Advice for photography, and also for living.  If you can’t file down the subject lines and print your own field of endeavour in their place, you’re being FAR too literal.

A Reader Writes: I want to be a photographer someday. Any advice?

Yes, lots.

Go read this and let’s see what we can do. And then we’ll go shoot pictures.

This is inside Nino’s, one of a trio of Italian restaurants run by a lovely couple whom I got to photograph for the paper.

REALLY nice light in those places. They’re a little out of my budget, what with the crashing newspaper business and all, but if I skip a few meals now and then I can probably afford both the cash and the calories once in a while.

This is why it’s important to keep a camera handy… because you just never know.

Lock and load… there’s some pretty light out there this evening, too.

This is a Painted Lady, but I’m not expert enough to determine which variety (there are apparently four different flavors). Apparently it found the juice of my table-mates’ watermelon tasty enough to ignore a camera four or five inches away.

I wasn’t the only one that thought this was a good idea. The theatre seats were packed solid, and the hill was a couple of steps past SRO….

Much fun was had by all…

New day coming… Lock and load…

So. From the International Festival:

This is Justino Barrera of Mariachi Internacional de Houston providing vocals and Javiera Paz of HCC providing motion.

Alejandro Say, whose family hails from Guatemala, provided a bit of traditional color as well.

There were people there from pretty much everywhere there are people, and I’d have loved to have had more time to spend with them, talking and photographing, but they had classes, the colleague had deadlines, and I needed coffee. So…

It’s now a thoroughly beautiful day. I’m going back out; there are still more pictures… somewhere.

Basically the same shot as before, worked with a slight color tone. Going for that “aged” look.

And the Tea House in the Garden. This is the building at the right above, and the other side looks out on the pond. Very serence place. It’s quite pretty inside as well, but it’s closed most of the time….

Then there are the trees.

They tend to be tallish.

As I mentioned the new film holders for the scanner are on order; they’ll arrive, all else equal, toward the end of next week or early the next. It’ll be a week or so after that to get them dialed all the way in, then I’ll be rescanning these. It’ll be interesting to see how much difference it makes.

The “Zen Camera” is my name for one of my favorite experimental devices, a 6×12 pinhole camera from ZeroImage. It’s a very pretty camera to look at, beautiful teak and brass, and it positively glows in the light. It’s been an interesting experience to work with it, because unlike every other camera I’ve ever used, it doesn’t actually DO anything. The shutter is that little bit of wood on the front. Slide it open to start the exposure, slide it closed to end it. Film advance involves turning a knob. Viewfinder? Eh. It’s aimed kinda sorta about out there somewheres. I can usually get a reasonably decent take on where the center of the image is, plus or minus about ten degrees. The edges? Not my department.

With slow film in low light, it’s a meditative experience… you open the shutter, and then you and the camera take in the scene together. At some point, you reach up and close the shutter again, advance the film, and either shoot more or move on. But there are no cues at all from the camera that it has in fact recorded an image on film. I ran several rolls before my subconscious became willing to admit that yes, this IS a camera and yes, it DOES make photographs.

The downside is that my scanner doesn’t really handle 120 film very well as it is, especially since I’m working with some very old stock given to me by a colleague who was getting out of 120 entirely. It’s got a tendency to curl and pop, which makes the scans not very sharp. I’m ordering a new film carrier for it, which should help immensely, but it’ll be a few days or weeks before that’s up and running. So for now… it’s Art. It’ll be photography sometime soon.

Scanning more tonight or tomorrow.