lazy

I've been avoiding photography like the plague, ironically even when I now carry with me two cameras at all times. Don't ask. I just don't have it in me and every project I have is still in its conceptual phase. Also, I'm not interested in party photography -- to be honest at those occasions I'd rather hold a greyhound on my hand. God bless the people who do it in Boston though (Check David Day) Anyway, meanwhile waiting for photo Godot I've been shooting 6x7 on a borrowed Fuji Rangefinder (Fuji GSW690III -- "Texas Leica"). I just contradicted myself but trust me I have not, it's all been haphazard shooting without digging too deep. But finally last week I broke the 5D and headed out to the Middlesex lounge to go see Raster-Noton courtesy of Susanna from Non-Event. To quote Unlocked Groove/Make It New Selekta Alan Manzi, "these cats are loud". Fuck yeah they were, never heard sine waves that loud in my life. It was great.

Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, July 09, 2007, , links to this post




burned out

Needed a significant break from the rigor of the scholarship of early cinema (and that crash course on cinematography I decided to take). That was a lot of reading and research and at the end I felt I could have spent another year reading and researching. About a week ago, I finished school, handed in that final paper on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante and have not even thought about film or photography since.

Then the Canon TX1 finally arrived (3 months since I ordered it) . So I started shooting HD video, 720 @ 30p people! insane. I started covering the shots of all these mental storyboards I had in my head for the last three months. Just a quick exercise of the equipment and for my eyes but I haven't stopped since. Because it is fun, this little camera is about the size of a box of marlboro 100s, incredibly inconspicuous. I'll shoot for another week around Cambridge (I am not telling you what I am shooting right now), I will go at it on Final Cut Pro, and then I will upload it to Viddler, Virb, Vimeo, Blip.tv, or whatever site it is that the cool people have their eyeballs on. I will be doing a pulldown to 24P in FCP soon and see what that looks like (what's a 20% reduction of speed amongst friends).

So there is nothing about photography here. Let me add this then: I'm buying T-Max 100 on Readyloads and a JOBO 2521 to shoot 4x5 this summer on my converted 110B.

One last thing on Vigo, Brightcove has some of his films online. In order: À propos de Nice (1929). The documentary on the swimmer Jean Taris Taris, roi de l'eau (1931) here on youtube. Zéro De Conduite (1933). Jean Vigo's last film before his death at 29: L'Atalante (1934), a poem which I will always try to steal from like a Pixies record. The films on Brightcove are part of an "anarchist" film collection. Jean Vigo's father was a well known anarchist who was assassinated in prison under mysterious circumstances. The majority of the early criticism on Vigo's films made the simple assumption that they were all agit prop one way or the other and missed Vigo's important aesthetic concerns. Those few bars of Le théme d'amour always grab me.


First scene of L'Atalante:

Adblock

Labels: ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, June 04, 2007, , links to this post




WWJR



From Clay Eno's blog: What would Jesus Retouch?

Clever dude -- he is the person that originally got me thinking about the amount of non-darkroom type of processing I did to the photos: too much. I've turned that corner I feel a lot of new photographers encounter while trying to get that polished look hundreds of hours at a Watcom tablet do to the imagery that surrounds us. If you look at Clay's portraits you see human skin and it is beautiful. I'm a big fan of that now. Also, I recently read on Soth's blog that he did not have any big philosophical opposition to retouching. Fair enough, but I should have de-lurked and pressed him to expound on that (btw, he has, as usual, amazing work in the April issue of W). Maybe some other time.

Labels: , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, April 05, 2007, , links to this post




Emma

Emma

My idea of shooting Amanda from Baba Yaga at a lonely bus stop (an homage to Salty Dave's acrylic painting "Waiting for a Bus That Ain't Coming") did not fly with The Phoenix. Whatever. We ended up using a model from ModelMayhem land, Emma, who was a trooper because it was freezing outside at the Cambridge Common. That's a curve in LAB mode in Photoshop but the image was produced very flatly via another curve in Capture One (I wish there was a LAB mode or a way to add multiple curves in Capture One, I also wish somebody who wasn't blind and hated photographers redesigned the UI). There are two pocketwizard'd 580EX flashes providing cross fill in that shot as well as a small reflector.

Labels: , , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Monday, March 26, 2007, , links to this post




Eclectic Collective



I went ahead and did a massive sweep of my flickr bucket. It was really becoming a very bad habit to post photos without much editing under the pretense that "nobody important would see them". This, followed by the typical flickr response, inevitably skews your perception of the qualities of a particular image. Well, at least I found that to be the case. So now I'm back to using flickr to host images that have gone through my own behind-closed-doors editing process. Let's see how this works.

Now that this is done, I can spend time thinking what I'd like my new website to be like. I'm looking to strike a good balance between a typical photographer's website (i.e. a livebooks kind of thing, a branding site) and perhaps a photo blog (but not one that gets updated daily obviously). I'll see what I can come up with. Then the mythical portfolio gets printed...

Here is an old photo taken at the Middle East of the trumpet player of The Eclectic Collective back when I shot film (i.e. not that long ago, I just like saying that so I can sound cantankerous and cranky when in reality I'm still wet behind the ears). I think I was obsessed with rear curtain sync'ed flash and dragging the shutter back then. Oh I still am.

Labels: , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 15, 2007, , links to this post




The Good Fight


The customer is always right but I don't have to freaking like it. I don't have to take a photo I don't want to take. I know it is a banal observation but it is powerful and liberating. A friend recently quipped on an email:
"I get the feeling that a lot of people want a lot of really bad, really cheesy concept photography. Because there is tons of it and I think you have to try hard to make your pictures that lame"

I seem to find myself in the middle of fighting "the cheesy concept" fairly often. It's a hard battle and it takes its toll. I'm fairly aggravated with a client right now. Marina Warner when writing about the simplicity of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante writes "For it is often poverty of imagination that spins a great foam of dramatic incident in which to hide; richness that allows the banal its beauty."

I ran into Mike Slack's work recently when I read his interview in Andrew Long's fotolog.com (via 2point8). Afterwards, I found another interview with him at flashfilm.com that yielded an interesting tidbit:

"Instead of a favorite subject, I keep a long mental list of things that I try (and often fail) to avoid shooting. That list includes: funny-looking bushes; chain link fences; street signs; arrows of any kind; empty parking lots; painted brick walls; weeds; stairs; shadows; doors; rain gutters; tools; words; hats; the backs of people's heads; trash; trash cans; empty roads; plush toys; food; loading docks; telephones; cracked sidewalks; shopping carts; manhole covers; water towers; inanimate objects that resemble sex organs; airplanes; shoes; telephone wires; water puddles; clouds; stray dogs; ugly office buildings; brightly colored flowers; the ocean; empty hotel rooms; long hotel corridors; birds; air conditioners; fire hydrants; curtains; framed paintings; crashed cars; cell phone transmitters; and sofa cushions."

This list is obviously personal to him (and the "often fail" clause is a very important part of the power of such list) but it was very cathartic to write mine. But I'm not posting that list yet.



Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 15, 2007,




alright march, bring your ides!

A little more breathing room this time. Nothing exciting happening photographically up in my yard. Mostly spending my time doing the kind of work that pays rent in Boston (let me state the obvious here: not photography). Meanwhile I've been cleaning up the flickr bucket and re-examining a lot of of my photography to consider various ways to integrate it into my hopelessly out of date website. Perhaps I will finally print a couple of portfolios and send them out, recenter the website around better work... So much to do, so little time but I really need to take care of this.

I did get to see "Thin" By Lauren Greenfield as well as attending her talk about the process of making the documentary. I saw the first scene of that film about two years ago to this date I think. At that time I had gotten the impression the majority of the work was done. Not so. For somebody of the stature and talent of Lauren to work on this sort of time scale, as a dear friend pointed out, "bespeaks of the difficulties involved in making a documentary." So true. I won't bore you with a discussion of the film itself, that's for some other kind of blog, but you ought to go see it.

I'm also knee deep in the middle of surveying a great number of silent films from the 20s and 30s. It is incredibly inspiring to see how much was done with so little equipment (isn't that always the case?). Here are two of my favorite stills this week. First one is a frame out of the beginning of Zemlja (Earth) by the Ukranian Olexandr Dovzhenko. The second one is from the Dane Carl Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (youtube).





Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, March 01, 2007, , links to this post




who did this to my photo and why do they hate me?




Printed version:

Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Friday, January 26, 2007, , links to this post




"People don't dance no more, they just stand there like this"

New Year's Eve at the Square One loft in Fort Point was fun. I was wide open with a 35mm 2.0 at 3200 all night long, some bounced flash rear-curtained some of the time, gelled and/or bare-bulbed some of the other time. Some of the impromptu portraits weren't too bad either but I was so up close with the 35 that there is a photo-booth feel to them. Happy New Year to everybody.

Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Thursday, January 04, 2007, , links to this post




getting your hair done at the library

Janice's fashion piece on the Phoenix was published this week. It's cheeky and well written, read it. I liked the tone and the writing a lot more than the photo they picked for it. I have no one to blame, I sent it. But I liked this one better.

Labels: , , ,


posted by Ricardo De Lima @ Wednesday, December 13, 2006, , links to this post