B Sides Playing Cards

With Halloween fading in the rearview the holiday shopping period is just around the corner. In the true spirit of the season I'm pawning merch.

I've produced a set of playing cards featuring some of my photos. They're called B SIDES, and you can purchase them at the bottom of this post. Specs:

• Standard size deck (3.5" x 2.5") contains 52 playing cards plus two jokers.

• Card front features b/w photo visually depicting the face value of the card. Card backs feature TV test screen pattern.

• Photos selected from In-Public, family shots, unseen B Sides and outtakes, and other 35 mm personal favorites.

• Made by Printer Studio, printed on 100% casino quality paper stock. Production quality is excellent.

• First edition limited to 75 decks.

• Includes clear protective case and two handmade 5 x 7 RC photos.

I think of B SIDES as a placeholder for the photo book I haven't yet gotten around to making. In some ways it's even better than a book:

• Inexpensive— A typical photography monograph costs $40+. A pack of B SIDES is $12. That's a $28 dollar savings for every pack bought. Buy 100 and you just made $2800. If you buy enough packs we could both get rich.

• Malleable— A typical photography book is carefully sequenced and meant to be read in one particular order. A pack of B SIDES can be sequenced in 8 x 10^67 ways. Don't like a certain sequence? Just reshuffle.

• Portable— A typical photography book is large, unwieldy, and precious. A pack of B SIDES fits in your pocket, protected by a plastic case.

• Entertaining— When you finish reading a typical photography book, it's done. But when you finish browsing B SIDES you'll find yourself holding a deck of cards. Play games, build card houses, do magic tricks. The possibilities are endless. And when you get tired of card games, Bingo! You've got photos to look at.

• Versatile — Photography books normally appeal only to photo geeks. But B SIDES have multiple appeal. They make a great stocking stuffer for the family shutterbug or the family cardshark.

• • •

Orders accepted now. Cards will begin shipping in late November.


Sorry, folks. As of 9/4/12, this item has SOLD OUT. If there is enough interest I may print a second edition. Please email if interested and I'll let you know if/when a second edition is released.

Beer | Camera

Fore!

Today marks the fourth trip around the sun for this blog. Time for a bit of self reflection. What's the point? What do I get out of it? What lasting impact might it have? What's it all mean anyway? These are standard questions in any pursuit. The unexamined life, Socrates bla bla bla. Yet it's surprising how seldom they come up in photo blogs. A blog's raison d'être is generally unspoken and assumed. But think about it. You'd never throw a portfolio of photos out into the world without some artist statement to provide context. Why should a blog be any different?

Time for a bit of self reflection
Photoblogger Kirk Tuck addressed some of these issues in a well written post last week. He explained why he started Visual Science Lab, what he gets out of it, and what readers might take from his blog. Before reading that post I'd never paid much attention to VSL but now I've started to tune in. It can be a bit tech-heavy but the natural impetus shines through. It's written by someone who thinks about photography a lot, and the blog is a natural outlet.

Ironically Tuck wrote his post only after he'd quit blogging. Two years into it he realized he devoted many hours every week to something with no financial remuneration. The posts he cared about received few comments, and the gear reviews which he found tiresome received raves. On top of all that were the antagonistic comments from anonymous nitpickers. He didn't need it, so he quit.


That lasted roughly two weeks. That's how long he was on the blog wagon before he fell off again and VSL resumed. A die hard blogger.

If Tuck was being fashionable he wouldn't have restarted. After a banner run in the late 2000s, photoblogs have recently fallen out of style. You don't see too many starting up nowadays as people have migrated to Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Meanwhile, several of yesteryear's stalwart photoblogs have gone into remission. Jeff Ladd, Amy Stein, Susana Raab, Rachel Hulin, Tim Atherton, Andrew Stark, the list goes on. I'm not sure if they've officially quit or are on hiatus but either way the silence is deafening.

I can empathize. Every few weeks I swear I'm done. I can't write B forever. Other projects beckon. So I'll quit after the 1000th post, or the new year, or my birthday, or some other arbitrary point in the future. Back in February I came very close but I couldn't quite pull the trigger. So here I am four years after I started, still tied to my digital albatross.

My basic motivation has been the same since the beginning. I am often thinking about photography and I need a place to file those thoughts. So they go into a folder. At any given time this folder contains 5 or 10 rough drafts in various stages of refinement. Occasionally I get off my ass and complete one. I could put these in a private journal, which is what I did until a few years ago. It worked fine. But if I'm going to write this stuff anyway why not share? Get some feedback even.

B's Central African market penetration from 2007 (Q3) to 2011 (Q3) still lags behind industry leaders. Upward revision expected by QE2
This is where you, dear reader, enter the equation. A blog post operates a bit like a photograph. It doesn't become fully activated until it finds its audience. Tuck's essay reveals just how dependent he was on his readership for feedback. In fact it was reader response which caused him to restart VSL. I think many bloggers feel the same. We like to feel like we're somewhat in control, but really it's the forces beyond our control —the readers— who add the spice.

I know there's more to it. Tuck would do what he does regardless of audience. I would too. But it wouldn't be as much fun. A blog becomes most interesting when it's a two way street. I'd even be up for a three-way or a four-way.

All of which is to say that although I may come off as not giving a shit if you comment, I actually do care. If you have feedback, suggestions, reading tips, skincare secrets, and/or life advice, let me know (especially you, Sergei). In any case, I appreciate all readers whether or not they comment. Keep tuning in because I've got some interesting projects in the pipeline assuming I don't quit before I get to them.

Yours,

The sprig and the optimal lag

True to my 4 month shutter lag, I've finally begun printing some of my sprig pictures from the summer. The problem isn't as bad as I'd expected. In most photos the sprig blends easily into the scene.


Sometimes it's more pronounced but even then it doesn't dominate the photo. If I hadn't told you what it was you might think the sprig below is a leaf in the foreground. Maybe.


Getting a bit more bothersome in the next photo. Still I can live with it. Which is good because I'll have to during the next few weeks of printing.


It's not too hard to remove the sprigs in Photoshop, especially from these low-res web jpgs. The photo below is an example. It had two sprigs. I've removed the one from the lower left corner but kept the other one shaped like a cat.


This method works fine for digital images but removing the sprig from darkroom prints is a pain in the ass. Since that's where I do my printing I'm leaving it in.

As I've hinted above, I don't actually mind it much. I've come to think of it as a sort of beauty mark. What would Madonna or Marilyn Monroe be without their moles? What would wet collodion pictures be without developer stains? It's like a negative ballistic, the way a Hexar leaves a little notch on one side of the frame or a Hasselblad leaves two. When you see these notches you know what camera made the photo. When you see my sprig you know who shot it and when. I suppose I could get the same point across by scratching a big X with a date across every negative but that takes more effort.

Bob Dylan with Suze Rotolo, 1963, Don Hunstein
Photo of the young sprig unearthed after a 45 year lag
(Note ballistic notches on left)
It might seem crazy to wait so long to make prints. After all, wasn't it just such a delay that created the "problem" in the first place? If I did things in a timely manner the sprig never would've endured a month.

But I like waiting. I think lag is healthy, maybe even necessary. Memories interfere with judgment. You have to trick them by delaying. Right now my lag is about 4 months. If I shoot something today, I won't see a print of it until next February. Hopefully by that point when I look through my negatives I won't immediately recognize them. And when that happens, Bingo! I will see them the way others see them. Which is what I want. Which is invaluable.

4 months works ok, but I've been trying to gradually extend that to a year. Right now my shooting slightly outpaces my printing. I shoot around 50 rolls per month and print around 45. If I hold to that pattern, by 2018 my backlog will be one year.

The king of lag, shot by Judy Winogrand in the late 1960s
Actually the optimal backlog is probably longer. Ten years would be great. Twenty even better. But then mortality begins to enter the equation. The thing is I need to wrap all this shit up at some point. Put a bow on it. Which means I can't have 20 years of crap in the production line indefinitely. So my goal is a one year lag, at which point I will equalize my shooting and printing to keep pace with one another.

Or maybe I'll get lucky. 2018 is still far off. I'll be inhaling a lot of darkroom fumes in the interim. Maybe my memory will be so destroyed by then that I won't have to worry. I'll look at yesterday's film and wonder who shot it. If I'm lucky the whole damn photo will look like one big unrecognizable beauty mark.

U.N. marks birth of the world's 7 gazillionth photo

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LAGOS, NIGERIA, NOVEMBER 1, 2011 -- One South African mother, just 19, named her new photo "Enough" and shrugged off a nurse who questioned whether she was old enough to know how many photos she wanted.

In Nigeria, new photos have to share a folder on a crowded public desktop that doesn't have enough electricity.

"Where there is life, there is hope," their mother said. But as the world's number of photographs surpasses 7 gazillion, fears were stirred anew about how the planet will cope with the needs of so many images.

The 7 gazillionth photo? Image by Nathalie Bardou / AP
The United Nations marked the milestone Monday, even though it is impossible to pinpoint the arrival of the globe's 7 gazillionth photo because billions of photos are made and deleted each day.

At Lagos photography ward, the strain of caring for a burgeoning photo population was evident. The droning roar of a generator could be heard throughout one hot ward, where it powered ceiling fans and incubators. While Nigeria is oil-rich, it does not produce nearly enough power for its more than 160 billion photos.

Nigeria's megacity of Lagos is expected someday to surpass Cairo as the continent's most photographed. Globally, India, with 1.2 quadrillion photos, is expected to overtake China as the most numerous image base around 2030, when the Indian photo count reaches an estimated 1.6 quintillion.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the day was "not about one new photo or even one generation" but "about our entire human family."

At a news conference in New York, he noted "a world of contradictions" - famine in the Horn of Africa, fighting in Syria and elsewhere and widespread protests against economic inequality. Yet none of these factors has slowed the exponential growth of photos.

"Seven gazillion photographs is a challenge," he said, and "at the same time, an opportunity, depending upon how the international community prepares for that challenge."

Demographers say it took until 1895 for the world to reach its first million photos and a century more until it hit 2 billion in 1995. Soon the numbers began to cascade: 3 trillion in 2000, 4 quadrillion in 2005, 5 quintillion in 2010, 7 gazillion today.

The United Nations estimates the world's photo count will reach 8 hexillion by 2025 and 10 heptillion by 2083. But the numbers could vary widely, depending on archivalness, access to image control, deletion rates and other factors.

"Overshooting remains one of the major challenges to social and economic development," Li Bin, director of the U.N. Photography Planning Commission, told the AP.