Starting Over

Hello.

This is my first post in two years. I haven't stopped taking photos, but a few things happened. This is an explanation, not an excuse.

Initially, my plan was to take photos every week and write a blog post about them. I had the idea that this would keep me accountable; that I would somehow push myself into being a better photographer with constant assignments. Unfortunately, what really happened was that I began to resent it. I didn't resent taking photos; I actually never stopped doing that. I resented having to talk about them every week, having to come up with something meaningful to say. I have ideas about myself as a thoughtful person, and my perfectionist tendencies led me to not want to say anything if it wasn't profound.

Silly, I know. But it's what happened. So my last post was in September 2012.

Then, just less than a year later, my mother very suddenly and tragically passed away. This upended my life in a number of ways, and the last thing I wanted to prioritize was a blog I had already abandoned.

But here it is, two years after I stopped updating and a year after my mother's death, and I still shoot and develop film. Sometimes I go a week or two between rolls. Sometimes I shoot nothing but crap, and sometimes I get lucky. Sometimes I hate it.

But, with all the turmoil in my life for the past year, I never stopped shooting. I think that says something. Photography is not the only thing that keeps me going--I have amazing friends and a wonderful, supportive fiancee (another life development in the last year)--but it does continue to feed me in a really amazing way.

One of the most important things I've learned from this, when I really think about it, is to stop looking at my photos as a thing I do to please others. Sure, I still get a dopamine rush when people say nice things about them, but I'm coming to realize that I do this for me. And that's fine.

And it's also fine if I share them, even if they're not profound or if I don't have anything amazing to say about them.

I've changed the name of the blog and I'm abandoning any gimmicks. This is just going to be a place for me to post photos and, if the urge strikes me, thoughts that I have about them. If you're here, thanks for coming by. If you have feedback, I'd love to hear it.

Here are some photos I've taken since my last update that I particularly like. Click them to head over to Flickr for bigger versions.

I hope to update more frequently. Until next time...

Week 12 - Sarah

Sometimes it feels like everything is going right. The light is perfect, your framing is inspired, and you're getting great shot after great shot. And other times nothing works; everything you touch turns to crap.

And sometimes you shoot an entire roll of film and only get one good photo.

I think it's this situation--one gem out of a bunch of dirt clods--that is sometimes the most perplexing. It makes you wonder if that one great photo wasn't just pure luck. Clearly you weren't doing anything right the rest of the roll; why should you suddenly remember how not to suck? No, you think, must have been luck.

I don't think it's ever that absolute though. Matters of creativity are complicated. Maybe it was just a matter of the right factors coming in to play at the right time. Maybe all your other pictures were terrible because your rhythm wasn't right, or because you were working as if the conditions were different. Or maybe it is just luck sometimes, and maybe luck is what makes--forgive me--art. At least sometimes.

That's not the lesson I think I should take from this, though. I think the important thing for me to take away is that even on your bad days you're capable of doing something good. You just gotta keep going. Because you never know--maybe that next photo will be the one good one.

My sister came in to visit this weekend and I took an entire roll of film at lunch. This is the only one that was any good. But I like it so much that I'm perfectly fine with it.

Week 11 - Cube Bot

Of Robots and Equipment Failure

I had fun with the photos this week, but they're nothing special. There's a reason for that. I didn't take these pictures for art, I took them for science. Good thing I had a sweet wooden robot that my friend Dana gave me.

You see, the magazine on my Hasselblad appears to have issues. That's the part into which you load the film; it also controls the spacing between frames. Sometimes (and only sometimes, because if it was predictable it would be easy and heavens we can't have that) it overlaps two frames or, alternately, places all the frames ridiculously far apart from each other.

Before I took yet another piece of my camera to be serviced, I wanted to put a roll through and see if the problem would manifest again. That's where cube-bot comes in.

So this week I don't have any really interesting shots to share, just some black and white pictures of a robot toy made out of wood and elastic bands that was given to me by my friend Dana.

It's pretty cool, though. Dana was the first friend I made in Austin and during the 13 years I've known her, she's never given the wrong answer to the question "how does Tate feel about toys that look like robots?"

(The answer is "he likes them very much thank you.")

What did Cube Bot teach me? Not much, sadly. No major issues with the frames, but they were still spaced apart from each other pretty crazily. So I took it in earlier today and probably won't be able to use my camera for weeks. Also, he taught me that I still hate the walls in my apartment.

But I can't actually say I'm all that upset about not being able to use the camera for a while. The thing has been a lot of fun but also a lot of stress. It's going to take me years to get fully comfortable with it, and until then I'm going to continue to frustrate myself.

It's going to be nice to get back to the gear with which I am already comfortable, and the freedom in 35mm to shoot more frames won't hurt either. It's almost like I've been given an excuse to stop thinking about the gear and get back to thinking about the images. I can dig it.

Anyway, Cube Bot thanks you for stopping by. He can't calculate much, being made of wood, but he generally does what he's told. Also, as wood is an organic material, he's technically more closely related to humans than he is to robots of the metal flavor; this is good news for us if (when) the robots revolt.

Week 10 - State

I don't shoot a lot of color.

I realized that, since getting my new Hasselblad with its expensive German lens, I haven't even bothered to see how color looks through it. So, when I drove Rachel down to San Marcos for a school function, I decided to shoot a roll of color on campus and see how it turned out.

I learned a few things.

First of all, the film magazine on this thing is unreliable and sometimes does strange things. Once, I had it overlap three photos so that the bottom of one frame cut through the middle of a woman's head. This time, however, it just offset its frames by one so that instead of 12 shots, I got 11 shots. It just started at #2 and only pretended to shoot the final frame.

This, the Internet tells me, can be easily fixed. Well, relatively easily. It's a common failure and can be fixed by cleaning and re-lubricating the magazine. This can be done by a qualified technician, of which Austin apparently has a few. But, as with all European mechanical objects, it's not exactly cheap. Or fast. So I'm going to have to give the camera up--again--for probably a month or two and drop another bill on it.

Second, I learned that I really need to get a hood for this thing. The lens I own is so old that it predates modern lens multicoating, meaning it flares pretty badly. Again, nothing made for this camera is cheap.

I feel like I understand what "car guys" go through when they try to buy and maintain classic cars. You love the thing, but damned if it isn't a giant money pit.

Oh well. Pictures:

I've done better, but at least the quality of the photos is nice. I can see why, in optimal condition, these cameras are so well regarded. I just wish I'd bought one in optimal condition.

Sigh.

Week 9 - Out and About with the 'Blad

Even once you technically understand how to use a new camera, there's still a good long period of acclimation before you really get a feel for it. I would say that, right now, I'm most comfortable with my 35mm Nikon F3; I've gotten to the point that I know where the controls are almost through muscle memory. I don't have to think about the equipment, it fades into the background and I just shoot.

I am not there yet with my new Hasselblad. It's bigger, heavier, uses a strange square aspect ratio, and is not exactly built for quick snapshots. It has promise, and I want to get comfortable with it, but I'm not there yet.

I don't have a lot of insightful commentary this week. Mostly I have been trying to take the Hasselblad out more and get used to shooting with it in public. This isn't the easiest thing to do because it's about as subtle as dump truck, but I think that we've reached a point as a society that no mechanical film camera with knobs on it is going to escape notice. I just have to embrace the fact that I'm walking around with an anachronism around my neck.

Here are some images I shot this week while I was out eating and walking around.

Light fixture at the Crestview light rail station (next to Black Star Co-op)

Sculpture next to the Crestview light rail station

Epoch Coffee, North Loop

Landscaping along Victory Drive

Fire hydrant along Victory Drive

I'm still getting used to the square format. It is really interesting for some shots but really frustrating for others. Working in 35 (and making movies) teaches you to visualize everything in rectangles, and it's a hard habit to break.

That's all for this week. Thanks for dropping in.

Week 8 - sushi

Quit Thinking So Hard

Rachel suggested to me recently that in my zeal to practice deliberate, planned, painterly portraits, I was running the risk of neglecting what she considered to be one of my strengths: spontaneous portraiture. I usually keep a 35mm camera in my car and tend to take it out whenever we're at a restaurant or a coffee shop (I finished graduate school but Rachel didn't, that's about all you have time to do in her shoes).

The result is that I have about a billion pictures of Rachel drinking tea, but I also end up with some good pictures not only of her but of my other friends as well.

Like this one from 2011, at the old Kerbey Lane location on South Lamar

Or this one of my friend Don, also from 2011, at the Parlor in Hyde Park

So, with that in mind, I took my Nikon F3HP with me when we went out for veggie sushi at one of our favorite places, Banzai. That's when the fun started.

They're Talking About Us

As usual, I sat down with Rachel at a two-top and started snapping away. One of the great things about buying film in bulk is that you can usually afford to be liberal with your shots; coupled with my sometimes-troubling lack of compositional discipline, this leads me to take all kinds of crazy pictures.

Thus, the sight of me leaning in and out of Rachel's face with a camera and shooting weird things like her hands is a fairly common one if you hang out in the same restaurants we do. I am actually quite mortified of being disruptive or making people uncomfortable--which is why I'm afraid of street photography--so while I'm sure I look silly I try never to bother anyone. I won't even fire the shutter if it's very quiet in the room.

At one point while we were there, I decided that I was tired of the angles available to me from where I was sitting. Rachel (because she is an amazing sport and very supportive) suggested that we switch sides, which would move the light to another side of her face and change the background.

That's when she noticed it.

Two college-aged girls sitting at a table in another part of the restaurant apparently thought it was worthy of their scorn that I should take pictures of my partner in a restaurant. Rachel noticed that they were giggling and overheard one of them say "oh, now they're changing sides." She said this in a tone of voice one would use for the punchline to a hilarious joke.

One of them was wearing a UCLA shirt, leading me to believe she's at least spent some time in Los Angeles. I find it hard to believe she never encountered people taking photos in public before. Perhaps I'm biased, but when I encounter people taking photos in public my thoughts are generally either "crap, am I in their shot?" or "is that a Leica?"

My point is: these girls were judging us for doing something perfectly acceptable and that I would think could be seen as sweet. I still like taking Rachel's picture after five years, and while I usually don't like drawing attention to myself in public I am damn sure not ashamed of making nice pictures of the woman I love.

Rachel immediately locked her s-foils in attack position and, not quietly, said "those girls are laughing at us. I hope they can read my lips right now."

Apparently they could because they immediately got very uncomfortable and refused to make eye contact with her. Perhaps they could feel the shame-stare. Says Rachel: "I usually try really hard not to be formidable, but I made an indignant exception."

I for one thought the entire experience was highly amusing.

"They can. They know I caught them. They're not even looking over here anymore." And, sure enough, within a few minutes they quietly and quickly walked out the restaurant past us while averting their eyes.

While some college kids laughing at me is really the least of my troubles, I still wanted to tell this story. I'm trying to decide if there's anything I can learn from it, and the best I can come up with after thinking about it is this:

When you practice a creative hobby, sometimes you'll look silly. Maybe you won't look silly to everyone, and maybe you won't look silly all the time. But sometimes, somewhere, someone is going to give you a hard time for it. And that sucks.

I said earlier that I'm afraid of street photography because I am afraid of making a scene or getting in people's faces or interrupting their privacy. I don't particularly like being the center of attention, despite what you may believe if you saw the stuff I did on college TV. But the thing is this: carrying around a 30+ year old manual film camera in public is going to make me an object of interest. I'm going to have to deal with the fact that people are going to notice it, they're going to say things, and yes, they may laugh at me.

But at the end of the day, I'm the one with the nice photos. So whatever.

Week 7 - Production Stills

Speed...Mark...Action

This post will be a bit of a departure from my previous posts about portraiture. I recently worked on my friend Don's short film (he and I have a little film outfit going). In addition to the other odd jobs I did on set, I took my Nikon F3 along and shot many rolls of production stills.

Most people these days shoot production stills in digital and in color, but of course I'm me so I did it in film and black and white. But it worked out, because the movie has a vaguely-defined 50s or 60s vibe to it and is itself going to be in black and white, so Don was actually excited that I'd be doing the stills traditionally.

There isn't much to say about these, other than I found it a nice change of pace to do on-the-fly "documentary" style photography. I tried to catch any interesting moment I could, and being a producer on the film meant that people didn't generally question my shoving a camera in their faces.

Don asked me to avoid spoiling too much of the film with the photos I post. I had to leave out some of the shots I'm really proud of, but not all of them.

Without further delay, production stills from the newest Jollyville Pictures short, tentatively titled "The Horrible Life of Dr. Ghoul," directed by Don Swaynos and starring Chris Doubek, Jason Newman, Kerri Lendo, Byron Brown, and Jessie Tilton.

Click the images for larger versions.

Nathan Smith and Jack Lewandowski

Nathan Smith

Ted Griffis, Jack Lewandowski, Nathan Smith

Kerri Lendo, being made-up by Lauren Gonzalez

Chris Doubek

Kerri Lendo and Chris Doubek perform a scene

Kerri Lendo and Don Swaynos

Byron Brown, Jessie Tilton, and Chris Doubek

 Thanks for stopping by, and stay tuned to JollyvillePictures.com for updates on Dr. Ghoul!