After trawling through 15 years of photos taken at the queer end of Riis beach (many in dusty negative form), I think I've satisfied my classically-trained desire for formal and conceptual symmetry.

At one end of the timeline, we have a set of nearly monochrome photos taken in the water last Juneteenth. A few abstract selfies, where my face is masked by bubbles and whorls.

There will be at least one anchor image at the center: a large-ish print of a very attractive person standing in the foamy surf, holding a can of Peach-a-rita, with an expression as pleasant and inscrutable as the Mona Lisa (IMHO).

After that, pictures from 2010 (I think). Shot on incredibly expired Fuji NPZ 800. My friends and I ended up twerking in the parking with a different group of queers we had just met, getting blasted on "jungle juice" we bought from them. The pictures here are so grainy, so weirdly saturated and tinted, beautiful. They're all environmental candids, and so I was compelled to leave out the more documentary photos depicting all the social transactions.

Who knows how I'll feel about it next week. This will be the first time in decades I've publicly shared any of my work in print form.

Many people who still bother to shoot and scan film now use an Epson V-series of one sort or another. These have a an infrared lamp which can create an image that is a map of dust and scratches, as non-silver film is transparent to these wavelengths.

I use VueScan. It has never filled me with joy to use it, as it's quite quirky. But once you learn its quirks, its very thoughtful and works really well and allows for very efficient workflows. For whatever reason, however, its IR cleaning routine is really quite bad in my experience. It allows you to turn it off completely, however, while still outputting the IR channel.

Here, I show my recent discovery of Photoshop's "content-aware fill" feature, and how I use it in conjunction with the IR channel.

For reference, I use an Epson V750 with the stock holders with the little height adjusting feet that get me to an acceptable focus and resolution. I also have an ancient Microtek ArtixScan 120tf, a dedicated film scanner, and I've compared the two before. With the ArtixScan lacking the infrared feature, the choice is a no-brainer for me now. I'm sticking with the V750.

For reference, this film is Fuji NPZ 800, which came to me in 2009 or 2010 from a friend who found a bag of ancient, expired film on her stoop. The photo is from the summer of 2010....

Over ten years ago I found myself impressed (in an exasperated kind of way) about how good some people seemed to be at constantly posting to the Internet, particularly to the burgeoning social media space. I still am.

I figured that one had to, at the very least, develop an instinct for instantaneously categorizing every passing thought and a discipline for immediately syndicating it to the appropriate social media application.

This still sounds incredibly tedious and idiotic to me. Even now, as my addled and aging brain slows and forgets, I take even more time before pressing "Send" or "Post". And about 90% of the time, I don't press that damn button at all. To be sure, this mainly has to do with a longstanding lack of ambition and overriding laziness.

Anyway, I had this one imaginary category called "Twitter Thoughts". I think we can all agree that we can come up with a better phrase, like "one-inch thought", bagatelle/morceau/amuse bouche.

For now I'm going to go with "small thoughts", which this post is very decidedly not. Not because it's a stroke of genius but merely because of its length.

If it were a small thought, it might contain only the following: a comment left on one of those terrible engagement-baiting articles that make up maybe 99% of my Facebook feed now.

I'm not going to get into the substance (?) of this comment, except to say that if the collection of fines levied on small businesses makes...

Everybody's doing it, but I'm doing it late!

I've never photographed in heavy, windy snow. And really, I avoided the worst of it. The biggest challenge was the accumulation of snow and haze on the lens. It was rarely had a good aesthetic effect, and my attempts to clean the lens usually led to even less desirable results.

I would have experimented with the effect more, but I was with a friend. And as always, my process is at its best when I'm alone.

(Speaking of which, has anybody heard from the NYBG about the fellowship? I haven't. I wonder if they tell the recipient before the tell the non-recipients.)

My college professor recently revamped his site and I went through all the extra material from American Prospects that I hadn't ever seen before. I should reach out, but why? How? What should be my excuse? My old cello professor remembered me pretty well, maybe I'll get lucky with Joel, too. Ah, mid-life!

It's nice to be able to look at his photos, to know how they've influenced me, and how I feel perfectly fine where my vision very obviously diverges. In particular, I think my compositions tend to be a bit more enclosed, even claustrophobic in a way. I will try to be more aware of when I might be able to simplify or open up a composition, with more negative space perhaps. But as I mainly shoot in the city or in the woods, it is rare...

Several reasons compelled me to finally leave my apartment. I had to go to my purposefully slightly inconveniently-located pharmacy. And I had recently acquired a small upholstery cleaning machine for which I needed some cleaning solution at the Lowe's next to the Culver Viaduct which runs over the Gowanus Canal.

Although it was fixing to rain quite heavily, it wasn't slated until further along in the evening, and so I set out with my camera, no umbrella, and water permeable Vans.

Rain is, to an extent, like a natural polarizing filter. Contrast is selectively increased. Blacktop deepens (where there aren't puddles), tree trunks saturate.

Although my Olympus is robustly water resistant, dealing with water on the lens is a pain. I'll need to figure out what kind of cloth works best in these conditions, and how many of them I'll need.

These photos revist so much of the character of my Civilization Day era that I decided to make them into squares.

Only a few people, but I have been getting somewhat bolder lately. I didn't include the teenaged boy with a broken foot, making his way uphill on crutches. It just didn't work as a square, though the full photo is decent. I could really sympathize.

Nothing particularly remarkable here, but sometimes that's the point. I was just reading an interview about different ways of being a concert soloist, and the cellist remarked (about one of his teachers, János Starker, from whom I receive much of my technique...

I was relieved to finally submit my application for this year's Larry Lederman Photography Fellowship at the New York Botanical Garden.

I do not plan to share my proposal or biography here until at least after the recipient is announced at the end of March. However, here is the artist statement, which caused me some grief with its 200 word limit.

I spent several decades refining my photographic practice into a restrained and detached sensibility, what might be called pingdan tianzhen (平淡天真) in classical Chinese landscape painting. Placid compositions, subtle ironies, social and environmental anxieties.

After recovering from a broken foot and losing work with USAID in early 2025, I decided to push myself toward a more exuberant, experimental, and embodied approach.

I photographed a lot of water last year: through it, in it, and under it. I biked along much of the beautiful, PCB-polluted Housatonic. I let the surf crash into me at The People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park while I attempted selfies and more traditional compositions. I tried to catalog its endless colors and textures, the optical effects it has on itself and the things around it, how it physically interacts with the camera and my body.

I have been presenting my photographs as essays on my personal blog. I write about making them. A kind of psychogeography. For example, an encounter with a dead porcupine, and then an abandoned Chevy Suburban—while pushing my bike through a rough forest road in 95 degree heat—resulted in a meditation...

A cold but sunny day in the low 30s F. These days I'm more aware of people staring on the street. It could be the un-mannered mustache which is only recently more commonly worn by people my age. Or something else I'll never know. It does not really concern me. [Update: I'm realizing that this may happen more often when I'm carrying a camera or a cello on my back. 📊]

I have difficulty embracing the icy blueness of the deepening winter in my pictures. I have difficulty balancing so many nearly-neutral colors in post. (A friend has offered me a 2011 Apple cinema display which I'll be picking up tonight. It might be a nice upgrade to my current Asus.) And in the moment I feel that I ought to resist the pretense of forcing whatever colorful facades or detritus I can find into a sad garbage composition. It's often an exercise in just being okay with the way things look at this time of the year. Nevertheless, witness the keeled over artificial Christmas tree on an astroturf patio, strung out with its gold tinsel boa. I couldn't resist.

The Almond Path is a single switchback down the northern side of a hill, encircled by Atlantic Avenue, distinguished by a large number of pine trees whose rusty needles and ashy cones carpet the slope. The efficiency of a road or hiking trail are not required, so it goes down then up and down again. It seems less visited, less...

As with most days this year, it was unusually warm. And so we were told, later on, by a very enthusiastic docent, that we might not see the elusive and reclusive Pallas's Cat especially because of the heat. However, near closing time, and with my friend needing to catch an imminent flight home, we tried again and got lucky. Lucky us. It was slow and magesterial, sought the cool rocks in the shadows, blended in but deigned to look up and out a few times. #blessed.

I had never been to this zoo, and I think it had been decades since I had been to any zoo. This, despite the fact that it is a 10 minute bike ride from my apartment, and that I bike by it regularly. And I'm often reminded that I'm biking by it because I'll hear the plaintive call of the resident peacock and try, unsuccessfully, to imitate it.

Reminiscense incoming. The last time may have been with my dad when I was home from college one summer. He and my mom had gotten yearly passes to the San Diego Zoo as part of their empty nesting. My dad occasionally got excited or fixated on very specific things. Model trains. Nissan ZXs. Guns. Neon signs for light beers such as Miller Light (his favorite). This time, he seemed surprisingly, if only briefly, enthusiastic about the new hippopatomus exhibit. I don't think we looked at anything else when we went. (I assume that he and my...

We went multi-modal to Harriman State Park: from Park Slope to the Christopher St PATH station, to Hoboken, the NJT to Sloatsburg.

It's good to know that this way into the park is so much more pleasant than the unpleasantly-steep Willow Grove Rd. However, it is worth noting that if one is planning to bike all the way from NYC to Harriman, it is far more interesting to cleave to the Hudson and take this way in rather than to cut through the suburbs of New Jersey in order to ease up Seven Lakes Dr.

Once past the visitor center, we took a short bit of forest road which gave Michael a small taste of the bushwhacking life. We even came upon some fresh bear scat.

Giving way to some modest pavement, we found ourselves at the entrance to the American Canoe Association HQ, occupying a peninsula at the southern end of Lake Sebago. Michael was suddenly reminded that he might in fact be a member of the ACA and so we decided to explore. We were advised to seek out the camp director who explained that several clubs kept cabins here, including the Sebago Canoe Club of which Michael had recently become a member. They practice their skills in the Jamaica Bay, which, in my estimation, would be quite an intimidating introduction to human-powered boating.

At the SCC cabin, we met Gayle, a widower into contra-dance and bluegrass fiddle. We discovered that she's our neighbor in south Brooklyn. She...

This is a moderately low-effort post, but I thought I'd collect together some of the more interesting (to me) photos from the end of September, early October.

I'm currently stuck on day 3 of my Green Mountains travelogue. We'll see whether the passage of time blurs its details into a more literary (rather than a fanatically journalistic) form.

There isn't much aesthetic coherence here, qua photography, which is fine. This is more like psychogeography.

In fact, photos 1, 2, and 8-14 are all from meetings with an ex whom I hadn't seen since we separated in 2017. We used to take morning strolls in the cemetery.

I spent perhaps too much of my 20s at Metropolitan Bar where I was a devotee to (and occasional performer in) the "Hot Fruit" cabaret/dance party. $2 PBR tall-boys, can you imagine? It felt like it would never end.

The blankest location for me here is DUMBO. I never had a significant connection to the place, as aesthetically interesting as it is. It's weirdly monochrome! Tall and cramped, everything seems slightly too large, to no purpose. Expensive-looking boutiques and understated galleries. It seems rather tourist-y, but perhaps it always was.

It's where a friend got married between the two bridges while I played Bach and a curious arrangement of a Daft Punk/Panda Bear song — very probably inaudibly, between the carousel calliope, traffic and passing trains. Before Hugh Ryan wrote When Brooklyn Was Queer, he and others had some sort of queer...