Richard Clark's fStop!

Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

2010-07-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

simplify, simplify, simplify

What kids do today :)

2009-10-20T22:52:00.000-07:00

I drove down the highway last night, Masterton to Featherston, 5:30 PM, peak hour traffic in the Wairarapa, clouds, silver grey framing the hills and mountains in ayers of light.

I snapped a few images, nothing to write home about. I entered Featherston and took the back way home, past the new skateboard park. Silver back lit concrete with stark black outlines of kids playing. Out of the car, I thought I would just get one wide shot of the park, nothing specific, you know how people are today with kids and old men with cameras, :) As I took a shot the kids all came over to me and clamored to see what I was doing, "take my picture", "take mine", "what ya doing mister?" And so, even though I had the 'wrong lens', I managed to snap a couple :)

Where the Hell is Featherston?

2009-10-19T15:53:00.001-07:00

Tucked in the shadow and downdraft of the Remutakas, dumping ground for the excessive moisture of the Kapiti Coast, on the north shore of Lake Wairarapa, lies the small, blink and miss village of Featherston.
I arrived here about a year ago in a round about sort of way from Wellington, via Napier, Sydney, New York and Venice Beach California. When I heard it said that Featherston was for those people who were totally over them selves I smiled. It took me 58 years to get over the Hill, hopefully not quite as long to get over my Self.
And, after all my big city living I feel no sense of isolation at all in a country that, by it’s very geographic, political and social nature, is totally isolated.
Now I have a link to all that is local and all that is global, I now have:

http://www.facebook.com/featherston.wairarapa

Yes. . . Facebook has come to Featherston!
There is now a community web page of 595 members and it’s growing.

“Hey nice page! And thanks Shara for organising the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra to do a workshop in Featherston. It was a hoot! We'll be strumming til the cows come home.”

Asked to write about this phenom I decided to ask some seriously probing questions, like:

1. How relevant is featherston facebook to your life?
2. Does it show featherston in a positive or negative light?
3. Does it create a sense of community?
4. Do you live in featherston?
5. Were you born in featherston?
6. Is it a good site to find out what is happening in featherston?
7. How else do you find what's going on?

It’s fascinating, as it only started September 2009, not yet a year and the voice it has given the community is quite extraordinary and way beyond what the local council has achieved in years of trying.
Facebook is a social networking web site, it has over 500million members, it's the face of the present and the future state of Internet 2. It will grow. It will connect the dots as it has in my life. For small isolated communities, and individuals, this new technology can be a life line. A source of news, ideas, connectedness for those who live here, for those who once lived here but moved on and a window for those who may consider Featherston in their future plans. To me this shows the imperativeness of New Zealand having unlimited fibre optic broadband access and not the faux broadband we now have with copper telephone cables.

“I like to tell people it's the perfect example of an online community. People use it as a notice board and it's a great way to find out stuff you wouldn't otherwise know. For example:
*when the water ran out and what was going on
*that you can learn French on Monday nights
*when to take your baby to playcentre and where that is
*what happened to Oh La La
*What green dollars are . . . When I set this page up I thought a couple of people might join. The activity here and the contributions are beyond my wildest expectations and have made me participate more in the community and to meet more people.” - Solitaire, Councillor

“I have found this to be a great way of spreading information about the Community Centre without spamming everyone . . . its up to the individual to decide if they want to look at the Featherston events.
Also, I think it takes into consideration the fact that there are many more technically savvy Featherston people than we give ourselves credit for. I like to think that the residents of Featherston are forward thinking & this site is a prime example of this.
Finally, I think its a great way of connecting with other Featherston residents...not everyone works around a routine Mon - Friday 9 to 5 schedule...it gives young/old/new/established residents a neutral platform to communicate with others” - Heather, Community Center

“I'm pretty new but I think it's great!!! I can find out easily what's on in town and also let other people know about exhibitions, workshops, markets, etc!!!” - Monica, Artist

As for me, I have 3 Blogs, a Web site and belong to nearly :) every web site worthy of spending time on . . . . picasa, youtube, linkedin, plaxo, flikr, xing, ning, twitter, skype, myspace, lulu, imdb and now Facebook! I must admit to not spending time on all of them but who comes up with these names? That's what i want to know :)

And so, the answers to my probing questions were a great snapshot as to how people view their community.

1. on a scale of 1 to 5, 90% were in the positive
2. evenly divided with ‘yes’ and ‘no’
3. "absolutely, only for those with computers, yes, some more than others, i believe it does, if people participate, definitely, sure does, yeah, I recently moved to featherston and found this very helpful, as above"
4. 12 yes, 3 no
5. 13 no, 2 yes
6. “ I hope so I spent ages uploading all the events”, “it is for me, because I can see what’s happening, wherever I am “, “It is one way, the Pheonix paper is the other”, “yes”, “because I live in Sydney now it lets me check up”, “my first port of call”, “excellent”, “Not too bad!”
7. “How else?”, “free newspapers?”, “Supermarket NoticeBoard?”, “grapevine?”, “ask heather at the community center?”, “my family still lives there”, “word of mouth?”, “People talking?”

And so there it is, Featherston has gone from whoa to go in a very short period of time with their very own FaceBook page and a growing sense of self. Featherston is now connected through friends and friends of friends of friends, all over this planet!

" Barry, the Temuka problem is under control"

2009-10-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

So, where the bloody hell is Temuka?

. . . and so, thursday the 24th september I caught the 7:12am featherston train to wellington, bags safely stowed in the rear carriage, me comfortably ensconced next to some fellow who didn’t even bother to acknowledge my presence. The conductor, ticket clipper, whatever they are called these days, railway inspector, railway host, whatever, well he made up for it. Off we trundled, I say trundled because the kiwi train experience is not a smooth ride, old carriages, crappy rails, whatever. However, Lake Wairarapa in the early morning light totally made up for it and then through the tunnel and out into the Maymorn light and all the way to Wellie, my birthplace. I had checked the rail schedule/timetable whatever, over the internet and printed it out, I didn’t realize until I was at the airport that one ticket would have taken me the whole nine yards, Feathie Station to Wellington International Airport. What a great service and the region has a great deal to be grateful for. I never did that in all the years I lived in the US. Featherston Rail Station is but a 5 minutes day dreaming walk from my home. Airport baggage check in is but 2 minutes from where the bus dropped me off. 2 hours door to door, not at all bad considering I waited half an hour for the bus in Wellie. A somewhat cramped and bumpy flight at 26000’, no view, total cloud cover, no communication with the people sitting either side of me in the cramped seats. I was always lead to believe Kiwi’s were a friendly bunch . . . yeah right!
My friend Sandie collected me from airport, we cruised Christchurch, photographed my dad’s burial spot on the Avon River in Hagley Park, enjoyed a coffee, cruised through the Cathedral and smiled at the commercial nature of the church in this day and age, drove toward Little River, stopping at the beach cottages of Birdling Flat and smiling while trying not to laugh out loud aka lol, watching a camper van try and drive over a beach track that was very clearly marked as 4 Wheel Drive Only. OOPS!
Oops indeed, as we could see it digging itself deeper and deeper into the shingle as it spun wheels hopelessly. Not a good sign. But Birdling Flat is truly beautiful, the real kiwi batch beach, the color of the ocean a creamy blue green, crystal clear waves breaking and not a place to swim. The batches in various states or disrepair or expensive renovation, a fast disappearing Kiwi Iconic lifestyle as money talks and people walk :)
Little River is a glorious old settlement and Sandie’s sister Norma, farms peonies and black faced sheep, sadly the weather was socked in with rain clouds and so the colors were rather muted but still, it’s a glorious spot. I managed to keep my camera in it’s case and simply enjoyed the experience. The afternoon was spent preparing dinner for Norma’s birthday and it was great being able to observe siblings working around each other. I miss that, the family connection but, as mine are far flung, for me it is but a dream.
The birthday party was smaller than expected but it was certainly lively with Norma, Sandie, Margaret and Me. Great company, great dialogue, good ideas.
The truth well told, far away from the stullifying political correctness that is killing the great kiwi spirit.
Friday morning and still no sun but tea and toast made up for it and out amongst the farm animals, fed chooks and got to know the black lambs. Seriously cute but I am not a farmer, as much as I love the great outdoors.
Packed, we drove South to Timaru via Rakaia, Ashburton and Temuka where we checked into the old Temuka Pub. In Timaru we explored the harbor and coast, the cemetery, city streets, cafes, shopped for winter woolies and then headed north to Temuka and had dinner at an Irish Pub, great food, great atmosphere and quite remarkable the conviviality of a small New Zealand town, quite different from my North Island experiences. It appeared or at least seemed to me that the people have more sense of community on the mainland, Pounamu. Maybe it’s my vivid imagination but somehow I don’t thinks so as every where I went, everyone I spoke to, it appeared there was a willingness to engage, to share.
Up early Saturday we found a great cafe behind the main shops, breakfasted and then explored Temuka by foot, finding many of the places and people who populate the film I had edited and the reason for me being in the South.
No Petrol | No Diesel, a full length independent feature film made on the smell of a very, very small oily rag, NZ$40000.00! Written and directed by Stef Harris a Christchurch writer/policeman. I was invited to edit only after it was shot and editing had already started. I had a great time taking it somewhere rather than where it was. That is what I love about film editing, pure story telling and flexibility when & if, the producer & director & editor trust the relationship and the process, with Stef this was certainly the case and it was certainly a great relationship. I hope we get to do it again, soon :).
Anyhow, here we were, invited to a Red Carpet Civic Reception and a screening of the film at the Theatre Royal in Timaru, followed by dinner back in Temuka.
This is my first experience of this kind in the land I left 45 years ago.
As we explored Temuka on foot, we found Devlin Motors, which features in the Film. Fortuitously we met and enjoyed a great conversation with Anthony at Devlin Motors. It was quite amazing to simply bump into him on a Saturday morning and have an in-depth discussion of small town politics and the inventiveness of kiwis. The other person in the discussion, his name sadly escapes me, is building a bicycle based on the original plans of ‘Mad’ Richard Pearse who, arguably made the first manned flight in the World, certainly the first in the British Commonwealth, back in 1903. Some would have it that Orville and Wilbur Wright were the first but then I am a Kiwi and so, of course it had to be ‘Mad’ Richard who was first. I was once married to Christy, whose father Jack Carlson, worked at Wright Patterson Air Force base in Dayton Ohio. Jack was lead design engineer on some large bomber, a B50 or something. I used to love teasing him about Richard Pearse and of course he rose to the bait.
If there is one thing I love about my homeland, it is the inventive #8 fencing wire attitude that is still to be found away from the Beehive and Auckland. I could have stood talking to Anthony and his friend for ages. He also gave us directions to the Richard Pearse Memorial and so we drove out there and on to Opihi and Hanging Rock, discovering, totally by chance the film shooting locations of No Petrol | No Diesel. We lunched at Opihi Vineyard, getting into a great conversation with the owner, Alan Lambie. South Canterbury’s only Vineyard.
Back at the Temuka Hotel after showering, shaving, dressing, prepping and primping for the evenings celebration, we joined a large party of Film Crew and Actors assembled in the Hotel bar, it was great to finally put names to faces. At 4:30, on the dot, we were bussed to Timaru and the Theatre Royal for a red carpet welcome and civic reception. It was an amazing turn out of the people and politicians of Timaru and South Canterbury in support of a film shot with such a small budget but with an enormous passion and professionalism. As the Mayoress stated, a small independent Hollywood Film is made for 2 million! No Petrol | No Diesel was made for about 1% of that!
I was in two minds but finally decided to take my camera and so filmed the reception, even though I felt I was hiding behind the camera but also managed to interact with many, many people. I was the only one to record the proceedings unfortunately but I now have an invaluable record. A gift to the producers no doubt.
I was very generously congratulated by cast and crew for my editing, I also, somewhat embarrassingly, found out that the director referred to me as “Good Richard” as against “ . . . “ but that is another story :) for another day, maybe.
The film was screened to sustained applause and then we were all bussed back to Temuka for dinner and drinks provided by the Timaru Council, who I found, had invested in the film. A great peice of PR. Hopefully the film will be accepted into the Sundance Film Festival set for early next year, fingers crossed please.
My table companions were Anthony from Devlin Motors, the location for much of the filming, and his parents who were simply amazing and totally inspiring as an old farming couple. Alive, intelligent, witty and full of sparkle and love for each other. I could spend days listening to their stories. I also enjoyed a great chat with the director Stef over drinks back at the pub. It seems strange to say that but Stef is based in Christchurch as a working policeman and I am based in Featherston as a sometime working . . . and so we had only spent 3 days together during the editing, Stef would fly and drive north to view where I was taking his project, such was the level of trust we held each other in, thank god I delivered a good film :) !
Otherwise he could have had me arrested! She-it, didn’t think of that before.
Early Sunday we cruised Temuka and back to Opihi Vineyard for brunch and then, at the invitation of the owner, we tramped over wet soggy paddocks to explore 800 year old maori carvings, shooting hundreds of digital images, the light was perfect with flat overcast skies. It was an amazing experience. A limestone gully that is remote and challenging to get to. Very little sign of human interference.
Next morning we drove to Christchurch, stopping at Rakaia for lunch on the go. I just managed to catch the plane as I had forgotten to reset my watch to daylight hours or whatever the stupid politicians call it. We landed in Wellie after a great flight to be met by Emily, drove to Cuba Street for coffee and bought fresh fish at Wellington Trawler, drove home over the hill and relaxed over dinner.
It was a very surprising and very enjoyable weekend spent with old friends, new friends and the accolades of a job well done. I can only hope that more film will come my way and that I continue to share my vast overseas film experience with kiwis who are open to it.
I say that last as a reflection of my own point of view as there appears to be quite large divides through out New Zealand society and the film industry in particular.
First there is the Peter Jackson aka Hollywood Film industry which, based on my own personal experience does no great favors to local independents, albeit providing world class facilities, at a price :) and then there is the real New Zealand film industry of small passionate companies and film makers spread far and wide and finally, and disappointingly, there is the New Zealand Television industry which appears, again based on my own personal experience :), not to support or encourage New Zealand film makers.
Of course there are those, who WILL remain nameless :), who appear to live continuously off public funding, thus denying others access to film funding. Just my observation and totally open to being challenged. The British who I don’t totally trust, appear to have a system of funding that works, there is another essay I guess.
It was a great weekend. No two ways about it!
Cheers, Richard.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

2009-10-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

MAY 17, 2009, 7:18 PM
Essay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age

By FRED R. CONRAD
Fast is fine, but slow can be much better.

Digital photography and the ascent of the Web have quickened our jobs. Instead of one deadline a day, we now have continual deadlines, bringing exponentially increasing speed to what we do at The Times.

One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.

When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior. A camera can trap a photographer sometimes. You can look so intently through a viewfinder that you are unaware of the picture in front of you. When I use an 8-by-10 camera for portraits, I will compose the picture and step back. Using a long cable release, I will look at the subject and wait for the moment. It’s very liberating.

Some of my portraiture work for a Metro section series “Tribes of New York” included “The Ushers,” “The Messengers,” “The Goth Girls,” and “Ladies of the Red Hat Society.”

The same technique worked for me when I photographed architecture for the “Geometries” series. But there was another liberating aspect, too. With exposures that may take as long as an hour, you really don’t know what the end result will be. There is a little bit of faith involved, and a lot of imagination. That, and the fact that you have to wait to develop the film, just adds to the excitement.

When the Lens project started, I hadn’t shot large format black-and-white film for quite a while. In fact, there is no dark room in the new Times headquarters. Lucky for me, Chuck Kelton and his Kelton Labs are still around. Then I needed to settle on a film and developer. I ended up with Fuji Neopan and Efke 25, made in Croatia. For a developer, I chose Rodinal. It’s been around since the 1890s. It was made by Agfa, which no longer exists, but I found a store in Hollywood, Freestyle Photographic Supplies, that carried both the film and developer.

One memorable experience during this project was photographing the one remaining Loew’s Wonder Theater that still shows movies. Loew’s built five Wonder Theaters in the New York metropolitan area in the late 1920s. Two of these movie palaces are now churches. One no longer has its Wonder organ or a movie screen; instead, it hosts music events and boxing matches. One has remained vacant and decaying since 1984. And then there is the Jersey Loew’s in Journal Square. The theater is being restored. It has an original Wonder organ that plays. They even show movies.

I shot the theater from the balcony, while the movie “Blade Runner” was playing. I had no idea how long to leave the shutter open. Since the movie was two hours long, I decided to make two exposures — an hour each. It was during those two exposures that I realized how different and special it was to be shooting on film. When you shoot digital, the images are quick and you spend more time looking at the back of your camera than you do seeing.

I hope that film and large-format cameras stick around for a while. I love the results and I cherish the process. More importantly, when I have the time and opportunity to shoot big film, I feel a connection with photographers who came before me. That may be the most important reason.

Dead Center of Town!

2009-10-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

just got back from temuka and the Mayoral reception in Timaru, spent time visiting the dead center of temuka, will post photographs, read the full report on kiwicafe blog, :)

no water!

2009-09-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

this morning i came home from walking myself and my dog to find I had no water. turn on the tap to make coffee before I turn on the taps to take a shower, no water. whoa, no water. what an amazing wake up to my self. no water. we are, i believe, about 80% water. we need water to drink to live, to breath, no water, we are dead, simple really. we need water to grow our food, we need water to produce our power, we need water, pure and simple.
what an amazing reminder. i checked out the internet, the local featherston water supply had burst a main at boar gully road. the local featherston council had posted a message on the featherston facebook. kudos to the council. grey brothers supplied a tanker of water at the local anzac hall and now, mid day, the water is back on again. i now have a 10 gallon container of water in my shed and i will buy and fill another one. I will not replace my water tank with a flash heater, with those systems there is no holding tank. otherwise i need to look at a system where I have a water back up. maybe a large tank, 100 gallons that my water flows into before reaching the house. water. it’s our survival on this planet. no water, no life. today as i edit my zane grey film i am selecting scenes from the mogollon rim in central arizona, usa, beautiful, cold, clear, trout filled streams cascade down the mountains and into the valleys. without that resource there would be no settlement, no farming, no crops, no beef, no elk, deer or mountain lions. water. we all need it. how many of us appreciate it? i sort of do, did :) now i totally understand. to turn on the tap to draw a glass of water to drink, nothing, zip, zilch, nope, nada. no water. i have felt a thirst all day since i couldn’t drink and for some reason it is resonating with me more that usual. total appreciation for aqua, h2o, water. now it’s back on i can shower, shave even, wash the dishes.
so what can i do to save the water. first i can pay attention to what i use it for. first and foremost i need it for drinking. i don’t need to wash the car, water the lawn or wash the dog. i haven’t washed my car for two years. i don’t mow my lawn, i grow natives and i grow vegetables and fruit trees and roses and i have found, both in venice beach and featherston, that they do just fine if i don’t water, in fact the roses seem to do better. i shower when i feel the need, i shave every few days, i do wash the dishes regularly. i use water to cook, i will use less, boil less, steam more.
water. what an interesting experience, something so simple as having a water main burst can teach us so much, if we are open to the lessons of life. i do know there are those that will rail against the council, who will complain rather than viewing the situation as a lesson, a wake up call.maybe we need more such moments to teach us that our resources are not absolute, nothing is guaranteed in life, that i know. not even happiness. life and death. period.

What color am I?

2009-09-19T21:33:00.001-07:00

--------------------
Re: EFEFEF, my cars number plate :)

Ok here it comes :) Assuming you don't have a lot to do with RGBs or hex... apologies in advance if otherwise.

Colours to a screen are written as a combination of Red/Green/Blue values, RGB. Values for each colour go from 0-255 (256 possibilities incl the 0), so pure white (all colours full on) is 255-255-255. Black is no light ie 0-0-0. Pure blue (no red, no green, just full blue) is 0-0-255 and bright yellow is 255-255-0 (ie no blue). A colour like 255-204-102 is full red, quite a lot of green and less blue which makes an orange shade.

When you write RGB values in code you use hexadecimal (base 16, cos it's a computa) instead of decimal. Decimal 255 is hex FF (16*16), so white in RGB is FFFFFF, pure blue is 0000FF, bright yellow is FFFF00 etc. The orangey shade is FFCC66.

Even colour balances like FFFFFF or 6A6A6A or 282828 fall along a line from white through grey down to black.

So, EFEFEF is evenly balanced but not quite pure white ... just an off-white. That's what we concluded you were, wasn't it? :)
--------------------

this is sent to me by fellow featherstonian, Rowan Smith, applause to rowan please . . . . I guess after all I am off white, somewhere between a Pakeha and a Brownout, I guess :)

What's in it for me, I hear you ask . . . life is a slippery journey at times!

2009-09-08T18:26:00.001-07:00

Featherston on Facebook and what it means to those who leave :) and what it means to those who stay, never left, were born here, will die here and, what it means to those who say they are bored.

In 1962, Saturday 1st September, Spring, I ran from the Rimutaka Summit to the Featherston Post Office, a participant in the Wellington to Masterton Road Relay, I ran down that hill three times over the next few years managing to get below 33 minutes for 6.26 miles, say 11k. Not bad for a skinny kid who ran as a survival mechanism as a teenager with angst :)
Today I hike from Featherston to above the Summit and who ever knew I would end up living and truly enjoying Featherston. My father’s sister, Aunt Nancy was married to a local butcher, Porky Davis and so my connection isn’t purely running. Porky had a butcher shop where Hokey Smoke hangs out today.
So here I am, living in the ‘Hood’ so to speak.
A long round about way of getting here, Mt Victoria to Napier to Sydney to New York to Los Angeles and Venice Beach to the American West to Masterton to . . . Featherston, get here I did.

47 years from running the Hill to hiking the Hill.

and now I get to edit and make films, take snaps of what I see and write my thoughts, sharing them on my Blogs and on Facebook.

Featherston, South Wairarapa, Aotearoa.
Not a bad address at all, nope, not bad at all.

Today the sun is shining, it’s actually hot, the air is still, my garden grows, my plants flower, friends drop in and we have Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin and Pecasa and Flickr and Plaxo and YouTube and so many, many more ways in which to be connected to the World. Don’t you just love it. To those who express their boredom, I say this, go look in the mirror because, just maybe, you may find yourself to be boring, simple really. Grab your life and live it, if you don’t like it here, go travel, see the world, be yourself, come back and visit occasionally, until such time you can look in the mirror and be at peace with your self and . . . Featherston. Enjoy.

they're baaack!

2009-08-20T18:43:00.000-07:00

WE'RE BACK FROM THE BIG SMOKE
&
CUCKOO IS OPEN AGAIN AS USUAL
WEDNESDAY - SUNDAY
FROM 11am
FOR LUNCH, DINNER & INBETWEEN

WE HAD A FANTASTIC HOLIDAY IN BUENOS AIRES & WE'RE LOOKING
FORWARD TO SHARING SOME OF OUR TALES WITH OUR REGULAR
CUSTOMERS SOMETIME SOON....

CHEERS,

CHELSEA & TIM @ CUCKOO

128 MAIN ST GREYTOWN
06 304 8992

No Petrol | No Diesel

2009-08-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought, I certainly didn't, that when I moved to Featherston I would attract the amount of film work I have enjoyed over the past 12 months. That is how long I have lived here. Please click on the title, this link is to TVNZ and an article they produced on the feature film I recently edited and post produced. It is the second feature in 12 months, the first was a Kiwi Western for some young Wellingtonians, not a great experience, but with film there are always highs and lows. Stef Harris's film was a definite high and a totally enjoyable process for me. As for what is next? Who knows, I am tackling the editing of my own feature length documentary, it could take a year, I could run out of money but for today I am doing just fine. 3.5 years back in Aotearoa after 43 years overseas, mmm, interesting. A Stranger in a Strange Land, but I am relaxing into the time warp, slowly but surely and the people of the South Wairarapa, Featherston in particular, are making it doable and totally enjoyable. And just over the hill is the place of my birth, Mt Victoria on the Haitaitai side, not all bad. So from New York to Featherston, film happens :) I have much gratitude.

Politicians on the Gravy Train!

2009-08-13T15:21:00.000-07:00

letter to Paul Holmes NZ Herald,

"so Paul, what the bloody hell are you trying to say?
Generally speaking you do have a point. But based on Bill English's hypocritical rantings you are also miss reading the mood of NZ.
We are a small country, at times a little country. I have lived in big countries and have earned big bucks and travelled first class without needing to apologize for it. But that was there and this is here. In the past 3 years, after 43 overseas, I have had to learn a different way of being, of living, of spending. Painful to realize this is not the US. Perception is everything in politics. Helen Clark's painting saga, speeding saga. What underlying psyche fuels such things. A Minister of Finance is not above the principles he espouses. Leaders are there to lead. They are our 'elected' representatives, therefore they are answerable to their electorate. To uphold the law, we need to practice the law. Rob Moodie was a great example of principles above personalities, the current mob could well do to take lessons from Alice."

the same could be said for our local South Wai Council, who are they there to serve? featherston is finally getting a skateboard park, yeeha! but how much waffling took place in Martinborough to get that after a decade of piffle. if you can't deliver, step aside and let those who can DO!

it's winter going into spring, brrrrr

2009-08-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

The Meanness in Masterton.

2009-07-14T23:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Brent Goodwin, what is it with you and Aratoi?
Be honest, are you wishing that the funding that Aratoi so rightfully receives as a community asset should go to you and your dismal cinema ‘complex’. Dare I say it is you that has the ‘complex’.
In my not so humble opinion your cinema, by any standard, is a disgrace for a community of any size. I have attended open air theatres in the Pilbara region of Western Australia that are better run and better presented. My experience is one of 40 years working in film around the world. I have attended premiers, some of my own, in London, New York, Hollywood and Sydney. Come September I will be attending the mayoral screening of my latest feature project in Timaru. I even built my own preview theatre with state of the art equipment in Sydney back in the 70’s. I have been a projectionist, a film handler, film maker and a film critic. I have restored classic Simplex E7 projectors, imported the latest technology from London. I love Cinema. Cinema Paradiso was one of my favorite films, it reminded me of my early blunders in running films out of sync. I understand the issues of good projection. But I am at a loss why you keep tossing darts in Aratoi’s direction. I have spoken to you on numerous occasions regarding films projected upside down, where the projector gate was set at the incorrect setting, where no sound appeared with the film. We have even enjoyed a laugh or two when films were shown with no problems. You have refunded when I have complained, imagine that.
So I simply don’t get it? What am I missing? What is your agenda, and please, don’t tell me there isn’t one. You have been playing this particular cracked record since January 2006 when I moved to the Wairarapa from Los Angeles. You sit on a valuable piece of real estate with a wonderfully historic façade. My father even painted the interior years and years ago. So please, come clean, tell me what you want, what you think you are missing out on. Do you want Trust House dollars? Please tell me, tell us, the community, because you are simply making a fool out of yourself and the community with your harping. It’s time to put up or shut up, I can’t be clearer than that. I will continue to patronise your cinema, I will continue to let you know when you deliver less than the ticket price demands. And I will continue to let you know when you do well. Cheers.

the 4th and what it means.

2009-07-04T23:32:00.000-07:00

. . . t'was a great night nevertheless !

Quote:
"The small falsehoods and great truth of the Fourth of July
A lot of the lore that surrounds the holiday isn't accurate, but its meaning and power are undeniable.
By Peter de Bolla

July 4, 2009

Each Fourth of July is celebrated in the time-honored way -- fireworks, parades, cookouts and, oh yes, recommitment to the fine principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence: those "self-evident" truths and "unalienable" rights.

It is curious, however, that so much of the inherited lore around the Fourth of July is based in misapprehension.

For starters, the day itself, July 4, isn't exactly America's Independence Day. John Adams believed that July 2 would become the significant day in the new republic's calendar of celebration. That's because it was on July 2, 1776, that delegates from the 13 Colonies at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia in fact voted to proclaim independence from King George III and his ministers.

What happened two days later? A decision to make the July 2 decision public. The delegates gave the statement they'd agreed on to a printer, and the "broadsides" he published carried the July 4 date.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the physical document revered as the Declaration of Independence, a vellum scroll kept in the National Archives in Washington with 57 signatures proudly sitting at its foot, has no claim on being the unique founding document. It was hand-copied later. As to the signatures of those who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, they were added later still -- some were inscribed by new congressional delegates, men who hadn't even been in the room on July 2.

Moreover, although generations of American schoolchildren have learned that the declaration's author was Thomas Jefferson, this is also a slightly inaccurate portrayal of the facts. Jefferson did indeed draft the text, but others in the Continental Congress had their own views about the best form of words to use. The last paragraph, for example, containing the words "that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free independent states," was in fact penned by another Virginian, Richard Henry Lee.

In 1776, there was no public proclamation, no formal "declaration" read to the Colonists on either July 2 or July 4. And the news that resolutions against the king had been adopted could of course only travel at the speed of the fastest horse and rider. Therefore, the celebration of any selected day as the birth of the nation could only ever be a convenient fiction.

Nevertheless, in 1777, the members of the Continental Congress did decide to note July 4 by not meeting. A small and very low-key celebration was mounted, and everyone went to church. There was some talk of muskets being fired, but gunpowder was in short supply as the Colonies were at war.

Each subsequent year, celebrations were held in towns and cities, and each began to develop traditions for observing the day. The text of the declaration was read aloud. Dinners were held, often in the open air, with elaborate toasts, commonly 13 in number representing the original Colonies. Fireworks were from early on a feature of the day. Parades of the local great and good took place in town squares. By the time of the 50th anniversary in 1826, the traditions of the public celebration were fully established.

Perhaps it is best to see the Fourth of July as a story that, although not strictly speaking true, nevertheless conveys a belief: that the nation came into being on a particular day in 1776, signed, sealed and delivered. And each and every Fourth of July, as if for the first time, the story is both celebrated and instantiated, "America" -- by simple force of a declaration -- is founded again.

Today most of you will take the day off, put some hot dogs on the grill and open a few cans of beer. Some, like the astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1992, will unfurl the Stars and Stripes and sing "Happy Birthday." But however one chooses to celebrate independence, may it also be remembered that the birthday of the nation, and the declaratory act that founded it, created and continues to create an architecture of belief. In 1776, it had the power to change the world. For good or ill, it still does.

Peter de Bolla, a professor of cultural history and a fellow of King's College at Cambridge University, is the author of the recently published "The Fourth of July and the Founding of America." - end quote

. . . as for me, I celebrated by phoning my eldest brother, his birthday is the 4th, spent the day in my birthplace, Wellington, then home and out to a 4th July Kiwi style, at the Tin Hut, a local, fully restored Country Pub, I stayed away from the burgers and hot dogs, they seem to lose something in the translation from Nathan's Famous to the local variety. Same with the frozen beef patties in the Burgers. I opted for the safety of lambshanks, mashed spuds and peas. But nevertheless, it was a great evening and I wore my western hat from Bisbee Arizona with it's silver conches and stuff, the real mccoy, m'boy! We drank local beer and danced to the local and very good Verandah Band with MC Pat 'Q' McKenna. Hat's off to Marcus, mine host and the many women who organized the whole damned shebang. It was a hoot. Many Americans stomping along with the locals. YEEHA! . . . Yankees Indeed.

YEEHAH!

2009-06-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

What is my view, what lens reflects best?

2009-06-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

Finding the right lens that works for the images I see.

A dear friend just read what follows and suggested I empty a shoe box, make a pin hole, and that is how I view the world. Then, 10 minutes ago, which is why I am changing this piece, I flicked open a great book by Brenda Ueland ‘ If You Want To Write’. The chapter I read is called ‘Microscopic Truthfullness’.
And she questions how many Americans do this.
I guess that applying that concept to the question I ask and the pinhole comment of my friend I can see the relevance. How do I view the world, my world, the world around me. How closely do I pay attention to the details of life and events that shape my journey. How honest am I in my daily snapping and daily activities. I have to say that most of the time I am pretty focussed on the details of life which is why I snap what I snap. As a film editor I have to pay attention to detail, detail rules my life in the edit suite. If I blink I miss the gems, the nuanced performances that make the difference between an emotional story and a flat limpid one. And so to a lens. I again ask the question, how do I see my world? I tend to see moments, moments that cartier bresson described as “in the blink of an eye”. I love light, I love watching people. I love the way light moves across a landscape and I love the darkness of shadows. In New Zealand there is a great deal of darkness. The Piano, a great film, portrayed that darkness well. It is brooding, it lies in the landscape, a canopy of rich, thick, water dripping foliage. Clouds roll in from the west, rolling off the vast stretch of water between OZ and NZ, cloaking the mountains that rise behind my home and rolling, like a great breaking surf, down across the plains toward the coast line to the east. There is a heaviness, a water ladeness, a soggyness. Winter lies cold and sharp and with the few crisp clear days comes a light that glows with clarity. 4pm and the camera needs to be ready as 20 minutes is all there is of that glow. It is almost the mood between moods, the darkness gives way to golden light but then retreats into itself much like the farmers at end of day. Gone. Just a glimpse. This needs a fast eye, fast feet, a great camera and even greater lenses. To capture the detail takes Patience. Skill. Timing. And it is in this moment, the world comes alive. “Life is once forever”, Cartier Bresson again. So there is my dilemma, a format camera or something small and fast aka Leica. And that is what I have chosen. And what lenses, to come back to my original question. The rest of this piece is what I originally wrote, now, through a friend and a good piece of writing I get to make a decision, this becomes, again I quote Cartier Bresson, “The Decisive Moment” What a great expression. But now I know, the fastest 28mm lens I can buy, not what I can afford, but what I can buy. Now it simply becomes a matter of what do I sell, certainly not my soul for this is all about feeding and luxuriating in, my soul. Amen.

Now, if you need, read on . . .
It is a dilemma, what is my vision, how do I see the world around me?
As always I am left with more questions than answers. Thank god I have friends who are not shy in guiding me. Thank god I have been fortunate to work alongside some of the worlds great photographers. From these differing personalities and experiences I get to see myself and my world, in a clearer light. I have never been tempted to plagiarise but I totally open to being inspired. In fact it is the impressionists who inspire me most and of those, Cezanne is the most current influence. His study of a fixed landmark seen through a variety of prisms. Same subject, different angle, light, perspective, emotion. I have a couple of images that I have been studying. Fixed and yet ever changing. Lone Pine, which is simply that, a lone pine that dominates the skyline behind my cottage in featherston. Around 4pm I look out my kitchen window and sure enough there is always an attitude, a color, a shift in clouds that has me, with my camera, down to my garden fence and snapping away.
But which lens works for me?
I have tried 5 to date.
First there is my trusty Leica Digilux 2 with it’s 28 to 90mm Summicron lens.
With this I have to leave it and accept it at the 28mm setting. This camera has served me well for 5 years now.
Then there are my luxurious M series lenses.
Tri-Elmar f4 16/18/21
Summilux f1.4 50mm
Summilux f2 90mm
Of course on a Digital camera they all take on a different aspect but I usually, but not always, take this into account when framing. I love shooting from the hip and basically that is what I do. Sure I shoot a lot of snaps but I just fire away, some would accuse me of spraying, but so be it. That is why, generally speaking that the wide angle lenses best suit my style and that is where I need to focus so to speak.
And after all is ingested to my lightroom library I find I am going back to the one lens. The 28mm which in digital terms is a true 35mm.
That is what is missing from my M series arsenal and I am trying hard not to spend the money at the moment and lash out on the glorious Summicron f2 28mm. It is so tempting and I know I will not be totally satisfied until I have that in my bag. So, in these days of recessionary thinking, what do I sell to pay for the new lens. I need some revolutionary thinking! I will not bore you with the price as the cost of anything Leica is ‘obscene’. I use that term with a dash of irony as I could sell so many other things to pay for it. But the old adage of you get what you pay for is certainly true in this case. Follow this link to the Holy Grail.
>http://en.leica-camera.com/photography/m_system/lenses/photojournalism/index.html<
So, today, I have my 50mm to play with, the Tri Elmar is my wide angle and that I love. I have not used the 90mm for a while and I wonder why I keep something I do not use. A film body, M6 would be a far more useful tool.
The next question becomes, now that I have the 28mm/35mm as my prime fixed lens of choice, what do I snap, what turns me on or captures my eye. Sure I shoot a great deal of junk but in saying that I am reminded of henri cartier bresson’s “life is once forever”.
Enough said, cheers, Richard.

Homeless to Harvard!

2009-06-22T19:15:00.000-07:00

From the Los Angeles Times
She finally has a home: Harvard
Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row.
By Esmeralda Bermudez

11:03 PM PDT, June 19, 2009

Khadijah Williams stepped into chemistry class and instantly tuned out the commotion.

She walked past students laughing, gossiping, napping and combing one another's hair. Past a cellphone blaring rap songs. And past a substitute teacher sitting in a near-daze.

Quietly, the 18-year-old settled into an empty table, flipped open her physics book and focused. Nothing mattered now except homework.

"No wonder you're going to Harvard," a girl teased her.

Around here, Khadijah is known as "Harvard girl," the "smart girl" and the girl with the contagious smile who landed at Jefferson High School only 18 months ago.

What students don't know is that she is also a homeless girl.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn't smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep -- survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret -- not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

"I was so proud of being smart I never wanted people to say, 'You got the easy way out because you're homeless,' " she said. "I never saw it as an excuse."

A drive to succeed

"I have felt the anger at having to catch up in school . . . being bullied because they knew I was poor, different, and read too much," she wrote in her college essays. "I knew that if I wanted to become a smart, successful scholar, I should talk to other smart people."

Khadijah was in third grade when she first realized the power of test scores, placing in the 99th percentile on a state exam. Her teachers marked the 9-year-old as gifted, a special category that Khadijah, even at that early age, vowed to keep.

"I still remember that exact number," Khadijah said. "It meant only 0.01 students tested better than I did."

In the years that followed, her mother, Chantwuan Williams, pulled her out of school eight more times. When shelters closed, money ran out or her mother didn't feel safe, they packed what little they carried and boarded buses to find housing in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ventura, San Diego, San Bernardino and Orange County, staying for months, at most, in one place.

She finished only half of fourth grade, half of fifth and skipped sixth. Seventh grade was split between Los Angeles and San Diego. Eighth grade consisted of two weeks in San Bernardino.

At every stop, Khadijah pushed to keep herself in each school's gifted program. She read nutrition charts, newspapers and four to five books a month, anything to transport her mind away from the chaos and the sour smell.

At school, she was the outsider. At the shelter, she was often bullied. "You ain't college-bound," the pimps barked. "You live in skid row!"

In 10th grade, Khadijah realized that if she wanted to succeed, she couldn't do it alone. She began to reach out to organizations and mentors: the Upward Bound Program, Higher Edge L.A., Experience Berkeley and South Central Scholars; teachers, counselors and college alumni networks. They helped her enroll in summer community college classes, gave her access to computers and scholarship applications and taught her about networking.

When she enrolled in the fall of her junior year at Jefferson High School, she was determined to stay put, regardless of where her mother moved. Graduation was not far off and she needed strong college letters of recommendation from teachers who were familiar with her work.

This soon meant commuting by bus from an Orange County armory. She awoke at 4 a.m. and returned at 11 p.m., and kept her grade-point average at just below a 4.0 while participating in the Academic Decathlon, the debate team and leading the school's track and field team.

"That's when I was really stressed," she says, at once sighing and laughing.

Khadijah graduated Friday evening with high honors, fourth in her class. She was accepted to more than 20 universities nationwide, including Brown, Columbia, Amherst and Williams. She chose a full scholarship to Harvard and aspires to become an education attorney.

Early adversity

She tried her best; she never smoked or drank, never did drugs, and she never put us in abusive situations. However, that was the best she could do.

There are questions about her mother Khadijah is not ready to ask, answers she is not ready to hear. How did her mother end up on the streets? How come she never found a stable home for her daughters? Why wasn't there family to turn to, no father, no grandparents? And what will become of her little sister?

"I don't know. I don't know," is often her response. Ask personal questions about her mother and the fire in Khadijah's eyes turns dim. She knows when she arrives in Cambridge, Mass., she will need to seek counseling. So much of her life is a blur.

She knows she was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., to a 14-year-old mother. She thinks Chantwuan might have been ostracized from her family. She may have tried to attend school, but the stress of a baby proved too much. When Khadijah was a toddler, they moved to California. A few years later, Jeanine was born.

She has chosen not to criticize her mother. Instead Khadijah said she inspired her to learn. "She would tell me I had a gift, she would call me Oprah."

When her college applications were due in December, James and Patricia London of South Central Scholars invited Khadijah to their home in Rancho Palos Verdes to help her write her essays.

When they went to return her to skid row, her mother and sister were gone.

Khadijah accepted the Londons' invitation to spend the rest of her school year with them.

In their comfortable hilltop home, Khadijah learned a new set of lessons. The orthopedic doctor and nurse taught her table manners, money management and grooming.

She won't be the first homeless student to arrive at Harvard.

Julie Hilden, the Harvard interviewer who met with Khadijah to gauge whether she should be accepted, said it was clear from the start that Khadijah was a top candidate. But school officials had to make sure they could provide what she needed to make the transition successful.

They plan to connect her with faculty mentors and potentially, a host family to check in with every so often. She will also attend a Harvard summer program at Cornell to take college-prep courses.

"I strongly recommended her," Hilden said. "I told them, 'If you don't take her, you might be missing out on the next Michelle Obama. Don't make this mistake.' "

Seeking connections

"I think about how I can convince my peers about the value of education. . . . I have found that after all the teasing, these peers start to respect me . . . . I decided that I could be the one to uplift my peers . . . . My work is far reaching and never finished."

Khadijah expected to feel more connected after nearly two years at Jefferson, to make at least one good friend.

Students flock to the smart girl for help with homework and tests and class questions. She walks through campus tenderly waving and smiling and complimenting everyone she knows.

But when prom pictures arrive, they show her posing alone in a silky black and white dress. In her yearbook, hundreds of familiar faces look back, but the memories are missing.

"It's a nice, glossy, shiny, colorful yearbook," she said. "But it feels like they're all strangers. I'm nowhere in these pages."

In the last six months, she saw her mother only a few times and on Thursday tried to find her. Khadijah headed to a South-Central storage facility where they last stored their belongings.

She found Chantwuan sitting on a garbage bag full of clothes.

"Khadijah's here!" her sister Jeanine yells. Chantwuan's face lit up.

She explained the details of her graduation, the bus route to get there and gave her mother a prom picture. She said she would leave for summer school Friday.

There is no talk of coming home of for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Proudly, Khadijah modeled her hunter green graduation cap and gown and practiced switching the tassel from right to left as she would during the ceremony.

"Look at you," her mother says. "You're really going to Harvard, huh?"

"Yeah," she says, pausing. "I'm going to Harvard."

esmeralda.bermudez@latimes.com

Hi there Richard,

Yes on the blog reference.
Thanks a million for reading Khadijah's story and sharing it with your loved ones. I wish I could craft a response to each e-mail we have received, but there are hundreds and by the looks of it, there will be hundreds more in the coming days. Readers from across the country, and from as far away as Brazil, India, Tokyo and New Zealand have sent their regards and encouragement.
Khadijah has been an exceptionally private person her entire life, but she chose to share her story because she wants to inspire youths everywhere to believe in themselves. This is what she plans to dedicate her life to as an education attorney.
I know she will be humbled and blown away by your response. For those of you who have asked to make donations toward her living expenses, thank you. I know she will be most grateful.
I will pass along details on where to send help as soon as possible.
With gratitude,

Esmeralda Bermudez,
Metro Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times

Why It Has To Be a Leica

2009-06-03T01:17:00.000-07:00

Quote -

"I honestly didn't mean this to be a big thing on the blog this week, but I guess, by popular demand, I have to elaborate. But please see the note at the very end of this post.

First of all, what I'm suggesting is an exercise. Young people think a year is a very long time. All us older people know it isn't. A year spent learning several important aspects of photography at once, in a concerted way, will pay off for many years after that, regardless of where you take it later. That's assuming you really want to be a photographer in the first place, of course.

Why using a Leica for a year doesn't cost anything, as several commenters have correctly guessed: a used M6 goes for between $1000 to $1200, give or take, and won't depreciate much (if at all) in a year. How much interest would your bank give you right now for keeping that grand parked in a savings account for that period of time? I don't know if you've checked interest rates recently, but the answer is "not very much." At the end of the year you'll lose maybe $100, counting shipping and Ebay fees and lost bank interest, maybe $200 if you're unlucky and/or impatient. Dave Terrell recounts, in the comments to the previous post, how he used some Leica gear for four years and came out $140 ahead. The same has been true for me. I've owned three Leicas at various times over the years, and I made money on two of them. Not much, but the upshot was that the three together ended up not costing me a dime to own and shoot with for a while. Not a dime. (Wish I could say the same for my digital cameras, which have collectively depreciated more than enough to cover a nice Leica and a good lens.) If you do what I suggest, film and paper, or outside processing and printing, will cost much more than the camera will—and both will be dwarfed by the value of the time you'll put in.

And in case you're feeling all whiney about not being able to come up with a grand for the camera: you're young. Work. Save up. Get an extra job. Sacrifice a little. Drink less. Get motivated and go find the damn money, for chrissake. (Malcolm Forbes used to say that no motorcycle enthusiast should be jealous of his motorcycle collection, because any working stiff could afford one motorcycle, and one is all anybody really needs.) Even if you don't have enough credit with anyone on Earth to borrow a grand for a year, it's still not impossible. When I wanted my first camera, I worked two jobs, seven days and 70 hours a week. Granted, I wouldn't have wanted to do that for the rest of my life, but after a few months of that grind I had my camera and lens. In any event, if you're not committed to being out of pocket to the tune of $100 or $200 for a camera you're going to use every day for a year, well, then maybe you aren't committed enough for this exercise, is all. No penalty, no prison time. But don't complain.

Why it has to be a Leica: well, other cameras can be good teachers too. But the Leica is the best teacher, and here's why you should pick it and not a substitute:

1. It's no fun to look through. Totally boring, in fact. Just a window. The framelines aren't even accurate, so you you can't get all prissy about edges and exact framing. And about that "what you see is what you get" with an SLR, digital or otherwise? Not so, because you're always seeing through the lens at its maximum aperture, meaning its minimum d.o.f., aberrations maximized. That particular distortion is just as distracting as parallax and the other flaws of rangefinder viewing, just different. The RF camera sees like you should during this year: at a glance, taking everything in at once. A few months of shooting with a Leica and you'll start to get a feel for what aperture you need for what depth of field. (Mostly I think you'll learn it's not as all-fired important as the SLRs—and the online forums—would lead you to believe.)

2. The Leica is really simple—truly, "as simple as possible, and no simpler." (Well, except for that frameline-preview lever.) You know what "the feel of the wheel" is? It's when you've been driving for a few months and suddenly you realize you don't have to think about anything consciously any more. When you first got behind the wheel of a car, you had to think about everything. After a while it becomes second nature. You think what you want to happen, and it happens. I'm not saying this is some deep spiritual thing. I'm reminded of the old joke—what did the guru say to the hot dog vendor? "Make me one with everything." But "becoming one" with the camera is a cool thing, and a good lesson. It is really, really hard to achieve on a modern DSLR, because they're not built for that. I'm not saying it's necessary to learn to handle the camera this way to do good work or anything like that, but it is really cool, cool enough that it's worthwhile experiencing at least once in your life with cameras.

3. The Leica is quiet. Not super quiet, any more, but quiet enough. It changes how you can shoot compared to most SLRs. You'll see.

4. The Leica is really responsive. First of all, it doesn't ever do one damn thing you don't tell it to do. Modern cameras are your servants: always stepping in trying to help, always trying to take things out of your hands and do the work for you. Which is fine. But we're talking about learning here, and you will learn more if you have to do everything yourself for a while. Think of the difference: who is better off, the rich man who has servants doing everything for him, but who is fully capable of taking care of himself if he has to, or the rich man who is helplessly dependent on his servants to take care of him, and would perish without them? Learn to pull your own weight, then go back to all the helper-cameras. You'll be infinitely better off. Forever, not just for the time being.
And the shutter lag is 18 milliseconds, with a very positive mechanical shutter feel. That, coupled with the total absence of blackout in the viewfinder window, will teach you to take the picture at the exact right moment, not some vague approximation of it. All good pros know how to do this, regardless of how they learned it.

5. A Leica is cool to wear in any language, in any country. You don't need to make excuses, feel sheepish, wish you had something else, worry about your image, etc. If you can't get better, then you never have to fret about not having good enough.

6. Finally, and just as importantly as any other reason here: a Leica is a Leica. The icon, the legend, all that, yatta yatta. It has been responsible for far more than its share of great work; more great photographers used it in the second half of the twentieth century than any other camera, at least part of the time. You can see even in the comments to the previous post that the camera provokes strong emotions and opinions; no other 35mm excites nearly the same passions nearly as universally in our little craft. Until you get to grips with a Leica, you haven't gotten to grips with a Leica. So, do it. Then you'll know firsthand what everyone is bloviating about, and need never suffer a scintilla more angst on that account.

Do this while you're young, and have time in your life. Do it while you have the energy to commit, while all your possibilities are still open, while you still have the motivation to stay in training. Because make no mistake, photographing the way I suggested in the previous post is the photographic equivalent of being a top athlete: it takes dedication and coordination and talent and time and sacrifice and lots of training. Not everybody can do it. (I can't, these days. Too old, slow, stiff and lazy.) This whole idea works better—it's simply more possible for most of us—when we're young and have energy to throw away. You can tell from the comments that a lot of our readers have done something similar to this at some point in their lives, and only a few don't agree it was a good thing for them.

So what I'm suggesting is that you devote a year and some cash and work your butt off and learn some lessons about photographing that will stick in your brain pan throughout the rest of your life. It's not a film vs. digital thing; you can go back to digital and never look back and it will still never stop helping you. It's not a black-and-white vs. color thing; a year of seeing "luminances only" will help your color photography too, even if you never shoot another "capture" of B&W in your life. It's not a rangefinder vs. any-other-kind-of-camera thing; I think you'll find that the lessons the rangefinder will teach you are exportable. And it's not even a Leica vs. other-rangefinder thing, either. But until you've gotten to know life with Leica, you don't know about life with Leica, and it's just going to keep on being one more thing you don't know. So why not get to know it, firsthand and for yourself?

I don't even really like rangefinders. Most other people don't either. (What they like is Leicas, not rangefinders, for many reasons, some sensible, some stupid.) If they did, there would be more people buying them, and there would be a few viable digital rangefinders on offer. The reason there aren't is that only a few people really like the damn things.

They still have a lot to teach you, though, in my humble opinion. Most people will never get to, but a year with a Leica as a teacher is something every passionate photographer would experience once in their lifetimes if they were really lucky.

Mike

P.S. A year with a view camera, too. But, as Ctein would say, "Put down the can opener and step slowly away from the worms....""

- end quote
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full credit is given to the following Blog, well worth following, cheers, Richard.
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html

Featherston is a Train Town.

2009-04-29T03:17:00.001-07:00

Trains make a noise, lots of noise. Trains come in all shapes and all sizes. Trains, real trains, coal powered, steam driven, make smoke, lots of smoke. It’s what makes kids love them. There is a romance to them. And, of course, trains are always going somewhere.
As a child I love the K Class Locomotives and I loved the small black shunters that shunted backward and forward from Port Napier to
Port Ahuriri. Short, blunt. Purposefull. They crossed the road at the bottom of Bluff Hill where we lived. They hooted, I smiled. There is a mystery to a train, there is magic, and, as I said, a romance.
In my teens, as a harrier, I travelled from Napier to Gisborne by railcar, not a real train and yet it was still a train. We tossed rolls of toilet paper over the Mohaka Viaduct. We ate railway pies and drank railway tea and we played Crown & Anchor as we travelled and ran badly as a result. I remember living in suspended silence as our eldest brother caught the Wellington to Auckland Express and heard it become the Tangiwai Rail Disaster in 1953, but that he had missed the train at the last moment. From Sydney to Adelaide 3rd class, now that was a trip. Cold, Hard, Slow. Sydney to Brisbane was more enjoyable. I travelled from Perth to Manjimup in West Australia. I watched the giant ore trains that emptied the Pilbara to fill ships for Japan. I commuted daily by train in Sydney and New York, I have travelled from Hong Kong Central into China’s New Territories, travelled underground in London and Paris but my favorite spot on the face of the planet is, and always will be, Grand Central Terminal in New York. Center of the Universe I call it. Standing in the main concourse, up on the mezzanine, looking out over what appears to me as a huge ants nest of intertwined travellers. Literally thousands upon thousands going about their daily business. Travellers waiting to be met, seen off, connecting with other travellers, a huge melting pot of humanity.
The destination board fascinated me. The Hudson Line and all the other lines that went all the way to Niagara Falls. For nourishment as I watched I ate at the Oyster Bar, so often that I became a regular.
A dozen mixed oysters and a glass of Cloudy Bay.
I walked through the main concourse every morning and every evening, to and from work on Madison Avenue. The deep down rumble of multiple trains on multiple tracks on multiple levels. The sound is what got me, the acoustics. Down below the main concourse I can stand in one corner and whisper into the vaulted wall and another person across the passageway can hear my voice as clear as a bell. Amazing. I loved the Hudson Line, visiting friends at Croton, Sleepy Hollow and Ossining, aka Sing Sing. I love the New York subway, the smell, the noise, the rattle of trains on the 6 Line, the A Line, the E and all the others that took me down town, up town, the cross town shuttle. Finally, and unfortunately it was the overwhelming smell of urine and the grime and crime of the subway that had me leave New York for the Coast. I love New York.
And then to Penn Station to catch the train, 1st Class, to Washington DC. That was something, to pass an America in decay. An America that used to produce. Sad to see shuttered buildings, mile after mile.

I spent 21 years in New Zealand, 20 years in Australia, 20 in America and now I am back in New Zealand and am in despair at the state of our State Rail. Grubby, boring, unimaginative, slow and expensive.
However, on certain days, I get to drive at 160k chasing the classic trains that sometimes ply the Manawatu Gorge and sometimes appear in the Wairarapa. What magic there is in trains.
I have stood 3 feet from an East West Main Line near Route 66 in Arizona, as a mile long train roared by, loaded two stories high with shipping containers and to be told that 42 trains pass this spot daily.
I edited Television Commercials for BNSF in America. I filmed BNSF Rolling Stock as I travelled the American West for two years. I spent time chatting to the crew of the Durango to Silverton steam trains. Glorious engines from a glorious age. I have devoured Zane Grey and read Union Pacific so many times I almost live it. I drove from Venice Beach, California to Ogden Utah, where the Golden Spike was driven way back in ’65, towing an Airstream Trailer. All those memories and I am not at all what I would call a Train Nut or Fan. But, for whatever reason, trains play a large part in my imagination. I love to film and photograph them and have a growing collection. And the thing that really, really gets me is the sad lonesome sound of distant trains, be they in New Zealand or the American West. Someone, somewhere is travelling by train right now.
Long Live the Tracks. Long Live the Trains that Ply them and the Engineers who keep them running.

The Future of Featherston?

2009-03-22T18:07:00.000-07:00

I sat with friends last night, neighbors to boot and we talked about OUR TOWN.
Feathers Town, Featherston or, as it was originally named in 1857, Burlings
Now here I live, but an hour from where I was born and with a population smaller than any place I have ever lived for a month or more. It is an interesting little blip on the Highway. It is the hamlet you hit when climbing down off the Rimutakas, it is THE Gateway to the Wairarapa. The village before Martinborough and Greytown. Steeped in History, as interesting and older than the American West. Yep, older! Now there we were, wondering, last night over a glass of my own grown Pinot, how do we take the bones of a great little burg and make it a stopping place for the drivers, bikers and truckers who ply the 'HILL'. Whether they go North or South, Featherston is the first and last place to stop and grab a break in the Wai, to stretch the legs and wander. I say wander because it is a great place to park, get off the main drag and explore both sides of the highway before continuing.
But that is the question, what to do to get travelers to regard Featherston as a place worthy of more than a slowing down to the legal limit of 50km per hour. A tricky one as the town appears divided into sections and between the sections the glue appears to be garish real estate agents, fish and chips shops that went broke and second hand furniture stores. Try and find a 7 day cafe or a place to get a glass of whatever after 4pm. Hard, real hard.
It's all there though, the main drag, a long straight east west piece of bitumen that beautifully reflects the sun, morning or evening. There are building of an era gone by. There is a great Museum, houseing the only remaining Fell Engine, a neat Library, a state of the art Digital Video Cinema that is, I hear, closing. There are gracious buildings owned by a few and despaired of by the many. They are falling down as I write. The local kids run riot with tagging and breaking of windows, boredom has set in at age 8! Go figure. Groups of girls scream at other groups of girls. We had a couple of vicious beatings this past weekend, we have had a recent murder and a spate of burglaries. What parents have sown we reap. Bugger. So this piece is my first question. Is anyone else interested in doing rather than talking? It is easier to stop traffic than stop the violence. It all begins with a shift in attitude. What may have worked doesn't appear to be working.
Featherston, Gateway to the Wairarapa. The Wairarapa is the playground for the capital of Aotearoa NZ. It needs a suitable Gateway. It needs suitable branding. It needs new ideas, new blood. If nothing changes then the status quo needs to stand aside and allow new ideas and new blood a chance of change. But it does need a major shift in attitude.
Please feel free to contact me or add your thoughts, positive or negative. Ciao.

ps, the photographs represent what it could be, attractive, alive, creative, a hub for all the eclectic differences that exist in the South Wairarapa.

It's the Eye Stupid . . . isn't it?

2009-03-10T18:10:00.001-07:00

Finally, I am taking time to add an article, I have been so distracted by the complexity of living and am working hard to get back to SIMPLE!

quote – "Not bad for the cheapest, most plastic, simplest and lightest DSR on the market!!

Canon 1000D with Canon 28 F2.8 (42mm equivalent) prime lens. Total cost about $1,000.

This machine takes seriously good pictures." - end quote, Julian Ward

Now, to put this into perspective, Julian has Leica cameras, leica lenses, shoots film, processes and prints beautiful gallery quality prints. He also has high end Canon gear. He has published books and is a fountain of knowledge, fact and/or funny.
http://julianward.co.nz/
I say all this as I am exploring photography in my 'later' years.
Age 17 I talked about photography, played with it a bit, walked away from it, age 24, and into a film editing career. Since that time I have snapped my travels and travails. Fun. I have worked with many Film Directors who started as photographers, David Bailey, Jonathon Taylor, Klaus Lucka, Bryce Atwell, John Ashenhurst, Steve Horn, Leslie Dektor et al. I learned a great deal in composition and color. Thanks guys.
So here I am back at the beginning.
Years ago I bought a Sony, still have it, a DSC-V1 a Cyber Shot 5.0 MegaPixels. A Digital Camera. It has worked flawlessly for years, continues to do so. Before that as a teenager and into my early 20’s I played with Nikon, Mamiya, Pentax. After the Sony came a Contax VS111 with a Carl Zeiss Vario Sonnar T* lens , I bought one on a bored Saturday morning ( don’t ask) in New York. Loaded it with a roll of FP4 and shot Wall Street. Some would say I missed J but last year I discovered the negs and proofs, had them scanned as high res digital negs and voila! Amazing, high contrast images.
Then, in 2005, came my US West exploration and I thought I needed something a tad better that a 5MP Sony. Bought a Leica Digilux 2.

I love it, what a great camera, there is a whole group out there on the web dedicated to the Digilux 2.

I shot thousands of snaps across the west, worked like a dream, all JPEG files, I knew nothing of Raw then. No changing lenses in the dusty desert.
2006, back in Venice Beach, before leaving for NZ, with Samy’s Camera just down the road I invested in a Nikon D200 and ALL the new lenses. They say a fool and his money are soon parted. I admit here and now, when it comes to money, I have no clue. I have never had a problem earning it, just couldn’t save it. But maybe, in this day and age, that is not a bad thing. Imagine all that earned money in an investment account that would, today, be supporting some ex banker making like a prime minister in the south pacific. Maybe I have done my bit for the world of consumerism. Nothing to feel guilty about as I have always bought well. The D200 was a computer, I don’t need a computer that shoots video and needs Arnold ‘i’ll be baack’ to carry it. Sold that. Invested, there is no other word for it, invested in a Leica system, new M8 body, new lenses, new attitude.
So here I am with some very tasty equipment and the question arises. “Are my snaps better than the Sony?”
YES!
Better than the Digilux2 . . . ? Maybe, maybe not.
Better than the Nikon? My jury is still out, which brings me back to Julian’s Canon. I have watched him shoot. He shoots, I snap. Not saying I don’t have a good eye, I do. Good enough for people to buy prints.
But my gear is worth 20 grand, his . . . 1 grand.
Are my snaps 20 times better than his photographs . . . . :) no comment :)
The point being that it is the shooter, shore the gear helps but it’s still the shooter. I also shot New York and the beginnings of my Zane Grey & Me projects with a Sony PC5.
I am finishing a 43 minute film,
‘9/11 . . . ps, New York, New York, I love You!’ all shot on mini dv, hand held ntsc. It looks awesome, not the quality per se but the content.
Of course Zane Grey & Me is shot mainly on a Sony Z1U. HDDV.
I can certainly tell the difference.
And, again, how important is the gear?
I am learning, not very much but it does help. I guess it all depends on where I wish to take my work. If I want to be a fine art photographer then I would invest in medium or large format, but do I love photography that much? Well, sort of. Maybe I am vascillating here. Maybe.
I continue to use the Digilux 2
I just bought 6 rolls of FP4 for the CONTAX.
So what do I need a 6000 buck body for?
The lenses for the Leica are awesome, I must admit, from 16mm to 90mm. I do have fun exploring the lenses and I guess that is what it is all about. Fixed lenses rather than zooms.
The irony is that I have found that certain images I love to capture are the result of playing with, experimenting with, the M8.
My dear friend Sandie bought a Nikon D40 and apart from being screwed by the Wellington dealer, captures awesome, fresh images that I love to basically edit in iPhoto. For my own I use Lightroom but again, iPhoto is simple. It works. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
My friend Klaus Lucka, in New York, shoots film with a Hasseblad and a Nobilux, his work is awesome. Art quality.
My old buddy in Sydney Brian McInerney, shoots film and his prints are collectibles.
Those are instances where the tools needed are not debatable.
But down here, at my snapping level, the tools are a matter of pocket, taste and choice. I admit, I do love quality. Land Rovers, Apple Computers, Deane & DeLuca, Hennesey & Ingalls, Orvis, Palm Treos, etc, etc. You get the idea. However, think of the money I could have ‘saved’ . . . YEAH RIGHT!
So my Leicas, Contax and Sony cameras serve me well. It’s my eye that is important, they serve me well, especially since Dr. Helen Long played laser surgery packman on my right iris. Amazing really. And Helen loves photography.
So, with whatever camera I pick up today, I will continue to practice.
I will continue to be amazed at others work, others images. It is they, not what they hold that is the key. I am not a Photoshop kind of guy but would like to know more, simply to print better quality prints, not to make photos into illustrations. That is not my line. I am a story teller.
I use images, both still and moving and also the written word. Amen.

Ps, I do love my Leicas, worth every hard earned dollar. The heft, the ease of operation, the glass, they are a beautiful piece of equipment.
What am I trying to share here, dunno really, just wanted to use the quote by Julian I guess, cheers, Richard Clark, Snapper.

How can I make a difference?

2009-01-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

I received this reply for a posting on Doculink, the question was something like “How do I become successful?” I include it to show that through simple, honest communication, we can make a difference. Simply speak your own truth, not someone elses.

Quote -

Thank you for this post, Richard. I concur with your wisdom and may file this email away – something I do not typically do, as I don't appreciate clutter – to show my 2 1/2 year old daughter one day when she feels stuck.

Monique

- end quote.

On Jan 19, 2009, at 2:52 PM, Richard Clark wrote:
Bloody Hard Work._Nothing is for nothing._Read Cezanne's life story, he had to wait until age 60-ish to really _'make' it._Picasso on the other hand . . . we should all be so lucky._Hard work, focus, daily practice, good friends, mentors, watch good _movies, the Classics._Read good literature. Write daily, journalling if you need to start _somewhere._make a wish list. dream._Since I was 13 I have been working hard, I have a great deal to show _for it._It just doesn't happen in isolation. Eliminate anyone who does not _support you._I don't mean Chicago eliminate :), just don't waste time on/with fools _and foes._Never go to the Hardware Store for Milk. Start small and grow, water _daily.__Richard Clark_Film | Fotography | Filosophy_Aotearoa New Zealand_http://kiwicafe.blogspot.com/_

Do we hurt enough, yet?

2009-01-19T17:42:00.000-08:00

Just now, listening to out local access radio station, I sat in sadness and disbelief as a local police constable talked of hotels and bars in masterton closing around 1-2:00AM and some 2 to 300 people take to wandering the streets in various stages of intoxication.
I spoke to a good friend of mine soon after and shared with them that I had spent the weekend recording a conference held in conjunction with AA, Alcoholics Anonymous in Wellington.
I heard the expression “I was so sick I thought I was well”. Wow! Sounds like Aotearoa NZ as I have experienced her these past 3 years. Yep, three years ago I moved to Aotearoa NZ after 43 years of Australia and The United States of America. In Australia I experienced a level of bullying that reminded me of my childhood but never comprehended the effects until I moved to New York. I learned my film editing craft in Sydney and the level of drinking astounded me. If I refused to go drinking on a Friday night, I could kiss goodby to my job. The only time I could have a dialogue with the company owner was after he had downed a couple of beers. Sad but true. The drinking culture was totally imbedded in the DNA of the film industry. I remember smiling at American producers who had taked projects “Down Under” to shoot. They loved the crews but were astounded at the amount of alcohol consumed. It is no wonder that for the first time in my life, at age 44, in New York, I felt totally accepted and not bullied. Maybe that says more about me than the societies I grew up in, maybe not. It certainly took me that long to begin my real education to life and love and healing. Finally I was able to reflect on my life to that time. I found many blank spaces in my memory, those spaces still exist, spaces where I shut down to deal with the trauma of particular experiences as a child.
I have experienced black outs since but only from the effects of a bike accident when I was in a short head injury induced coma. I know that short period of time will always be gone. The brains way of dealing with shock. But to have black outs that refuse to heal lingering from childhood, that I find profoundly sad.
I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to drink until the brain blanks out. Binge drinking does that and teenage women/girls in Aotearoa are a huge disproportionate statistic in this ‘game’. I cannot even begin to comprehend what drives teens and pre-teens, as young as 8 and 9, to engage in such life challenging pursuits. Sure, as a child, I did some dumb arsed things, for which I was surely and, at times severely punished but never, ever, did I or my friends simply try and drink to oblivion. We did wheelies in the ‘oldies’ car. Even ran under the back of a turning farm truck between Masterton and Carterton. And what about the party pill phenomenon? That staggers me. Yes, I have smoked a joint or two, once I even snorted coke but thought my nose would explode so only did it once. The thought of injecting myself with a needle, no way. I saw a Peter Weir movie once where a huge close up of a needle picking up the skin of the forarm and injecting some sort of fluid totally turned me off. I nearly threw up at the image. Thank god for my sensitive nature. I always thought I needed toughening up, especially to live in New York or Venice Beach. But no. I never felt unsafe in those areas. Was never abused or robbed, can’t say the same for the Wai.
The places I have felt fear for my physical safety have been few and far between. Ceduna on the South Australian plains, Kings Cross in Sydney, Masterton and Wellington in New Zealand. A sad testimony to the state of my ‘homeland’.
What to do? Nothing!
Raise the awareness, show, through a commitment to my own recovery, that it is possible to live life fully and freely by changing attitudes. By taking responsibility. By holding others, and myself, fully accountable for our actions. It’s not at all easy. But nothing worthwhile in life is at all easy. To be President of the United States of America or President of the Greytown Lions Club, neither can be phoned in. It takes commitment. It takes focus and it takes practice, it also, in my own experience, takes the input and support of others. We cannot do it alone. We are social beings us humans. It doesn’t always seem so but given a choice we would rather, or should I say I would rather, be in the company of equals than live a life of isolation. I love the concept of ‘One Amongst Many’. It gives a sense of belonging. It also could be said that the groups who go binge drinking are not in isolation but then that, to me, become a whole new ballgame of giving away individual responsibilty and mob rule takes over. The Stockholm Syndrome I believe. The same energy and insanity that created the Salem Witch Trials of America in 1682. The phenomena lasted less than a month but nearly 30 people were put to death. Young girls told stories that had no substance in fact and people were jailed, prosecuted, persecuted and burned at the stake. It wasn’t until one person said stop, that anyone started questioning the substance of the behaviour that lead to the trials.
Today we need someone to yell “STOP!”.
Me, You, Us!
We, as a society, are out of control and We, as a society have out collective heads up our collective arses, all that concerns us, or so it seems to me, is the state of the economy and if we can hang onto the beemer and the bach.
We just voted out a Socialist, “Nanny State” Government and yet the Substance Abuse increased dramatically during the years they governed. So that is not the answer.
I have often heard it said that a person will not change until they hurt enough. Bloody hell, what do teenagers and adults in this so called Clean Green, 100% Pure New Zealand have to do to hurt so badly that they will find the desire to change.
Today, I am lost for an answer. All I can do is scream “HELP!”.
Who will join me?

Everything 'Old is New' again . . .

2009-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

And so to a New Year.
As I highlighted "Old is New"
This year I hope to buy a Leica Film Body, M6 or similar, to use my wonderful Leica glass with.
I love my M8, maybe I could have waited for the M8.2 but then I am sure, :) knowing me :) would have spent the money on some piece of useless something. Not only do I have a camera system I truly love, I have a really good investment in these challenging times. I am taking a break from deliberately seeking income this year to work on my own projects. Sure I would love to be financially secure but have come to the awareness and acceptance that financial security is but a myth, it's kind of like a drug. Keeps me from my reality, my truth. And today, my truth and reality is that I need, I want, to produce my own projects through to completion. I have my 9/11 film close to a locked edit and now I have begun the long slow process of ingesting 220 hours of my Zane Grey footage into my computer. It is all digital, MiniDV, DVCam, HDV, it takes real time to ingest unlike the new P2 technology. But then with the new technology I would not be doing what I have been trained, over 40 years, to do and that is to watch every single frame. Only then can I truly know what I have. I make notes as I go and am patiently logging. I would love the metadata that my Leica provides but I will wait. The equipment I have is the best for what I do, Apple, FCP, Sony, Leica. Last year I worked on three P2 recorded projects and still looked at every frame. It's what I learned, what gave me a successful career, what helped me help my clients achieve great heights. To compromise now would be to waste those years. It is simple, Film making, Photography, Writing, in fact any creative process, takes just the right amount of time, no matter how long. The more time, the more satisfying the result. So this year will be revealed to me, daily and I will attempt to the very best of my ability to complete to my satisfaction that which I have started. May you all enjoy such fun.

Polaroid Film Flies Again

2009-01-18T13:22:00.000-08:00

Smile! Rescue bid begins for Polaroid

4:00AM Monday Jan 19, 2009
Emily Dugan
For a generation, the Polaroid camera gave near-instant pleasure to millions of users around the world, chronicling everything from births and weddings to the downright explicit.

But when digital photography came along in the 1990s - with instant images and the ability to edit and delete pictures before they saw the light of day - Polaroid was doomed, its white-framed snaps apparently defunct.

When Polaroid announced last February that it would stop production of its instant film, it seemed the much-loved camera was gone forever. But within weeks, a group of users had started a global campaign for the format to return. And now, thanks to an unlikely saviour, their pleas have been heard.

All going well, the Polaroid factory in Amsterdam will soon be making film again, thanks to its new owner, an eccentric Austrian artist and businessman, Florian Kaps.

Kaps, 39, has dedicated the past five years to instant photography. He set up Polanoid.net, the biggest Polaroid gallery on the web, and the first Polaroid-only art gallery in Vienna, called Polanoir.

Now he plans to save the film. "The project is more than a business plan; it's a fight against the idea that everything has to die when it doesn't create turnover," said Kaps.

Dubbed "The Impossible Project", the development of new film for Polaroid cameras launches today. Working with the Manchester-based black and white photography company Ilford, the machinery is in place to produce film of two exposure types, each compatible with both the classic SX-70 cameras popular with artists and the more modern 600 series.

- INDEPENDENT

Happy Holidays and a truly great New Year . . .

2008-12-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

http://picasaweb.google.com/kiwicafe/2008Xmas#

It is what it is!

2008-11-28T22:58:00.001-08:00

Out of the ordinary
He's a softly spoken gentleman from the Deep South, with a taste for bourbon and antique guns and a reputation as a 'hellraiser'. He's also the photographer whose extraordinary ability to find beauty in the banal has transformed the way we look at the world. Sean O'Hagan travels to America to meet William Eggleston
Sean O'Hagan
guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 25 2004

William Eggleston is not hard to spot in the lobby of the Mansfield Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Every inch a southern dandy, he stands out amid the casual wear and sombre suits, dressed in a pastel-blue summer jacket, boldly striped tie, white trousers and matching shoes. His hair is parted on the left and sweeps over a pale face that peers in perpetual suspicion from behind old-fashioned oval horn-rimmed spectacles. He looks out of place and out of time, as if he has just stepped out of a PG Wodehouse novel.

Had you to guess where he came from and what he did from his appearance alone, the words 'English' and 'aristocrat' might spring to mind way before 'American' and 'photographer'. And yet, at 65, William Eggleston is perhaps the most innovative American photographer of the past 50 years whose unique style has transformed the way we look at the world. His influence on our visually led contemporary popular culture is now so pervasive that it goes unnoticed. In fashion shoots and films, advertising and art photography, Eggleston's everyday view of things, initially dismissed by critics in the mid-Seventies, is now the prevalent aesthetic. Put simply, it would be difficult to imagine the world according to David Lynch or Gus Van Sant or Juergen Teller or Sofia Coppola without the world according to William Eggleston.

Both the opening of Lynch's Blue Velvet and Van Sant's Elephant are homages to Eggleston, the first in its use of saturated colour to highlight the surrealism of small-town America, the second a shot of a blue sky straight out of Eggleston's Wedgwood Blue series, where he pointed the camera directly up at the wispy clouds.

'It was the beauty of banal details that was inspirational,' Coppola said of Eggleston's influence on her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides, in 1999, and it is this ability to record, and illuminate, the mundane that is his stock in trade.

His most famous photograph, entitled Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, but always referred to as The Red Ceiling, is of a bare light bulb from a crimson ceiling, three white cables snaking across the glossy surface like arteries. It is taken from an angle that suggests he may have stood on a chair, or simply held the camera above his head. In its apparent casualness, it is emblematic of Eggleston's art, being both ordinary and loaded with meaning, utterly simple and yet endlessly complex. A mundane image, maybe, yet one that carries within it some indefinable sense of menace. 'It is so powerful,' he once said, 'that I have never seen it reproduced on the page to my satisfaction. When you look at the dye transfer print, it's like red blood that's wet on the wall. It shocks you every time.'

Eggleston has travelled from his native Memphis to Manhattan to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Institute of Contemporary Photography, and the previous night he had celebrated in the company of the great Czech-born photographer Josef Koudelka, who was also honoured. Today, though, the bar is closed and, to add insult to injury, he must repair to the street every time he feels like a smoke. In person, Eggleston looks older than his 65 years, and though his reputation as a gentrified hellraiser precedes him, he comes across initially as diffident and guarded, ill-at- ease in the company of strangers, still more so with strangers who want to question him about his work. This is not what I had expected, having heard some wild stories about his legendary lifestyle.

Back in the mid-Nineties, when Primal Scream were recording their album Give Out But Don't Give Up in Memphis, they paid a call on Eggleston to ask if they could use Troubled Waters, his strange image of a neon Confederate flag and a palm tree, on the cover. 'I remember he was wearing jodhpurs and leather boots, some kind of military outfit, and walking about with a rifle and a bayonet,' recalls lead singer Bobby Gillespie. 'When he heard we were Scottish, he sat down at the piano and started reciting great chunks of Rabbie Burns. It was surreal.'

Gillespie's friend, the filmmaker Douglas Hart, takes up the story. 'William and his wife were knocking back these massive drinks. He asked us to let him hear a song, and then he would decide if we could have the picture. We played him "Moving On Up", and he fell on his knees and started shouting, "Bo Diddley! Bo Diddley! Y'all love Bo Diddley!" He rummaged through his records and pulled out "I'm the Meat Man", by Jerry Lee [Lewis] and played it so loud the speakers blew. Then his wife shouted, "Y'all want ribs?" She insisted we all go to a local rib joint. It was wild.' Gillespie nods in agreement. 'He let us have the picture though. He was a true gent.'

Today, perhaps because of his tendency to excess, Eggleston is accompanied everywhere by his son, Winston, a friendly but firm chaperone who looks after the archive and, one suspects, tries to keep his father's wilder side in check. Winston briefs the photographer and myself beforehand: the photo session must be brief, the interview should not broach the subject of specific photographs nor dwell on his private life. 'I've seen him get impatient with interviewers,' says Winston, 'and he's apt to up and leave if that occurs.'

When we are seated in a dark corner of the bar, I begin by asking Eggleston where he comes from, exactly. He stares straight ahead, as if deep in thought, then, after about 30 seconds, answers softly, 'Nowhere,' except the word comes out as three syllables - 'No-whe-ahhh' - each one enunciated in a soft southern lilt. It is not an auspicious start, but it is followed by a sly smile, then another equally long pause, after which he elaborates in what I will soon come to recognise as a typically vague manner. 'I was born on the Mississippi delta. Cotton country. Married a gal from Mississippi, too, but I've been living in or around Memphis since about 1960.'

Eggleston is the slowest and most softly spoken person I have ever met, and the silence while he considers a question is so deep and long that I find myself wondering if he has simply chosen to ignore my fumbling attempts at elucidation. His thoughts, when they emerge into speech, are expressed succinctly and in oddly illuminating phrases that, like his work, are both simple and complex. I imagine Samuel Beckett and himself would have got on famously. 'A picture is what it is,' he says when I ask him why he no longer wishes to talk about individual photographs, 'and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.'

The 'whatever they are' aspect, one feels, is what perplexed the critics back in 1976, when Eggleston had his groundbreaking and controversial show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (Moma). Before then, colour photography was confined to advertising and product catalogues, but Eggleston hauled it, in all its saturated glory, into the rarefied world of fine art. The show and the accompanying catalogue, William Eggleston's Guide, can be seen, in retrospect, as the pivotal moment when colour photography became an art form. It was a cultural shift that enraged many contemporary critics. The New York Times called it 'the most hated show of the year', while Hilton Kramer, the most conservative and influential American critic, took issue with curator John Szarkowski's claim in the catalogue that Eggleston's photographs were 'perfect'. 'Perfectly banal, perhaps,' he wrote, 'perfectly boring, certainly.'

I ask Eggleston if he was surprised or dismayed by the negative critical response. 'Hell, no,' he says, smiling. 'It didn't surprise or offend me. Didn't impinge on me at all. I didn't think either, as some people did, that the work was revolutionary. It was certainly different to what was being done before I started, no question about that. But even if I hadn't done that show I would still have continued as normal. Wouldn't have changed a thing.'

Born in Memphis in 1939, Eggleston was raised in a grand house on a former cotton plantation amid considerable wealth and privilege, and retains the airs and graces of the old southern aristocracy. His father was killed in action during the Second World War and he was raised by his grandfather, Joseph Albert May, who pursued photography as a hobby. Eggleston attended military academy, then Vanderbilt University and 'Ole Miss' - the University of Mississippi - without ever graduating. He took up the camera reluctantly in 1957, encouraged by his best friend, who was impressed by his enthusiasm for the work of Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans.

'I had an old Canon and a Leica,' he says, 'but I didn't know the first thing about photography. Never learnt it off anybody either. It quickly came to be that I grew interested in photographing whatever was there wherever I happened to be. For any reason.'

Does he remember the first photograph he took that he was happy with? 'First one I took,' he says, matter of factly. 'Very first one. I can remember exactly the feeling of satisfaction.' Can he recall the subject matter? 'It was an exact duplicate of the Parthenon across from the university. My friend and I walked over and I took a picture of it. Came back from the printers just how I saw it.'

By the time he arrived in New York in 1967, Eggleston had amassed a suitcase full of slides that he had taken in and around Mississippi and Tennessee over the previous few years. He trailed it around » New York, calling on like-minded souls such as Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, who encouraged him to take it to John Szarkowski at Moma, perhaps the most influential curator of photography in the past century. Szarkowski saw in Eggleston what many others couldn't, or wouldn't, see - a new and radical aesthetic in the making.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, when reportage was the dominant form, Eggleston had chosen instead to literally photograph the world around him, often in minute detail, and from what seemed at the time like skewed angles. In image after image, he had captured the old, weird America of the rural south as it merged with the vulgar new post-war America of fast food, plastic and neon. His subjects were commonplace: a muddy pick-up truck; a freezer filled with pre-packed food; discarded shoes under a bed. Sometimes he shot from below, making a child's tricycle look almost monumental; a corrugated tin roof resemble a freeway. In 1973, he discovered a process called dye-transfer printing while browsing through a commercial catalogue full of colour-saturated advertising images of perfume bottles and cigarette packets. From that moment, though his neutral gaze remained constant, everything he photographed was rendered heightened and unreal.

'He is the supreme colourist of American photography,' says British photographer Martin Parr, who acknowledges Eggleston as an influence on his own work, 'and what he was doing in the Seventies was so far ahead of the game that it was revolutionary. Photography is a generic form and there are not that many truly original artists, but Eggleston is definitely one of them.'

In 1976, Szarkowski helped Eggleston edit his already vast archive of over 2,000 photographs down to the 75 striking images that made up the Moma show. William Eggleston's Guide was, says Parr, 'lambasted at the time for being crude and simplistic, like Robert Frank's Americans before it, when in fact, it was both alarmingly simple and utterly complex. It took people a long time to understand Eggleston. Even when he had the big Barbican show over here in 1990, people were baffled, and it was considered a flop.'

The Guide was followed by other equally arresting books, including Los Alamos and The Democratic Forest. Then, in 1976, on one of his few magazine assignments, for Rolling Stone, he stopped looking through the viewfinder altogether, and began using his Leica 'like a shotgun', often shooting pictures on the move. Anything to stop becoming formulaic.

Juergen Teller pinpoints this curiously cavalier style as perhaps the key to Eggleston's singular genius. 'What has always intrigued me about Eggleston is that he seems so completely free,' says Teller. 'It's like he doesn't give a damn about anything, what people think least of all. It's almost arrogant, but it's more than that. It's a really rare thing to be that free, and you can feel it from his work.' That freedom may be tied in some way to Eggleston's wealth, to the fact that he never had to depend on anything, including photography, to earn a living. 'I guess he never had the pressure of being commercial,' continues Teller. 'He just does what he wants and it shows in the best way. It's like an intense hobby to him.' When I ask Eggleston if he considered photography to be more a hobby than a job, he nods: 'There might be something in that, all right.'

In the early Seventies, Eggleston also established a reputation as a hellraiser, hanging out with musicians and artists in Memphis's burgeoning boho scene. Around this time he shot hours of video footage on an old Sony Porta-Pak camera for a legendary lost project entitled Stranded in Canton. This, too, was an experiment in the democratic gaze, the exotic and the mundane flowing into each other, and of equal significance to Eggleston's lens. He shot day and night in juke joints, on sidewalks, in bars and fields, trailing friends as they drank and took drugs, and even capturing a travelling freak show in which two geeks bit the heads off live chickens. The hundreds of hours of footage has now finally been edited down to a manageable 85 minutes by Robert Gordon, who chronicled the local music scene in his excellent book, It Came from Memphis. 'It's black-and-white hand-held footage, mainly,' says Gordon, 'and it is shot in a form that is not dissimilar to the photographs he took at the time - impressionistic, free-form and often incredibly detailed. It's more character based, though, and many of the characters are acquaintances of Bill's, all of them sharing what you might call an extreme nature. There's a transvestite, and a veterinarian and at least two dentists. It's like the other side of the Memphis looking glass, a world fuelled by drugs, alcohol and poetic furore. Bill told me they were all using Quaaludes at the time, even the dentists. That's Memphis for you, I guess.'

Around this time, too, Eggleston also crossed paths with Alex Chilton, lead singer of Memphis rock group Big Star. The first photograph of Eggleston's I ever saw was the aforementioned red ceiling, which adorned the sleeve of Big Star's Radio City album. On a recent re-released version of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers album, you can hear Eggleston play piano as Chilton sings a damaged version of the Nat King Cole classic, 'Nature Boy'. Another Eggleston shot of dolls arranged on the bonnet of a classic car appeared on Chilton's solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert.

'Bill used a studio round the back of Chilton's parents' house,' says Memphis musician and producer Bill Dickinson, who has played with everyone from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones, and produced Big Star. 'They were artists and bohemians and their house was like a salon for local talent. The first time I saw Alex Chilton he was about 13. He was running round the lawn, eyes spinning.'

When I ask Eggleston about his involvement with the Memphis music scene, though, he shakes his head and denies any knowledge of it. 'Of no interest to me at all,' he says, in a manner that suggests this avenue of enquiry is closed. 'That's Bill to a tee,' laughs Dickinson, when I mention this. 'But he was a wild man, and still is. He wore Savile Row suits and drove a Bentley, and played classical piano, but he was more rock'n'roll than any of us, even though he probably hated the music we were making. He'd shoot with some kind of night vision lens often until the bitter end, then just fall over unconscious on the floor. He wasn't just at the party, he was the party. When he and Stanley Booth [the Memphis-based rock writer] got together, it was like World War Three.'

It was Dickinson's wife, Mary Lindsay, who first introduced Eggleston to her best friend, Lucia Birch, who, until her recent death, was his long-term lover. 'What a pair,' she says. 'She was blazing with talent. She really pushed him past his greatness.' Dickinson agrees: 'You could say they were kindred spirits. Eggleston used to turn off the lights and shoot his guns in the dark for fun. The house was riddled with holes made by $6,000 antique shotguns. It was a boredom thing. Bill is someone who gets bored easily, and he'll go to extremes not to be bored.'

During his sojourn in New York in the Seventies, Eggleston also enjoyed a long dalliance with Viva, the most beautiful of Andy Warhol's 'superstars', both of them holding court in the famed Chelsea Hotel. 'Beautiful girl,' he says. 'I still see her from time to time and we still get along real well.' I ask Eggleston how he feels when he sees himself described as a hellraiser. 'Don't care much for it,' he replies, shaking his head, 'and it usually comes from people who don't know me, so how the hell would they know? It is sometimes a little bothersome from the standpoint that it is so completely inaccurate it can get real irritating. I try not to think about it. If I did, I'd be mad all day.'

That, I would hazard a guess, would not be a pretty sight. Does he still have a fondness for guns? 'I'm fascinated by certain ones,' he says, smiling. 'Beautiful ones. Some are boring. I don't shoot that much - guns, that is.' And how would he like to be remembered? He considers this for a moment or two, then his eyes light up with a mischievous twinkle. 'As a lover,' he says.

Despite, or maybe because of, his cavalier approach to his life and his art, William Eggleston belongs to that rare and disappearing breed, the instinctive artist who seems to see into and beyond what we refer to as the 'everyday'. Often his truly great photographs are a reflection of himself, mysterious and loaded with suggestion, hinting at some darker narrative that is unfolding just out of frame. Though he rejects the notion that he has a southern sensibility, some of his best work was taken locally, and has a definite southern Gothic undertow. A hooded anorak on a bare wall calls up the spectre of the Klan, even as it mocks that same imagery. On the opposite page, a white boiler suit hangs pristine and lifeless from a tree. Nothing is set up, everything is down to his unerring instinct for the mundane and the mysterious, and his almost uncanny ability to capture the same.

'I couldn't do what that guy does', he says, after the Observer photographer, Steve Pyke, has captured his portrait. 'If I could creep up on someone, that would be different. That would be a secret photograph. Instantaneous and unrehearsed'.

When humans enter the frame, they tend to look suspiciously back at Eggleston's lens, or are blissfully unaware of it. It is often impossible to guess whether the subject is an acquaintance or a stranger. Who is the mysterious blonde woman sitting on the wall in a deserted Memphis street, looking straight at the camera, uncertain and intense? Or the girl stretched out on the sun-tinted grass as if drugged or unconscious? 'Often,' notes Teller, 'there is something morbid about his images that's mysterious and compelling, and unique to him. Everyone, including me, has at one time or another wanted to do that sort of Eggleston picture, but never succeeded. It's totally about how he sees things in his mind's eye.'

This, of course, is his singular genius, and it seems unsurprising, in retrospect, that he might wish to guard it by making it seem simple. Towards the end of the interview, I broach once again the subject of his working methods. Given his famously democratic approach, how, I wonder, does he decide what to photograph? 'I just wait until it appears,' he says, as if this were the most obvious thing in the world to do. 'Which is often where I happen to be. Might be something right across the street. Might be something on down the road. And I'm usually very pleased when I get the image back. It's usually exactly what I saw. I don't have any favourites. Every picture is equal but different.' Is it true that there are thousands of unseen William Eggleston images? 'Indeed, yes,' he nods, then leans across the table conspiratorially, 'but I've seen 'em.'

On that note, he heads out onto the street for a cigarette. When he returns, and drinks have been ordered, he looks relieved. Winston shows us his father's camera, a Leica, embossed with the name William Eggleston, and the man himself tells us he is waiting for a commission 'to come over to England to photograph the Brighton Pavilion'. Somebody please put in that call.

I ask him if he would miss taking photographs if, for some reason, he had to stop. 'Probably not,' he says, shaking his head. 'I don't have a burning desire to go out and document anything. It just happens when it happens. It's not a conscious effort, nor is it a struggle. Wouldn't do it if it was. The idea of the suffering artist has never appealed to me,' he says, smiling his childlike smile. 'Being here is suffering enough.'

Though he seems tired of talking photography, I ask him finally if there is an underlying discipline that governs his work. He shrugs. 'Let me put it this way, I work very quickly and that's part of it.

I only ever take one picture of one thing. Literally. Never two. So then that picture is taken and then the next one is waiting somewhere else.' Let me get this straight, I say, astonished: each image he has produced is the result of one single shot? He nods. And what happens, I ask, if you don't get the picture you want in that one shot? 'Then I don't get it,' he answers simply. 'I don't really worry if it works out or not.

I figure it's not worth worrying about. There's always another picture.' He makes his genius sound almost accidental, I suggest. He thinks about this for a while. 'Yes,' he nods, smiling. 'There's probably something to that. The "almost" is important, though.'

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

every one hides a hidden talent, some more than others!

2008-10-30T00:32:00.001-07:00

I have a friend, a very special friend :)
My friend watches me take snaps, she is very, very patient.
When I stop the car, she stops her car, my ‘special friend’ was not about to change me, otherwise . . .
My friend began to read Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ‘The mind‘s eye’ and, became hooked.
Started reading ‘A BIOGRAPHY’ and was even more hooked.
Now not everyone is going to go out and buy a Leica on a whim. It’s an investment.
My friend, on the advisedment of another friend, a photographer and Leica user suggested a Nikon D40. And so my friend, ‘my special friend’ :) went out and bought a camera and her very first shot out of the memory card was a cracker.
Ah! I thought, we have a photographer lurking in our midst.
Now, to bore you, I am a snapper, that has become my secondary title after Film Editor & . . .
But my friend, well, with camera in hand has gone travelling, all over, Wellington, Featherston, Nelson, Greymouth, Westport, Christchurch, Banks Peninsular, Brisbane, Surfers and back. We sat down a couple of days ago and I asked her, “Sandie my dear, how did your photos go?” to which she replied, “Didn’t really get any WOW! moments, but did shoot a lot of shots” or words to that effect.
Well, as it happens, I have a serious computer, software, printer set up. I have a serious digital dark room! So, out of the camera came the memory card and into my reader and into iPhoto. Thought I, this is not for Lightroom, these are just travel shots. Yeah! Right! I imported, I started clicking from frame to frame to Frame to FRAME!
WOW! Moments everywhere.
It made me realise that pressing the button once the camera is to they eye is but the beginning.
Then comes the processing.
Digitally speaking we have a virtual darkroom with a computer.
I took some of my ‘special friends’ shots and started cropping, just like in a dark room, I started playing with the exposure, just like in a dark room. Nothing in Photoshop, nothing that can’t be done in a ‘Digital Darkroom’. And here they are. I personally think many people, friends as well, are put off by the basic ‘shot’ they see, after they have shot it. Little do they know that is just the beginning. Magic comes in many shapes and sizes, iPhoto is a powerful tool. Now Adobe have an online version. It gets better. It will get better, it is an evolutionary art form and we are seeing an explosion of unknown, hidden talent, in ourselves. We have PICASA, we have BLOGS. Go play, let the fun begin. Ciao and my deepest thanks to my ‘special friend’ Sandie for allowing me to share this with you.

River East Gallery - Greytown

2008-10-25T13:46:00.000-07:00

. . . oops, as i go to start writing the local Featherston fire siren whines up, i hope it's a simple call out.
anyhow, last night,in Greytown, North of Wellington, on Highway 2, River East Gallery had the last opening in it's 3 year reign as the Wairarapa's only independent art gallery of any note. It is closing at the end of this exhibition. It is sad. Chris and Raewyn, sisters in art, did a heroic effort in hanging 12 very diverse photographers to create one of the very best photo exhibitions I have attended anywhere. The photographers, the attendees, the atmosphere gave lie to the belief that photography is not a significant or even legitimate art form. It was a great evening. Why, you may ask, and should ask, why is the gallery closing. I can only offer one side of the coin, the rent was raised by a degree that smacks of Wall Street excess. The Greytown Lands Trust owns the premises and Chris held a 7 year lease. It has simply challenged her viability. The Trust, a large landlord has a responsibility, not only to the shareholders but also to the community. As I often rant, "a community without art is not a community". Aratoi in Masterton is often strangled by local vested and blinkered interests. I left New Zealand, sick of the 3 R's, Rugby, Racing and Religion. My observation over the pat 30 months is that nothing much has changed. We even have a Prime Minister who signs artworks not of her own making and then obsfucates when challenged, sheesh! I have a T Shirt from Venice Beach that I often wear to openings, ART WON"T HURT YOU! So true. it will challenge, enhance, surprise, shock, enlighten, as it should.
Greytown is a favorite destination for Wellingtonian's looking to escape for a weekend in the country. The village has cafes, shoe shops, clothes shops, furniture, junk, computers, knicknacks, hidden treasures, a great butcher and french baker . . . real estate agents flourish and there is a great art shop. And one Art Gallery, River East, that is the only independent outlet for local artists in an agricultural environment. Soon to be no more. It's good for me, it's moving to my neck of the woods, Featherston. Over the Hill from Wellington and there is Fabulous Featherston. Cornucopia for food, a great antique store next to a second hand book treasure, close by is the Tin Hut and of course a parade of garish real estate agents, and soon, early next year, River East Gallery. yep, Greytown's loss is Featherston's gain. I can only hope that the South Wairarapa Council, known 'affectionately' as the "do nothing council", a tad unfairly I think :), support her here in Featherston. However, they are the same council that controls Greytown and Martinborough, the same Council that allowed a small, insignificant and no longer present dissenting voice prevent the Cordon Bleu Cooking School from opening in Martinborough. Martinborough is Wine, Food goes with Wine, now it is the known as the Center for Whine. With River East closing they are allowing a local cornerstone to disappear. Greytown has foot traffic. Featherston is a whistle stop. A mere F Stop even. We have artists here, we have photographers even, John Casey, Esther Bunning and more. I will work hard to support Chris and her move, the word needs to get out and spread around but not like the local dairy farmers run off. Featherston, FStop now needs a large sign stating, Park Your Car, Get out and Stretch your imagination, Enjoy our Treasures. Featherston and the South Wairarapa is one of New Zealand's best kept secrets, the people, homes, hiking trails, stands of Totara and Eucalyptus, swimming holes, ocean views, a unique lake, light values are truly unique. A creative treasure trove. Anyhow, get along to River East before the exhibition closes. It not only deserves but needs your support. It will open in it's new location with a new lease of life, long may it rain, oops reign.

Dickies singing the blues today . . .

2008-10-19T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am sitting here in my office feeling very sad and flat and I guess a touch depressed although I think more from melancholy than anything else. We had a murder in Featherston last week and today is the funeral for Paul who died. I have no idea why he died but he did. I have no idea if he deserved to die but he did. It seems a very punishing way to end a life, being beaten. No matter what the reason, no matter Paul’s life style, being brutally murdered is not the right way to go. Mind you it happens every nanno second of every day all round the World. Still no justification for a brutal slaying. I hear one of the teens who was in on the act is a policemans son. Very sad. There will be stories, there will be finger pointing and mumbling behind drawn shades. That is the New Zealand way. Maybe if I had gone to the funeral I would have seen a dialogue, maybe. I love the concept of a wake when all and sundry, those who turn up, can express their grief, their anger, their support, whatever. I have no idea why I am feeling what I am feeling but what I am meant to be doing doesn’t seem to hold a great deal of joy for me today. I will plug on, I will do the best I can but it’s hard. Very hard.

This is a small rural community, it’s a piss stop as you drive over the ‘Hill’ from Wellington, New Zealand’s capitol. Or it can be seen as the last patch of green before you head to Wellington driving south over the Rimutakas. I have lived here 3 moons, 3 months. It is far, far different from anywhere I have lived for the past 43 years since I left New Zealand at age 21. I guess it could be called an annex satellite town of the capitol. Locals would object I am sure but truth be known it is one of the best kept secrets in New Zealand. It is small, less than 3000 people. The main street is like many North Island main streets, full of interesting but neglected buidings that date back well over 100 years. There are always plans afoot to ‘fix’ these towns, to ‘beautify’ them but more often than not the status quo appears to win out and all stays the same. Small town politics.
New blood is not encouraged or even invited to participate. At present I am looking for a way I can be of service to the town and surrounding areas. I am an ideas man. But ideas are not always embraced, too radical, what would I know, who do you think you are. No thanks, we are comfortable exactly as we are.

Featherston has no Mayor, no one to look up to. We are lumped together with terminally unique, don’t touch a thing, Martinborough or the grey power capitol of Greytown. We all share the same South Wairarapa District Council and we are all controlled by the Greater Wellington Regional Council. 3 towns and a few other burgs all share one mayor at present. I personally would like to see each community with it’s own mayor and that position having term limits as should all the other council positions, the elected ones that is. 2 x 4 years.
Rotation of leadership encourages new ideas. It would, I believe, help get things done rather than have our represntatives branded as the “Do Nothing Council”. Maybe I am being harsh but as I sit here thinking of Paul who was beaten to death I feel sad. I know this will pass, I know Paul, for who ever he was, will be honoured as will his parents. We all deserve that, good bad or indifferent. I always feel much better for writing out my deepest most personal thoughts, good , bad or indifferent. It gets it out of me and then I have no need to rant at or dump on, anyone else and I can be happy rather needing to be right. Amen.
and what has this to do with fStop, well Featherston is an fStop, the subtext to my regular text.

Hiya Richard!

I must admit that I spent about an hour this Monday morning, reading both of your blogs! (Two? Whew!
Good on ya matey!)...The story I settled into (amidst all of the US political stuff!) was your commentary
on the 48 hour film festival!!! It sounded fantastic and it was good to see how you and Jason came
together and collaborated. (If it wasn't for Jason, it would have taken us longer to meet!!!!)...

Anyways, Richard, I just have to say...I am proud to be a part of your life and I am a little sad that
no sooner than we began to come together that I needed to split NZ for life over the horizon!

We are holding onto our home in Wellington and we both know that one day I will be back! I look forward
to the night we celebrate that triumphant homecoming!

All the Best to you my distant friend! Deane - Los Angeles

Richard
As always your blogs are fascinating. The photos of town are stunning, looks like a great place to be. Don't get too down about the murder, as you said, happens everywhere for the most mundane of reasons. Keep up the great work.

Hope all is well. John - Philadelphia

Hi Richard,

sorry to hear about the sad incident in Featherston. I think the photos are really stunning on the blog .... think you should publish a book of these portaits of nz. really !
holding my breath here until the election and hoping for the best.

all the best
Bella - Silver Lake Ca.

Richard:

The U.S. Treasury may have listened in part. The first monies (250 billion) are said to be to buy preferred stock in the banks. I have not heard that the banks must first write down the troubled assets, and I like that idea. There is some on-going requirement to do so, but that entails a time lag.

D. Earl Ellis - Pacific Pallisades, Ca.

Don’t mind, It’s a shame you missed the funeral as there was “dialogue” in terms of people’s tributes – several people talked about what happened, and pulled no punches, something has to be done about this kind of violent behaviour.

I liked the most, the tribute from one of Paul’s old mates from school days – she was from Featherston , no longer living here , but she talked about how they all used to hang out together, look out for one another , support one another, “old school Featherstonians”…she wondered at what young people these days seem to be capable of doing, inflicting on the world…why? She urged everyone to look after the person next to them, behind them, be less judgemental – get to know people for who they are – that’s what Paul did – he took people as they were – didn’t judge you by what he’d heard, or what people said about you etc etc, just took you for who you were. Always there to help, always supported his mates, and strangers alike. Did things like went down and swept up the broken glass/bottles at the “rotunda” (near the park where he eventually was beaten) – he said to Jack, “what will people think of Featherston, seeing all that glass everywhere, broken”….

A sad loss, but heartening to see his mates open up in front of a packed-out church; and the Mayor (who lives in Featherston at least) was there, along with several community board members / council types – so they heard it all too.

Perhaps see you later for a catch up and vino? As I had to depart early last night, and today I had to get back here to work – though I feel VERY LITTLE desire to do any today, I want to curl up, watch a soppy movie and cry…

Oh well…seize the day people – burn the candles you have stored away for “a special occasion” ; invite your mates over for dinner even if your carpet is stained and your sofa old and wanting…talk less and listen more….(stolen and edited from one of those emails doing the rounds!).

X S - Featherston NZ

to grow, i need to go . . .

2008-10-16T00:45:00.001-07:00

I cannot stay in one place and hope my photography will grow. To snap I need to travel down the road, across the world. It has come to me late but it has come to me. Curiosity has been with me all along. I don’t need to follow the stock market to survive, I need to follow my instincts to live. Fully alive. People. That is my pallette, to find those faces, hands, feet, limbs, expressions, body language, I need to be ‘out there’ to be in here, behind a lens. That is my muse. Sometimes a cloud, a moon, but more important to me is the humanity in the human I see walking, talking, struggling. This to me is life. New York, my first love of place, that is a place of people, a people place to observe, explore and snap to my hearts content. Long may it be with me. For today a small, 2400 rersidents less one who was brutally murdered this week, town in new zealand is enough. Tomorrow? Who knows. Paris? Wellington? St Petersburgh? Follow my gut. Trust in the universe, listen, observe, explore. Amen.

gadgets, do they make me a better snapper?

2008-10-10T23:37:00.001-07:00

i so want to spend this time ripping the mccain/pallin racial republican diatribe but i won't, you need to go to my other blog for that and that is where i will put my anger, this blog is about snapping and such.

in fact this particular article is about gadgetry and does it make me or anyone a better snapper?

today, actually it was yesterday i received my latest copy of LFI, Leica Fotografie International, magazine and i was immediately drawn to the article, "accessories, handy and dandy paraphanalia for photographers". seriously. the front cover no less, along with keen press and cityscape, very valuable articles for a leica officanado. but it was/is "accessories" that caught my eye. the stock market and world financial institutions are crumbling and i am intrigued by accessories. the article is headed "something for everyone" and there is. from hand made leather camera cases for the m8 to a thumbs up cs thingy to a leica handgrip to landscape filers, to an alternative bottom plate for the m8! mercy! so much stuff, so little time. when i bought my m8 and started adding leica glass, 16/18/21-90-50mm, i began to pay attention to those around me who are leica users. i found a goodie in wellington new zealand, city of my birth. julian ward by name. free plugs can't be all bad for good fotografiers jules? surely. anyhow i digress, it's the 'second glass of red on a saturday night' syndrome. everything we do has a syndrome attached these days. writing this article, rave, whatever, has a 'syndrome' attached. bloogers syndrome. more bloog than blog! yep, definitely second glass of red wine on a . . . .syndrome. my ex will be adding it to her analysis papers:). i joke, she is a good ex. seriously. anyhow, i flipped the page to "earth explorer" a camera bag by national geographic. once upon a time i would buy this shit, today in a down turned, keep it simple, economic period . . . don't touch my credit card. today i have no credit card debt, one of the few. but these goodies i admit are tempting. but do they add to my prowess as a prowler with a camera, a street snapper in the mould of the master, cartier-bresson or, to his friends, simply hcb. my friend sandie read his biography and went out and bought a brand new camera, alas a nikon, but nevertheless, sandie became a snapper. her first snap was a killer and then down hill to grandchildren snaps. oh well. but this 'stuff', does it add, detract, stimulate, i doubt it. my friend julian a leica film man but a lusting digital person, added a 10 cent attachment to my camera body that has changed my life in the way i simply hold the camera. a rubber plug from a hardware store, cost = .05 cents nz. the thumbs up cs as described in lfi is euro100, she-it. then there is the leica handgrip, euro200. and on and on it goes. i am into simple. keep it simple. down size.

i have accessorized my life up the whazoo, big time. i have different sets of hiking boots, hiking poles, thermal underwear, hats, do i have hats, sunglasses. sunglasses for snow, for running, for cycling. don't get me started on my back packs for day hikes, cycling, running, overnight, five day and on and on and on!. i have quite possibly the worlds largest t-shirt collection, from magnum to oblivion. over 200 t-shirts. what the hell. good for lens cleaning and that is it. just recently i bought a second house, the first one, very cool, is on the market but for today i have two houses. fortunately i have one mortgage. but my new house is small, 900 sq ft. a garden that will grow enough organic vegetables for the whole block. one bedroom. one editing 'film' room. a lounge. a kitchen. one bathroom. who needs five, only in california. the point of this is that when i first moved into my new house i decided i would only move here what i needed. and today i need very little. my clothes sit in a plastic bin until my 'other' house sells and then i can buy a chest of drawers. for now i have a couple of pair of jeans, italian, a couple of t-shirts, designer, a couple of pairs of shoes, french, underwear from patagonia, 4 handkerchiefs, some thermals, this is new zealand. hats, i have a kick arse western style handmadeone from bisbee arizona, same shop as supplied harrison ford's raiders of the lost ark hat, very cool. but that is it. plus a couple of jackets. period. now i am finding i need no more than that. cartier-bresson used one lens. i have 3. with my eyes on another. but seriously once i work out my snapper style, why, i need no more than one. all my lenses are primes. that is my justification. i need no more. i don't need luigis leather goods, god but they look cool, i also don't need an 'abrahamsson softie' whatever the hell that is. do i need a wooden tripod to give me anti-shake, anti-rock values, i think not. a billingham bag, ouch, a battery free sekonic studio deluxe 111 L-398 A exposure meter, way cool. but no. a joby gorillapod, nah! enough already. as i write this the new zealand dollar has fallen from the hi 70's to under 60 cents us. good for me with a us bank account but not good for traveling. good for new zealand exporters. not for my next trip to new york. accessories, not! i see, i snap. do i need a quieter shutter, not, scratch proof rear glass, not. i need to retain and train my eye. what i see is what i get. i shoot something, oops, snap something, every single day of the week. today i spoke to a very attractive docent in a local gallery, she professes to being a painter but has not painted for six months, 'it makes me uncomfortable to paint" say what, okay, that will be my next blather. what is an artist? ciao.

revealing myself to the world.

2008-10-04T19:01:00.000-07:00

Last night, 4th october 2008, 4pm, pacific daylight time carolyn mcgillicuddy’s and my photographic exhibition opened. as much as i tried to remain detached I found it not possible and so, for the week that i committed to setting up, hanging, prepping, i absorbed the anxiety of showing my inner self to the world. for 40 years I have learned how to work on others/clients projects, this time it was me on show. not quite the same and so here i am today, sunday relaxing, eating, drinking and getting my equilibrium back, kick back time I guess. I want to thank so many, many people who have supported, encouraged and nurtured my self expression. my dear friend sandie, friends david e. & david w & david l. dan m. & dan h, bruce & bob, natalijia, christy, geoff, john, my sister jennifer, shara, rosemary, sharon l, robert v, erik a, klaus l, brian mc, and, of course, carolyn, without who’s friendship this would not have happened. julian my new friend who inspires leica thoughts and who played guitar, deane and there are many many more who will be in my mind and heart. to all of you, thank you. it was successful beyond my wildest dreams. friends and neighbors, out of towners all turned up, they brought their children, they brought their friendship and it connected me to aotearoa new zealand in a way that has elluded me to date. it was a true sense of community. i felt the years and the doubts of my homeland fall away, i felt accepted and appreciated and honored and more. one of many. carolyn and I even sold some works. for those of you who didn’t make the opening you have time to see inside myself. quite amazing. thank you.

i am a snapper

2008-09-29T15:28:00.000-07:00

"digital is only for snap shots" - klaus lucka, professional photographer

so whats with a label? photographer! nah, im a picture taker, i like to snap what i see as I see it, if someone else relates to it, well then, all the better. i take snaps. I am not a photographer. i already have a title, i am a Film Editor.

so why do i like 'snapper', it has kind of a homey ring to it, i snap away, like cartier - bresson, in the blink of an eye. but seriously though, snapper is what i am calling my picture taking. hanging a label of photographer is a burden i don't want, don't need.

i began snapping around my late teens i guess, i shot anything, just a record, not 'real' photographs, snaps.

then as i travelled away from aotearoa new zealand, first to australia i began to meet photographers, some became my friends, some i worked with as they developed as film directors. i owned a spotmatic, a mamiyaflex and maybe some other bits and pieces.

when i got into film my camera sort of got put away. sure i took happy snaps as we fooled around, when i got married, my children, my house, silly sort of stuff that i look at today and smile. nothing to say i would get serious or should get serious. yes i liked photography, talked about it a bit but really it was point and shoot stuff. i have boxes and boxes of prints and negs from those years and now i get to share them with my grown children and allow myself to smile at the simplicity of my life back then.

then of course my life became complex, opened my own business, bought a house, bought a farm, bought a yacht, yadda, yadda, big boys toys came thick and fast but no fancy camera, i still took snaps, recording day to day stuff not really giving it much thought. i left australia, new york beckonned and how i loved it in return. that was the place to be come a photographer but i didn't, what i did do was walk around with a tiny miniDV camera and record what i saw, that has all now been edited, there you go, edited - that is what i do, into a half hour film: 9/11 - New York, I Love You. that piece of nonsense sits in my computer waiting . . .

and so i continued snapping away. snaps of friends, snaps of building, the twin towers even. snap, snap bloody snap.
moved to venice beach and snapped some more, still with a tiny 4 megapixel sony. a surprise divorce threw me back on my heels and off into the American West, snapping as i went, also shooting miniDV. back in venice beach i showed some friends, they expressed interest in what i was shooting/snapping and so i went up the road to samy's camera and outlaid the princely sum of 1600 bucks for a leica digilux 2. nice one dicky. so off i went into the west with somewhat of a real camera, 6.5 megapixels fixed lens and shot thousands of snaps with a fresh eye, sort of paying attention to content and framing and those sort of creative things. i changed my web site to a Blog and started posting snaps and words of what i was seeing and the support of friends came thick and fast. "when are you going to exhibit?" whoa! not so fast dudes. i am a film editor, not a photographer, sure there's some cute shots but hell, i'm not a photographer. i have worked with photographers, john ashenhurst, david bailey, klaus lucka, jonathon taylor et al, now they were photographers. and so i pushed on and drove and hiked and explored and climbed and snapped away to my hearts content. finished with travel, quick segue to aotearoa new zealand with a nikon d200 in my bags, sort of a pro camera but more of a computer. in new zealand i snapped away, printed a couple of pieces, sold them, large, mounted on board, good feedback. oh so maybe i am a photographer? then i discovered that the nikon was too damned big and heavy and i sold it all, lock stock and all the blazing lenses. now it gets well used by a real photographer. i bought, well, actually i invested in a leica m8 system and a set of new lenses, broke the bank didn't i but now i have a system that works for me. but still, i remain, i continue, to be a snapper. snap happy. my first exhibition opens this coming saturday in aotearoa new zealand, a small rural centre close by where i live. later in the week i will post a couple of snaps from the exhibition, you make up your mind as to what i am. i am also back editing film and so that is what i am a film editor, editing a western, a feature, a pavlova western. that is what i do, for laughs i snap and i write, that is my passion, snapping and writing, hence my blog. capeche? i am sure you do, if not tough, and, as they say, have a nice day, ciao.

Professional Photographer

2008-09-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

so . . . i would love to have studied photography but didn't, I fell, literally, into film editing and would have it no other way. because of that i got to work with some truly great photographers and so, 6 degrees of separation i guess, by default and osmosis i am now exploring. i love photography and i have no idea what i would call my 'style'. 'style', it's an interesting word. at the present time i have a library of 26500 photographs, taken since 2004. i started by exploring the american west and now, new zealand. that is not a bad library and now, well now i get to work out what i wish to do with it all. exhibitions, i have one next month in new zealand. after that maybe a book or two, a slide show of three, stock shots? maybe, or simply none of the above. maybe i am doing it simply to see what i can do, the emphasis being what 'i' can do. me. i don't shoot images to sell, i shoot images to see if i can capture what i see. it's an interesting dilemma. i am paying a writer, a journalist to write a piece about an exhibition i am holding in partnership with a friend. the journalist got it totally wrong. wrong place, wrong, time, wrong career. i have a lesson to lear from this. why pay someone to write something i could do myself. it may not be great but it would be accurate. so my blog is my chance to explore, both this richard clark's fstop and my other one, richard clark's kiwicafe.com. writing, photography and film editing. those are the genres i use to express who i am, what i see. why get someone to translate what i can perfectly myself. i still have a great deal to learn.

so what do i shoot?

2008-09-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

now, what to do, a blog is a commitment, photography is a commitment, my time is a . . .
i remember owning a pentax spotmatic then a mamiyaflex, a nikkormat, then a bunch of inconsequential film/digital point and shoots. in 2004 i bought my first serious digital camera, a leica digilux 2. i travelled the american west for two years fotographing and filming as i went. interviews, portraits, panorama and stuff. i started my first blog in 2004, kiwicafe.com, it now sits idle while i play with other blogs. in 2006, as i segued to new zealand i invested in a nikon d200 and a complete set of new nikon lenses. i had fun but kept my leica handy. it was soo simple, it captured both raw and jpeg. the nikon was complex, a veritable computer. not totally robust and any way, i have computers. i simply want to capture images with the best glass i can afford, some studied some on the fly. out went the nikon. i ordered a leica m8 plus 3 leica lenses. it took close to a year for the order to be filled but i am one happy shutter bug. 16/18/21mm - 50mm - 90mm. i may buy a 28mm and/or 35mm, maybe. henri cartier-bresson owned a 35mm leica and a 35mm lens, period. so now, 26500 photographs later i am ready and willing, important word that, willing, to exhibit. to be seen. to come out of my shadow and into the light so to speak. reveal myself. as a film editor for 40 years i have had no problem editing films for real photographers - david bailey, klaus lucka, steve horn, john ashenhurst, lesley dektor, bryce atwell, walter ioos and jonathon taylor amongst others. now it's my turn to show what i absorbed, or didn't. my imagery is vast and varied, street, portrait, architectural, panorama, documentary, nonsense. i am exploring to find my niche. i enjoy what i see. i enjoy finding elements, much as i did with film editing, those moments others could not see. i am not a technician, i cannot, will not explain what and why i do what i do. it's not necessary, to me. it shouldn't be necessary for others but i am aware that we all see and experience life very differently. so be it.

EFEFEF

2008-09-09T02:16:00.000-07:00

EFEFEF . . . yes, believe it, that is my licence plate, aka number plate, on my car. My trailer will be EFOF. Work that one out!
But honestly F Stop is my new Blog, a Blog that is all about where I live and what I do. F is for Featherston. F Stop is for Fotography, that's what I do. It's also for Film, that's also what I do, Film Editor & . . . that is my official job designation and this is my first post. F'ing believable. So look to this Blog for anything to do with the F Word. Seriously.