Everything Old Is New Again

Probably the coolest actual place we went to in Florida was the Festival Flea Market. It's like all those big covered markets you see in the center of cities all over the world. Except instead of fresh produce and quality stuff it's watches, perfume and belts. Full of really old white people who don't quite know how to dress themselves. Lots of pleather and ill-fitting pants.

But right in the middle of the whole thing is a gigantic antique store, and as soon as I saw it I knew I was going to be all over it.

I could have easily spent a whole day in the place. It was full of all sorts of little curios and chotchkies. Drawers of interesting old jewelry, decrepit dress-forms and head wear from time's past.

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Busy busy working on a whole bunch of bird pictures from Florida. Expect a punny Hitchcock reference post sometime during the week.

Creativity -> Things

Chase Jarvis recently talked (and has been talking) about creativity and the importance of just getting what you do out into the world, no matter how polished, deep or amazing it is. Eventually - at least according to him - that incremental creating of cool things eventually becomes sustainable.

At the start of writing this blog I was really concerned with the view-count on pictures and the traffic stats that would build up. Inevitably the first day after an upload I'd check the stats and get some satisfaction or dissapointment, depending on how things were trending. I got really emotionally invested in how many people saw what I did.

Which is natural when you create something. We should want what we create to be seen by all sorts of people; it's good for the work and it's good for you. But it shouldn't overshadow the work you do. It's unhealthy when checking popularity and page views takes the place of producing more work.

I've got no idea how many people read this blog or see my pictures. Actually that's a lie; I have a rough idea, but I find myself checking less and less. Eventually the workflow should become so fast that I don't have time to. In a perfect world.

As time goes on I find myself caring less and less about actual numbers and more about their feelings. One person being into what I do enough to talk to me about it is worth more than hundreds of thousands of faceless views. It's the back-and-forth sharing that's really worthwhile both personally and professionaly.

Shot a few frames of a captive Cuchka last night with the new toy! Really loving the tiny focal plane of the 1.8 aperture with the 35mm length, which is a lot more usable indoors with the DX sensor crop.

I initially didn't like this particular frame because the nose is in focus and the eyes aren't, but it's grown on me. It makes her look bigger and more removed, I think. Like a ghost of a big cat.

Click through the picture for a few more angles.

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I'm in Florida for this weekend to visit family, so intermittent updates until next week!

I've Been Wasting My Time

If I knew I could be doing this for a living I would have never wasted my time going to school or doing photography. Geesh.

(Sorry there's been no real holiday update; been busy not being busy. Expect photos taken with super-cool 35mm lense and softbox(es!) next week. And lots of them! Gonna be a good year for picture-takin', methinks!)

The Finale

to KITE RUNNER

Kite Runner

He say you Kite Runna'!

Went to Astoria Park today to help Mike out with one of his more ridiculous ideas: aerial kite photography. Normally it wouldn't be that ridiculous, but he chose to do it in December, right when a huge blizzard was blowing into New York City.

Mike had plans of constructing the whole rig to do the project, kite and all. He even made a kite, but it was so hilariously bad that it had to be burnt and all evidence of its existence destroyed. Even mentioning "box kite" around him still kinda makes him twitch. One store bought kite, a Canon point&shoot and an e-bay rigging later, we were in business.

Kind of. This was pretty much the story for the first half hour or so. Getting a little lift off the ground, but not enough to lift the line-attached camera rigging, which weighed probably two pounds, very high off the ground.

This was about as far as we got at this part of the park. After running up and down the hill about six or eight times and figuring out just how uncoordinated five people can be, we decided to move the rigging closer to the kite itself so it would be able to accelerate faster. I also quietly suggested we move to the big hill in the center of Astoria Park, the one that looks like where you would want to fly a kite.

At the big hill we had a lot more success, but it still wasn't going that well. Up to this point I'd been shooting stills and video of the other guys taking turns flying the kite, not really getting it very high - maybe 30-40 feet up. I asked if I could give it a go, and promptly took the kite up to something like 80 feet. I'm going to throw all semblance of humbleness out the window here and say that it felt really freaking amazing. So amazing that Mike wasn't able to capture any pictorial evidence of my first or second flights because he was so in awe, but trust me. It was great.

Here is a recreation of my amazing kite-flying ability. It's important that you really blow with a deep breath into the kite, otherwise it just won't gain air.

Once we got it up, we started getting real aerial pictures. I only got to see a couple of them when we went back home to check, but a couple looked really cool. There were also a lot of interesting ones of the camera on the ground looking at our group through the grass, but those probably won't win any awards for aerial photography.

All in all, a good day.

Sometime during the week, the story of how we almost chopped off someone's hand.

It's December! Christmas is almost here!

And oh my god the sky is on fire!!!

St. John's University puts out a crazy amount of cash for Christmas. Outside of St. Augustine they set up gigantic speaker systems, a huge Christmas tree and light projectors that project images of snowflakes onto the front of the library. Every single tree on campus is covered with several rungs of Christmas lights, which must make their already gigantic electricity bill even more ridiculous. And they cap it all off with a huuuge fireworks display on the Great Lawn. Your tuition dollars at work.

But, y'know, it is really pretty.