christophe thinks out loud

Flickr

Because I'm lazy, and don't want to keep doing the make-thumbnail-get-HTML-upload thing here, I'll post future photographs to my Flickr account. You can see the Flickr badge in the right-hand column, on the main page.

Space Needle, Goose . . .

Just another day in liberal San Francisco

In brief, SF Muni fare inspectors and SFPD cops threaten to arrest someone under a non-existent law against taking photographs in Muni stations, and then threaten to trump up a bogus trespassing charge when the photographer refuses to be bullied.

My favorite part is where the cop accuses the photographer of wasting his time.

Picture

It's been a while since I've put a new picture up here. This is from a somewhat impromptu shoot on February 10th.

brrr.

Great idea for a photo shoot. I'm getting very cold just thinking about it, though.

Photo

Light, Albert Embankment, London, December 2004.

Larry Sultan: The Valley

So, why does The XXX Project bug me, and Larry Sultan’s work doesn’t? It’s a good question: they are both mainstream photographers who have ventured, like Victorian explorers, into the heart of the porn industry, and returned to tell the tale.

Part of it is that I just admire Sultan’s work, technically: damn, I wish I could light sets like he does. Part of it is while they are both playing amateur anthropologist, Sultan does not condescend as if the porn industry was a tribe of rare monkies. “This is the first time these Porn People have ever seen a Real Photographer. Let’s watch their interesting rites as they explore the shiny objects we present them with.”

For certain mainstream entertainment types who decide to check out the porn world, they make the ironic distance clear. They may be in the porn world, but they are certainly not of it. They want the reflected glamour of the porn world without acquiring the bottom-caste air that clings to those who actually work in it.

I don’t get that from Sultan’s work; it just seem friendly, not patronizing. (If you’re in San Francisco before 1 August, check it out at SF MOMA.)

Naked Porn Stars!

Perhaps I am just confused. I am sure that Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is a fine photographer. It is clearly true that he can correctly expose film. But can someone tell me why taking 30 pictures of porn stars, whose entire job it is to pose naked for photographers, is being treated as if Vermeer had returned to Earth, complete with HBO special and a gallery show in New York?

I mean, is calling a book of porn star images The XXX Project pretentious or what? I’m sure that legions of photographers are saying, “Naked pictures of Jenna Jameson and Nina Hartley? I have thousands of them! Why does he get a show?”

Oh, well. Jenna Jameson looks quite striking without porn star makeup.

Or maybe . . .

Or perhaps this will be the next cover. So many decisions!

The Next Cover?

I haven’t decided yet if this is going to be the cover of the next Blowfish catalog, but I love the image regardless.

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Statue, V. Vörösmarty tér, Budapest, 2002

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“Must Be,” London, 2001

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“You are the path you take,” London, 2001

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Pigeon deflector,
San Francisco, 2004

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Bird tracks in cement,
San Francisco, 2004

Canon PowerShot S50

I finally broke down and got a digital point-and-shoot camera. I’ve carried around a Yashica T4 for years, and I love it . . . but I was getting tired of missing shots because I hadn’t remembered to load it. Also, to be honest, most “look, there’s a great shot!” moments turn out to be not such great shots in retrospect, but you only discover that after you’ve paid to have the film processed.

The Canon PowerShot S50 seems to occupy the same niche as the T4 used to: It’s a point-and-shoot that Real Photographers won’t call you a girlie-man for using. Digital Photography Review has their usual encyclopedic review of the product.

I’ve only had the S50 for a couple of days, but here are some first impressions.

For a digital camera, the user interface is well-designed. (Although I’m a hardcore Nikon bigot when it comes to SLRs, I will freely grant you this: Nikon user interfaces suck, and their digital camera interfaces suck hard. I’m told the D2H has a good UI; I haven’t quite had the fiscal resources to investigate it.) If you don’t need to change the settings very often, the menu system is fine; otherwise, you can spend a while trying to find the particular setting you need.

As just about everyone who has reviewed the S40/45/50 has mentioned, the “joystick” multicontroller, which is used for just about everything, feels mushy and imprecise. Not a disaster, but something with a firm click would have been much better.

The shutter lag is annoying, like just about any digital camera currently on the market, but not nearly as bad as the previous generation of digital point-and-shoots.

The features that I find particularly nifty about the camera are:

Full manual modes — The S50 does, of course, have the stupid automatic modes that cameras are encrusted with these days, but you can defeat them and set aperature-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual modes. It even has a manual focus mode, although the autofocus seems fine.

RAW file format — You can save and download files in RAW format, and play with them later. This is very cool, especially if you didn’t set the white point quite right when you took the initial picture. The downside of this is that Canon’s software, at least for the Macintosh, is slow and stupid; I’m hoping that the RAW plug-in for Photoshop is less painful to use.

A macro focus setting — You can get up close and very personal. This is very nifty if you see just the right flower or whatever, and want to take an extreme closeup.

Custom white point setting — Like the big digital SLRs, you can set the white point against a photo gray card, or a white target. While you can in theory correct this later, it’s always better to get it right the first time.

All in all, it’s a nice little camera. It is a bit hard to find, and I suspect that Canon might be in the process of discontinuing it (it’s slightly over a year old, which is about 76 in digital camera years). Of course, this does mean that clearance prices might be forthcoming, too.

Basta le Barbie

The story of the Russian girl who won an on-line beauty contest despite not being the typical beauty queen type is utterly heart-warming. Even though I deal in a business that is sadly addicted to Barbie-types, often with tragic results, it is wonderful to see blows being struck against that being the only standard of female beauty.

Along those lines, I keep meaning to use this image somewhere; it being horizontal format makes it a bit harder to find a good use of it, but I love it none the less.

Richard Kadrey's Photography

Although I'm normally leery of Yahoo! Groups (they seem awfully curious about your personal details just to let you have access to a microscopic bit of space on their server), I'll make an exception to recommend the group for Richard Kadrey's photography.

One of his photos (see right) graced the cover of our first issue of Leviathan, our annual catalog. He's also the author of Metrophage, a book I quite enjoyed even if he seems somewhat embarassed by it now.

The Girls of April

We decided (well, OK, I decided) to run advertisements in Girlfriends and On Our Backs, since they are having anniversary issues and all. Unfortunately, the only images of two women that we had in our files were way too hot for Girlfriends, so a photo shoot was in order. After a few hasty emails and telephone calls, I got a couple of my favorite models to appear on late notice.

It's always wonderful to work with professionals. Thanks to both of them for the great results. (I'll do a proper gallery once a few more are scanned.)

Simon's Photos

Simon Pride takes much better photographs than I do, even if his level of gratuitous nudity is much lower.

Banned in Bentonville, 2

This is the image that we sent to them instead. How precisely this one is not "showing people having sex" compared to the other is one of those Talmudic questions that only publishers are able to decide.

Banned in Bentonville

I suppose I should take some pleasure in producing an image that was too racy for Mens Edge magazine to use. They say it was because they were just picked up by WalMart. Anything's possible, I suppose, although I notice that they didn't complain about the picture and description of the Aneros that accompanied the ad we sent in.