I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience with the EOS 1D-X during last month’s March Madness basketball tournament. The thing was so quick. Twelve frames per second felt like the difference between firing an AK and a minigun. I’ve never had a camera that fast.

But for all the minigun shooting I did, it was more of a challenge than normal to find a memorable set of photos. That was partly the fault of the subject – basketball. It’s one of the most challenging sports to find original photographs in.

And while it’s nice to have a camera that never misses, I found myself missing some soul in my photography. A lot of the time I was just pointing straight ahead and making a twelve frame per second video. And the edit, with all those photos… Mind numbing.

About once a year the cry goes out: Slow down! says one photographer or another. They say things like:

“4 frames a second is fast enough”

or

“Put your camera on single shot”

But these are not correct. It is well intentioned bad advice.

Sometimes even twelve frames a second is not fast enough to avoid missing a shot. And why limit yourself to popping off single shots when the world is in full motion? I want continuous drive when moments are dancing in front of me. Because I am not Luke Skywalker. I can’t use the Force to intuit events before they happen.

And neither can you.

But there is smart advice intended in the slow down talk. Here’s what those good people are trying to tell you…

Be calm.

Think.

Push the button with purpose.

Yeah. Cold, windy, even snow falling here in mid-April. It sucks. The photo above shows my mood. Just wasn’t feeling it for a couple of days. Funny how you can come out swinging for a couple weeks and then find you’re at zero. By midweek I still had nothing worthwhile for this post.

Photographed a dome-home, a soccer game, the remnants of an apartment fire. Then my car died. When it mysteriously started back up, a homeless guy with a bashed up face jumped in and while I gave him a ride across town while he said all of these lines…

My name is Al

I’m so high

Life is lonely…

…and hookers aren’t the answer

My name is Al

You need anything? Cuz I got lots of stuff

Don’t go to the strip clubs for strippers, private shows are better

You sure you’re okay, white boy?

They call me Animal, but my name is Al

You smell like a cop. You a cop?

Weed? I’m beyond weed right now

Friday night I went out to the garage and ripped through a three foot stack of matted 13×19 inch prints of my work from 1987-2003. I ripped the prints up and dumped the pieces into the trash bin. Maybe it was a brief moment of madness. I don’t know. The work meant a lot to me, but sometimes you get the dread that time has moved on and the work has lost any meaning to anyone else. I felt it and starting tearing up prints. Very cathartic.

We are all producing a great many photographs. More importantly, we’re all sharing too many photographs. In the past, you’d open a photo book and only see higher quality imagery, stuff that had been sifted, edited, thought through. Now it’s a flood of imagery everywhere that does bring us more greatness to look at, but we are forced to find it in oceans of mediocrity and wasted time and things that are funny for five seconds then forgotten. Junk food. Junk photos. Junk.

I was talking to a sports videographer for a local university. He told me that he only ingests the video that he’s going to use. Everything else gets deleted. He said, there’s no point in keeping anything you’re not going to use.

Good advice.

This whole digital archive situation is a f*ck-all mess. I can’t go quite as far as him, discarding so much, but I’m going to take his intent and raise the bar on what I save for myself. I’m holding on to a lot of stuff I will never feel the need to show you. It’s not good enough and I won’t waste your time.

And another thing, photography is dead, photojournalism is over, I’m not saying either of those trite things. But I am thinking this: Don’t call me a photographer anymore. I’m an observer. Because everyone is a photographer now, but I observe things and do it quite well. Wait, maybe I won’t so quickly ditch the title of photographer. I’ve held it for a quarter century. I’m confused. Just make all the bad photography go away, please.

Some things are not worth sharing, like herpes.

-Two Paragraphs Were Deleted From This Space-

As you can tell from my tone, ripping up all of those prints wasn’t enough to get all the poison out of my system.

But it was a good thing. It helped me decide to stop putting my work on sites I don’t own, sites that strip out my metadata, etc. Thirty readers or thirty million, slow load times and all, I’ll be right here on my own site doing what I’ve always done.

Changing things up, as always. I’m about to stop posting my work on Tumblr and that sucks. I love Tumblr so much. Like my friend always says, it’s the punk rock of the Internet. But, sorry, I gotta cut it off. Not enough feedback to keep going.

I put, what, four years into Tumblr? At least three. Whatever. I’ll keep re-posting the crazy on The Clunk and daily book covers, too.

Note: I’m getting off the treadmill of posting daily. I’m not slowing down at all, just posting once a week from now on. The idea came to me at 3:53am. At that dark hour my mind was either crystal sharp or red fogged. I’m not sure which. We will find out soon enough.

This was a very productive week for photography. The photos are out there every minute, everywhere. You just have to go out and get them.

That’s the setup – Mark IIN, Mark IV, and 1D-X. 24-70 II, 70-200 II and 300/2.8. Thanks to Mike and Canon for the X. http://lensrentals.com for the 24-70 and 70-200. All but the Mark IIN are rocking. If the Mark IIN was hanging with these other cameras at high school, they would ditch him/her.

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this one’s better…

Here’s how I feel about Google’s announcement that they’re shutting down Google Reader…

Link: Part 41 | One Star Loser

Link: Remembering 2012 – Trent Nelson

He asked me, “If you could go back, would you decide to become a photographer again?” An interesting question, something that I hadn’t directly asked myself before

Link: go irish and/or roll tide | Redlights and Redeyes

 I sat there after the first half with Alabama up several touchdowns up on Notre Dame and ate a terrible hot dog in a media room where all the photographers just looked depressed.  All of the excitement, the adrenaline, and preparedness was sucked right out of everyone.  No hopes of a comeback.  There were just a lot of shocked Notre Dame faces and chants of “Roll Tide!”  Over.  And over.  And over

It’s not too late to get into my three-session Smartphone Photography class. First class is tomorrow/today, Tuesday January 8th from 6:30-8:30pm.

We have a lot of fun and you’ll learn more than you can remember.

Click the logo below for more info and signup details:

It’s 2013, so all the sub 4-star films were just deleted from my Netflix queue. This one (which was not deleted), OSS 117: Lost in Rio, had been in my queue for two years. Just watched it. Amazing, and highly recommended. Here’s the trailer:

Just finished one of the best films I will see all year long…

Bones Brigade, An Autobiography. So much inspiration, so many great quotes from people who took something and pushed it farther than anyone thought it could go.

Full disclosure: 1984 or 1985 or something, Ted bought a skateboard with money from his job scooping ice cream. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing. A few days later, sill unconvinced, I went into the skate shop myself and the Future Primitive video was playing on a small television. Game over. I had to have a skateboard, like immediately. To this day time on the board clears the mind and brings one of the best feelings of my life.

Bones Brigade, An Autobiography is streaming on Netflix at the moment. Here: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Bones_Brigade_An_Autobiography/70228180

Fan of pranks? Watch The Antics Roadshow on Netflix streaming.

.:.

And this is pretty awesome:

Because I added the film Karate-Robo Zaborgar to my Netflix queue the following films were recommended…

Attack the Gas Station 2 (Juyuso seubgyuksageun 2)
10 years have passed since Mr. Park had his gas station robbed. Since then, neighborhood thugs and biker gangs have continued to rob him. Mr. Park decided that he has had enough and declares war.

Meatball Machine
A new romance between factory workers Yôji (Issei Takahashi) and Sachiko (Aoba Kawai) is going well — that is, until aliens invade Earth and implant themselves into tumor-like growths on humans’ shoulders. When Sachiko is attacked and transformed into a slave cyborg, it’s up to the half-infected Yôji to rescue his lover. Co-directors Jun’ichi Yamamoto and Yudai Yamaguchi surround their tender love story with a rollickingly gross splatter-fest.

Mutant Girls Squad (Sentô Shôjo: Chi No Tekkamen Densetsu)
Teen misfit Rin discovers she is a weapon-clawed mutant, descended from creatures who are being exterminated in the name of public safety. She soon learns she isn’t alone and joins a group of similar mutants who are training together to fight back.

Black Lightning (Chernaya Molniya)
When he unexpectedly receives a rusty old clunker as a gift, Moscow college student Dima (Grigoriy Dobrygin) nearly ditches it out of embarrassment. But after discovering that the car can fly, Dima takes advantage of this special weapon to become a real crime fighter.

And the film that started it all…

Karate-Robo Zaborgar (Denjin Zabôgâ: Gekijô-ban)
Superhero Daiman, who rides a robotic motorcycle that knows karate, is called upon to battle the syndicate Sigma, led by the evil Dr. Akunomiya and his sidekick, gorgeous cyborg Miss Borg.

Looks like I’ll be busy for a while…

.:.