Memo To Self II

The Blues, Hip Hop and Photography

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:22:56 -0500

I love music more than I love photography. I think of myself as a blues musician who uses a camera instead of a guitar to express myself. Photographing music and the lifestyles that go along with a partticular genre is a very difficult task. The photographer, given enough time must become part of the world he or she is photographing.

The two best photo essays I’ve ever seen on music just happen to come from William Albert Allard and David Alan Harvey. Allard captured the great American wolrd of the blues while Harvey went deep into the modern day blues of Hip- Hop. Both photographers were around 60 years old when they shot these pictures. I hope I can continue to grow as these two artists have done.

Check out their great work here:
http://www.davidalanharvey.com/#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=2

http://www.davidalanharvey.com/#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=3

http://www.williamalbertallard.com/collections.php?view=28

It Is Now

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 18:58:29 -0400

“The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

We have moved on. Left behind a period of darkness and changed physical locations as if geography was the culprit all along. A new place to call home and yet we find ourselves sleeping in beds that are hundreds of miles from our own. The new life is one of constant movement, setting up shop like the traveling carnival on the edge of town. I am almost always more comfortable when I am among strangers and although we are with friends I no longer feel like the same person they knew a year ago.

It as if I have been released from my self imposed shackles and am just beginning to find a voice that I knew was lurking somewhere deep within my soul just waiting for the right moment to whisper in my ear and guide me to find, not what I thought I was looking for but what I was meant to find.

I no longer question the journey, rather I accept it and follow it’s path through good and bad knowing that true wisdom comes just as often through pain and uncertainty as it does from what we are told is pleasure and success. The shadows often give birth to as much creativity as the light.

I am also aware that things are always changing and I must take advantage of these bursts of creativity
while they last.

KH

If You Keep Moving, They Can't Catch You

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:35:42 -0400

We have begun our move. We still don’t have a place to live in Sacramento but were heading up there later today to try and find a place. We thought we had a condo but it fell through at the last minute so the search resumes. We have started the ugly packing process and yet it seems as if we have done nothing.

I like the idea of starting over but am dreading the actual move itself. I keep telling myself that things will get better once we are settled but the uncertainty of the whole thing is just enough to add an edge to everything that happens this summer.

We will be downsizing from a house to a smaller condo without a yard. Our plan, once we get back on track is to try and work enough to pay the bills and return to the time when we traveled as much as we could afford. We have learned over the past few years that we need far less than we thought. For me, that consists of enough room for my books and music, some nice walls to hang photos and nearby access to good fly fishing. And streets to roam for the photography that keeps me from going insane. Honestly, If we could afford to do it I think we would travel full time and live in hotels. But since that won’t likely happen we will make the best of what we have and take things as they come.

One of the other things I’ve learned about myself is that I’m really not cut out to live a 9-5, wait for the weekend kind of life. I need to keep moving to stay creative and don’t really have the same longing for home that others do. Home is wherever we are.

Both Anna and I grew up in families that moved all over the world. My family moved every three years or so and I changed schools so often that I don’t even remember how many I attended. It shapes your personality and leaves you feeling that there just might be something better around the corner.

The corner is in sight.

KH

Going Electric

Sun, 10 Jun 2012 16:50:02 -0400

I never imagined that the use of a camera phone would induce such opposition from so many established professional photographers. By nature, photographers, especially those who spent years in the rigid and now dying world of newspapers are afraid of change. Change has brought stunning developments in technology that have evened the playing field so that a talented amateur photographer with an iPhone and an imagination can create images that just years ago were the domain of the pro. Many, but not all newspaper photographers are stuck in a Life Magazine world where every picture looks exactly the same and any deviation from the standard composition is deemed “artsy” and therefore a bad picture. This has never been true of European photographers who have for years stretched the limits of the medium and as a result produced much more interesting pictures. I’ve never shared the view of these visual neanderthals and struggled with this concept during my years working at newspapers. I remember a conversation I had with a well known Associated Press photographer years ago. I was sharing a darkroom with him in the middle of Kansas and he noted that I was taking longer to print my pictures than he was. “Ya know,” he said, “we’re in the business of getting a picture to people so that it can line a birdcage in 24 hours, not so they can hang it on their wall.” That thought stayed with me. No, I thought, I do want to make pictures that people can hang on a wall and look at for years. The average news photo has a shelf life of about 24 hours. One of my former photo editors and best friends, Russell Yip and I use to edit images by talking about which one was likely to have the longest shelf life. It was one of the few times when I was able to publish the pictures I liked as opposed to the ones that fit the preconceived ideas of what a newspaper photograph should look like. Which brings me to the recent comments I’ve received concerning my use of the camera phone. A number of professional photographers have made statements about how bad the quality of the images are and how “it just doesn’t look professional” to use a phone to shoot pictures. Several of those making the comments have admitted that they have yet to use the iPhone camera and are basing their opinions on the pictures their uncle Stan is taking of his backyard flowers or their teenage nephew’s drunken pictures of his buddies flipping off the camera at the local beer barn. Most of all, they are just afraid of change. The iPhone camera is not perfect, far from it, but for certain types of photography it is a great leap forward. Everyone has a smart phone now so when I break mine out in a public place no one even notices that I’m shooting pictures. The photography that has always interested me is street photography. People often ask me if they can go out and shoot pictures with me. I am not at all afraid of sharing what I know and would not object to holding a workshop on street photography but when I’m actually working I prefer to be alone. Many of the pictures I shoot, including several shown in this post were made while I was doing something else. The iPhone allows me to have a camera with me when I go to Target, out to get a bite to eat, taking my parents to a Dr.’s appointment and anything else I need to do. I don’t always “go out shooting pictures” so much as I just live my life and photograph whatever comes my way. I am continuing to work on my bus stop series and plan to make a Blurb book when I’m done. Most of the pictures shown here are from that series. I’m including some links to the photography that influenced and continues to influence me. There are others but this is a good place to start. http://www.atgetphotography.com/The-Photographers/Garry-Winogrand.html http://www.webbnorriswebb.com/#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=8&a=1&at=0 http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/01/frank/index.html My biggest influence however is not a photographer at all, but a musician. The life and work of Bob Dylan played the biggest part in forming my ideas about art. Dylan caused waves of horror in the music world in 1966 when he switched from the acoustic folk music that launched his career to full on electric rock and roll. The music was force unlike anything since the early work of Elvis but it was greeted by outrage and near violence. Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” has some incredible footage of both the music and the reaction of the stunned and angry fans. Pete Seeger tried to cut the cord to the amps with an axe. The music world was changing and the old guard hated it. Dylan never blinked and kept following his dreams. “Dylan’s attitude, according to roadie Jonathan Taplin, was, “Well, fuck them if they think they can keep electricity out of here, I’ll do it.” I see some similarities in what’s happening with photo technology. There are no rules. KLH

I Aint Got No Spare

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:47:00 -0400

“I ain’t got no spare/I ain’t got no jack/I don’t give a shit/I’m not going back”
― Tom Waits

It’s taken a bit of trauma in my life to somehow find the dark cave where my creativity has been camped out in hibernation for the past three years but I have been seeing signs lately that the bear is coming out of his stupor and is ready to go back to work.

I never for a moment thought it was completely gone but it was obvious that I had to erase years of hearing the voices of office bound editors telling me what he picture must look like before I even picked up the camera. Who knows maybe that voice is my own, doubting my vision, whispering in my ear that no one will want to see these pictures I’m taking and what I first thought looked cool maybe is nothing more than a random collections of objects that no one will want to look at?

Those voices will likely never go away for ever but I have reached a place where I no longer care if anyone’s looking over my shoulder giving me the thumbs up as I do my work. I know what I want to say and I’m quite happy making photographs for myself. Others are welcome to come along and enjoy them but it’s obvious to me that I work better when I think less. Act first. I can always think later.

My work with the camera phone has been a big part of my recent excitement for photography. It’s a tool that allows me to have the least amount of camera equipment necessary to get the picture I want. I’m not a camera geek so the less between my eyes and the subject, the better. I have used nothing but my IPhone for the past three months.

I am no expert. I’m just shooting tons of pictures and making lot’s of mistakes. I’m sure I’m doing plenty of things wrong but so far the camera/app combos described below have been working pretty well for me. I’m sure I’ll discover more features every week.

I am using a number of apps with my pictures. I use the Camera + app for the actual camera. The default camera works well too but Camera + seems to have a really nice exposure lock that can make all the difference in getting some of those high contrast images. Other people may find good results with other camera apps but this works well for me. Camera + also offers a number of light settings like backlight, darken, cloudy etc. You can crop and and special effects as well.

After shooting in Camera + I will usually crop the image into a square in the same app or occasionally brighten or darken the image and save it to the camera roll.

Next I open the image in another app called Snapseed which also features a camera but I go straight to the controls that include the ability to do selective dodging and burning (they call it selective darken and brighten) by moving your finger along the area of the screen you want to change. It also features a sharpen tool, choice of frames and several other features like Grunge and Vintage which I have not used. It also allows you to straighten a crooked image just like in Photoshop.

Once I’ve finished with Snapseed I again save the changes to the camera roll and then open the picture in Instagram and apply whatever look seems to fit the picture and seconds later it’s online. Magic.

I am still photographing the project on my parents and have included a picture of my mom in an elevator to a Dr’s appointment as well as a photo of my dad being released after a month in a hospital and nursing home and am beginning to return to my favorite subject, the streets of wherever I am.

KH 5-22-2012.

Sometimes Things Just Break.

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 21:22:31 -0400

“The days slide by
Should have done, should have done, we all sigh…”
― Warren Zevon

Enjoy every sandwich.”
― Warren Zevon

Less than two weeks after my mom was suddenly hospitalized my father took another fall in the middle of the night and was taken by ambulance to a Sacramento hospital. He has numerous health issues and has essentially been unable to walk under his own power for quite some time. He is stubborn and proud however and refuses help. Twice while visiting in the past month he has taken a bad fall in the middle of the night while trying to get to the bathroom. This time I was fast asleep but woke up with a feeling that something was wrong. Sure enough, he had fallen and couldn’t move. He was a dead weight and as much as I tried, I couldn’t lift him. He had hit his head and elbow on the tile so we called 911. The paramedics were wonderful and managed to get him up and onto a stretcher.

So, at 3:30 am my mom and I drove across town to the hospital while we waited for test results. He was admitted and has been in the hospital ever since. After talking with the Dr’s and case workers we made the tough choice to have him transferred to a nursing facility to see if he can regain the strength to walk under his own power. He is still in the hospital until he’s a little stronger but by mid week should be transferred to a live-in facility. We have no idea if this will be a permanent situation or not.

My mom has been caring for him by herself and it has been killing her. She has been ill several times this year herself and just can’t seem to escape the stress of being a caregiver for both herself and my dad. I have experienced enough of this to understand how exhausting it can be. Wondering all night if he is going to get up and take a fall takes it’s toll. My mom is always tired and despite her heroic efforts, needs help.

There’s a lot more to do this week and plenty of tough decisions to make.

All photos shot with an iPhone.

Sunday with the iPhone

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:59:00 -0400

I spent a little time walking around with my iPhone today. Just shooting street scenes. This camera is such a wonderful tool for the type of photography I love. Unless, I’m being paid, the iPhone is now my camera of choice.

The tools change, the pictures don't

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 23:09:14 -0400

My recent purchase of an iPhone has provided me with an unexpected and quite welcome increase in my passion for photography. I have a love/hate relationship with cameras. I love making photographs but hate carrying a bulky camera everywhere I go. My favorite camera by far is the Leica rangefinder but the cost of film and processing has kept me from using it much lately. I’m also quite lazy and the real enjoyment of photography comes from the experience of being someplace and capturing the image. The rest, as Hunter S. Thompson once said is “pain”. And to cure the pain, someone pays me to caption, process and transmit the picture to the appropriate publication. I just like walking around places and taking pictures. That’s enough for me. If I could have a camera implanted in my forehead I would be quite happy.

Which brings me to the iPhone. I love it. I can keep it in my pocket and bring it out in places where a full sized camera would draw too much attention. The quality is good enough for my use and although I would like to see some improvements in exposure control and shutter speed, I’m sure those will be here soon enough.

So, for now, I have been playing with the camera, shooting snapshots and working on a documentary project on my parents. I’m having fun with photography again and that is a gift that will allow me to avoid even thinking that I can ever do a “real” job ever again.

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

It was cloudy all year.

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:42:00 -0500

There’s no way sugarcoat it, 2011 was about as fun as a jalapeno laced enema. I’ll spare you the details but I’m quite convinced that the ten photos here do reflect a certain glimpse into the darkness that seemed to be just a couple of steps behind me for most of the year. I’m not a commercial photographer so if I can somehow share with people a sense of the things I was feeling and seeing when I made the photograph then I have done my job. Look at these pictures as diary of moods.

Oh, The Zumanity

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 20:44:36 -0400

After pretty much keeping myself cooped up like a mutant lab rat for the past week, I joined Anna and our friends Mark and Kristy for a night at the zoo. If animals have any sense of time they were probably wondering why the fleshy, mostly hairless apes were staring at them after closing hours. It was one of those after hours events where the zoo is opened for a few hours and featured excellent music by local band Fierce Creatures.

It was fun but the fact that it was 104 degrees at 5pm did make it seem like we were actually in the rain forest rather than just visiting an exhibit. Moments after we entered the reptile exhibit, the power went out leaving us alone in a small building with some of the most poisonous, scaled assassins on Earth. It was so dark that we couldn’t find the door and had to use cell phone screens to lead us to daylight.

The light was beautiful so I spent most of my time trying to make use of it as the flamingos wandered in and out of the pockets of sun.

Before we left the zoo we picked up some free tickets to the Greek Festival across town, which was going on until midnight. It was the promise of food that lured me because it was till hot and I knew the place would be, well a zoo. It’s always crowded and I knew it was going to be a little more than I wanted to deal with but we went anyway and had some good grub and met some nice people.

We had to park quite a distance from the festival and as we were walking from the car, Mark spotted some sprinklers that called to him. He and Kristy ran through the spray like two drunken college students. They are neither college students nor were they drunk, just festive.

KH

You Never Know What Will Work

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:24:46 -0400

I’ve been trying to work on a new project. It’s rather undefined but I have been making some progress. I looked at some pictures I’d made over the past few months and found that they formed a loose sort of theme. Last week I spent a couple of days trying to find a few more images and in the process made this picture of Steve and his dog in downtown Fresno. It doesn’t really fit into what I was trying to do but I like the picture. It turns out that a bunch of other people like it too. What at first seemed like a grab shot has gotten some real nice responses from my Facebook friends and others.

Local Player Makes MLB Debut

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:51:00 -0400

Former Clovis high pitcher Ryan Cook made his major league debut yesterday with the Arizona Diamondbacks. I photographed him a number of times while he was in high school. It’s good to see him hitting the big time. This picture was taken during a playoff game, if I’m not mistaken, against Madera.

Dogs of the Past

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 21:27:00 -0400

This story started when a friend mentioned that he had seen a sign advertising dog racing “in the middle of nowhere.” I hadn’t lived in Fresno long and had been looking for photo ideas so this caught my attention. I often got in my beat up Datsun B-210 and just started driving with no particular destination in mind. This is how I find out about a place when I first arrive. Just drive around and look for myself.

I got out a map and had my friend show me where he thought he had seen the sign. It did look like the middle of nowhere, a lonely spot where two rural stretches of highway met about 90 minutes from Fresno. It sounded too good to be true, so I packed up my gear and drove off to see what I could find.

After driving though desert-like scenes for more than an hour, I came down a long hill. In the distance I could see what appeared to be several hundred cars parked on either side of the road. As I got closer I could see that there were two buildings, one on each side of the road. On one side was a small cafe with a hand painted sign that read “Reef City Cafe” and on the other a gas station. That was it. Just beyond the buildings for as far as you could see were dry, rolling hills that at a distance looked like suede. Other than the two small buildings at the intersection there wasn’t a structure within sight.

But there were people. Lots of people and most of them had dogs. They had parked their cars and trucks all along the side of the road and were gathered in a large group in an otherwise empty field. The air was filled with the sound of barking dogs.

I approached a man in his sixties, dressed in camouflage from head to toe, who had two dogs on a leash and wore a dirty baseball cap with a Ford logo on it. I introduced myself and the man told me his name was Harrison. He lived outside Lemoore, California, and owned a small chicken ranch. He explained to me that the dog races were “not really legal” but that nobody seemed to care. It wasn’t so much the racing, he explained, as it was the open gambling that was illegal.

“I don’t know why it’s illegal,” he said, “after all, they had cockfighting in the Bible.”

It turns out that although money was wagered, it wasn’t in large amounts and it was all quite public. People would bring their dogs to the front of the crowd where a man with a microphone would offer up bets on whether the dog would be the first to cross the finish line or the first to “tree.” Harrison explained that the dogs would be taken in a truck to the top of a hill about a mile from the finish line and released. The path to the finish line had been dragged with a bag of raccoon scent that would lead the animals to the finish line. It wasn’t really a line, but a telephone pole with a bag of raccoon scent tied to the top. A circle was drawn in chalk around the pole and the winning dog would cross the circle and bark up at the bag of raccoon scent. This was to simulate “treeing” an animal like a raccoon or bobcat.

The first dog to “tree” was the winner and the first dog to cross into the circle after that was the runner up. This continued all day in a series of heats with 6-10 dogs in each heat.

As a photographer this whole thing was a dream come true. A really unique event with very low-key people who didn’t mind being photographed. It was the kind of thing I live for.

As this was early in my career I now look back at these pictures and really wish I could shoot this again. My skills were minimal and technically many of the pictures I made back then are lacking. Still, I have no regrets. It’s a wonderful event and truly a slice of valley life that no longer exists.

I went back the next year and shot more pictures but after that the dog races disappeared. Either that, or I was just never told where they were being held. I’d love to find out if they still do this.

KH

In The Beginning...

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:33:54 -0400

This is my first picture story. In many many ways this project launched my career in photojournalism. Shot while in college it was the result of having a roommate who worked part-time at the Fresno Bee compiling the obituaries. Walter Sweet, or Dr. Death to his friends, and I had been trying to think of story ideas over summer break and I asked him to see if he could help me find a local gravedigger who still used a shovel instead of heavy equipment. It turned out that one of the last people in the state to do this type of work was just a few miles from Fresno in the small town of Laton, Ca.

We contacted Vern Davis, the gravedigger and headed south to see him at work. The pictures now look quite unsophisticated and fairly unimpressive to me now but the subject matter was so good it hid my lack of skill. The story ran in the Daily Collegian and a few days later I received a phone call from The Fresno Bee asking If I would be interested in selling the story to the the paper. Of course, I jumped at the chance and it ran on the front of the Metro section a couple of days later. The story won a couple of college journalism awards and was always a hit with editors when presenting my portfolio.

Before I left Vern on the last day of shooting I asked Walter to shoot a picture of me as I made the lead photograph while laying in an open grave. Some people thought it was a little morbid but I have always found it quite funny.

Let's See How This Goes

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:43:00 -0400

I’ve tried blogging, tweeting and Facebook. This seems like a nice mix of them all so I’m going to give it a shot. Most of my post will likely be about my photography work http://www.kurthegre.com/ my love of music, fly fishing and comedy.

Thanks for checking me out.

Yosemite National Park.

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 20:38:00 -0400

Yosemite National Park.