Feeding My Passion

I didn’t get a photo on Monday, so I’m a day behind on the 30-day assignment. This afternoon I’ll post the pictures I took of a radio DJ this morning (7a!), along with the pictures I’m going to take at the main Merced Fire Department. That will catch me up, and then I’ll have another 7 days of photos. Then I’ll do my 1-Day project, do a book report on Loup’s book, pitch my essay, and photograph it!

Oh, I need to get a portfolio together and submit it, but that might be challenging since I’ve moved 11 times (no kidding) since I left Columbia in December 1999, and my photos aren’t as together as they should be for this type of thing. I’ll talk to David about it for some guidance.

Steve Peña changes out a car’s oil and oil and inspects while it’s up on the lift at Caton’s Auto Machine in Merced, Calif.

The Failed Logic (Isaiah Foulks on bass, Brody Amaral, drums, Ben Carpenter, lead vocals and guitar, and Scott Little, guitar and backup vocals) plays at The Partisan, a club in downtown Merced, on Sunday night.

Jhonathan Thomas, Jesus Santana, Richard Simonia, and Joey Thomas play 2-on-2 basketball near dusk in Merced’s Applegate Park.

University of California-Merced has hosted a human rights film series the last 4 years. The film last week was Veiled Voices, and because the filmmaker, Brigid Maher was there, the discussion afterward was especially interesting and lively.

This week the film was Crude, and I made some photos there. Terrible lighting and I really dislike the little pop-up on-camera flash, so I set the ISO to 1600. I’m not exactly happy about the noise, but I prefer noise to flash

Cristian Ricci, literature professor at the University of California-Merced during the question and answer period after the documentary Crude.

The owner/instructor at the big Taekwondo dojo on Main Street wasn’t really making it easy for me to photograph a class for my daily assignment, so I went to Merced MMA, a mixed martial arts studio also on Main Street. After going one day and introducing myself, they told me to come back the next day so they would had a chance to talk with the management. In the end, they were much more cooperative!

I’ve always enjoyed making sports pictures, though mine are of the more standard action variety than anything truly unique or interestingly different. Getting the lacrosse picture was relatively easy, mostly because the player was running drills and not zooming all over the field, and it was outside, so I had plenty of light so I could both stop down and speed up. Merced MMA is in a former car dealership, so it’s all windows, but the class I wanted to photograph was at night, so natural light wasn’t a consideration, so I’m all the way open and relatively slow for action.

I’m also trying to use the 85mm (127.5mm) more, but long, clean lines of sight were hard to come by, and trying to shoot really tightly on sports action requires more skill than I currently have. So I used both lenses, which includes the 25.5-75mm zoom.

I’m halfway through the 30-day assignment, and I thought this would be a good time to review what I’ve done so far. I’m satisfied with my results so far, mostly in how well I am approaching people and my very conscious choice of a fairly wide variety of subjects.

But what I’m noticing about my photos is that they all look quite similar, similar because I’ve been using one lens, a very nice 17-50mm (25.5-75mm in 35mm terms), and at 17mm most of the time. I like the lens, it’s sharp, pretty fast (universally f2.8), focuses quickly, and it’s nice and wide. My favorite focal length of all time back when I was shooting film was 28mm, so this is mighty close. What makes all the photos look very similar is the depth of field.

Because I’m not getting super cozy with my subjects yet (with a notable exception on Day 8), I can’t really open my aperture way up and use selective focus to keep the background (or foreground) out of focus. So everything is fairly sharp, which can lead to a lot of clutter in the frame. That’s fine sometimes, but not all the time.

Enter the 85/1.8! Ta-da! My dad has given this lens to me, which is very generous of him, especially since this lens rocks. But I haven’t used it yet! I like wide angle lenses for the most part, I can do more funner stuff with them! But I want to use a more selective depth of field and I want to try using this great lens. It’s 127.5mm on the D200, so it’s very different than shooting with the much wider 25.5-75mm zoom, not a great lens for the small stores I’ve been working in lately, at least not the way I’ve been using the zoom, so I’ll be changing where I position myself and I’ll be looking for very different types of pictures when I’m using it as well. Here’s my first go at it, and these pictures feel different to me, which is a good start.

(For the purposes of the 30-day assignment, I’m only counting the pictures with people in them that I’ve approached. The first and the last photos fit the bill in this group.)

Matt Mateo has been an employee at Just for You, an adult-themed store in downtown Merced, for 4 years.

Downtown Merced in the evening.

Bishop’s on the Square is one of the few fine-dining restaurants in Merced.

Fernando’s Bisto in downtown Merced

Curt Nelson, local vocalist and choir director, and Rob Hypes, talk behind a theater in downtown Merced.

I think it’s time for me to start using the 85.

Della Salas goes over the Merced Antique Mall’s stall assignments with owner Rose Ann Bressler.

While Antique Mall owner Rose Ann Bressler looks on (middle), Micki Rucker (left), a long-time customer who now rents a stall at Merced Antique Mall, examines a pitcher that Mary Jo Campodonica (right) is going to sell in her own stall.

Antique Mall employee and seller Mary Jo Campodonica (right) shows owner Rose Ann Bressler a purse she’s pricing for sale in her booth while Micki Rucker, a long-time customer who rents a stall, looks on.

My laptop can’t gracefully handle the large RAW files the D200 makes and I’m not willing to go back to JPEG as long as I have it, so yesterday I moved all my photos to a more powerful desktop computer. So I didn’t make a picture yesterday. So I’m sorry. So?

I’ll double up sometime this week.

Tonight I’m cooking stir-fried bok choy and shrimp and tofu pad thai for a dinner party. Last night my mother made the bases for chocolate ice cream and Barbara Tropp’s ginger ice cream, plus Tropp’s dark chocolate ice cream sauce. We’ll be eating well tonight! But first I must make photos!

Update 2/23

Epilogue: Ok, so after I got all of my photos posted here, I needed to prep for dinner since I was asked to cook for a weekly dinner thing my parents host. Because the prep took longer than I had expected, I missed my chance yesterday to make my daily picture. Now I’ve got catch up 2 days! I’m not worried that I won’t make the days up before 10 March (which is 30 days from my beginning on 8 February), I’m just a little disappointed in myself for letting it happen.

Forward!

Every non-rainy Saturday, there’s a big market at the Merced County Fairgrounds with vendors that sell everything from socks and bootlegged Spanish- and Hmong-language videos, to cherimoya, dried chilies, fresh exotic roots to aid digestion, and elote, roasted corn-on-the-cob you can dip in butter and sprinkle with chili powder and parmesan cheese.

A produce vendor cuts open and displays a melon for a potential customer.

Bonus:

My uncle Tad teaches the newest member of my family, Kylee, how to play the shell game.