* the camera roll *

so i apologize for my absence these past two months or so.  the ole missus and i got a bit sidetracked and went off and had ourselves a junior.  this is what i’ve been up to these past two months:

kinda nuts how quick they grow.  like weeds.  at left is in the hospital around day 1.5.  center pic is about the two week mark.  right pic was about a week or so ago.

one of the many things that i love about this kid is that he doesn’t seem to give a damn when i pop him with a strobe.  i’ve been concocting all sorts of photo ideas for him.  torturously embarrassing photos that i want to take of him in ridiculous buntings and outfits, set into absurd backdrops.  think terry gilliam.  i plan on starting these after the holidays.

hello.

welcome to my site, devoted to snappy snaps from my umbilical cord that is the iphone.  since i first bought one a year ago, it has never been more than 50 feet away from me.  24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entire year so far.  

well, now thinking about it, the previous statement is actually not 100% accurate.  i have once been iphone-less for about 16 hours, when i accidentally dropped it into the san francisco bay while on a boat, woozy from dramamine.  i can’t begin to describe to you the feeling of being so utterly lost and disconnected from the world during those 16 hours.  how else was i going to check my email every five minutes?  needless to say, i was at the apple store promptly at 9 am the next morning, four hundred bucks poorer.  remember when they used to cost that much?

now, i don’t want to be one of those apple drones who thinks one infinite loop can do no wrong.  but i can only echo the flocks of ridiculous sheeps who are constantly saying, “wow!  how did i ever live without the iphone?”  that thing really has become infused into my daily routine.  i mean, what else would i be doing when i’m barreling down i-280 at 90 miles an hour?  plus, the ole missus and i have developed this habit when we wake up first thing in the morning: this one-two combo of yawning and fumbling for our iphones which sit charging quietly next to us on our respective nightstands, checking our emails and facebooks because WE CAN’T MISS A SINGLE EMAIL EVER.

besides being used to constantly monitor my facebook page and to play blackjack, my iphone has become my new favorite camera.  i have it with me at all times.  see, this is a really great thing, because a number of years ago, i used to be one of those jaded lazy newspaper staff photographers who couldn’t be bothered carrying a camera with me unless i was on the clock.  that was really bad, because i felt that it had a bit of a negative influence on how i saw my world and took pictures.  things just weren’t fresh anymore.  for a couple of years, i was more interested in playing drums in rock bands instead of shooting pics.  pictures were solely a way to earn a living.  

alright, alright…  there were several contributing factors that nudged me back into the warm embrace of my marriage with photography.  i forced myself out of a lethargic final few years at the paper (nothing like a steady paycheck to turn me soft) and entered the oh-so-exciting world of freelance.  i also discovered the world of really great contemporary fine art photogs that challenged my way of seeing.  and i got back into shooting on big film.  i taught a photo class for a year, which forced me to take apart and reassemble my philosophies on photography.  so when you combine all those factors with this little cameraphone that has kept a continual orbit around me for the past year, you get a guy who’s taking a lot of weirdo pictures again.

so now the iphone camera, ever ready in my jeans pocket, has kinda given me a bit of a kick in the ass.  i’m now always keeping my eyes open for those little eggleston-like snapshots of my little corner of the world — this anthropological making sense of things that seem random at first, but paint a pretty weird picture of our world when collected en masse.  

that’s what this blog is all about.  the devotion to these weird little pictures that i have collected this past year.  i figure that this blog will be the best place for them, since the iphone resolution is pretty shitty and unprintable in any paper form beyond  a postage stamp.  

please come by and visit now and then.  i’m going to try to regularly post images.  sometimes in one big huff, sometimes a trickle here and there.

john.