Combining Passions

I’ve made trading one passionate pursuit for another a very nasty habit in my life. This is my first attempt to rectify the aforementioned practice by showing you what it was that took my eye off of the eyepiece.

For as long as I can remember there have been three things that I have always used to keep myself sane:

1) Something to draw/write with (pens, pencils, markers, etc)

2) A camera (motion picture, still, or video)

3) A bicycle.

It’s this last object that has a hold on me currently. For as long as I can remember, bikes have been the best way for me to interact viscerally with the world around me. One of my favorite memories is of my sister spending the better part of the afternoon trying to teach me how to ride a bike by having me balance on the bike standing still. Needless to say (despite her best intentions and the fact that I still can’t accomplish that feat to this day) I got completely frustrated and was about to quit when my grandfather came out to the driveway and calmed me down. He assured me that I could in fact figure it out and offered me only one simple piece of advice:

“If you feel yourself falling, steer in that direction.”

With that and a gentle push down the driveway I was set free to explore the world on two wheels. Now, I’d had a Big Wheel and a tricycle before but nothing as quick and nimble as a training wheel-less Huffy BMX that my mother and the maintenance guys in our apartment building had assembled for my birthday. This was as close to real freedom any seven-year-old was going to get.

So, why has all of this been brought out of the dustbin of history? Because as passions go, my obsession with cycling has been saving my sanity lately. I’ve had a lot more time off lately and doing less introspective and more visceral things has helped stave off any crazy making thoughts of economic peril. Mountain bike rides have been especially helpful in providing stimulating beauty but have also presented a challenge to the ever present photographer in me. You see, I’ll end up in these extremely beautiful places and then only have my little point-and-shoot with me to document said beauty. It’s the equivalent of bring my Big Wheel to race the Tour De France.

Verdugo Mountains

I’ve taken some pretty pictures for sure, but nothing that feels like what I could have gotten, given a better tool to work with. I’ve thought about strapping a more substantial camera to my backpack for a ride or two but after I took a pretty minor spill the other day, I realized that the fall would have been major for anything affixed to my back. Thus, the more time I spend on my bike, the less time I’ve had to do any serious picture taking and I’ve been spending a lot of time on two wheels lately. A problem with very little downside health-wise but my artistic self is feeling a bit flabby from lack of mental and soulful exercise.

The only way I could see quelling any kind of artist versus athlete dichotomy raging inside was to give both sides of me something fun to do. Why not get something great to look at and fun to ride? The solution?

It’s not the fastest bike I’ve ever had, but that’s not the point. It’s not the latest and greatest technology either, but again, not the point. No, this thing is just pure 100% fun. It’s gets me from point A to point B with minimum effort and maximum fun. I love to look at this thing too. It reminds me of all the bikes I saw growing up that the “big kids” rode.

So, now I leave the car at home and ride to the store, the mall, the office, etc. It feels good to be out in the fall air. It’s even more fun to come home and grab a few stills of my new best friend. Classic lines will always be just that… classic. Here’s a few more shots to show you what I mean:

 

 

 

 

See? I know that object worship may not be the best thing to do, especially this time of year, but it still seems okay to love something that saves a few hydrocarbons. Now, if only Schwinn could split off from that multinational corporation and move back to Chicago, all would be truly right with the world.

As the words my grandfather told me still rattle in my head as a kind of “go with the flow” mantra, I now roll quietly around my neighborhood observing things and places that I’d never had the pleasure of seeing pass by that slowly or that close before. I’m sure that they too will soon be subjects for me to photograph, just as the bike that brought me to them had once been. Finding a way to blend the things that feed my soul seems much more rewarding to me now than keeping my peas and potatoes separate. If you catch my drift.

Series

In art school, I was required to do a photo series as part of my assignments. To some extent it was the most maddening experience I’ve ever had because I always felt like I was just pulling something out of my arse instead of having this really focused vision of some element of life or subject matter that demanded my attention. Eventually, I’d just do an odd, semi-silly narrative based theme that helped me realize story telling was more for me than serious analytical photography. Thus film school came next.

Years later though, I find myself yearning to go back to my roots. The photo series haunts the nether regions of my mind. One photo I took last year in paticular begs for compainions. I was working on a shoot in the parking lot of some random strip mall in Barstow when I decided to look through the lens of my Canon in search of the hidden beauty of this, the most common of places. I’m not sure that I found any but what I did find was an assortment of garish colors and straight, fabricated lines that when pushed together formed over-simplified icons of consumerism.

This image always had a behind the scenes quality to it for me. I’m not entirely sure were I would go with the examination of this kind of subject matter. I have a feeling I’d get wrapped up in the lines again and lose the point of lovingly mocking the everyday attempts at seduction these places attempt with us.

They try and draw us in with hissing and popping lights, low, low prices and the occasional waving mascot. These places aren’t the big leagues, they aren’t the places you plan to go to, that you want to be in. They’re the place that you end up. Maybe something better was closed. Maybe you’re too tried or drunk to travel farther than safely recommended by your state of mind. In any case, they’ll always be there. Easy to ignore, but hard to forget in a pinch.

Visually it’s a hard story to translate and I’m not sure I’m up for crawling around a P.F. Chang’s parking lot late at night again but I’m thinking it’d be a good exercise for me to attempt. Watch out Five Star Liquor Mart, here I come!

New Additions

Today I received the latest of my new lenses for the Leica, a 28mm f2.8. I contemplated the 35mm for a long time but found that it wasn’t wide enough for the things I wanted to do photographically. So my lovely 50mm f2 is now joined by an 80-200mm f4 and the afore mentioned 28mm. A nice little family of options is growing.

I also got two of the three rolls from my trip up north processed (one’s still in the camera). A&I labs in Hollywood handled the processing, proofing and scans. I have to say that I’m not at all happy with the negative scans they did for me. There’s dust everywhere and everything seems excessively grainy for 200 ASA stock. So for now I’ll simply work off of the proof sheets and see if there’s anything there for me to print.

My exposures are becoming much more consistent now that I’m metering exclusively with the Pentax Digital Spotmeter. I’m learning so many new things about how to effectively evaluate a scene and I’m relearning that wonderful Zone System scale that I always vaguely understood but rarely put into practice because of impatience or lack of understanding or a myriad of other reasons I kept myself at a sub-par level.

It feels good to start trusting your own skill level instead of just throwing a bunch of stuff you thought you learned way back when against your work and seeing what sticks. The next thing I’m going to have to get in the habit of doing is taking better notes. Digital is great because it remembers everything for you short of filters and lighting. As seductive as it is to trust that I “just know” what I’m doing now, it’s better for me to look closely at the details and learn from all that I put into the image. 

Like I said, the scans are pretty bad but I will show you one image from a previous trip I took to Griffith Observatory simply because I could see it as one of those places I’ll find myself revisiting over and over again. I love this building so much for what it holds. It has history, knowledge, and beauty ensconced in it’s heavily ornate, bleached walls. There are few places like this in Los Angeles. I’m glad that it’s here.

So, here’s a Leica shot and though it may not show much of the building itself, it’s hard not to know where you are when you see it. That’s why I love it’s iconography so much.

Found Objects

My four day tour of the central coast of California ended only yesterday and yet I feel a world away from it as I re-nest back here in Los Angeles. It was almost otherworldly how things just seemed to fall into place. I’d follow some vague instinctual compass toward a destination, then events would simply unfold as if I’d planned it that way from the beginning.

Now granted, driving aimlessly around an area such as San Luis Obispo won’t have you ending up anywhere too short of stunning but there is always a risk when flying blind.

Camping worked out better than I thought as well, though the only campground that could get into was surrounded by a National Guard base. Despite that geographic anomaly, it was quite a pleasant site that worked out well for my needs (i.e., fire pit, level ground, no one right next to me). I’m reserving a space at Montana de Oro state beach for next year, it’s quite a lovely spot.

As for the photographic side of my journey, I’ve included a few shots from my Canon 40D that I quickly ran through Lightroom to adjust some levels and though I hate to do it, I did crop a couple of shots.

It was a very inspiring landscape to take in viscerally but I often found myself struggling to connect photographically. It was in my calmer moments, the times I made time to sit and study my surrounding, that I found the most ease capturing what I felt and finding it in the lens.

I can see now why so many photographers I’ve respected revisit certain subjects over and over again. It’s not that they are out of ideas, it’s that they’ve had new thoughts and experiences since last seeing something a first, second or third time. They want to revisit something they have history with so as to paint it with a brush of new perspective. That kind of study can sometimes take years. This could serve me as a great exercise in patience.

Most of the places I went, I could find myself revisiting time and time again. It was four days and three rolls of quiet reflection and reflected light readings. I’ve now started my thirty-fifth year on this planet. I have no idea of where it will take me but I intend to use as much of it as I can to study things a bit closer.

Open Road

Tomorrow I’m heading out of town for my birthday. It’ll just be me, some camping gear, maybe my bike and a couple of cameras. This will be something of a first for me. Usually I spend my birthday with friends and whatnot, but this year is all about clearing out the cobwebs (creative and otherwise) so, I’ll be heading north with no set plans or destination.

Seems like a really chancy idea now that I write it down. The fact is though, most of the places that I’ve planned to be recently haven’t been that much fun, how bad could the ones I haven’t planned be?

I might cheat a bit and use the old iPhone to get some direction from time to time. Camping might be the biggest crux of the trip. I’m hoping the Jones family decides they’d rather play ski ball at the pier than commune with nature this weekend. You never know.

That’s kind of the point, right?

Walking into light…

I learned to shoot film at about 13. It was my first meditative experience and I’ve come to find that it is still the easiest way for me to focus. I have since moved to the seductive realm of digital photography and have been impressed with the speed and quality of the results. However, I am an analog person at heart. So, about two weeks ago I decided that it was time to take my grandfathers Leica R4s out of the closet and peer though the only lens that wasn’t stolen the year my life went to pot. A normal lens of course. The 50mm f/2.

It’ll serve as the one way I can view the world in my clearest state. I’ll buy other lenses of course, but this one was his. It has history. I won’t lose it sight of it.

As for this blog? Writing has always been something I’ve used to clear my mind but photography has been the thing that has sharpened it. I’m starting this record for me. It seems an odd thing to say about something so public, but for now it makes sense to keep it open.