Coolpix Challenge: Rome, Tuscany, Paris, Geneva

I’ve travelled a lot, far beyond the norm of my class and culture (working class Chicano), and for years my friends and family would tell me, “Take lots of pictures!”

I told them I’d write to them instead, because I wasn’t going to take a camera.

I went to countries I had never expected to visit, Cuba, Poland, Germany, but I never brought a camera, because I believed that to travel with a camera would distract me from experiencing the cities I entered.

And maybe for me, back then, I was right.

Maybe I would have went into a new country or city concerned with finding a good photo and would have missed out on all the experiences I had walking alone at any hour.  

I remember walking by myself in Warsaw at two in the morning, collecting memories, the light and the glass, the shadows, and I didn’t need or want a camera.

The last time I spent the summer living in Paris, I used to look down on tourists with cameras, silently scoffing at them, impatient with them because there they were trying to get the Eifel Tower in every shot, and because at the Louvre, they clamored around the Mona Lisa, her smile protected behind glass, and they stood on tippy toes and shot unfocused pictures of her, her features lost in the glare of their own flash.

And because I was “living” there, i.e., renting an apartment in the Place Godot, across the small plaza from Picasso’s Paris studio, I felt like I was somehow not a tourist.

I wouldn’t have been seen carrying a camera, but one time, as I stood smoking a cigarette in front of the grave of Julio Cortázar, a young Argentine woman asked me if I would take a photo of her and his tombstone, and she handed me her point-and-shoot.

I took it quick, a bit too eager to hand it back to her and get out of there.

I saw what a good camera could do. As you know, the initials stand for Single Lens Replacement, because they have good, stable bodies and various levels and types of lenses. I have four lenses now, which I fit into the body of my camera, depending on the shot I want to capture.

I’m also going to visit the grave of Borges, who is buried in Geneva.

And I want to take pictures.

Getting that camera made me face what I had been avoiding all my life:

I am my father.

He took pictures, built his own dark room in our garage, had thousands of dollars in equipment, lighting, meters, lenses, and a plethora of cameras.

I have been wanting to take pictures all my life, but I denied that part of me, because to accept that I was a photographer was to accept that I was my father’s son, but now, a bit less concerned with my image of self, my father now old and under dementia, I have given into the lens of my father.

I am my father.

My father took this shot circa 1968. The women with the black coat and blonde hair is my mother. Not sure who the others are.

I take a camera everywhere, usually my SLR.

Now I see what a self-righteous tourist I was when I “lived” in the Place Godot.

Now I don’t care what I think of me.

I’m no longer trying to impress myself with images of my self.

When we travel, I have my camera and I take pictures.

So screw you self-righteous Chacón “living” in Paris.

(And if there’s no change of season, how can you say you’ve lived somewhere? At most, you spent one summer there).

Now I just want to take pictures, and now I try to blend in as a tourist, so I can take street photography and get candid shots, although what I think is beautiful may not have anything to do with the monuments that make the city I’m visiting so famous and full of tourists.

Photos are like haikus or short poems, short moments, images that somehow capture what I am capable of feeling.

This is one way of saying what a powerful photo contains. A good photo is a glimpse into the sublime. In an earlier post, I’ve talked about the image as a wormhole, and I guess if I were to try and say what it is I seek in an image, I’m seeking wormholes.

Like most little kids who grew up to be writers, I’m still looking to get glimpses into parallel universes, and strong images do that for me.

Here's a photo I took at Dinah's in West LA.

This photo, if you look close, there seems to be some long-robed angel looking over the scene.

See her in the long robe?  This is not photoshop. This was in the image and although I may not have been aware of it at the time, it may be one of the reasons the image struck me and I shot.

 This image struck me before I noticed this detail.

The image is a Jacob’s ladder.  It reaches through the veil and allows me to see other realities, to see light spilling from the other side.

Well.

Sounds dramatic, but you get the point.

So this summer Sasha and I will be travelling to Italy, and then we'll spend most of the summer in Paris.

I planned on bringing my SLR, but then an idea came to me.

Why not play with resistance by NOT taking my SLR, but taking my point and shoot instead?

Like most photo geeks, I have a point-and-shoot that I slip in my pocket, in case I see a texture that I might want to use later in Photoshop, a stone wall, a brick bridge, clouds in the sky.

I use a Coolpix S9100.

It doesn’t have automatic capability, and you cannot shoot in raw, but it takes pretty good pictures. 

All the pictures in this entry, other than the ones taken by my father, are taken with the Coolpix S9100.

So the challenge is this:  I’m leaving my SLR at home.

I want to push the boundaries of this point-and-shoot, know how to use it so intuitively that every setting, every condition of light and depth, will come to me as if from my body, and snap! I’ll get the perfect shot.

I want to work within the limitations of the camera, to push its boundaries.

If there is a shot I cannot take, I want it to be because the camera is not capable of taking that shot, not because I wasn’t quick enough on controls to know what setting I should have used, and like in every point-and-shoot, there’s a lot of them.

Close-up, Food, Museum, Pets, Night landscape, Indoor party, Snow, Beach, and on and on. . .

Can I outgrow a point and shoot?

I want to try.

I want to know the limitations of the Coolpix so that I can truly know when the SLR is necessary. Under what circumstances would it not be enough?

A Coolpix S9100 might be enough for me.

One of my photo heroes is Henri Cartier Bresson, whose Paris street photos are among the best, helping to define the genre of street photography, and he shot everything with a Leica 55mm. One
lens, one camera for everything he shot.

And let’s face facts: The Leica is a great camera, but the technology back then cannot compare with what your average point-and-shoot can do today.

Today an iPhone camera has a lens has an f stop of f2.4, letting in more light than the most expensive lenses on my SLR. 

What if I find in doing this experiment that my SLR might be more for my ego than necessity?

I’ve even been tempted to buy an better SLR than the one I have now, which is a Nikon D5000, which many camera geeks will tell you is a starter camera.

But before I feed my ego and upgrade my amateur equipment, I want to know in my gut why I need a “better” camera.

This concept reminds me of my father, the photographer:

When I was a kid, I wanted to play electric guitar and be in a rock band. I was going to be famous.

I was going to play lead guitar so hauntingly that it would be spooky.

This is me when I wanted to rock out, taken by my father.

But I needed the best electric guitar out there, professional like the ones used by my guitar heroes, Santana, Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton.

For Christmas one year I asked my parents for a Gibson with a Marhsall amp.

“Horse crap!” my dad said. “You don’t even know how to play.”

I reminded him that I was taking lessons.

On Christmas, my parents did get me an electric guitar, and although it was a used generic brand, it was nice.

They didn’t get me an amp, but my dad hooked up a speaker for me that he found at the secondhand store, and he put a chord in my guitar and it worked, a tinny, distorted sound, but it worked.

“If you outgrow this equipment,” my father said. “I promise you I’ll get you a better amp.”

I never did out grow it.

I quit playing guitar.

And although I don’t think I’ll give up taking pictures any time soon, let’s see if I outgrow the Coolpix S9100.

All pictures taken on the Coolpix S9100

El Paso Street Photography: How photos may rob our souls.

I decided to stay in El Paso for the summer, here on the writer’s block.


I had never done this before, at least not the entire summer, and I soon found that anyone who says there’s nothing to do in El Paso hasn’t been paying attention.

There’s so much going on during the summer I sometimes have to decide among festivals, concerts, offbeat church bazaars, craft markets.


I find I'm attracted to what I guess is called Street photography, random shots of city life.

Here's some shots I took at the Texas Tattoo Showdown.

You can click on any image to make it bigger.





A beautiful El Paso family.


But I also like driving east of the city on Montana with my friend Moses, where we take pictures of stuff, whatever strikes us, for whatever reason.



"Y"



I like photos of people, especially when the image seems to capture something about the person.

"Cigarette and Lollipop."


"Yes, My butt!"


We have all heard the movie cliche wherein a native from Africa or South America doesn't want their photos taken, because they feel it steals their souls, and although the idea is supposed to make so-called advanced peoples scoff at native beliefs, there might be some truth to the idea.

Maybe not so much for the person in the photo, but for the photographer.


Photographers take photos for the same reason poets write poetry.

We can articulate many reasons one strives to capture an image, and one of those reasons is to say that the desire to create, the creative impulse to snap each shot or to write a poem or even to bake bread or grow vegetables in your own garden is the same impulse that connects us with the divinity, with the Creator.
We are co-creators, created in God's image. We are created to be creators, even when it comes to reality.

Matter, we know,is empty space, and it requires our consciousness to see what's there, to call a thing a thing.


Maybe if we take photos but they are trapped, stored, hoarded in the nano world, they are not able to release what energy created them, our divinity, the higher part of our souls, so a part of our spirits are trapped in storage too.

Yes, it’s good photographic sense to shoot as many pictures as possible, and as writers (that is, artists), we create and uncover imagery, but it may not be healthy on any level to collect too many of them.

It’s not like in the old days when a photo album, even several of them, contained the images that would become important in our lives.

When I was a kid, my father was a serious amateur photographer, and he took pictures with expensive cameras, which had 24 or so exposures to each roll of film, and he developed them in the darkroom he built in our garage.

I remember the smell of the chemicals, and how he hung the dripping photo paper on twine with metal clamps, and we would watch the white face of paper slowly turn into a recognizable image, my mother posing in a dress under a tree, me and my brother holding toy guns and shooting at the camera.


Millions of people keep images in their cameras, their computers, their phones, their ipods, millions and millions of images out there, and although each person that stores them might like to believe that someday they or their heirs might go through the storage disks and view each and every photo and extract some important ones, there are far too many images suffering eternal darkness for anyone to have the time to go through and evaluate each one.

Maybe it’s best to delete the majority of the photos we take, not only for our soul's sake (I'm still not sure how I feel about that idea), but also because throwing away hundreds of images causes us to value the ones that we do keep.




We tend to collect so many things in our homes that we don't value what we have, we lament what we don't have. We store stuff in boxes, in garages and attics, and some of us have so much stuff we pay extra money each month to keep the things in storage spaces.

Coming from such a generation, our temptation to collect images makes sense.

But I don’t want to be a collector of images.

And although it’s hard to decide what to give up, it seems like a good discipline to let go of things, in this case, to literally let go of images.

It's a good way to practice detachment.

This photo hobby is quite recent for me, so I'm thinking about all this stuff as I go out and take pictures.

But I seem to be evolving two criteria by which I'll save a photo.

One: I review the photos I take the same way I walk through a museum.

I walk through pretty quickly , feeling no obligation to stand before paintings for any reason other than they strike me, and I want to get a longer, closer look at the work.

When I walked through the MoMA in New York, I spent a lot of time standing before Motherwell’s Elegy, mesmerized by the energy pulsing from the black trinity of oval shapes.



Images that didn’t strike me I let blur by.



When I’m viewing the pictures I have taken, I go through them quickly, but if one grabs my attention I stop and look at it.

That’s a finalist.

"El Tweety Tambien"


The second way I decide which ones to keep is if a title for the image comes easy, or to put it another, perhaps crazier way, if a voice says something to me.

This one for example.

When I saw it I thought “Mi Familia Por vida," which is what the tattoo says on the guy's head.



"Kafka"


Here’s a cheesy photo-shopped version, getting rid of the noise in the background and replacing it with an even more cheesy background.


Is “photo-shop” a verb?

One says a picture was or is photo-shopped, yes?

Even when another program is used? It’s like saying give me a Band aid or a Coke, when we mean a plaster or a cola.

I’m still not sure where I stand on the seeming controversy among photographers about the value of photo-shopping. Some seem to believe that a photo should appear as it was taken, because to photo-shop it means you can make a great image out of anything.

I’m not sure if I agree, maybe because to me the process of editing photos has always been a part of what I know as photography, but I don’t disagree either. I have yet to take a position. Maybe I never will, but will admire both and practice both approach.

I wonder how poets would feel about running every poem they have written through an advanced computer program that identifies and intensifies metaphors and rhythmic linguistic patterns?

If it could improve the poem, would it lessen its value?




"The Shadows"


Okay, that's already several photos I've saved from our summer in El Paso thus far.

There's still a bit over a month to go before classes start at UTEP.

If I believe what I say above, all that pontificating pomp about detachment, I better delete the rest.

I'm glad we decided to stay in the city for the summer.

Kafka and Joey seem pretty happy about it.


You can see these and a few more by clicking here.

Ay te watcho!

From Chuco

¡Ajúa!