Take Out Photo

Date Due

2013-03-09T17:28:00.000-08:00

My otherwise minimalist man cave has been overrun with library books lately, most of them from interlibrary loan. I've been obsessively reading late at night for various projects, usually annoyed if I can't get through two or three books a week. Last night, for some odd reason, I noticed the stamped "date due" slips pasted in the back of the books. I thought about what an enigmatic chronology they represent. I wondered who checked the books out. I wondered about the clusters of dates, the ten-year chronological leaps of dormancy, the layers of check out slips or the complete lack of them (Has no one at Colorado State checked out Zizek's The Parallax View? Has no one in Toronto checked out Lyotard's The Inhuman? Not that I'd blame them.), the colors of the ink, the relation of the stamps to the lines, etc. I realized that the library's digital books have no such history, no traces of past users, of frequency, or of the librarians. At least half of the books I read are digital. I imagine that the percentage will increase rapidly in the next few years. The "Date Due" slips are chronicles of how information has been circulated. They remind us of other readers (and sometimes of hierarchies such as "FACULTY LOAN") and of the physical passage of a book through the hands of other people. They are stories attached to books that will no longer be told.

So late last night, I spread out all of the books on my coffee table, and when I got up this morning, I photographed them. I will probably do more as other books make their way into my home. In fact, I may do some work about other signs of the material history of library books (like the annoying underlined passages left by disrespectful readers)—that is, if I can pull myself away from reading enough to pick up my camera.

Techniques of the Observer, Washington State University Libraries

Suspensions of Perception, Texas Tech University Libraries

Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, BYU Libraries

The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, BYU Libraries

The Parallax View, Colorado State University Libraries

Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900, BYU Libraries

New Media, 1740-1915, University of Oklahoma Libraries

The Culture of Time and Space, Washington State University Libraries

Between Film and Screen, BYU Libraries

The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, University of Toronto Libraries

The Emergence of Cinematic Time, BYU Libraries

Can we please just stop with the heart hands already?

2013-02-25T22:57:00.001-08:00

Source: imgfave.com via Marc on Pinterest

I repinned the above photo to my pinboard "all in good fun"—the board devoted to gently mocking popular pins that I find amusing. Here was my caption:

Doctor: I'm sorry to inform you that your baby has been born with heart hands.
Mother: But I only did heart hands one time for that maternity photo, I swear!
Doctor: One time is one time too many.

In spite of my mockery, the photo was then repinned 412 times at last count onto boards like "cute picture ideas." So even though I have had enough of heart hands in all their various iterations, clearly the rest of the world has not.

Comments?

The New Year Post 2013

2013-01-16T00:12:00.000-08:00

Time to assess last year—ok, well. past time by about two weeks. It doesn't bode well for 2013.

First, the overall picture. Since I started this blog, number of posts per year is:

2008: 88 (which was in half of a year)

2009: 118

2010: 73

2011: 76

2012: *gulp* 45

Notice any trends? And then there's the fact that I feel like I should begin the blog with a confessional ("It's been more than a month since my last post.")

The average life span of a photoblog is two years. Actually, I just made that up. I have no idea what the lifespan of a photoblog is, but as a reader, I have seen many of them come and go. Will mine be next? Probably not. Will my posting become more frequent this year? I guess we'll see.

So, on to the day of reckoning for last year's goal....

2012 was to be the year of shameless commercialism. After my artsy "epic fail" project of 2011 during which I learned that success in gallery shows can be expensive, I vowed to devote myself to the commercial realm. The screen shot above (from art.com) shows that it was the year of black-and-white Paris photos over vintage text and the year of dogs. The year was off to a good start when about 10,000 prints sold in January. Things kept going (but at a slower pace) for the rest of the year, and then in May, I ran into a postcard rack with two of my dog prints.

I must be rolling in cash from all those sales, right? Not really, since my royalty payment is a modest percentage of wholesale. Not that I'm complaining (just trying to give an accurate picture). I know that some photographers only dream of galleries and high end art sales (and I'd love that, too), but I dream of seeing my photos on the art aisle of Target (or some similar store).

Advice to the new photographer—you can earn more money doing weddings. Nevertheless, I'm drifting away from the wedding market—at least at my old prices. I've decided that the absolute cheapest package I will now offer is $1800. The mid-range package (with album, engagement, wedding, etc. pretty much everything you really need) is $3400. The price increase, while not enormous compared to some (Jonathan Canlas, anyone?), definitely puts me out of the range of a lot of potential clients. Raising prices in bad economic times is a risky move, but I have a limited amount of time and my old prices just led me to resent the work.

Speaking of risky price increases, let's talk about Smugmug.

When Smugmug decided to double their annual fees for pro accounts with no corresponding increase in features/service, many people started looking for alternatives. Being a huge Smugmug fan, my response was to save money by attempting to customize my smugmug site to the point where I could dump my regular .com and hosting plan, thereby offsetting the price hike and streamlining my web presence. I spent hours trying to tweak code in Smugmug, but never finished and am not happy with the results so far. I still have until April to downgrade or abandon Smugmug before my annual renewal. So far, I'm pretty disappointed with Smugmug—not with their stellar customer service, but with the fact that they don't provide stylish website templates (just *meh* themes). Yes, you can tweak the code like crazy if you have the skills, but I don't have time to master java, CSS, and whatnot.

Back to last year's goals...

Last year, I said I would do an occasional tutorial (I did. not often.), some posts about books I'm reading, a "variety of projects," and hopefully some "real-life retouch" posts. The real-life retouch didn't happen, so I make no promises this year.

Also related to last year, my pathetic attempt at monetizing my blog with skimlinks has thus far earned me enough money to buy a couple of albums on iTunes. I'm sure I would have done better had I written more posts and spent more time trying to promote products, but hey—it's still money and I haven't cluttered my blog with ads, so I see no reason to remove skimlinks.

A word about Pinterest

On Jan 1, 2012 I had 146 followers on Pinterest. Today, I have 1,710. The ease of pinning (vs. writing posts) and the immediate satisfaction of seeing "likes" and "repins" and increasing numbers of followers means that I have more incentive to pin than to post. I can blame Pinterest, at least in part, for my decrease in blog posts, but I don't see it ever replacing my blog.

So what's this year's goal?

I don't know. To be honest, the Sundance film festival starts this week which means I will be watching movies non-stop for the rest of the month. I knew that if I didn't force myself to do this post tonight, then I might never do it—which ultimately shows that I still maintain at least some degree of commitment to my blog.

So if I force myself to come up with a goal, here, on the spot?

Portraiture. I want to get back to portraiture, preferably starting with my own kids. You can therefore expect:

one or more posts about my quest to redo a photo wall in my home
some portrait inspiration and experimentation
the occasional tutorial
???

And in a project unrelated to photography, 2013 will hopefully see this parked domain turn into the promotional vehicle for an amazingly cool French book (sort of the anti-textbook French textbook that will make pedagogues gnash their teeth and cry out in horror) I am writing (with boy-wonder Andrew of crustaceansingles.com ) for iPads everywhere.

That's as ambitious as this year gets. If you've made it to the end of this post, thanks, loyal reader! So nice of you to indulge my yearly New Year's rambling. I hope to repay you sometime this year with inspiration of some kind.

I'll be back post-Sundance.

Blue Paris

2012-12-07T17:31:00.001-08:00

Blue Paris, Marc Olivier

Texture, texture, and more texture.
I put enough layers of texture over this that it began to remind me of those metallic Kleenex boxes with abstract patterns on them from the 1970s.
Anyway, I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff about texture in my other life as an academic right now which is distracting me from photography. I'll try to merge some of it into my blog soon.

Sotheby's catalogue app

2012-12-04T23:01:00.000-08:00

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2012/so-buhl-collection-n08886/overview.html

Until tonight I had no idea that Sotheby's had an app (turns out they have several). Since I am not in the income bracket to bid on art auctions as a hobby (unless you want to count ebay), I had never sought out Sotheby's. Herbert Bayer's "Lonely Metropolitan" 1932 (the eye/hand collage pictured above) is expected to sell for somewhere between $300,000-$500,000. It's part of an amazing photography collection by Henry Buhl grouped around the theme of hands. It's a drool-worthy collection that includes photography by Walker Evans, Robert Doisneau, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Frank, Irving Penn, John Baldessari, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, William Eggleston etc. etc. It would be difficult to overstate how amazing this collection is. And how to I know? Because I just downloaded the free app and looked at the free catalogue in all its glory on my iPad. After registering, submitting a pedigree demonstrating noble lineage (kidding), you can access and download free catalogues such as "A Show of Hands," which is like getting free photo/art books. Most of the photos allowing zooming, and there are even short videos about some key pieces. I'm an instant fan and am thrilled that Sotheby's is willing to share this work with lowly Plebs who will not be getting a $600,000-$800,000 Jeff Wall photo in their stocking this Christmas.

update: If you want to see some of the collection in book form, your best bet is to get Speaking With Hands —a catalogue from the 2004 Guggenheim show of Buhl's collection. I snatched up a "very good" used hardcover about two minutes ago for around $20.