Good work if you can get it

Will I ever be able to spend as much time in the streets with my camera as I’d like to? Probably not until I can figure out a way to spend my time taking pictures instead of working for a living or otherwise navigating this modern existence, and I haven’t quite gotten it yet.

When I do manage to get out with my camera, in an ongoing attempt to get the most out of that time, I’ve been working to think less about the camera itself and think more about what I want to do with it. So my focus in the streets this year, when I’ve been able to get out, has mainly been about two things…

• Range (or “zone”) focusing: setting an ideal focus distance based on the the lens’ focal length and the desired aperture for the situation, and then touching the lens as little as possible while taking pictures
• Sunny 16: the classic rule of measuring available light without relying on a meter—setting the shutter speed as close as possible to the film’s box speed, and starting at an aperture of 16 for bright and sunny conditions, stopping up from there to compensate for diminishing light

Wrapping my head around these two concepts and increasingly employing them as I navigate the streets with a camera has helped me focus on capturing what I’m seeing as I’m seeing it—ultimately worrying less about the technical aspects of photography, and focusing more on being present in the process of making photographs. 

Essentially, cutting all the “feed and speeds” bullshit allows me to think about the fundamentals—movement, composition, and contrast. And the two latest photosets posted to the blog are, in large part, the results of this pursuit.

• July 4th is a colorful holiday, so it was only natural that, when spending the day in SF with my camera, I shoot with color film—Kodak Gold 200.
  Photos here: San Francisco, July 4th, 2005 (in color)
• On July 5th, I went back into the City to hit the Fillmore Jazz Fest with the meterless M3 and some black & white film—tried and true Kodak Tri-X 400.
  Photos here: Fillmore Jazz Festival 2025

Both days were gorgeous—sunny, cloudless, warm—and the conditions and the crowds lent themselves nicely to the process.

Some house keeping…

You might notice a new look on the website and email. It’s the manifestation of infrastructural change. I recently moved off Squarespace and on to Ghost, an open source publishing platform for web and email run by a Singapore-based nonprofit. 

Without going into my sociopolitical views, I’ve been slowly working to reduce my reliance on US based tech companies (for…reasons), while simultaneously simplifying my presence online, and taking more control over it. This means learning some basic coding skills (fun! slow! I’m getting there, but coincidentally the web store is still offline), and making some changes in content and in cadence.

Since the beginning, One For The Road has been billed as a monthly email affair, deployed on the last Sunday, a schedule I’ve been struggling to keep for a while now. Going forward, One For The Road will simply be the email delivery mechanism for anything that goes up on the site, when it goes up.

No need to worry about how this will impact your inbox—I barely get one post out per month, so it’s not like subscribers will be drowning in dispatches from me. It just means things are now looser in terms of the whats and the whens. I also plan—“plan” being the operative word here—to separate photo and music posts, and maybe even focus a little more on writing for the sake of writing. But we’ll see how that goes…no promises.

A change in the lineup…

One last thing to report: I quit the band I’ve been in for a while. It’s not like I don’t want to play music—I would very much like to continue doing so—but my work and life schedules have been pretty insane lately, and ultimately my heart has not been in the music the band is making. Time feels increasingly like the most important currency of my existence, and I want to spend it doing things that I’m 100% in on. So rather than drag it out by half-assing my involvement and souring my relationship with those guys, who I genuinely love as musicians and humans, I decided to step out. They plan to carry on without me, which I highly encouraged—they’ll be fine, we’ll be fine. 

Honestly, the weirdest upshot from that decision has been that the piece of my identity that, over time, has been built on making music with other people now feels foundationless. I’m not actively playing (outside of admittedly more frequent solo jams in my little home setup) and I suddenly don’t even know if I can call myself a real musician anymore. Whatever...chock that up to inconsequential existential mental meanderings.

BTW… RIP Ozzy. To close us out, here’s Black Sabbath live at the Ontario Motor Speedway for California Jam in 1974…