: when the pictures aren’t working, get closer. Simplify. Figure out what attracted you to what you’re pointing the camera at in the first place, and move in towards that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes that means you have to do a little bouldering. Sometimes that means you’re digging through layers to find something to wipe the mist off of your lens. Whatever works.

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night shooting at yosemite

2014-04-19 06:22:02Z

We got to the park, and we were all really super tired and cold. Since there were several photographers in the group, though, we had to go out and shoot, at least a little. The first two images I’ve already put out, shot hand-held at obscene ISO. the rest of these were shot on a tripod, at longer exposures (but still at ISO 6400 or so). I really wish it had been this clear in the daylight. Instead, it rained all day on us, and so most of my shots were equally gray. Lesson learned: keep shooting when the light is good. Sleep when you’re dead.

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not dead yet

2014-04-17 03:04:35Z

I swear I don’t mean to be dribbling out these photos one at a time, but the last two days… well, I got the flu (thanks, flu shot, for nothing), and my RAID had to be rebuilt. Luckily for me, adding a disk back to the raid is all automagic, because I’ve been pretty worthless otherwise. In any case, I’m alive, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll be back at it.

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one photo got left out

2014-04-13 19:10:46Z

I decided that this one, that was from later in the evening, really belonged with the last group of photos… but since I don’t like to go back and edit posts, and it’s sunday, I’m just gonna be lazy and post one photo, and call it good.

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half glimpses in the dark

2014-04-11 05:54:31Z

I think we took the long way to get there, through Merced. The long way is my favorite way. You see more. Honestly, after that burrito, I was pretty out of it, just shooting pictures out the window and trying to take it all in. On a camera nerd note, photos 3-5 were shot at ISO 25600, which is just silly fast. Would I use this for product shots? No. I do like the way it looks, even though there’s no fine detail (focus was impossible, since those were shot from the car). I do think digital cameras have matured enough that I can afford to stay a year or 18 months behind the curve and reap substantial savings. The camera I just bought is the same one I bought new when it came out in 2012, but this time I paid about half price. It’ll last me at least another year, at which point something that’s new and hot now will be affordable, and all the problems that come with early adoption will be sorted.

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yosemite chapter 1

2014-04-10 04:57:38Z

splitting this into several chapters because there are many photos with many different moods in them. Going out to Yosemite was the last trip out from the old house, although I didn’t thing of it as such at the time. It was sort of a headlong rush home and then down to the south bay to meet out ride/companions for the trip, D and C. we made it on the road at about five, and hit traffic both going south and north. That, along with separate stops at starbucks, gander mountain, and a little mexican place just before the pass into the valley, for dinner. Come to think of it, it may have been bass pro shops where we stopped for socks, they’re effectively the same, just REI with guns instead of bikes and boats in addition. I was on the lookout for a spare battery for the rented camera, a Nikon D610, but found none. It’s a fast camera, that does all the things my D700 did, but for less money and maybe a bit better in low light. Half a stop better. But I digress. After the mexican food, there was a long, winding road into the valley. This is a place that is impressive even in half-glimpses in the dark. Those photos are in the next post, though.

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and now for something completely different

2014-04-07 21:02:07Z

And by completely different, I mean black and white, night photos. Pretty much my raison d’etre for a long time. Now, I’m looking more at the day time. I’m not sure if that’s an accident of when I’m awake, or something I’m doing on a subconcious level. Probably a little bit of both.

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I have a camera again!

2014-04-04 06:37:28Z

I’m happy to report that my new camera arrived today, so I can keep boring you indefinitely with more photos… of course, that’s not the point. I’m not myself without it; not just without the camera, but without the act of taking pictures. I get depressed, moody. Easily tired. Someone asked me recently why I’m always taking photos, and I sort of drew a blank, like I always do. Then, they rescued me. “Do you do it just for the Art of it?” they said. Yes, that’s exactly why I do it. That, and I can’t not do it. I need to be taking pictures, in some fundamental way. Everything goes kind of flat and shitty when I’m not taking pictures regularly; it’s as if the act of photographing turns the world up a notch. Making photographs, making art, brings me joy, but not the kind sunshine and puppies and laughter kind. It’s more like water. It’s just not possible to go on without it. One is ephemeral, experiential. The other is hard and certain, something you make with your own hands. It is a sword that will cut god, a path to buddha-nature. Enough already. Have some photos. Goodnight.

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on the way to work

2014-04-03 05:25:35Z

I don’t know if it’s me, or what, but I always seem to find myself in these beautiful places. Everything sort of falls together, and then I take a picture. What is my subject? Is it the everyday? Is it me, being a crazy person? Is it the world, not making any sense? If there were a feeling I was trying to convey, maybe it would be that moment of realizing how lost you are, and looking around to get your bearings. It’s probably none of that. I have been drinking. There was wine, and then there was whiskey… well, at least tomorrow is Thursday.

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earthshine

2014-04-01 05:10:29Z

The phenomenon when the earth’s light is reflected on the crescent or new moon. It’s also pretty spectacular. This was the night of Chris’s birthday party, down in Santa Cruz. When looking it up to make sure it was one word instead of two, I found “this cool article”:http://http://science1.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2002/12apr_earthshine/ from nasa. Totally worth reading for the description of what earthshine would look like from the dark side of the moon.

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can't even think of a title

2014-03-28 08:55:00Z

This post has been through a a bunch of iterations about something that has nothing to do with the photos, so I figured I’d just post the photos.

On 'On Being a Photographer'

2014-03-26 03:58:13Z

Reading On Being a Photographer (OBaP, for short). It’s a good, if probelmatic book. It’s stronly opinionated about what is and isn’t a good photograph, and how they are made. It’s helped greatly by the fact that the two authors are generally dead on. There’s a lot in there that is about half rhetorical trickery and half untrue. They completely miss the point of photography after, say, John Szarkowski’s tenure at MOMA, and of a lot of the legitimate criticisms of photography. The book oozes the subtext of two old men yelling at kids “Get off my Lawn!” That said, the descriptions of working methods, how to do the work of being a photographer, are invaluable, and would have saved me about 5 years of learning if someone had put the book in my hand 10 (12?) years ago. It’s way more practical than “the mind’s eye“:http://www.amazon.com/Henri-Cartier-Bresson-The-Minds-Eye/dp/0893818755, but not as good as “beauty in photography“:http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Adams-Photography-Defense-Traditional/dp/0893813680. I’m only halfway through, but I think I’ll finish it this time (last time I started it I couldn’t get over the old man tone of the thing). Totally worthwhile. I’ve got about three weeks, wall clock time, until I can replace my camera. Call it a month, by the time it ships to me. This is the longest I’ve been without a camera since I started photographing seriously in 1998. Even when I got hit by the car, breaking my 5d, I had a loaner. It’s really weird. It doesn’t help that I was in the middle of discovering a new subject, the ‘signs’ project. One of the problems with OBaP: they think you can’t go out without a subject in mind and find one. It’s simply not true. It really seems absurd if you think about it, that you couldn’t dicsover something visual by working visually. It just requires a lot of patience. Now I’ve finally found something new to shoot, and it’s really exciting. I can’t wait till I’ve got something to shoot it with again.

TURKUAZ at the boom boom room

2014-03-25 06:17:35Z

My friend MKB invited us out, got us on the list. His cousin is the guitarist/keyboard/melodica player (plus more besides). We sat around pre-show and talked about being from the midwest, they talked about family things, and we all got good and drunk. We went around the corner to eat when our need for metaphorical tacos became a need for actual sushi. When we got back, they were still getting ready to take the stage, and then I really got to taking pictures. These guys were really, really rad. A lot of fun in a packed house. I would have paid to get in, and I almost bought a t-shirt, but I think I was either out of cash or too drunk at the end of the night. I do remember stopping to get a gatorade before ubering home.

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game night at the old casa

2014-03-24 03:00:53Z

Almost two weeks since I posted here. I’ve been busy. The new apartment is pretty livable at this point; the commute is settling into a routine, as is everything around the house. We have a microwave, finally, and groceries. We’re still working on breaking the habit of eating out all the time, which is hard, with so many good options by our door… but that’s totally a thing we can handle. Speaking of things that we’re ready to do again, these pictures are of a game night we had sometime in january. “Game nights” are a sort of proxy for inviting interesing and cool people over to the house, having food and conversation. The games present a sort of framework for alleviating social awkwardness. It fills the awkward pauses, takes the pressure of having to actually talk to each other off, and so everyone actually talks. They pretty regulary become more like dinner parties where the dinner is delivery pizza. I’m thinking next time I might actually cook something. Spaghetti or lasagna and fresh bread, something nice. I’ll have to consider how to accomodate vegetarians, though.

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more signs work

2014-03-10 06:18:26Z

It occurs to me that I’m going to have to come up with a better name for this work. There’s a feeling at the heart of it, about being lost, coming unmoored. It’s a thread that’s run through my work since I did “the world doesn’t make any sense”:http://bit.ly/1fiShkO work. That book was also where I learned the hard way to hate gutter bleeds. The PDF is ok if you view it with two pages together though. Back to what I was saying though: I look at those pictures today and I see how far I’ve come, and yet I’m still pretty much just groping around in the dark. Why are you reading confused and confusing shit on the internet? Go outside and take some pictures.

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noon light deserves love too

2014-03-07 07:13:37Z

Everybody always goes on and on about golden hour light, where the sun gives everything a glow that is supposedly the best light. So much so that some photographers don’t even take pictures except during the two hours around sunrise and sunset. Bullshit I say. Of course, I’m saying this with a camera that holds detail for something like 11 or 12 stops in a decent ISO. It’s as good as negative film ever was, and that’s saying something. It’s exposed differently, but there’s incredible tonal range available. One of the reasons earlier street photographers shot in black and white is that it offered the ability to handle these super contrasty situations. The signs project, which I don’t think any of these go with (save the middle one), is sort of becoming about playing with ambiguity of evidence. So, a sharp clear photo that could be any number of events, interpreted any number of ways. I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea. Signs may tell you something, but how can you believe it? Why do you think the person who put it there isn’t just as lost as you? How do you know someone in the equation (the signmaker, the photographer, the people in the photo) aren’t actively working to deceive you? It’s still at the stage that there are more questions than answers, which is really fun for me. The not-fun part is not having a camera, not knowing when I will again, etc. Oh well. At least it gives me time to work on the backlog.

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simon inside merchant's

2014-03-07 06:38:22Z

For some reason, I don’t have any of evryone else who was there that night in the edit. Probably because Merchnats is a dark hole of a bar, a place you’re likely to find trouble if you go looking for it. Since I don’t tend to do that, it was a pretty friendly neighborhood bar. Of course, now that I’m in a different neighborhood, I’ll have to find my pints of friendliness elsewhere. It was the darkness, anyway, that caused the trouble; hard to focus, and hard to get non-blurry shots. Anyway, a real post with more than one photo coming soon.

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two runners

2014-03-05 06:55:58Z

Can’t stop won’t stop forgot how to stop

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from the streets, yo

2014-03-04 06:06:14Z

Despite the fact that I know that it’s all been done, that they’re all trite contrivances doomed to failure, I still find myself making photos out walking in the street. I suppose that’s a sign I’m doing something right?

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one spot of color

2014-03-02 18:00:42Z

I was this close to putting this in black and white, but that red exit sign makes it.

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floffee runs

2014-02-28 06:27:58Z

I don’t know why the word ‘floffee’ came to describe the coffee runs we make in the afternoon, or why there’s an l in there. Fletch, who coined the term, claims it means “fancy coffee,” because we’ve been going to this tiny hole in the wall on maiden lane instead of the pete’s down on mission. Anyway, there’s a natural lull in the day, when the food from lunch is really solidly digesting, and 6pm (my office is 9-6, don’t get me started) seems like forever from now, so we generally get up and stretch at least, and usually someone will suggest coffee, and the rest of us will say hells yeah. We come out of the mental fog for a couple minutes, and then back to work.

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sophie being cute

2014-02-27 15:18:37Z

A sizable portion of this blogs readers come here just for cute photos of my wife. Who am I to argue?

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not photos from the book

2014-02-27 07:04:05Z

The mathematician “Paul Erdős”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s had a saying: when he came across a particularly beautiful proof, he’d say “That’s one from the book,” meaning the book that God kept all the best proofs in. bq. Although an agnostic atheist, he spoke of “The Book”, a visualization of a book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems. Lecturing in 1985 he said, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book.” He was really a fascinating fellow; really, go read the “wikipedia page”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s about him. Fun fact: if Hank Aaron has an Erdos number of 1 because of a signed baseball, mine is four, because of a project I owned, and passed on to an academic. The book I’m talking about, though, is just the one I’m meant to be working on. In a world filled with wonders like Erdos numbers and cloudy skies and busy life all around, is it any wonder I get distracted?

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gonna start on a new book

2014-02-26 06:20:03Z

I have a couple projects that at least have enough photos for book-ifying. I don’t know which one, though. The street stuff is a little premature, I think; I don’t know where it’s going yet. The photos from the ferry might be a good group. There’s also the signs project, which up until this moment only existed in my head… it’s really loosely framed at this point, and none of the pictures have made it up here yet. It’s also way too soon to put that one on paper. So, ferry photos it is. Of course, I have 10 other projects demanding my attention; there’s the watch that I’ve been planning to build, there’s the camera repair that I haven’t finished, there’s the postcard list, the wheels that I need to build for myself so sophie can have hers back, the bluetooth chording keyboard for my ipad, and the camera, which will happen about the time I retire at this rate. Anyway, don’t look for this book thing to happen soon. I’ve no idea what form it’ll be in, who’ll print it, or any of that. Silly details.

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new years 2014 (back on the air)

2014-02-25 06:51:11Z

this was a very nice evening with some new friends here in the bay. Really great folks. D&C are the same pair we went to Yosemite with a couple weekends ago. Really fun couple, I’m glad we met them. So. We’re in the new house, and I’ve got my computer and network up. The RAID came up just fine, and everything else seems as well; wifi works, at least. There’s a lot of unpacking, organizing, and laying out of furniture to be done, but home is where “127.0.0.1”:http://127.0.0.1 is.

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a history of stragglers

2014-02-22 06:50:36Z

So, we’re in the middle of moving, and the only real computer I have access to is my server, the one that runs the web site you’re reading. The server is cloudy, which means when I move house, I don’t have to move it. By real computer, I mean something that can run, at a minimum, vim and git. Those are the minimum tools I need to do a blog post. My rasberry pi also qualifies, but it’s in a box somewhere. Luckily, I had photos already out on the server, or theis would be a very boring post indeed. These are more from the period between Xmas and New Years. One from sonoma, and the others walking back from brunch at Portal. That’s what I meant by stragglers; I keep seeming to have one photo that should have gone with the previous set turn up the next time I open lightroom. It’s what I get for blogging tired. Not much to say right now. moving is hard, and it’s going to take us all week, I’m afraid. Tomorrow is the furniture, but there are a million little things that are going to take us a while to get. The kitchen, the closets, the camping stuff, yada yada yada. Up and down stairs until I’m tired of it, and then a few more trips. This was my idea, really. Save a little money, get into a nicer area. I’ll enjoy it once I get there, but now, I’m tired.

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sonoma plus one

2014-02-19 07:03:57Z

The day after xmas, we realized we had nothing to do and all the time in the world to do it in, so we took a little day trip to Sonoma for some wine tasting and food. It’s a nice drive out there, a couple hours, maybe, with traffic, and nice rolling hills to drive through. The first thing we did was get a bite at a little cafe, and then visited the tourist bureau. There was a nice lady there that told us about good places to eat, and gave us a map of wineries on the square, and some coupons for tastings. So, we wandered a bit. The first place we went to talked us into joining a wine club. The two bottles we were thinking about were effectively half price with the club. The tasting room had a bunch of kitschy household goods for sale, handmade by the looks, in addition to the wine. I think gauche is the word, but I may be so backward that shit like that is in style in some circles. The wine was good, and I don’t really regret the wine subscription. It does give us an excuse to go back every few months or so. The second place was more sophisticated, and seemed very proud of it’s italian heritage. They also had a pretty good schpiel about how some of their wines came into being by happy accident. Who knows if it was true, but there was a nice couple also in from the city who shared their salami and crackers with us on the patio as we had a glass. Pretty rad. The last place the vintner himself was serving us, and the guy who made the pottery on display came by to say hello. His wines were probably the best we had that day, and I really look forward to going back there. “Bump”:http://www.bumpwine.com/wines/ was the name. They do sell them online, although no clubs and no discounts. Then there was dinner, a nice pizza, which I had way too much of, and then we went home. The last photo is a straggler; the set I thought it was part of didn’t work, and I ended up getting rid of most of them, but I really like that gold tooth.

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ben and jenn came to town

2014-02-11 15:35:23Z

No, not that Ben and Jenn. Why would I care about them? No, these are two of our friends from oklahoma, out here to see family over the holidays. We met up, had brunch at Oakland Grill, and then took the ferry over to the city. December 26 and I hardly needed a jacket.

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to work and back again

2014-02-10 15:24:51Z

My commute includes about 100 yards of walking down market street. It is, as my friend Mike says, ‘Prime people watchin’. My tendency when taking pictures is to look for something about to happen, and try to get there in time. On this stretch of road, everything is always happening. Deals are made, breakfast is bought, people wander, lost, across the street at 9am on a Thursday. Tourists gater around their maps, and locals weave around them, as if they were statues. Bums beg for change, and they get some, sometimes. Messengers lock and unlock their bikes, delivery trucks stop with days or weeks of supplies for the buildings and restaurants. All in 100 yards!

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not daylight yet

2014-02-09 21:28:07Z

It occured to me, looking at these photos, that it’ll be light again soon when I get to the beach on these rides. We’re currently as far from the solstice as we were in late october, which makes me kinda happy, although it’s dark now, at 6pm. SOON. The last couple rides out there I haven’t really taken any photos, because it’s started to feel like I’m repeating myself. So the light coming back will be a welcome change. I do think that there is a photo of a bunch of dudes around a bonfire somewhere in the queue.

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after the office xmas party

2014-02-09 06:11:33Z

I took some photos at the party, but really, none of them were that great. After the party, we ended up meeting Fletch and his wife; they’re really cool folks. I think this was zeitgeist? It’s been too long ago now. It was one of those faux dive bars in the mission. NEWS FLASH: if there’s not a reasonable chance of your getting stabbed inside, it’s not an actual dive bar. That’s why I like Merchants, over on this side of the bay. Anyway, I digress. fuck bad pictures of shit I don’t care about. Here are some good pictures of things I care about:

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left the camera in jpeg

2014-02-07 07:10:43Z

So this was what, just before xmas? Severin came to town, and so we had to meet up for drinks. There was some confusion, followed by some stumbling, but luckily sophie was there to keep shit together. These would have been in color, but I somehow got the camera in JPEG mode, which means these have a weird blurry look to them when zoomed all the way in, as if the details were painted. Oh well. Which reminds me, I still haven’t done any work on a RAW converter to use with DarkTable. The list of projects keeps growing, and the time to work on them is somewhere between not much and nil. I need to prioritize, I suppose. Maybe after the move.

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a lunch walk to the fidi

2014-02-06 06:25:40Z

Startup central may be SOMA, but the finantial District is seeing a huge boom of its own. There’s a group of folks from work that almost always go for salads at an undisclosed location in that area (nobody wants to advertise). I’m not a salad eater by any stretch, but I do like the walk, and the light of all the giant glass building is nice. There’s something to these photos, a complexity, that I really like. They have a lot going on. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about subject. Specifically, what my subject is. What do I want to be looking at. It seems a lot of the most interesting things are already covered, in depth, by geniuses, sometimes many times over, in the face of change. I’m not sure where I was going with this paragraph. You can stop reading now. (ed. note: obviously the last picture wasn’t taken at lunch; it just fit with the building thing I had going, and happened to be next, chronologically)

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coffee run

2014-02-05 15:15:28Z

Last December at work had a visit from a really great teacher, “Sandi Metz”:http://www.sandimetz.com/. We spent the week mostly workshopping about object oriented design. I gotta say I learned a ton. It’s like there’s a whole different world of how to program that I was only dimly aware of. Patterns and antipatterns, refactoring to expose complexity (sorry Jacob, for thinking you were crazy when you showed me this before), and even one “miracle of programming”:https://github.com/skmetz/socialchorus-dec-2013/tree/miracle. Do you ever look at a problem, and you have solutions for it, but none of them are very good, and you suspect that there’s something even better just over the horizon? It’s the same as that feeling when you can’t quite remember the word you’re thinking of. Now, imagine someone came along and showed you how to go over that horizon, and, really, it was just a little hill in your way in the first place. That’s what Sandy did for us, in a nutshell. Some of the good advice, which I will attempt to summarize: 1) Do the simplest thing possible. 2) Take small steps. 3) Trust your feelings in areas you have experience; that’s your preverbal brain telling you something’s up. I really can’t say enough nice things about the whole workshop, so here are a couple photos I took on a coffee run.

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Ronan's bday

2014-02-04 14:35:23Z

I just realized I know two Ronans. One is in Oklahoma, and is distinguished from the one I know in California by being a) a toddler, and b) a girl. The one here is a 30 year old Irishman. Try not to get mixed up. We started at a tiny pizza place called Slicers. It was packed, just from our party. Place was tiny, and at the point we numbered about 15. Really, really good pizza though, and beers. Before too long, we moved down the road to this Tiki bar, where everything got both blurry and darker, if you catch my drift. No, It was literally dark in there, lit only by candles, and feeble, tiny bulbs on the wall. Last night, I nearly had a panic attack when my RAID stopped working. It was appearently one of those little blips that shuts the whole thing down entirely. A half an hour of troubleshooting and a reboot later and it was fine. For that half hour, I was thinking, fuck this, I’m going back to film. Film doesn’t have these problems. But with film, I simply couldn’t have shot in this light, at all. Reciprocity breakdown would have dragged these shots dow a couple stops below whatever ISO film I’d be using, and there’d be nothing in the shadows. 1/4 of a second at f/1.2, at least. So, I realized this, and then started looking at cameras again.

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just walking home

2014-01-30 05:24:55Z

That’s all I was doing. I had my camera out, and I was walking. There was a dude in the street, and it looke like he had been hit by a car, but he was talking. Ambulance was on its way. So I took two photos, and finished walking home.

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a post about a bag

2014-01-29 06:24:45Z

Just so you know, I’m writing this wearing a clown nose, and I purposely didn’t title this with the SEO grabbing headline “Topo Designs Mountain Bag review”, but that’s what it is. If that sounds terribly boring, please feel free to skip to the end, where there’s a nice picture of Sophie, and also some leaves still on a tree in early December. Those of you that know me know that I am hard on my personal effects. I need durability in everything, and that goes double for what I put my things in. It’s led to something of an obsession with the right bag. What goes in it is usually pretty mundane, but I care about the bag I carry. So, I’ve been known to put down some signifigant coin down on them, or to mark occasions with new bags. For xmas, Sophie’s mom gave me a nice gift card, which I decided would be well spent on a bag I’d been lusting after for a while, the Topo Designs Mountain Bag. First the good: It certainly looks good, all strappy and with oversized, durable zippers. 1000d cordura and lined with some plasticy stuff that seems pretty warterproof, and all the inner seams are at least covered with bias tape of some sort. When I got it, I was pretty happy, as the capacity is just what I was after (officially 1200 cu. in, although probably only 1000 in the main compartment), it’s ambidexterous, and has just the right ammout of organization for me. It comes in a good variety of colors, and is fairly good looking, at least to my eye. Unfortuantely, that’s all the good. It’s like no one field tested the bag at all. The top flap pocket is easy to lose stuff out of: if you put anything small and heavy in there, like a multi tool or a set of allens for your bike, and then flip the flap up, the stuff gets stuck in the little space above the zipper, and will fall out the next time you open it. Luckily, I was still in my living room when this happened to me. Then there’s the shoulder strap. The little tabs at the end for tightening it aren’t long enough, especially if you have gloves on. Then there’s the way the strap hardware is attached, sewn to the bag with a single seam at each end, just a line of heavy stitching. This is not how to secure a strap and have it hold. There are two good ways to do it that I’ve seen: the approach favored by seatbelt makers and the makers of Rucksack, ReLoad, and a host of other bags: to “make a box”:http://www.carryology.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/RELoad-Bags-2.jpg on top of the strap where it meets the pack, and then sew an X over the box, or the approach that Domke takes: “sew strap around the entire bag”:http://www.wexphotographic.com/webcontent/product_images/large/66/1013942.jpg, so that the pack cloth isn’t holding all the weight. Also, the bottom of the bag is a piece all by itself, just a rectangle on the bottom. It’s two extra seams at the sides taking weight, and two more places for water to leak in, if you should happen to set the bag down somewhere damp. The right way to do this is of course to have one piece that makes a big u: starting from one side at the top, going continuously around to the other. Like “this one my friend Sarah makes”:http://martineusa.com/products/oakland-messenger. All that to say that I’m still carrying the bag. Day to day it’s not bad at all. I’m doing my best not to overload it, and to keep it out of the wet. I just don’t expect it to last. (ed. note: Sophia says after heraing me bitch about this stuff for a couple minutes last night: ‘Why don’t you just design your own bags?’, and you know, I just might.)

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walkin around

2014-01-27 21:14:55Z

it’s lunchtime at work, and i remembered to put together an edit this morning. the light in this city is just fantastic, all the time.

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yup it's a boat

2014-01-24 04:58:28Z

We’re watching girls at my house, which means I’m sitting here fucking around on my iPad. Hello. Yes, these are pictures of boats. Well, at least they’re either on or in a boat. The harbor was glass smooth that night, eerie and quiet. Inside, not so quiet. That boat is an amazing place.

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friendsgiving in the sunset

2014-01-23 15:27:04Z

We stayed around here for the holidays, and had Thanksgiving dinner with some new friends in the city. Somehow, traffic wasn’t awful that day. I have to wonder if most people weren’t out in the burbs with family. Sophie made her mac n’ cheese, and I drove. This may seem like an unfair division of labor, but you have to consider that I also grated her cheese (not a euphemism). The people we were there with, Liz and Otto, were really great hosts, and the company in general was amazing. I wasn’t really on my people photo game, though (too much eating). We smoked, we drank, we talked of many things. (Sailing ships and sealing wax). Some day I’ll kick this parenthesis habit. You’ll see!

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bookended by sophia

2014-01-21 05:44:07Z

I mean, this was a really nice night. Sophia’s mom took us out to dinner. We had really nice sushi in downtown Oakland. our uber driver on the way was this old chinese lady, very nice, but strange. so i took pictures out the window. There are wonders everwhere. can I say how much I love this woman, my wife? no, no I cannot. for some reason, this stupid keyboard is hating on my setup again; all the capital letters aren’t working. (update: seems like an iSSH bug).

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solutions to bad blogging

2014-01-20 16:06:39Z

Man, I just don’t know about that last post. I mean, a couple sentences, some photos, that’s prety typical. It’s sort of weak sauce commentary though, is’t it? I mean, I’m all for punk rock disregaurding of the rules, but photos of ships and the bay bridges are not punk rock. They say the solution to bad speech is more speech (I’m already quoting Cory Doctorow, you know how this week is going to go). So, it follows the solution to bad blogging isn’t to delete the post, but to do it again, better.

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another day another ferry ride

2014-01-20 15:16:07Z

Yeah, I know, by my own cirteria, two of these three picutres are boring. Just goes to show that there aren’t any hard and fast rules in photography.

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scenery is boring

2014-01-17 06:16:39Z

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good lanscape, but they’re not alive, you know? OK, plants are alive. But add people, and it’s actually looking back at you, or at least could be. My new years resolution: more pictures of people, less pictures of not people (arrived at some weeks late, but whatever). So yeah: believe it or not, these are some of the less twisty parts of the road from Stinson back to civilization. I’d need a wide angle lens and some serious time with the concept of curves to really get it in the frame, if you know what I mean. And that would be boring.

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stinson beach

2014-01-16 15:46:15Z

So this was a nice day. Brunch and then a hella twisty drive through Marin to the beach. I didn’t think it was that bad, but Soph and her mom got a little carsick, and wouldn’t let me drive back. I suppose a year of hardly driving day-to-day has taken its toll on my skills. Our luck was up, and the sky was clear and blue (as opposed to the fog that could have come in). We basically laid there and listened to the surf for an hour, and then walked to the far end of the beach. We wished for a picnic basket, maybe some beers, but then we went home and had a really big dinner. But going home is the next post. I did something with the editing process. I decided to cut all the ones without people about halfway through. It seems sort of arbitrary, but it immediately focused the edit. I used to have a hard rule against photos without people in them. I thought that people were the most interesting thing, and that landscapes and scenic shots were just boring. Of course, I formed that opinion in Oklahoma, where there aren’t really landscapes as such.

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sophie and her mom

2014-01-16 15:39:00Z

Did I mention that Soph’s mom came to visit over thanksgiving?

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BART journey

2014-01-15 07:09:34Z

This was a trip to San Leandro to watch Saturday morning football with some friends. It’s saturday morning football when the games happen on EST and you’re on PST. Not a bad excuse to go drink mimosas and eat breakfast casserole, though. Public transit makes it possible. I tend to think of the reach of the BART as the real bounds of the city; it’s probably two hours between its two farthest points (Fremont and SFO, maybe?), but my average journey is something like half an hour. There’s definitely something to be said for getting under the bay in less than 20 minutes (from stop to stop; my commute is essentially that plus walking 7 minutes to one stop and 3 minutes to another). I mean, by that metric, my ‘hood is as close to SOMA as the Mission. Of course, commute time is only one metric.

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couple randos for ya

2014-01-14 06:22:56Z

I’m still editing the next big batch of photos; these cover from just before thanksgiving through new years. A pretty big batch, not like the old days where I’d pull out the card every day and see what had happened right in front of me. I’m starting something tonight; for every blog post I also make a print. The third image is tonight’s print. Of course, my printer is nearly out of ink, but I’ve found a cheaper alternative for that, so hopefully I’ll be printing more soon.

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sf streets in color

2014-01-10 04:47:29Z

In two weeks of being in oklahoma, I got three pictures. I shot all of these walking around before and after lunch, shortly after I got back. I am definitely in the right place.

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planes are awesome (part 2)

2014-01-09 03:51:09Z

Until we get spaceflight or teleports or something, this is the best way to go someplace. Even a bad flight is good because you get to go somewhere different, see amazing things out the window.

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planes are awesome (part 1)

2014-01-08 06:57:53Z

Dude, but seriously. I’m splitting this into two posts because I got a lot of awesome pictures of clouds and the ground. I’ve had a long love affiair with flying. It’s always pretty amazing, even what most people would call boring flights. I’m not afraid that nothing is holding the plane up, I’m amazed by the evidence of my eyes, that nothing but air and speed are holding the plane up. Not to mention the part where you get in and are flung thousands of miles in a few hours. Shift key appears to be working now, which is a nice change.

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last chance to party

2014-01-07 06:23:34Z

in oklahoma, that is. KJ called me on my last night in town, said there was a hell of a show happening at VZD’s. Psychobilly, she said. How could I say no? So we went out to the bar, had a pretty rockin time, as you can see. Koffin Kats killed it. there was great energy all around; the croud was also punk as fuck. in case you’re wondering, something is wrong with the shift key. ust imagine capitals in the right places.

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two weeks of not much to photograph

2014-01-06 19:26:14Z

I didn’t do much while I was back. I just settled into a rhythm of walks with my mom in the afternoons, working remotely with whoever I happened to be paired with that day, and sleeping in combined with a lot of late nights.

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an OK night

2014-01-03 07:16:35Z

get it? OK? no? Well, anyway, this was actually a pretty fun night. there was food off a truck, and ice cream, and a record store that had materialized in the plaza district since my last visit. Oh yeah, and hanging out with one of my best firends in the world, KJ. There are a few people I miss since moving away, and she’s pretty high up on the list.

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vertigo, or shots from the plane

2014-01-02 06:31:48Z

Can I talk about how much I didn’t want to leave my freshly official wife for two weeks? Because I really didn’t. I had to though; my mom got a kidney transplant, and I was needed to help out around the house, and I also personally needed to go out there and see her getting better. Anyway, I crossed about 1/2 the country before dinner, and I was exhausted at the end of it. Any flight that’s too early to catch BART to get to out of SFO is officially off the table. (I’ve officially doomed myself to 6AM flights forever with that statement, I know). The color of the ground on this flight though. I’ve never seen fall like that before.

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mountains on the way home

2013-12-31 00:20:15Z

The way home was pretty awesome. Instead of going through Sacramento, we went through the Sierras. The day started out kind of gray, but then the clouds sort of broke open, with a high, thin haze and a bunch of small cumulus clouds closer to us. Really good light, as long as you can get your exposures right. I was shooting through all the windows, but I think the dirt and reflections work here. We stopped for pizza at Fallon’s uncle’s, which was amazing. After that I was pretty much out for the day. I think I may have also run out of camera batteries; I know I was tired and hung over. Everyone who came: Thanks so much. You guys helped make it special, and I know it wouldn’t have been as fun without you. Now I’m going to stop, because I’m getting a sympathy hangover thinking about that day.

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my second wedding, or, what happens when someone else uses the camera

2013-12-30 06:19:29Z

We got to Tahoe about 1:30, with little idea of what to do next; we hadn’t booked anything in advance except the airbnb we stayed in. The rooms were nice, but they didn’t come with a chapel or courhouse, so we went to the internet in search of one. I found a chapel just up the way that would be able to do it for us, for something like $300, which was about what I expected. The lady on the phone sounded like she was used to dealing with the likes of me. Unprepared, not knowing what was going on. Fortunately, Sophie was there. She’d also been internetting in search of a solution, and found that the Nevada side of the lake had a weekend county recorders office open, and we could go there to get a license for $50. So, we all got in our cars and drove across the border. We got lucky, in that there was a officiant there; she was doing a ceremony up the hill or something, but she would come back for us in half an hour and do our ceremony for $40. So she did, and we did, and that was that. Here is where the subtitle comes in; I was a bit busy at the time, and so others in the party took pictures with mine and sophie’s cameras, to varying degrees of success. All of the photos of the ceremony were a bit blurry or cutting vital parts of our anatomies, so none of thse are here. The group shots after were great, as were a couple of the portraits of me and sophie. Then there’s the cake cutting picture from that night, where Sophie looks ready to kill, which is really one of my favorte pictures of her. I think someone implied that she was unabel to cut cake alone. At some point, later in the night, we decided to go down to the shore and look at the stars, which was pretty nice. Cold as all hell, but nice.

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on the way to tahoe

2013-12-29 23:06:44Z

So, me and Soph had to have two weddings… there was a snafu with the paperwork in oklahoma, all my fault. Anyway, it was a good excuse to go back to Tahoe. Everything about this weekend was pertty beautiful, so I’m cutting it into several posts. No deep thoughts today, because it’s sunday funday.

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fuck it, time for some color

2013-12-28 20:01:38Z

the number of times I’ve started a post title with ‘fuck’ is, in fact, pretty large. I blame it on society. B&W is awesome, and I think it was a much needed break from what I was doing, in order to get a better idea of where I’m going as an artist. Strip down, simplify, and don’t fuck around with triviality for a while. But then today, I was editing these photos, and I clicked the one of the woman in the orange caot over to color for a second, just to see, and I realized that I was still seeing in color most of the time, and that may of these photos worked better in color. It would be a shame to hide something good for the sake of style. I can’t ignore the evidence of my eyes. So here, some fucking color:

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back on the ferry

2013-12-28 08:58:41Z

I may have talked about this, but with my new job, for some reason I find it harder to get up on time to take the ferry. So for a while there, I only had one form of commute, and it was boring, and my instageam likes fell way off. More recently, though, I’ve started ferry-ing again. It really is a lot nice way to start the day. much less crowded, never too hot, and as a result, a lot more civil. I brought this up to a fellow passenger, and they said, “Well, we’re all in the same boat.” I’ve been thinking lately about this idea that I got from N. Scott Momaday’s In the Bear’s House, where one of the characters says “All stories are true.” It’s a koan for me; there are a lot of way to approach the idea, and a lot of layers to it. Obviously not all stories are ture on their face, but they all tell us something. About the tellers, about ourselves, and hopefully, about the world. “Storyteller” isn’t far removed from “teacher”, after all. I wish I could remember a little more of the context around that statement from the book, but I loaned my copy of it out and never saw it again some years ago.

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now with more santa cruz

2013-12-25 22:05:21Z

after the pier, we went for a little hike. nothing strenuous, more of a nice coda to the day. there was this beautiful little stream at the halfway point. and then i took an accidental selfie, which came out ok.

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that time we went to santa cruz

2013-12-25 07:27:24Z

We went down to visit some friends on a saturday, and then we ended up staying on their fold out couch. It was nice: Sophie got to play with cats, and I got to not drive 2 hours back to the city. I the morning, we went for brunch and a walk out on the pier. The brunch place was this totally hippie place called jupiter, good food though. All done up for Halloween, which was in the middle of a week this year if memory serves. Anyway, Santa Cruz has a lot going for it. nice little amusement park, beautiful little downtown (getting a little commercial, but so is SF), and hiking right in town. That’s the next post, though.

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something about scale

2013-12-24 07:52:00Z

There’s an essay that I’ve been working on and thinking about for the last several years. I think of it as my essay on scale, and the photos end up being drawn mostly from SF, but from other places as well. It’s about that moment when you look up and see the world as it is, and for just a moment realize how big things really are. There may be a better set of words to describe what I’m talking about. An actual essay, in addition to a photo essay? Maybe, but I need to at least figure out what I’m talking about first. Maybe it’s also about my personal discovery of just how big the world is, and how small I am in it. The truth is these are just glimpses of something much larger; to take in the whole thing would kill you, or at least drive you bonkers. Or maybe it’s not something you can look at the whole and understand. More like you can see a corner of it and understand the whole better. Looking up at the stars is seeing forever, and it just looks flat. Looking at mountains many miles wide and tall is the same; it’s scenery. Introduce some perspective somehow, and suddenly things pop into place.

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jacob's birthday party

2013-12-21 17:45:23Z

Getting out there was an adventure. We waited to get on the Bay Bridge for 2 hours. I have no idea why, but for some reason, everyone was trying to get to SF. So, by the time we got to Pacifica, it was fairly late and most of the festivities had died down. I was just a dozen or so folks, sitting around a fire pit, playing banjo or bongos or bells, singing, drinking still more homebrew. There was also (unpictured) a dessert made of apples, with cinnamon, sugar, then grilled, which was amazeballs. A really nice night.

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out of order

2013-12-20 15:36:36Z

I’m not sure if these photos are out of order or not, It may have been one of those weeks wehe I did two rides to the beach. I know there’s a racoon in the fourth one. I really like the gas station, for the shape of the awning and the apartments in the background. I know there’s cold brew, waiting for me to decant it. Edit to add: thing I forgot to talk about because no coffee when I wrote this. The feeling of bombing down market street at night, right into the heart of the city, weaving in and out of traffic. The best. (As I’ve said before, all the parts of that ride are the best).

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creative blocks

2013-12-19 15:53:41Z

been a while since I rapped at ya. I had a creative block that needed to be removed; blasted through, if nothing else. In the end, I decided the photos I was worrying over wenen’t even that great, so I just cut them and moved on. Somtimes, it’s startling to realize that even though I’ve been doing photography seriously for 15 years, I still don’t know what I’m doing.

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two ladies and a sunset

2013-12-12 06:33:44Z

Long weekend. Walking around festivals is exhausting. This was hardly simply, or hardly strictly, or something like that. A music festival that was a little bluegrass and a lot of other things: Gogol Bordello was playing, which was my main attraction. I remember being so exhausted at the end of this day that instead of going out to dinner with some friends, we cancelled on the way to dinner and went home to crash. And the last photo is sort of a ‘fuck you’ to past me, that thought going all B&W would stop the sunsets.

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a nice walk in the park

2013-12-10 15:33:44Z

This was one of those evenings where most of the group had a nice, calm walk in the park, and I was running around like a crazy person, trying to catch the light. It was singularly amazing.

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New Portfolio

2013-12-09 15:35:14Z

A friend told me that I was in danger of all of my photos becoming just pictures of my commute. I mean, I’m basically there anyway. Documenting the life of a late 20’s tech worker. I’m not sure that’s all I want to be doing. So, notice those little red buttons up there in the top nav? There’s a new one for my portfolio. Click it, and let me know what you think at my email (also linked above). If you’re hiring a photographer in the bay area and like it, let me know. In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not quitting my current job; I can do both, so I’m going to, and see where it takes me.

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new work folks

2013-12-07 19:13:16Z

One of the great things about working at a new place is all the cool new people you meet. The team at SC is no exception. They’re a diverse and extremely talented bunch, and I’m glad I get to work with them. Also, a photo of a building in SOMA and a nice street view, because I can.

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some days

2013-12-06 15:44:39Z

Some days the light is just right, and you can do no wrong with the camera. This was one of those days. I feel like this should have been after sunset, but maybe I was off work early for some reason. Two months is a long time.

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riding the wiggle

2013-12-05 15:32:47Z

The wiggle, fo those that aren’t familiar, is the path of least resisitance from the east when crossing to the west in SF. It’s still a bit of a climb, but every time you think “Holy crap, I have to go up that?!?,” there’s a right or a left turn, and it’s not nearly as bad as you thought. One more note: it’s really hard to take pictures while biking in traffic.

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ferry in black and white

2013-12-04 15:33:19Z

There’s something slightly twisted about posting a sunrise in black and white. “Here”:http://cl.ly/image/1k3G3f1H3f3y is the color version. What do you think?

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new way home

2013-12-03 06:17:34Z

New job means new commute means new things to see. This commute is a lot shorter, so there’s only two blocks between work and the BART. I may pull a “Bruce Davidson”:http://www.magnumphotos.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&ALID=2K7O3RJSJ42A&VBID=2K1HZSWEPT8V&PN=1 and shoot on the BART. Although, to be honest, my day to day isn’t nearly that gritty. SF in the 2010s is nothing next to NY in the 80s if the photos are evidence of anything.

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reception party afterparty

2013-12-01 19:22:41Z

This was all a big drunken blur. So, I’m going to use this space to thank a bunch of people that may or may not have been thanked yet. Thanks to Marylyn and Richard, who hosted the wedding at their house, and to Sophie’s mom, who cooked and held things to the plan on the day of, including getting the reception set up. Thanks to our friend Jessica Lothrop for doing the catering at the reception. Thanks to everyone who brought cakes, drinks, and themselves to both events. I know some people travelled pretty far to get there, and I really appreciate it. Sophia, in classic style, has a list of all the people, and the thank-you cards are gradually going out. This thing wouldn’t have been as much of a success without evry one who came along for the ride. So thanks.

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Yes

2013-12-01 17:03:04Z

Also, AW YEAAAAAH.

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I got married

2013-12-01 08:43:56Z

For most people this isn’t news. If you’re someone in the far future reading this, if it’s somehow survived without any of the social media to give it context: I’m madly in love with this woman, and I’m really glad that she puts up with me. That day, I got up and drove to lawton with two of my best friends in the world, one who was officiating and one who was going to be “best man” even though she wasn’t a man. Sophie’s aunt and uncle provided a venue for us; they have a lovely house of their own design, and a beautiful garden out back. I said some really sappy, meaningful things that I’d struggled to write the night before, got a little choked up, and she made up her vows on the spot. Tim said some great stuff that I don’t remember, and we were pronounced husband and wife. Then there was drinking and mingling, and cake cutting. The whole thing was perfect.

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back to ok

2013-11-30 07:32:10Z

So, in September, I went back to OK for a week to get hitched. Can I say how weird it was to be back? Going home is weird, because it’s not even home anymore. Home is a moving target of associations, friends, places I sleep, places I go out to, and all the things that are normal. The way I get up in the morning and take the train. The way my shower works. There are ten thousand little things which make up ‘home’. Anyway, enough blather. PHOTOS:

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first and last chance

2013-11-28 19:57:00Z

Just some random photos from a roll of film that got developed along with the wedding film. All my wedding photos were on film, because at the time I thought my fuji was broken. It made the week much simpler, photographically. As it turns out, a softrelease fixed the fuji, so I’m still shooting with it. I had forgotten how good film looked, with no fucking around with filters and contrast masking and shit. Blacks are black, whites are white. The tonality I have to work for in digital is just there already. I suppose my recent return to B&W was presaged by this work; it was definitely influenced by it. I have to thank “Hornbeck”:http://johnhornbeck.com/, too, because seeing his work on instagram and FB his work was a kick in the ass, a reminder that black and white could be great, and color was just a pretension. I realized I needed to stop fucking around. I need to make pictures.

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home of the a's

2013-11-28 19:44:44Z

This was the home opener. Somehow, I find myself at a baseball game about once every other year. I like the idea of baseball, and the games are fun to go to, but I can’t get into watching them on TV. It’s just a rare treat. I think this was like May-ish; the film stuff is all out of order, and this roll didn’t get developed with the rest.

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camp games

2013-11-27 06:22:40Z

I’m proud to announce that as of this post I’m less than three months behind. Seriously, this is a milestone for me, and I’m really thankful for all the people that helped me along my way. Seriously, three months sounds like a lot, but I’n basically leapfrogging september; All I have are a few film shots and the wedding. This was what the evenings looked like. Hanging out in the net shelter, to keep out the bugs. Playing games, eating, reading. Totally exactly what I needed.

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relaxing on the river

2013-11-26 07:02:36Z

This is most of what we did the last weekend we went camping. It is at least as relaxing as it looks. Probably more so, because there were seveal hammocks for when floating became too strenuous. Beer, foods, the whole bit. Astute observers will notice that there are actually two swimming holes depicted here, because we went to two different ones, on different days. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I think it was a three day weekend? A needed break, anyway.

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Last Team Lunch With EY

2013-11-25 06:22:22Z

Man, 00 pizza. Also, emotions. I miss these guys. A good bunch, one of the best bosses ever, and a really great work environment. I’m constantly reminded of just how lucky I am.

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bitter end trivia

2013-11-22 07:11:58Z

This was one of the nights where we met out at the Bitter End, a bar in the Richmond. Decent food, good beers, great decor. It’s a perfect dive bar, and far enough afield that it’s a pretty good crowd, not all hyper-startup-world. Not to get all down on startups, I mean, I work at one, but there’s something about the scene that makes me think it’s all going to come crashing down eventually. Maybe I’m wrong, and that’s oldthink. I do like to get away from it sometimes, though.

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Engagement Karaoke Party

2013-11-21 15:37:28Z

Because we didn’t have any wedding celebration planned here in SF, and because we’ve accumulated some friends here, we decided we needed to do smoething with them to celebrate the then upcoming nuptials. Karaoke was the natural choice. The only other thing I need to say is that I missed a couple members of the party, because they were sitting next to me; Demetrius and Christine, sorry about that.

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two more portaits

2013-11-19 21:50:41Z

Man, portraiture. The world at large may have infinite variety and beauty (see, e.g., all of the work of Adams, Weston, the other Adams, Paul Caponigro, etc, etc) but man, to me, people are so much more interesting and dynamic. There’s so much depth to a portrait, so many things that people automatically read and project onto the work that doesn’t happen with landscape pictures. It’s more difficult, because in addition to managing the light, the exposure, the framing, composition, and timing, people move all the time. I have a feeling that some photographers gravitate toward static subjects because they can’t deal with the difficulties. Having said that, I just spent two hours glued to the plane window, shooting pictures of the passing mountains and clouds. I do both, because I can’t refrain from taking a picture when I see one.

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last ride in the daylight

2013-11-19 01:31:49Z

As the winter makes the days shorter, my rides ended closer and closer to sunset, and then I’d arrive at the beach at sunset, and then finally, the last couple times, it’s been dark when I got there. This was somewhere in the middle of all that, near dark with the fog rolled in. Just fantastic. Can you tell I’m looking forward to getting back?

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Evil Party

2013-11-17 06:24:24Z

Whoever came up with this idea, it’s amazing. For Gina’s birthday, we all had to dress up as villans. I went as Dr. Evil, and Sophia did a mean poison ivy. I’m obligated by our marrige vows to post the picture of her in the mask, I think. Also, for anyone who was wondering how to look at a camera, Jamie is showing you how in that 2nd to last photo.

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americas cup from the water

2013-11-16 22:49:07Z

There was a lot of stuff written about how kinda bullshit the whole thing was for the City of SF, but since other people have already articulated the problems with hosting a sport for billionaires, I won’t rehash that here. It was nice to get out on the water, even though I got a bit sea sick. It’s funny, the ferry never does it to me, and the trips out on Seemant’s boat didn’t bother me either. Sometimes, though, I’ll get on a boat and just be in a bad way untill the motion sickness medicine kicks in. Barring that, this was a good excursion. The yacht we were on was incredibly nice, the kind of place a schlub like myself could retire to. 50ft, 3 bedrooms, well outfitted, too. Plenty of food and drink, and a fine captain to steer us. I can see why people that have the money for a big boat have one; sure, they’re showy, but they’re also genuinely enjoyable. Not that I’d ever buy one myself; far too many places to go and things to do.

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back in black and white

2013-11-16 22:07:10Z

I’ve decided I need to simplify a bit. I used to shoot in black in white all the time. There are myraid reasons: it’s more graphic and striking, there’s more process control, and it used to be cheaper. When that went away with digital, and I was able to shoot color at iso 3200, I went a little crazy with it. Now, there are plenty of reasons to shoot color. It’s closer to reality (for a given value of reality). It can be more eye-catching. And there I’m out of reasons. I’ve been lusting after “this camera”:http://www.amazon.com/Leica-10760-Monochrom-Compact-2-5-Inch/dp/B0082ES6HA for a while, but I realized, I have a perfectly good camera now, and the only thing that would get me is full frame. If I want to shoot black and white, I should just do it. So I am, starting now. This also solves the problem of a lot of the clichés I’m guilty of. Sunsets, especially. They’re just not the same in black and white.

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two portraits

2013-11-15 06:52:37Z

After the excitement of the last post, here’s two portraits of some friends. Editing pictures at a distance is hard. I can’t wait to be home.

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the flynn-curran wedding

2013-11-13 07:14:35Z

This was a lot of fun. It was sort of a last minute deal, because I’d only known Ronan and Amiee for a few weeks. I’d met them before, in Ireland, but not spent any appreciable time with them before they came to the US. It’s been great getting to know them, and I’m really happy I was there. This is the really severe edit; the broader edit can be found at “my gallery site”:http://galleries.notuntitled.com/flynn-curran-wedding-flickr.

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Zen Evenings

2013-11-08 01:43:15Z

The perfect evening is one that starts with “Let’s meet up for lunch,” and goes from there. This was one of those. It started meeting up for tacos, then it was movie night in Dolores, which quickly fizzled when we couldn’t hear or see (protip: get there early if you want either of those things). So, we went to the house, and thence to several bars, just sort of moving along on impulse. The larger the group, the harder this is, but it’s pretty good when it works.

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random photos day

2013-11-07 05:50:15Z

Today has been a very long day; started at 3am in SF and now I’m in OKC for 13 days, to help my mom with recovery from kidney transplant surgery. Anyone who’s waited multiple years on a transplant list knows what a relief this is (that goes for families as well). No more dialysis is a big improvement in quality of life, to be sure, but having that whole chapter closed and being able to start a new one is a great thing. Anyway, travel and sleep interruptions left me a bit drained, so I thought it’d be a good time to share the collection of random images that has accumulated at the top of the queue. These are photos that didn’t fit with whatever post I was doing at the time, but couldn’t bear to part with. Nothing tying them together other than my presence.

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four portraits

2013-11-05 06:35:41Z

These people are all very different, but I saw the visual similarity when I was editing, and decided they could go together. that’s all for tonight.

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midsummer complains about fall

2013-11-04 07:47:06Z

I think this must’ve been the ass end of July. It was grey and cold for the duration. I don’t know why, but sleep isn’t coming tonight for some reason. It’s not yet midnight, but it feels very late. Stupid Daylight Savings time. For those of use with sensitive circadian rhythms, it sucks.

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a grey ride through golden gate park

2013-11-04 06:12:12Z

There’s a certain hubris involved in putting these pictures up. I’m in effect saying that what I see has meaning and substance that’s more than passing interest, and that my perspective by itself is important. Sure, we’re all unique snowfalkes or whatever, but does the fact that I caught the mist just so in the first photo, or the gesture of the other riders in the other photos really matter? An “internet friend”:http://busblog.tonypierce.com/ of mine said recently that if you’re still blogging in 2013, you’re not doing it for fame, or fortune, you’re doing it for the love. That’s definitely true of me. In the end, I don’t care if it matters wether my perspective is important or not; I love these picutes, the people, the things that happen, and I want everyone to see that. No, it’s not just that I love all this. I have a responsibility to show the world what I see. It’s the social contract you make when you go out taking pictures, the thing that prevents it from being complete masturbatory voyeurism: you have to show everyone. Then it becomes a conversation, a discourse, not mere naval gazing. That’s what I want.

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being a bad friend

2013-11-02 05:18:15Z

I’ve been a bad friend. I haven’t talked to a bunch of these folks in a while, not directly. I’m have to fix that after this weekend. I’m just so damn busy and run down. But there are Lunches (when all of these photos were taken) and there will be more of them. Sometimes it takes seeing things to remember how important some people are.

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she says to me

2013-11-01 14:52:29Z

She says to me last night, “You know people like looking at pictures, right?” So here are a bunch from her work party, and the drive home. The view from the Oakland hills is really rad. I didn’t get many good pictures of the guests, the house, the spread, or anything you’d expect. If you can believe it, that was only the second cutest dog there. What can I say, I was tired.

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the smaller camping trip

2013-11-01 05:27:56Z

This was also incidentally the weekend when my trusty D700 bit the dust, or more precisely, took a bath. I was getting into my tube, and fell in with the camera. It was a brief dunk, but that was all it took. Almost four years of abuse, thousands of miles, and too may drops to count. The sands of Egypt, the streets of many cities, and finally what did it in was tubing in Sierras. I still have all the parts, and I’m eventually going to make it the world’s most expensive photogram machine. It was seriously a great way to spend a weekend; The water in both spots we went to was just cold enough to keep you cool, but not enough to freeze you. There were trees for my hammock and plentiful beers. And then, on the ride home, we had amazing pizza.

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on the way to camp, sometime in July

2013-10-31 05:16:02Z

These are from the trip out to camping the second to last time we went. The clouds in the background of the first timage are actually a thick fog that Soph piloted us through. I’m pretty sure I took over at the last exit, though; the last road is winding and rutted and pretty fun for me. Camping, in this mode, is mostly sitting in a float in a still part of a river and drinking beer. It’s wonderful. Ther are other kinds of camping I’d like to explore, because you can go places and see things that are impossible to get to any other way (I’m looking at you, backcountry hiking).

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streets again

2013-10-30 05:42:37Z

I did warn you. I was thinking about how if you really want to do something, do it every day, and how I should be writing more, even if it is just a few sentences. Remember when every other post was a whole essay? When I had strong opinions about selling out? Hey past me, income is nice, but don’t trade it for adventures. Things to write about: my wonderful wife, who makes me want to hurry home… the hella fast bike I built… (“srsly”:https://twitter.com/photomattmills/status/395365967791804416/photo/1) I dunno. Startup culture, and how fucked up it can be, but also how great it can be. Looking at old photos and finding gems. Looking at new photos, and the process of going from hating everything to loving a few of them enough to show the world (This delay has helped me a bit with that). Parentheticals, and how often is too often (right here). Yeah, time to sleep. See you all mañana.

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some people would miss all this

2013-10-29 14:32:29Z

Not just see it and move on but never notice it in the first place. It seems like random mess, but you can stare at it and sort of see themes emerge, like a world-sized rorschach test. What you see in the world defines who you are.

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a 90 minute tour

2013-10-29 06:11:48Z

Somewhere in there, (10 days after the fourth, according to the pictures’ metadata), we took the Jackpot out for a cruise around Treasure Island. For the first half, I rode out on the bow, and took photos, and then for the second, I went to the back, because I didn’t want to fall in. I’m used to the ferry, which is a really big catamaran; two hulls means they’re more stable, and a much bigger boat also means the same. This was… a bit different. Not bad, but bouncing up and down 3-4 feet over every wave and getting splashed with seawater a lot. My nikon got a workout that day, and so did my free arm, holding on to the railing.

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streets of SF (one of many)

2013-10-28 07:00:14Z

Man, street photography, why can’t I quit you? You’re so problematic from so many perspectives, but it feels so good. Also, how SOMA is an Audi with that vanity plate?

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trivia tuesdays

2013-10-27 23:28:31Z

For the first couple of months here in the bay, you could find us at bar trivia at least once a week. It’s a good way to get out of the house an dnot feel like you’re just wasting time. I may have mentioned it on the social medias. Anyway, it’s nice to sometimes win some beer some times (2 or 3 times, but who’s counting?), and have a good excuse to go drink it. Anyway, the bar we go to for trivia is just a stone’s throw from the rockridge BART, which has a nice view of the bay, the bridge, and the city beyond. I seem to take a picture of it everytime I’m there, but they don’t usually work. I do like this one, though.

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team lunches

2013-10-26 22:08:23Z

These guys, seriously. I don’t still wish I was at EY with the things I’m hearing (RIP EY Buffalo), but the team had talent and personality to spare.

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4th on a boat

2013-10-25 05:19:21Z

This is how I spent my 4th of July; on Seemant’s boat, drinking and waiting for fireworks that never came. Or, when they did, were far off in the distance (that shot was through my 500mm lens, and the only one that was remotely sharp). There was drinking, and there were photos, so I was pretty happy with how it all came out. This was the second time the Jillpot sailed, incidentally. It’s now known also as the “truth boat.” Weather it’s know for that beacuse you think you’re going to sink and become deathbed honest or not is up for question; I have not sailed on it under either name.

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posting will continue

2013-10-23 14:15:46Z

Until morale improves. Seriously, I just realized I’m almost 4 months behind posting photos, which is a stretch, even for me. We will get caught up by christmas, or therabouts.

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The better bridge

2013-10-23 05:32:40Z

I mean, look at it.

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pride 2013

2013-10-21 15:41:51Z

Pride in San Fransisco isn’t a lot different than pride in OKC… wait, who am I kidding? It’s the difference between a firecracker and a supernova. It’s the difference between 5000 and 100000 people. There’s a lot going on, plenty of crowds to get lost in, plenty to see and do. Just the people watching is pretty awesome. People of all stripes, out and proud. Whole parts of the city are closed off to traffic, and open to everything else. Which, incidentally, I didn’t see much of. People make a big deal about a couple naked guys, walking around, but here, that’s just another tuesday. Lots of street preformances, though, lots of yelling, food, drinking, dancing on lightposts, things you really don’t see every day. I was happy to see the support for Chelsea Manning. I hope she gets some much deserved freedom, sooner rather than later.

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Power lines

2013-10-20 19:10:50Z

There’s something very much of my generation of photographers about doing a composition study at a car accident scene. On the other hand, nobody was hurt, and it’s really a pretty commonplace thing, so maybe it’s appropriate to be a little blasé.

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the first four off the top

2013-10-20 06:27:05Z

These are just the first four images off the top of the queue. Only a little editing. I remember some of the context, except for the first one. I have no clue why I was walking in Chinatown just past dusk.

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back on the air

2013-10-19 22:29:15Z

This is “@photomattmills”:http://twitter.com/photomattmills, back on the air. The extened hiatus owes to my lack of a personal computer these past two months. I changed jobs, and the new employer has clauses in the contract about who owns what I produce on company equipment… anyway, I needed my own rig. I’ve completely forgotten where I was in the flow of editing and producing blog posts, so excuse me if I repeat myself. The new gig is super sweet. I’m learning a crap ton, which is great, and my co-workers and bosses are all pretty chill. To hold you over while I’m getting my shit together, and so you’ll know I’m actually alive, here’s a shot from our last camping trip. It’s the last star field I took, and the only one that’s even remotely sharp (although at 100% there’s still a little motion).

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More from the ferry

2013-08-30 17:15:36Z

I may seriously do a roman à clef style photo book from these and some other photos. Does anybody do that?

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Barbeque on the Jackpot

2013-08-29 22:12:38Z

This was also the day that the Jillpot launched for the first time. I burned meat on the back of the boat, there were many drinks, and someone (unpictured) decided to take a swim in the bay.

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some photos while you wait

2013-08-28 19:09:04Z

I’m writing a longer piece about caring in photography that I hope I’ll have done before the weekend, but while that’s still in progress, here are some photos.

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a weekend

2013-08-23 05:58:09Z

So, about a week after I got back, we got together on the boat for something. It may have been Fallon’s birthday. Anyway, there was some drinking, followed by some sleeping, and then a ride to Sacremento to meet Fallon’s dad, where, for some reason, there was a person in a Bear suit that didn’t want to pose for a photo. The second to last photo is something I’ve been experimenting with, calling them ‘awkward compositions’. The idea is to take the natural composition, what I would instinctively do, and throw everything just a little off. So, instead of perfect thirds, you get half sky, half ground, and a line (the gaurdrail) going trough in the center. It’s an attempt to break out of my habits, more or less, and still make good photos. It’s hard to break habits that you’ve had for more than a decade; I’ve been a photographer longer than I’ve been anything else. I want to stay fresh, give myself challenges. I’ve been thinking of assignments beyond little composition exercises (which, after all, are just foreplay, practice for the main event). I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I’m going somewhere.

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Howth

2013-08-17 06:36:52Z

Every hike should end at a bar.

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I'm going to try not to bore you

2013-08-17 04:13:01Z

I don’t want to bore you with tourist pictures, but I took a lot, and they made the edits, so this is one of two posts. I was ruthless editing these. Seriously. Anything redundant, or slightly boring got cut. I did about two days worth of actual tourism in my almost two weeks there; the rest of the time was spent working and laying around.

https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0004.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0005.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0006.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0007.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0008.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/i’m_going_to_try_not_to_bore_you/561/0009.jpg’ />

ping pong in the office

2013-08-13 06:43:32Z

So, all of the Engine Yard offices I’ve been in have ping pong tables. Secret to our success? Maybe. There is something about taking a break to do something physical while you’re thingking really hard on a problem for a long time. Moving around makes you forget some of the rigidity you had built up around the problems, and you have headspace then for solutions. I don’t really play ping pong, but I pace, I dance, whatever works. Sometimes I just need to stare out the window for a little while. Really, it’s stillness of mind that you’re after, the not-thinking. It’s the creative headspace, the white canvas. The moment of quiet before ideas come rushing to fill it. Beginner’s Mind: Stretching that moment out is Zen meditation (and one of the reasons I have a zen symbol tatooed on my arm). The longer you can stretch that moment out, the louder the ideas get. Sometimes, something really brilliant will come, other times, it’s just a solution to a tricky process problem. I know I should just post single images to twitter, but that’s so much harder to get to later, and this format makes the photos look better. Also, this is a good excuse to air my stupid ideas.

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david's dinner

2013-08-13 06:17:58Z

Man, this guy can cook. App, Main, Dessert, all delicious.

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can't think of a title

2013-08-10 19:40:25Z

Cool folks in the Dublin office though. This was day 2, I think. Maybe day 3?

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Then I went to Ireland

2013-08-08 05:59:23Z

So, I did a first blush edit of the pictures I took in Ireland, and got it down under a hundred; don’t worry, I won’t bore you with all of them. I’d really like to get it all into 3 or so posts. The trip out was fairly uneventful. I couldn’t sleep on the plane, so I shot pictures out of the window to amuse myself. The first one here was the best of the lot. I wonder what some of those lights are. Some of them tally as reflections off the window or lens flares. At least one doesn’t. By the time I arrived, I’d only slept 2 hours in the previous 36, and I was a bit lagged. Even so, I was in a new place, and filing thoughts away for later. One thing I noticed was how there seemed to be some thought put into almost every structure. A bridge isn’t just a bridge, but an opportuity to show off. Even the corner liquor store was less molded plactic and stamped metal than you’d see here. The plan of going to brunch on arrival turned into go to lunch, and then stagger across half the city after a SIM card with Long (one of my co-workers). The nearest phone store was 3 (named when 3g was a new thing). It was in a big open shopping area, a street lined with shops whose name I forget. The fake fakir, levitating, was there, with just about the worst sunburn I’ve ever seen.

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camping and poor planning

2013-08-06 06:34:19Z

so, this was the trip before the trip. Before my work trip to ireland, we were supposed to go camping with some friends we met through turntable; everybody bailed, basically, but we decided it’d be nice to get away for the weekend and have some quality time away from the world before I was gone for two weeks. The drive in was somewhat perilous, but also gorgeous. It didn’t help that I was trying and failing to beat sundown. Anyway, picture a dark dirt road with some washboard, some hairpin turns, a couple river fords (that’s places where you go in the water, instead of a bridge), and some cliffs. The beauty of the valley we were making out way down was not lost on me. There’s something really nice about moonlight. It looks like midday at first glance, but the shadows are super deep. Gone. There’s also the the chance that the photo won’t work at all; that my eyes are compensating for a contrast ratio that my camera can’t match. So it feels extra good. Once we got there, the trouble really started. We’d only brought one flashlight and no firewood, so we had to forage for it. In looking around for wood, I found one of the posts marking the parking area with my shin, fracturing it (I think; I never got an x-ray, but I still have a bump 6 weeks later). I found wood, though, and made a fire. Then, of course, we had to pitch the tent, and we slept on rocky, slanted ground. Sort of par for the course by that point. Then the morning came, and things started looking up. My shin was bloody, but didn’t hurt too much if I didn’t touch it. We made steak and eggs, moved the tent to a more level spot, and decided to go for a hike. We hiked down to the river, about 2 miles, and dipped our feet in. Cool and nice, and then I hung my hammock and did some real relaxing. At around 6pm, we decided not to spend another night; we’d had our night out, our relaxing by the river, even a nice hike.

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another skyline (from the ferry)

2013-08-06 06:18:44Z

Yeah, yeah. Two in a row, although different pictures. Next, a post about camping and poor planning.

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the poem guy and the cat video festival

2013-08-05 16:34:27Z

Yes, there was an internet cat video festival in Oakland, and yes, we had to go. By far the coolest thing showing there was this guy, doing live poem compositions on the subject of your choice; Sophie says “Cats in space!” and the guy pounds on his typewriter for about five minutes, talking and bantering with us. Appearently he’s normally in the tourist areas of SF, Fisherman’s Wharf and such.

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A skyline

2013-08-05 14:59:07Z

So, I was going to post a bunch of stuff this weekend, but in the process of setting up new internet, I inadvertently screwed up my firewall rules so that the only thing that wasn’t working was NFS, and then I didn’t have time to troubleshoot till now. hopefully this week goes better than all that.

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in defense of tilted frames

2013-08-01 01:25:44Z

I’ve seen several criticisms in the art blogs of tilted frames lately; that they’re gimmicky, that it’s been done, yadda, yadda. The truth is that as long as photography retains its performative aspect, that is, you have to choose moments while you’re actually in them, things will always be a little off kilter. (There’s a lot more to be said about the curation of robotic photography, but it’ll have to wait; I’m tired, and this post is about the world being a little sideways).

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beach ride

2013-07-30 00:23:47Z

The importance of this ride and it’s effect on my mental and physical well being cannot be understated. It’s 8 miles out, a beer stop, and 8 miles back across the peninsula; about two hours total, depending on how long the beer stop is. Long enough that I get to push myself a little, but not so long that I’m a wreck the next day. I start in SOMA, head south through approxamately the design district, and from there zigzag my way to the wiggle to get over the middle of things. There’s a wonderful bike path through panhandle park, where people are always out with their dogs, frisbees, and other paraphenalia. That path feeds right into Golden Gate park. GGP is wonderful, an amazing little pocket of nature in the middle of the city. There’s a really fast stretch of downhill, and then the ocean; end of the line. The Pacific is wonderful. Every time I see it, it’s different weather, different waves, but still, somehow constant. A goal to reach, an end. That is, until I decide to cross it in a sailboat. The ride back seems faster, because the only real climb is the scrabble up first set of hills going back into the park. I timed it, the other day, though, and the two slightly differing paths nearly identical in time and distance, probably due to traffic lights more than anything else. Someday, I’ll do this ride at 4AM and really see how fast I can make it out and back again.

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where I am

2013-07-30 00:08:45Z

for those not paying attention, that is, SF, CA, USA. also, I really like this photo, for no reason. Just sayin’.

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on the other boat

2013-07-29 01:37:09Z

So, the book will be photos from the ferry, right? but of course, there’s another boat in my life, which may or may not be in the final edit. I spend a reasonable ammount of time on the Jackpot, which is in fact my friend Seemant’s home. It’s an amazing setting for a lot of good stories (that may or may not see the light of day, depending on my mood/inebriation).

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walk to work

2013-07-28 22:18:12Z

I wasn’t kidding the other day on instagram; I really may do a book on/about my commute called ‘from the boat’. But I don’t know if I’d have pictures like this in it or not. Remains to be seen.

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not quite photos of work

2013-07-28 18:52:34Z

So, not to say that the office is boring; it’s infinitely better than sitting alone at home working remotely, but it is a little short on visually interesting human interaction. Also, I work in the office, so I’m not nearly as prone to taking photos there. I’m much more likely to have my camera while we’re going for a coffee in the afternoon, or walking to lunch or whatever. Also, as a rule, if more than three people are in a candid photo, at least one of them will be making a slightly awkward face. Oh well.

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metric was nice

2013-07-28 18:33:55Z

The very next night, we went to see Metric in Oakland, and it was a lot of fun. She went off for a minute about how nobody has any privacy any more, because cell phones. Truth. Also, note to self: Always floor seats. Duh.

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some street photos because sigur ros was boring

2013-07-28 17:47:08Z

I know, I know, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. There are ~500 images in my backlog, though, and my computer situation has finally stabilised to the point that I can blog again. These are all from the night we went to see sigur ros, the band with the made up language. All I could think, the whole time, was, “God I wish this were Radiohead, they’d be so much better.” On the plus side, we got to have some good sushi in the city, and Sophie enjoyed the show, so there’s that. at some point in this series of posts, there may be a narrative breakdown, but there will always be some good photos. Don’t worry, I’m just trying to get things online in a way that makes sense to me.

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City Photos

2013-06-06 23:49:26Z

This place is pretty rad. Hills! Tall buildings! Other things! There, I’ve used up all my exclamation points for the month.

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BBQ at Jacob's House

2013-06-04 19:23:32Z

Barbecues in Cali don’t tend to revolve around the grill in the way that they do in the midwest. This one was really about playing music (if you could) and trying all of Jacob’s beers. A very nice afternoon, in really good light. As the sun got lower, veiling flare became a real problem, but I don’t have a lens hood. Oh well; I think I did OK, anyway. Thanks to Jacob and JBird for hosting.

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hiking in the central peninsula

2013-06-02 14:47:48Z

I don’t know why I never hiked in Oklahoma, but I’ve been doing a lot of it here. Maybe because the city is more dense here, or maybe it’s the nicer weather. In any case, this was a nice little day trip we took down to the central peninsula. I took the film camera and the digi, and I think they both have their place. I need to get a wide angle for my x-pro, though.

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3rd st, SF

2013-06-01 16:44:26Z

So my walk to work from the Bart is mostly down 3rd st, which is always interesting. Good light, good sidewalks, always changing. I’m not sure why I bother doing the whole street thing. There’s a horde of amatures brute forcing the entire street photo-space (the set of possible photos you can take on the street). But the heart wants. Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point, yeah? (Pascal, natch).

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Birthday Picnic by the Lake

2013-05-30 10:13:43Z

More film work, this time Kelsey’s birthday picnic. Lake Merritt > Dolores Park. Also, paper lanterns are magical. They’re sort of difficult to light, but once they go, they float off into the distance, and disappear. Editing these photos was really difficult. I got way more attached to these than I usually would; maybe because I had to look at them longer (getting the distortion corrections as close as possible, curve corrections, dust spotting, etc). Also, unrelated: I’m in Dublin! It’s decent here. The smells and sights and sounds of another country.

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A's home opener

2013-05-23 03:09:02Z

I’ve been shooting film lately, more since we arrived, and I’m getting some results I really dig. These photos are from the A’s home opener; my boss, Jamie, invited us out to tailgate. There are a couple technical issues. They’re a little distorted from the lens and because the film wasn’t 100% flat. But I’m really happy with these.

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The Move

2013-05-15 06:36:26Z

I got back from that trip, woke up the next morning, and picked up a U-Box, which is really a glorified wooden crate. Sophia and I spent the day jigsawing all of our personal possessions that wouldn’t fit in the car into the box, and then taking it to the uhaul location. We spent the night at my folks’ place, and then hit the road in the morning. Shoutout to “Katie”:http://katality.com/ for being there at the buttcrack of dawn to see us off with cupcakes. Then it was, as my dad said, miles and miles of nothing but miles an miles. There was a “20 mile fog bank”:http://photounrelated.com/2013/05/11/getting-to-sf.html in western Oklahoma that broke up before Texas, and then smooth sailing all the way across to Flagstaff that first day. It’s a lot easier to travel when you have a good companion. The hotel I remembered as being “quaint and charming”:http://notuntitled.com/2012/08/04/road-problems.html from my last encounter was sort of run down and the bed was awful, but it was a bed. Woke up in the morning, had a last dose of green chili and eggs before leaving the southwest, and on to Cali. All through the central valley, the almond trees were in bloom. Finally, we made it to our SF accomos, ordered pizza, and passed out.

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Karaoke and coda (scenes from a good trip part 4)

2013-05-15 06:05:44Z

Put two of my support colleagues in a room together, away from their homes, and there will be drinking. Put three of them together and there will be at least one story to come out of it. Put them all together in one place and there will be karaoke. Add an open bar, and you’ll get the supreme moment of the trip, wherein Tim Littlemore gave the most epic rendition of “Sweet Child of Mine” ever. The next day was rough. Hangovers all around. Sleep on the bus home.

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Lake Tahoe (offsite/scenes from a good trip part 3)

2013-05-15 05:35:13Z

since a very large edit of these photos has already been on the “unofficial engineyard tumblr”:http://engineyard.tumblr.com, I’m going to do a cliff notes version in an effort to get closer to the present. I’d really like to be posting yesterday’s pictures, or at least last weeks, instead of two months ago (2.5 now; I’m behind on being behind). In short: it was good. I was leaving one team, support, who collectively are the most expert sysadmins and devops engineers I’ve ever known. Also not a few really excellent rubyists. Why would I leave that? A new adventure, of course. I mean, there are reason you tell people (promotion, pay, whatever), and then there’s the real reason, and the real reason is I can’t sit still for too long. New people, new environment, new problems.

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Night 1: SF

2013-04-28 19:28:54Z

Met up with some dudes at the airport, went to a fancy french restaurant, and had what I’ve come to realize is a fairly normal BART experience, conplete with a balloon animal lady. Yeah.

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scenes from a good trip

2013-04-27 17:46:19Z

The next morning, I got on a plane to SF, for a company offsite in Tahoe. I got to the hotel and crashed for a bit (as you do), and then went and found my compatriots. Wandered, took photos.

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going away party

2013-04-26 06:41:40Z

This was the last hurrah before we left town. After this, I was in tahoe for a week, and then we came home and packed everthing. It was great to see everyone one last time; many people came out and I didn’t get photos of them all. I was busy, I suppose. We had the main event at Picasso’s, which there for a while was basically my kitchen. A perfect spot for 40 of our closest friends to say goodbye. And then we moved on to the Other Room, which didn’t last long, and then ended up at the Mule. A good night to round things out, and then get up in the morning and get on a plane.

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Sophia

2013-04-26 06:18:51Z

This is the woman I’m going to marry, one of my favorite photos of her. That’s all.

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a horse, a host, and a happy couple

2013-04-22 08:14:49Z

OXFORD COMMAS. Now you know my stance on that subject. This was a night of bike riding and cards (and various plush things; the horse, the kid robot doughnut, etc). Maeghan and her dude seemed really happy, which is always a good thing. Yeah. that’s all, except to say that game of thrones was EPIC tonight. Edit to add: appearently we played yahtzee and I won? I don’t properly remember. This is what happens when I take two months to post shit. Although I am getting closer to present tense.

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train museum

2013-04-22 04:50:48Z

So, in Oklahoma there’s a train museum; part of the centennial celebrations or something, but now it’s the sort of place you “take your kids for their 2nd birthday”:http://katality.com/augusts-2nd-birthday-a-vintage-train-party/. I was hungover as hell, so I sort of wandred off, as I do… Lots of interesting shapes and textures. Small museums have this quirkyness about them that’s super endearing. There’s at least one person that cares enough about trains to devote their life to preserving them. The museum itself is a work of art, an arrangement of forms and objects to convey a message. Really cool. Also Maeghan was there. Hi!

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The first of several weddings

2013-04-19 07:26:25Z

Tim and Katie got hitched the day after I proposed to Sophie, and I was privileged to be their witness, along with Soph (natch). They’re having a real ceremony eventually, plus there’s my wedding, plus I know several other people getting hitched. It’s the thing to do now.

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random again

2013-04-17 07:01:57Z

A couple of random images, because I don’t ever stop looking, not really.

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in which things are complicated

2013-04-16 19:48:26Z

So, we left the venue only to find that two of the cars in our party were towed. On a sunday. From the lot of an office that was closed. Some people just hate fun. So that’s why the first pic below is people standing around in a parking lot. Then there were drinks at Saint’s, cards against humanity, and more drinks.

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gospel brunch part one

2013-04-16 04:24:38Z

I can’t talk about “that thing that happened today”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Boston_Marathon_bombings. I wasn’t there, don’t know anything other than what I’ve heard, and even though it’s from real news sources, it’s still not terribly reliable. I can give my condolences to the families, and tell you that my thoughts are with them, however little that means. What I would like to do, instead, is put a little good out into the world. So here: a very fun morning several months ago. This is the Gospel Brunch at the Boom, where two queens make fun of the audience and we all laugh at ourselves. Not pictured: me up on stage, “although that did happen”:http://photounrelated.com/2013/03/17/the-boom.html (that’s Sophia’s blog, of course).

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garris' norman birthday

2013-04-15 07:19:53Z

Small gathering, not too much drinking, just having a good time.

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lunch with tim + katie

2013-04-15 05:15:48Z

The architecture in Downtown OKC is all facades. Beautiful fronts on buildings that are 70 years old. There’s now way to know what to expect on the inside. It could be a rehab from the last decade, or it could be original and falling apart. It was nice to see Katie and Tim as well. We haven’t hung our in FAR TOO LONG because of the time zones between us. Where’s my teleport already? How about the personal jetpack, at least? no? Oh well.

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hunter's housewarming

2013-04-15 03:54:32Z

Since I’ve sat here trying to write about this for half an hour, and gotten nowhere, here are the pictures. It really was a fun afternoon.

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some sort of celebration

2013-04-06 21:05:55Z

The was some occasion for this particular night out, but dammed if I remember. This is what happens when you delay a month and change between drinking and blogging. The time difference really screws you. I do remember that the first photo was supposed to be of the cluster of girls in the background, and not the couple at the corner, but the camera does what it wants to. Also, the last picture is from another night, but I promised the dude I’d post it.

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holiday hangover camping

2013-04-06 20:03:41Z

This was an after-holidays holiday party… one last hurrah with the gang. It was supposed to be camping, but we couldn’t find accomos like we wanted. Nobody in Oklahoma rents cabins big enough for the likes of us. So, we went over to Heather and Jeff’s house, and we slept in sleeping bags on the ground (or the couch, lounge chairs, or anything else horizontal). I made it about halfway through the showing of rocky horror before I passed out.

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a couple others

2013-03-31 09:59:55Z

A few more from the road, just in between places. I drove a lot, before the move. Now I drive once every other week, and the car seems a luxury that I’m not at all sure I want to keep.

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at the house

2013-03-31 09:27:00Z

This was several houses ago, and it seems like a couple lifetimes as well. A lot of things that were planned hadn’t happened yet, and a lot of the plans hadn’t even been fully formed. Sometimes you end up back at the house with a bottle of vodka and a bunch of 5 hour energy and you make the best of it. This was one of those nights. (Note: those shots were awful, don’t bother).

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dark at the blue note

2013-03-28 21:49:18Z

Either it was very dark, or I was personally very blurry. The 50 1.2 is so pretty out of focus, though, I don’t mind. It’s also chipped on the rear element from a field repair in Brazil (a leatherman is not a pin spanner, so be careful).

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Counts as a White Xmas

2013-03-27 18:11:52Z

In Oklahoma, this counts. Later that day the snow actually covered the ground.

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Party at Matt's House

2013-03-24 15:32:24Z

People+beer/liquor+music = Party. Pretty easy. This one wasn’t too crazy; we didn’t break any furniture or have cops show up.

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Heather and Jeff's Xmas Party

2013-03-24 07:21:46Z

Really fun people, and really fun times. I’m now up to just after christmas in the editing, and making no more excuses for the lateness.

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I'm just gonna put these here...

2013-03-22 06:09:58Z

and not talk about the fact that I did a post like the previous one (braggadocio) then abandoned my blawg for… a month. Nevermind the part where I MOVED ACROSS THE COUNTRY and HAD MANY ADVENTURES and what not, including a two week period where my hard drive was completely inaccessible. Oh well. This is where the catching up starts. I also, of course, haven’t done anything on any weightier projects either. There’s only been time for work and survival (eat, sleep, pack, unpack). Hopefully this weekend will be restful as well.

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still carry the camera everywhere every day

2013-02-23 01:45:34Z

In case you were wondering, is all matt does any more work and party, the answer is, only when I’m not doing other rad shit. I still carry the camera everywhere, every day, so you can see some of the amazing shit that happens around me all the time.

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aaron and gabes xmas party

2013-02-23 01:37:26Z

One more fun round of Secret Santa.

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the children's c̶r̶u̶s̶a̶d̶e̶ brunch

2013-02-22 20:56:16Z

this was brunch sometime before xmas; had a bunch of rad people over. Holly made scones, and we made breakfast casserole, there was much champagne drinking by all. a good day.

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mostly I do this for love

2013-02-22 19:12:13Z

This was some saturday night, when we’d either ridden bikes or some one else was driving, and I let myself get comepletely smashed. Not hard at the Hilo. I love these people, and I love good loud rock music. It feels excessively sentimental, but if I can’t be that way on my second to last day in town, when can I?

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if you ask me very nicely

2013-02-13 07:22:06Z

And if the stars are right, and if you offer me some money, I’ll take pictures for you. The money has become less optional as my time gets more scarce. It has to be really good to entice me away from all the slacking off I do. Email me if you’re interested, I’ll send you a quote. This was a really crazy sort of shoot, no planning other than being in a decent location at the right time of day. If you’ve shot kids you know they can be somewhat flighty; after about 20 minutes of shooting, both my nerves and Katie’s (the mother, in photo 3) were shot. Sometimes the best plan is no plan, and I did get some decent pictures.

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Lindsay's Birthday

2013-02-12 07:47:43Z

These were all from Sophie’s (and my) friend Lindsay’s Birthday party. We all got really drunk; Sophie and I walked and took cabs, and I think mot everybody else did the same. Which was a good thing, because for the latter half of the evening, a majority of the party was blacked out. No, not me; I wasn’t trying to kill any more brain cells than I already have. If I keep doing these posts in pairs, I might get caught up to the present just before I have to go to Tahoe and get three weeks behind again (A week in Tahoe, a weekend to move, a couple weeks to find an apartment/adjust to life in SF). That’s the way the pan flashes.

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Just two photos

2013-02-12 07:22:41Z

Something about the moonlight through the trees in winter is especially magical. Or it could just be that I’m outside to see it. The phone booth is one of several on the OU campus; when I saw them I was really excited, and thought of doing a whole essay on them right then. But I had to get to the Dan Savage talk, which ended up being a packed house. Really great, really moving. Then we went and had pizza, and the phone booths seemed less photogenic on the way out.

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cards against humanity

2013-02-10 18:48:41Z

This may have been the first time I playd cards against humanity. A really fun, really awful game.

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just a couple photos

2013-02-10 17:23:05Z

From back in the city thanksgiving night. A long ass day, and there were no naps.

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One Big Table

2013-02-10 00:42:29Z

So, we finished our 5k, went home, showered, and then got in the car to drive to Lawton, to Sophie’s Aunt Marylyn’s house. Beautiful little place, lots of good shapes and textures; you could tell it was a place that they’d designed and built themselves. The meal was at the family table, with an extension at one end. No kids table here. Good food, good people. And then we drove back to the city.

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Turkey Tracks 5k

2013-02-05 07:22:15Z

I ran in another 5k on Thanksgiving. There were people in costumes and people in crazy hats and people who were a lot more serious about running than I was. My final time was 37 minutes and change. Only had my phone for pictures.

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Hunting

2013-01-28 14:01:32Z

In the woods, at least in these woods, the quiet was palpable, thick. I walked out for half an hour, into the thick quiet, and then sat, silent. Leaves falling to the ground were an event. Nothing was moving at first, but then I’d hear something rustling through the leaves. In those woods, in that quiet, there was no way to know if it was 200 yards away or over my left shoulder. I didn’t see any deer. Back at camp, my dad was waiting, pistol in hand. It may seem odd to hunt with a revolver, but I’ve seen him consistently hit at 200 yards, which is about as far as I trust my own aim with a rifle. He’d set off in the opposite direction at the same time as me, and come back just a few minutes earlier. The rule of hunting is that the game will show up as soon as you’re not prepared; so we sat and waited and talked the sun down, in low voices. Half an hour before sunset, at the end of legal shooting light, we unloaded and stowed the weapons, and cooked dinner. In the morning, we got back up, and headed back to the city.

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Foodies

2013-01-28 07:30:51Z

Before you get the pitchforks, that’s actually the name of the restaurant. A little Thai place on Hudson between 10th and 13th, in midtown. Really good food, decent beer prices. Small, diner atmosphere, a little eccentric, but overall enjoyable. Good company too, with Sophia and Anne and Isaac. Also, despite the two food/restaurant posts in a row, I swear this isn’t becoming a food blog. Anyway, photos:

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Dinner Club @1492

2013-01-26 21:00:49Z

A delicious meal with some good folks, once a month. Whoever picks the place for that month has to choose somewhere they’ve never been; I don’t know who chose 1492, (Sophia says it was our friend Dean), but it was a great meal, and someplace I hadn’t ever been either. I’m trying to think of places to go for next month. So far we’ve thought Iron Star would be good, or maybe the new green chili place in Yukon. Suggestions? @reply me on twitter, since I’m too lazy to put comments on this blawg.

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Performance something something

2013-01-26 19:13:18Z

I wiped my computer thursday night and installed mountain lion. Man, there was something wrong with my last install. Probably something I downloaded; for a while there, I was using a lot of semi-sketchy software. Who knows. There’s not really a theme to these photos, other than the fact that they were next to each other chronologically, and vaguely performance related. More when there’s more to tell.

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Not going there

2013-01-24 06:36:55Z

But I’m sure you know what the working title of this post was.

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Infrastructure

2013-01-22 07:21:43Z

This is one of the different veins I’m exploring: how we move around, how we get places, the shapes and structures and devices that enable it. This is one of those sets of work that needs to be made 60 inches wide, needs to be seen writ large. It may end up that way, or I may never get anything else done on it ever. I say ‘exploring’ but really, I’m just taking pictures of things without much conscious discretion, letting my subconscious guide the work. A photographic version of automatic drawing, if you will.

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Denver, briefly (rubyconf)

2013-01-21 05:39:05Z

So, just after we got back to the US, I got on another plane to go to Denver for RubyConf. It was actually a really good conf, where I learned some interesting stuff (as opposed to many of the other confs I’ve been at, where I did the hallway track the whole time). Denver herself is a beautiful city, great sunrises, good walking, if a little cold after the Mediterranean.

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structures

2013-01-21 03:59:28Z

I have more pictures than words, sorry if these get a bit terse. It’s a bit harder to connect the dots when themes are spread out over the months; I’m thinking I might start working on another book soon, though. Working title: ‘Matt Mills turns over a new leaf (photographically).’

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birthday brunch

2013-01-21 03:48:32Z

Sophie’s birthday brunch, a week after the fact. In which I didn’t get a good picture of my girlfriend. And with these, I’m back to being two months behind. On the good news list, I’ve got my storage box up and running. So things should have some regularity here from now on (says the guy who’s moving cross country in five weeks).

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brett's halloween party

2013-01-04 04:19:16Z

After the photo booth and the rest of the party, Sophie and I cabbed it to a friend’s house for another party, filled with people in costume (If you noticed katie was in a Data costume in the last post, that’s why). This party was nuts. The devil himself was doing palm and tarot readings, there were 500 jello shots to start the evening, a couple of dudes dressed as a left and right boob, a fire pit, a haunted walk, an open bar, and a lot of other madness. In other words, one hell of a night.

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photo booth

2013-01-03 06:15:42Z

So, the weekend after I got back into town, my friend “Tim”:http://timpromptu.com was having his birthday party… I won’t mention his ages, just that it was incremented to an even decade. I did a photo booth type thing, without the walls or curtain. The decoration is all Katie’s doing… basically I either stood there and hit the button, or used the intervalometer, or sometimes had Sophie take pictures; it was very improvisational. On-camera flash was used; there’s something a little crisp and glaring you need for a proper photo-booth shot. I’d have used a ring light if I had one. Very fun night, and doesn’t my lady look punk rock?

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A little town by the Sea

2012-12-29 08:58:35Z

This is the last of the Barcelona photos, finally… there was one more day in the city, but it was mostly filled with goodbyes and collecting all the souvenirs I’d bought, all the things scattered throughout the apartment, and getting to the airport. It was a really good trip. These are actually of a little seacoast town about 50km south of barcelona, called Sitges. Not a bad little place. Nice beaches (not the best in the world, but whatevs, I wasn’t there to swim). good food, cheap accomos. Would Sitges again.

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BCN tourists

2012-12-18 05:41:52Z

These are sort of more street photos, I’m realizing, but I was setting out to document something specific. Tourists are sort of weird. I mean, I totally was one, too. But You could tell tourists from natives at a glance. Not just the cameras or the different-than-local fashion, but the way they move and cluster. They pose for photos, they’re always a little tired and seem a little put-upon. Everything about them says “I’m not at home here.”

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Barcelona Street Scenes 1

2012-12-12 04:49:56Z

I guess you could say this was me at my most self-indulgent. I feel like the people that most like street photography are its practitioners. There’s no lasting connection with the individuals that are photographed. It’s just moments, instant reactions, nothing more, but nothing less. Still, since I do this for myself, and I like them, I’ll still make these photos when I can. There’s an isolation that people feel in crowds like the sidewalk; in that isolation their faces are an unselfconscious, unaffected expression of what they’re thinking. So there is something to these photos, if only to show (shout) the depths of one moment, in one time and in one place; so much going on at once.

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Barcelona Street Scenes 2

2012-12-12 04:01:36Z

This is the second set, and I won’t add to my other ramblings except to say man this was a really fun trip.

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stuff that didn't fit in to neat boxes but I liked anyway

2012-12-11 06:14:29Z

There are a bunch of street photos still to edit, and a nice post about silly tourists, but these needed to go somewhere and the mental energy required to edit 25 photos down to 10 was not a thing I had, so here are these, which were much easier to bring to press. Have a nice day.

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more buildings

2012-12-06 07:10:25Z

The title of this post is a lie; I just didn’t know what to call it; they’re not pictures of people, but I hate the word cityscapes. It is buildings, and a couple courtyards, and roses growing in an ancient Roman graveyard. A picture of a nice cloud thrown in, because I’m still me. Yeah, got another half dozen or so posts left in this vein, and then the vacation slideshow will be over, and the regular life slideshow will recommence.

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Churches

2012-12-06 07:02:29Z

It would be possible to go to Barcelona and spend all of your time there just looking at all the different churches. There’s probably a degree in medieval architecture to be had for a thesis on them. I took a few pictures.

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A lot of walking punctuated by cafes and tapas

2012-12-05 06:08:29Z

That was a lot of our time in Barcelona, just walking around the quarter our apartment was in, and eating delicious food, and ocaisionally seeing interesting things. Lots of cool little shops. Like a good american, I indulged in a few things: a very nice knife, of spanish steel, a blank book and fountain pen, and a couple hats to last me through the winter. There are still about 160 photos in the BCN collection in my lightroom; I’m going to allow myself maybe 4 more posts, in quick succession, and then move on. So I need to edit that to ~30 photos. Oy vey.

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The first of many posts about Barcelona

2012-11-26 05:39:30Z

So, as some of my friends know, I was in Barcelona for a couple weeks back in october, and up until that point I was doing a pretty good job of catching up with getting photos posted. Then of course everything went to hell, and so here we are almost december and I’m just now getting to this. Getting there involved a fairly late flight out of OKC, an even later flight out of Detroit, and an afternoon flight from Amsterdam. Airports are mostly boring, so no pictures of them this time, but one from the plane as we were looking out over the City and the ocean. I got to BCN, had a beer, and slept for 14 hours. The jaws of life couldn’t pry me from that bed. That morning, we got up and went to the market Boqueria, had a fairly decent breakfast, and set off in search of a local SIM card for my unlocked cell phone. Managed that, and then visited a cathedral (pictured) which was nice. Sorry, I didn’t take down place names or details; I’m not that kind of photographer (although if someone had been paying me to do travel photography of BCN, I probably would have kept better notes).

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epic karaoke

2012-11-06 04:49:12Z

The highlight of the support meetup this time was easily the karaoke night; the last meetup it was appearently fairly epic, but I slept through it. I was glad that we set it up again; I even sang. A lot of pictures this time. photo of me coutesy the inimitable “@jessicaspacekat”:http://twitter.com/jessicaspacekat, who I handed my camera just before taking the stage.

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arrival/new faces/old friends

2012-11-05 06:04:10Z

I got to SF in the morning, like I always do, and ended up wandering around a bit looking for the wrong café; there are two places in SF called “Justine’s,” one in a hotel, and one at the top of a really big hill. This is SF, where the hills really are fairly huge and daunting. Getting to the wrong one involved, of course, walking up the hill (with luggage) to find that I was in the wrong place. That wasn’t really a big deal though. I made it to the hotel late enough to check in, and did that; met with some of the co-workers for burgers, after which there was considerable drinking. This is just the best team. A bunch of brilliant, hard working dudes. Over the next couple days, I’m going to be doing some changes to the site; nothing huge, just some extra links to a portfolio bit that I’m working on, and an email link.

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going west

2012-11-01 23:43:29Z

Going west involved an airplane. The sun was coming up as the plane was taking off, and since we were going west fairly quickly, golden hour lasted through most of the flight. I got these shooting out the window of the plane; really great light.

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a few days at home

2012-11-01 23:35:26Z

Or a week… something like that. Things happened, laundry was done, and then I took off again. I got to say, “I’ll see you in Barcelona.” Then I went west for a bit.

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camping (aka the start of the travel season)

2012-10-30 18:06:48Z

I went camping with a bunch of cool folks at the end of September. This was simple car camping, not anything involving crazy hikes with a giant backpack or mountains (as if oklahoma had any). It rained on us all weekend, more or less; there was time to get the tents set up, and a little time for breakfast on saturday, and the rest of the weekend was spent under a tarp or inside our tents. Protip: tents are not sound proof. When I say the travel season, I mean the time when I personally find myself going all over the place for a period of about 6 weeks, biannually. This time, it was Camping, San Fransisco, Barcelona, and in tomorrow, I fly to Denver. As Tim told me, ‘The game been good to me’.

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Mr. Penumbra's 24 hour book store

2012-10-21 12:35:18Z

My normal readers should note that what follows is incredibly nerdy; part book review and part cryptanalysis, and no pretty pictures. You have been warned. I read “Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Book Store”:http://www.robinsloan.com/penumbra/ on the plane to SF, and it was a wonderful book. I devoured it, really; it’s got great pacing and mystery and all the things I like in a book. The characters are engaging, and I found myself rooting for the protagonist and the quest. Except… One of the plot points of the book is a code that remains unbroken for ~500 years. It’s called a substitution cypher in the book, and without revealing too many details, I just couldn’t believe that any substitution cypher would remain unbroken for that long. It was a bit of a let down. So, I did what any programmer would do: I built the thing. My somewhat incomplete implementation of cypher is “here”:https://github.com/mattmills/penumbra-code. Having built it, it’s a bit more clever than I thought. Because there are only 26 letters (less in latin, but I don’t have any latin text to work from), and because there are a lot of glyphs (I stopped myself at 88 latin symbols that might be in a typeset), you can actually make english look like noise with this code, more or less. Once you know what you’re up against, though, it is breakable. I haven’t coded it yet, but there’s at least a brute force method, and maybe something more clever is possible. It sort of depends on how much noise there is in the signal; minimally, you need 80 glyphs to make a flat distribution over a large text, but with a larger character set you could have random noise inserted to confuse the signal. The more glyphs in the typeface, the more noisy you can make it. If you had, say, 200 glyphs, and only 80 of them meaningful, then that would confuse codebreakers pretty well. If anyone has suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Pull requests too. I have a transatlantic flight on Tuesday, when I plan on getting this made into a gem and maybe even hacking together a little sinatra-based web form that will do encoding and decoding.

game day norman

2012-10-18 06:58:53Z

Norman. Game day, for the one game that we’ve lost this year. But it was still a fun, fairly drunken time.

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whole foods near closing time

2012-10-18 06:25:06Z

I forget what we were there for, but I was really just playing with my new camera while Sophie did the shopping. I know some people say “she does it better than me” as an excuse to make their signifigant other do the dishes or whatever, but Sophie is a fucking hawk in the grocery store. I amble around, trying samples and picking up random things that look good (and put them down in the wrong place). She has a list, and a path, and she has everything in a basket by the time I get to the meat counter for my chorizo. And then she ambles through the store with me, while I remember to get tortillas and forget the bread again.

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Yes another sunset

2012-10-15 11:52:37Z

And a photo of Sophia by candlelight.

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Ronan gets bigger

2012-10-15 10:43:02Z

So, some sunday in there, we went to visit KJ, and Ronan was being especially cute… in the way that only little babies can be. She’s already crawling, for crying out loud, and trying to stand on her own. Seems like yesterday she was a newborn. I’ve extrapolated, and at this rate she’ll be 12ft tall and running half the world by the age of 12.

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Just another saturday

2012-10-14 10:04:47Z

You know, havin a garage sale, riding bikes, the usual.

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in which sunday funday ruined our plans to watch all of trueblood in one go

2012-10-13 23:23:32Z

So we went over to Hunter’s the sunday after we got back from Colorado, and we watched a chunk of trueblood, something like the first five of the last season. Then he got a text from a friend, inviting him out to the hilo. Then all this happend:

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Two hours later, we went and watched a few more episodes, and then called it quits. Still haven’t finished it.

alex and the road home

2012-10-13 18:09:11Z

So I mentioned in the previous post seeing my friend Alex, and I sorta can’t believe I didn’t take any pictures of him, but it was really amazing to see him. On the last night of our stay, we met in this Arthouse-cinema place; outside it was a cafe/bar, and inside they played art films. It was great to see him and catch up. He’s in an Economics PhD program and kicking ass. Then there was the drive home. There were these amazing storms; one looke like the rain just stopped suddenly; we could see the clear air above the rain that was still falling. Then behind that storm, there was this weird dark mist (in the last photo). It was eaither really rapid evaporation in the heat that came behind the storm, or dust kicked up by the downdraft. But beautiful.

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rocky mountain nat'l park

2012-10-12 05:30:57Z

Like I said, mountains. and then behind this set are more mountains. And then, that evening, my friend alex showed me photos of a lake at 10,000 feet or something rediculous, beautiful, blue, clear and amazing. I’m definitely going to have to go back there and do some exploring.

a quiet little college town

2012-10-12 05:20:51Z

So, I’m currently on a plane, 37000 feet over the Atlantic. There is no wifi on this plane, which saddens me, if only because I can’t git push the cool things I’ve been doing with this Penumbra cypher. It’s terribly nerdy, but it’s keeping my mind occupied on these interminable flights. I’m some genuiuwill crack it in a minute as soon as someone bothers to notice it (As soon as I tweet to the author, probably). Anyway, Fort Collins was a really pleasant little town. I could actually see myself living there if/when I get sick of cities. There were pianos on the sidewalk,for anyone to play, and a bunch of breweries, and beautiful mountains, which I’ll get to in the next post.

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all the way to fort collins

2012-10-10 19:54:39Z

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: hammock camping is awesome. Setup and breakdown are easy, and it’s way easier on my back than sleeping on the ground. Also: starlight is awesome. We drove west from the state park in the morning. We were passing through this little town when we saw a little band of locals out in front of a what looked like a little house; they waved, we waved, and about two seconds later we were turning around to see what was going on. Turns out the house was a museum, and the locals gatherd were there for their weekly saturday morning get together. There were home made doughnuts and coffee, and everybody was sitting around telling stories. The museum had a ton of antiques, things found out in the desert, fossils, etc. The old couple running the place had just celebrated their 64th wedding anniversary. From there, we drove to Clayton, NM. had a delicious meal at the rabbit ear cafe (real green chili!) after going intentionally the wrong way for a minute. Then we high-tailed it to the interstate, and drove on the rest of the way. Another good day.

https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0065.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0066.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0067.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0068.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0069.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/all_the_way_to_fort_collins/655/0070.jpg’ />

to the panhandle

2012-10-10 19:31:18Z

really, though, I can only do the quotidian for so long before I have to go do something fun and unexpected. We went to colorado by way of black mesa; it’s about 6 hours more driving that way than the interstate, but it’s at least interesting.

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some random things

2012-10-10 18:33:15Z

theses are just from one of those fortnights where things just sort of move along. We went to the range and took the long way home, took a midnight bike ride, went to the lake and sat on the shore under the starlight. The there was Hunter’s birthday, where the light was awful but the food was wonderful.

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moving day

2012-10-09 16:47:16Z

helped my friend kj move into a new place. it rained, we waited, there were beers and burgers in there; not pictured is the doorknob I had to break off when someone locked their keys in the house. Good times.

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starlight

2012-10-08 22:15:58Z

went south to shoot the leonids back in august… didnt’ get many on film, unfortunately. Sort of the opposite of my luck at shooting lightning. The stars are always beautiful though.

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ali harter at the blue note

2012-10-05 04:29:04Z

Probably one of the best shows I’ve seen all year. Unpretentions, unaffected, just a woman and a guitar. I was surprised when I found out she wasn’t the headliner; the other bands were a couple of forgettable rock combinations. Anyway, yeah. Photos:

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robbers' cave state park

2012-10-05 00:11:12Z

A nice day out with my parents and Sophie. Tune in later for ruminations on the difference between cameras as flashy toys and cameras as tools. There may be a bonus section on the camera as a weapon as well…

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girl talk

2012-10-04 05:27:56Z

I didn’t have nearly as good a time as Sophie at this show, which is to say, I had a good time, but she was having the best time. It was the best part of all of the songs you love on fast forward for two hours. Lots of fun, but I still have some qualms with it- seems like he’s sacrificing depth and meaning by skipping between all of those parts of songs that just get you that frisson of goodness. It’s more pop than pop; a hyperreal pop, if you will. An evening of uncanny moments. I said on twitter last week: “In a world of simulacra, the uncanny experience– one that is just like the real thing– is all we have.” The implication being that ‘just like the real thing’ is insufficient. Girl talk turns that up to 11. It’s a show filled with uncanny moments, the striking sense of familiarity with a track that turns out to be just a little off. He makes music by collaging other peoples’ music: a simulacra of music. It’s fast and complex and hard not to listen to, and hard to think when you listen to. What it is overwhelms what it means, if it means anything. It subverts the ability to grasp why it doesn’t fulfill in the same way as many of the pop acts he borrows from. I’m maybe being too harsh here. It was a fun show. Just don’t expec to be moved to the depths of you soul or anything, and you’ll be fine.

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operation dinner out

2012-10-04 05:23:40Z

Well, not so much operation as… someone’s birthday at musashi’s? surely we weren’t randomly driving down western at sunset and decided to eat there, of all places. Anyway, a more serious post is up next.

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birds and planes

2012-10-04 01:37:10Z

Things in the sky.

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an evening in dallas

2012-10-03 19:58:34Z

So, after the run and a nice lunch, we drove down to Dallas to see some friends for some reason or another. Tim and Katie are always a fun time. Also photogenic as fuck:

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color me rad 5k

2012-10-03 16:55:11Z

I ran/walked in this… as you can see from the photo, I found out just how out of shape I am. Of course it was hella hot and they didn’t have much water for us, for some reason. Normally I’d say, “Walk two miles? No problemo,” but this was actually hard. I mean, nothing a shower and a quesadilla couldn’t fix, but yeah. Isn’t Sophie lovely, even all covered in dye?

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a couple pictures of bikes

2012-10-03 06:12:06Z

This post does what it says on the label, that’s all. If you’re wodering why I’m pushing out so many posts at once, I’m trying to clear most of the backlog before I go to spain. I’ve got a week and a half to get caught up to right now. Also, I have to be up in the morning, so this is all for tonight.

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MC show

2012-10-03 05:51:52Z

I don’t feel like writing/everything I write makes me feel self conscious. So here’s some photos.

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maeghan's bday

2012-10-02 23:03:20Z

So these are the only good pictures I got the night we all gathered at blue note for my friend maeghan’s birthday… unfortunately, none of them are of her. Oh well, maybe next year.

lightning

2012-09-27 04:32:38Z

So yeah, just a quick post… been watching the lightning out on the porch with Sophia. Really spectacular storms. I have about a bazillion photos in the backlog to post as well, but this was really too good not to share.

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Smash's B-day

2012-09-11 03:06:36Z

It’s been a while coming, but here are the photos of Ash’s birthday, which was the ~~excuse~~ reason I went out there anyway. That and I really wanted to get out of OKC for a bit. It was a fun night, that started with food trucks and ran on through several bars, and ended with me getting poisoned. Or something. I wasn’t that drunk, and I work up with the worst possible hangover. As in I was suffering all day, worse than any other hangover I’ve ever had. Got up at noon, and drove home. Had to dose myself with coffee and coconut water and a bagel to get moving. It was a pretty drive, as drives in the American west usually are. Not nearly as nice as getting home to my bed, though.

in which I get lost in downtown LA

2012-08-07 05:05:43Z

Thursday was a down day for the most part. I chilled, I read, I fixed a toilet, napped. A vaca from the vacation. but, because I can’t seem to sit still, even for one day, I started surfing art gallery web sites, and I found out that one of the big ones, MOCA, was open till 8 and after 5 was free. Ash, my host, didn’t want to go, so I hopped in my car and drove there myself, a feat that I would have been completely unable to do sans phone. Parked downtown several blocks away from the museum, and proceeded to get lost. I would have been fine if downtown LA had one street level, but of course it doesn’t. Anyway, I had a nice time being lost. Like always. I took out my camera, and found some pictures. These are part of a larger body of work, or may be… I’m trying to from an idea around the scale of cities, the perspective that that scale involves. I’m being elliptical because I’m not sure what I’m talking about. The idea isn’t complete, and it wouldn’t be interesting if it was. MOCA was freaking amazing. I’m not going to post any of the photos I took inside, because this isn’t an art history blog. I was stoked to see “John Baldessari”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU7V4GyEuXA, Robert Irwin, and a bunch of others. I was surprised at the power of the Rothko; given a whole day, I would have sat on the bench and stared for hours. There were some Arbus prints, around a corner, badly lit, and really truly unimpressive. Really let the air out of that legend for me. Anyway, after that there wasn’t much to do but drive home.

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4th

2012-08-05 18:16:18Z

So, I got there, and there was much rejoicing and not a little drinking. There was a bartender who gave me a shot that would have killed a lesser man. Me? I was fine. Totally all right, except for the stumbling. Then came the fourth, wherein all of our plans went awry. Plans are usually lists of things that don’t happen, in my reckoning, but I’ve never had quite so many fall through so completely. We were going to go to a beach somewhere for fireworks, but then there was hella traffic, so that turned us back. Then there was maybe a car show, but that was $20 to get in, and the booze wasn’t included. Finally, we said fuck it and went to a parking garage, where we actually got to see several shows, all round the valley we were in (I don’t know if it was the valley or not). There was beer and little caesars and another bar. A great deal of driving in the least traffic I saw while I was out there. Good times.

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arrival

2012-08-05 18:10:40Z

finally getting where you’re going is awesome, especially because that means whatever madness you came for can begin.

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road problems

2012-08-04 23:28:38Z

Things were fine through the national park, and then I realized I’d left my phone on silent, and I had a bazillion messages. The power was out at my house, my roommate had no AC. So, with little to no signal, I pulled off the road to try to connect and check the bill, with no luck. I stopped in a little town, to try to find some wifi, and after a bit of wandering, I found a mcdonalds that I’d missed on the first pass. Sure enough, I was past due. So I paid the bill, and then spent the next couple hours worrying that the A/C was still off in the house (it wasn’t). Anyway, that was a wasted couple hours all told, between the stopping twice and wardriving looking for wifi. It was totally worth it, though, when I saw that mountain off in the distance. Really amazing sunset for me, and a truly quaint motel in Williams AZ. Right out of the 50s, and although the town is one of those places that seems on the edge of collapse due to tourism. When a place has discount souvenir stores, it’s in some kind of trouble. I think the steady stream of people coming through keeps it in the black, though.

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petrified forest national park

2012-08-04 23:21:54Z

PFNP, for short, is just off of I-40, and I figured since I had some time to kill, I might as well drive the short loop and see the sights. It’s a lovely stretch of desert, but like most of this trip, it was ungodly hot, so I didn’t care to stick around too long. Very pretty, and worth the hour that I spent on it. Luckily, I got some other tourists to take my photo, even. Thanks random family from Florida! Hope the hydrating for altitude sickness worked out. That’s a lens in my left hand, in case you’re wondering.

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day 2: more driving

2012-08-04 22:54:18Z

This was day 2 of driving. It really was a pretty spectacular day, shot through with beautiful vistas and interesting stops. I had a green chili breakfast burrito to start it off, and it was just smooth sailing from there until after Petrified forest NP. Since those photos are in the next post, I’ll save that half of the day for later.

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road to cali (leaving town)

2012-08-02 05:04:15Z

I went out to LA to see my friend Ashley, AKA Smash, AKA chef to the unnameable stars (not that I signed an NDA, but trust does still mean something). But before I got there, I had to roll across two deserts, two mountain ranges, and untold small towns that I passed without even realizing. I covered half of I-40, coming and going. I know that road fairly well from my college days, but there’s a difference between a full on burn, at the edge of what’s possible for a college student to run out in the time he’s got to get to school, and a nice leisurely drive across half the country. On the way there, I split it across three days; six hours from home, I stopped in the New Mexico rest area and slept, after getting out and staring at the moon. There’s a kind of tired that’s familiar to anybody that’s done any solo driving. You start to feel it at the edges of things hours before you pull over– a little ache at the corner of your eyes, wandering attention between songs on the radio. When you need to push, you can push through that kind of tired. It’s not safe, but it is at least interesting. I started to feel it before I got to Amarillo; I knew there were two rest areas before Albuquerque that would do, if I could make it, so I pushed through a little. Now, understand, this trip has nothing on some of the epically stupid things I’ve done; Once, I started to feel the same driving through Arkansas, and turned north to drive through Kentucky, for what I thought would be a shortcut through to Virginia; about 20 hours later, sans stop, I made it. It’s easy to lose yourself; to get disconnected from the moment. All that you see is a million miles of flat ground, and the same white and yellow lines; it’s easy to feel cut off from the rest of the universe. In that moment, the most important thing to do is concentrate. Lose focus, the mind wanders. Eyelids get heavy, and then it’s up to luck- bumps in the road, rumble strips, a song change on the radio. Or you don’t wake up. I have always been very lucky. Anyway, this time I decided to be at least a little rational, and stop and sleep not too far into the journey. I took pictures to try and get that feeling down, and there was a storm off to the northwest that helped-things wander, and then you get a jolt of the present that brings you back.

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camping trip (nights)

2012-08-01 05:01:56Z

I think this was before the fourth, but don’t quote me. There’s been a lot of beer and quite a few miles since then. This was a good time, getting to know some new folks, and seeing some old friends as well. Hammock camping is awesome; I was set up and ready to go in like 15 minutes, and down and ready to leave in 5. Things to remember not in the photos: getting stuck going up the hill coming into camp, the place we stopped at was the shortest, everything tastes good cooked over a fire, and be sure to wear sunscreen. There is a second post, with the day photos, below.

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camping trip (days)

2012-08-01 05:01:01Z

These are the day photos; let the recording angel note that this is the Illinois River, outside Talequah; That we spent 7 hours floating 6 miles; that by the end, I was burnt, exhausted, and took a two hour nap the moment we got back to camp. Recommended: take a waterproof parasol, a camera with a housing, and use a canoe. Canoes go faster.

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traci's hilo birthday

2012-07-31 00:26:41Z

So, there was a lot of wildness this night, including a dude with leopard print tattoos over 90% of his body. Singing, dancing, and that was just in the living room. Than we went to the Hilo in cabs (for those of you in real cities, fuck you for having cabs that show up within 15 minutes when you call), proceecded to get hammered, then the dfry for fries at last call; we nearly lost Jay to some dude, and had to circle around twice to get him. Props to (in no particular order): The Morracan cabbie that dealt with our drunk asses, the bartenders at both bars, my downstairs neighbors for not calling the authorities, and finally, to Sarah, Reaghan, Sophia (who was somewhat new to this madness at the time), and of course, the birthday girl, Traci.

sarah francois comes to town

2012-07-29 18:50:21Z

My friends are sort of scattered, not just in the head, but geographically. All over the US and in several countries abroad as well. So I’m always stoked to see one of them come through my neck of the woods. Sarah is one of those friends with whom distance and time don’t matter; A hug and a beer and then we’re back on bikes, as if no time had passed since we’d last seen each other. Ben, her Londoner boyfriend, came along, and with Sophie rounding out a quartet, we had a grand time catching up.

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semi-random

2012-07-29 18:35:36Z

Sophie, then Anne and Isaac, from the last game of the finals.

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bluenote nights in a nutshell

2012-07-29 18:31:26Z

Walk to the bar, play pool, drink, stumble home.

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shivery shakes and boom bang at blue note

2012-07-27 19:52:47Z

This show was really rad. The Shivery shakes were good enough that I went right up after the set and bought their EP and followed them “on twitter”:https://twitter.com/shiveryshakes . And then the boom bang was in fine form, as usual. Good show, good times.

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cool little show at IAO

2012-07-27 19:31:25Z

This was a cool little show at IAO- the first time I’ve seen fiber arts since being in Santa Fe, and a cool little folky combo playing live music to boot. It was a good time; thanks to “Kerry”:https://twitter.com/jane4oh5 for getting me out there.

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the fisheye is a gimmick

2012-07-26 23:12:32Z

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’m pretty much over the fisheye. It really doesn’t have that much utility for image making. It has one look, and it does that all the time. There’s definitely a place for instagram-like pictures, but it’s not coming out of the SLR. After these, there are a couple more in the queue, but I’m retiring the fish o-fish-ally.

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shitty awesome and some crazy dudes

2012-07-26 15:30:23Z

This was a good show. Shitty/Awesome had some new stuff, and OBN IIIs was just out of their gourds. Good rock n’ roll, real crazy. Like, jump off the stage, mosh with the crowd, break some pint glasses, and then go on with the show.

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editing is hard

2012-07-26 05:30:32Z

So yeah, I did a lot of shooting an no editing, as I am wont to do, and it’s taken a while for me to catch up even this much. At this momen, 100 photos are processing to jpeg, at which point they’ll be postable again. I got through all the photos from camping, from one blue note show, from the week in cali, and the trips out and back. So those are all coming in the next couple days. Other good things that are happening. If you care about the day-to-day, you’re probably already my freind on FB and twitter, so I won’t bore you with repitition. Here’s a nice picture of the moon to start.

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the fish returns

2012-06-08 07:16:31Z

So, for some reason I finally got off my lazy ass and rebuilt my fisheye. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do ever since it broke on the way home from mexico last August (I never did get around to posting those pics). Anyway, suffice to say that super glue is not a strutural seal for anything that may take any kind of blunt force, like dropping, or time spent in my luggage. This is version 3 of this lens. The first two were prototypes, this one is a lot more usable. I used my dremel and made a focusing helical, even, so now the lens doesn’t fall off the end of the camera. Proof is in the pudding. I’m aware that the fish is sort of a gimmick lens, but it’s fun to play with.

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some random things 1

2012-06-08 07:09:05Z

File this under ‘life doesn’t really have a neat ordered narrative’. If it did, well, it wouldn’t be nearly this interesting. pretty girls, food from trucks, bike rides followed by bars followed by blogging… Anyway, photos:

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coming home from sf

2012-06-04 06:10:39Z

These are the last photos from my trip to SF. Went to a lovely barbecue with the devs, and then walked to the nearest BART station, which was a bit of a hike with my luggage, but the fact that I’d had plenty of beer with the food helped, and I made it just fine, with plenty of time to get to my gate. A good trip.

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pretty things at bluenote

2012-06-02 01:33:00Z

Last night I went to the blue note, not expecting much after the thunder game. I got a nice surprise. The “Pretty Things Peep Show”:http://www.prettythingsproductions.com was there, and I’ve gotta say they’re one of the better acts I’ve seen. The MC, Donny Vomit, kept things lively. I wish I’d taken more photos. As it is, editing these was really difficult- I liked a lot of them. The bed of no nails was particularly funny/entertaining.

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gimme shelter

2012-06-01 07:16:06Z

I don’t even know if I should tell this story. I’m still, at heart, trying to shoot the perfect assignment for Life in 1952. It was a couple of days ago, no longer news, just a thing that happened. It’s definitely one of my stories, one without a moral or a cause… a thing happened, and in the middle, there was a golden beautiful moment. Just for a moment, despite the world going to hell around us, there was a little perfection. So, I was at sauced when the storms came through on tuesday. At first, everybody was on the patio, but the sky opened up and drove is all inside; even the covered areas were getting wet. Then, a few minutes later, while I was standing in line for another beer, the owner came in and told us all we had to go to the basement, there was a tornado warning. Then the sirens went off, and we all had a harrowing moment running through the rain. In the basement, they gave us all beers and told us not to worry, even as water ran down the walls. But this is oklahoma, we’re used to bad weather, so everyone took it in stride, and we even toasted the proprietor. Then, after maybe 20 minutes, we all left; the worst part of the storm had blown over. I’m drunk and things are weird right now. But what else is new? A state of profound weirdness has become normal.

fireman training

2012-05-23 17:18:36Z

Let’s see… this was two weeks ago? I was out in SF again to get trained in what we call the ‘fireman’ role. Basically, a fire is a problem caused by the platform, requiring both access to the backend and knowledge of our code base to solve. So I got a week long crash course in all that. It’s a big app that does a lot between a lot of services, so it was more figuring out how to find out what I’d need to know than rote memorization. Also, of course, there was the non-work times. A week in one of the most beautiful cities in the world? Yes. Any time. On my last two days, I flirted with the idea of staying for another week, but I knew that that would just turn into me extending the stay as long as possible (two weeks, then a month, then finding an apartment…). Not a problem for anyone out there, but a bitch for some people back here. Plus, I would have missed mothers’ day brunch, and I couldn’t have done that. photos somewhat tangential:

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norman music fest 2012

2012-05-21 02:12:20Z

What’s this? Two posts in two days? It’s as if I’m really blogging again. All I can say is, don’t get used to it. I’ve got a bit of a backlog, but it won’t last. I’m doing stuff again though, so that might bring up the post volume somewhat. These photos are from norman music fest. It was a good day; pretty much exactly what I needed at the time. Met up with Anne, hung out with some of her friends, ran into a bunch of mine, drank, got made fun of at the stand up set (all in good fun). For once, NMF wasn’t an unqualified disaster. When I wasn’t worried about rushing around to see any band in particular, and focused on the people I was hanging out with, it turned out to be a good time.

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Railsconf 2012

2012-05-20 20:45:20Z

This was several weeks ago now, but I was in austin for a few days for Railsconf 2012. It was pretty fun, even though I didn’t go to any talks really. My job, while I was there, was to answer questions people had about our product in our booth. Pretty cool to meet everyone, actually. Note that these photos are a bit out of sequence; my little camera had the wrong year. Next: NMF!

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pleiades and venus up close

2012-04-08 21:50:20Z

Nothing tests your long exposure technique quite like shooting stars through a 500mm mirror lens. I should have been using a remote and mirror lock. 1 sec at 3200iso, f/6.3 (for the curious). Click the photo to see it larger.

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pickup game

2012-04-08 20:50:20Z

So last sunday, there was brunch and basketball watching at BBell’s house, and the dudes got inspired to go play a little pickup game in the alley, shirts vs. skins. I think skins won by 7 points. Then they realized due to the location of the basket relative to a certain ledge that they could all dunk. So that happened. Today I’m working, and then I’ma ride my bike later. Fun and adventure and really wild things. I see this post and the last post and I marveled at the fact that all those pictures happened in the same world. It’s no surprise, reflecting on this, that people get lost going from one place to another.

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SF Scenes (in the city)

2012-04-05 15:51:20Z

This was the first time I’ve been to San Francisco (since my first visit to the city back in high school) that I’ve felt like I got anything approaching an understanding with the city. The scale of it always threw me off in the past, for some reason. There was a mental parallax, if you will, between what I was expecting and what I was seeing. I think I’ve got a better alignment now.

https://images.matt.pictures/sf_scenes_(in_the_city)/700/0013.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/sf_scenes_(in_the_city)/700/0016.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/sf_scenes_(in_the_city)/700/0017.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/sf_scenes_(in_the_city)/700/0021.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/sf_scenes_(in_the_city)/700/0022.jpg’ />

The rest of the week (in people)

2012-04-05 15:39:20Z

Because I don’t want to go on ad nauseum about the meetup, I’m just gonna lump together things in two more posts. The people and the scenes- if I’d been doing this chronologically as I went, it wouldn’t be so bad, but now after the end it’s time to post and move on. So, they took us bowling wednesday, and it was pretty fun, despite the fact that I got the lowest score both times (bowling is not my sport). There was some fairly memorable sushi thursday, as well- 18 of us packed in to a restaurant smaller than my home office, with seating for 16.

https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0009.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0010.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0011.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0012.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0014.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0023.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_rest_of_the_week_(in_people)/701/0024.jpg’ />

Seemant's Boat (again)

2012-04-04 18:31:20Z

The only problem with parties on Seemant’s boat is the lighting. After dark, it gets very dark, so we tend to move elsewhere and scare the local restaurant managers before stumbling into a cab that breaks down just on the SF side of the bridge.

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The hangover that lasted a week

2012-04-04 01:30:20Z

So I know I said more photos coming soon in that last post… and then a lot of things happened all at once and next thing I know it’s a week from the following tuesday and I have a lingering sinus infection (don’t ask). So sue me. I didn’t actually have a hangover all week, but it sort of feels like I did; it’ll be a month before I’m recovered from the cycle of work-party-sleep-train-work. I don’t know how the guys who went out more did it at all. These are from saturday, I think. Rickhouse and Irish Bank with co-workers; the brits (Tim and Adam) arrived and all we could do is high five them. And then we drank excessively. Actually, scratch that; I was somewhat drunk when I took the photo of the street drummer, and that was fairly early on. The there were punchbowls and beers and falafel. And then sleep and more work. The rest of the week was a lot the same, with different people. The rest of the photos are mostly done, I’ll probably get around to posting them tomorrow. Three or four posts worth, at least.

https://images.matt.pictures/the_hangover_that_lasted_a_week/703/0001.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_hangover_that_lasted_a_week/703/0002.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_hangover_that_lasted_a_week/703/0003.jpg’ /> https://images.matt.pictures/the_hangover_that_lasted_a_week/703/0004.jpg’ />

figments from san fransisco

2012-03-24 21:22:20Z

I really like that word, ‘figment’. I’m stealing its use to describe photographs, of course. There may or may not be photos of a very long night in SF coming soon, depending on the hangover.

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about to start getting ready

2012-03-21 15:22:20Z

Another SF trip coming. I fly out Friday, work all weekend, and then half days all week, with the other half consumed by meetings and trainings. Worst part of the coming week: leaving my girlfriend here. Best part of this week: meeting all the great people on my team that I haven’t met yet. I do love to travel, to hit the open road. The world is so big and so full of possibility, and going places, for whatever reason, reminds me of that. Even though sometimes I bitch about being cramped or bored or exhausted, it’s still better than sitting at home.

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have you seen this bike?

2012-03-18 18:22:20Z

Coolest bike I’ve seen out somewhere in a while. All campy record, looked all original. I was, in my jealousy, tempted to clip that lock. But there’d be no joy in that, so I took a picture. If you’re the owner of this bike: we should ride some time, you’re probably pretty cool.

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Meet Ronan

2012-03-16 20:18:20Z

Ronan is KJ’s new baby, about a week and a half old at this point. She’s already picking up her head and rolling over, which means nothing to me, but apparently means she’s very strong for a newborn. Congratulations to KJ and Thorne!

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Today is Thursday

2012-03-15 14:40:20Z

And two days ago was my first thunder game. Have I mentioned, lately, how awesome my girlfriend is? Because she got us corporate box seats. Easily the swankiest way to see a basketball game– that ish was catered from the start and at halftime there was a desert cart that came by. I didn’t take the long lens, so no great pictures of anything, but it was a great game, right up till the last minute where we lost. Refs were blind, we shoulda gotten foul shots in those final seconds. Unrelated: I saw a pretty car that day, too.

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quick thought...

2012-03-13 18:05:20Z

Just a quick thought while I’m working– I’m sitting here and I realize that my phone has more ram and processing power than the web server that runs this site. How much longer before my phone could run my entire web presence without it being noticeable? and how long before the “mobile web” is the only web consumers like you and me use? There is a need for big iron (big server farms, lots of data processing capacity), but most of that stuff that I use could be distributed. I think it’s not going to be long before I can buy an app that makes me the center of my social media (as opposed to some external company), and when I want to turn it off or hide those embarrassing photos I posted, I can. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOEMv0S8AcA”>Freedom in the cloud, anyone?

This cloud thing is really getting out of hand

2012-03-13 14:05:20Z

Maybe not in a bad way? It seems like even when I’m taking pictures of people, I’m really looking at the far background. In other news, I may have another kidney infection. Since the last one landed me in a hospital in Egypt for three days, I’m being pretty cautious about this one, going to the doc this afternoon, pushing fluids (including that perennial favorite, cranberry juice).

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We went to momentum...

2012-03-11 10:45:20Z

So, we went to momentum last night, and there were a couple interesting things… an odd performance piece where this girl was grating beets. WTF do you grate beets for in the real world anyway? And seriously, WTF was that supposed to mean? I’m all for performance art. But man, I don’t know about that one. I could go down the list of weird shit I didn’t get for a while, but shooting down art that falls flat in Oklahoma is far too easy (and the performance piece above was actually better than a lot of what was there). Overall, this year’s Momentum just lacked a lot of the charm and whimsy that has marked it in the past. Like the guy from last year who was putting up signs on all the sold pieces that said something like “This is no longer Art,” or the Womb Room from the year before (or was that 2009?). Even the really good pieces that were chosen seemed to be playing it safe on the part of the curators. I’ve been doing a lot of streets and clouds lately. Sometimes I’m just looking for that perfect moment when the light in the sky is balanced by the streetlights, and other times, I just want to take a picture of something to see how it looks. Photos (mostly) unrelated:

https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0001.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0002.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0003.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0004.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0005.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0006.jpg” /> https://images.matt.pictures/we_went_to_momentum…/711/0007.jpg” />

Just photos of the clouds

2012-03-08 23:23:20Z

It’s too dark outside to do this with the phone, so I pulled out the big iron, and shot the moon. As it turned out though, the clouds were more interesting.

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I had a nightmare last night

2012-02-25 10:23:20Z

The nightmare was my twitter got hacked. This is how good my life is right now, that’s the worst my subconscious could come up with. Of course, I’m sure the world is going to come up with something much worse, now that I’ve said that. I haven’t blogged for a while, but I’m not giving up. I thought about rebooting and redesigning and using another domain that already points here: http://photounrelated.com”>photounrelated.com. That may still happen. Of course, since all my traffic comes from twitter and facebook anyway, it doesn’t matter, so long as the old links and the new ones still work. Photo Unrelated:

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interrupting the story for a moment

2011-12-07 14:00:00Z

So yeah, our coherent narrative has to be interrupted for this breaking story: I have a darkroom! I developed film! here, proofs:

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Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Then I got on a plane

2011-11-12 21:30:20Z

So I woke up at the ungodly hour of 5am after all that madness and grabbed all my stuff and walked over to the gf’s (who wasn’t yet anything other than an interesting friend) house, and woke her up, and she drove me to the airport. I like morning flights, you never end up done with everything and having hours to kill before them. It’s always wake up and go. Anyway, I get through security and put my shoes back on and have just enough time to get a burrito before I get on what might be only the second or third direct flight of my life; really quite nice to get on one plane and get off at your destination after a nice litle nap. Anyway, I disembarked, got on the bart and headed to my hotel; even napping on the plane I was still exhausted, so I took another nap. Then we went out to Seemant’s house boat, docked in Oakland, and had steaks and chips and a ton of beer. People talked, I got reasonably inebriated, and then we all tried to take the ferry, but it was closed early for fleet week. So, we all got back on the BART and went back to our respective hotels. Then I did something that seemed like a good idea at the time: I opened the window. Long story short, I was sick for two days with what I thought was a bad head cold, but turned out to be bad allergies. A day of cold medicine and a day of sudafed and then finally claritin did me right and reduced my symptoms to a headache. Which is why, in case any of the people who were there are wondering, I looked and felt slightly off all week. Other than that, it was a week of meetings and eating spectacular food and a lot of walking. LOT of walking.

https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0001.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0002.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0003.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0004.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0005.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0006.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0007.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0008.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0009.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0010.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0011.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0012.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0013.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0014.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0015.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0016.jpg” > https://images.matt.pictures/then_i_got_on_a_plane/715/0017.jpg” >

Picking up the Thread

2011-11-10 10:48:20Z

So I’m dogsitting, and generally bored while my lady is out of town (If you’re reading this, I miss you), so I figure I should pick up the thread of “things that happend to Matt Mills” somewhere, and the best place is probably the punk show I wnet to the night before I flew to SF the last time. I was sitting around watching star wars with a friend, and I get a text message from http://twitter.com/jane4oh5”>Kerry that says, “Come to the Speakeasy, bring your camera. Copperheads and Boom Bang.” And then another that says ‘Really, I’ll pay you.’ I was bored with the whole star wars scene, having watched it approxamately 12 bazillion times as a kid, I still remember all the lines. (yes, I’m a nerd). So I ran home and grabbed my camera and went to the show, which hadn’t even started yet. There were some beers. Remember, I’m supposed to get on a plane early in the morning and fly out to meet all my coworkers in San Fransisco; thinking of this and my empty suitcase, I took it easy on the beers. It was a punk show though, which you can’t really attend without a little drinking. But you know that. So, beers are consumed, and then the copperheads come on and rip through their set like it was talking bad about their mothers. Really fun, fast set. I couldn’t understand any of the words, of course, but that’s not what matters, really. What matters is the noise and the speed and the croud being into it, all jammed up right next to the stage, and the lead singer thrashing around and falling to the floor because so much of his energy is going into the song he can’t even stand because there’s nothing left, and the drummer soaked with sweat and exhausted, and the guitar player jumping up and down and playing as fast as he can to keep up with it all. Either that or we were all a bunch of drunk roaring idiots. Then the Boom Bang came on and solidly kicked some more ass; if the Copperheads were a warm up act, the Boom Bang was a bonfire. I know I use a lot of superlatives, and some of you out there are probably wondering if I’m full of shit or what. I think I just happen to go see stuff at rad moments. I vaguely remember these guys from the last Norman Music Fest I was at, and I wasn’t that impressed. the show at the speakeasy was altogether different. They were right on the bleeding edge of good rock and roll that night. And if you don’t believe me, here are the photos:

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After all that I went home and threw my shit in a bag (this was one of those times a http://notuntitled.com/2010/08/22/the-list.html”>packing list comes in handy) and slept a few hours and got on a plane…

the last two months, condensed

2011-11-10 01:00:00Z

So the last two or three months have been a bit of a blur. I turned 27, found a spectacular woman, got situated in my new job, took three trips of a week each (two to san fransisco and one to mexico), decided to start shooting film again, drank, ate, and told stories, and generally lived it up. There are some photos of all this. They are coming soon, I promise.

The wedding

2011-09-26 13:28:20Z

My friends Heather and Kyle got married, oh a month and a half ago now, and I was lucky enough to attend… really beautiful ceremony, in the alley where they had their first beers together. While some of my longtime friends know that I refuse, under any circumstances, to be a wedding photographer, I didn’t take any money for this one, and I would have been there anyway, so in this case I made an exception and took some photos. Besides, they’re really amazing people and I wanted to do something nice for them.

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catching up

2011-09-24 04:28:20Z

Work has been especially worky and my personal life has ben a crazy roller coaster, and that means the blog has been a bit neglected, but I’m trying to catch up. A wedding (not my own), a vacation, two business trips (the first one to vancouver and the other to san fransisco), all that really wears on you. There’s not a ton of energy left to blog. Add that to the fact that when I’m working, I’m actually working now, and it demands my full attention (really, it’s more like a compulsion to fix things that I have a hard time putting down, but I digress). So I just haven’t had the extra capacity, in time or mental bandwidth to get updates out to the world. First of all the new job is great. Engine Yard is easily the best company I’ve ever worked for, the work completely obsesses and consumes me, and the team I’m on has some of the brightest people I’ve ever worked with. Also they’re “hiring”:http://www.engineyard.com/company/careers. The only downside so far is I’ve been so focused on work, especially the last month, that I haven’t had a whole lot of personal time. The reason I’m writing this is to try and make some time for myself. So that’ll be the last you hear from me about work for a while. I went out with my dad one night a couple of weeks ago, drinking good scotch, and the subject of just how lucky I am came up. A lot of very improbable things have happened to me, and that I survived them all with no long term damage (modulo occasional back problems, scars, and a trail of broken hearts) is also pretty remarkable. I lost count at 19, numbering the times I could have legitimately died if things had been just a little different. If I’d spiked a little more fever, or if I’d been hit a little harder by that car, or pavement, or whatever. Or if the right person hadn’t been there at the right moment to save me. So yeah, phenomenally lucky. So yeah. That’s the state of things. Since I have photos queued up and ready to go, expect to see them here sometime in the next week. For now, just a sunset I shot from riding river the other day:

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two good bands

2011-08-15 00:49:20Z

the title of this post could have easily been ‘too good bands’. This was “Dr. Pants”:http://www.doctorpants.com and “Student Film”:http://www.myspace.com/studentfilm , which I saw last week at the blue note and the mustache bash, respectively. Fun acts. I wish I had more to say, but I’m getting ready to go to mexico (!!!!) and my head is full logistics and flight details and all the things I need to do… Yeah. Just a couple days to relax and not think about anything. I was thinking about not even taking a laptop. Now, if you’re in either of those bands, pretend this whole paragraph was me saying nice things about you; I had at least that much to say all in my head earlier, but got distracted. Yeah.

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in between things

2011-08-12 12:49:20Z

So these are just photos from in between things… I’m not a 100% event oriented photographer, I have the camera with me all the time. So sometimes there are random nice things that would otherwise slip through the cracks. These are that.

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jewel of a city, hard to get home

2011-08-12 12:19:20Z

So, vancouver was really beautiful. Coming home was difficult- not because I was sad to leave vancouver, but because of storms over denver. I was so tired. And yeah, I know I’m behind again. my resolution to keep up with the present in my blog lasted all of two posts. I’ll be catching up today though, so keep an eye out. (also, the last pic is above denver, just so we’re clear)

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vancouver (1st day)

2011-08-01 07:41:20Z

Today is my first day with “Engine Yard”:http://engineyard.com. Last night, I got to go out with a couple of the managers and one of the other new hires, and I really like their style. Also, had some really awesome food and drink wandering around downtown Vancouver. Earlier, I wandered a bit- just down to the bay from my hotel, really. Saw the Olympic torch, heard about four languages (Welsh, something scandanavian, chinese, and japanese), and had pangs of longing for living in a real city. Also, they have hills here: real, steep, make you regret a fixed gear hills. I wish I had my bike. Tons of people here on bike, too. I love cities.

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news of the weird

2011-07-22 18:05:20Z

Riding down the highway last night and saw this.

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rock show

2011-07-19 13:58:20Z

So, the old format of waiting a month to post photos? I’m tired of it. doesn’t work for me any more. I’m declaring blogging bankruptcy on the what I haven’t blogged before last night’s photos, and we’re just going to rock out with stuff from the show last night. I saw like 5 acts take the stage, and 4 of them were fucking amazing. Skating Polly is punk as fuck. 11 and 16 and all the angst and rawness that they could possibly have. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of band they grow into. Josh Sallee surprised me; I hadn’t really heard of him, but by the end of his set I was a fan. Saturday Sirens killed it, as usual. Good solid rock n roll. And then there was the only disappointment of the evening, a band who’s name I don’t even remember (not pictured, either). They might be a good act on their own, but with all the amazing talent on display last night they just seemed lost. To finish it out, Jabee came on and showed us all why he’s doing so well out there in the real world (places not oklahoma). Really a good show.

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show out there some where (just show up)

2011-07-02 20:24:20Z

Really fun night, just by showing up. It’d be nice if I could remember the name of the band or the singer, but I do remember that it was their first night playing together live. It was a really fun show. I’ll let the photos tell the rest.

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two random

2011-07-01 10:11:20Z

Just two random photos from the queue. Woke up with a sober hangover this morning. It’s like waking up after a night of heavy drinking, but without the fun of the night before. A full night’s sleep, where you wake up still tired and wondering just what the hell happened to you. Luckily, this morning, somebody brought me coffee, and life was good again. Anyway, the photos: Traci and Sky after a ride (come to think of it, this was the last time we rode) and then, a sunset storm.

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out in the woods

2011-06-28 13:11:20Z

So “@ryukochan”:http://twitter.com/#!/ryukochan, (Anne to her friends) said, I’m bored with my avatar, and so I suggested a photoshoot… next thing you know we’re planning a shoot out in the woods. The idea was for her to get lost in the woods and go from civilized and contained to completely unrestrained and feral. I have more photos, but I’m not publishing just everything yet, because I’m thinking I might submit it a few places. Fun shoot, anyway.

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more unrelated photos

2011-06-24 13:11:20Z

Weaning myself off the fisheye with a standard wide zoom. Things are afoot. Time to get away from the computer.

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weekend adventures

2011-06-24 08:32:20Z

Last blurry fisheye post, I swear. I do love those flags though. Er, well, the photos of them. As symbols, some days yes and some days no. Things like “this”:http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ln9aa10UAg1qzqlvro1_500.png make me wonder. But anyway, it’s friday, and it’s already a good day. Saw the sunrise and took pictures of clouds. Not a bad way to start your day.

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friends with fisheye

2011-06-23 12:28:20Z

I promise I am using my normal lens more now… but the fish is so fun.

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fish mark 2

2011-06-22 13:19:20Z

So the longest day of the year is behind us, and lots of good things are going on behind the scenes. In front, though, there’s this lens. This is version two of the thing, with the aperture control. I don’t remember (and I’m too lazy) if I mentioned this here before, but I like the photos and don’t mind another lens-specific post. I made it from some copper and stainless tubing and a projection lens from a TV, along with some parts from a broken 35mm that I had laying around. I need to get my bag back together and start carrying this thing again. Anyway, photos! These are from the last really bad stormy night; tornados in Blanchard and Edmond. Next: fish and friends!

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work is fun

2011-06-20 06:13:20Z

sometimes, at least.

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portraits from brunch

2011-06-20 06:12:20Z

yeah, yeah. Gratuitous picture of your friends Monday, something like that.

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brunch ish

2011-06-17 07:23:20Z

so, this was a hell of an epic brunch. Back when the thunder was still playing, I think. I find myself in picasso’s most sundays, because a) they’re close, and b) they’re awesome. It’s the kind of place you can meet a girl for the first time to kick off something amazing (photos to come on that one), meet your friends hungover, or take your mom for mother’s day. I’ve done all that in the past month there. It’s always a good time. This one was especially good, what with the thunder win and the pretty girls and plentiful mimosas. The epitome of a Picasso’s brunch.

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lots to tell

2011-06-17 07:15:20Z

I just pushed the better part of a month’s photos up to the server, and there’s a whole metric fuckton (bigger than a standard fuckton, you know) of stories to tell. Some of which I can’t tell, because a gentleman doesn’t. You all know neighbor Traci? Love neighbor Traci (that’s an order). She’s one of the friends that I’m fantastically lucky to have around. This was at the other room about a month ago, some random saturday. So a bunch of us were drinking, and somebody pulls out these fake glasses. You can’t tell because of the light, but they’re those yellow-tinted lenses. And Traci is just goofing off, being her usual silly self. Always cracks me up.

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mini shoot right before the real fashion show

2011-05-30 20:20:20Z

So right before we all left for the plaza district, another photographer that was there took some of the girls out to shoot, and I sort of butted in and shot a few things too. Couldn’t help myself. Anyway, good photos. Now I have a chore to take care of. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m making little 4x6 prints of the actual fashion show to give to the girls and or their stylists.

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behind the scenes at a fashion show

2011-05-28 04:54:07Z

Velvet monkey puts on an annual fashion show at their Plaza district location, and a couple people I know were modeling and since I’m friends with a few of the stylists, I went and did some behind the scenes shooting at the downtown location while they were getting ready. Some good concepts, some good looks, pretty fun overall. I’ve got another post coming where we did a little guerilla shoot in the street, those’ll be up sometime tomorrow.

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after work...

2011-05-26 07:17:07Z

I saw this after work one day… dude just kept buzzing the soccer field and sign shops. Now I want one of these rigs.

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outside, after hours

2011-05-26 07:17:07Z

sometimes, the night is just too good to give up at 2am, and there’s no place to go, so you just chill outside the bar till things die down.

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looking up

2011-05-25 21:28:07Z

literally.

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lunch assembly line

2011-05-25 21:04:07Z

chick-fil-a is always mobbed with people and always fast. but that’s not what this is about.

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drummer pictures are hard

2011-05-25 21:00:07Z

and then my camera broke

2011-05-23 23:47:07Z

So yeah, day of, I get to the fest, anticipating one hell of a day, and instead I get an unmitigated disaster. My camera broke and a bunch of other things happened. And then I heard about some other shit, fights and bullshit. And a pretty girl that I’m into left town for L.A. (Sidenote: I really should cut back on the women, but what fun would that be?). On the plus side, I was sober when it was time to drive back to the city. So I came back and passed out. Then I woke up and fixed the camera.

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while we're waiting

2011-05-21 00:34:07Z

well, given the strong possibility that the world might end today, I figured I should go ahead and get a coupe more photos up. by strong possibility, I mean that it’s as likely now as it is at any other minute in history. anyway: more norman photos. Friday Night. The Mimsies and some other madness before.

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with the roses

2011-05-20 00:34:07Z

I was walking home from somewhere west of my apartment, in the middle of the night, and I saw these and thought How Nice. And because it would be rude to pick someone else’s roses, I took a picture, and moved on.

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tattoo show

2011-05-20 00:23:07Z

randomly went to the tattoo convention, thinking I was there to see this band I keep missing (and who just changed lead singers for some reason, I dunno), and anyway, I had a pretty interesting conversation with their guitarist, I think, about the demographic represented there. Odd and interesting. Anyway, had one good photo:

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NMF (yeah, I'm that far behind)

2011-05-19 09:45:07Z

My shoulder is killing me… no idea why, I’m hoping I just slept on it wrong. The photos: I was down in norman for NMF thursday, friday, and saturday; this was the first night, everybody trying on Kj’s new glasses. Also Joey at the bottom rockin’ out with one of the bands he plays in that isn’t Shitty/Awesome.

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guitar hero

2011-05-16 13:47:07Z

those controllers aren’t hooked up to anything… they’re so good at rockband they no longer need the xbox. er, something like that.

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sunsets

2011-05-16 05:58:07Z

I know they’re cliched and overdone, but I still like ‘em. sunsets and clouds. I was a nat geo photog in another life, I swear. Garry Winogrand is still my spirit animal, though.

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the moon

2011-05-16 04:53:07Z

Oy vey, what a couple of weeks. Shooting the moon. Shooting the Sun. Shooting whatever looks good. It’s been nice. But I’ve realized over the past couple days that there are at least a few people that still want to see photos here. So, without further ado, I will be posting a bunch of shit from the last couple weeks, as usual, and as I can.

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saturday sirens

2011-04-28 18:46:07Z

These are the last photos in the queue to be posted; luckily, today, I got contacts, and I can see again. By see, I mean see pictures, not just focus on stuff. I can already tell, it’s better this way. Which I really knew all along. Anyway, photos… These are from a totally excellent show I went to at Belle Isle. The Saturday Sirens played a great set. thanks “@jane4oh5”:http://twitter.com/#!/jane4oh5 for tweeting about it, because it was a rad time.

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good day

2011-04-27 10:30:07Z

Author’s Note: If you don’t care about my personal life and just come here for the pictures, well, ignore the text and look at the pretty photo at the bottom. f yeah yesterday was a good day. better than “the song”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWfbGGZE07M. Guess you could say I started it off right. rolled over and kissed a pretty girl. really don’t wanna screw this up, so I’m gonna have to remain coy. We’re going slow(ish). Slower than usual. We’re acting like little Fonzies, and being cool about it. Anyway, from there, I emailed my bosses and told them I was taking a mental health day. The first thing you should do on a mental health day is sleep in. If there is a curvy, witty, or cute reason to stay in bed than all the better. So we did that, and then she had to get on with her day, and so did I, so we did. I got back to the city, to my apartment, and ran into my neighbor Traci, who was on her way to get her bike fixed, and we decided to go for a ride after she got back. She comes back with an un-fixed bike. The sales guy talked down to her at the bicycle store, and so she walked out and told them her neighbor (me) would fix it. So, I had her bring the bike up and I wrenched on it for a bit and got it into running shape again. I made a part for it, even. So that was good. Then we went for our ride, just to downtown and back, and we both saw and remembered at the same time that the Arts Festival was happening downtown. So we went down there for a late lunch, and she bought mine to thank me for fixing her bike. Then we came home, only on the way I got a flat tire. Really though, that was the only bad thing to happen today, and a flat tire that means a nice twenty minute walk home when I’ve got time to kill isn’t really bad. Then off to mom’s house for her “dialysis”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialysis… in case you’re wondering, she does it daily, at home, and I go out there to help her on nights that my dad can’t be there. Usually once a week, on tuesday, although that my change to a floating day as the class my dad teaches is out for the summer. Anyway, I hang out there, do some laundry, and then go home. I’ve said for years that tuesdays were the worst days of the week. Years. Now I’m reconsidering. This one day brought up the average so much that tuesdays are now on par with thursdays. Would I have noticed all this goodness on a saturday? Probably. Will this saturday, involving the girl from the first paragraph and norman music fest, be better? Maybe. It’s going to have to try hard.

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waiting

2011-04-25 12:16:07Z

Right now, I’m at work, on lunch, just sort of waiting for it to be over. When I have lunch here in the office (microwaved something-or-other) it only takes ten minutes, as opposed to the hour or hour and a half going out somewhere usually takes. And it’s cheaper, less than a buck for a sandwich and gatorade. And since there are only a couple decent restaurants in edmond anyway, I’m not missing much. The problem is, I’ve now got 50 minutes to kill. Luckily, I have a blog to write for… The photo is about waiting, too. Leia here was waiting for a phone call, to go and pick her boyfriend up. It’s complicated if you go deeper than that as far as details, but I like the photo anyway.

https://images.matt.pictures/waiting/754/0022.jpg”>

b-ville madness

2011-04-24 20:56:57Z

Went to bartlesville again, two weeks ago? three? I'm thinking three. And when I go to bartlesville, there is some madness. In no particular order: A broken cell phone. Divorce. Drinking. driving. A puppy that I couldn't keep, for now. Inappropriate jokes at 9am that were funny for all by 9:05.

other people's children

2011-04-24 11:55:55Z

So a lot of my friends have kids. Sometimes, they're around, or sometimes I'm around, whatever. But those individual pictures don't really fit with photos from bars, photos from parties, of drinking, etc. If there's anyone out there who only knows me through this blog, they might think that that's all I do, but the truth is a little more complicated. Anyway, what was the point of all that?

the other room

2011-04-22 05:38:41Z

well, this is a first. I'm up at 5 am, really awake at this hour for the first time in years. had a good day yesterday, and I'm planning on having another one today. I had a date, too, and I've got another one of those coming today, too. If you ever hear me complaining about my life, feel free to tell me to fuck off. (Now, that's different than bitching about oklahoma, which is as much a pastime here as bitching about the weather...)

walking into mcnellies

2011-04-21 02:16:35Z

I walked towards mcnellies, and I noticed the steam rising; and I thought, "If the shadows hold and I can get that steam, that'd be a good picture." So I tried a couple exposures, and it worked. i think this means I'm going to be all right, photographically.

sunset from the road

2011-04-20 11:56:31Z

moonshot

2011-04-20 01:20:31Z

the supermoon through the trees. the 500, natch.

moved to new software

2011-04-20 00:00:00Z

not that you'd notice, but I finally completed the move to jekyll for my blog. it makes it faster and less likely to crash. I don't even have to run mysql any more.

st patty's day

2011-04-15 00:00:00Z

mcnellies was nuts. the streets ran green with dudebro money. couldn’t stop us from dancin’ though.

this is my working life...

2011-04-13 00:00:00Z

where the most exciting real thing to happen is the sunlight I see as I come in. saying more about me than the work, I think.

from stillwater

2011-04-10 00:00:00Z

went up to stilly, to a cabin in the woods, 12 hours of get away from it all… It was pretty all right. Calming. I wouldn’t say restful. But hey, there you are.

bridge on the #rideforsanity

2011-04-05 00:00:00Z

this was on my first ride of the river trail for the season; I go out there once or twice a week and ride my troubles away. Or at least regain some calm and focus and put things into perspective. As I said somewhere near the inception of the five years blog that preceded this one, “Midnight bike rides fix Everything.” While they don’t, in fact, they always make me feel better.

bobby and zack skate

2011-04-05 00:00:00Z

yeah, that’s about it for these. I like the last one; looks like he’s doing karate or something.

the bag

2011-04-05 00:00:00Z

yeah, do I really need to comment? She just came out of the kitchen, dancing with that bag on her head. We were all wasted. I still don’t know why.

pretty neighbor ladies

2011-04-05 00:00:00Z

well, these aren’t my neighbors, they’re kj’s. but hey, they were cool to hang out with.

Momentum and stuff

2011-04-04 00:00:00Z

The dude in the hat! Amazing. I wrote about momentum for the naked earth blog but I have no idea when it will go live; sort of depends on the editor. The chair, I wanted to sit in it, I wanted to steal it and put it out by the curb; that chair did not belong in that show. Inconsistent curation. Also I’m supposed to write about graffiti for the NE journal. HA!

broken social scene

2011-03-30 00:00:00Z

went out to tulsa, got to see a really good show. Broken social sceneplayed. I’d heard BSS at parties, on the spy, etc, and a bunch of friends were going. So I went, not quite on a whim, but only with a couple days notice. Good show, good brunch the day after. I was sad that I didn’t even try to take my camera into the venue. A friend told me that they weren’t letting people with cameras in and so I didn’t try; turns out they didn’t care. And I could have been in the front row, too. Oh well.

ok nobody move this is a robbery

2011-03-22 00:00:00Z

er, something like that. a drive by blogging, maybe. Quick and painless as long as nobody tries to be a hero, OK?

finally doing a shoot...

2011-03-20 00:00:00Z

Going over to kj’s here in a minute to do a photo shoot, not either of the planned ones (that I’ll have to get off my ass and do here pretty quick, before summer tries to kill us all), but just a test shoot getting ready for a thing in early april. Anyway, photos unrelated:

just one photo

2011-03-19 00:00:00Z

for now. drinkin wine with my neighbor. laptop party. yep, we’re nerds. she’s cuter than your neighbor, though. (photo unrelated, from the blue note several weeks ago).

snow x2

2011-03-17 00:00:00Z

My photos from the first snow storm were a little too depressing… not in that they were bad, but you can tell looking at them that I feel like shit. Since I feel a lot better now (o hai spring), I’m leaving them out. But these, from the second storm, are better.

espresso cupping @elementalcoffee

2011-03-09 00:00:00Z

just a couple photos… got a bunch more in the queue. It’s amazing how far behind you get when you start a month behind and then lose the use of your laptop for a week and a half. But enough excuses. I’m working on a bunch of things… couple photo shoots coming up hopefully, coding some interesting side projects. I have to wonder: is the extra mental energy spent on coding a drain on my photography? I think it is. If nothing else, there’s only so much time in a day. I don’t sleep much. Oh well. That’s what the coffee obsession is for.

rough week

2011-03-08 00:00:00Z

It’s been a long week and a half actually. Broken laptop and hospital time and exhaustion and stress. But on the other hand: drinking and good times and great friends and new beautiful women. really, I’ll take what I can get. and now I’m back on the air, everybody’s healthy (knock on wood) and my lappy is more or less restored. Done and done.

skate photos near my house

2011-02-26 00:00:00Z

Taking photos of skaters is weird. I was doing it today, again, and really, it’s a completely different thing from photographing other kinds of athletes or doing regular portraits. It requires you to be very close to the action- you’ve got to be careful not to make yourself an obstacle while being in the middle of things, basically. Anyway, yeah. I’ve been off the last month. not shooting as well as I usually do. I’ll get it sorted. I’m hoping it’s just the winter blues, which usually go away as things warm up.

I'm a little nervous...

2011-02-25 00:00:00Z

Not about these photos, which are decent. I’m going to a rally today, in solidarity with the people in wisconsin. It’s another one of those moments in history. Revolutions across the world. Protests here in the US. People who are nostalgic for the late 60’s, wake up and get your ases down to the capitol. It’s a good time to be alive. And it is Oklahoma. Not a lot likely to happen here. (I know I just jinxed myself. The knowing negates it). But still, anything can happen. Anyway, enjoy the photos and pay attention to twitter for updates on the ground.

shoot pt 2

2011-02-20 00:00:00Z

So here’s the second batch… these are mostly meghan’s and some supporting cast shots… big B and his friend (chris? I don’t remember the name).

weird dreams. weirder reality.

2011-02-20 00:00:00Z

well, I opened this tab yesterday, and the dream I was going to write about has pretty much evaporated from my memory. Oh well. The first photo is from elemental, at there new shop, the first morning they were open… it was sort of beautiful how thin their operation was, and how well it worked. There was one woman with a square reader taking credit cards, and one barista making amazing espresso drinks. It’s gottena bit better now, even… I think they have heat in their building, and some more furniture. Really exciting to see a new business start up an do so well.

onto the shoot...

2011-02-20 00:00:00Z

This shit was a blast. seriously a lot of fun. As in, we’re going to have to do it again. Thanks to (in no particular order): Amber (hair and makeup), Brian (lights/grip), KJ, and Meghan (models). Anyway, yeah. Photos. I’m splitting this into two posts to ease the server load. Next one in a hot minute.

city...

2011-02-10 00:00:00Z

Speaking of the city, I was riding around the other day, and had another one of those moments, where I saw something that caught me. I took this photo:

the new sauced

2011-02-10 00:00:00Z

good advice:

2011-02-09 00:00:00Z

“Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak arabic, love music, and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers, and warriors."

and then I came back to okc

2011-02-08 00:00:00Z

and the madness continues… it’s not in the world, as I told my friends, but damn it’s a good time.

cemetery in the neighborhood

2011-02-07 00:00:00Z

well, not my neighborhodd, but the one I was staying in… I conceived a big typology type project while I was there. All the cemeteries of New Orleans. Of course, I’d have to live there… if the city doesn’t sink before I get the chance to move there, that is. It’d be a couple years. When I’m looking to semi-retire or something. or when I get a wild hair and have to light out. Although, as my local friends advised me, it’d be easier if I picked a subset to look at. I could spend a long time looking at these angels, for example.

new years eve

2011-02-07 00:00:00Z

Yeah, this night was pretty freakin awesome. My first tattoo and a lot of fireworks and drinking champagne etc etc etc. Auspicious. Suspicious. Something like that.

down to the fishin' camp

2011-01-31 00:00:00Z

So we drove down to Cocodrie, which is the middle of nowhere, reaching out towards the gulf of mexico. Even the middle of nowhere has trash pickup these days. That’s america for ya. The birds were nice, flying to roost somewhere at sunset, and the sunset was pretty awesome, too. Nice to get away from it all for a minute. Which was the point of the trip, come to think of it.

more new orleans...

2011-01-28 00:00:00Z

between things, so a quick blog post… charging my phone, actually. Toured the Abita brewery while I was in Louisiana… that’s the crowd in the first photo. That’s Lane(y?) and Jeana sorta dancing at rock n’ bowl in the second… and finishing off the night at some local bar in the third. I like that bars there don’t close except when the bartender feels like it. It lets the night flow much more naturally. Speaking of bars, my phone is charged enough to get me through the night and I’m off.

new orleans

2011-01-27 00:00:00Z

a couple posts from my little after christmas jaunt… there’ll be a couple posts like this. good times, relaxing and recharging. I’m gonna have to do another trip soon. Maybe St Louis again; I met a guy in egypt that works up there… and i do know a couple people there too. hrm. I do like to travel.

video shoot for brother gruesome

2011-01-26 00:00:00Z

So this was a long stop motion video that I think they were going to set to music and have a video; and at then end they knocked it all down. This rings all sorts of bells for me as a critic and artist; it’s collaborative, impermanent, made for reproduction… things I like, more or less. But standing there, looking at it, most of it sucked; right as it was about to go somewhere interesting one or more of the parties involved would fuck it up. Come to think of it though, that’ll probably look pretty good on video.

christmas night at the fry

2011-01-19 00:00:00Z

christmas night, doin’ it right. I may have been a little obnoxious in front of my friend’s wife (wife and friend in the first pic). It was the DNR talking, I swear. Anyway, yeah, onward and upward.

mcnellies party plus after

2011-01-18 00:00:00Z

This was a pretty good time, even though they cut the party off at 1am. Went to this sketchy party and arrived just as the cops were leaving, said f this and headed to a friend’s house to dance till we got tired of it. Good times.

welp, so much for that lens...

2011-01-18 00:00:00Z

I just spent the last hour putting the finishing touches on a repair that I started way back when. Unfortunately, there’s nothing physically wrong with the lens; I had it in many pieces, far enough into the guts to find any physical defect, and there were none. So, I don’t know what’s wrong with the lens. It works fine in manual focus, and I’m tempted to sell it on ebay as such. then again, having a backup 50 is never a bad idea. Photo evidence (sorry for the crappy phone pic):

Norman 80's night

2011-01-18 00:00:00Z

week before christmas, I think this was… tuesday or wednesday. damn I’m tired. I’m gonna go nap now.

max's birthday

2011-01-15 00:00:00Z

Just a couple of the photos, too good not to share. Damn that was a long day… brunch, little kids, mcnellie’s xmas party, and then the after party. No wonder I’m exhausted all the time. Seriously I’ve gotta do something about that. Sleep more probably.

Ali's b-day brunch

2011-01-10 00:00:00Z

So yeah, this was also a couple weeks ago. I think it was the sunday after christmas. Pretty sure, in fact. Jen made pumpkin pancakes, which were awesome. Other things happened, pictured below. Bobby skating. Porch sitting. Big B lookin like the big G with the sunlight coming from behind him. Canon on his lap though, and we all know canons are the devil’s camera. (this is another case of me either being funny or unintelligible. I don’t care which).

conservatory show ish

2011-01-09 00:00:00Z

Went to this show on a monday, sometime before christmas. The poor first guy had almost nobody there… I think his mom was taking pictures at one point, while the rest of us were off in the bar area, waiting for Rico Muerte to play. He wasn’t bad, except all of his songs were about his girlfriend. Then RM came on, solid rock, then some dudes from savannah with way too much gear but decent sound and then I left before it was over because some of us have to work at 8:30 in the morning. I’m not happy about it, but that’s the way it is.

christmas lights

2011-01-09 00:00:00Z

so I know it’s no longer the holiday season and whatever, but it’s particularly gray and all doom and gloom today, so here: christmas lights to cheer you up.

a sunset again

2010-12-31 00:00:00Z

Last one this year, I promise.

a moment

2010-12-30 00:00:00Z

Sometimes there’s a moment when I see something and I realize the world is changing; we say things are different now but it doesn’t really affect the mood in my head, but then I see something like this guy hanging down from the broadway extension to do god knows what maintenance, and something clicks. Hundreds of feet in the air like some kind of hero, just doing his job. Not ‘everyday hero’ but ‘this wasn’t possible before’; something outside my personal mythos. And then for a while my thoughts are colored by the fact the the world is bigger and stranger than even I thought; and that’s saying something.

thanksgiving-ish

2010-12-27 00:00:00Z

For some reason, I’m still a month behind, although I am slowly but surely catching up. Sarah, a couple days after thanksgiving, invited me to her family’s late-giving, which they’d delayed so she could make it. It was nice, and then the next day we went to friendsgiving, which I didn’t really take pictures of because I was too busy stuffing my face.

My house is clean! (pictures unrelated)

2010-12-27 00:00:00Z

This is worth a blog post by itself… my house hasn’t been this clean since last spring at least… pretty sure I swept sometime last march… not really. But shit had gotten out of hand what with me having no time to clean and less energy than time. I scrubbed everywhere that needs to be scrubbed, swept what needed to be swept, and all my dishes are clean. funny story: my house stays cleaner when I’m broke. Although why I didn’t do this in the months between getting back from egypt and starting the new job I don’t know. anyway yeah, photos unrelated (from Athena and Aphrodite’s bday party):

Mimsies Reunion show at blue note

2010-12-25 00:00:00Z

This was the best live show I’ve ever seen. Freakin’ amazing. Electric and intense and raw and the lead singer, Casey, was the center of it all. If you weren’t there you should be pissed. You missed a hell of a show.

Holly's baby shower

2010-12-24 00:00:00Z

Well, one of them… there were several, actually, but this one is the only one I went to. And there are other good photos, mostly variations on these though. And Atlas (the baby, and isn’t that a awesome name?) was born the day before yesterday (or was it yesterday? I haven’t been able to keep track of the days in weeks). If the kid’s as rad as his parents, he’s set for a rad life.

If I should fall asleep in your arms...

2010-12-24 00:00:00Z

Please wake me up in my dreams." Just rediscovering how awesome an album “Frank’s Wild Years” is. Seriously, you should give it a listen. Also “Romeo is Bleeding” off of Blue Valentine, very good. Merry Christmas, happy blah blah. Another post coming soon; this won’t satisfy my blogging addiction for today.

everybody's havin babies...

2010-12-23 00:00:00Z

er, well, it seems that way. Katie wanted some pinup-like pictures, which I’m not posting, and some more normal ones, which are below. This was a fun shoot. As for the babies, four (five? six? depending on how close of a friend we’re talking about) friends of varying closeness have had kids in the last 6 months, and several more are expecting. None for me, thanks.

last time at the hell house. forever.

2010-12-22 00:00:00Z

I’m sure someone else will move in and civilize the place now and it won’t be the hell house any more. This was a good way to go out though, beating a couch into submission with an axe and then burning it in the back yard, and then the fire trucks show up… yeah. I’ll miss it a little. That night with the fire was a perfect end to it for me: the right mix of madness and fun and hilarity, and also danger of decapitation/third degree burns.

Eclipse (jumping at shadows)

2010-12-21 00:00:00Z

So I knew if I didn’t get this up now it’d be after new years before I got to it. I had to improvise a tripod out of duct tape and a light stand. If you click on it, you can see it even bigger. I might have to make some prints of this one… have to get an ink cartridge first though. hrm. I had lots of clever things to say that I though of while I was outside shooting this but now they’ve all left my head and I need rest. See you guys in the morning.

can't think of a title

2010-12-21 00:00:00Z

Sometimes I think I’m being funny when actually I’m being unintelligible. The title of the last post is an example of that. anyway, yeah, tired, but making it through. Time off soon, and a nice little trip… things are happening again. It’s after the solstice and I’m breaking out of my winter doldrums. I hope.

Rico Muerte at Conservatory

2010-12-20 00:00:00Z

it just occurred to me what an odd name that was for a rock and roll venue… rock has never really been about conserving anything… and I’m in love with ellipses. Anyway, before rico muerte, there was this “dad metal” band who’s name I can’t remember, but who was unintentionally hilarious, all but the dude in the moon boot, who earned mad cred just for showing un in that shit. And the graffiti out back really kinda blew my mind. Anyway, onward and upward…

pretty pictures

2010-12-20 00:00:00Z

yeah, I’m guilty of this shit too… pretty pictures… but with the fall around, and the last good light of the year, how can I help myself? or at least, it was the last good light of the year. also, if you’re reading this, you’re reading it on the new server. piece of cake to move.

posting on the new server

2010-12-19 00:00:00Z

so I can tell the difference between the new and the old. and to test out the twitter thingy I just did. this will disappear sometime tomorrow.

and then the day after

2010-12-18 00:00:00Z

Not pictured is the brunch we had or the awesome wipeout KJ had. It’s amazing how much fin that little plastic trike was. A good day.

light this candle

2010-12-18 00:00:00Z

let’s see… it’s been a few weeks since I’ve done this, had a new job to adjust to and some mad winter darkness blues to deal with… but here I am. Still looking for perfection. Still taking those photos. Still makin’ your women wish they were my woman. Don’t get jealous… it’s just the photos. don’t worry, there’s more where this came from.

Pants off party that was a month ago

2010-12-18 00:00:00Z

And therefore the statute of limitations on embarrassment has expired… and anyway, since when do I care about being embarrassed? This was a good party. I met Christian there, and it’s been a month and a half of good times, with more in store.

just found this...

2010-11-30 00:00:00Z

Just found this in my scratch buffer, and I don’t remember where I got it from:

real halloween

2010-11-26 00:00:00Z

you know, when I really start posting, I go through these photos a lot faster. two days later and we’re through the current batch and now I’ve gotta go edit again.

mid-week steez

2010-11-26 00:00:00Z

moving on, through the middle of that week, a lot of things happened. Then I took pictures of them.

haloweeney

2010-11-25 00:00:00Z

Actually, these are still from the ghouls gone wild weekend, but all my friends love halloween so much they gotta do it twice/all week. And the bar-top pic: the whole night was pretty epic, but that was the high point for me.

things I'm thankful for

2010-11-25 00:00:00Z

While everyone else is nappin’ away the afternoon figured I do one of these.

workin on thanksgiving...

2010-11-25 00:00:00Z

Yeah, workin on thanksgiving morning… postin photos for your ass in my cold apartment… the window leaks around the window A/C… gotta fix that soon. These were the week before halloween, which means I more or less a month behind on posting shit… oh well. You can’t rush art. and By Art, I mean, I’m a slacker. Another post later today, so check back here instead of watching football after the feast.

different bar, different night, different people.

2010-11-24 00:00:00Z

In the first picture, at least. in the other it’s at least a different set of people.

hilo-ish

2010-11-24 00:00:00Z

photos from the hilo. this is why i’ll never be upper management, and also why I don’t care about ever being upper anything. the new job is nice though; I’m working with good people, and doing interesting things, or at least they’re interesting to me, which is what matters. And I think I’ve got scheduling posts sorted for this thing, so that’s good too, look for about one a day.

birthday party?

2010-11-12 00:00:00Z

SO, I’m pretty sure this was timmy’s birthday or something… there was a keg, I remember that, and the european exchange students (not pictured). Also, while cody didn’t land the pictured trick, he got it on the next try. I just like this photo better.

The way home

2010-11-05 00:00:00Z

So, yeah. Came home, and then the haloween madness started. Kj drove, which meant I got to sleep, wonderful road-weary sleep, and I woke up and there was a sunset and we were nearly there. I wonder if you know how fucking wonderful that is? A moment of calm and peace, after one set of mad adventures and before the next.

band shoot, second half (bartlesville part 4)

2010-11-02 00:00:00Z

The last one is my favorite; something about these guys just indicates a degree of whimsy. Thanks to the old man for the use of his antiques and mirror, thanks to Heather for inviting me and introducing all of us, and thanks to Kyle for the sweet suite (didn’t think I’d pass that pun up, did you?). There’s one more b-ville post coming, the road home, which is always sweet, and you shouldn’t miss, ‘cause it’s got more KJ in it. Probably tomorrow lunch or in the evening, depending on how the day goes.

insomnia post (Bville part 3)

2010-11-01 00:00:00Z

Here I am, trying to sleep, and I can’t. so I figure I’ll post something. These are from the shoot that sunday afternoon, with Kyle in Bartlesville. There were a lot of things that were wrong, unprepared-for, and generally hilarious about this shoot, but overall, I can’t complain, the images look pretty good. This is broken into two posts, just to ease the server load.

Frank and Lola's (bartlesville part 1)

2010-10-28 00:00:00Z

Went to Bartlesville a couple weeks ago, saw the sights, did some things, got into stuff. My friends Heather and Kyle invited me up to see a show, Truckstop Honeymoon, and to shoot Kyle’s two-man band, er… not sure what their name is, I’ll update this when I find out.

back at the suite (bartlesville pt. 2)

2010-10-28 00:00:00Z

So, when I went up there, I thought I was going to be sleeping on a couch. This is fine, I’ve done it many times before, and don’t really mind. Kyle had other ideas. He got me a suite in the Price Tower, which if you don’t know, is the only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (well, the only one that got built, at least). I don’t know how, I only know that he paid very little for it through some connection he had. Nice if you can get it, that’s for sure.

Tim's b-day

2010-10-26 00:00:00Z

I know, this was weeks ago. Sue me.

William Eggleston and the 'nice camera' effect

2010-10-25 00:00:00Z

“Photography is not a ‘difficult’ medium. All photographs are, by definition, ‘easy’ to make—you just push a button. The value of the medium lies in the photographer’s calling a moment in time to our attention—a moment we might otherwise have missed—and saying ‘this is important.’ It takes something simple and fleeting and turns it into something emblematic.” – William Eggleston

Too good not to share

2010-10-21 00:00:00Z

Yeah, more from the same shoot. The first two we were going for some kind of oklahoma-y look, and the last was just to be creepy.

Real live photo shoot with @christaemay

2010-10-20 00:00:00Z

Christa needed photos for her real world audition or something, and I’d been looking to do some kind of shoot for a while, something that got me away from the usual available-darkeness-drunk-friends schtick. My brother (the real one in ABQ) had just sent me some new lights, stands and umbrellas-2 of each, in fact. So we got together and did this in about an hour in my living room.

Jim (@jimeldridge)

2010-10-19 00:00:00Z

The only guy I know besides myself who can wear a fedora well.

barbecue and bluenote

2010-10-19 00:00:00Z

couples

2010-10-14 00:00:00Z

Yeah, I’m a zombie today.

Fire. Party. And some weird toy.

2010-10-14 00:00:00Z

Well, I promised fun and adventure and pretty ladies, and the last two or three weeks have been full of that. Also full of chest cold sickness, but I’m 90-95% better now. I haven’t been this sick from a cold in years and years. The only thing keeping me together has been orange juice and cold pills. The cold pills don’t exactly seem to work, but they’re not hurting that I can tell. Anyway, this party was before I got sick.

saga of the lens

2010-10-13 00:00:00Z

So, my 50mm (this one) broke the other night with little warning. middle of a shoot, and it stops focusing. My spare 50 was at home in pieces, and my other lenses were also at home. This is the reality of getting ambushed with shoots in the middle of a road trip. Welcome to my life.

daytime fair photos

2010-10-12 00:00:00Z

ROLLING LUGGAGE IS NOT APPROPRIATE FOR CAMERAS. Unless, that is, they are pelican cases with wheels. Then I’ll assume you know what you’re doing. Two tripods, though, that’s just silly.

back on the air (for real this time)

2010-10-11 00:00:00Z

So, I’ve been having some issues with the site, mostly due to my own idiocy, but I think they’re resolved and anything that happens from now on will be filed under ‘new issues’. Note: When configuring nginx, just tell it to listen on port 80, leave off the ‘default’ that most configurations seem to have. If you need ssl too, that’s port 443. There.

the fair at night

2010-10-03 00:00:00Z

The first pic isn’t from the fair, but it’s only fair to put it in, because she got me in. As in Mckenzie bought my ticket. The fair at night isn’t much different than the fair during the day, except that the crackhead-looking carnies are actually on crack, and not just fiending. There’s another post from my daytime runs at the fair coming up, too. As soon as I finish with those photos, that is…

portraits

2010-10-02 00:00:00Z

working through the backlog.

54 hours

2010-10-02 00:00:00Z

So, this took a very long time, to cover the distance between these two photos. Not a lot to say, really. Gonna have to go back to make up for the three weeks I missed.

station ident

2010-09-24 00:00:00Z

over on warren ellis’ blog, he does these, and well, I’m just doing this one so that those of you who follow me in cyberspace only (and who haven’t heard from me since I got back) that I’m alive and well. Egypt was cut short because of some illness requiring a brief hospitalization, after which I was right as rain, but which completely drained my funds, destroying the fine balance I had between making money and spending it. So I had to come back early. I also now owe my mother a fortune, even though she says I don’t. there will be state fair pictures soon, and plans are hatching for more adventures.

made it to the beach

2010-09-10 00:00:00Z

It’s wonderfully quiet here. I’ve only been here an hour and I’m already more relaxed. Got a meal, got my room, a shower, etc, etc. Internets is spotty and costly here. We’ll see if they change the password on me or what. Might just be incommunicado for a few days. Put the “get away” in get away from it all.

Nile sunset

2010-09-08 00:00:00Z

So today I did a bad thing. I had dinner at Pizza Hut. But! I timed it so I would be right by the Nile, so I could see the sunset over the world’s longest river, and take some pictures. Here:

Cairo: Life in the street

2010-09-08 00:00:00Z

yeah, I know, more street pictures. I could do this all month, if I weren’t sick of Cairo. Really, really tired. noise. Cars. Crossing the road. No food in the day, because of Ramadan. A week at the beach is just what the doctor ordered. Yeah:

cairo traffic

2010-09-07 00:00:00Z

seriously, the traffic here is something else. It’s a big part of what I’ll take away from here. I’ll have dreams of the sound of horns and weaving through crowds of pedestrians. Also, crossing the street here is a bitch and a half. The cars in that first picture? Stopped. Then they move a few feet, then they stop again.

Cairo in the morning

2010-09-07 00:00:00Z

Compared to andy other time of the day, the streets in Cairo are empty in the morning, about 6am. I say about because I’m not entirely sure of when this was. There’s been some confusion about daylight savings time. I’ve spent today in front of the computer, except for the half hour walk I took this morning, in the quiet. Programming and thinking and playing games. Man I need to get outta this room. Maybe go walk around. Down to the Museum, even though it’s closed.

The Great Pyramid of Giza

2010-09-06 00:00:00Z

yesterday, I went to the pyramids, fulfilling my tourist quota for this entire trip, and maybe even for my eventual recovery trip to St. Louis (Stuart: I would kill half a dozen men for a pizza-pie from blackthorn. Just name names. THERE IS NO REAL PIZZA HERE).

museum day

2010-09-04 00:00:00Z

Went to the Cairo Museum yesterday. I met this New Zealand fellow, Kim, and he was going, and so I went. Photos were against the rules in the museum though, so unfortunately you’ll have to go yourself to see such wonders as the burial mask of king tut and 12.5 million tiny statues of every pharaoh ever. Today we’re going to the world’s oldest tourist trap, the pyramids. Should be a fun morning. Then I really need to get some programming done. Money is officially short.

the adventure of getting to the hostel

2010-09-03 00:00:00Z

So, after the last plane landed, I got myself through customs with no hitches. The visa was a piece of cake, just pay the man, get your sticker, and move on. I looked like what I am, a tourist/backpacker, and customs doesn’t give a fuck about guys like me. This is probably wise on their part.

first impressions are going to have to wait

2010-09-03 00:00:00Z

I don’t think I can make generalizations about what I see here. All I’ve got is my specific story, so I’ll stick to that.

airplanes

2010-09-02 00:00:00Z

ok, 15 minutes to dash off my thoughts so far:

This is the view from my room.

2010-09-02 00:00:00Z

addendum to the list

2010-09-01 00:00:00Z

So, after compiling the list the other day, I realized there were a few things I left off, and some details I left out. First of all, the towel. A Towel is very important. Normally, I would take a backpacker’s towel, which are made out of this microfiber super absorbent material, is smaller than a regular towel, and dries faster. For this trip, I’m using a shamwow, which is the same material as the more expensive backpacker’s towels, but cheaper and available everywhere.

Che's 40th Birthday

2010-08-31 00:00:00Z

So yeah, photos. It was a great party. I’m blogged out for today. http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649”> http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=71649” allowFullScreen=”true” flashvars=”offsite=true&lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fphotomattmills%2Fsets%2F72157624850873910%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fphotomattmills%2Fsets%2F72157624850873910%2F&set_id=72157624850873910&jump_to=” width=”999” height=”666”>

and then the blue note

2010-08-31 00:00:00Z

Since it’s 6am, and I’m awake, I might as well blog these pictures. I lied, there’s one more post of drunk people, at Che’s birthday party. But they’re very well done drunk people.

first, the Hilo

2010-08-30 00:00:00Z

Ah, what would life be without the Hilo, with its drag shows, strong drinks, and occasional free darts? More dignified? Less blurry? Who knows. I’ve definitely had some memorable nights there, and some nights I’d rather forget.

at the pool

2010-08-29 00:00:00Z

This was the same Sunday, that same afternoon. Nice light, a lot of good action with people jumping into the pool. Also, high fives are always appropriate, even in mid air over the pool.

sunday at KJ's

2010-08-28 00:00:00Z

rock show at the blue note. again.

2010-08-27 00:00:00Z

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just a few

2010-08-27 00:00:00Z

Something to start your day off right with. If you’re not supposed to have a beer at least you can have a photo. On the good news list: I found what might end up being my lightroom replacement in ubuntu. it’s called raw therapee. It’s pretty bare bones right now, but it does what I need for the road.

gotta get these posted...

2010-08-26 00:00:00Z

So, I booked my hostel, and everything is coming along swimmingly. I’m just gonna vomit up a bunch of posts really quickly because I don’t have time to space things out any more. Get ready for an overload of Photos.

another rock show at blue note

2010-08-26 00:00:00Z

pausing only to note that I haven’t seen Rustin since this show. Hope he’s alive and shit.

Star Gazing

2010-08-26 00:00:00Z

You wouldn’t think there would be photos from an adventure out to lake Arcadia to see the Perseid meteor shower, but then you aren’t me. It all started at Heather’s going away party. There were a few drinks (though not a lot, not by a damn sight) and somebody mentioned it, and then the next thing you know five of us were cramming into Heather’s car (after dumping some of her jut-packed things into the back yard) and pushing off.

sunday funday

2010-08-26 00:00:00Z

This was a couple sundays ago. Man was I tired. Actually, these might have been on two different days, but at least they feel like the same day. The way the days have been run together the last couple of weeks, I’m not even sure which way is up sometimes. Maybe it’s just that I’m really tired right now, too.

a lot of cigarettes

2010-08-26 00:00:00Z

(mom: ignore this) A little known secret about me: I only smoke because I like the way that smoke looks in the air. Which is also why I just barely smoke.

sometimes...

2010-08-23 00:00:00Z

sometimes you get lucky and the gods smile down on you when you walk out the front door and there’s a beautiful sunset with the weirdest light that makes the air feel thick, like you could cut it with a knife. And then you go on to a rad evening that ends in the weirdest way possible, babies and nazis and flat tires, oh my. Just sayin’:

to make up for all that writing

2010-08-23 00:00:00Z

some photos, just sort of random and nice, especially that last one.

the list

2010-08-22 00:00:00Z

I’m getting ready to go on a big ol’ trip to Egypt, as most of my friends know. And, well, I have a confession to make: I love lists. They’re the only kind of organization I really ever use or need. My lists, they take care of me. Shot lists and set lists and tasks that need to be done. There is one kind of list that is nearer and dearer to me than any other though: The Packing List.

OpenBeta BarCamp Dos

2010-08-18 00:00:00Z

Went to this three(four?) weeks ago, and it was actually a pretty good time. The talks were a little on the basic side, I think because a lot of the heavy hitters in the OKC tech scene were absent (I’m looking at you, Grant). I gave three talks, and in one, it turned out my audience knew more about the subject than I did, so I got to learn some things.

some portraits from mid-july...

2010-08-18 00:00:00Z

I know I’m way behind, so sue me. I don’t know, I’ve been kinda depressed. Luckily, I seem to be doing better right now. It’s 4:15 in the morning and I feel fine.

Kolby's going away

2010-08-17 00:00:00Z

Roller Derby

2010-08-17 00:00:00Z

The same day as barcamp (man, I was tired when I started that day, and near dead by the end), I went to my first banked-track roller derby match, between the Red Dirt Rebellion, and some team from florida. RDR lost, but it was fun to watch and take photos of, anyway. The long lens shots were with my trusty 500mm mirror lens. Manually focused pictures of fast movement at slow shutter speeds. That’s why I make the big bucks (somebody hire me please?).

warren ellis is batshit

2010-08-04 00:00:00Z

Warren Ellis

house

2010-08-03 00:00:00Z

This is tangentially related to the post below, but not enough for it to go there. The one person who might get it doesn’t read this, as far as I know.

love and the internet

2010-08-03 00:00:00Z

Love, man, that’s a tough one. It doesn’t make any sense. My normal approach is useless here. Not that I’d try to do math on it, but it’s definitely one of those areas where the world doesn’t make any sense. Is is bad that all of my thoughts can be summed up in links? the best, though, is the blockquote from tony pierce:

but when it comes to love, real love, long lasting forever and ever love, the type of love that means everything, and fuels everything, and creates magic that last for generations – well that love is worth climbing every mountain and fording through every stream.

one more photo

2010-08-02 00:00:00Z

When I took this I was thinking http://www.planetperplex.com/img/magritte_empire_of_light.jpg”>Empire of Lights, but it’s a little darker than that. This is the last photo I took before I had to send my camera off for cleaning. Anyway, yeah. https://images.matt.pictures/one_more_photo/884/0035.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

late evening photos

2010-08-01 00:00:00Z

more pride, more cowbell

2010-07-31 00:00:00Z

nothing to do with last night

2010-07-31 00:00:00Z

Just some clouds and things. https://images.matt.pictures/nothing_to_do_with_last_night/888/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/nothing_to_do_with_last_night/888/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/nothing_to_do_with_last_night/888/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/nothing_to_do_with_last_night/888/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

kj's house with the cool kids

2010-07-31 00:00:00Z

Just hangin’ out on a hungover saturday. https://images.matt.pictures/kj’s_house_with_the_cool_kids/890/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/kj’s_house_with_the_cool_kids/890/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/kj’s_house_with_the_cool_kids/890/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

the other roll

2010-07-31 00:00:00Z

Turns out there was another roll that I shot at my opening. Then I got it scanned, and now I’m posting the only picture I still like from that roll. So Ha. https://images.matt.pictures/the_other_roll/886/0003.jpg”>

pride part 1

2010-07-31 00:00:00Z

This is only the first half. Second half is up next.

https://images.matt.pictures/pride_part_1/887/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/pride_part_1/887/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/pride_part_1/887/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/pride_part_1/887/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/pride_part_1/887/0021.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

ghosts

2010-07-30 00:00:00Z

from http://snarkmarket.com”>snarkmarket:

Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to point out how it’s a mathematical certainty that the air we breathe and the water we drink passed through the lungs and kidneys (respectively) of every one who ever lived. Likewise, in these Civil War photos, both the destroyed Southern buildings (one of them a US army fort) and the Northern cannons that destroyed them result from the profits of American slavery. Amer icans like to think about victories in World War II with out thinking about the cities and people destroyed in Russia and dozens of other countries (including Japan, Italy, and Germany) that stand behind that war — in no small part because we don’t have to live with them, to walk down those streets, to feel those ghosts. But we’re haunted all the same.

I just had to repost that- I love the idea of the past as ghosts, haunting us, unescapable. Shades of Robert Pirsig- we’re the sum of all the ghosts of the past. Not all of them are bad, luckily.

haley's move+clouds

2010-07-30 00:00:00Z

Yeah, I shot a lot of clouds while I was shooting film. Easy targets.

https://images.matt.pictures/haley’s_move+clouds/892/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” /> https://images.matt.pictures/haley’s_move+clouds/892/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/haley’s_move+clouds/892/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/haley’s_move+clouds/892/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

egypt in a month...

2010-07-30 00:00:00Z

and I’m not nearly ready… so much to do… at least the blog is up and running. I hope it’s not blacklisted when I get there. hrm. need to work on setting up a proxy for myself. or at least TOR. Chelsea

https://images.matt.pictures/egypt_in_a_month…/894/20100730-re4t5n931u4pbtudhhud5cayck.jpg” alt=”Chelsea”/>

Clouds: https://images.matt.pictures/egypt_in_a_month…/894/20100730-basg8bfsbrs81ytkpcm5xp9cfi.jpg” alt=”clouds”/>

This is the new blog.

2010-07-30 00:00:00Z

It’s remarkably like the old blog, except that it’s all on my own server, and much less prone to downtime than tumblr was. Also, I managed to import all the old posts from the “five years” blog I had on blogger. So that’s good too, even though I don’t have the history in place yet. It’ll happen.

more ringlight

2010-07-15 00:00:00Z

Agents of the Fisc...

2010-07-14 00:00:00Z

"
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

about shooting film

2010-07-09 00:00:00Z

So these are the last images from that night of the blues saloon, the night of the party, only a couple nights before I would decide it was time for a detox.

It’s funny, but my camera has been away at the service facility in El Segundo, CA, and I’ve been using a film camera to get my fix. The shooting is very different. A lot of people will talk about the different qualities of the images, the grain structure, all of that, but something I really like is how few pictures there are on a roll. You get to be way more critical of what you’re shooting, what you see; instead of hitting the button and then looking to see what I can do better, I find myself making those checks (frame edges, composition, etc.) before I click the shutter.

Another thing: developing film is the closest thing to magic us mere mortals can do. Roll the film onto the developing reels in the dark, then put on the lid, turn on the lights, and run it through the developer (FG-7, if you care), the stop bath, and the fixer, and then you can pull out the negatives and see all of your pictures at once. It’s the most boring regular process ever, but at the end you have these perfect little jewels, full of potential. Anyway, look for some shots from film here soonish.

Dance Floor

2010-07-07 00:00:00Z

Blues saloon:

The night of the blues saloon

2010-07-06 00:00:00Z

Took these the night of the blues saloon… this is only the first third of what I’m going to post from that night… more later. Madness. Good times.

Now for some photos...

2010-07-02 00:00:00Z

From… Last friday? Friday before? something like that. More coming from that same night soon.

and then the night ends...

2010-07-02 00:00:00Z

I don’t really have much memory of taking these pictures. Apparently I was falling asleep, waking up for a few seconds, snapping a photo and falling back asleep.

@christaemay at a party

2010-07-02 00:00:00Z

I was editing at my parent’s house and my mom looks over my shoulder and says, “Wow, she’s pretty.” Yeah mom. She is. Pretty and dangerous. Like all my friends.

not drinking...

2010-07-02 00:00:00Z

So, I haven’t had anything to drink in three or four days, and I’m stating to notice a difference. I can type faster; My pool game is better; I see pictures just a little quicker, focus better. My memory too, it seems improved. But it took me until today to really see any improvement, even a subjective one. I like it; it’s like the moment when I got my first pair of glasses and could actually see better. Drinking is fun, but this might be better. I figure some moderate consumption won’t hurt me, but I’m gonna keep going for at least a week, see what happens.Anyway, photos coming soonish.

to the pool

2010-07-02 00:00:00Z

Of course we were guests of a resident at the unnamed pool. We had every right to be there.

first a word from our sponsors

2010-07-01 00:00:00Z

These are from my show opening. The show is still up, but not for much longer. Also, this was the first time I’ve shot film in ages, and it came out all right, for me not having a light meter.

light out for a day

2010-06-26 00:00:00Z

Took a little road trip to the Wichita Mountains, which are nowhere near Wichita, Kansas, incidentally. Berlin (second photo) came along and took pictures too. You can see her photos form that day on her flickr. I finally got to try a meers burger, which was good, but their onion rings weren’t that great. Irma’s is better. It was a nice chill day to get away from the city and see some sights.

morning after

2010-06-26 00:00:00Z

A bunch of good things

2010-06-26 00:00:00Z

from a party. I mean, these are great things that happened. I just took the pictures.

with the ringlight

2010-06-25 00:00:00Z

I know I’m cheating and skipping ahead, but I really like this. now back to your regularly scheduled blog…

from @kriskanaly's art show

2010-06-24 00:00:00Z

Also, because the queue feature is eating posts right now, I”m gonna have to manually post things. Oh well.

no, don't take my picture

2010-06-24 00:00:00Z

Only let me look really cute while I hide from the camera.

single photos

2010-06-23 00:00:00Z

Jus to get them out there, I’m gonna post some singles. One at a time. I do this mostly to torture @maeghan. That and they don’t go together. This is KJ and Lindsey.

Moving on...

2010-06-21 00:00:00Z

And then that night I began the business of figuring out how to function again. I met this chick who seemed all right but turned out to be totally psycho. Or turned psycho after drinking. I have a photo of her, but I really don’t feel like posting it. I seem to attract the crazies lately. Oh well, c’est la vie.

Adam's memorial ride

2010-06-21 00:00:00Z

There would be more of these, but I didn’t much feel like taking pictures. Wasn’t totally together. I was sad and not really functioning so well. But the ride helped, and the funeral (minus the pastors that didn’t really know adam) was good. The ride after, without the police escort, was better. We took over the street, up broadway and down 23rd, a critical mass like this city hasn’t seen in a while. It was kinda epic, which fitted with what I was feeling at the time. Maybe you had to be there.

Hand photo

2010-06-21 00:00:00Z

Meet my dad’s right hand.

Booze Cruise Again

2010-06-21 00:00:00Z

Yep, it’s happening again; Youths on bikes out terrorize the local bar scene. Or at least get drunk and have a good time.

Paseo fest

2010-06-21 00:00:00Z

Not many pictures from this night made it through the edit filter. oh well. I have a tendency to try to make a narrative with photo series, but some nights just don’t fall into that pattern. Too much going on to get it all, or too much happening in bad light, etc. And sometimes my narrative making brain cells aren’t firing either. Of course, the gist of what happened is what you see in these photos, even if there isn’t a series of them. We drank. We chilled. That’s about it.

I just don't know what to do with myself...

2010-06-19 00:00:00Z

By which I mean I have the white stripes in my head. I’ve been reading this book, called The Photographer, about a photog who went into afghanistan with MSF during the Soviet-Afghan war. Towards the middle of the book, the photographer and one of the doctors are talking about what it takes to improve in their respective professions, and the doctor says to the photog: “…To take good photos, you have to age well.” I like that sentiment very much.

from Hefner grill

2010-06-19 00:00:00Z

All of these look a little yellow to me now, but I’m not going to go back and correct ‘em. Too much like work. I’m having a really great day thus far. Bike ride, hangin’ out, big truck burrito, and now I’m huddled next to my ac tryin to cool off. The hot laptop isn’t much help, but oh well.

speedo cruise and sausage fest

2010-06-18 00:00:00Z

yeah, yeah, way late to the party on these, too. I’ve been busy. so sue me.

MOAR COWBELL FRIDAY!!!1!

2010-06-18 00:00:00Z

photos unrelated:

I see the strangest shit sometimes

2010-06-05 00:00:00Z

That’s a cap gun, by the way.

my first time at the arbor

2010-06-05 00:00:00Z

It’s a sweet space. Really big, and then had a lot of cool shit there for the show, plus some live work too. Some painters painting during the show for our entertainment. Which, come to think of it, is a little odd. Painting isn’t usually performative, but I was entertained.

Jen's birthday

2010-06-05 00:00:00Z

This was shot number 6? 7? of a lot. Jen turned 21 sometime in the last month. good times had by all, anyway.

This hug was only awkward for this half-moment when I took the picture.

after rdrc came a party.

2010-06-04 00:00:00Z

Things happened. People were there. The details escape me.

old photos now...

2010-06-04 00:00:00Z

They were new at one time, why not give them some love? These poor neglected photos need a home. Think of the photos.

couple singles

2010-06-04 00:00:00Z

single photos, that is. Clouds and the Cinco de Mayo dance party at iguana. At least, I think that’s what this is.

For Adam...

2010-05-25 00:00:00Z

I already posted these to the flickr group, but here they are again. For those of you that didn’t know him, Adam was a really amazing guy. Nice, dependable, humble, an all around good guy, even after all he’d been through. He’s already missed.

Elder Hellkat.

There’s a memorial bike ride for him starting at Sauced, 1pm on Friday; the car procession will follow the bikes, so anybody in cars who wants to join should be there. Memorial Services are at 2pm at Frontline church, 6th and broadway. The reception is afterwards at the prohibition room, in the gold dome, 23rd and western.

out...

2010-05-19 00:00:00Z

of photos to post, after these. Well, there are more, but they’re not edited.

Ha. There are so many things that word could mean as a teaser! I could do a poll, what did you think matt mills meant when he said ‘out’? Out of town? Out of his mind? How do you feel about me talking about myself in the third person?

a dream and some photos

2010-05-17 00:00:00Z

So, last night I had this dream that I got to egypt and somehow had forgotten my cameras, all of them, and all I could get was a film camera, and the only film I could find was ISO 100 color film, and 120-size black and white. Thought you’d like to know that.

Also of note: If you’re staying at my house and happen to see me before I shower and wake up for a couple hours, I’m not really human yet. Cro-magnon or something till about noon.

Ignore this post...

2010-05-17 00:00:00Z

Unless you’re cool. Because only the cool kids blog. Wait. Huh?

advice from @busblog

2010-05-04 00:00:00Z

from the world famous busblog, tony answers questions sometimes:

Holly in her natural habitat

2010-05-04 00:00:00Z

Being awesome, that is.

NMF in Many Parts (4- The People)

2010-05-03 00:00:00Z

NMF in Many Parts (5)

2010-05-03 00:00:00Z

sarah came back to town

2010-05-03 00:00:00Z

and then she left again. But good times.

NMF in Many Parts (6)

2010-05-03 00:00:00Z

This was the last show I saw, because at this point I could barely walk. Like, man I was tired. I drove home and I don’t even know how I made it. So tired. These are all with the 500, but none of the exposures were particularly long, a good thing in a jostling crowd mere feet form the mosh pit.

Braums

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

“Did he just take my picture?” the guy asked. “Yeah, it’s kinda what he does.”

NMF in Many Parts(2)

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

The number of things going on in this picture is at least double what you think it is. And then there’s all the things that happened that night that aren’t in the picture. A couple good rock bands, a hillbilly jug of sangria, a foamy (but free) keg, etc. etc. If I sat here and actually listed everything, you’d get bored and never read again. You had to be there. And you should have.

NMF in Many Parts (sunday brunch)

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

So, Amber was kind enough to let me and Chas and her bro crash at her house, even leaving the front door open so we didn’t have to leave the party when she did. The next morning, Amber and josh and I had brunch at the Norman Airport. It’s a place to go to based on novelty, because the service sucked and the food wasn’t even as good as ihop.

NMF in Many Parts(1)

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

Because I have this thing about making the page not get too slow to load, and because I feel like people look the individual images better when there aren’t 21232283 pictures to look at, the NMF stuff will be broken up a bit. This is the first night, second or third show.

I feel like if I were really to describe my life, I’d be another johnathan harris, it’s so weird and wonderful and straight up surreal.

Anyway, evidence:

Clouds

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

I’ve been doing this thing now for the past couple weeks, when I see a cloud that I like, for whatever reason, I take a picture. Clouds are the ultimate transients. Impossible to pin down. The way the light plays on them is so dramatic, as if they have moods.

Anyway, I’m thinking of using these for a show I have coming up. I know, I’m becoming that pretentious asshole I never wanted to become. Whatever, I’ll probably come up with something better like 48 hours before the show and rush around getting it done in the nick of time.

Things in the Sky

2010-05-02 00:00:00Z

NMF Pre-Gaming With Sherree Chamberlain

2010-05-01 00:00:00Z

And by pre-gaming, I mean I went to a show, to warm me up for all the other shows. I could have used a drink, as this was a TV taping and all those cameras made me kinda nervous, but after a couple takes I got used to them and was able just to enjoy the music.

Why I was there exactly is a little complicated- a friend is a PA or something for the show, and I ran into her when I was in Stillwater a couple months ago at a show, and she asked me to do some stills for them, so I did. And I guess as a thank-you and because they needed warm bodies in the seats, I got to go to the on set taping of the show, Warehouse something or other.

Before the show, waiting on the rehearsals to get done.
The 500mm does its thing. 1/50th of a second baby!
Still 1/50th. Little blurry this time, but I still like it.
Sharp? what? Yeah. I’m kinda in love with what that lens can do. It’s hard to focus and hard to use, but the stuff it does is unique.

working on the new more awesome blog

2010-04-29 00:00:00Z

but in the meantime, here’s some photos:

sunset walk

2010-04-27 00:00:00Z

Today is a weird ass day… I keep doing that thing you’re supposed to do in lucid dreams where you look at everything twice, to tell if I’m awake or not. Man, people in the hospital, (everyone is fine now as far as I know) sudden revelations, breakfast tacos, madness.

Yesterday, I lost my voice. I said to Reaghan: “I took a shot of Tom Waits,” because when I could talk, that’s who I sounded like. This morning, eating my taco, I heard in my head his reading of Bukowski’s poem “Nirvana”: “Not much chance. Completely cut loose from purpose…” Oh the ipod of the mind.

Anyway, here are some entirely unrelated photos:

Scissortail Space

2010-04-24 00:00:00Z

I’ve been volunteering at the Scissortail social space the last couple weeks, helping out with their bike shop- it’s all pay as you can/free. If you’re having bike problems, come by wednesday after 2, and I’ll be glad to help. I mean, look at that truing stand.
They also have a decent-sized lending library, lots of good books that I have a feeling are hard to find in the MLS libraries. So come hang out, have some coffee (if we have any) and fix yo’ bike. It’s just south of the corner of 30th and walker, right here, next to the AA Food Mart.

The benefits of coworking...

2010-04-23 00:00:00Z

I’ve been working from the OKC CoCo for the last month or so now, and it’s a really great environment. I mean, not to sound like an advertisement. The concept of it is solid, though. Mostly, it’s getting work done, but there are all these really smart people around, also working, to bounce ideas off of and build relationships with. Most places I go it’s very hard to talk about my day job, the things I have to bitch about don’t even make sense to people who haven’t struggled with what turns out to be a missing } 300 lines up for hours. Anyway, yeah:

Full disclosure: I get my membership in exchange for shooting events for the CoCo.

locavore ish

2010-04-18 00:00:00Z

the goods

the loot

sunday funday pt 1

2010-04-18 00:00:00Z

I heard you like your pages to load fast, so I split this into two posts.

serious faces

2010-04-18 00:00:00Z

kinda reminds me of sergio leone. The second one is just me playing around with my new 500mm lens. It’s kinda fun.

road photo

2010-04-18 00:00:00Z

if you look very closely, and can read backwards, you can see the sign says “night work.” Which is what driving is, or should be.

sunday funday pt 2

2010-04-18 00:00:00Z

wearing my hat

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

So, as I was leaving McNellies one night, this girl asks if if she can try my hat on. I say, only if I can take your picture. And then I got my hat back.

barbeque

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

This was the night I sorta karate chopped mark in the face. he was showing some Aikido-handshake thing, and I was like, “Try me,” and, well, I didn’t really mean to hit him, just kinda mime it, but fine motor control and lots of Optimator (beer) don’t mix.
Oh yeah: cutest kid ever.

josh-face

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

Maeghan took this. I think.

Reaghan+Kat

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

Glamour Shot? more like hot shots. of SoCo.

friday with bee

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

Lightning

2010-04-17 00:00:00Z

I know I already posted this to twitter once, but a little backstory would be nice maybe. I’m always out in Midwest City on tuesdays, and I usually go home via surface streets, but I decided to take the highway to try and beat the storms. Of course, I ended up in the middle of it, and I had to try to take pictures of the lightning while driving down the road. And it worked.

Church

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

Sunday...

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

Was peaceful and really nice. A calm day with a good drunk at the right end of it. Also, got to hang out with:

And, even though you only see her knees/hands/arms, Victoria was there too.
And then I met (or re-met, depending on how drunk you have to be on a first meeting for it not to count) Jessica:

A good day. And I know I went and got these pictures up mad quick. Don’t get used to it.

Dinner and more drinking

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

Remember, this was all one night.

Saturday...

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

Was a hell of a day. E.G. :

The rest of the day was about the same.

The mill

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

Not the ‘Mills’, like I just mistyped and corrected. No, this is Rex’s home bar. And This is one big post, because there isn’t a natural break in them.

Katie's B-day

2010-04-07 00:00:00Z

At least the first bar. There was dinner and then another bar, and then there was a titty bar which I didn’t go to.

The Two Joshes

2010-04-03 00:00:00Z

At McNellie’s. As of this writing, it was yesterday, but by the time this publishes, it’ll be last wednesday.

Hangin' out with @Meaghan

2010-04-03 00:00:00Z

When a night just needs to kick it up a notch...

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

Go to bluenote. Meet some ladies. Stir with rock music. Take photos.

Open Beta 4- The Main Event

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

The day after

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

well, that might not have been the end of the night, but the pics got either not so good or at least repetitive (I photograph my obsessions at my best, and when I’m drunk it gets worse), so we’re moving on.

This is the next day. Holly, mourning. And then getting ready to go to work. And then the cat.

Open Beta 4-The Sidelines and The After

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

All of you probably already know this, but I did a photobooth which you can see the results of here at the other end of this finely crafted link.
Fooling around in the photobooth.
Lots of love for the creator of okaybyme.com, the hyperlocal blog roll.
Powerpoint Karaoke

one of the joshes almost gets kicked…
by the one and only tootie (I wouldn’t post so many photos of her if she weren’t so damn photogenic).
After that at the rooster, well, you know the rooster. Drinking and photos.

Holly's House

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

When you see this at the start of the night, you know it’s going to be wild.

did we really go to rooster? hmmm....

2010-04-02 00:00:00Z

The photos say yes, and the photos don’t lie without photoshop. what a night! and this wasn’t the end! it was only the middle!

Austin Night 2

2010-04-01 00:00:00Z

This was the night I randomly walked into a kings of leon set, and then walked out again because the hippy smell was unbearable. That, and they sounded exactly like they do on CD. 21st street Coop
The Show

Steves!

2010-04-01 00:00:00Z

I have to shout that at him whenever I see him, mostly because I tend to be shitfaced when I run into him. Anyway, he was there, in austin, at the donut shop with the ganesha mural outside.
The new tattoo.

The Austin Weekend

2010-04-01 00:00:00Z

Last time I wrote anything here, I was just waking up the morning after these were shot. Two (or three?) weeks later, I finally get my shit together again. This is the first night, drinking beer and hanging out with Neil.

Morning Drive

2010-04-01 00:00:00Z

Driving around one morning. Not sure what I was doing. Still not sure what I’m doing, in fact.

couple outside hilo

2010-03-20 00:00:00Z

one big st. patty's post

2010-03-20 00:00:00Z

She was worried about giving him five.

Holly took this one. I think.

fry times

2010-03-20 00:00:00Z

Ray-guns came back!

2010-03-20 00:00:00Z

under way...

2010-03-20 00:00:00Z

So, I’m in austin as I write this. I’m as surprised as you. Just so you know, going from stuck in the office to packed and under way to fun and adventure and really wild things in like half an hour is the _best_ feeling. That, and I don’t mind missing the snow. We left just as the storms ere arriving.
On the road.

portrait phase

2010-03-17 00:00:00Z

This was the point in the night where I was still fairly coherent. Yeah, that happens. but not for long…

morning after (brunch phase)

2010-03-17 00:00:00Z

any successful night needs a brunch/recovery day after… time outside, fresh air, all that.
yeah, it’s a nature photo. sue me. they look like trees!

the start of a long night...

2010-03-17 00:00:00Z

Like a shrine to the beer gods.

Hello, My Name Is…

the blurry phase

2010-03-17 00:00:00Z

this is that point in the night when I’m blurry, so some of the pictures are blurry… not that that’s always a bad thing.

profile...

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

skater down by the river.

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

The mississippi river.

Ruins in NOLA.

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

Vic on the sidewalk, bourbon street, New Orleans

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

Casey, Pravda bar.

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

Jeana

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

the last skate photo. until the next one.

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

and then I came back to my regular life after all that adventure.

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

Vic at the absinthe bar in New Orleans

2010-03-15 00:00:00Z

there's a man in the ceiling...

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

Tootie + Rooster

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

acme art

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

I hvae no idea what this place is, but it looks cool.

kurr and other dude.

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

fire good.

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

Rachel Z

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

66 trippin'

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

coburn finally said yes

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

g-dog

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

More tootie!

2010-03-14 00:00:00Z

Rex doin' his thing.

2010-03-13 00:00:00Z

old photos...

2010-03-13 00:00:00Z

so I’m going to be posting photos from the last three weeks or so over the next couple days… one every two hours.

from the fry...

2010-03-13 00:00:00Z

landscape

2010-03-13 00:00:00Z

in baton rouge

2010-03-05 00:00:00Z

by the river

2010-03-05 00:00:00Z

bank plaza

2010-03-05 00:00:00Z

group shot

2010-03-05 00:00:00Z

belle isle / uglysuit

2010-02-17 00:00:00Z

Sauced last friday...

2010-02-17 00:00:00Z

Together:

Really together:

The show:

The first rule of MashUp camp

2010-02-16 00:00:00Z

Is you don’t talk about mashup camp. The second rule is pay attention and forget to take photos because you’re too engaged with the ideas of what’s going on. Or at least that’s what happened to me. This is from the McNellie’s, afterward.

couple extra things...

2010-02-16 00:00:00Z

big backlog to work through. Like I said on twitter, covering the LCD of my camera has made a difference. that, and maybe a certain lady who I’m going to remain coy about in public until I know it’s cool. Keep on rockin’, updates on the 3’s.

hey @laniebarret, I took a photo!

2010-02-13 00:00:00Z

guitar man

2010-02-13 00:00:00Z

sigrid is leaving. Sad day.

2010-02-13 00:00:00Z

We’ll miss you. Burn wisconsin down and bring Rayguns when you come back, ok?
Edit:Some shit happened, and she’s not leaving yet.

for @thirtysixthspan and @okccoco

2010-02-12 00:00:00Z

Walking in the snow

2010-02-06 00:00:00Z

This was last sunday, and things were just at that stage of melting that we could play with really large chunks of ice. And now I’m out of backlog to work with, so I have to get more photos off the camera. Wah-hoo.

hopefully people will see this when they wake up...

2010-02-05 00:00:00Z

More Backlog.
THE SNOW.
CKolby Homemaker. Good time going over to his house during the storm and eating a bunch of home-made food and playing dominoes. Man I love living close to everything.

RAISING HAITI

2010-02-05 00:00:00Z

You should all come out to this show, all proceeds from the door go to the Red Cross Haiti relief effort. Linkage. RSVP, fuckers.
The photos are from the first show, which they’re just repeating because of the storm. Mo’ money, less pain and suffering. Although that’s not much of a slogan, it’s true.
Rex, who organized the whole thing.
@oh_tootie at the first show. There’s another one ~~tomorrow~~tonight.

Last post on blogger

2010-02-04 00:00:00Z

Well, this is the 371st post, and probably the last here on blogger. It’s been a good run; with this and other blogs, I’ve been using blogger for going on five years (ha ha), but now they’re stopping ftp uploading, and while I understand that, it’s something I need, or at least that I really want. for the time being, I’ll be posting at http://photomattmills.tumblr.com”>photomattmills.tumblr.com, and in the long term I’ll be trying to extract the posts from this blog and put up something here that is more or less a redesigned and better Five Years. We’ll see.

a saturday somewhere in there.

2010-02-04 00:00:00Z

This was the night after I moved in to my new apartment. A good night.

Cute Couples Night?

2010-02-03 00:00:00Z

Shit, I don’t know if they’re even still together.
Yeah, I’m posting two nearly identical photos. The first one because I think it’s funny, and the second one because I figure they’ll want it.

Again, two photos. But I figure they’ll want both.

This would have been a good way to end the night for him, if not for the rule that the first to pass out is fair game for sharpie.

ICEPOCALYPSE

2010-01-29 00:00:00Z

Yes, I’m annoyed by my own title.. but I do it because I know so many of you will also be frowning, and that makes me laugh.

So I went for a walk, down to Grant’s house to make coffee, and he had some interesting news which I’m not sure I can share yet, not the big Ruby news, but something else really cool for him personally. All I can say is damn.

Just another wanderer. “I’ll be all right, as long as I have some traction,” he told me.https://images.matt.pictures/icepocalypse/1028/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This was rush hour, on 23rd street… never seen it this dead at that hour. https://images.matt.pictures/icepocalypse/1028/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And yeah, there was all this white stuff on the ground. god’s cocaine party. Mostly sleet, though, not the fine white powder all kids and skiers love. Blowing wind, sleet in my face, and there I was, taking pictures. It’s a 15 minute walk that took me about 20 due to detours.

https://images.matt.pictures/icepocalypse/1028/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I do love these lights.https://images.matt.pictures/icepocalypse/1028/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Good coffee at Grant’s, Then I walked to dinner at Mcnellie’s. I kept drinking after dinner, getting drunk and thinking about hard math problems in my head. I always know I’ve had a long day at the computer when I’m thinking about math, drunk. (was it three or four pints? I was only there an hour and a half, must have been three). Yeah, Snow and Ice and everything nice. I’m going back to bed.

https://images.matt.pictures/icepocalypse/1028/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I love Winogrand

2010-01-25 00:00:00Z

From http://www.americansuburbx.com/2008/01/theory-interview-with-garry-winogrand.html”>American Suburb X:

Interviewer: If you don’t like “street photographer,” how do you respond to that other Ã¦tiresome phrase’, “snapshot aesthetic”?

Winogrand: I knew that was coming. That’s another stupidity. The people who use the term don’t even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they’re talking about snapshots they’re talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody’s fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer’s shoulder. That’s when the picture is taken, always. It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

You should read the whole thing.

A typical sunday night...

2010-01-25 00:00:00Z

As usual, these are a week delayed, so from 8 days ago. Sundays up at classics are pretty excellent though. More (and less blurry) pics from this last sunday coming soon, I promise. I just realized that none of these are in classics, which is just where we start, after all, not always where we finish.

Boring club in Bricktown.https://images.matt.pictures/a_typical_sunday_night…/1030/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Exciting moment in the boring club in bricktown. https://images.matt.pictures/a_typical_sunday_night…/1030/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Random encounter outside the club.https://images.matt.pictures/a_typical_sunday_night…/1030/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

New Digs

2010-01-22 00:00:00Z

Bedroom french doors:

Since I can't sleep

2010-01-22 00:00:00Z

I’m gonna post some photos. Two wednesdays ago, I found myself at hooters. No, really. Talk about the ass-end of the restaurant business… I’m told the girls that wait there at least make a lot of money. Good for them, now they just need to work on the food. (These girls, for those of you that don’t know them, aren’t hooters girls, just friends). Then I went to the new Blue Note. It was weird times 20. Times 10^100. Maybe not that weird; there were no green monsters or invading Persians. Not even any mild-mannered persians. But weird. And cleaner. Anyway, photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/since_i_can’t_sleep/1031/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/since_i_can’t_sleep/1031/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/since_i_can’t_sleep/1031/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/since_i_can’t_sleep/1031/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/since_i_can’t_sleep/1031/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

One Long Saturday

2010-01-22 00:00:00Z

Last saturday was a very long, very good day… it had phases, I did things. I walked the dog with Damaris, then hung out with her and Grant and some other kids for sdinner and drunken fry, and then down to makers and bricktown for fog and fun. Makers is where god would hang out, if he was looking for a jazz club in this town. And the Fog… yeah, it gets a capitol letter. Good stuff. The fog outside lifted the fog inside, if you will. And if you won’t, well, too bad.

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/one_long_saturday/1032/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Starting off right

2010-01-19 00:00:00Z

So, this is how we brought in the new year, with chicken pot pie and soup and baked goods. I was so full after that lunch, I didn’t eat until lunch the next day. Yes, these are cutesy family photos. I DO WHAT I WANT. Nyah.

https://images.matt.pictures/starting_off_right/1034/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starting_off_right/1034/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starting_off_right/1034/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

More from early January

2010-01-19 00:00:00Z

Because if I don’t just do one big post with these, I’ll never get them all out, and that would be a tragedy. These are somewhat random; I find myself going out a lot at night. It’s the insomnia more than anything; since I’m going to be up anyway, I figure I might as well not be sitting at home bored to death. And I know I’ve been saying that I want to get away from the ‘photos of drunk friends’ (or drunken photos of friends) thing, but here they are again anyway. I drink, I take pictures, it’s bound to happen. The last photo Kat took, by the way.

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/more_from_early_january/1035/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

yes, I'm aware...

2010-01-15 00:00:00Z

that it’s two weeks into the new year, and I’m just now posting these from NYE, but whatever. You’ll take what you get and like it. Or not. Here:

https://images.matt.pictures/yes,_i’m_aware…/1036/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/yes,_i’m_aware…/1036/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Midnight Countdown: (there’s an app for that)https://images.matt.pictures/yes,_i’m_aware…/1036/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/yes,_i’m_aware…/1036/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/yes,_i’m_aware…/1036/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Last photos from 09

2010-01-13 00:00:00Z

yeah, the title says it all. I just rode my bike to work, pretty proud of that. The best part: I wasn’t once afraid for my life as cars passed. So that’s better. Anyway, photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_09/1037/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_09/1037/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_09/1037/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/last_photos_from_09/1037/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Back in Blog

2010-01-12 00:00:00Z

Yeah, i had another one of those lulls. Always happens. NYE and the surrounding weeks found me unable to drink without getting massive hangovers and as usual, some depression, which wasn’t helped by my inability to shoot photos, so the whole thing kind of spiraled downwards so much so that I don’t want to be the man with the camera anymore. This is what I feared the most when I took the programming job; by filling my head with something else, there isn’t room for the photography.

Look at this hipster.https://images.matt.pictures/back_in_blog/1038/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Of course, we all know that’s bullshit. I’m as much a photographer as I was then, and this is just a temporary setback. I’m gonna get my chops back, by hook or by crook, and all will be well with the world. And for the record, I have taken a few good photos, just not as many as I’d like.

Before the freakin’ blizzard, or maybe after. Shit conditions to be out in, though.https://images.matt.pictures/back_in_blog/1038/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

fucking snow...

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

yeah, I’m not one for news pictures so much… the news is all fake anyway, or at least 90% bullshit to 10% truth… but I do like the snow. So, for once, a topical post.

https://images.matt.pictures/fucking_snow…/1045/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/fucking_snow…/1045/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/fucking_snow…/1045/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/fucking_snow…/1045/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

It's been seven days since...

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

I took all these photos. Ok, in that last post, where I said I hadn’t taken any good ones of Ali when we were celebrating her bday? I lied. There’s one here that I really like and another that’s all right, but it’s not her face. What else? That was a dfry night, which is becoming more and more common now that blue note has changed the jukebox. My favorite bar is changing owners very soon… this has happened once before, and that change brought us ladies night and free pool afternoons, but we lost good show coming out of there, so maybe this time we’ll keep the free beer and get back some awesome shows.

Then there are the two pictures in here that aren’t portraits. I’m becoming more impulsive with my photography, and that off ramp was an extreme example. I glanced out of the bar door, saw something, and had a compulsion to go out and shoot it. That’s all I came up with; although there are several frames, I only like that one. What else? Holly, you’d better be treating my hat well. Regular walks, exercise, hand wash only. Now I have to get photos off the camera.

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0043.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0044.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0045.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0046.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0047.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0048.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0049.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0050.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0051.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_seven_days_since…/1043/0052.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

office christmas party, pt 2

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

This is the second half, and because it happened later, was more drunken.

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0031.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0032.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0033.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0034.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0035.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0036.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_2/1041/0037.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Office christmas party, pt 1

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

You know, you;d think the office christmas party would be boring, and nothing would really happen. And I suppose I did end up driving myself home that night, so it wasn’t that crazy. But still, it requires two posts to get all the photos in. Here:

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0023.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0025.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0026.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0027.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0028.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0029.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/office_christmas_party,_pt_1/1042/0030.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

It's been four days since...

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

I was at the blue note… this was the night I found out someone new was buying it, definitely bittersweet… but the sweet was good, too, Hanging out w/ Kat and Sigrid and Kat’s fam (her dad is a pool shark, watchout), and then just the drinking, oh, the drinking…

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_four_days_since…/1044/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_four_days_since…/1044/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_four_days_since…/1044/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

the last december birthday

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

Mike J’s. At the Sipango. And you might think, from these pictures, that it’s not a bad place to hang out. You’d be wrong. I wouldn’t go there again unless it’s someone’s birthday, and they won’t see reason and come to a bar with less dudebros. The things we do for our friends. Actually, I only stayed for half an hour, everybody was already pretty well wasted by the time I got there. Although I did have dinner and some beers earlier at Mcnellies that night, I wasn’t drinking, if you know what I mean. Tuesday, you know?

https://images.matt.pictures/the_last_december_birthday/1040/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_last_december_birthday/1040/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_last_december_birthday/1040/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

two fridays ago...

2009-12-27 00:00:00Z

This was the night of Ali’s birthday… sorry ali, didn’t get any of you, as you were in tulsa… the following night I also didn’t get any, because the light in the dfry is shit. Also, I’m not shooting as much as I used to. it ebbs and flows, just like everything else, and right now, I’m at an ebb… I’ve just had an idea for a new project, though, one that’s been staring me in the face for months and me not even noticing. The working title is ‘hackers in the heartland’… a hacker in the sense of ‘maker’ or ‘expert’. You know who you are, expect emails soon. Anyway, on with the photos.

https://images.matt.pictures/two_fridays_ago…/1039/0038.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/two_fridays_ago…/1039/0039.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/two_fridays_ago…/1039/0040.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/two_fridays_ago…/1039/0042.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

two wednesdays ago...

2009-12-26 00:00:00Z

nobody could believe what was happening… I could scarcely deal with it myself… I mean, look at these girls… and I wasn’t on my game, just imagine what was actually happening…

seriously though, I need to do some catch up on photos… these are seriously stale… expect a post every three hours until I’m caught up to what’s in the camera right now. no promises that the front text will make any more sense than this one did.

https://images.matt.pictures/two_wednesdays_ago…/1046/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/two_wednesdays_ago…/1046/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Chris' b-day

2009-12-23 00:00:00Z

This is what happens when you get in a fight with a truckon one wheel. And win.

I think this was that one night...

2009-12-22 00:00:00Z

Remember? The night that I drank far far too much? Excessive amounts of excess. So hungover in the morning I couldn’t move? Yeah, well, there was this artshow, and I was broke, and a lot of other people fed me booze, but I wasn’t really keeping track. I started counting in the morning, and the number of drinks I had was some where in excess of way too many. I think my short term memory shorted out there at the end, I have a lot of the same picture, like I took it and then forgot. Not that I remember now, but the photos at least tell something. Artifacts. Thank god for autofocus.

I know, deadpan images are dead, but I liked the asshole tax.https://images.matt.pictures/i_think_this_was_that_one_night…/1048/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Husband…
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and wife.
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five minutes for a blog post...

2009-12-22 00:00:00Z

first one will be brief. This is from two wednesdays ago, for once I wasn’t out at blue note, and Chelsea came down to get a cell phone (I have spares and hers was spastic). While I was looking for the charger, she says, “Why don’t we go to norman and see my friends play a jazz set?” and of course I went. I always have some fantastic luck when I hang out with her; I met a former South African paratrooper at one party, or there was the time we came across fire-dancers just before a rock show, etc, etc. This time, one of the professors from OU showed up and asked to sit in, and dude was cool. Didn’t hog the stage, played a couple good numbers, and left. And my five minutes were up a while ago:

Trumpet playin’ man.https://images.matt.pictures/five_minutes_for_a_blog_post…/1049/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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More later.

Pearl Goes Away

2009-12-15 00:00:00Z

It seems like every weekend, we have and excuse to party… and if there is no party, we at least have a reason to drink. Anyway, I know these are like a week and a half late, but I really had far too much fun at this party and the day after… I’ve had a lot of good days in the past moth or so, and this was one of them (or at least that night and the next morning). The kind of good time that makes me want to hang onto certain pictures, even though they’re not as good. When I rush to post, that’s when you see 40 pictures split into two posts; when I wait, you get 7 pictures in one post, but I think they’re the best 7. Anyway, on with the show:

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Return to the Fry

2009-12-11 00:00:00Z

So, a couple weeks ago now, I was in the Drunken fry and some dudebro tried to steal my hat and then start a fight with Cody. This was a mistake on his part, and, well, nothing happened, not really. But I’d been avoiding the fry after that, because who wants to deal with that shit? Anyway, last friday a bunch of us started the night getting smashed and playing dominoes, at which point going to the fry sounded like a good idea. And then there weren’t enough seats in the car, so I said “Fuck it, I’ll ride my bike.” And it was awesome and cold, but mostly awesome. And then drunken, and then fries, in phases.

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friendsgiving part 2

2009-12-09 00:00:00Z

Some good discussion over on my facebook with Kris Kanaly re: that last post where I said the oughts sucked in a lot of ways. If you can read it you should, I don’t feel like re-hashing a lot of stuff here. A note on the nature of this blog: I post the photos for other people to see, and I write stuff for myself. It’s always rough and nothing I say here is ever final or complete. Also: I didn’t mean that there was nothing good happening anywhere, just that only a few pieces of art (and by art I mean writing, painting , photography, and any creative endeavour) were what I’d call transformative, that stick with you, that change you, that have a lasting effect. Then I realized, on reflection, that a small number of works like that might be normal. Not that the worlds sucks, but you don’t make the mona lisa every day, either. A fault, but I think the rest of the argument stands- reducing noise and increasing good signal is a good thing. Anyway, on with the photos.

Apples to apples, which is an excellent idea while drunk, even though I lost a lot.https://images.matt.pictures/friendsgiving_part_2/1052/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Fixing the flag. also: Permanent Distress would be a good name for a punk band.https://images.matt.pictures/friendsgiving_part_2/1052/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Hot ass. Wait. I mean, on fire. Well, jumping over it, anyway.https://images.matt.pictures/friendsgiving_part_2/1052/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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INFINITE BROMANCE:https://images.matt.pictures/friendsgiving_part_2/1052/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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CHELSEA ENGAGED!

2009-12-09 00:00:00Z

Only not really. Hi Ms Miller. Heard you liked the blog and couldn’t resist a little fun.

Ok, joke’s over. Back to your regularly scheduled blog.

Friendsgiving part 1

2009-12-08 00:00:00Z

This post is brought to you by the agave-turkey-waffle-taco, and box wine.

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some thoughts and some random

2009-12-07 00:00:00Z

I’ve been thinking, a lot of people are saying what a craptastic decade this has been, calling it the ‘naughts’ because that’s what it ammounts to. The whole world and every single one of us in it has had kind of a shitty time. There are a few gleaming shiny bits of technology and a lot of death and hate and crap and that’s about it. Music has gone to hell. I haven’t seen any art that really floored me since about 2003, and all of that was made before 2000. What the hell, people?

I think I have one answer- it’s not all of the answer, because so much shit comes from a lot of assholes- but for the first time ever, we have access to everything we want, ever. You know that impulse you have to look at every title in the bookstore at least once, so you don’t miss anything? Or to go through all the rooms in the thrift store, for that one special find? That same impulse combined with the internet and the exponential growth of things available to look at has completely consumed our collective conscious. It’s normal to be obsessed with something, and it’s weird to be disconnected.

Here’s the catch: obsessives are crazy. Not the good crazy, the stay up for three weeks on benzedrine and write the great american novel crazy, but the found dead in her house with two dead cats under piles of used toilet paper rolls crazy. We have been so obsessed with mining all that is out there and finding the gems that we have made no time to create our own identity. You think to yourself if you can just finish this season of lost or get that Eames chair or write the perfect tweet, then you can be at peace, but that’s a lie.

The truth is, there is no such thing as being finished. There is no rest until you’re dead, and no safety either. And as long as you spend your time keeping up with the latest and greatest of the whole world and all of your friends, you will have no time for yourself, to make the world a better place.

I’m not saying to cut yourself off from twitter and facebook and all of that. They are wonderful tools for communication, and they should be used that way. You are not a one person broadcast to the world; you’re leaving a note for your friends. You can’t keep up with everything, so you might as well take the time to do something that’s worth sharing.

And yes, I realize the inherent contradiction, putting this on my blog. Where the hell else am I going to put it? Why share something like this in a channel nobody cares about any more, like a dumb old magazine or newspaper. This is the fucking future, and we didn’t get our flying cars and vacations around venus and all that shit, but we did get blogs and iphones and all the tools we could ever dream of for making the world however we want it. Let’s let go of the old shit and get out there and create something of our own.

Enough rant. I hope you read it and didn’t skip to the photos, even though I like these photos. I have more in this vein, including an expansion of what I mean about not being a broadcast for the whole world, but that’s another rant, and there are plenty of photos to bait you all with later, no? ;)

Adam lock Was back in ton for like two seconds, and these are two from that night at Mcnellies. Have fun kids, and look for freindsgiving photos tomorrow.

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pretty freakin' awesome

2009-12-04 00:00:00Z

via http://succeedblog.org”>succeedblog:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4197108&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1” />http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4197108&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”400” height=”225”>

http://vimeo.com/4197108”>Pop Up from http://vimeo.com/user1474033”>abw on http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo.

tail end

2009-12-03 00:00:00Z

these are the last that I have uploaded; next is Friendsgiving and maybe thanksgiving even, when I get somewhere with wifi that works. Anyway, battery is also dying. More later.
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last wednesday

2009-12-02 00:00:00Z

Calories

2009-12-01 00:00:00Z

I just found out that 20% of the calories you burn are burned by your brain. Does that mean, then, that people with super high metabolism can think more and/or faster? Endurance athletes: ultramarathon runners, touring cyclists who do 80+ miles a day, anybody at the olympics, people like that. Can prolonged exercise make you smarter just by making the processor run hotter?

people come back to town for a holiday

2009-11-30 00:00:00Z

Somebody this weekend asked me this weekend, in a pointed, trying-to-give-advice kind of way, why I hang out with the people I do… as if there are better people somewhere. The truth is it’s damn hard to find people I can talk to, I need all the friends I can get. Real people, people who don’t fuck with trivialities. They sure as hell have their faults, but so do I.

Speaking of friends, of real people… a bunch of people came back into town last week for the holiday, all of whom I was glad to see. This is mostly about them, and the next few posts, too… it’s been a good break. Now back to the grind.

Rayguns and Devin.https://images.matt.pictures/people_come_back_to_town_for_a_holiday/1060/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Caitlin, in from Austin fo a day, then gone the next.https://images.matt.pictures/people_come_back_to_town_for_a_holiday/1060/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I flew a kite that day, and it was fun even though the wind was weak sauce. Photo from Caitlin’s cell phone.https://images.matt.pictures/people_come_back_to_town_for_a_holiday/1060/IMG00203.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Waking up Reaghan, who was napping after drinking all afternoon. https://images.matt.pictures/people_come_back_to_town_for_a_holiday/1060/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Neil, after I was drunk and a lost cause. Also gone now.https://images.matt.pictures/people_come_back_to_town_for_a_holiday/1060/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

a quick wednesday post

2009-11-26 00:00:00Z

that is, photos from a wednesday night. these are from a couple weeks ago. still working through the backlog. all I have to say about what’s happening right now: if you’re not me, sorry ‘bout ‘cha luck.

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a bunch of people I don't know in stillwater

2009-11-26 00:00:00Z

well, I do know the guests of honor, the Chelseas. This was a fun party until the cops came and I had to walk two miles back to Chelsea’s house… never earned a night on a couch more. Well, maybe I have… there was that time in Brazil… or that time… well, anyway, I seem to just stay exhausted these days. No rest for the wicked. Here:

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the last bike against hunger pics until the next one...

2009-11-25 00:00:00Z

Man, there’ve been a lot of these events. What is is about people on bikes and donating to charity? Anyway, these rae from the first weekend, when everybody just rode. The second weekend, I didn’t really take any photos, I was was processing all of these for your ass. But more people showed then and money and cans were raised, so hopefully some people got fed.

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had a thought walking to 7-11

2009-11-25 00:00:00Z

so, I was thinking about twitter… and social media in general… a mistake most so-called experts make is thinking of little updates as broadcasting, when really it’s backchannel. You have a hundred twitter followers that also follow you, you’re inside that circle of people, messaging them things that are irrelevant or unimportant to the rest of the world, but that they might find useful/entertaining/funny. Non-sequiturs. The useful information that you get from the chatter are the things you wouldn’t have found otherwise. Most importantly, it’s behind the scenes.

That’s true for most twitter users, I’d bet. Then there are the “experts” who think of twitter as a place to sell stuff; it’s a free way to shout things about your product, after all. The problem is, when seen in the light of the above: all advertising on twitter is effectively noise. If your product is good, it will get word of mouth (actually, you’ll get more word of mouth if it’s bad or easy to make fun of; see snuggies, slap-chop, etc.).

not cursing in the title.

2009-11-23 00:00:00Z

Random ass night at the hell house.

More hell house, in the kitchen.

The real hell cat?

Yeah, alien spaceship shit, because I roll like that.

Or just the inside of the concert hall. There were people inside speechifying and I was kind of embarassed that they are the good guys.

yeah, yeah, I know...

2009-11-23 00:00:00Z

I haven’t been posting. I have a shit ton of photos, and they’re all uploaded now, so my only excuse is that I’m usually pretty tired of the computer at the end of the day and don’t have the energy to write a whole lot or stare at the screen for an extra hour or two to put something together.

Anyway, these rae from the beginning photo class I taught at OKCCoCo - I only had four people show up, so it was a little bit of a letdown, but at least I was able to answer some questions and maybe the people learned some things. I said a lot, I know that much.

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Things I should be doing

2009-11-16 00:00:00Z

Getting ready for the first Oklahoma Citizen meeting wednesday-yes, the newspaper has a name, tentatively. I need to make an agenda, decide what I’m going to say, maybe put together a powerpoint, etc. etc. It’s a lot of prep work.

2. Laundry- I wore one clean sock today and one dirty sock. Enough said.

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3. House Cleaning- literally. My room has once more transformed into a series of piles, and the bathroom hasn’t been scrubbed in a couple weeks.

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4. Physical therapy exercises- these take about ten minutes, and I’ll probably do them right after I get done writing this.

5. Promote http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/909837”>my book. Done.

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6. Process some of the pictures from the last few weeks. (The ones you’re seeing here are from just after halloween. I have a bunch still in the camera from after that even).

And that’s it. My todo list for right now. What I should be doing. Instead, I’m waiting on a phone call to go out and celebrate somebody’s birthday. No names, I am a gentleman after all.

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what's next?

2009-11-05 00:00:00Z

this is always on my mind. For a very long time, I’ve been casting about, trying to find my way through the world, and it’s been a ripping good time. I’ve got a good job now, one that will eventually afford me a great deal of freedom, assuming I don’t get tied down with a wife and kids and mortgage and all the trappings of modern life that are really just a trap.

It’s a curve though. I’m starting at zero: zero knowledge of the stuff I’m doing, zero time to do anything but sleep and work, zero money, and zero photos taken since I started the job on tuesday. these will all help each other though: As I learn the job, I’ll have more time to get out and do things; as soon as I have a paycheck, I’ll have more money in hand than I’ve had in months; and of course, there will be more photos. (I just checked; there are a couple photos on the camera, but nothing of consequence).

one thing, I guess: I’ve realized that you don’t have to be all one thing; that is, you can do a lot of different things, do them well, and it’s not that you’re letting go of one thing for another, it’s that you’re able to do both, and that all of your activities inform one another. It’s a good thing I’ve come to this realization, because it’s a really bad time to be trying to make money off of photography. (I’m not going to go into details, but someone was pissed at me recently because they thought I was putting out a certain photo for a profit, and it made me laugh. I’ve never made money off of what I consider my real work, the portraits, the documentary projects, etc).

the second half of the party pictures

2009-11-03 00:00:00Z

Don’t be mad if I cut a picture you liked; they’re still in the http://www.flickr.com/photos/photomattmills/sets/72157622720538580/“>flickr set, but I wanted to trim this some. Onward!

This photo isn’t here for the fact that I found waldo. It’s here because the girl on the right recognized me. From this blog. Hi, if you’re reading this. I didn’t catch your name.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0032.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0034.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m a fan of this.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0036.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I don’t know if it’s a abberation of the lens or what, but does that guy in blue look flat to you? Weird.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0037.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Of course, Tanner got back in town and had to start things off right: by pummelling some dude at a party.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0039.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Because this scene never happened in the cartoon.
https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0040.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0041.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0042.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0043.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0044.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0045.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0046.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0047.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0048.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Rachel and Timmy had the best costumes of the night; they came dressed as each other. Everyone kept doing double takes all night at both of them.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0049.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0050.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0051.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0052.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0053.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0054.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0055.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0056.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0057.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I like these two photos together, eve though they’re both a little blurry, because the look on her face (2nd pic) is the look I’ve seen 1000 times, along with the phrase “Did you just take a picture?” https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0058.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0059.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Bearded lady? https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0060.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0061.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0062.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0063.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The thing about this is, when they came in, I looked over at Rachel (the one in the green shirt, for clarity) and said to myself, “Is that Timmy?”https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0064.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0065.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This could be a cuervo ad, if the label were facing the right way.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0066.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Because the party never stops.https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0067.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0069.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0070.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_second_half_of_the_party_pictures/1069/0071.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The Morning after...

2009-11-03 00:00:00Z

So these are the last of them, except a coupla skate sequences… This was fun. And now, I’ve got a regular job, I’m going to be boring, but the good news is it’s at least interesting work… learning a new programming language, plus a library or two, plus a new super complicated framework… all marketable skills, things I can use to get a job telecommuting from anywhere.

”hey guys, let’s go get food and make a big brunch.”https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0072.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Made their money back, at least. https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0073.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Feast in preparation. Man that shit was epic and delicious.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0074.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

What’s that they’re passing around? Oh yeah, hair of the dog.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0075.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Sacrifices to the party gods.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0076.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0077.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Timmy said “Man, if I hadn’t done these tricks a million times, I wouldn’t be able to do them right now.”https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0078.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

For some people, the party never stops.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after…/1070/0079.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

so I lied...

2009-11-02 00:00:00Z

I was going to just be lazy and post the photos to flickr and be done, but some of these need captions and comments and snarkiness. Also, I think more people will see them this way. These are split into three posts, so as not to hurt your page load time and my bandwidth.

Oh yeah, a technical note- these pictures wouldn’t have been possible without clever deployment of the on camera flash and a little reflector to bounce it off of the ceiling/walls. If you want to learn stuff like that, why not come to http://services.okccoco.com/classes/detail/50”>the class I’m teaching at the coco next week? /blatant plug.

Getting ready to race. Tanner hadn’t ridden a bike in two months and took fourth.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

At my checkpoint, I made them do pushups. “I hate you,” Cody said, as he jumped back on his bike. He went on to win the race.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Brian said his costume was rock and roll jesus, something like that, but looking at it now, I can’t help but think of him as Spider jerusalem on his jesus binge. All the comic book nerds know what I’m talking about.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Unfortunately, both dominatrixpizza.com and hotgirlseatingpizza.com are taken.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This is what happens when you run smack into a car that doesn’t give you your right of way.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The look on her face is really worse than the bruise and small hematoma he had.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

No comment.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Hey Look! It’s JEM! I still have that theme song in my head.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

We even had someone dressed as a streaker/flasher.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The second best couples’ costume goes to Chris and his lovely girlfriend Talia (sorry if I just butchered the spelling of you name, but it’s late). https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This guy gets the award for “Costume I saw last year on a girl.” It was weirder/scarier on the girl by far.
https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Dance floor photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Neil, you look taller now. What gives?https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Really glad Slash came by to DJ. Wouldn’t have been as rad without him at the laptops.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0021.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0022.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0023.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0025.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Cyrus came as… himself? not sure. but he brought whiskey, which everyone knows is a substitute for a costume.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0026.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0027.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I wish she were just a little sharper. A little stillness in all that movement. My flash didn’t fire.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0028.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Cyrus is explaining to her that a star trek t-shirt doesn’t actually constitute a costume. https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0029.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0030.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Kelly, don’t worry. The flash will make it all right.https://images.matt.pictures/so_i_lied…/1071/0031.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

That’s it for now. tune in next time for more fun, excitement, and references you’ll have to google to get.

Helloween race +party +the day after

2009-11-02 00:00:00Z

So, there’s a lot of photos from last saturday, and rather than split it up into three or four posts, I’m just going to post this handy flickr gallery and call it a day. It was really epic. Like wow.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/photomattmills/albums/72157622720538580” title=”Halloween”>https://live.staticflickr.com/2692/4070173314_35c2519f8b_h.jpg” width=”1600” height=”1200” alt=”Halloween”>

booze cruise: the return?

2009-10-31 00:00:00Z

well, at lest we went to the rooster and had a pitcher and it was friday. the rest needs work still, including my bike, which I need to get done before tonight, which is going to be madness itself. And then there was a house party, oh yeah.

https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise:_the_return?/1075/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

See how much fun the guys are having? See that pained look on the girl’s face? That pretty much sums it up.https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise:_the_return?/1075/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

halloween warmup

2009-10-31 00:00:00Z

Remember everone, this isn’t actually halloween yet, just a preamble.

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_warmup/1074/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

mimosa break

2009-10-31 00:00:00Z

before all the madness that is about to rain down on us, let’s pause and just relax and have a mimosa:

https://images.matt.pictures/mimosa_break/1073/mimosabreak.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Open Beta After Party

2009-10-28 00:00:00Z

I’m not going to bore you, my more general audience, with event photos of Open Beta. The fun stuff, as always, was at the afterparty. Some people might notice curious black spots in a couple of the photos; this is where that someone has been removed from the background. This person has especially delicate privacy issues (read: other journalists might be interested in harming him and his, and that’s not what these photos are for), and I have to respect that. Odd social circles I find myself travelling in these days. Anyway, the photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/open_beta_after_party/1076/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The state of the economy: flea markets

2009-10-27 00:00:00Z

now, you’d think that with everything going to hell in a handbasket, you expect to see flea markets like this:

https://images.matt.pictures/the_state_of_the_economy:_flea_markets/1077/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

but then we went to another, and it was better:

https://images.matt.pictures/the_state_of_the_economy:_flea_markets/1077/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Win some, lose some. This has been a moment of zen between moments of madness, brought to you by Matt’s moments of Zen.

KRONDOR

2009-10-27 00:00:00Z

The Scene of the Preparations:

duct tape man:

Praise KRONDOR!

LOVE IN THE TIME OF KRONDOR

Plague Doctor and sailor?

Scaring small children

This is what winning looks like. FOR KRONDOR!

And then there was the after party at Bell’s house:

Me, courtesy amber, who seems to take good pics of me every time I hand her the camera. That’s talent.

Snack run.

Returning the favor to Amber:

And one-upping:

Taking a picture for her myspace?

I have no idea why there was a hooter’s girl on the steps, but I do remember that this was a work uniform, not a costume.

it's been days since....

2009-10-27 00:00:00Z

I last posted, and these photos aren’t what everybody is waiting on, but hey, all the selects are made, now all I have to do is go through and color balance and adjust some exposure, and everything will be wonderful. Meantime, here are these, which have been sitting on my hard drive for a week, waiting for me to have a working display again. There’s a long saga involved, but I really don’t feel like going into my broken laptop problems.

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0021.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0022.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/it’s_been_days_since…./1079/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

A brief post about bicycles

2009-10-27 00:00:00Z

just to frustrate the people waiting for KRONDOR pictures. Don’t worry, I’m onto that next, I’m even skipping the openbeta stuff to get to it. But anyway:

The Science Museum (their real name, no kidding) here in the city has a little exhibit on antique bicycles, or the development of the bike, or something like that. Really cool, I want two of everything they have on display. including that steam powered bike. that’s pretty rad.

Lori looks at an original boneshaker. She was there on assignment from to see some exhibit in the photo hall of fame, and got me in for free.https://images.matt.pictures/a_brief_post_about_bicycles/1080/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Harley moped with suicide shifter! OMG.https://images.matt.pictures/a_brief_post_about_bicycles/1080/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Steampunk bike. Or is is still steampunk when it’s actually a steam engine?https://images.matt.pictures/a_brief_post_about_bicycles/1080/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I would ride the hell outta this wooden fixie piece of awesome.https://images.matt.pictures/a_brief_post_about_bicycles/1080/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The night that kamps failed...

2009-10-20 00:00:00Z

to provide free pbr. We recovered and drowned our sorrows at red rooster and then of course blue note…

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0005.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0006.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/the_night_that_kamps_failed…/1081/0007.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Halloween store

2009-10-15 00:00:00Z

As Lori said, “Kill it with fire!”:

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_store/1082/0013.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Or better yet, lop off the top of it’s head and make it in to a grotesque beer bong. Don priest robe and/or long underwear and demonstrate:

https://images.matt.pictures/halloween_store/1082/0015.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

another day, another batch!

2009-10-14 00:00:00Z

This is another in a series I'm working on called "Boring but interesting enough to be AdultSwim bumps."

still catching up...

2009-10-13 00:00:00Z

This is all from last wednesday… so I’m only a week behind now… really the problem is me. I have everything I’ve shot up to yesterday edited and ready to post, but I’m lazy or reluctant to post everything all at once or something.

Soccer field very early/very late the night before.https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Kamp’s, which is technically not a club, since they’re sketchy like that. But they did have free pbr until 11 that night, which led to a lot of the further madness.https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

OKC’s newest sport, synchronized drinking.https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

I don’t really know who this is, i mean I remember taking the picture and introducing myself, but anyway I’m kinda in love with this, ok?https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0005.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Hat fight.https://images.matt.pictures/still_catching_up…/1084/0006.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

wow I'm way behind....

2009-10-12 00:00:00Z

blame it on the busted macbook (parts are on their way from hong kong, and we all know how long it takes a slow boat from china to get here…) or blame it on being bummed about not getting the magazine job I thought I was a shoe-in for, or, well, general laziness, but anyway, here are some pics from sunday before last, more shooting for the http://thenakedsun.com”>naked sun, which is still in progress and might actually be the saving of us all, if by us all I mean media/art people that would like to make money and keep on doing our thing at the same time.

https://images.matt.pictures/wow_i’m_way_behind…./1085/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/wow_i’m_way_behind…./1085/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/wow_i’m_way_behind…./1085/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/wow_i’m_way_behind…./1085/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

last of the saturday photos, and a weird thing that just happened

2009-10-07 00:00:00Z

This dude's name was Izzy. I think.

Plaza district fest part 1

2009-10-06 00:00:00Z

I’m splitting these into multiple parts, because I think they’ll work better that way, and because I say so. Nyah.

hangin’ out on the roof deck at Victoria’s.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

LOW-ANGLE SHOTS ARE COOLER AT 18MM.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Creepiest Halloween decoration I’;ve seen so far this year. But subtle.
https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Now to the photos of the fest itself. First, the ubiquitous dad with a kid on his shoulder:

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0005.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Homies. B’lieve me, they’re tight like that.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0006.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0007.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Not sure what’s going on here, but it involves intoxication on everyone’s part.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0008.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Katie shows her metal face.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0009.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0010.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

MOAR METAL FACE.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_1/1088/0011.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Plaza district fest part 2

2009-10-06 00:00:00Z

I’m not sure what the theme or the unifying whatever was for this street fest, but I think it might have been “Mess with the drunks,” viz:

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0012.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

And then the dragon chased Victoria and Beach.

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https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0014.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Tim, we need to talk. You have a problem with face paint. Admitting it is the first step. https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0015.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Maeghan, we need to talk. You have a problem. It might have something to do with the fact that you told me to do these captions.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0016.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Velvet Monkey insides.https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0017.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

Stiltman.
https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0018.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

John’s band:

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https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0020.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/plaza_district_fest_part_2/1087/0021.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos” />

being lost

2009-10-05 00:00:00Z

Yesterday or the day before, sunday, anyway, I was driving down the highway and I had this sudden feeling of disconnectedness, of being lost. Like when in the night you wake up and don’t know where you are.

I was coming around a curve, and it was raining, cloudy, but I know that section of road, have driven it many times. There’s the normal state of having been somewhere, and you remember, for example, that the bathroom is behind you and your car is out in the parking lot or driveway, and that the roads that led you there also lead to home. It’s a grounded feeling, a feeling that lets you ignore parts of the landscape that aren’t normal.

For a brief second, coming around that curve, it was like all those connections, where I was going and where I was coming from, and everything that I knew the location of, all of that was cut off, and it was as if I was floating above it. It’s so odd because I normally have a very good sense of the space I’m in and what is around me.

Then, I looked around I saw every detail of everything, blades of grass and tree branches, and the cars a quarter mile back, and the shapes of the clouds, and then, gradually, over a period of ten seconds, the feeling faded, and while I didn’t feel really normal for a couple minutes, the hyper-awareness was gone and the highway was just highway, and the sky was just sky, and the weirdness went away, just like it does when you turn on the light in the middle of the night.

Anyway, now back to your regularly scheduled blog. There’s some nice pics from plaza fest and outtakes from the naked sun shoot coming up, so stay tuned.

Some opolis show or something

2009-10-04 00:00:00Z

Friday was fun as shit. Definitely the best night out I’ve had in a while that didn’t involve getting far too drunk. Actually, there was drinking, of course. But the funness was from the dancing and the company, Amber and Kat and some of their friends, oh yeah, and I saw Grizzly Bear’s tour bus. At least, that’s what someone said it was. No idea who these bands were, forgot their names already, go to the opolis web site and look i9f you care, but they honestly weren’t that great, or I would have written the names down or shot the poster or something. But the night as a whole was a blast.

Ghost Bike:https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

This guy sucked. Took forever to start and then played bad music.
https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0005.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Amber looks all evil. But I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt because she’s the whole reason I was down there.https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0006.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

These guys strike me as the kind of music that’s enjoyable right now, but we’ll be embarrassed about in a couple years.https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0007.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0008.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Dancing at La Luna.https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0009.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Showed chelsea this, and said, what do you think of it, and she said, it’s a good picture but her boobs look hexagonal. So, sorry Amber. Next time I’ll try to make you not look evil and hexagonal.https://images.matt.pictures/some_opolis_show_or_something/1091/0010.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Throw Your Voice

2009-10-04 00:00:00Z

All of these need captions, but instead of me writing them, you should pull out a sharpie and write them in in the whitespace between the pictures. No, not really. Seriously though, the conference was really fun, I learned a lot about podcasting and a little about blogging. Breakfast from prairie thunder, coffee from cafe evoke and lunch from iguana, all wonderful. It was nice to meet everyone, and hopefully you all like the photos.

https://images.matt.pictures/throw_your_voice/1090/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

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https://images.matt.pictures/throw_your_voice/1090/0016.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

a sunset, some clouds, and myself:

2009-09-28 00:00:00Z

The Opposite Signs... another band post...

2009-09-28 00:00:00Z

I swear I’m not turning into http://jeremycharles.com”>Jeremy Charles, or worse, Annie Leibowitz, but I do seem to be shooting a lot of musicians lately. This band I didn’t really like. The sound was super mellow, smooth jazz like, and it really did nothing for me. There were some good moments, when it seemed like a song would break out and do something interesting, but then it got drowned in the hopeless drone.

https://images.matt.pictures/the_opposite_signs…_another_band_post…/1092/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_opposite_signs…_another_band_post…/1092/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_opposite_signs…_another_band_post…/1092/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/the_opposite_signs…_another_band_post…/1092/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Deluxe Craft Weekend

2009-09-28 00:00:00Z

Well, samples from the half hour that I was there. It seemed like a really fun time, and if I hadn’t been sleep depping and working and whatnot this weekend, I probably would have really enjoyed doing some classes and just sitting around kibitzing with everyone. I could have gotten some of my bookbinding experiments done maybe. Anyway, photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/deluxe_craft_weekend/1093/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/deluxe_craft_weekend/1093/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Norman Bike against Hunger Alleycat

2009-09-23 00:00:00Z

Not much to say except Ken deserves mad props for putting together the whole bike against hunger series… and to everyone else who organized, Pearl, Stewart, Isiah, and whoever else I’m forgetting, thanks you guys for putting together an awesome set of events; every one I went to was a good time. Now, photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0025.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0026.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0028.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0029.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0030.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0031.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0032.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0033.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0034.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0035.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0036.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And last but not least, a sunset. I’ve gotten in the habit of shooting these recently. They’re cliche sure, but pretty anyway.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_bike_against_hunger_alleycat/1096/0037.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

friends at the hilo

2009-09-23 00:00:00Z

I’m doing something I’ve long threatened to do; these are here as a nice tight edit, and there are more over in my http://www.flickr.com/photos/photomattmills”>flickr. Also, romantic disaster was there, photos and review to come.

https://images.matt.pictures/friends_at_the_hilo/1097/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/friends_at_the_hilo/1097/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/friends_at_the_hilo/1097/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/friends_at_the_hilo/1097/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/friends_at_the_hilo/1097/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Romantic Disaster at HiLo

2009-09-23 00:00:00Z

Romantic disaster is a local band that’s doing amazing things. They’ve got a great sound and a great look, the kind that even comes through when they’re all wasted and playing a quick set at an AIDS benefit show at a dive like the HiLo. In fact, it probably added to the rawness and unpredictability of the whole thing. Of course, your humble blogger was drunk off his ass, so maybe I was just responding to the visceral loudness and hotness of their lead singer. But I’ve heard them play before, when I was sober and so were they, and they’re good. Put them on your list of bands to catch, and then someday, you can be like, “I saw them in this tiny ass club in OKC. The bassist used to make my pizza.” Oh wait, that’s me.

https://images.matt.pictures/romantic_disaster_at_hilo/1095/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/romantic_disaster_at_hilo/1095/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/romantic_disaster_at_hilo/1095/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

state fair photos

2009-09-22 00:00:00Z

So I went to the fair saturday night…. insanity. The only time I see this many people in one place is when I’m not in oklahoma. But a fun time too, I got my annual fair lemonade and saw the slap chop guy (look at my twitpic, I’m too lazy to repost that one). By the way, can you tell I love my new wide angle way too much?

https://images.matt.pictures/state_fair_photos/1099/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/state_fair_photos/1099/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/state_fair_photos/1099/0022.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Katie, Erin, and some other people I only half know on the Fireball ride. https://images.matt.pictures/state_fair_photos/1099/0023.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Also, Tommy and Deepak.https://images.matt.pictures/state_fair_photos/1099/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Ok, back to room cleaning.

what? 300 posts!

2009-09-22 00:00:00Z

Yeah, I’m as shocked as you are. Some of those are drafts that were never published, but still… a year and a half and three hundred posts later, we’re still here. Wow. This one sort of snuck up me. It seems like just a couple weeks ago I had the 250th post. But no. Anyway, some random photos before we get to fair stuff and bike race later today.

I don’t have enough superlatives for the meal I had at Musashi’s last thursday. The show was fun, but the kobe beef there is tied for the best steak I’ve ever had. The fried rice was also really good. I like places that pay attention to their staples.https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Yeah, ooh, pretty fire. Thanks to Lori for letting me show her a good time.https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Completely unrelated: Justin and Miranda.
https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Little creepy there Justin. (photo by http://twitter.com/maeghan”>@maeghan).https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This picture is really kinda weird. Hipshot and unintentional. https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This is weirder. Tim pole dancing.https://images.matt.pictures/what?_300_posts!/1098/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Opolis show

2009-09-21 00:00:00Z

Went down to norman with Chelsea (and now she has a twitter so I can link that: http://twitter.com/thenakedsun”>@thenakedsun) and took photos of the band “Deer People” (or is that “The Deer People”?) and anyway, hated the photos when I first looked, but really these aren’t that bad. There’s a second band down there, Mayola, they were good too. Louder and more energetic, but a lot simpler musically. I liked both.

On the way to Norman.https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Oh yeah, there were random firedancers.https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0025.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And then the sky opened up. And it rained a lot.https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0026.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Like, really a lot, even for a place where the rain has been going for two weeks.https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0027.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And then there were the bands. I was there covering Deer People, so naturally I have a lot of pictures of them. Here:

https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0028.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0029.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0030.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Saw this between bands backstage.https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0044.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Then Mayola rocked out a short set… I don’t know about you, but sometimes really high energy three-chord rock is what the doctor ordered. And their bassist is a badass.

https://images.matt.pictures/opolis_show/1100/0045.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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just some pics...

2009-09-21 00:00:00Z

for the haters

2009-09-20 00:00:00Z

am I late to the party, or is this just awesome?

2009-09-10 00:00:00Z

25th Birthday, photoshoot, awesomeness

2009-09-09 00:00:00Z

Basically last sunday was one of the best days I’ve ever had, right up there with my 20th birthday, the day I graduated high school, and the field day at summer arts’ institute. Might even be the best, what with all the excellent madness and amazing people and things.

I woke up and went home, had a good breakfast with the family, eggs, home fries, bacon, the kind of meal you dream of later. Then I coordinated with Chelsea and Meaghan for the shoot later that day (don’t cheat, there’s tons of story before we get to those pictures). We were going to go to Stillwater and make a big production, but Maeghan had cut her foot badly the night before. She didn’t want to cancel, so I suggested we scale back, just do one of the ideas and do it here in the city. So we did, and chelsea came down and met us at Sauced. Cyrus showed up on his motorbike (dubbed the aluminum falcon because it’s also a piece of crap) and said hello and whatnot, and then jetted, and so did we.

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

We found a place to do the painting, over at Grant (http://twitter.com/schofield”>@schofield) and Damaris’ (http://twitter.com/somna”>@somna) house, but they weren’t going to be home, so we went in search of coffee, and failed. What we did find, Sara Sara, was downright creepy. But their cupcakes were decent and the milk bar was brilliant. They need to work on their coffee offerings though. Real espresso would be nice.

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Then I waited, while Maeghan did the work and Chelsea sat very still. This is what the waiting was like:

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Now add to that 20 mosquito bites, and I decided to go inside to wait. This is what the girls were up to:

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And later:

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And finally, on location, swatting a bee:

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And the final silhouette:

https://images.matt.pictures/25th_birthday,_photoshoot,_awesomeness/1106/0021.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

There’s another picture up at http://thenakedsun.com”>The Naked Sun our literary journal. That’s right, I said “our”- I’m one of the editors and web designer, and if everybody is half as cool as then seem, and can manage to meet deadlines, we’re going to be the raddest thing out there.

From the shoot, we dropped Maeghan off to go get her foot checked out, and headed to Norman for cake and more adventures. Tune in in a coupla hours, and there’ll be more pics.

Norman Playground

2009-09-09 00:00:00Z

So to put a capper on an unbelievably amazing day, we went down to norman, where Amber and her fiancee Josh fed us cake and roast and squash. Even the squash was good, and I’ve never like it in the past. Might have to revise that sentiment now. Anyway, we watched a movie, something weird with Zooey Deschanel and some dude adopting a baby from china.Weird ending, but I think I liked it. Then we all went to the park, where it was very dark. Too dark to focus using normal methods; zen methods were employed with some success. As sharp as can be, considering 1/10th of a second at f/1.2 and ISO 25000. You don’t believe me, you go out and try it. Anyway, pictures:

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_playground/1104/0022.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Chelsea took this one, she said I needed pics of myself on my birthday. Here’s me playing on a playground at 25 years.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_playground/1104/0023.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And here’s the playground, also by her.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_playground/1104/0024.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Amber, looking at Josh in the foreground.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_playground/1104/0025.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/norman_playground/1104/0026.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Last friday

2009-09-09 00:00:00Z

Ran into Amber and Kat at blue note, fun times.

I don't even remember when this was. Thursday?

2009-09-08 00:00:00Z

Another Monday

2009-09-03 00:00:00Z

Monday rolls around and I’m looking for polaroid film when who should call me but http://www.furburger.org”>Christa May, wondering if I’m down for a little libation at Mcnellie’s. Of course I am. I’m always down for Mcnellie’s.

Logan and Matt, not me, but Christa’s new dude. Isn’t it nice how everyone seems to be forming couples at the same time? Or at least several of my friends have over the past few weeks.https://images.matt.pictures/another_monday/1110/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Matt by himself. https://images.matt.pictures/another_monday/1110/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m posting all three of these because I can’t remember which she liked and I think they all look pretty decent. #3 is the best, but who am I to judge? Oh yeah, that’s my job. So yeah, just ignore the first two, those are just for Christa.

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Amber's B-day

2009-09-03 00:00:00Z

Amber herself at the piano.

Location, Location

2009-09-03 00:00:00Z

Sunday was location scouting. And thrift stores. And a nondisclosure agreement, so I’m not sure what I can and can’t say, but none of these are embargoed, formally or informally, so there you have it. We’re working on cool shit, and when it comes out it’s going to be really rad, but that’s not for four months or so, so expect teasers and hints and nothing substantive until at least january.

https://images.matt.pictures/location,_location/1109/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Credit where credit is due: photo by Chelsea M’lynn.https://images.matt.pictures/location,_location/1109/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Sherree Chamberlain

2009-09-03 00:00:00Z

This is the band and the singer/songwriter that the crew that I was there to photograph was there to film. Wait, let me rephrase. I showed up and my friend Tomee was there with a film crew to record Sherree and her band, and Tomee asked me if I would shoot some production stills, so I did. And I got backstage access for the whole show, and some nice pictures; My friend and fellow photographer http://jeremycharles.com”>Jeremy Charles said something on twitter about the joy of the performer being why he does concert photography, and I saw what he meant shooting these pictures. I shouldn’t be surprised that he also has a http://www.jeremycharles.com/blog/index.php/2009/05/27/sherree-chamberlain-photos/“>gallery of photos of Chamberlain too. Dude knows what’s up. Girl can sing and entertain and has the look too.

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One picture

2009-09-02 00:00:00Z

There’s a story in news-photographer apocrypha about an old school photographer who went out on assignment to someplace very remote; say, China. Mongolia. Now this guy was old school to our old school; learned to photograph with a 4x5 and knew a time when lens caps doubled as shutters. He went to China with a new nikon 35mm and when he got back, as he was deplaning, an assistant for whatever paper he was working for met him just off the plane to rush his film to the lab. He pulls out his camera, rewinds the roll that’s inside, and hands it to the assistant, saying “Print ‘em both, kid.”

Now, I’m not a fan of the slow, patient photography that this implies; neither am I a proponent of going out to an event and overheating a motor drive taking way too many pictures. I like to take a series of pictures that tells the story over time. But there is something to be said for being patient, and taking less pictures. The night I took this photo, I took two; this one and one of the inside of my bag as I was putting the camera away.

https://images.matt.pictures/one_picture/1114/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Now I have to go and edit the pictures from the next night, where I shot 500 pictures in a couple hours. There’s a lot going on here at matt mills world HQ, so stay tuned.

Uglysuit

2009-09-02 00:00:00Z

So last saturday and sunday I was in stillwater for various reasons including location scouting and “for the hell of it.” I rolled out of OKC at 9pm, right after work, and rolled into stillwater at around 10, rolling right up to a show and betting an assignment for production stills in the first five minutes of being there.

Anyway, I’m getting out of the car and combobulating myself (grabbing my camera and checking the settings and making sure I have an extra battery and card) and I hear the band that’s playing, don’t know who it is, but they sound good. Then I walk in and recognize Uglysuit on stage. Fucking good show.

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Random friends

2009-09-02 00:00:00Z

Hopefully I can be forgiven for sandwiching these photos of some friends I ran into at the concert in between band posts… these are cool people, as far as I know. I mean, I’m not their mother, so I can’t be a character witness, but at least they knew where the cool show was in stillwater that night and made it out, so that says something. And some of them, the ones I know better, are verified badass. So, guilt by association with me:

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Code for a Cause comes to CoCo

2009-09-01 00:00:00Z

So saturday was a busy day, spent mostly recovering from friday in the morning, but I did manage to stop by the CoCo for a minute to snap a few pictures of code for a cause, a really neat charity that provieds web site makeovers for nonprofits. 600 hours of web design and coding all compressed into one day. Pretty awesome. Wish I could have stayed longer.

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Big Truck Tacos

2009-08-27 00:00:00Z

So, back when I was trying to start a city blog for okc, and at the same time still blogging here and doing my best imitation of a fish’s drinking habits, I had a series that would have been titled “I love it here”- reviews of good shit here in OKC that would have been a regular feature if the blog had had more than three readers. Shows you how good I am at promotion.

The inside of the place is nicely decorated, with good seating.https://images.matt.pictures/big_truck_tacos/1116/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I had a couple steak al carbon tacos, a mexican coke, and chips and salsa. The tacos were good, not too greasy, with corn tortillas and onions for flavor. About that flavor: I wish I could say it was on par with other places I’ve had tacos locally, (I’m looking at you, Iguana, with all your deliciousness) but there just wasn’t enough. All I got was beef and onion, no spice. That said, they were good, and with the salsa, not bad at all. The chips and salsa were chips and salsa, good and fresh. A word on Mexican Coke: you should try it. They use real cane sugar to make it, which has a better flavor than high fructose bullshit. Really better than what you get out of the fountain. I think I paid 9 bucks for the meal, and I was pretty satisfied when I was done.

Any place with patio seating is a win in this town. We Okies like to dine al fresco.https://images.matt.pictures/big_truck_tacos/1116/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Anyway, Big Truck Tacos would have been a natural fit for that series. They’re a locally owned newish place, right in the middle of the part of 23rd street that I was betting would see development 6 months ago… and here we are, already a new restaurant. And they’re good. Great patio seating, nice atmos inside, fast service, friendly staff, and that awesome location, they’ve got all the stuff they need lined up to be a success.

Not a food photographer. But doesn’t this look good? Needs more seasoning to be perfect, though.https://images.matt.pictures/big_truck_tacos/1116/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Definitely recommended, and you’ll probably see me there trying out more menu items as the weeks progress.

The Morning After

2009-08-26 00:00:00Z

This is the last of the pics from last weekend. Man, that was epic. I’m basically doing two jobs, but only getting paid for one; I’m a lowly barista, and I’m a photographer, shooting all the time and editing when I can, around my social and work schedule. It’s actually pretty fun, I just don’t sleep a lot these days. Never did sleep much though.

That morning, though, I woke up and felt fine; six whole hours of sleep does wonders, even when there’s half a bottle of rum involved. then we did brunch at Cafe do Brasil. They really have the best sunday brunch, and my favorite chorizo in town. Then onto sauced to hang out on the patio and soak up the sun on a gorgeous day. A fantastic end to a really great weekend.

Chelsea stretching. I love the lines in this one; odd parallels you don’t expect take a second to resolve. https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0038.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Again with Chelsea. Did I mention she’s also gorgeous? Yeah. Now I have.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0039.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Pearl looking all stoic and really not hungover.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0040.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This puppy was cute as hell. And obviously sent by the devil to enslave us all.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0041.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

See? It took Pearl right in with its pink belly. https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0043.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Obviously Dangerous.https://images.matt.pictures/the_morning_after/1117/0044.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

My afterparty Shots

2009-08-26 00:00:00Z

So yeah, despite having my camera stolen (borrowed, I guess) I did manage to take a ton of photos myself at that party. Yeah, I know, more drunk people. but they look good.

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MYL Chelsea's After Party Photos

2009-08-26 00:00:00Z

I first met http://photomattmills.com/images/madeyoulookandafter/0033.jpg”>Chelsea at the bike prom on friday- she seemed interesting in a “you’re a person with interesting ideas” kind of way, then she showed up here in the city for Made You Look and the afterparty, and turns out we’re into a lot of the same things, photography and journalism and documentary work, and we’re getting along famously at the party when she asks to see my camera, and I hand it over (this is after several stout rum and cokes, mind), and she runs off taking pictures like there’s no tomorrow. And I don’t know, something about the way I can see she’s concentrating, I let her keep going with it for a while.

I’m really glad I did because she’s really good. Focus is on the money, compositionally interesting, good moments, the whole bit. I asked her later, after seeing the pictures, if she had any experience. “I just shoot everything I love. Always have,” she tells me. And that’s exactly it folks, what I’ve been saying for years: shoot what you love, the rest is just technicalities.

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Made You Look

2009-08-26 00:00:00Z

First off, a video:
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6277295&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1” />http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6277295&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowscriptaccess=”always” width=”640” height=”358”>

http://vimeo.com/6277295”>B Boy Sequence II from http://vimeo.com/user932074”>Matt Mills on http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo.

.

Then, just a few stills not in that sequence. The battle was decent, but I missed most of it, jumped up on stage with Chelsea (who you’ll be hearing a lot more about in a little bit) and squeezed a spot with a view of the dance floor. Kicked some dudes bag out of the way. It was good to see the little part that I saw; the show was so small this year I wondered why they bothered. The art was all pretty decent, but nothing stuck with me. There should have been more, in more space. Bricktown wasn;t the place to have it, people. Anyway, photos:

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Up next will be photos of the afterparty, which was way more epic.

BIKE PROM

2009-08-24 00:00:00Z

I was going to be all cool and separate thes out into three or four posts, but I realized there’s no reason to do that, because I’ve got a ton more posts coming, including a review of big truck tacos, some fliks from made you look 09, and crazy sunday with puppies. So, without further delay, bikeprom (and yes, I’m being lazy by not adding captions, but most of these are self explanatory):

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refreshokc at coco

2009-08-21 00:00:00Z

driving around

2009-08-20 00:00:00Z

I’m at a loss for subjects that aren’t drunk people and aren’t boring. This is all I’ve been able to come up with in the last couple days. Oh yeah, and some of sober people.

Nighttime, trying to get pictures of lightning. At least the signs look cool.https://images.matt.pictures/driving_around/1123/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

So there was a fire, and I drove around it trying to get closer, this is all I could do.https://images.matt.pictures/driving_around/1123/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Not my shoes; issues.https://images.matt.pictures/driving_around/1123/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Random party

2009-08-18 00:00:00Z

These are from a random party last week; I’m still working through the backlog. I’ll probably post everything else sometime tonight.

Ran to the bar for shots, ‘cause there was only 3.2 beers at the party.https://images.matt.pictures/random_party/1125/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/random_party/1125/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Christa and KW- It was cool to see him out, even randomly.https://images.matt.pictures/random_party/1125/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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The dude on the right was leaving the country (or was it his birthday?); it was his party, anyway.https://images.matt.pictures/random_party/1125/0020.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/random_party/1125/0021.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The rest of the backlog

2009-08-18 00:00:00Z

Last Wednesday

2009-08-17 00:00:00Z

Shoes.

beginning at the beginning

2009-08-17 00:00:00Z

So I have a huge pile of photos from the last week, and I’ve been procrastinating on posting them because of work and lazyness and such, but here, finally, on a coffee fueled sunday night, I’ve gotten them all out and will post them in blog-sized chunks until I get bored with them and post all the rest in a large-ish post sometime on tuesday.

Mom on her first day as a retiree. Lunch at Olive Garden.https://images.matt.pictures/beginning_at_the_beginning/1127/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This dude was sort of bewildered at the camera. Also, he took the next photo, of Christa and me. Bewildered by focus as well. https://images.matt.pictures/beginning_at_the_beginning/1127/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Yeah, that’s me. A sight rarely seen on the internets, although there are really far too many pics of me out there at this point.https://images.matt.pictures/beginning_at_the_beginning/1127/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Cmay in her natural habitat.https://images.matt.pictures/beginning_at_the_beginning/1127/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Lambo outside of work. Did I mention I work at a nice place? https://images.matt.pictures/beginning_at_the_beginning/1127/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Booze Cruise Meets BROQUEST

2009-08-11 00:00:00Z

Or at least one of the members of BROQUEST was there. All in all, a fun night. I keep hearing that other people are doing booze cruise on saturdays now, if that’s true could someone tell me? Chris? I just want to drink and ride bikes with people, and who cares what night it’s on, right?

Anyway, between last week’s illness, starting the new job, and all the things I was doing over the weekend, I’ve been neglecting all the backend stuff- editing, organizing, and blogging. It’s tiring, and the list of things I need to get done tomorrow is a mile and a half long. May or may not do all/some of it.

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https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise_meets_broquest/1129/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise_meets_broquest/1129/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise_meets_broquest/1129/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Another Norman Saturday Night

2009-08-11 00:00:00Z

I felt kinda really off shooting saturday, ended up dancing as much as photographing. That’s what I get for eating a whole hot n ready sausage pizza.

This girl had everything I look for in a woman: 1. a camera 2. madness 3. the tendency to flip shit and run off.https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Cameron, also late of BROQUEST, although he finished in a different place. https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This was a complete accident. I like it.https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This was completely on purpose. I like it as well.https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The morning after… It’s funny how few pictures I have of scenes like this, when it happens to me all the time. Expect that to change in the weeks to come.https://images.matt.pictures/another_norman_saturday_night/1130/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Morning

2009-08-11 00:00:00Z

Technical difficulties...

2009-08-05 00:00:00Z

For those of you paying attention, there has been a little hiatus, a delay, a mini vacation even… Partly because of work, and the interruption to my sleep schedule, but also partly because it seems like I pick up every little bug that comes along since my accident. I felt like death for 48 hours, and I still have something of a sore throat, but I think I’m going to be all right.

https://images.matt.pictures/technical_difficulties…/1131/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

These pics are from Monday; Lori texted me from work, asking me to get people up there, so I did; http://www.furburger.org”>Christa and Jonathan came out and had drinks. It’s sort of a hellish job, working in a karaoke bar; I hope Lori gets something else soon.

https://images.matt.pictures/technical_difficulties…/1131/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Anyway, I like my new job so far. It’s actually challenging to steam milk. I still don’t really have a grasp of what I’m really doing, but that will come in time.

https://images.matt.pictures/technical_difficulties…/1131/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And for those of you that have read this far down, a surprise: Booze cruise is happening this Friday, 9pm. The plan is to do two rounds at each bar, so we can keep some kind of momentum. Starting at the rooster, have a couple pitchers, then to the drunken fry, because I really want to try that truffle shit, and then to nancy’s, so we can all get banned from yet another karaoke bar. I’m going to be annoying everyone in my phone/twitter followers about this too for the next couple days, hopefully enough people come out.

https://images.matt.pictures/technical_difficulties…/1131/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

ISO 25,000

2009-08-02 00:00:00Z

So this is crazy, really wild, I mean, talk about no light, some of these are taken in the reflected mirror ball light off a black wall, just insanely no light at all, but here are the pictures. This is going to be fun. I’m playing around at ISO 25k, which is just unheard of, it’s so noisy it’s an extra level of abstraction. Focus is “guess and get lucky sometimes,” other times it’s just blurry and that doesn’t really hurt things because these pictures aren’t about detail but about energy and tone and exploring places that heretofore were invisible to the camera, and a lot of times to the eye. These are places people go but not places that are easily seen unless you go there, at least until now. Enough ramble. The photos!

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/iso_25,000/1133/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Outtakes...

2009-08-02 00:00:00Z

These didn’t really fit with the rest of the pictures I took last night, but I Like them anyway, and I think at least some people will like ‘em. next post in 5…4…

https://images.matt.pictures/outtakes…/1132/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/outtakes…/1132/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/outtakes…/1132/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/outtakes…/1132/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/outtakes…/1132/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Friday Booze Cruise

2009-08-01 00:00:00Z

Mikey T and his epic dome.

OKCCOCO has an artshow

2009-08-01 00:00:00Z

Lots of good stuff. Somehow I didn’t shoot any of Kanaly’s work, but he had some up as well. Anyway, Last night was crazy and photo filled, I’ve got two more posts in the pipeline for tonight.
https://images.matt.pictures/okccoco_has_an_artshow/1134/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/okccoco_has_an_artshow/1134/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/okccoco_has_an_artshow/1134/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/okccoco_has_an_artshow/1134/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/okccoco_has_an_artshow/1134/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Make-a-wish Has a Rock Show

2009-08-01 00:00:00Z

Sometime Last week I found out that some of my friends from highschool were doing a benefit show for Make-a-Wish Foundation, and they needed a photographer. So, I ent and shot a few things, didn’t stay the whole night. The first band was really shitty, the same three chords, all at the same tempo, and the same one note drone from the lead singer for every song. It was boring and shitty. then Hundresomethings came on, and well, they were better. They still lack a little edge, I don’t know what they need, but it’s not bad to hear live. Then I had to go. The good news: they raised over $2k last night.

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/make-a-wish_has_a_rock_show/1135/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Why magnum needs a blog

2009-07-30 00:00:00Z

Ok, so go read http://blog.magnumphotos.com/2009/07/the_future_of_the_magnum_blog.html”>this statement from Magnum Photo’s blog. The gist of it is, they aren’t blogging for the foreseeable future, and might not blog ever again. The reason they give is that blogs aren’t a good platform for quality content. It’s offensive and wrong-headed, to say the least. Even if/when they do come back, if it’s as several blogs or as one feed, if the focus becomes more about dialogue than content, I think they’re missing something big.

https://images.matt.pictures/why_magnum_needs_a_blog/1137/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
To say that blogs aren’t a good place for quality content is http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/“>ignorant http://www.americansuburbx.com/“>and http://curatedby.jon-kyle.com/“>misinformed. (Links go to rebuttal examples.http://www.burnmagazine.org/“>Also this). Those are all blogs, all that I’ve come across recently; there are countless sources of good content on the web, places that have really brilliant content, displayed well. The last one is a community effort, and in fact arose because of a group of people looking for a place. So, to shut down a blog to build a community seems silly. Why not blog the process of making the new site?

https://images.matt.pictures/why_magnum_needs_a_blog/1137/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Why aren’t the photographers of Magnum, surely some of the world’s finest visual storytellers, blogging themselves? (With the notable exception of David Allen Harvey, who runs Burn magazine, of course). It’d be the best group blog ever, if they would embrace a little technology; the best eyes in the world, reporting daily what they see. From the perspective of one who does it, who has done it now for going on two years (with a little hiatus between the end of the santa fe blog and the start of this one), it’s not hard at all to knock out a blog post a day, sometimes two or three. Especially if all it consists of are photos with captions. Every other day is even easier; even when I was working full time at a job that had nothing to do with my photography, I still did that.

https://images.matt.pictures/why_magnum_needs_a_blog/1137/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
I guess part of the problem is that to get a group of photographers to do anything together is something like herding cats; if you’ve ever walked in a city with even four or five of us you know what I’m talking about; it takes two or three times as long to get somewhere (even dinner) because the whole group sort of wanders off after a picture, and then the rest have to wait, and by the time the one gets back someone else has wandered off. Now imagine a group like that, all self-interested, agreeing to do something like a group blog, to share space on the web with anyone else?

https://images.matt.pictures/why_magnum_needs_a_blog/1137/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Thinking that way is really wrong-headed. Separate channels for each photographer presume that each one is doing enough to hold a reader’s interest indefinitely, and that readers of one photographer won’t be interested in others. It’s silly. The truth is, group blogs of like minded people (or at least people who are all talking about the same things) usually have more readers and better content than single author blogs. Think http://laist.com/“>LAist, http://boingboing.net/“>BoingBoing, or blogs like that. The rising tide lifts all boats. And, because there are other people out there doing the same thing in the same space, you’re apt to learn and improve your own content as time goes on.

https://images.matt.pictures/why_magnum_needs_a_blog/1137/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Of course, nobody listens to me, or at least nobody at Magnum.

Photography as a New Liberal Art

2009-07-28 00:00:00Z

This is not a post about taking photographs, but about looking at them, reading them, and understanding what they are and are not. If you want to know about taking photos, there’s a ton of good literature out there. There is a whole subset of phototographers who think that the techniques of photography (exposure, sharpness, depth, grain/noise, etc) are an end unto themselves, but this is a false path. But the fact that they exist and are there to tell us what the rules are so we can break them effectively is a good thing.

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The idea of “New Liberal Arts” comes from http://snarkmarket.com/“>Snarkmarket and their interesting if incomplete book http://snarkmarket.com/nla/“>New Liberal Arts, which is based around the idea that to function intelligently in society today, there is a new skillset outside of the traditional lines of the liberal arts. The main point of learning liberal arts is to learn how to think critically about the world. Since it’s my area, and since the chapter in the book is one of the areas that comes up short, I thought some expansion was called for in the area of thinking critically about photographs. These are all just starting points, ideas, and not rules forever.

The first most important consideration when looking at a photograph is the content of the picture. A photo is a two-d simulacra of the 4-d world; It takes a cone of space (the angle of view) and a slice of time (the shutter speed) and reduces that to an image on a piece of paper, or more commonly now, a screen. There are parts in and out of focus, there is a limit to the detail that can be seen (and no software, no matter what CSI tells you, can bring back detail from a pixelated image). There is a perspective, and by this I mean a camera position, high or low, close to the subject or far away.

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

What does this mean to us, the viewer? Any rendering of a scene is only a partial rendering; at any given time there are an infinite number of perspectives and the same infinite gradation of moments that the camera can have, and we are seeing only one. I am categorically opposed to the idea that all of these perspectives are equal (relativism be damned, it’s solipsism with a coat of postmodern paint). Some moments are better than others, and if that weren’t the case, there would be no art in photography.

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

A photo can be evidence, it can tell a (short) story, but through selection of moments and perspectives, the photograph can tell a lie, too. It is impossible to tell by looking at a photograph if it is true or false. The only thing that can be determined is if it has been altered after the fact. This is why people are always so aghast when someone is caught photoshopping news pictures, because it disturbs their questionable belief in the veracity of the medium of photography. It’s a religious belief, one which has no grounding in fact; you’d see similar responses if you went in front of a church congregation and gave them a logical proof of atheism (ask a Jesuit, they really do exist, but reality is not wholly logical anyway).

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

So, a photo can’t be true or false from the perspective of a viewer, and here I’m only talking of candid pictures, not staged or manipulated after the fact. I can walk into a party and make 300 pictures, and just in the selection of what to show, make it look like the best party ever or the worst time anybody has ever had outside of torture chambers. Neither is true. Or they both might be.

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Ok, that’s all the lesson I have in me today. The important takeaway: a photo is never the whole story. Sometimes it’s enough.

https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photography_as_a_new_liberal_art/1138/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

leftovers

2009-07-28 00:00:00Z

These are a few random things from before dfest that I like but I didn’t put up the first time for whatever reason.

Mom getting ready to do dialysis.https://images.matt.pictures/leftovers/1139/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I actually like this better than the other image of these two that I posted saturday.https://images.matt.pictures/leftovers/1139/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

More barcamp. By lunch, everybody needed power.
https://images.matt.pictures/leftovers/1139/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Hornbeck does yoyo.https://images.matt.pictures/leftovers/1139/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

booze cruise: the return

2009-07-25 00:00:00Z

So last night was the first booze cruise I’ve been to in months… between time off the bike and booze cruise itself kind of dying out, it just hasn’t happened. I don’t know about anybody else, but a week doesn’t seem complete without riding my bike around on a friday night and getting smashed. So I did. Unfortunately, the night was ruined at the end, the second or third stolen purse at blue note. Sucks. The photos weren’t all that great, I wasn’t really focused, but as always, there are a few cool things. Anyway, next up is a post from barcamp okc, which is going on right now.

Casey at rooster.https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise:_the_return/1140/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Faye terrorizing Ken.https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise:_the_return/1140/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Faye and M__, who’s name I should remember, but I don’t. I’m a bad person, I know.https://images.matt.pictures/booze_cruise:_the_return/1140/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

#barcampokc

2009-07-25 00:00:00Z

These are from the morning session of Barcamp OKC. What you don’t see is all the interesting conceptual talk, which is really the cool part and unfortunately doesn’t show up in pictures.

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/#barcampokc/1141/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

just photos

2009-07-23 00:00:00Z

edit to add captions… because I realized some of these need them.

https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I said: I really don’t think it’s a good idea to sit there. Does she know where that floor has been? Somebody else said: Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve pissed on that exact spot.https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m not exactly sure what was going on, but it seemed like the whole situation was about an inch away from a fight between this guy and…https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

(interlude for the dress)https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

this guy, the one with the backpack. Fighting is stupid. Ruined a perfectly good game of pool.https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This was 5-10 minutes later; she just happened to glance over as I was taking the picture. At least I hope she’s not pissed :). https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Goldie with the serious face. Or tired drunkface? There are a lot of thing you could project onto that face. I think she’s just zonin’ out a little.
https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Rachel on the phone with Timmy. https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Yes, it’s kind of a cliche, Cody lighting a cigarette, but whatever, have you ever see a cigarette that bent and crazy looking?https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

That thing on her shoulder? a waterproof portable radio. I don’t care what anybody says, if she’s packin’ her very own personal dance machine, she’s cool with me.
https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1143/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Night Shooting

2009-07-23 00:00:00Z

just a quick post

2009-07-22 00:00:00Z

before I rush out to Mcnellies for 3 dolla burgers.
https://images.matt.pictures/just_a_quick_post/1144/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/just_a_quick_post/1144/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/just_a_quick_post/1144/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/just_a_quick_post/1144/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/just_a_quick_post/1144/0019.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

starbux is giving away pastries

2009-07-21 00:00:00Z

And I’m not drawn in by their evil conspiracy. It’s taken years, but now they’re finally making a move. Wake up, Sheeple!

(At least one person reading this will get the joke. The rest of you, don’t worry, I’m not any more unhinged than I ever was).

I’m writing this from my restored and much loved macbook. Friday night, before I went out to shoot these pictures, I was leaning over my desk to grab my bike off of the wall, and I knocked over a 16oz cup of coffee right into the computer. I knew there was nothing I could really do then; the best thing to do is let it dry first. So I did, I went off to the party, had a good time, (moar hellkats=more good times), and rode home.

Next day, I tried to restart it, no dice, so I opened it up and there was a ton of gunk on everything, of course. Coffee+2.5yrs of dust, pretty much. Disheartened, I gave up and went to Mcnellies to be attacked by the photographer from lookatOKC. No, I don’t want my picture taken. No, I won’t sign a release. Go talk to the wedding party. It’s my own fault for wearing my houndstooth fedora; that thing draws attention like whoa.

Paperazzi deflected (yeah, I’m aware of the irony, but at least I know the people I take pictures of), I went home, and little elves hadn’t come in and fixed my laptop, so the next day (sunday), I started dousing it with alcohol, and then I had the bright idea to get out a toothbrush and scrub away the crud. I let it dry overnight, plugged everything together, and it worked on the first try. Go me.

also: the more I use my new camera, the more I love it. I’ve already shot 2000 photos with it. ok, fine, I’ll shut up about it already. But the good news keeps on coming, I have a job interview tomorrow, I fixed this laptop, etc.

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/starbux_is_giving_away_pastries/1145/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

More D700. More Awesome.

2009-07-19 00:00:00Z

It’s too early and I haven’t had my coffee. So here, pictures without many words:
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0007.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0010.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0011.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0012.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0013.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0014.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
I can has… tongue?https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0015.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0016.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/more_d700._more_awesome./1148/0017.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

No, you can't tawe my picture

2009-07-19 00:00:00Z

dear lookatokc photographer,

No, you can’t take my picture. Yes, I’m also a working photographer (for a given value of working), no, that doesn’t mean we really have anything in common. You take party pics, i take pictures of my friends at parties. You use a flash when you don’t need it, I hate it even when I absolutely have to use it. You have a huge camera bag weighing you down with shit you don’t need, I only own two lenses. All of these are strikes against you, but really, it’s just that I don’t like having my picture taken.

Some of us don’t want to be in the paper. I might be the only one, but I’d wager there are at least a few people out there who like anonymity. Or who need it.

Certainly there’s little value in party pics, hell, I take thousands myself and put them on this shitty blog, but the big difference is that I know the people that I take pictures of, for the most part. I feel weird not knowing people and taking their picture. It’s knowing the people that lets me get closer, get a little more meaning in the phototographs than the standard grin and grab-the-person-next-to-you. Some of them, at least (yes, there are a few posed pics here on the blog and more on my facebook, but those are here for the people in them, not for me to show off).

post #250!

2009-07-19 00:00:00Z

Never though this blog would make it this long. But then I also thought I’d be long gone from oklahoma too. Anyway, It’s been an interesting four days, to say the least. I got my new camera on wednesday, and I couldn’t be happier with it. The D700 is an amazing machine; it makes everything that I do easier and pushes the realm of photographic possibility farther than I’d thought possible. Yeah, it’s that good.

That was my first delay; I was having too much fun with the new camera to blog. Then the power went out in my neighborhood overnight, and there was no internet; then, finally, just as I got these photos edited, i spilled a coffee into my macbook, ruining it. so now they’re re-edited, and here for your enjoyment.

Next post: look for the gratuitous cat photos (not what you think).

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larry and his flask

2009-07-15 00:00:00Z

This band, Larry and his flask, is a crazy high energy bluegrass punk band. Good sound, but I didn’t stay for the second set. I don’t know, the blugrass part of their sound got annoying to me, but then I loved them for the first half. Go figure.

The guy with the base, though, I swear he was playing tourette’s or something, different instruments every song, running around, throwing his base on the floor and then on a table, just crazy. Entertaining as hell.

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Anyway, new camera’s here, I’m playing with and and enjoying the hell out of it. Laters.

Norman B-day's and such

2009-07-13 00:00:00Z

another round of drinking and photos… this was one of those nights that sort of blurred together towards the end… really fun, though, and I woke up in time to head off the hangover with water. Protip: Water works best before you actually feel the hangover. If you already have a headache, you’re going to suffer more.

Anyway, I rode my bike to get down there, 20 miles in 2.3 hours… terrible time, I know, but I did it, and that’s the important part. There was a lot of terror and panic, and anger at everything with four wheels, but it’s all part of the show at this point. I’ve just got to recondition myself, and that’s going to take time. How long before I can ride ten miles in half an hour again? I don’t know, probably a while. How long before I don’t flinch every time a car passes is more important, and hopefully that’ll be sooner. Pain and fatigue I can deal with, fear is harder.

Less seriously, though, the night was a blast. 2 hours of bike riding to get to 6 hours of party=8 good hours. For example:

Fabulous shoes.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

B-Bell in classic black and white.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Birthday Girl Shelby. Peep that bling.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

An infinity of bromance? No, I actually think they were headbutting or something. I did mention that things were blurry for me at the end of the night, right?https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Traci and Casey, now roommates and rhyme-mates.https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Incidentally, this is the same guy (mario, I think) who had the shoes. Makes me wonder: Are they clown shoes?https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Shelby and Cody, and the damn taco bell cup I was sorely tempted to clone out. https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

LOLWAT?https://images.matt.pictures/norman_b-day’s_and_such/1150/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Anyway, I’ve got a bike to ride and pictures that won’t take themselves.

Wednesday pool adventure

2009-07-10 00:00:00Z

So I forgot to post these- edited them, output jpegs, and then forgot to actually upload and blog them. I thought I did, sorry I lied to you cody. My fault. Anyway, these suffer a little bit from being shot at insanely high ISO on a small format camera, so don’t judge too harshly. On a related note, I can’t wait to get my new camera and really get to shooting again.

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sometimes...

2009-07-10 00:00:00Z

Sometimes all you have to do is get out there and push the button. When there are doubts, when the haters are getting to you, when you worry that you’re past prime, never going to amount to anything, that’s when you’ve gotta go out and make pictures. Prime the pump, get those psychomotor cues going. Creating something is the best solution to get out of a funk; there are precious few things better than an unexpectedly good picture. I wasn’t expecting much out of these, but I really like ‘em.

Fuck I’m verbose today. Wrote my intro for the OKCITY book too. Might do a limited run(10-20), and publish a pdf for free.

this is what happens when you double tap long exposures- more often than not one or the other will be good. for this one, the second frame was really blurry.https://images.matt.pictures/sometimes…/1152/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

i tried this in black and white, but his eyes really make the picture. I don’t think I had a good portrait of him before this either, so it’s doubly good.https://images.matt.pictures/sometimes…/1152/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

This was going to be titled “the fight,” but I don’t know if it comes through.https://images.matt.pictures/sometimes…/1152/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Another eye picture.https://images.matt.pictures/sometimes…/1152/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Photo Walk

2009-07-09 00:00:00Z

The 4th was a good night; I ended up sort of all over the place, first riding my bike to a party right on the river in Tulsa, and then catching a ride out to the sticks for a huge bash in a field (this being the 4th, and it being oklahoma, nobody’s day is complete without going out into the middle of nowhere and Blowing Shit Up).

We get there and there’s a $10 cover per head. Then we stand in line for beer for half an hour for 3.2 bud light. Then, just as I’m tweeting about how a fight would be a nice mood lifter, it starts to rain. So, the people who have tents run for them, and the people who don’t run for their cars. I’m not lying when I say that I probably had a better time sitting in that car listening to music and talking than I would have getting obliterated and setting fire to the whole party.

Then we bailed and headed back to Tim’s apartment, where everybody just crashed. Which meant that my bike was across downtown from me when I woke up in the morning, so of course, I went to get it. I didn’t have to walk, I could have waited for a ride to pick it up, but the walk appealed to me. And then there were photos:

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oh yeah, I was supposed to post these...

2009-07-07 00:00:00Z

Yeah, meant to put these up yesterday. Got distracted by Hulu again. Royal Pains this time. Good thing House is in the off season, or I’d never get anything done.

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Seriously though, I went out to Tulsa to take a break and recharge, sort of reset myself. One of the nice effects of travel is you almost always get a fresh look at yourself while trying to look at a new place, even if that new place is only a couple hours away. I’d been feeling a little blocked up creatively and a weekend away from my routine was just what I needed.

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I actually fasted this weekend- not in the “not eating at all” sense of the word but in the “staying hungry” sense. One moderate meal a day, the occasional beer, maybe a snack. Whenever I’ve tried the cold turkey no food approach, I’ve failed miserably, because I lack the willpower. One meal a day is enough to give you the edge of feeling hungry without making it into this huge task.

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About that- the edge of hardship- when things are difficult, sometimes it will make you sharper, quicker, more discerning- you can rise to the situation in a way that, when everything is easy, you couldn’t. I’ve always thought the best art comes out of working around limitations, not when the limitations are removed.

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Midnight photo sesh

2009-07-03 00:00:00Z

Couple photos… Went to sleep on Timmy & Ali’s couch, woke up when Ali got home after the bars, hung out with all these dudes. Tulsa=Coolsville thus far. My team won at trivia, although I don’t think I contributed more than one or two answers. Bike Against hunger got some money, and some gift certificates on top of that. Today’s adgenda includes a bike shop and finding whole foods.

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The cookout

2009-07-02 00:00:00Z

night portraits

2009-06-30 00:00:00Z

I actually took this because I really liked the light, and I wanted to remember it for future studio use. Single, harsh light can be good, even from directly above the subject.

Pride Parade

2009-06-30 00:00:00Z

So, it’s pride 09. I wasn’t on, but these I like. For those who don’t know: I’m straight. And I’m not going to lie, this was mostly about being a part of the spectacle and drinking and cooking out for me. But yes, I do support a whole range of gay rights, marriage and equal protection and other things. But this was a party on wheels.

I’d like to say the big fail is because of the lack of intimacy with the subject(true), or sub-standard camera equipment(not true), but really it was because I lacked two things: focus and a camera strap. I wasn’t focused on taking pictures, more on riding the new bike, and I didn’t have a strap to hold the camera so I was constantly death gripping it and worried I would drop it.

Two days before, but already started at the Copa.https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The Bike Horde.https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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This was something about people wearing leather and being gay? Not sure. update from my friend hope who Knows Things: “The picture at the pride parade the people in leather. Its the national leather association. that’s what the blue and black flag with the red heart represents. its a BDSM community with a very strong Gay following. I know i always have the strangest information. but there you go.”https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This really surprised me; Dell is a big company, glad to see that they were out there in support. They have a pretty big call center here in the city.https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The Boneshakers were out, all five of us that are still here and riding.https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I don’t know what to say about the dude on the horse.https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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The crowd at the end was something else. A couple thousand people, easily. All along the route there were spectators, but nothing to make me expect this. https://images.matt.pictures/pride_parade/1157/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

it all sucks

2009-06-30 00:00:00Z

So I was going to post some more pictures, but I hate everything I’ve shot now, and so there’s nothing else to post.

last tulsa shit

2009-06-28 00:00:00Z

I’m posting this from the backyard of a cookout after pride parade. I promise, this is the last of the tulsa photos. Until I go to tulsa again in a week or two.

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skate photos...

2009-06-27 00:00:00Z

I said at the time on twitter, that I wished for a wider lens, but really I think these aren’t bad at all. A camera that can shoot sequences would be nice, and I could have shot more varied things with more lenses, but I think sometimes limitations can drive creativity, and that’s what happened here.

For everybody that’s tired of Tulsa pictures and posts, don’t worry, I’ve got one more small post and then it’s back to OKC pictures. And yeah, I could have put up all these pictures at once, but would you have looked as much at them, seen them as well? Anyway, there’ll be a lot of pictures from pride parade hopefully, and I’ve a few from this week too.

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More Tulsa, With Cars!

2009-06-26 00:00:00Z

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY… was when I took these. Sunday morning, mostly, although the car show was in the afternoon. i really wasn’t that impressed visually with the cars… i liked their style, I thought the work was impressive, but visually to me cars are just a big dead thing in the frame. If I’d been reporting on the car show, I would have picked out little details, but as it was I was just walking around with Rachel and Gretchen, all of us trying not to die in the heat.

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Coming soon (after I take a nap to kill the hangover): The skate sessions.

Tulsa Weekend post the first

2009-06-25 00:00:00Z

There will be several posts, as I took a lot of photos and they’re awesome.
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Oh the life of a freelancer...

2009-06-24 00:00:00Z

A week ago, I went down to medicine park to assist http://www.jeremycharles.com”>Jeremy Charles with a little advertorial. Hold the reflector, keep the lights from blowing away, that sort of thing. While I was there, I had a little down time to walk up the main drag and shoot a few pics of the town, and while details were being decided, I was able to shoot the little kid who was the subject of the ad in question. It was nice to get out and shoot in the mode of dropping into a location, gestalting, and shooting pictures based on those impressions.

It’s also always nice to work with a pro of Jeremy’s caliber, someone who knows their look, knows their gear, lights, who “gets it.” That said, working with a family of four who are inexperienced in front of the camera, and having two small kids in that mix, was stressful.

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a few that don't fit

2009-06-24 00:00:00Z

these are from various random rolls, don’t fit anywhere, but deserve to see the light of day anyway.

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Mom was in the hospital...

2009-06-23 00:00:00Z

for once, i actually managed to Shoot pictures of mom from start to finish in the hospital. This visit was more than a little silly. She had a non-specific infection, possbly blood, possibly kidney, but they made her stay in the hospital for 4 days when she could have stayed at home. Ostensibly it was to monitor her, but I don’ think we would have done a worse job of that at home. Add to that the stress factor of being in the hospital, and the whole thing was kind of ridiculous.

Mom the day she went to the dialysis clinic with a fever.https://images.matt.pictures/mom_was_in_the_hospital…/1166/0001.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

The first cultures, which were the only ones that came back positive.https://images.matt.pictures/mom_was_in_the_hospital…/1166/0002.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Hallway going into Presbyterian Tower, OU Med center. https://images.matt.pictures/mom_was_in_the_hospital…/1166/0003.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

Mom coming back from the vending machines. Not happy.https://images.matt.pictures/mom_was_in_the_hospital…/1166/0004.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

In the last few minutes of her stay, the doctor came in and removed her catheter.https://images.matt.pictures/mom_was_in_the_hospital…/1166/0005.jpg” class=”photo” alt=”Photos”/>

On the other hand, she did feel quite a bit better getting out (no more infection), and she doesn’t have a cardiac catheter any more- the leg graft they did several months ago is working, and as of today, she’s about halfway through training to stick herself and do the whole thing at home again.

Velvet monkey opening/16th st. Friday

2009-06-22 00:00:00Z

All I have to say is I was really off that night. A lot of blurry pics from too low a shutter speed. So that’s why the coverage isn’t as good as it should be.
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Brofest: The Morning After

2009-06-21 00:00:00Z

I'm not exactly sure if this was the morning after brofest or just the morening after some other party. But this guy is full of hangover.

Brofest

2009-06-20 00:00:00Z

These pictures are all from the raddest ride kickoff/fundraiser ever. Stuart, Pat and Cameron are heading across the country on the http://broquest.com/“>Broquest (link goes to their site). This is why film sucks sometimes; I’m just now getting the pics from their out of town party up and they’re already three states into their Portland to Portland run. Oh well.

The Dudes of America played, and they’re a bunch of rockstars. I’m too lazy to caption, you can figure it out. That and I’m blogging while flying down the highway. wah-hoo.

https://images.matt.pictures/brofest/1169/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/brofest/1169/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/brofest/1169/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

random

2009-06-19 00:00:00Z

So I’ve finally gotten my film developed, and the first batch is just some random photos. There was another roll of old film I found in a drawer, and I think at least one of these is from that. It’s really weird and difficult to be working with files scanned from film automatically. I can’t adjust exposure or white balance or any of that good stuff. Oh well, at least they’re better than nothing. I can’t wait until I get a new body in though.
https://images.matt.pictures/random/1170/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/random/1170/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/random/1170/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/random/1170/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/random/1170/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

lack of posting (and why)

2009-06-14 00:00:00Z

So I’ve been doing stuff and seeing things, but the reason I haven’t been posting that much is this:

https://images.matt.pictures/lack_of_posting_(and_why)/1171/film.jpg”>

That’s almost a week’s worth of shooting. I know, I know, that’s not a lot, but it will make for about a week’s worth of posts, once I get around to developing it. I’m waiting on some money from a lens I sold. (With my canon body out of commission, I didn’t need the 24-105 any more, so it went on ebay and sold quick).

Meanwhile, there was a race yesterday, Bike Against Hunger the First, which was pretty cool. Kudos to Ken for putting it together and for all the rad prizes. Cody won, and I’d swear he rode up to my checkpoint on one wheel. He was there and gone in about 10 seconds. Yeah though, if you ever get the chance to work a checkpoint, bring a sign and a nice chair. A beverage and a book are optional but the book probably saved my sanity, i just wished I’d had the rest of that stuff. That, and it’s impossible to run a checkpoint and take pics of the checkpoint at the same time. It’s one or the other.

OK, I’m going to save the rest for another day, because there are a lot of stories to tell, and a lot of pictures that go with them, so rather than mix things all about, I’ll just wait until I can get the pictures, and then tell the stories.

people suck

2009-06-10 00:00:00Z

The comments on the story about the accident in tulsa are really terrible, really sad. I can’t believe people actually think like that, that the solution to driver negligence (which is almost always the case of bike accidents involving a bike and a car) is for cyclists to not ride their bikes.

I ride a road bike. I ride it on the road because it’s made for pavement, and because it’s illegal for me to ride on the sidewalk. For a lot of miles of my riding, there are no sidewalks. Bike trails are nice where the exist, and I don’t mind dodging pedestrians and slower cyclists even, but the trails almost never go anywhere useful. I ride in the middle of the lane because that’s the safest place for me to be. I am more noticeable and to pass me you have to use the other lane. I’m almost never on roads that don’t have a passing lane, at least when traffic is an issue. Every cyclist with any experience knows the roads with the best pavement and least traffic to get where they are going, and new cyclists often hear about them the first time they meet other riders (‘You take 10th st all the way from where? no no no, take 4th to downtown, then…’).

If you’re a driver, watch where you’re going and don’t drive drunk, ok? I see a lot of people bitching on the internet about aggro/self righteous cyclists, but if a random cyclist started killing drivers at random, and got away with it (hit and runs are the rule), wouldn’t you be mad at them? This case would have been just like that, if an eyewitness hadn’t run the driver off the road to stop her.

Fact: you have to double or triple your speed to reduce time traveled by a significant amount when driving in town. That means that even a full 60 seconds waiting behind a cyclist (this is a lot longer than you think) going 15 mph waiting to pass is only going to slow you by about 30 seconds in your overall travel time. You spend more time than that sitting at red lights, making coffee or chatting with co-workers. Hell, I spend more time staring at the wall persuading myself to get out of bed. It’s not worth getting upset over and certainly not worth killing some poor guy who’s just trying to get somewhere.

If you’re a cyclist, be careful. You’d look hotter in a helmet, and by hotter I mean sexier without head injuries. Use lower traffic roads, lights, and bright clothing. Of course, none of that helped me this last time, but I know it’s saved me a thousand other times. Don’t be an asshole, but take the lane, it’s yours by law, and if you’re off to the side, it’s easier to go unnoticed. If a driver is coming towards you, yell at them, whatever you feel like yelling, as loud as you can. More than once yelling “HEY!” has saved my bacon.

I think that’s all. Good luck and good night.

Car Kills Two Cyclists in Tulsa, third in hospital

2009-06-09 00:00:00Z

I already posted this to twitter, but I figure more people will see it if I put it here too. I look at all those bike pieces scattered in the road, and I’m thinking, if my bike had been super light carbon, that’d be me. Lugged Steel Saved My Life. (For those that don’t know: I was http://photomattmills.com/blog/2009/05/wreck.html”>hit a couple weeks ago by an inattentive driver).

Text story http://artfa.gs/driver-kills”>here and video:

This is a sad day. My heart goes out to the dude in the hospital and the families of the dead.

(another post to follow, more generally about sharing the road.)

photos

2009-06-06 00:00:00Z

photos of the brace

2009-06-06 00:00:00Z

So last night I was mobbed at the party when I took off my shirt… mobbed with markers. This is the result.

https://images.matt.pictures/photos_of_the_brace/1175/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photos_of_the_brace/1175/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/photos_of_the_brace/1175/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Wednesday photos

2009-06-04 00:00:00Z

This is sort of a test post, I’m mucking about with the stylesheet. I’m also writing some essays for the photobook I’ve been trying to do since january. Wednesday was a success though, in that I got out and had a good time. And I took some photos. The style might not be right, but I’m working on it.
https://images.matt.pictures/wednesday_photos/1176/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
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old photos..

2009-05-31 00:00:00Z

since I’ve had to resort to shooting film, I had to get it processed, and there was this random roll that has been on my printer stand for a while, so I had it done as well. These are from the end of spring 2006, at the annual Doc Studies barbecue. Looking at this old work, I couldn’t help but notice how different it is, and how much higher a percentage of misses I had back then, even with the same camera & lens.

Two of the graduating seniors.https://images.matt.pictures/old_photos../1178/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Professors standing around. The difference in the personalities from right to left is so huge, if they stood any closer, the universe would have exploded.https://images.matt.pictures/old_photos../1178/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Kari, my girlfriend at the time. I’m going to leave it as an exercise for the reader to make up what happened between us. I can tell you it won’t be as interesting as what actually happened.https://images.matt.pictures/old_photos../1178/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

photo adventures

2009-05-31 00:00:00Z

This is from the rest of the last batch of processing. Traci (last picture) came and rescued me from my stircrazyness on Friday, whereupon we went downtown and walked around, lots of fun things to see around that time of day, just as work is getting out. Then there was sauced pizza and a norman party, where everybody thought my brace was fake until I told them the story. Getting out again, I’ve told that same story 20 million times. hopefully I’m done telling it now, but I have a feeling I won’t be able to stop until I’m done wearing the brace.

My dad, playing with the dog. I don’t know what occasioned this look. https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Most people would take a picture of the statue that this camera watches, but I found the sign much more interesting.https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I know I’ve taken and shown similar, but I don’t care.https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This is the inside of an old bank building, downtown. The architecture was quite detailed and decorative, very nice. the kind of stuff nobody makes any more.https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Alleys:
https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Traci, picking her outfit. With ISO 400 film, this was like 1/30th of a second at f/1.2. The party was darker, so those pictures didn’t really work out.
https://images.matt.pictures/photo_adventures/1177/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Paseo arts fest

2009-05-26 00:00:00Z

I forgot my cf cards, and so I had to improvise and use my phone camera to take a few pictures. It was a very zen experience shooting this way, with complete simplicity. I was able to concentrate soley on the images. you only have one button to push, and that’s it.

https://images.matt.pictures/paseo_arts_fest/1179/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I was sitting there, at sauced, at Haley’s booth, and I was watching all the ametures with their digital rebels, and I realized that the difference between them and the professionals I had worked around and with was principally one of concentration. The pros are zeroed in on what they are doing, the only thing in the world for them is the viewfinder.

Matty from the Rodchenko(sp?) angle. https://images.matt.pictures/paseo_arts_fest/1179/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

On a completely different note, I found a really cool company called Elphel building the open source camera I dreamed up last year. they sell a bunch of boards that could theoretically turn any old 35mm film camera into a digital camera, in either black and white or color. Their examples kinda suck, and I suspect it has something to do with the tone curves they’re using, but if I can get the parts and get it to spit out 16 bit raw data, I would be one happy matt mills. For the nerds: http://www3.elphel.com/“>Elphel’s web site.

https://images.matt.pictures/paseo_arts_fest/1179/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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it's 6:30 and I'm still up. time to give up on sleep?

2009-05-25 00:00:00Z

(note: where I say today, I’m mostly talking about sunday, as I started writing this at about 5am monday morning, thinking still as if “today” were sunday. It’s a total brain dump/rant, but there’s a lot of good tidbits, anyway).

I can’t sleep. Maybe if I write everything down that’s on my mind, I can get some peace and rest.

The lawyer situation: I’ve made the initial contact with someone who is supposed to be good, but may or may not know anything about bikes/bike law. I sent along the police report, descriptions of my injuries and the photo of the bike I put on twitter. So, on that, I’m waiting.

Injuries: everything was better today, except for right after I woke up; moving around a little worked out the little bit of stiffness that I had, and the only thing that’s bothered me all day has been my ankle, and that only in the last couple hours. For some reason, bad days seem to follow the good ones, and I’m more than a little afraid of waking up in agony. Maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. No pain pills today though, that’s something.

On the subject of pain pills, I’m somewhat divided, because on the one hand, they allow me to function on the bad days, at the worst moments, I can still get out of bed and move about the house, but I’m always a little hazy on those days, and it’s nice to be clear. Would I just be in bed, suffering? Does pain by itself slow healing? When will I stop feeling like I’ve been hit by a car at 35mph?

Questions for the doctor (appointment on the second): How long will it take me to recover? How much of a recovery can I expect to make? Am I permanently damaged? When can I get rid of the shell? Where is the break exactly? Can I see my X-rays? How much PT (physical therapy) will I need?

Questions for the lawyer: How hard is this going to be? Is all of my stuff (bike, camera) covered? How much PT will I be able to afford? What about lost work time/income?

I’ve got lists of things that I need and/or want; things that are missing, notably my passport and notebook and flask; lists that I don’t know if I’ll ever tick off all the items or not. How is it that despite being an invalid unable to drive or walk I have so much to accomplish? And the number of little side things on my mind, besides. For example: I have to get my car registered and licensed this week, and I’m thinking about either getting an iphone or fixing the netbook, but I don’t really know which to do, and I can’t do anything at all about these things till friday, which is when I get my last paycheck from OSU. The paycheck is a surprise, though. I’m glad for it, and that I’ll be able to fix/do stuff once I get it.

Then there’s all the nice stuff people have done for me, from loaning books to bringing me beer to just coming over and hanging out and talking. I have a stack of comic books that I’ve read thanks to Cyrus and a bunch of DVDs that I’ve half watched on the nod, thanks to Adam M. I had the best cup of coffee I’ve ever tasted while I was still in the hospital thanks to Francois. I’ve got beer and good literature thanks to Stuart. I’m just now digging into the lit. Ken got me a freakin’ camera, even if it is just on loan for a while. That’s why there’s still a trickle of pictures up here. I haven’t forgotten any of you, and I’m trying to think of something nice to do, in gratitude, once I’m back on my feet.

That’s about it. I think I’ve gone from the surface to the deep parts of what’s on my mind. If I wrote any more, I’d be telling my life story, as all the other thoughts I have are just snippets of anecdotes from disconnected stories.

sam's club and the electric cart

2009-05-23 00:00:00Z

I’ve never before actually needed to ride in one, but they say there’s a first for everything. Today, I used one of those electric carts to get around sams. FYI, they’re a pain when you have to use them. That and for some reason I kept getting dirty looks; I guess because I have the brace on under my shirt people thought I was a healthy person abusing the cart, if that were possible. Oh well. Photos:

For memorial day, or whatever holiday this is. Yay flag.
https://images.matt.pictures/sam’s_club_and_the_electric_cart/1181/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Bathroom sign at old chicago.
https://images.matt.pictures/sam’s_club_and_the_electric_cart/1181/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And finally some rain.
https://images.matt.pictures/sam’s_club_and_the_electric_cart/1181/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Out of the house

2009-05-21 00:00:00Z

Went out last night. Did the whole blue note/ladies night thing. Tommy G came and picked me up, and off we went, into the night. It was nice to see some of the people out that I hadn’t seen in two weeks. Of course, as sure as the night before, the morning after is a bitch. I woke up and I couldn’t move, there was a lot of pain. I’m sure it was a combination of attempting to detox and the night out, but still, I’m glad the pain pills were within arms reach.

So, as things stand, I still need to get a lawyer, I don’t know if there’s going to be long term damage, and I still don’t have a job. Sometimes I need the pain pills and sometimes I don’t. it seems to depend on what I’ve been doing more than anything; the easier I take it, the better off I am.

On the good news list, I have a camera now, thanks to Ken’s boss. It’s a digi Rebel, nothing to write home about, but it’s functional, at least, and I figure I could do worse. It’s not like I have any assignments anyway. Project idea: Photograph all the stuff people have loaned/given me while convalescing. I might work on that after my nap. photos of last night to follow later too.

Wednesday Cripple

2009-05-21 00:00:00Z

fallout

2009-05-17 00:00:00Z

I write this blog for two reasons, to share pictures and so all the people in my life, no matter how far flung, can get an idea of what’s going on in my life. Now, since I had the wreck last tuesday, I’ve only posted once, just putting up some details and leaving it at that. Since then I’ve been popping pain pills at regular intervals and working my way through the stack of comic books and movies my friends brought by. Then someone bitches in the comments that I’m boring him. I told him to go fuck himself, because, hey, I deserve a couple days off for the broken back.

On the other hand, I do have a few updates to pass along. I got out of the hospital Friday, and promptly took a nap. When I woke up I realized I hadn’t looked at my camera in several days, so I pulled it out and found it was broken. My 50mm 1.2 won’t autofocus and the mode dial no longer works at all. And the battery door is broken off. The bag I was carrying has a hole in it, too.

It’s hard to get up and down, but I can walk and stand pretty well, although that does depend on me keeping up with the pain pills- one every four hours and I can move and function pretty well. On the pain meds, I can do most normal stuff.

I didn’t take any before I went to sleep last night, mostly because I was feeling fine and I really don’t like the drugged feeling. This morning, I was regretting that decision, because all of the minor aches had turned to major ones, and it was a task just to sit up in bed. I took pills, and now I’m fine. I can’t wait for the day when I don’t depend on pills to get around the house. Should be soon.

the wreck

2009-05-14 00:00:00Z

since I’ve told this about twenty times yesterday and today, and a lot of those tellings were under the influence of strong drugs, i figure one more time won’t hurt.

i was riding my bike into town on 4th street and a car t-boned me hit me from the rear. The lady said she was singing to her kids. my lights were on, and i’d bet they weren’t looking. I can’t remember any of what happened. paramedics said the car was pretty messed up, but they also noticed I had my lights on. at least the car didn’t run off.

they took me to ou med center, where they determined I have a spinal fracture but no damage to my spinal cord. bruised ribs, some cuts, and my right ankle is stiff. I’m alive and I’ll heal, which is the good news. i’m going to be laid up for a while though, have to wear a torso brace for 6 weeks.

everybody’s been awesome, thanks for all the support, food, books, and just dropping in to visit. I’m here till tomorrow at least, then home and more rest. pills. no bike for a while. if you want to get in touch but don’t have my number, just send me a direct message on twitter. laters.

(Edit to fix how the accident happened, I was more bruised on one side than the other, making me think I was t-boned).

another wreck

2009-05-14 00:00:00Z

since I’ve told this about twenty times today, and a lot of those tellings were under the influence of strong drugs, i figure one more time won’t hurt.

i was riding into town on 4th street and a car t-boned me. my lights were on, and i’d bet money they weren’t looking. paramedics said the car was pretty messed up too.

Finally, I know where the flats are coming from

2009-05-12 00:00:00Z

Or at least some of them. It’s a bad idea to leave your bike in a hot car- heat raises pressure and softens rubber, and then before you know it, you’ve had 10 flats in just a few weeks. And it’s always a bummer to go out to get your wheels for a ride and find flats.

Last night was a typical monday- blue note pool, tommy g night ride, but with a couple bonuses. Ran into some people who told me rumors of photo work, so that’s pretty awesome. Also: Alibi’s, which I’d never been to before last night, has $3 bottomless cups of beer. It’s shitty light beer, but it will make drunkface just fine.

Meet Tasha. Cool chick. I fixed her bike a little. And by fixed her bike, you know what I mean. Flat tire, of course.
https://images.matt.pictures/finally,_i_know_where_the_flats_are_coming_from/1187/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

So, after some drinking, it was time to ride and work off the beer. We got about a mile, and then I had a blowout. My guess is my rim strip already had a hole from the first blowout of the night, which happened in my car before the evening started. So, I had to sit around and wait for some one to go grab my car, and then we made a walmart run for more tubes, and then the ride was back on.

self, tasha. Tommy needs his own camera, he’s got a good eye.https://images.matt.pictures/finally,_i_know_where_the_flats_are_coming_from/1187/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

By the time we were actually riding, it was 3:30am. We did a couple parking garages, a little bricktown, I skidded the ramp in front of the theater (it’s a really long ass ramp, ~100 yards), and the freewheel riding dudes (tommy and lem) I was with didn’t care.

”Wouldn’t it be cool to climb that fire escape,” Tommy said. “Except for the fall and die part,” I said.https://images.matt.pictures/finally,_i_know_where_the_flats_are_coming_from/1187/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Lemhttps://images.matt.pictures/finally,_i_know_where_the_flats_are_coming_from/1187/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Tommy
https://images.matt.pictures/finally,_i_know_where_the_flats_are_coming_from/1187/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Water Boarding Party

2009-05-10 00:00:00Z

remember when I said I was bored with taking pictures of drunk people? somebody heard that and responded with the wildest, craziest thing I’ve ever seen at a party. They had a water boarding party. In priest robes.

They swore up and down that they’d gotten them legally. The robes. And as for the water torture, well, what’s a little torture between friends?

Actually, everyone pouring got poured on too, so it was at least sort of fair. And there was a “safe word,” in the form of a hammer that the person on the board would drop when they’d had enough. Which was usually seconds. Nobody made it very long.

Right now, you’re thinking to yourself, “Did MM get waterboarded?” and the answer is a definite no. I drowned http://payingoffmyloans.blogspot.com/2008/01/nine-times-ive-nearly-died-pt-1.html”>once before (note, the near-death count has gone up since then), was resuscitated, and for about six years of my childhood I didn’t go near the water, and I took very shallow baths. So, I don’t need to experience simulated drowning, I’ve had the real thing.

Other than the torture, it was a pretty standard evening, with a lot of beer and liquor consumed, and crashing out on the couch. I hadn’t been letting myself get that drunk, but once in a while it’s fun. At least I didn’t black out.

felt like saturday all night...

2009-05-09 00:00:00Z

Band plays art opening. Man bites dog.

kamps

2009-05-07 00:00:00Z

I hate grading

2009-05-06 00:00:00Z

You know that story about how some monasteries require applicants to stand outside and wait for three days before they can enter? After a semester of teaching a bunch of kids who are just there to fill in a blank on their degree rubric, I understand that now. So many people aren’t in college to learn, they’re there to buy a piece of paper. And when you expect them to do more than sit there in class and stare at the wall, they balk. Sometimes there’s one or two good students, but they’re the exception. It would be nice if we could limit our students to those who wanted to learn.

Dinner on no diet day. Gotta love it.https://images.matt.pictures/i_hate_grading/1191/grill.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Oh well. I’ll never be an ancient sage of anything, either, and I’m not taking another teaching job, unless it’s teaching photography as art. I’ll never forget the blank faces I got after showing my students “La Jetee.” It wasn’t that they didn’t understand the film, they had just ignored it. Anyway, the sun is shining, the outside is gorgeous, and I’m off.

stoking my paranoia

2009-05-05 00:00:00Z

from http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/an_expectation.html”>Schneier:

… Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it’s on a computer owned by a telephone company. Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don’t even know exist.

And more data is being generated. Lists of books you buy, as well as the books you look at, are stored in the computers of online booksellers. Your affinity card tells your supermarket what foods you like. What were cash transactions are now credit card transactions. What used to be an anonymous coin tossed into a toll booth is now an EZ Pass record of which highway you were on, and when. What used to be a face-to-face chat is now an e-mail, IM, or SMS conversation – or maybe a conversation inside Facebook.

Hiatus

2009-05-04 00:00:00Z

Sorry for the hiatus. I’ve been stupid and self-doubting or maybe smart and self doubting. And I’ve been sick. Anyway, while my hard drive is restoring from backup, I thought I’d share a few of the week’s lesser failures. Actually, looking at the pix, they’re not that bad. Lighting in clubs is just impossible unless you bring your own.

https://images.matt.pictures/hiatus/1194/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I shot these all last wednesday, at Kamp’s deli. It turns into the latest and greatest OKC dance club on wednesday nights. It might be there more often, but I really don’t know. It was actually really fun, there was a good spread of music and a good spread of people. Lots of photographers, although I was the only one not using flash.

https://images.matt.pictures/hiatus/1194/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m not leaving out the captions out of laziness or unremembered details, but I really think these don’t need anything to explain them.

https://images.matt.pictures/hiatus/1194/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/hiatus/1194/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/hiatus/1194/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

And then came saturday...

2009-05-04 00:00:00Z

I spent a lot of last week in bed, although not in a good way. I was laid low by some upper respiratory virus, most likely a cold, but maybe the flu. No swollen glands or soreness, though, and no high fever, so probably not. Wednesday I was fine, Thursday I woke up and had a sore throat and slept all day and then felt fine, Friday I felt like shit all day so I stayed in and out of the rain, and then came Saturday.

https://images.matt.pictures/and_then_came_saturday…/1195/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Saturday, I was supposed to meet up with a certain lady to hang out. So I text her around 6:30, she says she’s still at work, so I tell her to just let me know when she gets free, and we can coordinate then. 10:30 rolls around, no news, so I decide to head out on my own. I still haven’t heard back from her. Can’t win ‘em all.

https://images.matt.pictures/and_then_came_saturday…/1195/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I went to Sauced for a few good beers and then Blue note for a few less good beers, and then Cyrus texts me and says he’s at a party around the corner. So I say I’ll be there in a hot minute and head out. Side note: Paying in cash means you can leave whenever you want to.

https://images.matt.pictures/and_then_came_saturday…/1195/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

So I get to the party and no Cyrus. There were a bunch of people I didn’t know and one that I did; it was Melissa’s going away party. So, I turned my gregariousness up to 11 and met a bunch of new people, although I’m afraid by that time I was more fueled by booze than by social graces. Then there was more beer and more hard liquor and a lot of blurry moments. Cyrus got back maybe 15 minutes after I’d arrived, with more beer.

https://images.matt.pictures/and_then_came_saturday…/1195/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Later, after more beer and some whiskey, I extracted myself from the party, wandered around a bit, decided I should park the car, got on my bike, wandered a bit more and ended up crashing on Cyrus’ couch. I realized this morning that that particular party was the kind where you have a really good time while there and then only later realize you were making a complete fool out of yourself.

https://images.matt.pictures/and_then_came_saturday…/1195/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Today was a typical sunday: Jeff’s for brunch, video games, movies, pizza, bar, home. I’ve got to get a job, and an apartment, and a motorcycle. In that order. Ah, goals. It’s nice to have those again.

Just to prove that I don't just shoot parties...

2009-05-04 00:00:00Z

I took my camera to the grocery store. I have an idea: to make interesting pictures when nothing is happening. It’s a weird personal barrier I have, a switch that is either on or off in my head; if it doesn’t seem to me like anything is happening, then nothing is. Of course, something is always happening, “the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.” (james baldwin)

https://images.matt.pictures/just_to_prove_that_i_don’t_just_shoot_parties…/1193/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_to_prove_that_i_don’t_just_shoot_parties…/1193/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_to_prove_that_i_don’t_just_shoot_parties…/1193/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_to_prove_that_i_don’t_just_shoot_parties…/1193/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/just_to_prove_that_i_don’t_just_shoot_parties…/1193/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

because I'm a sucker for a pretty lady

2009-04-27 00:00:00Z

and because it’s her birthday, and because, well, what are friends for? I’m posting yet another huge batch of photos to flickr. This time though, I’m going to be smart and only post highlights here and if you want to see the whole set you can head over there http://www.flickr.com/photos/photomattmills/sets/72157617411519820/show/“>by clicking this finely crafted link.

Sometimes I find that I know I have enough good pictures of something and yet I’m still shooting, something is knawing at me to keep going, and I don’t really know why. On an “on” night, this means I come away with quite a lot of good stuff. This shoot was about 5% that I liked, and maybe as high as 20% that weren’t crap, even by my standards. In a small party, that means a lot of pictures of the same people, and yet some people get missed, too. Sorry if I missed you.

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/because_i’m_a_sucker_for_a_pretty_lady/1196/0018.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Norman Music Fest

2009-04-26 00:00:00Z

This is the 200th post here, and to celebrate, I’m being lazy and trying flickr’s embedded slideshows. These are all from norman music fest, taken yesterday. Sorry it’s flash.

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=70933”> http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=70933” allowFullScreen=”true” flashvars=”offsite=true&lang=en-us&page_show_url=%2Fphotos%2Fphotomattmills%2Fsets%2F72157617360997934%2Fshow%2F&page_show_back_url=%2Fphotos%2Fphotomattmills%2Fsets%2F72157617360997934%2F&set_id=72157617360997934&jump_to=” width=”750” height=”560”>

Clearing off the card...

2009-04-24 00:00:00Z

In anticipation of a monster weekend (Norman music fest tomorrow, arts fest tonight if I can get my ass in gear), I had to clear off the card in the camera, and because I love you all so much, I’m sharing.

No matter what I do to this tree in Lightroom, it’s still just a tree. I still kinda like it though.https://images.matt.pictures/clearing_off_the_card…/1198/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Polo.https://images.matt.pictures/clearing_off_the_card…/1198/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Cookout after polo. seriously good burgers and salsa at the Murray’s house. (sorry if I just butchered your name, Adam)https://images.matt.pictures/clearing_off_the_card…/1198/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Trying to get together a mutant stretched bike. Don’t know if they succeeded, I left for the Blue note.https://images.matt.pictures/clearing_off_the_card…/1198/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Hipshot, this girl was in her own world, literally dancing to a beat only she could hear. Which is too silly, because if the music had gone with what she was dancing, she wouldn’t have been half bad.https://images.matt.pictures/clearing_off_the_card…/1198/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Plan

2009-04-22 00:00:00Z

plan for the day:

1. Drink Coffee

2. Take mom to work

3. Shoot Pictures

4. Pick Mom up From Work

5. Come home

6. Blog

7. Drink/Philander/fall down/sleep as needed

23rd street

2009-04-19 00:00:00Z

So I finally got out and shot some yesterday, for the first time in three or four days. I don’t know what exactly caused the slump; I’ve been doing a lot around the house, just sort of hanging out with friends, nothing terribly interesting. So I decided to do something with myself. Calling around to find someone to model failed, everyrone was either recovering from the weekend or not answering their phones.

Anyway, no pretty ladies in these pictures. I had the crazy idea to go way out on 23rd street yesterday, and along the way I was sort of pulled in by all the signs I saw. I’m going to have to go back and shoot some more out there; might do a photo-walk of the few miles between choctaw and post road.

This victorian house was out in the middle of a lot of mobile homes for sale; it looked more like a storage for unwanted uprooted homes than a sales lot.https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I shot this mostly for the patch of light and the clouds. These tonalities are really difficult to get right on a screen.https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Like I said, signs.https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This last one was taken of the wig shop, much later at night. It’s a really strange looking place. I have to remember to try to go in there when they’re open.https://images.matt.pictures/23rd_street/1200/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

lazy photo upload

2009-04-16 00:00:00Z

I might do captions later.
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
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https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
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https://images.matt.pictures/lazy_photo_upload/1201/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This post is all captions

2009-04-11 00:00:00Z

Went to the bike art opening, a lot of Norman scenesters and young parents in the crowd. The art was ok, the bikes were cool.

(insert clever title, I'm not feeling it right now)

2009-04-09 00:00:00Z

Creative Commons

2009-04-07 00:00:00Z

Just added a CC tag to the bottom of the blog. I had always meant to, but it slipped my mind until this business with the AP threatening to sue people for quoting, linking, etc. So you know that it is: This work is licensed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/“>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Now back to your regularly scheduled blog.

really dig this.

2009-04-07 00:00:00Z

The most dangerous person in the world.

for sale (ignore this unless you're interested)

2009-04-06 00:00:00Z

Time for a new bag

2009-04-05 00:00:00Z

This is one of those “the shit in my bag” posts, sort of. http://photomattmills.com/blog/2008/04/things-i-carry.html”>Way back when, I didn’t carry that much, life was simple, and if there was anything I needed but didn’t have, I could usually just do without it.

Things are more complicated for me now. I often find myself away from home for a couple days at a time, so the stuff I carry has ballooned a bit. For the last several months I’ve been using a “Metropolis” chrome bag (I’ve had the bag for years, actually, but I prefer smaller bags when I can get away with them). The problem with the bag, and shoulder bags in general, is that they’re very picky about how they’re packed- if things are arranged wrong, something’s always digging into your back, and if they’re full, they stick out and fit weird. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but it seems to me that when you’ve got a lot of gear, a backpack is the way to haul it.

And actually, the chrome bag is the perfect size for the hardware I carry- my cameras, my laptop, the cords and chargers, etc. But if I need anything more, say a jacket, an extra layer of clothing, and/or a water bottle, then there’s just not enough room to wear it comfortably. This was brought home rather painfully this morning trying to bike in a t-shirt with a wind chill of 30ËšF. I made it from 23rd and robinson to 10th and broadway- about a mile, give or take some meandering and alleys. I could tell that trying to ride the rest of the way home from there would be a bad idea- a frozen matt mills can’t ride his bike or take pictures or philander or any of the fun stuff. Beyond that, dying of exposure in the city with a charged cell phone is stupid. So I called my dad, and he came and picked me up.

I’m too lazy to make a list, and this photo is short my flask and some tools I can’t seem to find, but this is everything else.https://images.matt.pictures/time_for_a_new_bag/1207/stuff.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m a chronic couch surfer, a product of living in the burbs and partying in the city. That and all my friends live in the city. The best solution would be to move, and as soon as I have a job that lasts more than two weeks, I’m going to do that. (Remember: I’m available to photograph anything but weddings, even on short notice). For now though, I’m switching bags. Sorry Chrome, you’re cool and all, but it’s time to go back to my roots, a nice big backpack I’ve had for like 10 years. Stuffed very full, it’ll hold everything I need for a week of hard travel- say, everything I’d encounter between here and timbuktu. As it is, I can put everything I need for a weekend of night parties and morning blogging.

The bag all loaded. Not too huge.
https://images.matt.pictures/time_for_a_new_bag/1207/bag.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Awake and working after the party

2009-04-04 00:00:00Z

Mesta park, rolling around, version 1.

4 hrs

2009-04-04 00:00:00Z

4 hours sleep… moving the banked track with the RDR roller girls… five hours of bike polo. Can’t think straight. So photos.

I know this is from last night, and you know where to file complaints. I like it.https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Moving party! With some beer.https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Polo break.https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Sparks run? what’s wrong with this picture? https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Grant plays with his new camera.https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Erin:
https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/4_hrs/1209/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Blue Note. Again.

2009-04-02 00:00:00Z

At the blue note on a wednesday, although I started the night at McNellie’s. It feels better to be making portraits, although I’ve lost all sense as to whether these are any good or not. I was just a little off the whole night (actually, for the last several nights) and I can’t put my finger on why, exactly. Oh well, it’ll work itself out.

Cat gives me the crazy eye.https://images.matt.pictures/blue_note._again./1211/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
This is a look that says “I can’t believe I’ve run into my ex” and “How can I get away from him?” Trust me, I was there.https://images.matt.pictures/blue_note._again./1211/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Cyrus does normal? is this a fluke?
https://images.matt.pictures/blue_note._again./1211/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/blue_note._again./1211/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Midnight bike rides part eleventy-million

2009-04-02 00:00:00Z

Tuesday, I went out for a bike ride, just to get a little air, and ended up at the blue note, which has become my bar of first resort. I actually made really good time on the ride in, at least for me: 7 miles in half an hour.

When I got there, Chris was sitting at the bar (hi chris). Next thing I know, I’m doing an irish car bomb with him and Victoria, and the night rolls out from there. A couple beers and a couple shots later, we head back to Chris’ house. On the way, I confirmed what I’d heard earlier in the day: my work had all been taken down from Sauced. It’s gone, and I’m pissed. Fuck Sauced.

Eyeing a bolt-hole to attach the chain guard.
https://images.matt.pictures/midnight_bike_rides_part_eleventy-million/1210/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Anyway, we got to Chris’ house, which he shares with KW, and I watched Lisa put the finishing touches on her bike. It’s a cute girl cruiser, fashionable and functional.

The bike. Yes, I know it’a a little blurry, so was I.https://images.matt.pictures/midnight_bike_rides_part_eleventy-million/1210/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Then I rode my ass home, no idea how long it took, but it was a pretty nice ride, except for the south wind. I always pass by this last scene, but for some reason early on April Fool’s day, it grabbed me. Who cares if I look foolish? Nobody was around, anyway.
https://images.matt.pictures/midnight_bike_rides_part_eleventy-million/1210/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I suck at team sports pt 1

2009-03-30 00:00:00Z

I’m sure there will eventually be a part two to this, but my stomach started disagreeing with me, and is only now, a day and a half later, finally settling down. So I only played one game, and only shot two of them, and then I ran off to drink (see previous post). Anyway, here’s the goods:

https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_suck_at_team_sports_pt_1/1213/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

ok, some pictures already

2009-03-30 00:00:00Z

It was a nice uneventful weekend… well, things happened, but it was fun and nobody got hurt this time, which is to say no fights, trips to the hospital, supergluing of wounds, etc. So all of the things that have defined my weekends of partying didn’t happen. Just drinking, followed by sobering up in some chill spot (thanks to the bike cave and the schofield house, respectively, for their hospitality). Anyway, photos:

Matty at HiLo- yes, that’s a plastic tiara on his head.https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Tanner, at the bike cave, concentrating on some Texas hold ‘em. I passed out like a narcoleptic on valium.https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Andria, while she was getting me shitfaced on sunday afternoon. Jager is still a good time though.https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Bartender, chatting. This was moments after she was showing off her tongue’s lack of connective tissue. I like this picture better though.https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Trinity and her beau, forgotten his name. She was saying something about me taking pictures at monster’s ball. https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Rainstorms, tonight. Hope tomorrow is nice, I’ve got work to do.https://images.matt.pictures/ok,_some_pictures_already/1212/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’ll only add to these that three times in the past five days women have offered to pose scantily/provocatively clad for me. I’m not a skeezy dude, they asked me, but it’s kinda funny. What change in my complete lack of game caused all this? More as it develops. (oh yeah, and bike polo post soon).

Always remember the super glue

2009-03-27 00:00:00Z

Start with ladies' night

2009-03-27 00:00:00Z

"I have something in my nose? What?"

Bike polo

2009-03-27 00:00:00Z

Bike polo is fun. Evidence:
https://images.matt.pictures/bike_polo/1215/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/bike_polo/1215/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/bike_polo/1215/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/bike_polo/1215/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

twitter thoughts too long for twitter

2009-03-25 00:00:00Z

A conversation today on twitter got me to thinking about photography, and culture and style and art and society. There was a photographer, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, who’s work really demonstrates all that’s wrong with the world right now.

The photographer that brought up all these questions is a very successful commercial photographer. Very polished, styled images. There are a lot of things that I don’t like about them. A lot of his images are super low contrast, with no blacks (tonality, not people) at all, while also cropping off body parts willy-nilly. His lighting also bothers me- the photos strike me as the kind you need an army of assistants (well, at least two or three) to maintain-complex and unnatural. Not every shot should be into the light, all of them can’t be at golden hour, and sweat is never that perfectly placed. It’s a distinctive look, but it’s a plastic look, it’s one I’ve seen a thousand times before.

We live in a dissafected, disenfranchised society. There are the indebted, and there are the people we owe money to. The rich are few and far between, something like 5% of the population at any given time, depending on your definition of rich. Money as we think of it now has no basis in the real world, but is merely some numbers in digital domains.

Given that, where is art? It’s all gold and glam and crazy hair and tight pants. It’s abstract and disconnected and complex. It’s thin, insubstantial. It’s going to fall apart.

It’s the lack of substance that I keep coming back to in my thinking; those photographs, even of somewhat interesting subjects, were plastic and boring, stamped out of a mill of complicated lights and staged action-peaks that only look like decisive moments. They are the shiny object, to be consumed and tossed away without thought.

Where are the real photographs, the photographers of the world as it is? I’m not talking about people wandering to far flung regions to uncover the the worst of the worst, I’m talking about the local people, the ones doing projects and reporting on local things? Where are these photographers? They’re out there, I’m sure it’s not just me laboring under a delusion. I know because I’m one of ‘em.

This one goes out to Mom

2009-03-23 00:00:00Z

Yeah, sure, sappy, I know. Go fuck yourself. My mom is in the hospital for the 13th time since September. Or was it August? I can’t remember when she started dialysis, but it was around then. 3 A.V. fistulas, a peritoneal port, 6 cardiac caths, a couple infections, surgeries to install and remove the above, time for monitoring, recovering, etc, etc. She’s been through a lot. And she’s still not done, although it now seems that they’ve got a handle on why the fistulas keep failing so consistently, it’s a 2% of the population kind of problem. Now she’s going to rest for a couple months and they’re going to do something different for a dialysis access.

She might murder me for posting this, but oh well, at least then I won’t have to worry about my student loans. This was right before they took her back for surgery today.https://images.matt.pictures/this_one_goes_out_to_mom/1218/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Home, where the laptop is

2009-03-23 00:00:00Z

Phil the wonderdog, and his owner Todd.

SXSW update....

2009-03-20 00:00:00Z

So we’re still here, still haven’t seen any shows, and if it weren’t for our gracious and intelligent host, we wouldn’t even have had and free beer. Austin is really going to have to kick it up a notch to save itself from this one.

Beginning of the night, all dressed up, still hopeful.
https://images.matt.pictures/sxsw_update…./1220/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

We went to the party 45 minutes early and there was already a line a couple hundred people long. For some reason, when you tell people free beer and hot DJ’s, they line up like it’s the cure for stupidity. And then stand there. For two hours. While people cut, and get to go in vip.

On the way, the night looked promising.
https://images.matt.pictures/sxsw_update…./1220/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Seems to me it’s an intelligence test. It sounds like a good idea to go stand in line for a little while and get a bunch of free shit- booze, music, hot, scantily clad women etc. There’s a limit to how much you can stand there though, and here’s where the intelligence test comes in: the smarter you are, the sooner you leave. When we left, there were still 200 people standing in line, not about to get in.

The line, when we got there. Seemed like we’d get in.
https://images.matt.pictures/sxsw_update…./1220/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Now, they were at capacity when they stopped letting people in, I’m sure. But after a bunch of people leave, why not let the people at the front of the line in? Instead, they were only allowing VIP’s, which unfortunately, we’re not.

The same line, 45 minutes later.
https://images.matt.pictures/sxsw_update…./1220/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

So, we gave up after about an hour of just standing there. In our defense, there were maybe 20 people in front of us; it seemed possible, when they said they were at capacity, that we might get in after some people left. Then we came back to the house, (Todd’s house) and drank beer and talked late into the night with todd, todd’s friend who works for SNL, and his girlfriend, who’s name I’ve forgotten. Longtime blogreaders and friends will know this is because I’m horrible with names.

This was as far as we got. Then we gave up and commenced drinking.
https://images.matt.pictures/sxsw_update…./1220/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

In austin. on a couch.

2009-03-19 00:00:00Z

So, throwing yourself at the mercy of the universe occasionally does work out. I’m on a couch here in Austin, TX, mere miles from downtown and the famous and ever popular SXSW music fest.

The whole journey started this morning, when Sarah twittered about going to SXSW today, to catch some band. So I called her and asked if she could delay an extra half hour, to give me time to get my shit together ( I thought we were leaving tomorrow). She told me she didn’t really have shit together either, and so I had time, meet at her house, and everything would be cool.

It took for-ev-er to get out of OKC though- one thing after another kept going wrong, or errands that should have taken just a few minutes took an hour, and on and on. It was like the karmic forces of the city didn’t want to let us go. Finally, after something like 2 hours of running around, we were ready to go.

The drive down was good- there was a nice sunset, some McD’s, a little nap, and not a few pictures. I drove the last 40 minutes, and after a couple tries, parallel parked the car on an off street east of downtown. We got on our bikes, and not two minutes later were yelled at by some cops. Nice job austin PD, making people new in town feel welcome.

So, jetting away from that situation (nice thing about bikes in a city- there’s little chance for someone in a car to catch you), we found ourselves right in the middle of the maddness, on the mainline, we hit the central nerve, etc, etc. Only to be greeted by a sign outside all the official venues: no photography without a press pass. Bullshit I say. The good news is that for the most part we’re going to be frequenting unofficial parties and venues; apparently that’s where the best parts are.

Went from there to the long branch, which was a cool little joint. Nice atmos, good music, interesting clientele (if you could call them that). I had a couple beers, and that (and a short ride back to the car, and a short car ride) brings me to the present tense. Oh yeah, and there’s a crazy jumpy dog in the house we’re staying at.

day 1 sxsw

2009-03-19 00:00:00Z

Today has kinda been a blur… there was morning coffee, burritos, american appearal factory seconds sale, walking around, biking around, whole foods, lots of music, lost of fun. And I haven’t even had any free beer yet.

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Japanther rocks your face off

2009-03-18 00:00:00Z

Show was good. bunch of good pics. invented the unintentional photo essay. Don’t worry, I’ll explain later. Gotta go get my shit together for SXSW. See you all on the flip side.

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https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/japanther_rocks_your_face_off/1223/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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a few from last night

2009-03-15 00:00:00Z

FYI, she’s staring at tanner trying to track stand and chug beers. Tanner was able to get three without a foot down, but that photo just looks like a dude chugging beer on a bike.
https://images.matt.pictures/a_few_from_last_night/1224/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Jim, all dressed up at the party. Martini: extra dirty. Suit: extra sharp.
https://images.matt.pictures/a_few_from_last_night/1224/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Adam Lock, back in town for the week.
https://images.matt.pictures/a_few_from_last_night/1224/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

test

2009-03-14 00:00:00Z

trying to post to get the feed to update. real post coming in a bit with photos of a band. fun.

Three guys play some music

2009-03-14 00:00:00Z

Ended up at sauced friday, and didn’t have time to post these yesterday. some people might say that makes me a bad blogger, but they need to get a life. The band is called, I think, The Double Clutchers. I could tell they were having fun, not a bad sound, but a lot of covers. I enjoyed it.

https://images.matt.pictures/three_guys_play_some_music/1225/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/three_guys_play_some_music/1225/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/three_guys_play_some_music/1225/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This girl is not a member of the band. Rule of thumb: stripes = trouble. She’s not wearing paisley, that’s all I’m sayin’.

https://images.matt.pictures/three_guys_play_some_music/1225/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Pictures until I was too drunk to focus

2009-03-13 00:00:00Z

By which I actually mean there are more photos, and some of them are in focus, but after the last one here (which we’ll pretend was intentional), I was walking the fine line between blackout and just stupid, and so none of those photos are any good.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

I’m actually not sure any of these are any good, but they’re kind of fun, at least. That’s the threshold these days for blog-worthy photos, if I think someone I know will get a laugh or like it or link or somesuch, then I’ll put it up. Actually, there’s a quality threshold as well, see paragraph 1 for example.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Wednesday was a pretty epic night, and actually it’s a good thing, because my money’s just about run out again. Time to find another jobby job. I did a pretty good job of embarrassing myself in front of girls I barely know, and some old friends in the mix too. It’s strange, the way things run in circles sometimes.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

I’ve never seen a look on Cyrus’s face like the one below, but it’s probably always there under the surface- a sort of laughing incredulity. Either that or it’s drunkface and I’m reading too much into a picture.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Reagan always makes the best photo-faces. It’s like she’s screaming “I”M REAGAN” with her whole face.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

And here’s the old friends I was talking about- Chase and Brian- I’ve known Brian since high school. He’ll probably get pissed and send me more death threats, but that’s a risk I’m willing to take to bring everyone quality photos.

https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

I really like this pic, for some ineffable reason. I know, I know. Shoot me.
https://images.matt.pictures/pictures_until_i_was_too_drunk_to_focus/1227/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Openbeta2

2009-03-13 00:00:00Z

Last night was openbeta, and it was actually a really cool interesting event. I’m not just saying that, you know; a lot of talks and conferences bore the shit out of me, and I just leave in the middle of them. OK, so I stepped out for a smoke in the middle of one of the boring lightning talks, but other than that, it was good.

https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

This is Grant, giving his demo of Twircl, which still hasn’t launched, but is by far the coolest thing I’ve seen one of my friends come up with since art school. Twircl is a direct group messaging app that runs on top of twitter, something that the system needs.

https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

These are the wimgo girls, and, well, do I really need to say anything. Thanks for the pen, ladies.
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Grant kills ‘em with his presentation:
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Voltron Presents: Why they’re awesome. I need to find out if they have any staff photographer openings. Maybe they need a screwball wandering correspondent for their web side? Y/Y?
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The view from OKCCoCo:
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Afterparty:
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

There was a good reason for these faces, but I can’t remember for the life of me why.
https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/openbeta2/1228/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Film is too much

2009-03-09 00:00:00Z

Shooting in a bit of a different mode yesterday. With the digital camera. Decided film was too expensive. So sue me. I don’t think the look suffers that much.
https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I like how even the McD’s sign is screwed up.
https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Every time I talk about this project, people bring up the tower theatre; looking at the fron of it, I wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just build a new one in the vacant lot across the street.
https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/film_is_too_much/1229/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The shooting yesterday wasn’t as good, as fulfilling as is was the first couple outings; I thought, walking back, that I might just give up the project and move on. But it seems like I’m onto something; the dilapidation there is a symptom of the wider economic problems. I can’t tell if it’s getting worse or better. Also, I look at the pictures, see I’m doing good work, and can hardly stop myself.

Momentum Artshow

2009-03-08 00:00:00Z

Momentum 09 was last night, and I was really surprised by the quality and scope and size and attendance of the show. It was packed, the work was 75% good, all stuff I’m not used to seeing in this town, and it filled a freaking warehouse.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

There were a lot of big open installations, a lof of big cool paintings, some shit photos (sorry everyone, but the photo showing this year just wasn’t that great, with a few notable exceptions). Hving these clouds right by the entrance set the mood for the place: it was as if someone took a piece of a real art scene out of the air of New York or Santa Fe and stuck it here in oak city, improbably and strangely. So it seemed natural to see a crib full of beer bongs and a whole room of homoerotic black fraternity induction paintings.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Then there was my friend Bobby’s band, playing a pretty rad live set. If they’d had a cd available, I’d have bought one, and that’s not something I do a lot. These kids know how to rock.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

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Then there was this womblike installation in what used to be a woman’s restroom. It was completely transformed and amazing; all it needed was some giant pillows on the floor and some mild hallucinogenic gas in the air and it would have been perfect.
https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I didn’t know what to think of the deer. But I like the photo, so sue me.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0015.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Some MC, not all that great. Nobody’s perfect, maybe he was havin’ an off night.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0016.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Then there was the after after after party, which was really about four people in Jim’s apartment eating cheese and drinking french wine. I’d like to say it was a nice end to the night, but there were a couple fights on the lawn that complicated things. So instead it was kind of a haggard exhausted end to the evening, but at least it was in good company.

https://images.matt.pictures/momentum_artshow/1231/0017.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Some random photos:

2009-03-08 00:00:00Z

There’s a post about momentum coming, but to tide everyone over until I can get that together, here’s some photos from earlier in the week. Francois, on wednesday:
https://images.matt.pictures/some_random_photos:/1230/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Ray-guns, at McNellie’s:
https://images.matt.pictures/some_random_photos:/1230/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Cody at blue note:
https://images.matt.pictures/some_random_photos:/1230/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
It was one of those nights where I was the drunk one. Not as drunk as some people, though, and that turned out to be a good thing. I told Sarah early on in the night that I’d make sure she got home alright. She did, and I crashed on her couch. My good deed for the week done, I give you the morning after:
https://images.matt.pictures/some_random_photos:/1230/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

More in a few minutes, when I get the real momentum post together.

Candid Portraits for Hire

2009-03-02 00:00:00Z

So, this is a New Idea. At least, I think it’s new, and if it isn’t, well, I don’t know anybody that does it. The idea is, a lot of people like to have good pictures of their family; in fact, this is the only thing a lot of people care to have pictures of. But studio pictures from places like walmart or sears or even glamour shots suck.

So instead of a studio, what about the home? And instead of a quick grin-and-grab, what about spending some time with the family, say two hours- over dinner, maybe, or an afternoon in the park? Candid pictures the whole time, and give the family digital copies that they can do whatever they want with? If they want to order prints through me, that’s fine, but I’d rather make money shooting than printing, so that’s where the charges come from.

The pictures here in this post were shot in the space of about an hour and a half; These aren’t all of the keepers, just enough for a teaser. I ended up sending the family 25 images in all, all of which I was happy with.

So, if anyone is interested in this being done with their family, just drop me a line at my email, rates are negotiable, and depend on how much and what you want me to do.

Just photos

2009-03-01 00:00:00Z

Just photos. need flickr next.
https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1233/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
She swears she hit her eye on a cabinet door, and actually I believe her.
https://images.matt.pictures/just_photos/1233/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Kanaly busts a move.
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Ole?
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Perspectives? More like Photos

2009-02-28 00:00:00Z

Last night was portrait night, or a really wild ass night, or a depressing fucker, or a wild debauch, all depending on your perspective. Crying girls, a night in the drunk tank, someone got neck punched, someone else got shot down, couple people got laid (I assume), someone went 59mph on rollers, it goes on and on. Me, I took it mellow, took some pictures, and passed out on a couch. I’m feeling lazy, so here’s photos. If you want more details, call someone who knows.

https://images.matt.pictures/perspectives?_more_like_photos/1234/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>
https://images.matt.pictures/perspectives?_more_like_photos/1234/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>
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https://images.matt.pictures/perspectives?_more_like_photos/1234/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>
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https://images.matt.pictures/perspectives?_more_like_photos/1234/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

another cool montage

2009-02-24 00:00:00Z

Warning: this thing does contain some explicit images, so if boobs offend you, f off until you grow up, ok? On with the show:

http://www.youtube.com/v/-dYnKUyoyg8&hl=en&fs=1”>http://www.youtube.com/v/-dYnKUyoyg8&hl=en&fs=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640” height=”385”>

Found via http://www.1854.eu/“>1854, the blog of the British journal of photography. Appearently somebody is trying to get this banned or unbanned at a festival across the pond. That story is http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=840363”>here. Cool work, anyway.

Crane go Boom

2009-02-24 00:00:00Z

Crane accident at the Dean Mcgee Eye institute’s new construction. No injuries reported at this time, however the operator did have to call home for a spare pair of pants to be brought to the site.

https://images.matt.pictures/crane_go_boom/1235/3306731606_bfd2c0d70d_o.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Seriously, it’s a good thing that nobody got hurt, and I can’t help but think it’s probably a indicator of good procedure somewhere that nobody was stupid enough to be underneath the running crane. As for the causes, could be operator error, could be equipment malfunction, I don’t know. Five minutes from now it’ll be old news.

Update: My dad (a pipe weldor with ~40 years on construction sites) tells me that it was almost definitely operator error. The main line was pulled too tight, the cable snapped, everything jumps and goes slack, at which point the lack of tension causes the jib to fall. It was a huge stroke of luck, according to dad, that the crane came down in an empty area, and also that the operator is alive.

your camera does matter

2009-02-23 00:00:00Z

OK, so I’m tired of all this bullshit on the web about how http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/notcamera.htm”>your camera doesn’t matter, no need for that 4000 dollar setup, etc. Then there was http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK2603NP5A00POX”>this crap (which I got via http://www.kottke.org/09/02/a-poor-photographer-blames-his-tools”>kottke, a pretty good blog usually) about how the old masters, those before autofocus and autoexposure had it about the same as anyone with a point and shoot. The photographers he mentions for the most part shot with Leicas, cameras renowned for their speed, quality, and ability to work in low light even with the ISO 400 films of the time. (The author of that piece confuses old color emulsions, which were very slow, with black and white, which have been reasonable since the mid nineteen thirties). Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of my personal heroes, whom he mentions by name, was famous for almost always using a 50mm f/2 lens and ISO 400 Tri-x, moderately fast film with incredible tonalities possible.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to make good photos with cheap or lesser cameras. I’m even using some of the shots from my old G9 in the book I’m trying to produce. But telling people to buck up and try harder in the face of the crap that is the consumer camera market right now, well, that’s bullshit. The factors that are comparable are not the important ones to photographers. The important things are all related to creative control and perspective. The reason little digital cameras mostly suck is you have little control over how the thing sees; it’s very hard to fit your vision into a little screen. Here’s a list of the things that do matter, though:

1. Format size. This comes before every other consideration, as it is a defining characteristic of how the camera will work, its weight, how the image is printed, how depth of field is established, all sorts of things. Bigger gives higher technical image quality, and smaller means better ease of use. My personal choice is the 24x36mm rectangle- a good balance between optical and tonal qualities and the ability to move around. Notice I say here “format” and not “megapixels”; the difference being that format is very important and megapixels aren’t anymore.

2. Shutter Lag. THIS WAS ALMOST NUMBER ONE. That’s because it’s so often overlooked and it’s perhaps the most important to the most photographers (potential and actual). A camera’s shutter lag needs to be small, less than one tenth of a second, for it to be remotely useful in getting a moment, which for me is all of photography. Most crappy (P&S) cameras, you could press the shutter button, go have lunch, come back, start a pot of coffee for the afternoon, and then, finally, the camera will make the exposure. Completely unacceptable. In most old manual cameras, this wasn’t a problem, because the mechanical path from the shutter to the button was short and fast.

3. Focal Length. You may say that for a given photographer, they will have many lenses, but many tend toward one end of the spectrum or another- James Nachtwey uses wide angles a lot, Cartier-Bresson preferred the fifty (normal in his preferred 35mm format), paparazzi live and die by their telephoto lenses, and if you ask ten photographers, you’ll get ten answers, all unique. I’m a normal and wider kind of photographer, 50 and 20.

4. Minimum F/stop- This determines the most amount of light that the lens can allow to pass through. I cart around a huge honking 50mm f/1.2, which gathers light somewhat akin to a radio telescope collecting signal, but that’s because I work in dark rooms with sketchy nonexistent lighting a lot. For most people, f/2 is plenty for most situations.

OK, so for most point and shoots, the lenses suck, the format sucks, the viewing sucks, and the shutter lag is longer than a smoke break. It’s a miracle these things make pictures at all. You almost have to be a savant to get anything good out of them. To the people out there that know better, please stop bullshitting amateurs into thinking that their camreras are capable machines, because more than likely the machine sucks and they haven’t a hope of getting better with it.

PS- Ken Rockwell, while being a little odd a lot of the time, has a lot of good smart things to say about photography and cameras, so long as you know he’s joking half of the time. The other guy makes some good points, too, but really, if the camera didn’t matter, we’d all be painters. Now go take some pictures.

Sunday Sunday Sunday

2009-02-22 00:00:00Z

Today was a good day in paradise. Started out sleeping in a bit, then went to brunch/coffee/movie with Lori:
https://images.matt.pictures/sunday_sunday_sunday/1238/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
The brunch we were going to go to (the guatemalan on classen) is closed sundays, or at least it was closed today, so we went to cafe do brasil, where I got my chorizo fix over eggs and a side of Mimosa. Coffee at coffeeslingers, mostly to kill time, and then onto the movie, Taken, which was awesome- the most realistic fight scenes I can recall in a movie. Brutal, fast paced, and it could’ve ended about five minutes before it did. No need to sugar coat the ending, Hollywood.
https://images.matt.pictures/sunday_sunday_sunday/1238/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Then, with Lori off to study something boring, I was free to go shoot golden hour on 23rd street. I had to go around twice to get the photo of the capitol.
https://images.matt.pictures/sunday_sunday_sunday/1238/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
These same people are always hanging out on that bench in the corner. I don’t know if they live in the apartments out of frame to the left or they’re homeless and that’s just their spot.
https://images.matt.pictures/sunday_sunday_sunday/1238/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Homage to Eugene Atget. Wig shop. It was always a little but of a surprise to hit the end of a roll so quickly; about half an hour walking and 141 pictures.
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So, I walked from Robinson to Classen, dropped off the four rolls I’d shot at Walgreens, and went to grab a bite while they were being run. I have my doubts about the usability of these photo cd scans; fine for web, but I’m going to need to scan them better to make prints. Might just not bother next time and scan everything at home. Then again it does make blogging a lot easier.

Lacking the will to blog

2009-02-21 00:00:00Z

Right now, I should tell the story of the excellent day I had shooting with http://www.jeremycharles.com/blog/“>Jeremy Charles, or rather him shooting and me assisting, but I think I can may be just say that it was a good time, picked up a few new tricks for my lighting bag, and it was nice to be able to talk to someone about photography who’s been where I’m at and receive a little encouragement. Also, I had a moment to grab a few photos of the first band, who’s name I forget. This is why I usually take notes of these things. Anyway, Photos (now with black borders!):

https://images.matt.pictures/lacking_the_will_to_blog/1239/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
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photos of the random

2009-02-19 00:00:00Z

Edit to add: photo of me by the inimitable Tara, the girl with the glasses in the second pic.

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Why I quit my job/ What Happened today

2009-02-19 00:00:00Z

So, it’s been a long ass day. I got up and I was sore from a fall last night, I’m still stiff, actually, but that’s another story.

I got up and went to work, and for once I was pretty on time, or at least I was there earlier than the other two people in my office. I go back to the processor to turn it on, and there were a couple pieces out of it, so I opened the lid and took a look at the tanks, and the rinse baths were a bit frothy. If you know anything about processors, or about photography in general, It’s not a good thing for your rinse baths to be opaque, and also not a good thing for them to be frothy. The froth turned out to be rinse aid, which is strange and unnecessary, but whatever. I digress.

So, I see the processor in this state and I’m a little upset. You’ve got to understand, this is a quarter of a mil sitting there let to rot. Not only that, but the utility of it, its ability to make prints, was seriously degraded. Maybe I’m crazy. But I was a little pissed. So, I tell everyone we really need to drain and clean the machine, and then we can get back to printing, it’ll take a day, but the prints will be better and the machine won’t in danger of breaking down imminently.

As background, I’ve worked on these machines before, and I have a pretty intimate understanding of the chemistry involved. If you want, you can look it up, I’m not in the mood to explain it here. There’s no need for the rinse aid in the final baths, because the prints are dired with hot air right away. Which I tried to explain to the office manager (or whatever keith is), but he wasn’t having any of it. By this time I’d been to get cleaning supplies, pulled the rinse bath rollers, and cleaned the first set. I put the machine back together and went outside for a smoke.

I’m outside, then, with one of the other people I work with, Haley (not Luna). Keith, the office manager, comes over and starts talking about the machine, and I try to explain to him that really the machine should be thouroughly cleaned once a month, and he goes off on me. Says he just got off the phone with some so-and so from tech support who told him it only needed it every six months, and moreover my experience didn’t matter because I’d never worked on this machine, and I said to him, fine, let’s just let it drop, no reason to be angry. So he yells at me some more, and I tell him to let it go some more, and seemed like about ten times we went back and fourth like that, and finally I tell him, fine, find another photographer. And I turned on my heel and grabbed my shit and I was gone.

Since then, I’ve had a pretty chill day. I went to sauced and had some coffee, shot some photos for the 23rd st project (coming soon, next post, I swear), and built a bike for a pretty girl. The girl is attached to a guy, but sometimes it’s nice to build something just because you can, because it’s something positive in an otherwise shit day. Maybe the photos are good though.

Also, if you know anyone looking for an experienced photographer, photo assistant, fine printer, entry-level web programmer, locksmith, or portugese translator, I’m available.

First day of 23rd st. Project

2009-02-17 00:00:00Z

So today was the first day of working on the 23rd street project; just a walk up and down with my leica to see what I saw, and to try to get a handle on what the project would and could be.

https://images.matt.pictures/first_day_of_23rd_st._project/1242/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

So, as I was walking and talking to Grant, I was also thinking. Grant graciously came along to watch my back. I have this tendency to concentrate so much on what I’m photographing that I walk out into the road to get the right angle, and not notice oncoming cars. So it’s good to have someone along who isn’t trying to line up things visually, much less conceptualize a new project at the same time.

https://images.matt.pictures/first_day_of_23rd_st._project/1242/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The project as I see it now can go a couple of ways; I can see it happening fairly quickly, couple weeks of work, but the idea, the interesting thing to me thus far, is that 23rd street is the border between two really distinct neighborhoods, and that contrast causes all this crazy activity, lots of bums, shops, empty storefronts, crazy shit. It’s a busy area.

https://images.matt.pictures/first_day_of_23rd_st._project/1242/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

But also there’s the possibility of following the street for a while, six months to a year, to see what happens, because as midtown wraps up to the south and paseo continues to develop to the north, there’s no way all these buildings will stay run down; they’re going to become prime real estate soon; it’s already happening to a few little strips.

https://images.matt.pictures/first_day_of_23rd_st._project/1242/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I like the idea of this photo essay as a series of intense contrasts; the tension between the neighborhoods from the north and the south, the new shops and their new customers and the old bums and winos and just the plain residents (somehoe nobody has yet targeted the down-and-out demographic, except maybe Byron’s liquor). It’s probably an avenue I’ll pursue (or at least be thinking about while I’m shooting.

https://images.matt.pictures/first_day_of_23rd_st._project/1242/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Edit to add: Film scanning is a bitch. I think I’m probably going to just shoot this with my canon digi, just to save myself the hassle and the expense of film. OK, croudsource an answer: what do you think? Is the film look in the above pics worth the hassle? (shitty scans, I know; part of the cost would be a new scanner).

Fucker

2009-02-15 00:00:00Z

So yesterday was a fucker of a day. After I said all that about loving life on the road and how I’d rather be doing my job than carousing and womanizing and drinking (still basically true), I had a fucker of an afternoon.

It was made worse by the fact that I had a great morning- I was shooting really well, not too tired or too sore in the shoulders. Well, there was a bit of technical difficulty at the beginning (I had changed my manual ip to try to get my comp working on their network, and voila, it worked, but then the guys out front couldn’t connect to me. Never mind they could’ve found me in the network browser). But being a little pissed just sharpened me up, and I hit all the marks just right. That I also have to make up the marks as I go, or rather intuit them (an important philosophical difference, but we have to many parentheticals already) makes no difference.

https://images.matt.pictures/fucker/1243/leonardsign.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>

Then the afternoon came. Groups of dancers, first duo/trios, and then gradually increasing until there were 30 on the floor. So, just as we were getting into the groups of 6-8, one of the pins bent in on my card reader and I was in trouble. So, I sent the guys out front, my boss, an IM asking for help. I get no response, and in short order I had worked through my extra cards. So, I ran out to their area, and in the process, missed a dance routine. Threw me off the rest of the afternoon. Got heated there for a second and I was tempeted to walk off from the whole thing, but my better nature prevailed, and I’m still employed. that is, they didn’t fire me for a mistake, and I didn’t walk off mad.

Then dinner, and my boss was in hot water for us leaving “early.” Early being maybe 15 minutes to beat the crowd. Oh well, now nobody in the whole crew gives a shit, we’re only doing this job for the money anyway. Why won’t people figure out that giving subordinates shit just pisses them off and gets you less work, of lower quality? Foster a good work environment, and good things happen. Positive reinforcement. When your buisiness depends on creative people, all that bad emotion can really fuck up their day, which in turn screws your product.

Enough rambling, back to work for me.

Up too early

2009-02-14 00:00:00Z

Why am I awake at this ungodly hour? It’s saturday morning. I should be drunk, passed out with my arms around some beautiful woman I don’t deserve. I should have partied all night with my friends.

Instead, I’m here in a town in north carolina in a town who’s name I can’t spell right (albamarle? albermar? something). Today, I’m going to go and sit in a chair for hours on end, and take pictures. This instead of waking up with said woman, making breakfast and nursing a hangover all day, orange juice, eggs, coffee, maybe a mid-afternoon bike ride.

No, today I’ll shoot more than 10,000 pictures. I’ll hear the same 50 songs repeated about twice, some more than others, and some more annoyingly than others (I never did like Annie). I’ll hold up the 5 pound camera setup for most of that time, a 12-13 hour day, with a short break for lunch. I’ll be exhausted and ache at the end and probably have one dinner choice, because everything else in town shuts down at 8.

The strangest part? I prefer this to staying at home. I’d rather be out here on the edge of what I can do, busting my ass, trying to do something nearly impossible (produce good art on demand, several hundred times in a day? that’s so absurd it’s beyond consideration, but here we are). This is difficult, but it’s the life I’ve been missing out on in a lot of ways, going different places, doing photography, a little suffering but much joy.

Other than the people in what I’m already thinking of as my old life, there’s nothing I miss. With the exception of the hypothetical pretty lady, who 9/10ths of the time I’m texting from the road anyway. What’s wrong with me?

just a few phots from the road

2009-02-14 00:00:00Z

I’m in albemarle NC and I can’t sleep. Insomnia-blogging. not much to say right now. might think of more later and give it another post.
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video from last night

2009-02-12 00:00:00Z

Oh noes! Tornadoes!

2009-02-11 00:00:00Z

So, i kind of wasn’t going to blog this, it being old news and all, but I wanted to at least share the pictures. Funny story: for the pictures of everybody crouded together in the bathroom, that was for the second cell that passed over us, the one that wasn’t really anything to worry about.

My first day in the office was actually good. Doing sysadin-like duties already, although I don’t really think I qualify for the title yet. Or at least I was doing them until the power went out. Point for twitter- I found out about the storm a little ahead of everyone else on twitter. Then I sat there for twenty minutes trying to find decent radar coverage (not really possible on the internet, unless you get a live feed from the tv stations, which is easier to get from, say, a TV).

a weekend in kentucky

2009-02-10 00:00:00Z

So I started my new job for reals last weekend, and it was strange, like everything else in my life. The traveling was some of the easiest I’ve done. Nothing went wrong (in an unfixable way, at least). Like I said, the things that are usually difficult, like morning coffee or lunch, were handled with ease. For those not in the know: my new job is taking pictures of dance competitions. to the tune of 20k images a weekend.
https://images.matt.pictures/a_weekend_in_kentucky/1249/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
The hard part wasn’t really taking the photos, either, although I can tell already that my timing and camera handling is going to get a lot better (this coming from someone who didn’t think that was possible). This is a good thing.
https://images.matt.pictures/a_weekend_in_kentucky/1249/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
(There was some bs here that I cut out, because some shit shouldn’t see the light of day. not while it’s half baked at least. suffice to say that dance competitions are hard to fit into my worldview; they are, in a word, problematic).
https://images.matt.pictures/a_weekend_in_kentucky/1249/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
At the end of the day, the girls probably mostly have a great time dancing, and enjoy having quality pictures of what they love doing. I can dig on that. Thinking of it that way, it’s hard to hold onto my objections. At the end of the day, I’m a professional. I do the job, nobody gets hurt because of it, maybe some people enjoy what I produce even. That’s fine with me.

The abbreviated quest for coffee

2009-02-07 00:00:00Z

So I woke up at about 4:30 this morning, local time. I sat around for a little bit, then decided to get my ass in gear and shower and clean off two days of road dirt and sleep. Every time I needed something, there it was in my bag. Even Q-tips, even my phone charger.

So, fresh, dressed, I pulled out my laptop and read a bunch of feeds, all the usual blogs. At this point I thought I’d try to go and find coffee, usually an exercise frought with difficulty not least because of my level of awareness.
https://images.matt.pictures/the_abbreviated_quest_for_coffee/1250/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>
Out the room door and down the stairs of the convenient downtown hotel. and into the lobby. I already knew that the continental breakfast didn’t start until 7am on saturday (seriously, the majority of travel is business and on the weekend; some people have to be out the door earlier). I had little hope, then, of finding coffee in the lobby. I found the usual breakfast nook empty, per expectations, but as I was snapping a photo of it, the desk clerk came around the corner and I asked her: Where can I get coffee?
https://images.matt.pictures/the_abbreviated_quest_for_coffee/1250/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos”/>
That angel, that wonderful woman, told me that she was making it right then, that it would be out momentarily. F’ing amazing. So I stood around for a minute or two, then she came back with an airpot. Awesome.

That’s this trip so far in a nutshell. I’m a professional working with professionals. Everybody’s doing their job, there haven’t been any disasters yet. (As I type that I knock the wood of the desk). And today, I get to the best part; for six or eight hours, I’m going to sit in a chair and take pictures.

It’s not enough; I’m still gonna have to push my own work, keep making my own pictures, but it’s a start. I think I’m gonna like this job.

posting before I dash off to the office, to ride to kentucky...

2009-02-05 00:00:00Z

This is where I want to live when I grow up:
https://images.matt.pictures/posting_before_i_dash_off_to_the_office,_to_ride_to_kentucky…/1252/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
This will be my corner store. Wait, are those apartments above that store? Can I change my mind about the house thing? Awesome.
https://images.matt.pictures/posting_before_i_dash_off_to_the_office,_to_ride_to_kentucky…/1252/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Rushing out the door

2009-02-05 00:00:00Z

First off, I’m writing this in a bit of a rush, scratching off that last to do item from my list before I hit the door. The Regular Wednesday sesh was a lot of fun; not only did we hit the litter box, but we rode around and hit some spots as well. Down by the chase building, a little bricktown love, and then we rocked up the monster hill. It’s the only monster in town, another sign that OKC isn’t a real city. Anyway, photos:

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I love how everyone’s starting to get the no handed shit down pat, or at least look good for the thirtieth of a second I need to get the photos. Nice to see hornbeck in town, too, and on his new whip no less.

So anyway, that’s all folks, I’m out. I’m going to try to shoot and post from the road, we’ll see how well that works. I’ll be twittering, at least. On the flip side.

dream jobs

2009-02-04 00:00:00Z

no time to post thouroughly, but topic for later: why the hell aren’t we doing our dream jobs? Or busting ass to work towards them? Not allowed to use the words “in these difficult economic times” or anything of the like. The time to do that shit is now, easy or hard.

not usually a fan of flash...

2009-02-03 00:00:00Z

But the volume knob http://paulsboutique.beastieboys.com”>here is pretty badass. Actually yesterday I was talking mad shit on flash for web design because it usually sucks and just does the same stuff that you can do faster and better in javascript… but this I have no idea how I’d do, and it’s a cool effect.

New Furniture...

2009-02-02 00:00:00Z

So I got a new couch today, courtesy of Grant (hi grant). The best way to get me to clean is to move furniture, and/or get new furniture. Something about rearranging everything makes me want to organize all my crap and throw away all the various detritus I collect over time. So, after sleeping through the super bowl, I started to work.

The room actually seemed to get worse for the first couple hours, so I paused, laid on the new loveseat and listened to tom waits, which for some reason motivated me. Nighthawks at the Diner for anyone who cares.

I don’t throw away all of my junk; I’m enough of a romantic that some stuff I keep around for sentimental value alone. I have bits and pieces of most of the cameras I’ve owned over the years for example. The ones that weren’t stolen, that is. Certain pictures, too, I just can’t part with or throw away prints of, even if they’re a little damaged. The tech stuff I’m pretty good about trashing once it’s past its prime. So, because it’s such a rare occurrence, I give you my room, as clean as it gets:

https://images.matt.pictures/new_furniture…/1255/clean_room.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Also yesterday, I had my first gig with Take Two productions, and let me say it’s nice to work with professionals. I was running the wider of the two video cameras, something I’ve never done before (all my video experience has been single-camera work, documentary, and as cheap as possible). It took me a few numbers, but I got the hang of it. It didn’t help that I was on an hour and a half of sleep; I probably would have been a bit quicker on the uptake, a little smoother, if I had been able to sleep saturday night. Or at night at all; It’s 5am and my super nap ended around 9pm.

Anyway, I might end up preferring to run video on these gigs, given that I get more work from take 2; there’s less pressure. We’ll see. I haven’t done stills for them yet, and I’d like to try that too; It’s more in my bones to do stills. This site isn’t “videographermattmills” for a reason. Anyway, my newly clean and cleared bed is calling my name.

comments are broken

2009-02-02 00:00:00Z

I’ll fix them soon, I promise. Right now I have to go teach.

cmay's party, then some booze cruise

2009-01-31 00:00:00Z

Last night I went to Royal Bavaria for Christa May’s birthday. Christa is the evil genius behind http://furburger.org”>Furburger for those that don’t know. It was a fun time, except the service sucked. And I was off my game, not that many good photos.

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Then We all headed into the city, ostensibly to go sing Karaoke at the Celebrity Club (no celebrities there though). They were at capacity, so I headed over to the rooster, caught up with booze cruise (which didn’t cruise that much).
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Then we moved on to a house party, Cody and Steve’s new spot:
https://images.matt.pictures/cmay’s_party,_then_some_booze_cruise/1257/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
This Girl Was madly in love with her board:
https://images.matt.pictures/cmay’s_party,_then_some_booze_cruise/1257/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Cody trying to pass out:
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https://images.matt.pictures/cmay’s_party,_then_some_booze_cruise/1257/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Can you tell that’s the same bed Cody was in? Can you guess what’s going on?
https://images.matt.pictures/cmay’s_party,_then_some_booze_cruise/1257/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
It’s all good in the end. Or at least it was when I was leaving:
https://images.matt.pictures/cmay’s_party,_then_some_booze_cruise/1257/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Then home, to sleep for 12 hours. Whenever I sleep dep, the crash is the best part. I’m guessing that’s why I wasn’t shooting that great, I was exhausted from not sleeping much, just a couple naps in a couple days really. Anyway, it’s time to ride again.

The $3 Cure for Cabin Fever

2009-01-29 00:00:00Z

yesterday, after far too long inside the house, I drove downtown for three dollar burgers at Mcnellie’s with a bunch of people. Ended up being nine or ten of us, crowded around a table for 7, but it was good. Delicious food and friends and some photos were just what the doctor ordered.

In other news, I think I’m going to spend the better part of tonight folding paper. The maquette is printed, I just have to fold everything and sew it together. Oh yeah, and cut up the last few photos. Speaking of photos:

https://images.matt.pictures/the_$3_cure_for_cabin_fever/1258/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/the_$3_cure_for_cabin_fever/1258/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/the_$3_cure_for_cabin_fever/1258/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/the_$3_cure_for_cabin_fever/1258/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/the_$3_cure_for_cabin_fever/1258/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

this is pretty cool

2009-01-28 00:00:00Z

just drinking my morning coffee and found this: (via http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/01/28/time-lapse-everywhere/“>A Photo Editor)
http://www.youtube.com/v/2_HXUhShhmY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1”>http://www.youtube.com/v/2_HXUhShhmY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425” height=”344”>

edit- This was made by http://www.eyalland.com/“>Eyal Landesman.

no way they're really thinking about this in oklahoma

2009-01-27 00:00:00Z

in response to some stuff on facebook, about nuclear power in oklahoma, and maybe putting it somewhere out in the desert:

the problem is nuclear waste stays dangerous for 10,000 plus years. We’re talking geologic time here. There’s barely anything manmade left from 10000 years ago, much less a solid intact structure. It’s a fool’s gambit to put this stuff in a salt mine or inside a mountain because any number of unforeseen events could leak the waste into the biosphere.

Of course, the waste is only a small part of the overall problem of radioactivity. People talk about Chernobyl and Three mile island as if they were the only nuclear accidents to ever happen, but actually they happen more frequently than you’d like to think. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents”>wikipedia for more examples, although I’m sure that list is incomplete. These are built by the lowest bidder, remember.

”Support in the short term” is like saying ok, a little poison is all right. This stuff is so toxic (before, during and after use) that we build ten foot concrete walls around it, then put more security and perimeters around that, and then beyond that is a line where you don’t have to wear a dosimeter any more. There are workers in some facilities who can never leave, because they themselves were irradiated so much that they are toxic to the outside world. (I have a feeling that they don’t last long like this).

edit to add: http://newsok.com/proponents-make-case-for-nuclear-in-oklahoma/article/3336983”>the article from the oklahoman. Seems there aren’t any real plans, just some legislators getting their panties in a bunch. 8 to ten years until they become operational is another problem for an “interim” solution.

I should be working on the blook

2009-01-26 00:00:00Z

And applying for jobs and trying my hardest to come up with the zillions of dollars I owe some silly people who think they’re ever going to get any money out of me. As I’m pretty sure I’m never going to get any money out of me, what chance have they got?

Anyway, there is a final final edit of pics for the blook, just under fifty pictures, and they’re in a sort-of order, so I’m going to mock that shit up and print it off and see what people say.

In other news, some lame pictures for your ass:
https://images.matt.pictures/i_should_be_working_on_the_blook/1262/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/i_should_be_working_on_the_blook/1262/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

yes, super boring, because the last week was all shot to hell between being in the hospital with my mom’s multiple operations and my stomach flu. Isn’t the dog cute though? I promise to get out more and take photos this week. Now, page design!

lil gallery for everyone

2009-01-26 00:00:00Z

Click here

Suzi Uzi/Roller Girl White Trash Bash

2009-01-19 00:00:00Z

A Good Start to the weekend

2009-01-17 00:00:00Z

Photos After Midnight

2009-01-16 00:00:00Z

just some photos....

2009-01-15 00:00:00Z

too true

2009-01-15 00:00:00Z

via http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/economic_distre.html”>Schneirer:

Part of the debtor mentality is a constant, frantically suppressed undercurrent of terror. We have one of the highest debt-to-income ratios in the world, and apparently most of us are two paychecks from the street. Those in power – governments, employers – exploit this, to great effect. Frightened people are obedient – not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally. If your employer tells you to work overtime, and you know that refusing could jeopardize everything you have, then not only do you work the overtime, but you convince yourself that you’re doing it voluntarily, out of loyalty to the company; because the alternative is to acknowledge that you are living in terror. Before you know it, you’ve persuaded yourself that you have a profound emotional attachment to some vast multinational corporation: you’ve indentured not just your working hours, but your entire thought process. The only people who are capable of either unfettered action or unfettered thought are those who – either because they’re heroically brave, or because they’re insane, or because they know themselves to be safe – are free from fear.
Quote is from The Likeness, a novel set in Ireland, by Tana French.

Funny that this wholly logical analysis is an old zen idea- that true mastery of any art (and thereby life itself) is freedom from fear. It’s particularly apropos because I’m getting about 5 calls a day from various debt collectors with delusions that I have the ability to pay them. Man I need a real job.

The Party that Grant Built

2009-01-11 00:00:00Z

I don’t know about everybody else, but this looks more like Charlie Chaplin than anything else:

This purse, it went so well with his shoes, he just had to try it on.

And I’m too lazy to caption the rest.

Silly Rabbit, Tricks are for bikes

2009-01-10 00:00:00Z

So, I’ve been a little lax in posting photos the last few days. Chalk it up to new year depression. January always gets me down, and it takes a few days for all the old habits to kick in and pull me out of my funk. It’s been a good couple of days though.

Sarah and Damaris see the green fairy:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0001.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

I’m officially a pedicab driver:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0002.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Add to that the other new job, the one where I’m officially a professor, and it couldn’t get more ridiculous. Unless of course you’re Steves with a tablecloth on your face:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0003.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
The litter box session was pretty good too:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0004.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0005.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0006.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0007.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0008.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0009.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0010.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0011.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

The next night, at the ever popular 3020:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0012.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
Karaoke at the raintree:
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0013.jpg” alt=”Photos” />
This last one comes with a public service announcement. There is a reason Old Milwaukee is so cheap. Do not try to play asshole with that shit unless you’re prepared for a monster hangover.
https://images.matt.pictures/silly_rabbit,_tricks_are_for_bikes/1269/0014.jpg” alt=”Photos” />

Reaghan and Sigrid's house Warming

2009-01-03 00:00:00Z

New Years Eve 2008/First Day of 2009

2009-01-02 00:00:00Z

fleet week airshow addendum

1970-01-01 00:00:00Z