A Plea For Tenderness

MARCIA IS MY FWIEND. ARE YOU MY FWIEND?

So I guess at this point I'm curious as to who's stopping by. Yeah, I've broadly invited most of ILX to visit and Ally (The Schef) is such a social bird that I'm sure some people get forwarded to me from her, but the lack of feedback is a little -- not bothersome -- disappointing. So leave a comment!

I am particularly interested in seeing who's been stopping by from Maryland (no hyperlink. If you don't know where or what Maryland is then... there is no hope for you) and locally in New York City.

Yes, I check my webstats often.

Also, I like the above picture in color moreso than black and white. Woops.

Original Artyfacts

Remnants from Coney Island

The Cyclone, Coney Island 5/27/07

 
Snakes, Coney Island 5/27/07

 
Grandma's Prophecies (Arcade Favor), Coney Island 5/27/07


(Let the record show that grandma only communicates in cyphers and Plain English.)
 
Richard and Ally (Photo Booth), Coney Island 5/27/07


(Ally lives on Flickr here.)

Lesser Koodoo and Mountain Nyala

Lesser Koodoo


Mountain Nyala


This is an experiment in webtraffic (made up of bad science). Thank you for visiting. The Nyala is hosted on the Daddy Site and the Koodoo is hosted on Flickr
.

Far Away, Where We Might Laugh Again

I'm going to experiment again with product distribution and limit posting more of these until the one before reaches 50 Flickr hits. In previous instances I had spammed the sweetholyfuck out of some of the groups (10-15 at a time, or as many as they would allow) and it seems to have limited exposure -- once they drop off the facing page, the less likely they are to be viewed, etc.. The next experiment will involve dropping one onto Flickr with a route back to this site where I host the rest of the group exclusively.

Bringing a Camera to Knife Fight, 3/17/07

I finally got around to seeing Knife Fight live after many years of broken promises and late-night cancellations due to late night calls for work the next day. They played Union Hall (no link, see previous entry) which I had been to in a drunk capacity, but not in a music show capacity and I can't say that I enjoyed it (the venue; Knife Fight is AWESOME) -- too-low lights caked in red and blue gells making white-balancing a motherfucker to figure out. I did get to fiddle around with remote flash placement, an example seen here,



The flash was propped up haphazardly on the stacks, and I might try it again with two next time, but it'll depend on the venue. There were also low-hanging speedrails that I could have mounted a unit on if I had packed a maffer or similar. Something to think about carrying around in the future. More on Flickr

My life is about to get heavier. As per multiple friends, I'm going for the 5D. As per examples of the quality of the ASA at 3200 posted on Flickr, it's really a no-brainer.

Flickr, Judgement, and Taste

So I currently have three pictures kicking around the Flickr "Judge Me" groups, trying to glean some sort of information about taste and what is and isn't visually interesting to people, and maybe find something broader about the level of Flickr in general. I am also fishing for compliments. This is also bad science of small sample size. I chose images that I was not particularly fond of, but some people seemed to enjoy; They had a goodly number of views to start.

This is the first one I entered in the Score Me! group, and you can see from the comments and grades that there's a sharp curve between initial thoughts and those that come after (scores run 8, 7.5, 6 and 5 in that order). There was then a comment suggesting that I post this image on the Ultimate Score Me group, which I did. Aside from the clunky posting code that requires multiple cuts and pastes, the "Of 5" scoring scale means the difference between an American School "B" grade and "D" grade photo is one point. Scores for this group run 3 (D), 3 (D), 3 (D), 4 (B), 5 (A) in order. Wither the outliers?



I entered this in because it was old, and was obviously black and white and obviously off-centered and inelegant... I thought it was graphically interesting more than anything. Two of the comments mentioned the framing being off-putting (4/10 and 6/10), one claimed it 'doesn't do anything for' him (3/10), one didn't know what to think of it at all (5.5/10). There was one additional vote with no comment of 3/10. So my initial thoughts are numerically confirmed by outsiders.



My polaroids are popular. I know this, thank you. Mr. Sea Lion was in the 8's all the way down (8.5, 8, 8, 8, 8) and is probably the most pretty of the three, and the most obvious at the same time. Some of the limits of this series are:

1) The fixed minimum distance from the subject (there's a glass window, obviously).

2) The nature of the film (which sometimes forces me to work at the fixed minimum distance to get acceptable results).

3) The fixed focal length of the lens (Holga, yo).

4) The staging of the subject (the Museum is designed to provide maximum viewage of a static object).

These all add up to images that are essentially portraits and a portrait is classically considered to be an image representative of the subject, and the result can be a little didactic. Understanding the American School scale of A through F, we can say that 5/5 people found this picture a "B", and in my logic, effectively representative of the thing that it is.



My next thoughts lie with the viewers themselves, and this is where things get tricky in a Glass House + Stones way. Some pissy comments on the group pages point out the people who seem to cut 'n' paste their scores straight across, the people who seem to score out of perceived meanness or revenge, and the people who are angry that they got an honest score and thought more highly of themselves than they should have.

The first two sets of comments are correct in their anger, the last is not, obviously -- you don't just throw pictures out there figuring that everyone to love them. But what can be determined is your audience. The people that offer the highest scores to a given picture tent to have favorited similar styles of picture and the converse is true as well.

Apropos of nothing, and certainly not a conclusion:

Some observations include the caste system within Flickr itself: the most popular kids are traditionally pretty (landscapes, well-timed portraits, people who post their model tests and etc), the arty kids have their own little group (the people doing stuff with polaroids or x-processing tend to have the same postings to the same groups and the same taste in subject mater) and there's a whole bunch of people who just want to see pictures of babies and their friends (or their dogs).

Those Are Not Powers; These Are Powers

More from your new favorite band: These Are Powers at Tonic on 3/8/07. I should be able to do some nice side-by-sides once the film portion comes back from Duggal (I switched labs after Baboo fucked up again).



Most exciting was a successful Gordon Parks moment:



I was looking for an example of the zoom 'n' shoot that he did to link to, but I couldn't find one. Oh well. More of these on Flickr.

Ironic Photos of Monticello New York Kennel Club Dog Show, Secaucus, NJ, 2007

This is another series that came about from a work situation, and the pictures I took might hint at my frame of mind more so than I'd like to make public. I speak of course about my great dislike of most people and fondness for animals, who are of course innocents in all of the nonsense of this world. And at the dog show, both my likes and dislikes collided in spectacular fashion.

There's a Bresson quote about a connection that needs to be made between "...the eye and the heart" and while it may be true, the question is what I see in my heart when I take something like this:



Bresson and Avedon and Penn and Edward Steichen and all the other great photographers had and have a great fondness for the people of this world and the connection to their place in it is what made and makes them great. My distrust and distaste for people shows through, I think, and I wonder if it holds me back creatively. Suze (see previous entry here), in one of her finer moments said that I can't take pretty pictures of people, that I took 'warts 'n' all' pictures and that my inability to do an unselfconciously flattering portrait was a great talent that I should embrace. It's all well and good, I suppouse, to be gifted (if true) with a predisposition to recognizing ugliness or some God-awful truth about humanity, but it doesn't really sell. Even Natchwey sees something beautiful in the struggle. I don't know if I do.

And back to my previous thoughts about the Flickr web-hit flow of traffic. Assume for a minute that I take unflattering pictures as a rule and that someday I am great at it -- I wonder if someone will see these pictures, and know a person in them and understand that I take unflattering pictures. Or if they'll see them, and ask they be taken down because of it.

Obsession Leads to Compulsion

WHO



ARE



YOU?



Thoughts on marketing:

There's more of those on Flickr, of course. I had originally thought that the Flickr site would draw more hits to the Official Richard Gin Site and the Official Richard Gin Blog (I Fall To Pieces) and it has, to a point, but not in any sort of impressive way. I think it takes a certain kind of person/Flickrwonk to bother to check in the profile page to find the link here and I may have to re-think my posting strategy. In a way, I'm more interested to see who finds this site directly, rather than those who make the trip over from the Flickr halfway house.

All the same, I would like to extend a warm hello to visitors from the UAE and United Kingdom who have come here.

It's Great To Be Alive

A grand day out at the American Museum Of Natural History results in me spending hours loading Polaroids to Flickr. I didn't think I liked the un-color-corrected Type 89, but I guess I do after all. Especially this,



Anyway, ducks and cats and dogs and fossils and other mammals abound in Richard's Menagerie.

Listening to Drive By Truckers, A World of Hurt

If you still think about each other and smile before you remember how screwed up it's gotten
Or maybe dream of a time less rotten
Remember, it ain't too late to take a deep breath and throw yourself into it with everything you got

Bad Things Happen In Threes

Dominique



I've been on this kick for a while now, possibly just to make myself feel responsible when it comes to editing my stuff -- restrict it to a 3-image set. This gesture is empty and pointless and gets me into trouble when I do event coverage and I give the client three times as many selects as they really need... and they decide they want them all. Anyway, there are two more for this set on the Flickr site.

Back to the subject at hand -- I remember one of my professors (whose opinion I still trust) mentioning that one of my short films was 'shot spot-on, but... I don't know about your pouty friends in it.' Now in their defense I'll claim that it wasn't that my friends were particularly pouty but rather that I shot and directed them poorly. Then there are the subjects you can't direct, like this one, that you can wind up and let go.

Animals, Animals, Animals

When I first got my Holgaroid (after much searching and hand wringing and research as to whether the stock would be discontinued* or whether I could even find one in the tri-state area), my first thought was, "OMG NOW I CAN MAKE ART BLABLAZOOBOYYARLYNOWAI!" which I think is a fine attitude to take with something like this. Of course, having not had a darkroom since college, any sort of immediate gratification when it comes to appreciating your own crapulence is... appreciated. Plus I love toy cameras. So when I combine Favorite Number 1 (toy camera) with what may be my favorite place in New York (North American Mammals wing; American Museum Of Natural History), I get happier than a fruit fly in an orchard.

More at the Flickr site here

*Of course, the stock was discontinued as of the first of the year. An unfavorable start, to be sure. I'm doing the math to see if I can easily adapt the back to take (what I guess would be...) the 600-series. Any ideas?