The boy in the bubble and other nearest misses
October 15, 2017
After yesterdays seriousness, I wanted to go the opposite way today. When I first started shooting those first 10,000 pictures that were supposed to be my worst and which preceded the next 10,000 which were arguably just as bad, I absolutely used to work exclusively in series. At the end of a shooting day there tended to be one or two shots that I really felt were standout and the bones of the story (if in those early days I actually had one) but were in turn complimented by a series of images that I was pleased with but that weren’t as strong. Basically rudimentary editing. I would lump the two together in a series of maybe 10-15 images which to me felt largely cohesive and beautiful and thereby in my mind, complete. Feet up on the table, pour a glass of wine, shit knocked out of the park.
As I became more focused on drilling down the work to a couple glory shots that were super cohesive and that could be neatly filed into smaller even more concise narratives, more and more of my good-but-not-great-picks hit the edit room floor. As I write this, I’m scanning a handful of rolls fresh from the lab and I’m seeing images that I really like (and am bothering to scan) but that I also doubt will make the final cut. Based on this revelation there may be a good chance that your third 10,000 photos also suck and that HCB was a fucking liar who secretly worked for Kodak.
Sigh.
So dear reader, tonight I’ve decided to post a few outtakes from my photographic musings. Images that I liked but I worry will never see the light of day if I don’t do this right now. These are all from the Santa Monica Pier and the Venice Boardwalk and I do hope you enjoy them.
“The boy in the bubble” and others, shot on the the Mamiya 6MF with a 50mm lens on Kodak Tri-X 400 film pushed +1 at the Icon.