My Camera is Broken

My camera broke earlier this month and I haven't been able to make any new work. I was however, able to get some stuff shot for my senzaburu project around thanksgiving, thanks to my friend Billy the Kim Strong Ill. This is one of the test shots from that shoot.

It's been a while since I have been photographing portraits of other people, but I think this is probably one of my best. Most of the time you work really hard to find that one picture, out of thousands, that works the way you want it to work. Then sometimes it just drops into your lap in a single shot, making you feel kinda stupid for working so hard. This would be closer to the latter.

Seeing as it has finally snowed in Boston, I will be focusing on completing my senbazuru project for the next few months. Because of the seasonal nature of that project, if I do not finish it this winter I would have to wait another year to complete it. So if you don't see much new work from me in the next month or so, be patient, it'll come, and it'll be filled with awesome.

On Becoming an Art School Statistic

I almost didn't make a post this month. To be honest I actually haven't shot anything in over a month and have instead been taking a break from making any work until I get my life together. I have come to the very painful realization that at this point in my life, I really need a real day job to keep a roof over my head while I scrounge together enough time to make and develop my art. Thus I have enrolled in a TEFL certification program so I can teach English domestically and abroad and will be busy trying to support my broke ass for the next couple of months or so.

All that being said, I do have some projects in the works right now, and for my five loyal readers I can promise that come winter I will have some interesting work put up. But until then, this is what I've got.

I seem to have fallen into a somewhat predictable working method, I take something that I really don't like and see if I can turn it into something I do. If there is one particular genera of photography I find absolutely uninteresting or feel no connection to, it would have to be definitively landscape photography (an Ansel Adams fan, I am not). I grew up in the suburbs of Boston and have lived in cities for the last five years of my life, in short I have never really been much of a nature person. That is to say, I really didn't get the whole loving the great out doors thing until I tried it for myself.

Back in September, my family took a trip to Yellowstone national park, a time that I like to refer to as the "Tang Style Family Vacation Technique." Looking around as we touched down in Salt Lake city and prepare for the long drive into the park, things started to click for me. I had never seen a place with so much wide open space, and I started to see why some people are so crazy about spending time outside. If I were constantly surrounded by such majestic beauty, I probably wouldn't want to send much time indoors either. As I looked around and marveled at the sublime power of nature I began to understand why I once so steadfastly and ignorantly hated nature photography. Because I had never been to those kinds of majestic places that you often seen in sierra club calendars, I had no way of relating to them. However, with time and experience our tastes change, and things that once seemed so important way back when, may not seem so important now.

Spaceships

I have lost many hours of sleep recently due to my purchasing of Starcraft II. Because of this, my nocturnal status must have leveled up something like 10x. I was up around 4am the other night just as another gigantic fog rolled in through Boston. As I took a moment to step away from my computer, and commanding my masses of alien armies, I took a look outside and thought to myself "Holy crap! Boston looks like a giant spaceship!" Here, let me show you: