Small vs. Big.

I really like (although I am not very good at) playing soccer. I coached in one place or another for about 10 years of my teaching career, growing to appreciate the sport and still not getting a lot better at it.

One of my favorite times as a player (did I mention that I wasn’t very good?) was when I played at an indoor sporting facility called RISE. Playing indoor means wearing slightly different shoes than playing outside. It also means that one can immediately enjoy a beer after a match with one’s teammates ’cause there’s a bar on the premises, but it’s the shoes that are important.

I wear these most of the time ’cause they’re comfortable and if they’re not too terribly beat up, they match a lot of my clothing, looking simultaneously neat and casual. They’re Adidas Sambas and when I found a pair that fit my daughter when she was still a baby, I snapped them up. Now that my son is that size, he wears them. ‘Cause after all, it’s not like either of them did (or is gonna do) a lot of walking in them,

I’d been thinking about doing a shot like this for a while and finally got around to it. I’m not sure I’m finished with it ’cause the placement of the shoes might need some work. Nonetheless, it makes me smile to see them.

A Big Black Truck.

Saw this on the walk with Henry the other morning.

This Is Not The Post.

That is, it’s not the post I wanted to use for today, but I got my wires crossed and bought new sd cards that are high capacity and my reader is not. My images are trapped until I can get a new reader (which I anticipate doing sometime today) on the new cards.

In any event, here’s yet another snapshot. These are the lights on the chandelier in our living room. I kinda thought they looked neat and I was seeing what the camera would do.

No Peeking.

Another shot from the recent shoot with my graduate friend. Those two MFAs look pretty sexy on her, no?

From the Bottom Up.

This is one of the shots from a recent fashion-themed shoot for a local video-artist friend of mine. She wore this dress to her final show at VCU’s Anderson Gallery here in Richmond and agreed to let me shoot a couple of her in it. Man, this was a hot dress.

I’ll post some of the others later.

Have a good weekend.

Boots.

I saw these on a day that I had my camera and I asked nicely. It’s good to have colleagues who’ll do stuff for me.

The Matrix.

“I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it. “

–Agent Smith from The Matrix

It was all I could think of when I re-discovered this neg.

There was this guy I used to know who bugged the heck out of me to come along when I shot a wedding six or seven years ago. I had never done it before and couldn’t afford to pay him, but happily let him come. I had a good time but he was absolutely bowled over by the experience.

Within a year, he’d quit his job and scored a couple of digital cameras and a simple editing system and was shooting weddings full time. Not long after that, he was shooting event coverage and somehow got a client who needed some headshots. He offered to bring me along as his assistant and said if I wanted I could shoot some. They were going for a Men in Black kinda theme.

This was one of the black and whites I shot. The other roll was cross processed and didn’t come out well ’cause the film lends itself more to colors and these were largely monochromatic images.

I kinda thought it looked more like Agent Smith.

A Lady, Darkly.

The first time I met Tatiana, she was still an undergraduate in college. These days, she’s a bartender and a graduate who’s thinking about law school.
Fortunately for her, she’ll always have a second career.

Down My Street.

I pass this car every day when I bring my daughter home from daycare and think, “Man, it must be cool to ride around in one of those, now that everyone drives something that’s run by a computer and mostly plastic. I should stop and shoot a picture or two of it, just for me.” I never do. Last weekend, I got off my duff and did. I shot half a roll standing around this car.

Again, I’m not thrilled with the scans, but it’s the darkroom potential I’m interested in. My mother-in-law’s got a friend who’s curating a black and white show later this summer and because I have a few prints of my own hanging here in the house, I’ve been nominated. It’s the reason I’ve been working on black and white stuff at all. Well, that and it’s fun to work with an image from start to finish.

In dealing with these scans, I’ve come to realize that the thing about Photoshop I get the least – at least as far as black and white imagery goes – is how to deal with contrast. To be fair, I scanned these using a computer with which I was not completely familiar, but I kinda thought that rescuing the haze that’s in the first image wouldn’t be too hard once I’d dealt with the levels in PS. I’m not sure I’m right.

But since the stuff I post here on the blog is for practice (I have a guy for when I need to actually have stuff scanned for real), it’s not killing me. Anyway, it’s a fun car to look at…