RYAN AND BRITTA AND RANDOM STUFF

I took pictures of ryan for the first time in 6 months. We only had like 20 minutes before she had to run off to meet up with her boyfriend so they're pretty rough. I'm gonna go back and do them again better. Styling and makeup by Ryan. The first one is her directed photo and then I took over and took film photos. I like her freckles.

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NEW TOY

I was so fat when this was taken. Everyone's always like "you're not fat!" I don't know...I look pretty fat.

I got my beauty dish in the mail today. It's like a huge aluminum hubcap with a dingdong in the middle that the flash bouces off and then curls around in all directions and hits you in the face! Sort of an up close and personal light that you can use for a lot of things especially faces (i.e. makes girls and their makeup look pretty). It was cheap but took forever to get. I got it because I took these photos which were sort of a preliminary test of using T55. Polaroid's gonna stop making it at some point so I wanted to use it before it's gone. It's so contrasty that you need a lot of softness but then if I stuck a softbox right in their face there wasn't enough shadow and sparkle. I really wasn't happy with these and I decided to stop wasting film and try something different. Hopefully this light will improve things and I can use it for all kinds of things. For technophiles the first was shot was with a 180mm RZ67ProII with a 4x5 back, the second was an insanely close Symmar APO 300mm/5.6L.

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WEST COAST STUFF

I finally coughed up some photos. I'll even annotate them for a change.

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BLUEJAYS

My roommate and I got flowers for the window boxes I made today. I noticed that a bluejay family made a nest right outside my window. The mom was all cuddled up in there when I got up. In general the birds seem to be having a field day and yentaing it up to each other all morning so it must finally be spring.

DAMN

I had been yapping about Kurt Vonnegut to my little sister Britta this week and gave her a book. Then I was checking the news tonight on the web and caught the story just as it first started to appear. It made me feel creepy. It turns out that he and I went to the same college and both studied biochemistry despite having, on some level, no interest in it. This makes us members of a granfalloon, a bokononist term for a meaningless association of human beings that people take great pride in. Other examples of granfalloons are the Communist party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the International Order of Odd Fellows--and any nation, anytime, anywhere.

Galapagos was one of his best books and I'm surprised people don't mention it more. Writing in the eighties, when every member of the republican party was dismissing the seventies energy crisis and global warming, he describes one character as having had the silly and completely ridiculous idea that power could be generated for free using strange contraptions that harnessed energy from the sun and the wind. Also:

It is hard to believe nowadays that people could ever have been as brilliantly duplicitous as James Wait--until I remind myself that just about every adult human being back then had a brain weighing about three kilograms! There was no end to the evil schemes that a thought machine that oversized couldn't imagine and execute.

and so it goes.

BOOKMAKING

I'm going through tons of photos to make a preliminary website and book. It's like a pyramid. Preliminary work to get access to better models and makeup/hair people for more serious shoots to make a better book to get access to even better models etc... I think I'm gonna have to get help. I've looked at so many photos the critical part of my brain is in temporary paralysis. I shot some decent stuff right before vacation so I'll show a few here that are interesting or maybe not interesting but I like them at the moment.

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