A Piece of Americana

Our world has had more painful moments to contend with lately.  And there is a lot more that we generally don’t know about because it hasn’t come to the national stage yet but just as painful.  My family and I have been on vacation for the last two weeks though and we still made the best of it.  There was no comfort in reading about Minnesota, Louisiana, and Dallas.  But even here in Florida, we heard about the attempted child abduction back in Victorville.  We learned about the 3 murders, including the 9-year-old boy, in San Bernardino too.  We live, work and go to school in the high desert.  Those things (and more I’m sure that did not hit the national stage) happened while we were gone but we’re heading back today.  We are in Orlando: Pulse Night Club.  We are from the Inland Empire: San Bernardino mass shooting.  Just the same, we earned a vacation and a respite from all of this pain.  This image is a parting shot of our last outing yesterday – the crowd is just random folks.  We barely made it back to the car before the downpour.  We had a lot of fun these last two weeks but the heat was a challenge.  It’s very humid here.  Truth be told, we had a good vacation but it’s time to go home.

Brick and Mortar

So, I know where I’m going but I can’t work on it at the moment.  I’m on another mission at this time.  But that’s ok – I can still share with you these images from my Victor Valley Project.

The Journey

A goal is starting to take shape – there is a destination.  I’m that kind of person, I thrive on seizing objectives.  Does that sound a little Army like?  Yeah, I guess that’s what you get when you spend most of your adult life as soldier.  Thus I display snippets of a past life here again today.  But that’s neither here nor there, the point is there is a goal – things are starting to take focus.  And I realize it is a two pronged approach that I’m after.  To begin with, I have to breathe some life back into TEAM TEN Tops & Tees and get that to bring in the initial funding for the photo project.  The project is another iteration of the Objectivity Project and I think it’s going to be a compelling body of work.

Yes, the journey is all too important but I really need to know where I’m going to begin with.  Truth be told, I feel better now – I have target.

8:30am, Breakfast, Jan 23, 2004 in Iraq.  We were at our halfway point where we spent the night.

 9:00am, Preparing before we hit the road.

 3:00pm, Our destination – the team we were changing out at the 3^rd ACR’s forward operating base.

6:00pm, Dinner, before we closed out the day on another journey in Army boots.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Bishop, Boron, Bakersfield, and Barstow – where do we go from here?  Who knows.  What I do know is that we live in some daunting times and unscrupulous people are preying on the fears of the majority of the people.  You can’t live afraid though – that’s not living, that’s just existing.  Truth be told, we have lived through much worse – it just wasn’t up front and personal the way a TV and the Internet are now.  Any arm chair historian can point to many times where the taking of innocent lives was much worse than it is today – here in the USA too.  We have to make the change we want though and that requires involvement.  Being involved will require some effort in educating yourself about truths versus lies.  And it is not a difficult thing to do, just form some questions and go dig for answers.  Here’s a question: there are three things, an alcoholic beverage, a pack of cigarettes, and a box of ammo.  Which one of these things can you buy in California without a driver’s license?  See, you just have to form a question and go search for the answer.  You will start seeing the truth and what needs to be done and you can shut off the rhetoric.  The uninformed can be herded like sheep to go in whatever direction the one herding them wants them to go.  An ignorant populace is a tremendous source of power for those who do know the #truth but don’t want you to know.  Dumb people are easy to scare.  Don’t be afraid, be a source of #knowledge.

If you need help on how to do this, ask me.

Kinetic Ambiguity

So, before I had said, “I want to see more than what we see at the moment because more is going on that what is seen.”  Hey, that was kind of goofy and made little sense but my Kinetic Ambiguity Project is in line with the point I am trying to make.  I’m not after the “Jackson Pollock” photograph but this project works towards where I’m going.  I know, you want to see where I’m going with this, not where it came from.  You want to see that #image I’m alluding to.  Soon, but I need to mull over what I have done to help me focus a little more.

Oh, and I did a lot of this Kinetic Ambiguity Project in Las Vegas – love that place.

H&A International

Downtown Victorville, on 7^th Street, is where H&A International used to be.  The building is still there but a new business has moved in.  That’s a good thing.  Change in the way of the community coming back.  It’s a long way to go but it’s the right direction.  But this is not about that.  I like this #image – its symmetry, its balance that is really asymmetrical, the colors, the over saturation of the colors, the use of the negative space – I like this image because I’m not finished with it.  I thought I was but realize that I’m not.  Truth be told, I want to see more than what we see at the moment because more is going on that what is seen.  And this is #California – so very much California but not the California known by most.  There is so much to see.

A Store

A famous photographer, Andreas Gurski, created an image, "99 Cent II Diptychon", that gained fame outside of the art world because of what it sold for at auction – over 3 million dollars.  Mr. Gurski is still alive.  I have often dreamed of selling an #image for 1 million dollars.  And I have dreamed of winning the lottery too.  I have dreamed about #Halle Berry being my girlfriend.  I have dreamed about a lot of stuff – but that’s cool, dreams.  But I pretty much keep myself planted in reality – go to work, be a father, keep working on my photography.  I work on my photography in an effort to make it better.  But sometimes I just photograph things just to see what it looks like.  This is not Andreas Gursky’s "99 Cent II Diptychon".  It’s just me in the store with my phone looking at colors.  I did no post production on these, no Melisandre, the red woman, magic to make them look like this or that – just taking a picture for the sake of seeing what it looks like.  It’s a snapshot, nothing more.  But, truth be told, I wouldn’t mind it if this “piece” commanded a million dollars at one of those auspicious art events and Halle Berry was there on my arm full of admiration at what I have created.  Now that’s a dream.

Train Depots

Back in 2011 when I was an early photography student at California State University, San Bernardino, (I love saying the whole name like that – go Coyotes!) one of the projects we had for our documentary #photography class was photographing some Inland Empire train stations.  We could capture others but some were on our “have to photograph” list.  I thought it was a good challenging #project that made you think how you would do it different since you knew others would be photographing the same structure.  I have since gone back to some of these train depots to use them as back drops or as the subject of the shoot themselves.  But these images are some of those from Prof. McGovern’s class (he is an incredible teacher and photographer in his own right).  I should make some full size prints of these images.

 Colton

 Pomona

 Redlands

 San Bernardino

 Union Station, Los Angeles

Union Station, Los Angeles

The Parking Lot

So, I really need to catch up in my post production for my images. There is so much I want to do but can't until my images are ready to go.  I guess every photographer has that situation.  Oh well, this is a shot from my phone in the Target parking lot in Apple Valley, CA - where I live.  No post production, just the shot from the phone because I thought the clouds were really dramatic looking.  Truth be told, I think it is fine as is.

Art Work

So I changed my website a little bit.  I want to give a go at moving my art work into something that can sustain itself.  It’s kind of like letting the art do the work.  That was silly but you know what I mean.  I will be updating it with more current work and getting back to competing too – I’m referring to art contest.  We’ll see how this turns out but in the meantime the link is to the revamped website.

Sentinels

They look like sentinels guarding something.  Or maybe they look like large cranes in the shipyards.  Then again, it could be robots waiting for the menacing dark robot that is advancing on their position.  They are just #mustard and mayo dispensers unless you let your imagination go.

Eastern Sky

I am really drawn to images of the eastern sky at dawn in particular.  This image is from where I use to live in Victorville looking east towards Apple Valley – where I live now.  I wonder, did I know something but was not aware of it?

A Street and 7th

  I made this image of downtown Victorville back in August 2014 in the morning.  Photography is really a kind of therapeutic thing for me.  I don’t know if I’m mentally unstable or not (I don’t feel like I am) but I feel really good when I’m creating images.  It’s just something about #photography that challenges me to take what may pass as ordinary and to try to make it extraordinary.  I don’t think this image is that but that is always the goal.  But this image does is a part of my continuing Victor Valley Project and you can look as some older examples of that at my web site if you are so inclined.  Though not extraordinary, I think this is a strong image though.

Mount Baldy (or Mount San Antonio)

  I live in a scenic paradise – the Victor Valley.  I know, some people would say, “What? #Victorville, Hesperia, Apple Valley and so on, are a part of a scenic paradise?”  It’s all in how you form your own thoughts about yourself and your life.  You want crap and feel like crap – I guess you’re crap.  I see what I see and I see a scenic paradise.  This is Mt. Baldy as seen east of Deep Creek Road at the top of the hill on Bear Valley Road.  It is part of the San Gabriel Mountains in San Bernardino County.  It is above 10,000 feet.  It is magnificent.  And it is an image I like a lot.

Happy New Year, 2016

It’s been a long time since I wrote something here.  Well, I have been busy.  I graduated from Cal State San Bernardino in the summer of 2014.  I got a job later that year.  I worked at that job for almost a year before I got the really great job I have now.  And I closed on a house last October and got my kids out of that horrible apartment complex we lived in for too long.  Yes, I would say that I have been a little preoccupied.  But #photography is my thing and I miss it tremendously.  And this blog is a good vehicle to show some of it.  So I need to get back to it.