It did take less than two days. I captured this at 18:12 and it’s now 18:27, and the thing is already on YouTube. Cool. Only problem, which is not a problem, is that it looks like shit. I say it’s not a problem because the point of the exercise was speak. Now I’ll look — but not too much — into video compression, and try to make a better version on the same take. I guess this is when compression comes into play.

“Of course, the writer’s task is to put obstacles in the way of writing, and yet writing still somehow always has gotten done, whether through fogs of Scotch or through fields of pixels.”   – Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik (Richard Avedon)

I just came across this while bumping around on the Web, avoiding the task of getting down to the writing that I really need to be doing (as in, to make money). The quote is from “Stray Questions for: Adam Gopnik” by Blake Wilson, published in “Paper Cuts” on January 30, 2009.

If what Gopnik says is true, maybe I’m actually doing well as a writer and not the flailing failure I often feel like. After all, who can do better than I at putting obstacles in the way of writing?

In response to Wilson’s question about how much time — if any — Gopnik spends on the Web, Gopnik shares:

“Too much, too much. Writing is the process of finding something to distract you from writing, and of all the helpful distractions — adultery, alcohol and acedia, all of which aided our writing fathers — none can equal the Internet.”

Fuck! I mean, on the one hand I really appreciate Gopnik’s frank perspective that he struggles with the crack-like addictive power of the Web. On the other hand, his observation makes me feel like I’ve been backsliding.

Of late I have been doing my damnedest to improve my writing by cutting down on adultery, alcohol and acedia. (The excessive adultery brought on by binge drinking might have been interesting to write about but the acedia made it impossible.) And now, actually finding myself trying to work instead of heading to a bar (not easy, I assure you), Gopnik’s words suggest I might actually be better off in that bar buying a drink for a potential lover. Apparently the fog of adultery and booze is easier to write through than these fields of pixels.

Woman preparing for festival. Santiago, Paraguay.

I took this image on my first full day in Paraguay, five hours south of the Capital, Asunción, where I had landed the day before, after 36 hours of flights from San Francisco. I was just warming up — in the 100+ Fº temperatures typical of Paraguay January — and photographed hundred of more times throughout this day. But seeing this image on my still-mesmerizing camera monitor gave me a “Ah few” moment, and I become much more focused on shooting. Very excited about digitial. This woman is a domestic worker in the one of the richest homes in Santiago, Paraguay, where my new friend, Penny Newberry, had lived for two years during a recent Peace Corps stint.

I just stumbled on this image I made at Baker Beach, San Francisco. I was glancing through folders of old captures as as I began to overhaul the filing structure and backup system for all my digital captures. Yes, I know how nerdy that sounds (and is), but I’m seriously looking forward to having easy access to all my captures in one, new, streamlined Lightroom catalog. Yes, I know, digital workflow snooze. But I have no doubt this long overdue process will allow me to WAY increase chance encounters with nice singles like this one — not to mention help me to create better collections for photo stories and motion projects.

When I spotted this image, I thought, “Huh? I took this?”

You see, this gold-toned rocky sunset seascape is not my style — at all — but the image looks OK, and it is a nice reminder of how close the heart of San Francisco lies to stunning nature. That was the best part of living in SF. (Although, if you look closely you will note that much of the “natural”-looking, out-of-focus distant cliff-face is actually made up of San Francisco real estate.)

I made this image when Michael, my best SF-buddy, and I were taking one of our regular walks on the beaches of San Francisco. This day clothes were necessary (shucks!) as we were being hit by blustering, salty winds as we scampered over rocks in November 2004. I had my Nikon D70, and was getting ready for my big Paraguay trip in January 2005.

Contrary to what this image and my latests posts might have you think, I am hardly a fine-arts oriented person, and certainly not in regard to photography. Nonetheless, as I was playing with the last posts, my screen overfilling with random video snapshots, I couldn’t help but fancy this composition. It seemed to speak very well to the lengthy conversations I have been having with Andrew Matusik, a young, highly driven, impressively successful commercial photographer. He is a total new-era photographay techno geek, yet he absolutely retains much the artistic sentiments that drove him to study fine art painting at Occidental College, long before he turned to photography.

One thing that Matusik and I talked about as I gathered information for a series of three articles I am writing about him is photographic collage that he recently constructed for GenLux Magazine. The piece — comprising more than 100 images and more than 120 Photoshop layers — is based on Matusik’s MC-Escher-esque photographic interpetation of a vision from his own dreamscape. I don’t recall my own dreams too often, but looking at my screen just now and seeing this same woman on the same bus, looking at herself, staring at the viewer, quitely passive but in a world of visual movement created by the juxtiposition of images, well, I just couldn’t help but hit “Apple + Shift + 4″ and grab this image. Captured from a computer monitor at a mere 72 dpi, this photograph (if that’s the right term) would  never pass technical muster for a standard print publication. But you can see it just fine, no?