Ten Reasons Why

I’ve been disappointed that I haven’t made better use of the digital SLR I bought last year, so I hereby dub 2008 the Year of Photogregory. Or Rittography. Or something clever that combines my name and photography.
I did get good use out of the Nikon D50 a few months back on my vacation to California for (a) & Sharon’s San Francisco wedding and (b) driving down the coast in a convertible Mustang.
And yesterday I finally got around to starting to get good use out of my Flickr account via the newly released Flickr Uploadr 3.0. The Uploadr is quite nice and takes nearly all the pain out of uploading batches of photos to Flickr. (The only remaining pain is the fault of Verizon DSL, not Flickr.)
So enjoy some brightly colored San Francisco pics which make the pallette of colors in last year’s vacation to Edinburgh look damn near monochromatic.
Still to come on my Flickr account: photos from last year’s not-so-monochromatic trip to Nice and the driving-down-the-coast-in-a-convertible-Mustang portion of this year’s vacation. And promises of more regular, non-vacation, man-about-town photos as I reclaim my creative life in 2008. ;-)

Photography

Back in 1986, I got introduced to Don DeLillo in a contemporary American literature class through his National Book Award-winning novel, . DeLillo is still one of my favorite American novelists (although I’ve enjoyed his recent work less than his novels from the 80’s and 90’s), and White Noise is one of those books that I re-read every few years, just for the hell of it. I own several copies of it, but the favorite copy is the original white-covered Penguin edition I bought for that contemporary American lit class back in ‘86. It has margin notes scrawled in it from the course, and again from several years later when I made White Noise part of the focus of my Master’s thesis. And some margin notes from when I taught it to my own students.

I taught White Noise in my own literature courses at least four times, alway somewhat disappointed that the vast majority of my students weren’t as blow away by it as I was (and many were actually violently put off by DeLillo’s highly stylized prose). More to the point, after I began to focus more on teaching composition & rhetoric than literature, I used an excerpt from White Noise — the oft-excerpted “Most Photographed Barn in America” scene — as a writing prompt in many more composition/rhetoric courses.

Imagine my delight then when this morning I read (via Kottke) a blog post that points out the combination of Flickr with mapping functionality that allows you to “theoretically pick any place in the world — a city, a neighborhood, a street corner, a building, and literally view that place through the lenses of the people who had photographed that place” means that we can now look at the actual Most Photographed Barn in America.

Still . . . the presence of the Rockies in the background makes me think that maybe this isn’t in proximity to the idyllic College-on-the-Hill, and maybe Jack and Murray are still standing on that elevated spot looking at the signs of another barn. Ah . . . what’s the differance? ;-)

Books, Writing & Literature, Photography

For those of you that are interested, there’s a few new photos on my Flickr account.

Photography

A few days ago, in a fit of consumerism brought on by the anticipation of a tax return, I went out and treated myself to a Nikon D50 Digital SLR.
I’m not the kind of person that makes big purchases easily — I’d been mulling this one over since last fall. Friends will remember that five years ago it took me nearly 11 months to screw up the courage to go buy a new Honda Civic. A Honda Civic! It’s not like it was a Benz or something; it was the epitome of the sensible car purchase.
Anyhow, my old, manual Nikon FM got stolen about two years ago, something that makes me sick to the stomach everytime I think about it. Despite my inability to make big purchases, I’m generally not very attached to the inanimate objects in my life. That camera, however, was given to me by my father when I was in junior high, and all mixed up with it are memories of him teaching me to shoot and teaching me to develop photos in the darkroom at his ad agency. I’d shot photos with that camera for over 25 years, everthing from high school yearbook photos, to friends’ weddings, to girlfriends, to pretentious self-portraits, and more. Losing that camera broke my heart, and I think I put off getting a new SLR, simply because I didn’t like thinking about that loss.
In the end, though, I wanted to experience the creative outlet of photography again. I’d bought an el cheapo digital point-and-shoot, but it was actually so far from what you can do with an SLR that it made me more frustrated not less.
So, hello new Nikon. Welcome to my life. You won’t ever replace my old friend, but we’ll find some new adventures together.
I hadn’t been able to put it through its paces until this weekend, because I tend to go to work not long after sunrise and get home in the dark. (Hate winter!) I finally got out yesterday evening and this morning to start getting acquainted with the new photographic partner in crime. Here’s a few samples of our output (click on the photos for a larger version):
The Supreme Court at Dusk

National Museum of the American Indian

It takes nice photos, but I’ve still got a lot to learn about this camera, its features, and “thinking digital.” The thought of playing with things like color saturation via camera settings, instead of in the film selection or developing, is exciting. And I can tell that my eye is rusty; compositions aren’t jumping out at me and I took a lot — and I mean a lot – of boring photos today. It’s going to take me awhile to get back into creative shape. And I guess I’m going to have to fork out for a Flickr subscription, because I’ll use up my space on the freebie account in the next few days probably.

Photography

From Pavement Terror:

Briefly, a few years ago I had a delivery job in Southampton, England (I won’t say what I was delivering or for whom). It was very boring and badly paid but I soon found a way of livening it up. I discovered that the van I had to drive could very easily be persuaded to produce very loud, frightening backfires as and when I wanted it to (I’m not telling you how, find out for yourselves) and as I’ve always been keen on photography, I tried an experiment.
I mounted a camera, pointing backwards, from the back window of the van, I hid it behind a retractable black cloth shutter and operated it with a cable-release long enough to be operated whilst driving. I would make the van backfire and photograph the frightened mayhem I’d created as I drove past.

These photos capture the combination of surprise and pain that a loud noise elicits, the way that people instinctively begin to assume a fetal position (head tucked, arms and legs pulled in). I wish there were also photos of the laughter and relief that usually follows such an incident, as you realize you’re not being shot at or a jet engine isn’t falling out of the sky on your head.
I can’t decide whether these photos are beautiful or cruel.
[Link via the Wooster Collective]

Photography

A cool idea: 26 Things | The International Photographic Scavenger Hunt
A good excuse to go play with my digital camera. :-)

Photography