Knuckledragger

RIP Teri Garr.

A guy on reddit rented a Canon 800mm F/5.6 RF and took a bunch of exposures of a rocket launch to make this composite: I actually had to resize OP's original, because it was so high resolution it made imgur and discord FTFO. The full size version is in the reddit link.

This is going to be a long walk. 4AD is a storied indie record label that released a ton of works by post-punk and indie rock artists in the 1980s. At that dawn of that decade they put out a bunch of releases by the Bauhaus, The The, Modern English, The Birthday Party and a host of other contemporaries of that era. I have a few 4AD Bauhaus records that I've owned for 35+ years. At one point in the late 80s, I had a The The T-shirt in spite of owning none of their music (I thought the name was funny.) Among the early 4AD releases is a one-off that is the only release by the band Rema-Rema while the band was active (there's a been a number since they broke up, but that's not really relevant.) Said release is an EP called Wheel In The Roses. I've heard it, but not any time recently. The EP's cover art has its own story at least as famous as the band. While not intentionally or historically so, the image has an enduring legacy due its homoeroticism. In the 90s I knew a gay house DJ who had a copy of the original 12" framed on his studio wall. The back story of the photo is wild and dark one. The subject of the photos is two wrestlers from the Nuba tribe in Africa. It was taken in 1948 by photojournalist George Rodger. Rodger took the photo on his tour of Africa. He set out on such a journey post-WWII to deal with the horrors he'd witnessed. His photos of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were some of the first images of the holocaust that were seen internationally. Here's where the story goes off the rails. George Rodger's son is Peter, who is a successful documentary filmmaker. Peter's son, George's grandson is ...was, Elliot Rodger, the incel mass murder.

RIP Paul Di'Anno, the original vocalist for Iron Maiden.

Here's a bit of history, the original HeadRoom Max Balanced Headphone Amplifier prototype: It sold for $850 apparently, which seems like a bargain to me.

There's a place on MV called the "Dumptique." The purpose is to keep reusable items out of the landfill. I drove up there with a car load of stuff I just couldn't keep (going from a 5 bedroom farmhouse to a 1200 square foot cottage is ride, let me tell you.) It was not my plan to take anything back, but I did peruse the media shelf. Apparently I arrived at the right moment. Mixed in with Sex in the City Season 3, Disc 4, some megachurch propaganda and a box of Christmas music missing disc 5 was this stack: Goddamn. It's like a Gen Xer died or gave up all their physical media. All of it is interesting, but that Bauhaus disc is legendary. It was almost more or less impossible to find in the late 80s when I was obsessively collecting their music. The only downside is that the Stranglers anthology is missing my favorite song by them. Of course, I've always been partial to the cover version by Prong.

A story in 3 parts: Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee shot multiple times in Las Vegas.

"Hi Milton, what's happening." "I'm going to need you to go ahead and not set the building state on fire."

Asheville, NC. AKA Brent's definition of hell.

Oof. RIP Kris Kristofferson. We're down to one Highwayman(!) This is about the coolest live video in existence. "Oh, hey. It's Willie Nelson. He's got that funny off-beat way of singing. He sure is a legend, though. What? Kris Kristofferson? He never seemed to age, in spite of all he put his body through. Did you know he once stole a US army helicopter?? Wait, did I just hear the 'Next up on The Dukes' voice? That's The definitive article Outlaw Country singer right there. There is literally no way this song can get any better." "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash"

An ambient artist I like named Palancar sent out an email this morning saying he shut down his bandcamp page. Sad, but he's put all of his music online at the Internet Archive. Careful listeners will recognize his track "Foss" which I have played on my radio show a few times over the years.

One for any BOS HCers. Soldiers Field Rd. "It's only a Storrowing if it comes from the Storrow region of Boston, otherwise its just a sparkling truck decapitation."

Everyone's favorite hyperactive, high-pitched Canadian tech-dropper seems to like it.

RIP James Earl Jones. One of the actors who took George Lucas' corny ass dialogue and elevated it to the level of a cultural touchstone for generations. Also his first film also happens to be my favorite one.

The following contains gratuitous cat pictures. I've mentioned my friends Peter and Adele before. Peter will be 88 this year. He spent decades shooting 4x5 and doing some clever double exposures. Peter doesn't use computers, so all of his work in is completely analogue and mostly not on the internet. I'd like to help him scan some of his works, but that's a huge job. Adele (at the tender age of 84) is very much online, and even knows how to use her SMRT TV as a bluetooth device with her iPhone to stream video and photos. Even I don't know how to do that, but in my defense, I hate fucking hate smartphones. Peter and Adele's daughter, who's around my age, is as computer literate as any Gen Xer. (She actually a VP of something-or-other in a cybersecurity company.) All this is relevant because she recently moved to MV and brought her two cats. This is Gertie, the more good natured of the two. The only problem with her is that she's so friendly she tends to run toward me, making her a difficult subject to capture at times. This is Gidget. She's much more mercurial, but quite friendly when she decides to be. ...and not when she doesn't! Yesterday I caught Gertie sitting in a box. Of course I didn't manage to catch her with her eyes open and looking at me. Solid Cat/10 interaction. Meanwhile Gidget checked the Golf's tire pressure. Then she sauntered back to see why Gertie was getting all the attention.

I've been lurking in /r/largeformat again. As I've mentioned, that subreddit has cured me (mostly) of ever wanting to buy a view camera. The time, money and effort most of the users put into what are frankly mediocre to bad results is staggering. The other side of this coin is that the photographers who are good with large format are really good at what they do. The larger the format, the bigger the delta. Most of the following are 4x5 Some are scanned negatives, others are contact prints. Most people don't seem to bother with enlargers anymore. Bork. An accident, but an interesting one. Potential album cover right there.

This guy shoots IR film with a Hasselblad.

Previously I mentioned wedding photography. In general, I avoid weddings like the plague. With that said, in the 00s I attended a few and dragged along my camera. I always made it a point to be clear I was not "the" definitive article wedding photographer. This meant I didn't have to capture anything I didn't want. I've mentioned previously that 2009 was a roller coaster of a year. I did a Part 1 Recap back in February and never did another installment. That post stopped right as the year got interesting. I might resume that thread at some point, but for today the topic is solely a wedding I attended in August that year. Weirdly, I didn't make a post about it at the time in 2009. That's odd as I was actively taking photos and posting them here regularly in that era. Unfortunately, Flickr's embed codes and HC's forum software are not friends. Much has changed about the Information Age in the last couple decades and it's largely been a turn for the worse (I'm looking at you, imgur.) That means I have to dig out the image URL for every photo I want to post. With that said, let's take a plunge into 15 years ago. The wedding was held at the Hyatt Regency Boston Harbor, which sited on an absolutely gorgeous location. This shot had some exposure issues. I salvaged it by cheating like an MFer in Luminar 4. The weather was about as good as anyone could hope. I was always proud of this shot. Clever (if I do say so myself) use of fill flash. The reality of the subjects in frame is of course more complex and, well, worse than the image. The four men are all DJs. The first died of an OD on his 44th birthday. The second is a serial philanderer who failed to pay me for the last lighting gig I ever did. The middle chap would later marry the woman beside him, but was a philanderer as well. The guy on the far right has had some run-ins with the law, but is doing okay now as best I know. Back stories aside, I love the arrangement of the people in the photo. Careful observers will note that there are not photos of the wedding ceremony itself. The couple hired a professional photographer and since he was there I made it a point to not be "that guy" just sat quietly during the exchange of vows. The photographer's day job was being a paparazzo. He had a Nikon D100, which was pretty long in the tooth even in 2009. He'd outfitted it with a flash bracket that could rotate independently of the camera. It was quite a compact rig and probably suited him well during his primary vocation. The pro photographer seemed to know what he was doing, so I stayed out of his way and did what I always do. This is a photo I didn't like at the time, but a decade and a half later I have a much different eye (and am much better at editing photos.) The Hyatt has a permanent tent for outdoor functions. The cake was pretty spectacular. The couple (who are both drum n bass DJs) hired a techno DJ to play their wedding. He did a stand up job of playing exactly the kind of music one expect to hear at a wedding. I could spin (no pun intended) a good number of paragraphs about this DJ in particular, but I'll leave to this: he drove and 1986 Buick Riviera that had a CRT touchscreen and knew more about techno than anyone I ever met. Everything else about his character is best left unsaid. This is not terribly relevant, but it was only upon revisiting this photo set that I learned I had apparently lent out my spare DJ mixer for the proceedings. I still have on the mainland, I think. The first dance. I've always liked this shot. The groom dances with his mum. The bride dancers with her uncle. More on him in a bit. At the time, the groom humorously called this one "second thoughts." I took this shot and a number of the ones above with the manual focus Nikon 75-150mm F/3.5E push-pull zoom. It spits CA if one is not careful, but has the best bokeh of any lens I've ever used. Pretty sharp wide open as well. The bride and her back tattoo. The 75-150 really showing it stuff here, even if I flubbed the focus just a small amount. Small footnote: The bride's uncle is gay. This is her dancing with her uncle's husband. Gay marriage has been legal in MA for 20 years. Massholes stronk. As I mentioned, the cake was something else. I bounced my flash off the tent's ceiling. Might as well drop the other shoe. This is the only photo of the wedding ceremony. I took it and it's not very good. Two days after the wedding I got a strange email from the pro photographer (I gave him my business card.) I had taken a couple photos with him and the groom and agreed to email them to him. The relevant part of the email from him said: Feeling bad for the dude, I sent him a link to the program FileJuicer. I explained at length how it worked with corrupted memory cards and that it could salvage many of the images from it. FJ was free to use, but cost $20 for all the features. I told him that seemed like a small price to pay given the situation. He wrote back clarifying that the "issue" was that he lost the first memory card and repeated (quite rudely, I might add) his demand for all photos I took of the ceremony. Any sympathy I had for him evaporated at that moment. In 2009, 2GB pro grade CF cards were less than $50. The Nikon D100 is a 5 megapixel camera. One 2GB CF card could easily hold 1200 shots. If he was using such old cards that he needed to swap during the shoot (I strongly suspect he had 256MB cards he bought with the camera in 2002) then he's got no one to blame but himself. Even in 2009, there were pro DSLR bodies that had dual memory card slots and could be configured to write to both simultaneously. This practice was standard even back then for pros that could not afford to lose a shot. I never replied to his second email. I saw the couple a month after the wedding and had to act like I didn't know the photographer had lost all the photos of the wedding ceremony. With all of that said, the sunset over Boston harbor is quite something: 17-40L. Back to the 75-150 for a moment. The Hyatt is a pretty cool looking building. 35mm F/2, wide open. He has no idea what's in store for him. The reception continued on for quite some time. I couldn't stay for all of it because my ride out of Boston was leaving. The 50mm F/1.4 misfocused a bit (as it is wont to due) but the groom's expression is priceless. Why am I posting all these photos now? Well, the 15th anniversary of the wedding just passed. I don't do much on Faecesbook that I don't have to, but over the years I've periodically posted a few images from the wedding on the anniversary. I hadn't done so in a few years so I decided to revisit the shots I took at the time. As I've mentioned, I am much better at editing photos now than I was back then. I spent a couple evenings reworking some of the old photos that I didn't like in 2009. I selected one and posted it to FB, tagging the bride and the groom. Before doing so, I FB stalked both of them a bit. Both had profiles that said "Married to [the other one]" but not much else. To their credit, neither are big users of social media. Half an hour after I posted the photo, I had a "message request" from the brides uncle. I accepted it and he said "I'm guessing you're out of the loop. You probably want to take that image down." I asked for clarification and an hour later he said the couple separated. Welp, as the kids say. At least the photos are good. Also think twice before you hire this guy for your event.

RIP Jack Peter Karlson, best known for his refined taste in Chinese food and his limp penis.

I have a long post about wedding photography brewing, but that's going to take some time to assemble. In the mean time enjoy this shitpost.

Blimey.