I've Been "Saved As"

I've been converted...and "saved"...and "saved as."

Of course none of you really know me. You see my photos, read my smart ass comments, probably form some sort of opinion about what kind of person I am. I'm not saying those horrible things you think about me arent' true. I may well be all that, and more. One of my favorite portrait artists, Diane Arbus, tried to crawl between the facade and the person revealed to the outside world, and I suppose self-evaluating myself, telling you WHAT or WHO I am is ridiculous because I have this mirror set up where I can't really see what you see anyway. Maybe it's better that way.

So now I'm going to tell you something about myself: I'm an outsider type. You know, one of those sorts who sits in coffee shops, peering out at all of you, keeping to myself, pulling the book I'm reading closer to myself when you walk by so you can't see what I'm reading. That type. And I love being on my own, alone. I never bore myself. I don't watch tv. I don't have an iPhone.

But I actually do like people. But please, save yourself the rejection, asking to join me on a photo session: I do that alone. Well, there was that one time with Dmitri, but that somehow was different. And there were a few times with Bethany and that was a big mistake.

I like to use non-mainstream everything. I shop at local stores as much as I can, and support the independent business. I am an independent business person and I am watching the corporations forcing all my favorite stores out of business and offering me less options in their replacements. I do not want to live in a corporate state, but it is slowly happening, isn't it? Now corporations (and very very rich people) can buy politicians and elections. Money = free speech. That's what our beloved Supreme Court says. Did you know that Justice Scalia's father, in 1934, founded the American Fascist Party?

Anyway, I'm drifting.

I like to shoot with cameras that the photography elitist snubs his/her nose at, brands like Fuji, and maybe even Samsung (if I can sell my Rebel and lenses at a decent price.) For photo editing, I have for years used Paint Shop Pro (PSP) since v.7 was the current version. It was easy and did everything I wanted. That was only because I didn't know what I really wanted and didn't know what alternatives I had. Another thing I didn't have was the money to buy it. I refused 'free' copies and stayed with my PSP. Last spring I purchased the Adobe CS4 for my business and when I fired up Photo Shop, was immediately frustrated when it was so different than PSP, a very easy to use intuitive program. PS is NOT that. It's a member of a secret cult and the only way to get the program to perform is to know the secret words that unlock the initiate's secrets. The program does not 'think' like a person. I am convinced it is The Beast.

So I did what I normally do when confronted with the need for information: I bought a few books. That turned out to be a disaster because both books took a very long time getting to the meat and potatoes of the program, the secret recipes. I'd have taken the sections in the front of these books (calibrating the screen, learning everything you need to know about the Bridge program, etc.) and stuffed it in the back of the book, where it belongs. So I didn't get anywhere with the program, and let it gather dust as I continued on with PSP. I just don't retain all that information in those early chapters before I get my hands wet. And just finding a spot from which to begin was difficult for me.

Then a few weeks ago, I decided I really need to learn PS, and dug in. After another frustrating bout with the books, I hit the web, watched tutorials, joined a forum, and now I can do very basic things in the program. And the results are dramatic. And the potentials are even more dramatic-er. It's an incredible program, with unbelievable power and gives the editor so much control. I'm taking some of my early shots, taken on not-so-popular brands of cameras in the earlier days of digital photography, and finding that with PS, and much prayer, I can fix up some of the technically weak issues on the photos. Amazing. Truly amazing.

For the past few weeks I have been going through my entire catalog of photos and picking out files that I would want to represent the body of my work. Right now I'm working on Detroit. I have quite a few ready for the PS treatment now and am slowly taking a second shot at editing them. No doubt, as I learn more, I'll have to go back and reedit some of the work I'm doing now.

If you are a stubborn, anti-corporate outsider like myself, and you're determined to stay out of the curve of statistics of those using PS as editing software, but you really would love to see your photos match the way you originally conceived them...

Sprung is Here

I had a friend many years ago who grew up in Hawaii. She moved here and made me aware of a few things that I took for granted up to that point in my life. One was the trees. We have an abundance of trees here. In the suburbs many city streets are completely lined with trees, creating a beautiful canopy. I am very fond of trees. Where she came from, there were few trees, but many mountains. Here, the trees were her mountain surrogate, as she loved the back set of mountains everywhere.

And the other flash of enlightenment she bestowed on me was a keen awareness of the seasons slowly changing. We went out photographing in the winter and she immediately noticed the new buds on the trees in February, something I had never spotted before. So now I see signs of new life long before the snows melt.

And there is one day where spring pops, and that day was yesterday. It is because of the trees that I know this day, the day that spring springs. We've had a lot of cold, wet weather the past few weeks, more like winter than early spring. And then yesterday, while driving down the street, under a canopy of trees, I suddenly noticed the light green of new growth...everywhere. Overnight, spring had sprung.

It is truly an amazing process to watch. If you know my photography, you know of my deep fondness for the autumn. Spring-sprung-Day is a red letter day on my calendar.

Now, if only I can endure the summer to feast on our next autumn!

The New American Dream - Detroit

Maybe it’s the smell of natural gas in the street, or the possibilities of flat tires with so much broken glass around. Or maybe it’s the defiance, going to places where I am not welcomed. Or maybe it’s the desire to show it like it is. I don’t know, but I have returned to the streets of Detroit (on a very limited basis) for photos. I’m working on a project and I need to be there. I’ve tried other styles but it’s the streets of Detroit, my comfort zone. Funny, since this is such a potentially dangerous venue for me. With added responsibilities in my life, I’m making an extra effort not to get myself killed in the city. That point has kept me from trolling Detroit for many months now. That and a need to flap my wings and try something different. Unfortunately some of ‘different’ included letting my cameras accumulate a thin layer of dust. I like different things but the people at Flickr don’t like it as much when I’m exploring different things, so I keep my different things to myself mostly and do the same old thing for Flickr.

Life is so hard in the city. I see why after just short periods of activity that I need a break. I understand why the people who feel trapped in the city (who may well BE trapped in the city) resent me driving around documenting their lives, their hoods. It’s very painful inside to see what I see, and painful all the more because of the system that created this economic disaster, the global economy, corporatism, the new oligarchy. Detroit and Gary today, and slowly, the rest of the country will follow. Detroit is not the exception but rather the harbinger.

Wall Street and the bankers have picked us clean, and continue to do so. It’s amazing they can find anymore meat on our bones at which to pick, but they want it all, they want to own not just Boardwalk, but the whole board. It doesn’t take a huge brain to see that if you ship our jobs overseas (47,000 factories have been closed here in the past ten or so years) that we’re going to suffer. Slowly, the American way of life is fading, the American Dream but a mere wisp of a forgotten thought. Today, the New American Dream isn’t to work hard and self-create a future but it’s to slap a few bucks on the counter of a party store, but a few lotto tickets, and hope you win.

The IMF is saying the American economy will slide out of the top slot by 2015. Is it any surprise? It started thirty one years ago with a president who said ‘charge it’ for all our debts, a man who taxed the crap out of the middle class while giving the rich very liberal tax breaks. And these wars we carry on our backs, draining the country of desperately needed funds for our own welfare. Wars for what? Oil… Natural gas…a presence in the Middle East.

Now we have an American nightmare. If we crash, the noise will be huge.

So I better get pictures of Detroit while I can, before these pictures become Every City, USA.

I'm Chained to the City

I can't help it. I've tried to escape Detroit but it is too much a part of my finger, the one that pushes the shutter button down. Click. I had this dream, more a fantasy, that I could make pictures without standing within Detroit city limits, but maybe I'm wrong. Sure, I like to photograph other things like cemeteries and non sequitur scenes, but I do perhaps feel most at home roaming the urban streets. A real battle rages on in my soul about shooting in Detroit. Yesterday, for example, I had the opportunity to get out early and get some shots but I hesitated, with quite a dialogue raging between the devil on one shoulder and my guardian angel on the other. Finally I succumbed to the evil one and headed into Detroit midday. There were quite a few people mulling about the streets and I felt much more inhibited, but I really wanted to find some interesting scenes. One was a house decaying from the back, a second story porch hanging by nails and splinters, no doubt.

"Hey you. Why are you taking pictures of my house?"

His voice was angry. I said nothing but gave him a friendly wave as I left the scene.

Detroit is changing. So many of the decimated properties have already been dismantled and left to the vegetation. So now the city blocks look more like a hockey player's mouth, with houses gone, just like teeth.

There is still plenty of decay. And struggle. I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to live in the city. I have a roof over my head and I eat whenever I want, and sometimes, I work, whenever I can. Thanks to the economy, I have more free time. And less money for gas to roam...and repair the car after I've roamed too much.

I've been reviewing ALL my photos and I see sorting through the folders that my most creative times are when I have access to the city. Cemeteries in the autumn rank closely up near the top of my self-created list of 'best' things to shoot.

I said yesterday that I just can't return to the city with the regularity I once enjoyed, 3-4 times a week. Maybe once a month will suffice, keeping in my there is less to capture. Or maybe I just need to work a bit harder, hone those eyes of mine to look for something new. I must admit that in the earlier days I could easily find quite a few shots in any given session.

However, on my other shoulder, I keep hearing another voice that is instructing me to find something different on which to focus my eyes.

Just Waiting for Something to Happen

I'm still on the shutter button, ready to pounce if something interesting passes my line of vision. However...I feel like I'm in a 'hold' pattern, waiting, not sure what's coming next. Politics plays a part in my little drama, with so much upheaval everywhere, with the rich moving behind the green curtain, getting ready to pull it shut and start running the show they way they've wanted to for a very long time. I think this has an impact on my photography, all those years I spent combing the littered streets of Detroit, documenting some dirty little secrets that some did not want revealed. However, the whole nation followed suit and what you see in my gallery can be found in so many major cities in the U.S. of A.

The rich (and corporations) need more tax cuts so they can create jobs for us little folk. I'm still waiting for the jobs to appear from eight years of tax cuts already. And I'm wondering if and when the public will ever wake up and smell the scam.

Oh wait, this is my photo blog. Sorry about that. I guess my feelings about politics are like eating a huge portion of cabbage soup...something is bound to escape.

Two of my two major cameras both need attention and I'll have to straddle them into the shop (a second time for the Fuji) but that shouldn't cramp my style too much because I do have a pocket camera on hand and I could dust off the Rebel XTi that I never did like. I just don't like having to put my mug behind the lens and look into that little hole in order to take my shot. It's not a very safe thing to do actually when I'm in the big city, roaming, looking...I'm also looked at and people wonder what I'm all about. Sometimes I'm met with hostility.

Ah, Detroit. Besides the trash on the streets, broken glass on the pavement is a major issue. Seeing flattened tires on cars parked on the streets is very common. Chuck holes are always nice, too. I've spent thousands of dollars keeping on the road, shooting in Detroit. It's not a nice place in which to break down either.

Besides the glass and trash, in some areas there is the strong smell of natural gas. And on the east side, the neighborhoods are really shrinking. One area, around Chene St., entire blocks of houses are gone. Too bad those fields can't be crops to feed the people in the city. What a concept...a neighborhood run farm that feeds the local people, with good quality cheap food. Eating in the hood is not a gourmet experience, unless you like fast food and whatever you can buy (over-priced at that) from the party store.

It's not very fun sometimes, living in the city.

I'm looking for projects and after a quick dip into the city last Sunday, I am thinking I might have to get down maybe once or twice a month. With gas prices fueling the bank accounts of speculator investors these days, I just can't afford the capricious wanderings in the city.

I only hope it doesn't get so bad that I'll be confined to only shooting within walking distance of my humble home.

On the Road Again

It has been a long time since I probed the deep inner bowels of the city of Detroit, butt yesterday I put on my boots and headed in. Actually, I had a shooting project, a visit to a closed cemetery that is open for just a few hours twice a year. That was a bust because it was so damn cold, windy and wet that I didn't rediscover my fingers for a while after leaving. The mucho rains flooded quite a bit of the cemetery, turning it swampy.

But I did get a chance to revisit Detroit.

It's better in some ways. Many of the damaged properties have been removed, plowed over. Stores, too.

I had mixed feelings about revisiting my old haunts. It was nice to again get some urban images, toilets under freeway overpasses, shoes tossed over power lines feeding into traffic signals, that sort of thing. I don't find that in the burbs where I live. I find the inner city folk far more resourceful, too, finding creative ways to solve urban problems, like using truck van seats for porch perching, that sort of thing. After trolling for a few hours, though, I definitely got that "been there, done that" feeling. I used to hit the streets three times a week for roughly 3-4 hours a shot, religiously. That's a butt-numbing situation.

In my spare time (what little I have), I have been doing my photography thing, reading, looking, just spending huge amounts of time soaking it in. My latest projects have been recent color photography, a study of street photographers 1940 - 1959 (focusing on six pioneer photographers), and most recently, studying the works of a Czech photographer named Miroslav Tichy. During the period of Communist rule in his country, he lost himself in capturing the essence of women with homemade cameras, made from wood, rubber bands, duct tape, and hand polished plastic lenses. He captured images of anything female, and was quite the voyeur with his amateurish looking cameras. Quite eccentric, too. What a pervert! The photos are fascinating, mostly of very low quality and many stained (I'm not sure I want to know what substance stained them.)

Very unique.

Next on the agenda will be studying the photos of voyeurism and surveillance. I'm getting access to a book on the topic later today.

There's nothing wrong with being a voyeur, unless you get caught. I think Susan Sontag in her On Photography noted that all photographers are really voyeurs at heart.

Think about it.

Let's Be Frank

While I'm trying to stir things up and renew my interest in taking photos, I have been secretly going back to my roots and spending a lot of thinking/reading time on the topic, perusing photography monographs. I'm working on a huge Diane Arbus book with lots of information and plenty of photos, went through a new Wm. Eggleston book, For Now. Also, I've been studying modern color photos in a few other books, and my most recent project has been studying Robert Frank's Seminal monograph, The Americans, an in-depth study of how the book came about and the thought behind how it was assembled. The massive volume I am reading is filled with detail. This book started a whole revolution of street photography, or at very least was one of the founding volumes. I suppose Wm. Klein's book came first, but with a totally different style of photos. Frank's The Americans was published in the USA around 1960 and didn't get great reviews...at first. It's a fantastic book, one I've been pouring over for years.

Another favorite photographer is Walker Evans and I've been paging through a few of his collections, too.

And when I'm not reading, I'm writing, clearing my thoughts with my trusty Sailor fountain pen, in my less-than-trusty Moleskine. You don't know that I have a fetish for anything related to communication and used to collect fountain pens. Well, it's true.

If you view my gallery, you know of my fascination for religious statuary. I'm a private person and would never wear my belief system on my sleeve, I have no bumper stickers on my car, and I don't even have former girlfriend's names carved into my arm. Religion and overly zealous patriotism (super patriotism) are timely subject matter.