The eye of hurricane Rita passed directly over Lufkin, Texas (where I grew up) up last night. Damage was limited, mainly to houses hit by downed trees. Also the big rotating bull atop Bryan's Smokehouse and BBQ was knocked down. Sad yes, but I am sure the bull will rise again. The Lufkin Daily News has more details and photos. Trees fell on our house there. We don't know the full extent of the damage yet.

That's my dad hiding under the N. He was on a trip with some of his medical school friends which would date this picture to around 1959. I especially love the background of this picture... reminds me of one of those Pedro Infante movies my grandfather and I would watch together on late night TV... also for me it recalls great Trios we would play on my grandparents record player. Here are some songs that bring it all back: Novia Mia , Lloren Guitarras

If you were walking in the vicinity of Hicks and Atlantic this evening you might have heard a long loud man scream. A rat, one of the large armadillo-like ones that come up from the river, jumped off a fence using me as stepping stone on the way to the ground. So yeah, that was me. Inelegant I know.

Rion points out this strange and compelling photoblog from Poland. Rion's recent photos from Belize are pretty darn strong in their own right.

I've been a fan of Jose Luis's work for a long time. His recent portraits have been superb.

And the great Alec Soth gives a nice talk on Minessota Public Radio on the The art of taking someone's picture.

Yes that's Kim Jong Ill on horseback. I should explain. I was googling information on The Bern Institute for Xylophonics when I came across some fascinating quicktime movies from North Korean TV: Mo Kin, 3 year old "genius" plays the xylophone, Mo Kin sings!, Kim Jong Ill's Roses, Potato Pride, & North Korean High School Girls. All these videos are from the Roppongi Video Happy Hour a wacky variety show in Japan. There are more videos both North Korean (including the horseback one) and Japanese (some very very silly) available on the main robpongi thumbnail page.

I never found the page Xylophonics institute, if you can track it down, drop the url in the comments.

When I lived in LA I would often drive aimlessly around the neighborhood just to hear the end of a This American Life broadcast. Now of course, it's on the web, always available. Listen to After the Flood, last week's show on New Orleans, and you'll know why I never miss an episode. (real audio required)

Boing Boing has a nice link to early American color photographs from the Great Depression. Most of those images are Kodacolor or Kodachrome (as an aside, check out this page on how to date early Kodachrome slides). I've long been fascinated with early photography from the generation before this, ie from the turn of the century. Most of these are Autochromes, the first widely available color photo process invented by the Lumier Brothers.

This is a pretty good timeline of the development of color photography.

The image below is from WWI for me it shows why Autochromes are compelling... there is just something so tangible and accessible about them versus early black and white or hand colored images.

Some linkage: early Russian photography, early French photography, World War I color photography, & a sampling of Lumiere Studio work. More WWI photos here and here (pages 6-8). This gallery of framed autochromes shows how saturated and "real" they can be.

Autochromes are often available on ebay, just search for Autochrome.

Update: Exhibition at UK's National Media Museum: Autochome- The Dawn of Color

Hardcore Mac geeks read on, everyone else: as you were.

Recently I've been tormented by some mysterious preference files that keep showing up in my system folder with jibberish names. Tracking down which app has been writing these files as been difficult. Also my hard disk has been spinning seeming at random when I'm not doing anything. This too was hard to troubleshoot.

FSEventer to the rescue. This little program opens up a graphical display window that shows you every file written to disk (including invisible files) and gives authorship information with a click. Despite the esoteric name it features a friendly interface and is fun to watch (to see it go nuts fire up a browser and hit some MS sites which write a million cookies). I managed to track down both of my mysterious problems in minutes. This is a good little program for your toolbox.

My mom's birthday just past. She would have been 60 which is hard to imagine. She was only 45 when she died, 21 when she had me. In my mind she is always young, although always still my mother, the adult. Her voice rings clear in my head and I'm sure it will remain so when I am an old man. The Mexican side of me holds death close.

My grandmother had 10 brothers and sisters, nine of them preceded her in death, and yet she always spoke of them as if they were guests expected at any moment. She would catalog stories of their lives, but would always end by noting their burial places often lamenting the fact that they were not together to more easily talk in the afterlife. From the age of 3 until I was in my 20's at the end of every visit she would whisper, "hug me tight because this is the last time you will see me in this world." She would often press pictures of herself in my hands so that I wouldn't forget "when I am gone."

My mother's pictures, letters, and other small things scattered around the house do not provoke melancholy, but instead remind me how much I have to live up to for my own son. It is a strange bargain knowing that the more we give of ourselves, the more open we are to pain, but the more alive we become.

Octavio Paz, one of my favorite poets writes, "To the inhabitant of New York, Paris, or London death is a word that is never uttered because it burns the lips. The Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it, it is one of his favourite playthings and his most enduring love."

Even if you've seen this disco video before, it deserves to be seen again. (Via WFMU)

Another photography related email comes from Ruby a junior high school student who asks: "What advice do you have for me so that I can take pictures like yours? I want to post them online."

Hmmm. Well Ruby I think the goal would be not to take pictures like mine or someone else's, but to take pictures that are your own, that show a little bit about how you see the world. For me photography is not about what you choose to shoot, but about what you choose to leave out. And ultimately it's all about emotion. What do you love? Or hate? What things do you see that other people miss? What moves you?

Highly biased advice:

I've been taking pictures most of my life so it's pretty much organic. Know your cameras. Feel comfortable with them. Get to the point where you don't have to think about how to make the camera do what you want it to do.

Tell a story.

I always tell myself to get closer. The closer you get (within reason) the more emotion you will find.

Long lenses are not a substitute for getting closer.

If you are shooting people look your subjects in the eye.

Slow down. Hang out with your subjects. Try waiting 10 minutes before pulling out the camera, or better yet, an hour.

Wait for the light to get better.

One of the silliest comments I see again and again is "nice depth of field" (ironically usually posted when the depth of field is shallow. People have gotten so used to digital cameras with high ISOs that stop down and keep everything in focus that they have forgotten the possibilities of wide aperture photography. Ditto for slow shutters speeds and motion. This said, don't let the wide aperture become a crutch. Just because you've focused on something at f 1.4 doesn't mean it's interesting.

Don't post pictures of cats (dogs are ok, dogs show emotion, but be sparing).

Avoid clichés. Some common clichés: zoo pictures, pictures shot and then modified with stock Photoshop filters, sunsets, flowers (unless your audience is full of horticulturalists nobody cares), abandoned buildings, graffiti, mannequins, people in clown makeup (or some other silly costume), fall foliage, water on glass (usually shot with a wide aperture), random people walking down an anonymous street, people in wacky t-shirts, pretty clouds, silly signs, empty roads, seagulls, swans, ducks, water reflections, couples on the beach.

Just because you shoot with a macro lens/holga/polaroid doesn't make it interesting.

When taking travel photos try to avoid the touristic. What is touristic? If you see a gaggle of tourists shooting in a particular spot, the images taken from there will be touristic. If it should be on a postcard, it's touristic. Photos of "natives" in tribal dress shot with a long lens, usually smiling at the photographer are touristic.

Turn off automatic stuff: auto-focus, auto-exposure, auto-whatever. Make some decisions.

Edit. Edit. Edit. (I am horrible at this.)

Shoot black and white now and then.

When I choose a picture to post I ask myself "so what?". If I can't answer that for myself, I figure it's not worth posting.

Experiment.

Have fun.

I've had a 2 or 3 requests recently via comments and email to explain my process from shot to post on my photoblog. It's not complicated:

Digital

1. Take picture

2. Use Photoshop's Raw import to select white balance, bump up sharpness, etc. (usually I just use the default settings).

3. Resize in Photoshop

4. Post to Movable Type.

Film

1. Take photo. (Usually w/ Nikon FM2 or FM3 & 24mm lens)

2. Develop negatives.

3. Scan negatives with Nikon Coolscan 5000.

4. Resize & unsharp mask if needed.

5. Post to Movable Type.

In some interior shots I use Photoshop's autocolor to correct for tungsten.

My scanner doesn't deal well with negatives with wide exposure range and the dark part of the photos often come out looking underexposed so in those cases I use Photoshop's "curve's" tool to adjust.

Most of the stuff I've posted recently was shot on film.

After a night of hanging out with Jay and listening to The Rivals, a local band whose lead singer is a doctor by day.

But while wandering around Red Hook with my family and looking out over the water towards Manhattan I remembered it is September 11th. "September 11th" has been so co-opted by our president and his party for crass political gain and war mongering that even the silent mental recitation of the phrase made me feel queasy. But of course it is absurd to allow the petty vainglorious machinations of the current administration interfere with remembrance of what is all of ours to bear.

I was not here in 9/11/2001. I had left town on September 5th on one of my sojourns half a world away. On the eleventh I was in the mountains cut off from all communication. I didn't hear about the attacks until almost a week later, and even then the information was incomplete. It wasn't until I landed in Hong Kong almost a month after the fact and walked into a newsstand in the deserted airport that the full scale of the destruction hit me. The rows of magazines with pictures of the towers, the victims, and the aftermath was shattering... almost incomprehensible, but of course everything was over.

Never did I have to suffer the urgent fear of not knowing what was going to happen next so prevalent on that day. It was much later still that I discovered a friend of mine, Suria Clarke had been working for Cantor Fitzgerald and had perished in the North Tower. She had been in a division of the company known as eSpeed and I didn't know it was connected to Cantor. I tried to contact her on my return to New York and found her phone dead. I had assumed she had moved and that I would hear from her soon. Only after suggesting to a mutual friend that she be a guest at a dinner party did I learn the awful truth.

Suria had a quality one so rarely finds in New York: she was an utterly reliable friend. I could call her late on a Monday night for dinner and she would arrive within the hour in good spirits and with 2 or 3 good stories to tell. She was always up for a movie or drinks or an exploratory walk around an unknown neighborhood. As both a Brit and a new arrival she had sharp eye for the absurdities of this city which she loved dearly. She of all people would be horrified by so much of what has been done in the name of the victims. Any tragedy becomes amplified if you have some connection to it and Suria's loss even more than the holes in the sky made it all hit home for me.

...
Photos from that day from the nonist.