Photography Archive

An exhibition of Henri-Cartier Bresson is coming to New York's MOMA in April. Here are the notes from the MOMA website:

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with "the decisive moment"--the title of his first major book. After World War II (most of which he spent as a prisoner of war) and his first museum show (at MoMA in 1947), he joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as Life while retaining control over their work. In the decade following the war, Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on India and Indonesia at the time of independence, China during the revolution, the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, the United States during the postwar boom, and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities. For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs--and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA's retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson's entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. The exhibition travels to The Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Might take some time, but eventually the show will travel out west to SF where I will definitely see it.

Until recently, I had a poster of this Bresson image, En Brie hanging in my place:

"Inspired by how some animals can blend into their environment, Liu Bolin from China uses camouflage principles to create amazing contemporary art."

Has to be seen to be believed. More here. The one with the bulldozer is amazing. I had to work hard to find Liu. Really incredible.

Diablo got more than a dusting of snow yesterday. There are some amazing pictures of the frosty, snow-blanketed Mt. Diablo on Flickr here and here.

My girlfriend sent me a link to these beautiful B&W images of African animals by British photog Nick Brandt. There are so many amazing shots, it was hard to pick which ones to display here. I urge you to check them out.

Hard to get tired of taking pics of the sweeping beach and stunning mountains of Ipanema. It's truly one of the world's finest beaches. Undoubetly, it is one of the best places in the world for people watching, especially on Sunday when the street adjacent to the beach shuts down to traffic and turns into a day long parade of dog walkers, joggers, strollers, cyclists, rollerbladders and gawkers.Truly, truly, truly fantastic. (add musical accompaniment here)

More images on Flickr, as always. I just wish we had more sunny days and less rain, though it did make for some dramatic pictures.

I've been around with the blog quite a bit lately. I came across a plugin, MTFlickrPhotos, that allows you to pull in content from Flickr into Movable Type, which is pretty cool. I've got my photos here.

The way I have it set up, it shows medium size images of the last 20 that I've uploaded to my Flickr account. I'd like to show sets and collections, but I can't figure out how to do it and there doesn't seem to be a way in the documentation.

I'd eventually like to have something like Jeff Croft's site. It's powered by Django, which I suppose I should learn. I'm just too lazy right now.

This picture is from photojournalist Callie Shell and I think it speaks volumes about the qualities that Obama will bring to the White House. If he wins, and it's looking more likely every day, he will be replacing a president who has taken more vacation time and spent more time Camp David than any of his predecessors. It's time we had some at the helm of this country who is going to work his ass off for the country.

Here's the photo cation:

Senator Obama was doing press interviews by telephone in a holding room between events. Sometime later as he was getting ready to begin his event, he asked me if I was photographing his shoes. When I said yes, he told me that he had already had them resoled once since he entered the race a year earlier. Providence, R.I., 3/1/2008.

More photos from Callie Shell's beautiful collection.

This photo is from an exhibition in Oslo called The Places We Live by Jonas Bendiksen. I've seen many places like this in my travels around the world. It's always sad and difficult and it reminds of how lucky I am and how much I have—a good thing to be reminded of in these time of financial turmoil.

I can remember the first time I was in Indonesia, back in 1995. I left Jakarta by train from Gambir Station and I was stunned to see all these people living in corrugated-roofed lean-tos in utter squalor along the side of the tracks within a few meters of where the trains came roaring by every day. There was no running water, sewage or electricity. It was middle age living right along side modern technology. It was frightening. It must have been a miserable existence for these people who moved from the countryside to scrap for a better life and found no better place to dwell than in the garbage dump that was the side of the tracks.

The place above at least has electricity and was clearly pulled together with the discarded detritus of semi-modern economy. How ironic it to live in self-fashioned house festooned with marketing from major transnational corporations.

Always good to have a bird of prey protecting your f'ing private golf course. I took this pic at the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Even their website is off limits to the likes of you.

I actually got off the bike and tried to get a better shot—the sun was right behind the bird and the sign, but sadly it flew away before I could get close enough. No, jack-booted thugs did not come arrest me after I ignore the sign and trespassed on their precious course.

The original large size of the photo is really cool. Kudos to anyone who can tell me what kind of bird that is. Hawk? Eagle? Falcon? I'm going with the latter, but I really have no idea.

Almost every day I pass by this memorial to a cyclist killed by a car. It's right around the corner from my place. It is always lovingly maintained. The bike has been stolen and is always replaced. The white bike is a stark reminder of how unsafe the roads can be and how dangerous my new hobby is. But the message is clear:

SLOW THE FUCK DOWN OR YOU'RE GOING TO KILL US!

I try to be careful but as I share the roads with cars, there's only so much I can do.

More photos here.

This is cool not just because of the long shadows cast after hiking in beautiful Briones Regional Park in Lafayette, but because of Mt. Diablo looming in the background.

One of the artists sent this image around this morning and I thought it was so cool, I had to share. Many more great foggy images of Dubai skyscrapers on Google Images. If you ever wondered where a good chunk of the $4.50 a gallon you're paying for gas/petrol is going, now you know. [also going here].

If it's Memorial Day weekend, it must be the Belly Dancer of the Year in Danville. I couldn't go last year because I was in Asia, but I did design the poster. This afternoon I dragged my weary body over to Contra Costa for the event after a 40 mile ride to Pinhole this morning. My arms were so tired from riding that it was tough for me to hold up the camera, but I managed and got some decent shots.

I've been watching belly dancing rather closely for the last 7 years or so. I'm no expert, but I have a good feeling about what makes a good dancer: choreography, stage presence, costuming, etc., but I'm almost always confused by the results of this contest. Of course, judging is very subjective and the judges are experts, so what the fuck do I know? This year, the best dancer, Ahava (above) took the title, but the runners up placement was just mind boggling. Anyway, congratulations to Ahava for her well deserved victory.

Photos of the finals are up on Flickr.

My sets of photos are loaded up on Flickr. There are few hundred, so I hope you enjoy them. This is picture of my endlessly patient tailor in Hoi An, Thuy.

I've come to New York for the wedding of my buddy Gary. I got a room at a cool art deco hotel, The Beekman, along the east river near the UN building. It's a pet friendly place, so I invited my brother up from DC and he drove here with Maria. Maria is such a trooper. We walked her all over the city. I pretty sure she loved Central Park the best.

More pics of New York on Flickr

More Yosemite on Flickr

I first ate satay at this street side vendor when I was in Bali in 2002. I stayed for 3 weeks just down the street in the Tebesaya section of Ubud and would pass this guy every afternoon, always stopping to pick up some satay and rice. It's the most delicious thing in the world. When I heard I was coming back to Bali, I started salivating at the prospect of returning to visit the orang satay (satay man).

He has an amazing set up. Everything he need is within arm's reach. He sits cross legged on the sidewalk with a massive tub of marinating satay skewers on his left. Directly in front of him, the grill. There is a small bag of charcoal to replenish the brazier. On his right, a bag filled with rice cooked in bamboo baskets and a bag of chili salt. There's a small rubbish bin and a box of small waters. Somewhere he was a wallet to make change. That's it. It's as basic as street, or any food for that matter, gets.

A wicker plate covered in paper with 8 sticks of satay (pork) and a mound of sticky rice will set you back less than 40 cents. Hard to beat. More pictures are posted on Flickr.

...are now posted on Flikr in their new feature, called collections. This is something that users like me have been asking for, for a long time now. Sets of sets. So this set or collection has about 10 sets with several hundred photos from my trip so far. I hope you enjoy them.

I just got an email from some guy named Declan something or other who claims to work for FHM Australia and they want to buy and print a few of my images from Marineworld. How cool is that?

In Whistler, courtesy of Mariah

I first heard about the memorial on NPR and it was just strange to hear a news story about something so close in a town I pass all the time. The jist of the storaty was not that the memorial was that, but that it was causing contoversy. I don't really see it. Maybe it's because I was against this war from the beginning, like most sensible people who saw it for what it was. But it seem to me that if you're against this war memorial, you'd have to be against every war memorial. You'd have to be against the WWII memorial on the National Mall, and the Viethnam memorial and the Korean War Memorial in the same place, and, well, all of Arlington National Cemetary which is essentially a massive war memorial. You get the point.

The controversy stems not from the memorial itself. It doesn't take ad absurdum logic to see that. The ontroversy is because of the poltical viewpoint of the people who erectred the memorial. See, it's ok to put u
p a memorial, but only if you support the war being memorialzied.

I have more photos of the memorial on Flickr

I finally sorted through my Yosemite photos and posted them on Flickr. It was a great trip. we stayed at the historic Wawona Hotel in the southwest part of the park where I had never been before. Not exactly roughing-it, but who cares. We hiked around the massive sequioas in Mariposa Grove. We checked out the view above the valley at Glacier Point. And we hiked around the valley floor. It was amazing. Yosemite always is.

Photos of the incomparable Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris are up now. The place is simply amazing. I walked around for 3 hours in the rain on the ankle breaking cobble stones streets that connect up the dozens of districts, and I wish I had 3 hours more. I could spend days wanderng around the tombs, taking photographs and hunting for famous resting spots. This time I found Oscar Wilde, Frederick Chopin, Sarah Bernhardt, George Suerat and of course, Jim Morrision, but there are dozens more including Gertude Stein, Moliere, Max Ernst, Edith Piaf, Louis David, Check out the map and see for yourself.

Still haven't had time to post, but I have tons of new pictures going up as I write this. I'm about to go out and meet Jack, one of my old friends from Melbourne. I went to his birthday party last weekend, just one of the many things that I haven't had a chance to write about.

The conference I was attending, @Media, is over. I'm headed off to Barcelona tomorrow. Still a day left to explore London. No time for sleep even though I'm exhausted.

The finals were yesterday. Still trying to get the pics online. I would have it done, except, well, for a minor accident last night.

Nadira from Seatle, who I thought should have won last year, took home the title. Everyone went home happy.

Here is how they finished:

Winner: Nadira
1st Runner up: Sandra
2nd Runner up: Ahava
3rd Runner up: Namira
4th Runner up: Cris!

UPDATE: All the pics are online now. And, well, there are even some good ones here and there

Michelle, who unfortunately did not place despite an excellent performance, has a few of my shots up on her website already, including on the banner on her home page.

I don't think I've ever been the victim of copyright infringement, as far as I know., until today. At least I found out about it today. I was searching around on Technorati and I found a site that was supposedly linking to me. Except all that he was doing was stealing a photograph off this site and putting it on his own without any attribtution. He did link the photo on his site to the actual photo, but all that did was allow me to find him. Amazing.

I'm not going to make any money off this site or the pictures I post here, however my site and all the contents are protected under a Creative Commons License. It's one of the least restrictive copyright options and all it requires is basic attribution. In my world, we call that courtesy.

People ask me to use photos of mine for various things here and there and I always say yes and I would have said yes to this dude, if he asked. But he didn't even bother to do that. Just went ahead and snatched it. It's kinda messed up. Not only that, he didn't even bother to copy the photo and host it on his own server, which I how I caught him. I doubt he gets much traffic, but I don't need to be supporting his bandwidth. That's just totally uncool.

So, please, if you want to use any of my photos or anything else, please 1) ask and 2) credit. It's the right thing to do.

I was skiing down for one of the last run's of the day last Saturday at Alpine Meadow. I stopped to wait for the girls I was skiing with and I came across these two kids who had built a kicker (a jump for you non-skiers) in a remote part of the mountain. The kicker wasn't huge, maybe about 3 feet off the ground and the pitch wsan't that great, but the hill was steep and the landing was all soft powder.

One of the kids (the one pictured here), and these guys are maybe 16 years old, tells me that I should have been there a few minutes ago. He flew 70 feet off the kicker and landed it. OK. I didn't really believe him, but it didn't matter. Clearly these guys were serious. They could have jumped all day in the terrain park, but insead they spent hours fashioning this perfectly squared off kicker.

The guy, who was on skis, was getting his nerve up to do a forard a flip. He side stepped up the hill about 15 feet and was sort of gauging his courage while being egged on by his friend. I didn't think he had a chance because the pitch of the kicker was too shallow. I also didn't think he was going to go for it, but he started downhill, hit the kicker and flipped forward. He didn't pull the full 360 degrees, but he made about 280, I would guess, and landed on his ass in the cushy snow. It was impressive.

Right about the time the girls showed up, the other kid, the one on the snowboard took another jump. This time I had my camera ready. I can't beleive how well this shot turned out considered I was just using my little Canon S500 point and shoot which usually has a tough time dealing with any kind of motion, but it's sharp as a tack and stopped the motion dead in the air. Check out the original size shot to really see how good this is.

I didn't if he landed it this jump or even how far he flew, but the kid got some serious air. Must be great to have rubber bones and no fear.

The reward for waking up at 7am and getting on the mountain when the lifts open. I wish I could ski this stuff all day every day.

More here.

After some fits and starts, some trouble with the weather (it's been raining like crazy here) and a nightmare hanging the frames on the convex wall of my gym, the Portrait of Cambodia show is open and ready for viewing.

The photos are a set of 9 color slides from my November 2001 trip to Southeast Asia and represent some of the best work I've ever done. Something about Cambodia and the ease of the people in front of the camera or my ease around them with the camera or the nature of manual film photography or my attention to composition and light because of classes I was taking at the time or some combination therein all sort of coalesced into some beautiful shots that I'm really proud of.

Unfortunately since the prints all came from slides, I do not have digital versions. The best I can do, for now, is take digital shots of the prints that are hanging in the gym. I will eventually scan the slides, but for right now, the only way to see the pictures is to go to the gym.

If you're in the area, feel free to stop by Berkeley Ironworks. You don't have to be a member. Just let them know that you want to checks out the photographs and they will gladly let you in. Ironworks is right off the 80 freeway just north of the Bay Bridge (exit Ashby Avenue) at 800 Potter Street Berkeley, CA, and very easy to get to.

The show will be up until February 15th.

So today was the day that my show was supposed to start at the Ironworks gym. I was psyched. I dropped a load of cash to get my shots printed and framed professionally. They looked awesome. But when I brought them to the gym, there was some confusion.

The general manager, Stein, who was the one who looked at my photos and booked me, wasn't around. He doesn't keep any kind of calendar or leaves any notes, so there was no way for the guys running the desk to know what was going on. Interestingly, the photographer who's stuff is currently up on the wall was climbing in the gym this morning. When we talked to him, he said that Stein had told him a few days ago that his shots were going to be up for another month and that there was another photographer (not me) who scheduled to go up in February.

Well, I was pissed. I tried to stay clam and did. It was just a simple mistake. But I was pissed. Who wouldn't be? I had to load all the prints back into the car, drive home and stick them in the garage instead of hang them on the wall in the gym. Had this been any old show, it wouldn't have been as big a deal. But this is my first show.

I sort of had a premonition that this would happen. Stein is very cool guy, but he's also very laissez faire about the whole photography thing. I kind of expected the process to be more formal, but he just came out, saw my shots, liked them and told me he a slot for me on January 15th.

Just to be sure, I sent an email to him to confirm and got this response:

Andrew,

Thanks for the note. The best way to correspond with me is definitely through e-mail. Look forward to seeing your images in here in Jan. Talk to you soon.

Stein-Erik Skaar
General Manager
Berkeley Ironworks

But this was back in November. And I hadn't heard from him since. No confirmation. Nothing. I didn't expect it. I just assumed the show was on as planned.

Since then, so I've been told, Stein has gotten married, went on a honeymoon and hasn't really had his head in the business. So I understand that. But I hope we can sort this mixup out and get my prints up on the wall where they belong.

"Smile" by Andrew Hecht

I have a show of my Cambodia shots coming up in the middle of this month. It's not a big deal. It's not at a gallery. It's not a coffee shop. It's at my gym. And while there are good (some even great) photographers who have been showcased there, it's still just a gym.

That said, hundreds if not thousands of eyeballs will see my photographs. And based on that, I decided that my little 8 x 12 prints framed 15 dollar Aaron Brothers jobbie were not going to do the trick. So I decided that I would print them a little larger, 16 x 24 for all but one (which is 20 x 30) and have them framed professionally with simple yet elegant black wood frames.

But the thing is, this process is anything but cheap. It costs 40 bucks just to print the damn photo and it costs another 140 to pay for the frame, the glass, the mat and the labor to put all together. This isn't a huge show. I'm only displaying 10 images, but do the math and you can quickly see that this is a very costly endeavor.

Now I didn't have to pay sales tax (it could have cost even more), but I have to go down to the Oakland city offices, get a business license ($30) and register for a sales tax number which means if I sell anything, I have to collect sales tax and remit it to the city. No big deal, I doubt I'll sell anything anyway, but you never know.

The photographs looked fantastic printed so large and I'm really looking forward to seeing them framed and even more to see the reactions of the folks at Ironworks Gym in Berkeley. If you're in the area, fell free to stop by starting January 15th.

As I delve further into Flickr and expore the millios of photos on the site, it's hard not to be impressed by the incredible talent by the thousands of photographers who choose to share their work with the rest of the world. The people who run Flickr are not immune to this and have created a section on the site to showcase the best of the best in a place they like to call "Interestingness". This is what they like say about the mouthful of a word:

Besides being a five syllable word suitable for tongue twisters, it is also an amazing new Flickr Feature.

There are lots of things that make a photo 'interesting' (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

We've added some pages (and changed some existing ones) to help you explore Flickr's most interesting photos. Before you start though, you might want to take your phone off the hook, send your boss to an executive training session and block off some time on your schedule, because we don't think you're going to be walking away from your screen any time soon. Beautiful, amazing, moving, striking - explore and discover some of Flickr's Finest.

Every day there are 500 photos that are honored on this page. In the last week or so, I've had at least 5 photos show up on the Interestness page, including three on page one (pretty cool, huh?) mostly on the strength on Fil's insane behavior when I take shower.

Don't know how they got there, the whole process is something of a mystery in the Flickr community, but nonetheless, they are there. I'm going to give you the links, but it's quite possible that the time you read this and click through to these links, they will be gone, because the quality of the interestingness clearly changes over time and photos shift position for what reason no one knows but they do.

Here they are:

Jumping in with Two Feet - 07JAN06
photo page
interestingness link

Fil Goes to Town - 06JAN06
photo page
interestingness link

Role Reversal - 05JAN06
photo page
interestingness link

There's a Cat on My Head - 03JAN06
photo page
interestingness link

Filemu & Makelani - 30 DEC 05
photo page
interestingness link

It almost never happens like this. Fil is always the one taking care of Mak, and rightly so. Mak needs round the clock care. But it did happen and I have it all documented here.

More photos of Fil taken this morning with my 10D.

I picked up a Motorola Razr last week when my previously trusty Nokia 3360 suddenly died. I've been playing around with it and I've finally got some of the features figured out. The phone has a camera. Not great quality. 1.2 megapixels, but I always have with it and it's connected. So now I can take mediocre quality pics and post them immediately online. I don't want to clog up this blog with these shots, but you can find them on a Blogger blog I set up, Idle Images, and they will simulataneously be posted on my Flickr site. If I can figure out how to give them subjects as I post them remotely then I'll really have something. In the meantime, it's pretty cool to be able to share this stuff almost instantaneouly. What I really need is a killer 5 mexapixel ultracompact camera that's also a phone instead of a fully featured uberconnected phone that also takes little pictures, and that will come in time, no doubt.


Not a bad shot for the camera phone. The light really needs to be perfect to get anything close to reasonable, but it's not about makiing museum quality prints, it's about documenting.

The photos from Costa Rica are up on Flickr. Hopefully some stories will come soon if I'm not too lazy (god, damn, I'm feeling fucking lazy)

Shots from around the Concord Flea Market last weekend. All taken in the early morning around 8am before the sun rose and the light became too harsh to shoot.

For years now I've admired the photographs that are on display at my gym - Ironworks - in Berkeley. The artists rotate every month and there has been some great work from natural landscapes, to action climbing (it's an indoor climbing gym), to photos from every country you can imagine, the latest installation of underwater photos of fish, sharks, coral, etc just came down today with shots of Ireland going up shortly.

As great as some of this work was, I always thought that I could place some of my better stuff there. The only thing stopping me was that I didn't have any pieces printed, matted and framed. But now I do and went to talk to the manager today about showing my stuff. He took a look. It took him about 5 seconds. He said they were perfect. Just the sort of work to get people inspired. How does January 15th sound?

So, I have a show in two months for two months. For two whole months, my Cambodia shots will be on display to hundreds if not thousands of eyeballs at my gym. Pretty fucking exciting.

Now I just have to decide if I want to reprint some of the shots I developed and printed myself (probably) and create some larger prints (16 x 20) of some of the best stuff (probably). What the fuck. It's only money, right?

I was going through some of my old photos and I came across this shot taken of me by my friend Peter Townshend on the Metro in Paris in 1989. 19 years old. First time in Paris--First time in Europe. First time overseas. First time anywhere--Just having been dumped by my girlfriend Alison Alsup.

It really was the best of times and the worst of times. Depsite being dropped like yesterday's news by the person who in my innocent 19 year old eyes was the love of my life (fuck, what an idiot I was), I made the most of the trip, hanging with Peter who had come to Paris to stay with his dad who was a visiting physics prof at some local university. I made my way to London to see another high school friend, Jason, who was doing a year abroad at Kings College London. And when he finished his finals, we traveled together through Paris to Rome to see my first girlfriend Gloria Piccioni who was working at the Canadian embassy in the Italian capital.

It was a crazy trip and the fact that some of my closest friends in the world happened to be in Europe at the time helped cushion what otherwise could have devastating blow.

My company is hosting and Arts & Crafts Fair today and I'm showing some of my portraits from Cambodia. It's no big deal other than it marks a milestone for me in getting off my ass, spending some cash and getting some of my prints framed.

I'm showing 20 8x10s, about half black & white and color. I hadn't looked at most of these pictures, especially the color shots, in years. But when I heard about this show, I dusted off my photo boxes, pulled out the notebooks and had a look at some of my handiwork.

I had completely forgotten that I had taken slides in Cambodia. I don't even remember looking at them. I probably had them developed, took a cursory look, stuffed them in sheets and locked them in notebook.

Some of them are remarkable. I even surprised myself. It's one thing to hold the slide up to the light and have a look. It's an entirely different feeling to print your photos and look at them professionally framed. I'm anxious to see how people react to them. I doubt I'll sell any, but we'll see. I kind of don't want to because now that I have all these prints framed, I can ask around at my gym and local coffee houses and various other places that hang photos and to try to get a show. That would be something for me. It's one thing to show your photos at a company event where all you have to do is fill out a form and you're in. It would be sweet affirmation however to have someone responsible for booking artists look at my work and decide to give me space.

More here.

It's amazing to walk around downtown Philadelphia and come across a sign that reads, this is where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Don't get much stuff like that out here in California.

Again I was assigned by Brightroom to shoot the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon in San Francisco. Last year it was beautiful sunny day in the city, but my assignment to shoot runners crossing the finish line, was a joke. This year, again it was a perfectly beautiful SF spring day, and again, more problems.

This year, I had a slightly different assignment. I shot the runners in the swim/bike transition along Marina again and then off to the Baker Beach Sand Steps to capture the agony of the competitors at the end of the grueling run. The first part was fine, went and all that, but the other photographer assigned to shoot the transition with was a no show.

Then I had to get to the Sand Steps, but my car was blocked in and there were no transportation of any kind. I had to hoof it. I'm not exactly sure how far it is, but it took me more than hour in the winding, uphill streets of the Presidio to get there. There's no reason I should ever have to do anything like that, but it's so typical of the poor planning that is always a problem at larger Brightroom events. Anyway, I got there before the first runner arrived, so I was annoyed but relieved.

After the swim off "The Rock", the Baker Beach Sand Steps are the seminal moment in the race when runners climb up about 400 feet from the beach to the road along a unforgiving steep and sandy incline. It's a grueling an agonizing ascent at the end of the very difficult race. Very few of the athletes, even the elite professionals, actually run. Most walk, shuffle or drag themselves up using the cords that line either side of the "steps".

I finally put the images from the Pageant finals online. You can find them here. Personally, I think, because there are so many shots, over 800, it's best to view the slideshow. Just click on the slideshow link, set the interval to 1 second and watch the show. It's almost like you were there, or would be if I didn't have to delete so many shots because they were blury or out of focus, but like I explained before, the photography conditions were rough for a novice like me. I'm happy any of them came out to be honest.

The finals were really good. Lots of very talented dancers. The results were somewhat surprising, at least to my amateur eye. I really thought Nadira, a tall, elegant, stunningly blond dancer from Seattle was going to take the title, but she finished second to a local dancer from Oakland named Shabnam, a tiny bundle of frenetic whirling dervish energy. The judges are valuing a whole set of criteria based of their collective years of experience that I can hardly begin to comprehend ranging from music, costuming, finger cymbals and choreogaphy. It's much more complicated than you think.

Anyway, the Pageant was good fun despite the problems with the program. I really enjoyed taking these shots and am reasonably happy with the results from my first time shooting anything indoors. I hope you like the photos. Please let me know what you think.
I would have put all the images up earlier, but I had run out of bandwidth on my Flickr account. I can harly believe it myself, but somehow I managed to put 2 gigs of images online in May. Mostly this was because I didn't want to resize any of them because I wanted Flickr to retain the metadata and also have to the largest resolution images on the web in case, I don't know, I ever needed them or my hard drive really crashed or whatever. It's a really tedious process, getting them all online, giving them all unique and relevant title and tagging them with keywords so I can search and sort them.

Flickr is really a great service, one of the few things worth paying for on the web. The only thing that I wish Flickr would enable in the next version is to have "subsets". Right now you can create sets to organize photos, which is great, but I have some sets that have a large number of photos, upwards of 1500 in one case, and it would be really nice to be able to subdivide the sets. It would keep everything nicely organized and make it easier for me and anyone else to view the photos. Flickr, are you listening?

That's it for harping on Flicker and that's definitely it for belly dancing for a while. Now back to regularly scheduled programming.

While most Americans are traveling, camping, having backyard barbeques and drinking themselves into a three day slumber on Memorial Day Weekend, a small but enthusiastic group of belly dancers have been meeting in Northern California for the past 32 years to celebrate their art form and compete for the crown of "Belly Dancer of the Year".

I had been hearing about "The Pageant" for years. It's an occupational hazard of dating a belly dancer. There are two things that will happen to you if you are lucky enough to date a dancer. The first is that you will have lots of incredible sex. The second is that you will see lots of belly dancing. Lots and lots of belly dancing. A tremendous amount of belly dancing.

I can't tell you how many festivals, restaurants and private parties I've been to since I met Jennifer back in 2001. I've seen hundreds of dancers. We broke up a long time ago and yet I still find myself dragged to this stuff. I enjoy it, in general, but sometimes it gets a little much, as would anything. I thought Belly Dancer of Year would be the apotheosis of this overexposure, but I was totally wrong. I was mesmerized.

I had sort of vested interest, since I was conscripted to design the program for the event. I put tons of work into the damn thing and was looking forward to seeing it printed. But the printer totally fucked up the job and when I saw the programs yesterday I wanted to kill. When you put so much work into something and somebody else fucks it up, it's tough to deal with. The pictures were all printed way to dark. Somehow the title font was printed in black so you couldn't see part of it. The program cover was printed at a slight angle so there was some of the white paper visible above the picture. Because the internal pages were printed so dark, it was hard to read the text. From my perspective it completely sucked so when people came up to me to compliment the program I really had to hold my tongue. I was embarrassed. I didn't want to take credit for something that looked that bad. That said, the promoter of the pageant, Leea Azizz, was beside herself with joy about it, so who am I to complain? Next year we'll find a printer that understands the concept of "proofing".

I got over it and settled in to watch the competition. Rather than find myself bored out of my mind as I expected (there were 21 performances in the solo category alone), I was consumed with taking pictures of these incredible dancers. So many of them were so good, I don't know how the judges are going to separate the top 5 or so. They managed to whittle down the field to 10 finalists who are dancing this afternoon. There were some surprises, but for the most part, the dancers I thought were best made it through.

It's not the easiest thing in the world to take pictures in a dark theater without a flash. The challenge really comes from finding a compromise between sharpness and dynamism. You want the shots to be as crisp and in-focus as possible. But you don't want to totally freeze the action because you'll lose any sense of movement. Therin lies the trouble.

The dancers are almost constantly in motion, so if you want to capture the movement of a veil during a spin, invariably, because the dancer is also moving, the whole composition will be out of focus. So you really have to concentrate on those moments when the head of the dancer is still and everything else is flying all over the place. It's a challenge.

Because it's so dark, I have to shoot at the widest possible aperture (f2.8 in this case). The result is that the depth of field is incredibly shallow and therefore so is the margin of error. If you focus on anything, like a veil or a sword, that is a little closer or further from the face of the dancer, she (or he, but mostly she) will be out focus enough to ruin the shot. It's a very delicate operation.

You have to find the right balance between shutter speed, film speed and white balance that gives you the best results. What makes it tougher is you can't just find one combo that works because each dancer, with variations in skin tone and costume brightness, is completely different. I don't know if I found the perfect settings, but I tried. You can see the results here. I spent a few hours culling through the shots, deleting most of the bad ones and posting them on Flickr.

I'm headed back today for the finals. Honestly, I'm surprised how much I'm looking forward to it.

If you look closely (or at the original shot), you can see a reflection of me taking this shot in Fil's left eye. Pretty cool. This pic and a whole lot more posted on Flickr.

It's still a work in progress, but I have a good chunk of my Mak & Fil images up on Flickr now. There are 610 shots taken from December 8th, 2002 until January 19th, 2005. I've taken quite a few since January and will them get up on the site sometime soon.

I still kick myself for not bringing my camera into the village when I first arrived in Samoa, so I have no pictures of Mak or Fil from their first few weeks of life. We were made so (unnecessarily) paranoid about thievery that everyone left anything with any intrinsic value locked up in Apia. It was really silly now that I look back on it.

Anyway, Flickr is really cool. One of the best things about it is that because it captures the EXIF data on photos when you upload them, it can put the shots in order that they were taken without any effort. So you can view the slideshow, see the earliest shots of Makelani and Filemu in Samoa and watch them as they grow and move from Matautu in southern Upolu where they adopted me to Apia where I stayed while I waited for training to end to Fagali'i where I lived for most of the year I was in Samoa to Sedona where I briefly stayed before I moved on to Vail where I spent the winter skiing from January to April and finally to California. Hope you enjoy it.

****UPDATE**** I've finished uploading most of the pictures and now there's more than 1200. I know that's insane, but most of the pictures were taken when I lived in Samoa, when, let's be honest here, I had little else to do but take pictures of my cats when they were being cute which was a lot of the time.

I finally got around to posting some of my pics to my newly minted Pro Flickr account. Some of the pics have seen the brief light of day on this website, but many have not previously been published anywhere. There's the Best of Samoa. My trips to New York City and Washington, DC at the end of 2003. My stay in Sedona, Arizona with my mom. I finally posted the Vail World Pond Skimming Championships from 2004 along with the lesser Heavenly Pond Skimming event from last weekend. Last but not least there's some shots from our end of season party up at the 585 Alpine Ski Haus.

All these links are links to the slideshows, which is the best way on Flickr to see a lot of pictures in a very short period of time. This works really well with the Pond Skimming stuff. Just click on the link, set the timer to one second or whatever interval you want and the let the computer do the walking for you. If you see a pic you like or want to comment on, you can always pause the slideshow, open that particular image and then go right back into the slideshow where you left off. If you're not fond of the whole slideshow thing, you can find all my shots here.

The next big project is to get all or most of the pictures that I have of Mak & Fil online and together in one place. It's going to be a massive undertaking because I have hundreds of shots of them over the 2 and half years of their uberpampered lives.

I'm having great fun with Flickr. There are some problems, and it doesn't always work the way I want it to, it's mostly fun. One of the coolest things is that when you upload a picture Flickr captures the EXIF metadata things like camera, exposure, aperture, ISO and whole host of other useful information. On the down side if you've modified your picture at in any kind of editing software, the metadata disappears. So, for example, you have this picture which was taken in Cambodia with, get this, actual film, and digitally scanned into my computer, has no EXIF metadata. If I didn't change the date taken, Flickr would be under the impression that the date the shot was taken is the same date it was uploaded as it has done with all these pics from the 585 Ski Haus party which I resized.

It's not a big problem except that the metadata is cool, and I'd like to Flickr capture it, but I also like to take full resolution pictures. So basically it means that I use up a lot of bandwidth uploading large pictures just to retain EXIF metadata info, the most important of which is date taken so that Flickr will put them in the right order. Fortunately, I have some serious (or mad, as the kids would say) bandwidth with my Pro Flickr account. Thanks again, Kelly.

I was walking in the parking garage from my car to the elevator when I crossed paths with this woman coming from the opposite direction who was looking at me funny like she wanted to say something, like "hello", but didn't know how to open her mouth when she says, have you seen the hummingbird nest, and points over my left shoulder.

I turned around and looked up and saw the tinniest of nests suspended in midair from a couple of looping ropes that were wrapped around the pipes that run the breadth and width of the garage ceiling. Inside was a hummingbird, so still that at first I thought it wasn't alive, that it was a doll or something, but when I moved closer I could see the tiniest of movements, the little was shaking.

This minuscule bird had built a nest suspended from the ceiling in my parking garage in Alameda. I had never seen anything like it. I snapped off a few pics and when I finally figured out how to focus on the tiny object, this was the result.

Thanks to the incredible generosity of my online buddy Kelly in Virginia, I now have a Pro Flickr account which means I'm no longer limited to 100 pictures or three sets, at least for the next year. So I've got a lot of work to do, combing through my digital photos and scanning in film and slides (need to get a new scanner, too) to get my stuff online. Thanks, Kelly. You're the best.

I've been playing around with Flickr for a few weeks now. I haven't added any new pictures since I reached my limit of 100 with the free site. But it has rekindled my interest in digitally archiving all my photos. I'll probably sign up for a premium account when I find a slide scanner than I want to buy.

In the meantime, I've been cruising Flickr looking at other folks pictures. There's some really good stuff out there. One of the things I like is that users can add "tags" or keywoords to each photo so that they are searchable and can be grouped. You can do searches on a particular tag through the Flickr site or you can use the handy and very cool Flickr Related Tag Browser. Just type in a keyword and see what comes up.

You can find information about how the site was built here.

Anyway, I put up a bunch of shots from my trip around the Levant in 98/99. Between x-rays on the border between Jordan and Israel, being scanned in with a cheap scanner, being resized in photoshop before I knew what I was doing, and resized again by the funky Flickr software, most of the shots look like they were taken with a first generation cell phone camera, but there they are anyway for your viewing pleasure.

The Flickr software is pretty cool. The slideshow does distort the photos a smidgeon, but you can see all the pics in their beautifully glory here.

I was surfing the web looking at pictures of The Gates here and here. In my travels around the web looking at Christo and Jean Claude's creation, I came across this recent picture of Central Park taken from space.

The image comes from the collection of the Earth Observatory which houses thousands of pictures taken from space. Most of the shots show natural disasters, hurricanes, fires, dust storms and the like, but there are also hundreds of random shots of interesting places on the earth including the one to the right of Mt. Hood. Here's a list of some of favorites (don't forget to zoom in on the image after it loads in your browser):

Angkor Wat

Heavy snowfall in California Sierras

San Francisco Skyline

Earth from the Moon

Athens Olympics Sports Complex

Rainbow Bridge

Portland, Mount Hood, & the Columbia River Gorge

Grand Canal, Venice

On Top of the World: Everest and Makalu

Ancient Citadel of Bam, Iran

High Dunes in the Namib Desert

Merapi Volcano, Java

Pyramids at Giza

Low Pressure off Northern California Coast

Angkor Ruins

Every year when Martin Luther King, Jr. day rolls around, I can't help
thinking about comedian Steve White talking about white supremacists not wanting to celebrate MLK day. Basically he said, you've got to be racist as hell not to want to take a day off a work... I couldn't agree more (as I sit here at work, trust me, I'd rather be taking the day off).

Off topic, but worth sharing while your attention, Mr. White is the author of one the best "driving while black" jokes. He said the cop took one look at his driver's license and said, "What's your middle name? Ain't?"

If you're one of the unfortunates who's never heard of Steve White, he's a classic old school comedian who's been in a bunch of Spike Lee pics.

Speaking of Spike Lee, he and his brother have been combing through the Magnum photo archives and have put together a retrospective of MLK photographs from the major moments in his life. Of course, the show is only on in NYC, but you can check it out online. There are some really amazing photos from the Magnum giants and the Lee brothers have done a fantastic job putting this whole thing together.

My sister Marni, her husband Paris and my nephew Mateo just before they left the hospital for home.

Mateo is my dad's first grandson. He hasn't forgotten how to hold a baby. Of course, he does have his own 9-year old twins.

Many more pictures to come.

An Election Spoiled Rotten

By Greg Palast

It's not even Election Day yet, and the Kerry-Edwards campaign is already down by a almost a million votes. That's because, in important states like Ohio, Florida and New Mexico, voter names have been systematically removed from the rolls and absentee ballots have been overlooked--overwhelmingly in minority areas, like Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, where Hispanic voters have a 500 percent greater chance of their vote being "spoiled." Investigative journalist Greg Palast reports on the trashing of the election.

[more]

I don't care who you are or what you do, but you can't help be impressed by the images that are coming back from Cassini. They are awesome. They are beautiful. They are also very expensive.

If you think your digital camera is expensive, it's nothing compared to what we spend on these interstellar photographic missions. I'm not saying it's not worth it. At some level, we have a responsibility to explore our world, it's just something to think about.

The long lost images from my October 2001 trip to Cambodia are back online after several years of languishing in the digital wilderness.

What happened? Well, first of all, I put the site up on Geocities. Each Geocities site is attached to a Yahoo email address and if you don't open up your mailbox every three months or so, Yahoo suspends the account, vaporizing any Geocities pages, rather unsporting of them, I should think.

It should have been an easy matter to get the files and put them back up on this site. However, when this happened, I was living in Samoa and my old PC was in storage in California. I finally got the PC back in my hands in the last few days and have resurrected the page.

For the record, the images were made with Agfa 100ISO B&W film with my old manual Minolta X-700. I developed and printed all the images myself at the Skyline College darkroom.

So without futher ado, I invite you to come check out Cambodia in Black & White.

The year before I left for the Peace Corps, I photographed a little triathlon in San Francisco which about 300 contestants that took place on the same landscape on which the famous Escape from Alcatraz is run. It prepared me in no way for the crowds of people, the teeming masses of athletes and the crush of the media that I expericened on Sunday.

I had two assignments. The first was to shoot the running transition from the swim to the bike. The second was to shoot the finish line. I don't know why we shot the transition, but it's not for me to question, just to shoot. So another photpgrapher, Alex, and I set up on the sidewalk of Marina Blvd. and shot some of the 1400 runners that passed us by. I say some because there were so many in such a tiny space that it was impossible to get even half of them. I think I maybe got a 1/3. Probably more likely a 1/5.

That done I headed to the finish line and took up the best spot in the media well right behind the finishing arch under which the runners pass. Under normal circumstances, it would have been simple. The runners cross the line. I shot them with the clock above. Easy. But this event was televised, and there were 1400 participants. And the area right behind the finish line was tiny.

Hasein, the team leader and my old buddy who happens to owe me 500 bucks, told me to just continue shooting no matter what and do my best, which is all I could do. The runners started coming. TV crews, news crews, guys handing out medals and athletes started piling up in the finish area. It was next to impossible to get a clean shot. Some of the athletes came through along the side so that the clock wasn't above them or stopped in the shade of the arch as the crossed the line or looked down to stop their watches right at the time that would have made the best photo. I did my best, but I doubt I made many sellable photos. It was just impossible.

Tomorrow I'm going to shoot the "Escape from Alcatraz" Triathlon in San Francisco. According the Brightroom assignment sheet, this event is one of only three triathlons that is televised on nationally & is considered the most prestegious non IronMan event in the world. Pretty cool.

What's even cooler is that there are something along the lines of 1400 participants and should run over 5 hours, so it will be a decent payday, plus I should be able to get some picturesque shots of athletes with the backdrop of the city.

So the shoot with Brightroom at the Napa Valley Triathlon went well. I had to leave to at 5am to get up there in time for the race, but I was done at 1030, which is the way it should always be.

I didn't get to see much of the famous wine growing valley but I did make a nie cruvy drive up the shores of Lake Barryesa that made me wish I had a Porsche instead of a Subaru.

The race itself was mostly unremarkable. That is too say that all triahlons are remarkable, just for the accomplishment. I should know. I ran one in Samoa. But this one was no more special that any other.

I sat out on the course and shot first bikers and then runners. I was flashed by some woman. This took me so much by surprise that I missed the shot. One second she was unzipping her top, and I thought she was just trying to cool off, but the zipper kept coming down and I was so shocked I forget to hit the shutter.

Then there was one racer that left me in awe. Number 500 was competing minues one limb. I saw amputee athletes all winter in Vail. Most of them were incredibly good and I formed this opinion that they were fearless because they had less to lose than the rest of this. It's probably way off base, but it's as good an explanation as any.

However this guy was a different story. Skiing might be hard work, even for the fully limbed, but it's also serious fun. Triathlons, however, are just gruelling labor. And for this guy to participate, let alone cross the finish line ahead of many competitors was an awe inspiring example of the will of the human spirit.

Jen was dancing last night at Amira, a restaurant in the Mission district in SF. I brought the 10D along and since the restaurant was mostly empty, I was able to take a few pictures without getting in the way of the patrons.

The light is notoriously bad in these Middle Eastern restaurants. Well, that's not true. It's great for the mood and the dancing, but not so hot for photography. I have a nice speedlite flash, but I hesitate using it at night because I detest the effect of having a large shadow on the wall behind the subject.

Instead I went for my fastest lens (50mm 1.4) and a moderately high ISO of 800. I was really happy with the camera's ability to maintain focus in such low light and while the images came out with a slightly orangish yellow cast, that's fine, because that's the way the light looks inside the place.

So far I love this camera, the only problem being the 3 frames per second. I really need something a little faster for shooting soccer and baseball and other sports, but for landscape and portraits, the 10D is brilliant.

Brightroom is a company I've worked with before. They shoot road races and triathlons all around the country. But now they've gone totally digital, hence the reason for the 10D purchase (it's not really a toy, in fact, it's tax deductible).

They called this morning to see if I can work a triathlon in Napa Valley. Of course I can. Not only will be able to spend afternoon in Napa, but Brightroom also pays 60 bucks an hour. If only they had work for me every day, I wouldn't have anything to worry about. Unfortunately, it's only one day a week at best and 3-4 hours at most. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to start my own business.

Oddly enough I'm also shooting in Napa on Sunday for Action Shooters. I will shoot that same amount time, working much harder because it's baseball instead of running and I will get less than half the amount. It's the sort of thing that makes me want to cry.

After waiting all day for the FedEx man to arrive, I was thrilled to take possession of my new toy, a Canon 10D. Whoo-hooo!

The Canon 10D is sort of a mid-range digital SLR. It's what we were using at Vail and it's a decent camera. It's not as fast as my film 1-V which takes 8 frames per second to the 10D's 3, but it's digital and it takes great pictures. No more scanning. No more film. No more processing.

I need to get a few more lenses. I have a 50mm 1.4, that's standard. Got to have that. And I have a 70-200mm 2.8, which is a brilliant all around lens. With the 2X teleconverter, it's perfect for close in sports, without it, it's a great portrait lens. I need to get something wider, say a 17-35mm and something longer, either a 300mm or a 400mm. The problem is I don't have a spare several grand sitting around. The damn thing about photography is that it is a seriously expensive hobby. The 10D alone set me back more than 1300 when you include shipping. I did sell my Nikon Coolpix 5700 but that's still some serious shrapnel.

BTW, this picture of Fil is one of the first taken with my new toy.

I shot baseball, soccer and softball tournaments for Action Shooters in the 9 months or so before I left for the Peace Corps. It's hard to believe, but I'm back working for them again. I guess I need the money.

I went down to Pleasanton (an oxymoronic placename if ever there was one) to shoot some kids playing baseball. It was the Pirates against Diamondbacks, not that means anything. All that mattered was that I was being paid to be there and take photos.

Action Shooters still uses film, which was a strange reverse transition for me. For the first half of the first roll, I kept looking at the back of the camera to see what the pics looked like only to see the flat back where the film goes instead of an LCD screen. It was disconcerting, but I got over it.

I had some problems with AS just before I let for Samoa. Mostly because Toby, one of the owners was a complete dick. He would lie to me and the other shooters. We'd go on long road trips to Southern California and he'd be driving the van and smoking pot while I was sitting in the back in a folding lawn chair. It made me slightly uncomfortable and, since I wasn't being paid all that much, very expendable. Toby also had some odd traits like referring to change as "shrapnel" which would confuse the hell out the customers and when a parent complained about the photos, he'd pretend that he didn't own the company, which was easy for anyone to buy because the guy was a simple scumbag.

AS has since opened a branch in Orange County and Toby has moved down there so I don't have to deal with him. Most of the guys who I used to shoot with have moved on too, hopefully to better things. There is one guy that I did shoot with before who still shoots on occasion, Hassein. Hassein owes me 500 bucks so I can't wait to see him and I'm certain the feeling is mutual.

Can you caption this photo? The winner gets a year supply of pisupo* and the undying admiration of your peers.

*since no one should eat pisupo, a year's supply consititues zero cans

Today wasn't a busy day on the mountain, being Easter and all. So instead of shooting patrons, we spent a good chunk of the day taking shots of each other. I went out in the afternoon with my fellow action photographer Oly from New Zealand. We took turns photographing each other doing fairly inadvisable things. Since there are already too many pictures of me on this site, here are some of Oly taking wing on his snowboard at Vail.

The era of big nudes is over.

Tomorrow I'm leaving to take a job as an on-mountain photographer at Vail, America's finest ski resort (or so they claim). This is something of dream job for me. It's very exciting and I can't wait to get there and get started.

How did I get this job? I could say I went through a battery of interviews and showed portfolios all over the place, but I'd be lying. All I did was call the company and ask for a job. That's it. Amazing, isn't it?

There was some trepidation about finding a place to live on such short notice (they needed an action photographer right away). It's mid-season and I have cats, which is a huge problem. I called my aunt & uncle who are good friends with a couple who live in Vail. They put out the word to their friends and acquantainces. Lo and behold, right before I was almost forced to board my precious kittens with some buddies in San Diego, I got a call from a woman who is looking for someone to rent out her extra room. And she doesn't care that I have cats. Bring 'em on, she says. God bless networking.

It should be fun to see how the Subie performs in the snow. It will be more fun to see how the kittens perform in the snow. It will be less fun to see how I perfom in the snow.

I recently saw War Photographer, a documentary about one of my personal heroes, James Nachtwey, considered by many the greatest war photographer ever. The film was both moving and incredibly disturbing, but having pored over Natchwey's photos, I was expecting that.

What I really enjoyed about the film was seeing the methodology of this great photographer. The documentary film makers attached a micro-videocamera onto Natchwey's Canon 1-V so that you could see over his trigger finger right into the action he was shooting. You could see him change shutter speeds and aperture settings. I saw that he used 400 speed film, which is a surprise since his pictures are so sharp. You could see how meticulous he was about taking notes, and about keeping his camera clean in less than ideal circumstances. You could see how he traveled. You could see how interacted with his subject matter. You could see how close he was to the action. It was amazing.

If you want to check out some of Natchwey's work, and I highly recommend it, though it's not for the faint of heart, here are some sites:

James Natchwey's site
www.jamesnachtwey.com/

Salon: James Nachtwey
http://dir.salon.com/people/feature/2000/04/10/inferno/index.html

Times - James Natchwey
http://wtc10048nyc.free.fr/174.html

While my brother and I waited for our time slot to go up the Washington Monument, we visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

I knew it was going to be upseting. It's one of the most depressing places on the planet. At a certain point I just had to get out of there because I was almost overcome with emotion, but not before I saw the photographs of Roman Vishniac.

From 1933 to 1939, Vishniac produced a photographic expose of Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe. His naturalistic photos are a brilliant record of life in the ghettos of Europe.

Today I went to the National Museum of American History, part of the massive Smithsonian. This is where you'll find things like Archie Bunker's chair and Lincoln's top hat and other pieces of Americana.

The most interesting exhibit to me was the collection of photographs from long time White House photojournalist Diana Walker. There was a huge array photos from Ford to Clinton showing both the public and private life of the presidents.

Part of the collection included her two Canons and her Leica. God knows what she's doing without them while they are on display, but it was ery cool to she what she took all her incredible pictures with.

The thing that's interesting about Walker is that she didn't start serious photography until she was in her mid-30s. Times have changed since she first strapped on a camera, but maybe there's hope for me.

If you want to see some wickedly good images of life in New York City, surf over to John Walder Photography. John is one of the most talented people I know. Then again, I don't really know that many talented people. Or that many people, come to think of it. All that aside, John does some really incredible stuff.

I know John from days suffering together as traveling photographers, going around California shooting little girls playing softball or whatever assignment we were sent to in some backwater town in the middle of nowhere. Right before I moved to Samoa. John took off for NYC to pursue his art. Go check out his work.