My boss sucks...

My last day of work was Friday and it was a massive fight to get to the end. I spent all week shooting the jobs that my boss didn't want to or, in the opinion of most people at the Bug, was too lazy to. But I digress. As much crap that a person has to go through when you work at Shutterbug it does provide a great outlet to get some good work done. If you're the type of person that can rifle through piles and piles of horse shit just to find a diamond (I don't know why a diamond would be in horse shit) then it isn't too bad. Some of the people there are great. Some of them are miserable. It's just a matter of not letting the miserable ones keep you down and deriving what you want out of the job.

So the massive fight I had to go through last week was the senior pictures he asked me to shoot. The first girl, as the studio manager put it, was a "charity case". She had no money and had worked her way through high school to be able to buy a car. Not a bad little story. We had the shoot planned out around her car (her trophy) and some of the areas of town that were unique to her. It didn't exactly work out that way. 1.) she didn't bring her car 2.) She hated being outside in the heat 3.) Even when we did come up with a cool shot for her, her midget sized patience overtook her and it was like pulling teeth. I said to hell with it, took her to the confides of an air conditioned studio, shot three set-ups and sent her on her way. The good thing is that when we shot in the studio she finally got excited about the pictures. It was exactly what she wanted. So all this time I wasted out on location trying to put together a package of images could have been avoided if I had just asked, "What type of picture do you want of yourself ?" I was so locked into what my boss wanted me to do that I lost focus and didn't ask what should have been my first and only question.

The second shoot was a cluster fuck of mis-guided scheduling and lack of communication. Our studio manager, as much as I want her to succeed, is the most unorganized person in the world. It might be that she comes from the corporate world of Sears studio photography. They tell her what to think and how to organize. She never had to do it on her own before now. So, instead of having one senior to shoot, we have two at the same time. Instead of spending the entire day with them, we spend a couple hours sharing time. Instead of doing location shots, we only do studio. To top it all off, my boss, the person that was supposed to shoot it, the man that the seniors were told was going to shoot their pictures decides to sleep in. I'm stuck there with Murphy's Law biting me on the ass, hard. I asked the models what they were expecting from the day's shoot and neither one of them knew nor cared. I thought to myself "fuck it" and shot some pictures for myself. I gave them stuff they can use but I certainly didn't shoot like it was senior pictures. Here are some samples of the day:





My last day at the Bug was reminiscent of the last day of school. I had the hope of summer ahead of me and the promise of next year. I can't wait to get out of Bowling Green just like I couldn't wait to get out of the Bug. It's not bad here, I just need away from these people and to be closer to the ones I trust and love.

Old people rock...

I just shot a picture that is going on the cover of a senior home's (Christian Care) golf brochure. I thought I would make the old guy look like a pimp...

Arguments have laws...

Am I the only one that remembers that there are rules to arguments? Why the fuck do most people start to fall into fallacies when the first signs of losing the battle rears its head? I got into a debate with a good friend the other day about Slam poetry. His position was that "Slam" poetry was inferior to the likes of Billy Collins and Langston Hughes. In addition to that he claimed that Slam Poetry was doing more harm than good in promoting poets. My position is that he knows too little to pass judgment as fast as he had. Look, Opinion is opinion, but opinion based on lack of information is ignorance. He, in my opinion, was lacking too much information to support his argument. If he had said, "Slam poetry, from what I've heard, is no where near as articulate or artistic as some other classical poets," I could have accepted that. He continued on about Slam's lack of artistic quality and worth as a viable and respected form of poetry. I can dig it man. I get your whole opinion. Just give me a ‘why’. Tell me how you reached this conclusion if you can. If you can’t, then let it die a little. Every thought we have doesn’t need to be a child. We don’t need to see every idea as a ‘little darling’ that needs to be nourished and encouraged. Some need to die. Some even need to be tortured.



As he continued bashing Slam as an inferior, obnoxious form of poetry, I would build counter points. This is where the "Laws" part of this post plays its hand. One major point of contention with him was that Slam had pushed back poetry into the dregs of artistic endeavors by being enveloped by tripe prose and stumbling lyrical disasters. One of the only counter points I had was that Slam had made poetry a success in the eyes of the market. It was now a viable form of art that HBO deemed worthwhile. My point is poetry books, magazines and pamphlets never match the staggering drawing power of TV. It didn't matter that it was HBO, CBS, NBC or any other network. The point is that it was broadcast, and that carries a lot of positive implications with it.

I was proud of this argument. How could anyone counter such a sound fact? Poetry is reaching the peak of its popularity by form of broadcast. Neither tricks nor traps to this argument. My friend did come back with an line of reasoning that, for lack of a better term, sucked the shit out of a cow's colon. He countered with, "HBO? The same network that airs Howie Mandel specials?" The table erupted with laughter. My entire argument was drowned by this comment. This blatant fallacy. The fucker drummed up support for his feeble argument by concocting a fallacious one. The fallacy he committed was a Red Herring fallacy. Red Herring fallacies, in my experience, are the most commonly abused fallacy in arguments. It’s increasingly more common when arguing with a conservative. It feels like they’re arguing what they want to argue and not the subject at hand.

Example:
“We humans are primarily responsible for causing global warming,” says person A
“No we’re not! Al Gore is just drumming up the masses on the whole global warming issue to sell books,” retorts person B

The argument has nothing to do with Al Gore. We’re talking about the science behind global warming, not some politician’s motives in exposing the science behind it.

Here’s the formula:
1. Topic A is under discussion.
2. Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A)
3. Topic A is abandoned.

This is the issue…he won the support of the table. More over, my roommate reminded me about how he “won the debate with the HBO comment”. His comment had nothing to do with the point that poetry had never been seen on TV before Slam. There was a huge movement across this country that gained so much momentum that Russell Simmons decided to spend time and money packaging it for the masses. The argument was not about equating Def Poetry Jam to the steaming pile of dog shit that is Howie Mandel. Ultimately it just proved to me that it doesn’t matter if your argument is sounder than someone else’s. It just matters whether you have the crowd on your side. You can rape logic every time you speak only if the crowd stays on your side. It’s fucking scary and it happens more than you know. Here’s a website with a list of inductive fallacies:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
Learn them. Love them.

This is more of a "Kohl" post...

This is for the all-influential Kohl Threlkeld. We all knew Vikings could concur foreign lands through a menagerie of rape and pillaging, but who would of thunk that a Viking could convince a Secular-Jew to start a blog? And you didn't have to pillage a damn thing...

I just talked to my friends in Nashville (Mike and Jenny) and they just completed a yearlong mural project. They were commissioned by Village Real Estate to paint a 250-foot wall across from a new condo project in Germantown. All told, it took them just a few months to paint the wall but the preparation is what took the bulk of time. I'm beyond happy for them. It's too far and few between that I see people that are doing exactly what they want and loving every minute of it.


Here is a stitched together panoramic I shot on one of the last days of painting. It was shot with an 80mm from across the street. I'm going down soon and re-shooting the completed project with a car mount and a 35mm lens. We're going to drive slowly next to the mural and shoot every few blocks, and then stitch it together to kill the bend.

Check out their site: www.numberwalls.com