Like this:

I just read that MAD Magazine is going to cease publishing.

As a kid, MAD gave me permission to be irreverent, but more important, it allowed me to look behind the curtain, to question Authority, and to find the real Truth that underlied the  Ozzie and Harriet worldview that was being spoon fed to us in the 1950s . Nothing against O and H, only the world as the media, the advertisers, and other big shots presented it. I guess it was an Eisenhower thing (no offense to Ike either. After all, he warned us about the Military Industrial Complex).

On a personal level, it allowed me to not take myself seriously, and helped define my Bullshit Detector.

If you believe, as I do, that laughter is the best medicine, it was regular doses of MAD that kept us healthy.

MAD was the Old Testament for Rowan and Martin’s Laugh in and George Carlin, and I suspect that if you looked under the bed of a Saturday Night Live or Simpsons writer, you were just as likely to find a MAD as a Playboy.

 

If MAD was the Bible, then Groucho was the High Priest.

 

 

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Next Chapter

Photographically, these are not productive times for me. For a few years after my                   2010 Calendar stimulated me back into serious photographic activity, I got busy.                            I joined a camera club, discovered Vivian Maier and Garry Winogrand (along with others), and heard this term, “Street Photography” being used. I felt I could identify with Street Photography.

For the next few years, I carried a camera everywhere with me, and while I had done this in the past as well, I am happy to say that these last few years were were my most productive.               I don’t think my craft had improved, but I do believe that my sense of photography has matured.

I wanted to refresh my photographic experiences not by sticking my head in books, but getting out there and brushing up against real life photogs who were doing real work. I saw good work at the camera club, but their organizational model was so enveloped in formal judgings and accumulating competition points, that I didn’t attend any of those the meetings. The other meetings were open showings with member critiques, and though the work was very good, the members even used the same language as the judges, and to me it just didn’t have any soul.

I am not a technical photographer, but the camera club made me want to learn about printing, so I took some classes from the Art Department of a local community college. One  thing I learned is  that I am not good at printing, but I did find value in assignments and critiques. Assignments instilled discipline, and I loved the dialogue of a group critique, but as these classes transitioned from one instructor who used Photography to discuss Art, to another who used Art to discuss Photography, I found it no longer stimulating.

All of this time, I was carrying my camera, and shooting like crazy. I was also entering calls for judged exhibitions, got accepted for a few, and even sold some work. The money was nice, but the acceptance, the validation of my ideas, was the most satisfying part.

What I just described took place from about 2010 to 2017, then started to peter out. I had attended a couple of Street Photography exhibitions and lectures, and although the images were fresh, they didn’t look very different. It seemed as if Street Photography had evolved into a genre, and the practitioners were all using the same rule book.

I also unsuccessfully entered a few Arty competitions, but those applications were really just exhibition inertia.

As Terry Allen would say, “All that exhibiting was just too damned inhibiting for a beer drinkin’ regular guy like me.”.

I was already  pretty unproductive for awhile, then when I broke my camera, I lost all momentum. I already had a few projects on the back burner, and thought that since I was cameraless, I could shift my energy to finishing them up, but like Meier and Winogrand, shooting is much more fun than processing and editing.

I have always used my camera for visual note taking, but over time, this chore was transferred to my phone, as I realized it was more accessible. Now that I don’t have a camera with me, I use the phone for everything, but don’t find it satisfying for “serious” work-I am a viewfinder guy, and have difficulty composing and shooting with a touchscreen.

I haven’t given up on Photography, but I think I just need to find new direction. Daily, I still go to several photography web sites*, which take me in several directions. I visit galleries, have read a few books, and attend monthly member critiques at SF Camerawork. I believe something is stirring inside, and hopefully, it will soon bubble to the surface.

 

Stay tuned.

 

* The Online Photographer

* Shorpy

* Petapixel 

* Shifter

 

 

 

I Broke My Camera

The triangle is the most stable structure- it’s a basic law addressing the strength of a form.

I was trying to squeeze some extra height out of my tripod by bringing the legs together, which raised the head, but also basically turned it into a monopod with three feet. I was distracted for a moment, and don’t know what happened next, but a crashing sound brought me back into the present. When I turned around, the tripod and camera were flat on the ground. When I powered the camera on, it would shut down after 7-8 seconds.

I take care of my tools, and although I am conscious of the cost to replace this camera, the object itself is not precious-it can be replaced. Every action has consequences, and I can accept the fact that I needed to make this tripod perform in a less than optimum way. I am a bit annoyed that, in the end, I chose a different photograph for my intended purpose, but that happens all the time anyway.

So what now?

Because I carry my camera everywhere, at first I felt the urge to replace it. But then I relaxed, saw this as an opportunity to not shoot for awhile, and put my photo energy to work on a few other projects.

Although I try to keep my photo library organized, bits and pieces get moved around, and duplicates in various file sizes and even formats get stored all over my computer and back up drive. When I need an image, sometimes it is difficult to determine which one is the final version, the one I intend to use, and which ones are just leftovers from the editing process. Here is one image stored in several locations, just on my laptop-

Here are more files of the same image, stored on my external hard drive-

Many of these folders each contain the many of the variations of individual images that are displayed below. they are the same image over and over again, hundreds of them, sometimes saved for only one purpose.

So many files, so little time.

I have developed a method of weeding our all of these duplicates, but it is mind numbing, and I can only clean up three or four at a time during my Friday night Blues show-

https://kcsm.org/jazzprograms/crazybouttheblues.php

2018 Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day

As always, the last Sunday in April is Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day. Getting accepted in and participating in a couple of shows and exhibitions has been pretty intoxicating, so it was a pleasure to go out and take photos just for the joy of participation.

I didn’t make a new lens this year, I just re used the one from last year

I went out with one subject in mind, and fortunately, got distracted by all of the possibilities I found along the way.

How could I resist the Emeryville City Hall,  one of my favorite East Bay buildings?

As I was shooting, I notice this interesting Giraffe* out in front of a café’

I returned home, and shot a couple of our household friends, a wall shelf in the dining room

 

 

and this Cat head doll my daughter made

 

 

In the end, I chose to use the Giraffe, it was more fun.

 

You can see the post here-

http://www.pinholeday.org/gallery/2018/?id=1091

 

But the greatest pleasure of the WWPPD website is to just start anywhere, and start scrolling through all of the terrific images that have been submitted from all over the world. Because I am a Do it Yourselfer, my additional pleasure is seeing all of the really clever contraptions my colleagues have devised to capture their images.

This ingenuity is still one of the strongest elements of being humans-making our own tools.

 

*No animals were harmed in the shooting of this photo.

Oops!… I Did It Again

“A Kiss on Sunset Boulevard” was also chosen by Juror Gus Powell for the current “Street Shooting Around the World ” show at the Los Angeles Center for Photography-

https://lacphoto.org/lacps-fourth-annual-street-shooting-around-the-world-exhibition-2018/

Coincidentally, I was in LA for the opening of last year’s show-

https://lacphoto.org/lacps-third-annual-street-shooting-around-the-world-exhibition-2017/

and I was walking over to a Wine Bar that I had discovered on Sunset Boulevard. I was in the crosswalk when I saw this couple making out in this alcove of the Amoeba Records store. The traffic light was changing, so I really only had seconds to take this shot and get out of the middle of that six lane street.

 

This show runs through March 18th.