a walk with two johns

yesterday (yes, a post about something that happened less than two months ago), I met up with Hornbeck and jrecursive to shoot some photos and hang out, talk shop. I shot a combination of from the hip and looking through he viewfinder, but most of these were shot at eye level.

Something I’ve heard said a bunch, including on this walk, that isn’t true: color photography lacks emotion. Fuck that. My esteemed colleagues were more or less in agreement, and I was in a too-agreeable mood to summon the proper righteous indignation, but: fuck that. If your photography lacks emotion, you’re not close enough. Get close. Have some Goddamn Feelings about what you’re doing. That will inevitably come through in the work. If you don’t care about what you’re doing, or about the subject at hand, then stop. You need to be entangled with what you’re shooting, you need to be emotionally involved, have some skin in the game. Some things are easy to care about: the sick, the grieving, and the au courant. (A lot of my pictures are really just me shouting “THIS REALLY HAPPENED!!!”). But for, say, the socioeconomic changes in a city, that’s harder to get into, to find the meat of, to see clearly.

I suppose, too, that color is just more laborious. Interpretive work in black and white is so pat these days that you can mostly do it with camera settings. Decide on a look, shoot JPEGs, and be done. Interpretive color depends a great deal on serendipity and correctness after the fact. It’s legitimately more work, and I find myself, when I want to be lazy, just converting to black and white (we are now solidly in territory where I am only speaking for myself, and it is decidedly not lazy for other photographers to make their own choice; some people work very hard at black and white, including my shooting companions).

So, what is true of color: you have to put in the work. There’s no hiding behind artifice.

Anyway, it was really good to get out with a couple of like minded people, shoot some photos, and shoot the shit for a while. Anybody in town wants to do a similar photo walk, hit me up on the usual channels. And thanks to John and John for the company.

I didn’t know this, but appearently the strip clubs in north beach are mad sketchy.It makes me happy that at least some part of SF isn’t yet gentrified.

de young

mobile posting again. i might fill this in with descriptions later –matt

LATER: so, coming back the next day to fill in some details… my friend Christa is in town, just to see the sights and hang out with people (if you follow me on the social, you know this). I got sick friday night with some quick-acting flu-like sickness, but was feeling better by saturday evening, and wanted to get some time before the end of her trip.

The art inside the de Young is kind of boring. There are a few galleries worth seeking out, containing both interesting contemporary work and historical works from the 20th century, but the collections from before 1900 focus on things that just don’t do it for me. I should say that my visit was brief and I didn’t have time for the pre-colombian wing. Even with that, the whole collection suffered from this sort of colonial gaze (which I’m sure is a thing, now that I type it out loud). the work I liked the most was the least gaze-y.

No, the best thing about the de Young was the space itself. The sculpture garden is world-class, and the view from the top of the tower is also very impressive. And from the outside, it’s worth seeing in person as well. There’s a reason I take pictures of it almost every time I bike by it.

protest at SFO

Usually I don’t do this, but posting from my phone. Peaceful so far, and we arrived to find they were letting those currently held go. Lots of chanting, lots of good signs. Cops, as always. anyway, I figured I should share these ASAP and worry about a long post later. Stay safe out there.

evening and the way home

So, last but not least, we went to the beach and hung out in the warm sun with some cheese and crackers and beverages. There, I hiked about 20 minutes to get to the last of the tufa pictures. I know, I should have waited 6 hours, gotten them in golden hour light, but who has time for that?

At that point, I was pretty tired, so we went back to the hotel room for a nap. We may or may not have gotten stuck watching reality TV shows instead of resting. Then, we drove to some hot springs, and I ran around like an idiot getting all the photos with the nice golden light. Neither one of us had remembered to pack a swimsuit, so we were just looking. It looked pretty nice.

We were sort of shuttling back and forth on the same 20 miles of 385 the whole trip. On our way to dinner, I saw the moon over the silhouetted mountains, and got a couple frames off before the scene changed completely. Looking closely at the full-res file, I can tell that I focused on the edge of the hills and not on the moon, but I think it works anyway.

That night, we had one of the weirder dinner experiences of our lives. We went to a restaurant that came recommended, and seemed pretty nice from their menu online. We got there, got seated, and just after our drinks came out, the head (and only) chef quit, and walked out. It took the rest of the staff about half an hour to convince him to come back and finish service for the people that were already seated. The food was actually still pretty good, if memory serves.

The last picture is a ringer; I took it in Yosemite, on the way back. We were going to stop for gummy bears, as the best ones in the world are in Yosemite, but we missed the turn. We did get a nice photo op, though.