I’m going through a lot of old magazines ripping out the photos I like and tossing the other 99.5% of the paper.

One thing I noticed in the stack of what I’ve kept, the models don’t look at the camera very often. I sometimes tell new models “don’t look at the camera unless you mean it.”

I look at all of these thousands of images in the magazines I’m tossing out, and I have a visceral reaction to compelling lighting, compositions, dances of color on the page. When I look at a photo in which the model is just standing there deer in headlights waiting for the shutter to click, supremely unconfident, no matter what is going on in the rest of the image, I have a strong dislike for the whole. If it is an interesting setting, I am even angry at the photographer for wasting it on an uncompelling subject.

To me, photography is only a rush when it feels challenging, and if the model just stands there looking at the lens, waiting to have their picture taken, it is uninteresting. I don’t like when they submit to the process, when they are having their picture taken rather than being interesting.

Unless you have the confidence to stare down the lens or tell a story, don’t go near it, the lens will know you are weak. The lens is predatory. To use it is always to be hunting for something. When the prey is immediately submissive, the hunt is dull.

I think the vehement defense of sampling for commercial music without paying for copyright licenses is just an excuse to be lazy from people who aren’t creative or skilled enough to spoof the sounds they want to reference.

There are demons in my head.
They swell inside my skull.
Sometimes sketching can sedate them.
Sometimes talking will drive them out.

The only way to kill the demons
is to build a cage,
Build what they look like.
Give them form
and they will bleed away
into the nest, the cage,
the mausoleum
built only for them.

Then more demons come.

A few months ago I went to the Richard Avedon fashion photography exhibit at the International Center of Photography with Freda. After going through the exhibition, we ended up in the gift shop and both bought Blackbird Fly 35mm TLR cameras. Here are some selections from my first roll.

First shot.

Freda with her TLR. Mine is red and she got the yellow one.

There is a hot shoe on the side of the camera for a flash, so I started messing around with a little Canon flash I usually attach to my G9.

My favorite coffee shop is also called Blackbird.

The NYC 2600 posse headed to dinner after the September meeting.

Murd0c and Gonzo slinging hooch.

Neo ponders.

I keep finding myself in a coffee shop at midnight or later. It is good to get out of the studio. Living in your workspace is a good thing and a bad thing. The bad part is that it’s hard to get time away from your projects. So I go to this coffee shop and have pondering time.

Usually I have a small notebook with me and scribble down notes for photos or stories or business plans. Sometimes I take a sketchbook and draw abstractly with 20 year old colored pencils. I did it with chalk for a while but that was too messy. I drink hot chocolate or hibiscus tea, sometimes a Peroni but not often.

Last night I took a stack of blank 3″x5″ note cards with me and wrote the outline for a screenplay on 35 cards. I read a history book several years ago and the story has been bouncing around in my head ever since. I’m not sure I want to do the screenplay as historical, but maybe a fantasy. Not a direct translation, but something filtered through a lot of the other concepts in my head. I don’t know when I’ll find time to write it all out though. Maybe I will stick all the cards on a bulletin board so I can keep looking at it. The great thing about note cards is that the story becomes very modular. Typing the outline on a computer or writing it out by hand tends to lock scenes into a set sequence. With note cards you can shuffle the story a lot more easily, insert bits more easily. You can really work on it in a far more non-linear way. There is a note cards function built into Celtx, but it’s just not the same.

So much going on with the online fashion magazine I’ve been editing, I don’t even have time to take pictures. In a way I’m glad because I needed to take a break and reevaluate my approach to fashion photography. I feel like a lot of what I was doing a year and a half ago was less than satisfactory for demonstrating my real intentions. I was shooting a lot of tests with available environments, when my real passion is creating total environments within an image. I want to be rendering idealized environments. THe guerilla photography thing just doesn’t do it for me. I’m thinking about building a standing set from theater flats in the middle of my studio that I can change easily, but it will mean devoting less time to modaCYCLE to get that accomplished.

My favorite modaCYCLE article so far was published last week, an interview I did via email with an artist named Ari Fish, who was a contestant on Project Runway. It’s unusual to see someone that interesting on television.

My feelings tend to imprint directly onto images. If I feel apathetic or tired, I get these:

If I feel frustrated I get this:

When I feel like being a technical photographer I get this:

When I click with the model and feel inspired by the styling I get these:

My mood and outlook directly affects what I am capturing.

I think it is important to have diverse interests. I do a lot more than just taking pictures.

Over this past weekend, July 18-20, roughly 3,000 computer hackers converged on the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan for The Last HOPE conference. The event happens once every two years and represents an unusual subculture’s version of a family reunion.

When I say “hacker” I mean it in the way Stephen Levy meant it when he wrote “Hackers: Heroes of The Computer Revolution” in 1984. In the “2600” hacker community are some of the most talented, intelligent, and creative people I have ever met. I get fairly frustrated with the negative image of hackers perpetuated by the mainstream media.

I only attended four of the 100+ presentations at this conference because I was fairly busy being one of two projects coordinators working around the clock for four days. In fact, for three of the four talks I did get to attend, I was giving the presentation.

Most of my time was occupied by three specific projects: The Attendee Meta-Data Project, Radio Statler!, and something called The NOC NOC.

The Attendee Meta-Data Project, for which I served as Project Manager, has gotten quite a bit of press attention. Hack-A-Day, Boing Boing, CNET, and many other tech news outlets have taken notice. Using a web survey, my team collected information on many of the conference’s participants, and we gave 1400 RFID tracking devices to attendees and recorded their movements in relation to the conference schedule. In the process, we collected a very interesting combined database which will be released in the near future for study and experimentation by the global hacker community. During the conference the attendees saw a bit of what we were doing displayed on plasma screens and on a special web site set up for the event. To the corporate technology world what we did will probably seem rather insignificant, but in reality there was a monumental task accomplished, and an invaluable resource for future research was created. I cannot express how much effort my team put into getting this project to function in the last four months from a weird little idea I’d had kicking around in my head since January of 2007. I wouldn’t have considered myself an installation artist before this project.

Radio Statler! (the exclamation point is part of the name) was an Internet radio station set up specially for the conference. I served as the station/project manager and an occasional producer on the project, but mostly the station was run by the Chief Engineer, who goes by the hacker handle Nikgod, and our Programming Coordinator, journalism student Bill “Arca” Peters, who stepped in at the last minute when another team member got stuck working on another continent. These guys, along with a host of other contributors, did a truly fantastic job under conditions from which anyone in commercial radio would likely go insane. While Bill Peters did the good journalism on his “All Hacks Considered” format, I worked on a couple of more eccentric programs during the conference, including the as-far-from-NPR-as-you-can-get “Welding Hour” call-in show, which involved more than a handful of members of the infamous Phone Losers of America (PLA) group, including Murd0c, Enamon, Gonzo, and Johnny X(mas).

The NOC NOC, along with a diagram for a much larger normal NOC, was an idea born from the previous conference, HOPE Number Six. NOC is IT industry shorthand for Network Operations Center. At the sixth conference the NOC was incredibly cramped, and the network itself inaccessible to people who wanted to share their computer systems. I had the idea for the NOC NOC while trying to work on a security turret camera and noticing the difficulties faced by attendees who wanted to share videos from other conferences and a group with an Asterisk telecommunications system. NOC NOC means Not Our Concern Network Operations Center. It was a large steel equipment cage enclosing a network switch and power strips with a formidable padlock. The stainless steel German ABUS Diskus 20/70 padlock was graciously provided by Deviant, an expert lock picker from TOOOL, so the chance of someone picking the lock before being noticed by security was negligible. I and Nick Amento, a senior network engineer at Harvard University and member of the network team, had keys to unlock the cage to get servers in and out. Not as many people as I had hoped took advantage of the service at this conference, but now we have the cage and people know it will be available, so I think at The Next HOPE people will bring more servers to plug in.

HOPE was an incredible experience, yet again. Now, I get back to fashion photography for a while with not so many distractions.

Decoration is a craft. Art is an anti-science. The pinnacle height of achievement in a craft is the perfect modification of a material into a vision. The pinnacle height of achievement in an art is the perfect modification of a vision into a metaphor. Some things can be both. Art cannot exist without craft. Craft cannot exist without art. Yet there is a vast difference from the goals of artists and craftspeople. Craft has a finite goal, the production of something tangible. Art has an infinite goal, the induction of something intangible. Craft relaxes. Art excites.