OutdoorType

The past few months I’ve been doing a lot of camera-less driving and it’s been killing me.

Last year, after kicking myself enough times for not having a camera on hand to try to capture some scene or another, I took to driving around with a camera in the car. And not just in the car, but in the front seat, and out of the case. And I did this a lot. And I took pictures from the car, lots and lots of pictures.

Then at work when I happened to notice some particularly nice light or a cool weather front moving through the area, I started taking “coffee breaks” and “long lunches.” I’d dash out to my car, drive out to a field or forest, and snap away hoping to catch something, anything to preserve the view in front of me.

I still try and practise this routine of having the camera with me as often as possible, but it’s mostly confined to weekends and the occasional weeknight*.

Anyways, there is a great point to this post and it is this… The latest addition to my news reader is the Nat Geo Adventure blog, discovered most likely, thanks to Kraig (another daily must read). Their latest posts comes from the magazine’s West Coast Editor, Steve Casimiro. He’s blogging about one of two of his best photographic tips gathered over the years and it is a tip that totally reinforces my want of carrying a camera with me at all times.

I know not everyone gets this. Even people who should know better sometimes ask silly questions. For instance, I was at a mountain bike race recently and for a change I was not part of the official photography team. As I walked around the race course catching up with friends I ran into an ex-girlfriend and we had sort of a weird exchange.

Noticing the camera hanging from my shoulder she asked, “Getting some good shots?” And because I wasn’t really taking pictures, but had the camera just in case, I replied, “Not really.”Looking confused I’m pretty sure she said something like, “Then why do you have your camera?” I don’t think I replied. I think I sort of stared dumbly while thinking to myself, “Um, hi, have we met?”

I almost always have a camera. And it’s because you never know. If I’d just gone to the race to hang out, I’d never have gotten this shot,which every time I look at it makes me break into a big, big smile. So take my word for it, take Steve Casimiro’s word for it. Take your camera with you.

* grrr… I hate the word weeknight – but that’s a whole other blog posting.

Metal bowls left atop preheated ovens will also preheat to the desired temperature (375° F). Ouch.

I’m sure someone spent lots of research dollars researching this very important subject mater, but they could have saved a lot of time (and money) and just asked me. I could have filled them in pretty quickly.

“Young men just find it difficult to tell the difference between women who are being friendly and women who are interested in something more,” said lead researcher Coreen Farris of Indiana University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Duh.

Luckily guys seem to be equally clueless when things are possibly working in their advantage too…

…the study, to be detailed in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, also found that it goes both ways for guys – they mistake females’ sexual signals as friendly ones. The researchers suggest guys have trouble noticing and interpreting the subtleties of non-verbal cues, in either direction.

So for you ladies out there, if you’re at all wondering about what it takes to get through to someone, generally the most direct/blunt way will do it (brightly lit, flashing neon signs, whacks on the head with cast iron kitchen appliances, etc.).

And because with me most things generally come around to words written by Aaron Sorkin I leave you with this awesome scene illustrating a guy (The American President) who is having trouble reading the signs…

				SHEPHERD
		As you pass through, you'll see a
		large closet on your left. And if
		you feel comfortable, hang up your
		coat, and when you come back I'll
		have fixed up a drink, we'll sit on
		the couch, and I will explain to
		you my plan.

				SYDNEY
		You have a plan? Don't make me
		wait. You're on a roll.

	SYDNEY disappears into the BATHROOM/DRESSING ROOM area.
	SHEPHERD keeps talking as he goes to the bar and makes a
	couple of drinks.

				SHEPHERD
			   (speaking up)
		Okay. You're attracted to me, but
		the idea of physical intimacy is
		uncomfortable because you only know
		me as the President. It's not always
		gonna be that way, and the reason I
		know that is because there was a
		moment last night when you were with
		me and not the President, and I know
		what a big step that was for you.
		So, Sydney, I'm in no rush. Here's
		my plan: We're gonna slow down.
		When you're comfortable, that's
		when it'll happen.

	SYDNEY comes back into the room...she's wearing one of
	SHEPHERD's dress shirts and nothing else. She walks toward
	him.

				SHEPHERD
			   (continuing)
		Perhaps I didn't properly explain
		the fundamentals of the "Slow Down"
		plan.

				SYDNEY
		You explained it great.

From WYFF in Greenville, SC today comes this news story about a fire on board a Delta 767. The opening to the story reads:

A passenger was burned during a fire on a Delta passenger plane that was forced to make an emergency landing at Greenville-Spartanburg Airport, according to airport officials.

But a couple paragraphs later we read:

The plane landed safely without incident and taxied to the B Concourse, Weston said.

WTF?! Landed safely, except for the whole passenger on fire thing.  Nice.  We also read that:

• the captain smelled smoke in the cockpit
• passenges reported hearing a “possible explosion”
• passengers reported feeling heat coming from the floor of the plane
• passengers were instructed to assume the crash position for landing

But luckily the plane landed without incident. Sweet.

Now, I’m not blaming the Delta baggage handlers or other employees, but is it a coincidence that a day after Delta announces it will cut half its workforce that things don’t exactly work as promised?

In other “Delta really hosed me” news, my friend flew into town for a few days visit. She flew Delta. Her checked bag was 100% soaked through and all of her clothes had this delightfully rancid smell to them. Now, granted neither she nor her bag caught fire, but who knows what happened to her bag.

…your doctor shines the light at the back of your throat, and before you can even say “Ahhh” she exclaims, “Oh Wow!”

When she then opens the exam room door and starts looking for other people to come in and see your throat, then you know that staying home from work today was totally legit.

I’m not anywhere near the most competitive person I know, but I have to admit to being just a little proud about my sick, sick body.

I just read an article in Time magazine about companies and free-lance photographers who are hired to follow and photograph regular, everyday people out for a night on the town. Apparently, some people are paying as much as $1,500 to be treated like a celebrity!

Phillip Barker agrees that a photographer is a powerful status symbol, even if it’s also an indulgence in narcissism. Barker, 29, posted an ad on Craigslist for a paparazzo to accompany him and 14 male friends during a bar-hopping birthday party in Chicago last November. Many of the responses were hostile (“You vain vain [expletive],” one read), but a woman, Mandy Johnston, took the job–delivering to the guys afterward an elaborate package of digital photos and prints and, during the evening, unexpected VIP stature: the crew skipped to the front of the line at several clubs. “We got in faster because of Mandy. People thought, These guys are important people,” Barker says.

A powerful status symbol? It might sound silly, but it’s true and I’ve seen it happen. A couple years ago I was walking around Adams Morgan with my camera. My friend was supposed to be making a website for one of the bars and we’d just shot a bunch of photos and were heading back to his apartment when we noticed the line waiting to get in to Chloe’s. It was a warm, late summer’s night and the place was packed and the line snaked down towards the McDonalds.

Trey, always the slightly mischievous one, told me to start taking pictures. I flipped on the external flash and started popping photos as we walked past the door and down the street. About 15 minutes later we returned and Trey approached the gate keepers guarding the entrance. A short bit of sweet talking and a gesture to me and my camera was all it took for us to jump ahead of the line. We were ushered to the first floor bar and the barman was instructed that “drinks are on the house for these guys.” We then spent a couple hours hanging out and taking photos. Needless to say, no one minded having their picture taken that night. If you carry around a big professional looking camera, people assume you must be a professional. The trick is to not correct them.

My other experience with the phenomenon described in the Time article was when I got hired to photograph a group of women who were having a girls night out on the town. Six women, all sorority sisters and long time friends, left the kids with their husbands and flew into DC for a reunion and to collectively celebrate their 40th birthdays. I photographed them as they had a special, VIP tour of the Capitol and then followed them down to Georgetown where they had reservations at a cozy little restaurant. I shot photos of them on the street and through the windows of the place and people did stop and stare and wonder who my “celebrity” subjects were.

Both these events were back in the fall of 2006… who knew that I was so cutting edge as to part of the early faux tabloid media entourage scene? I should mention that it was a lot of fun doing this and that you should contact me if you too would like to be a celebrity for a night.

Photo by Gary Taxali for TIME

laundromat, originally uploaded by catbagan. used under a Creative Commons license.

This started off as a simple comment to this post. I was about to write something like “ha ha, that does sound like an excessive amount of laundry. ” But then I got to thinking about the subject a little more and it turns out I’ve got some thoughts about laundry (and I’ve been doing my own laundry since the 7th grade, and that was a long time ago so I have a little bit of experience with the subject matter).

Now, it’s not like I sit around all day thinking about laundry and average loads of laundry per household, but, if I had ever given it much thought I would have come up with the notion that I probably do an average amount of laundry for my household.

Average household size, by the way, as defined by the 2000 US Census is 2.59 persons.

After a very liberal estimate of laundry usage at my house (a hold of two persons), in which I fired up Excel and made a quick spreadsheet, I came to the conclusion that my household does the following amount of laundry (where “loads of laundry” = number of loads run through the washing machine):

• 156 loads of laundry/year
• 1.5 loads of laundry/week

Factors to consider…

My place of work is pretty casual and I could get away with jeans and a t-shirt everyday of my life if I wanted. This means that I never go to the dry cleaners. Ever. Actually, that’s not true, I might go to the dry cleaners once, maybe twice a year in order to make my suit look nice if I’m shooting a wedding, but otherwise, no dry cleaning for me.

No dry cleaning means I wash everything at home. Luckily, things here are pretty easy… Every two weeks or so I have about two loads of darks to wash… Two cycles of cold water and I’m done. None of this warm wash/cold rinse stuff for me. So I’m saving energy there by not having to heat water with the electric water heater. Then, I hang dry all of my shirts, so that’s at least one cycle of the dyrer that is spared.

Now, the energy savings stop when it comes time to wash large, bulky items (like towels and sheets). My washer is at least 20 years old and is a top loading model of probably medium capacity. The agitator is a little wonky at times, so you have to be strategic when it comes to washing larger loads (like towels and sheets). Instead of dumping everything into one load you have to split stuff up into at least two loads (sometimes three) or else this terrible KA-CHUNK sound occurs during the rinse cycle and a buzzer goes off that you can hear all the way upstairs. The sound is really auwful and when it goes off a slight amount of panic ensues and you end up running down to the basement in order to push in the dial and make it stop. And so every couple of weeks, in order to avoid that horrible “the washer is ajar” alarm, I split larger loads into smaller loads and thus screw up my average number of washes. And I assume waste energy.

If I had my dream washer, a giant front loading model, I could save on water and energy and reduce the number of loads (also I could wash my sleeping bags at home and not have to take them to the coin laundry in Annandale next to the 7-11 where all the day labourers hang out – not that there’s anything wrong with day labourers… it’s really the coin laundry bit I don’t like). Unfortuneately a large front loading washer is not in this year’s budget and so I will have to made do with what I’ve got (unless someone can point out the savings that might be obtained by reducing the number of laundry loads performed at my house).

Thanks to John Catbagan for letting me use his photo. Check out his work on Flickr. 

Based on the guy’s reaction just now, it’s possible you are over tipping.  Either that or it was sarcasm and you totally missed it.

Apparently you should try Saturday mornings in Annandale.  There were nearly one hundred guys waiting for work on Little River Turnpike between the 7-11 and McDonalds.  I know the spot has been a long time gathering place, but I’ve never seen quite so many people before.

If there could be only one, which one would I get?

Inside You

or…

Not a Crook

The “inside you” one is funny and colourful and subtle and from Threadless. Meanwhile, “crook” is lacking in design and the image of Nixon waving peace signs is a little over used, but, you have to love the use of an ancillary McDonaldland character.

Speaking of McDonaldland, the evolution of the Hamburglar is kind of interesting:

The Hamburglar character was another thief that dressed in a black-and-white striped shirt and pants, a red cape, and a wide-brimmed hat and whose primary object of theft was McDonalds hamburger from the Hamburger Patch.

The design of the character changed from the 1970s to 1980s from a more sinister to a more cartoonish face. The age of the character has also changed, as originally he was depicted as an older man, but was redrawn as a less sinister young boy.

Originally, his vocabulary consisted of nothing other than “Robble, robble, robble.” His vocabulary has been expanded; he later was shown speaking ordinary English, though he continued to use “robble robble” to occasionally punctuate his speech. Although he was a thief, he was still considered a friend of Ronald McDonald and the rest of the McDonaldland gang, who appeared to tolerate his kleptomania as an eccentricity.

I think I’ll always have a taste for McDonalds… Damn the evil McOpCo geniuses of the 1970s and their advertising ways.