Jersey City Photo Shoot

A few selects from a shoot I did in Jersey City this week.

The shoot was coordinated by the talented Adam Himber of Parlay Studios (which is a gorgeous and surprisingly huge photo and film studio in Jersey City).

Adam was nice enough to hook us up with a Profoto Prohead, and the model ended up being an incredibly cool chick who also lives in my neighborhood.

End result: I now have experience with a new piece of industry standard lighting equipment, and all three of us have something to show for the day.

These are a couple of the shots:

Cat Whisperer Gets Owned

This happened at a friend's party. Chris was taunting this cat for quite some time before he got his comeuppance. Something told me to film. I just had one of those feelings.

Puppy! Bathtime!

It's a puppy! He had a bath! It's motherfucking puppy bath time! 

Photography is for rich people

I enjoy photography. Lately, I've been trying to develop a cohesive lighting style. It may or may not surprise you to know that it's not easy. That's right, lighting design is hard. I said it here. Let the controversy begin!

As of right now, I'm in between being a good photographer and being an okay one. It's a weird artistic place to be. I'll get more Facebook comments on a fuzzy iPhone photo of my cat than on a perfect portrait I spent the day setting up a 9-foot parabolic umbrella for. 

You can't really blame the general audience. They don't know what to look for in photography (besides, part of doing your job is that people don't notice you did it). Instagram is the new Facebook. Urban Outfitters sells Holgas. Add some light-leak effects on your iPhone. Use Auto Depth-of-Field to get that cool "some stuff is blurry, some stuff isn't" look. Add a vignette. It's all art when you don't know what actually goes into making art.

If you want to be a cash-money paid photographer, you'd better be prepared to bust your ass. Or, have someone who is paying your rent. Because prosumer SLRs with a kit lens are on sale in Best Buy. Photo Dad is loose in Manhattan, lens hood on indoors, taking flash photos of the moon. When everyone's a photographer, that means no one is a photographer.

And no one is paying for photographers these days. Photojournalism is officially dead, in fact, newspaper editors have been instructed to shoot and rape professional photographers on site. Why would anyone pay for photos when Photo Dad is running around? He'll do it for 50 bucks! He'll do it for free, just give him a credit! Being a photographer in 2012 means not worrying about where your next paycheck is coming from. Or, it means struggling for the love of your art. But who can afford to do that these days?

Jasmine Star can. Rockstar photographer. International wedding photographer. Shooting star.

What does it say about a photographer when a Google image search turns up more pictures of your face than it does of your work? 

From the About Me section on Jasmine's website:

Have you ever wanted something so badly it made your chest ache with longing? I had this ache a few times in my life. For a My Little Pony doll. For the LA Gear pump shoes... I left law school and started my business in 2006 and have since filled the ache in my chest with happiness that percolates from my heart. I fell in love with Love. The joy and fulfillment I receive in documenting the most special moments on a wedding day compares to nothing else. My Little Pony and LA Gear pump shoes included.

Yes, she compared photography to a fucking My Little Pony doll. And she is one of the highest paid wedding photographers working today. She also fell in love with love, which, as an aside, I feel compelled to mention is an unhealthy outlook on relationships. 

The way she describes her transformation into a photographer, she might as well have become a ballerina or an astronaut. She's Photography Barbie, and she's workin' it, girlfriend! Fabulous! She is everything that is wrong with art, and probably everything that is wrong with people. Her forced humility would be believable if only she weren't charging upwards of $1000 a head for her photography seminars.


In fact, here's an interesting article that exposes how she straight-up hacked some other photographer's work for her $1000 workshop and never gave the talented photographer credit. In the words of the Photogzilla blog:  "People were led to believe they would be learning about editorial photography, similar to the technical style demonstrated in the unauthorized images."


Also, she sounds like this:

As you may have noticed, she is talking about her bangs and lipstick. That's because she used to be a model. So, yeah. That just happened.

But, hey, she's a star! Be a star! Or, if you can't be a star, be rich! And buy expensive equipment! Or call yourself a star and people will believe it! And always shoot in RAW and have someone else clean up your mess in post, because there is no fucking way on earth that twit knows what she's doing. 

When someone tells you that it's not the equipment, it's the photographer, they are sort-of lying. They just want to sound romantic. Think about it: what painter would tell you that it doesn't matter what canvas and paint you use? Sure, just drop some melted crayon on that copier paper, it's all about your vision.

The truth is, it's going to cost you about $6,000 to get started as a semi-professional. Enter Jasmine Star, the former model turned artiste who could afford to quit law school in order to teach you everything she knows about photography. I am not sure if that includes have someone else optimize your images. 

Personally, I hope that if I just keep plugging along on my own, I'll improve as a photographer. In the meantime, at least I'm not Jasmine Star. I'm not teaching any seminars because I know enough to know that I don't have anything to teach people. There's somewhere I need to go and I'm not there yet. I'm no "shooting star", I guess. 

If I keep learning and paying attention to those around me who know more than me, maybe one day I'll be a great photographer. However, if you think you're already a shooting star, where else is there to go? What else is there to learn about your craft?

After all, when you see a star from earth, it's already dead.

Why You Shouldn't Care About Offending Jehovah's Witnesses

Please go to Street Carnage and read my latest essay about the failed word ban in the NY public school system and how this relates to the Jehovah's Witnesses.

About a month ago, the New York Public School System released (and then quickly backpedaled on) a list of words they would like banned from standardized tests.

To recap what you probably already know, the list included 50 potentially upsetting or offensive terms such as birthday, dinosaurs, dancing, pepperoni, and swimming pools.

Read more...

I was on NPR as the "resident racist".

If you missed it, I was on the Pat Morrison show on NPR in Los Angeles discussing "Hipster Racism". This was after Gawker called me an angry neocon. Let's call it "opposite week". I'm surprised no one accused me of being a pigfucker just to hear me deny it.

I was a bit nervous to go on a legit news station and defend ironic racism. That kind of thing can bode poorly on a job interview. However, since I'm not actually a racist, I decided it couldn't be that big of a deal. What could I possibly say to condemn myself? I think racism is bad? People don't necessarily feel comfortable standing up for something like this, because it could very easily tip out of their favor. However, I have no common sense. So I did it instead.

I think it went well and you can hardly even hear me peeing myself.

Here's a writeup about the interview by Gavin McInnes on Street Carnage: http://www.streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/npr-weighs-in-on-hipster-racism/

And here's the main NPR link with the whole show:
http://www.scpr.org/programs/patt-morrison/2012/05/04/26332/is-ashton-kutchers-generation-aware-of-racist-cari

The Myth of Compassionate People

In response to the more negative comments on my piece: The Myth of Hipster Racism on Street Carnage: 

To the people who want to tell me I’m a bad evil racist, why don’t you care what Marcus thinks on the matter? He tells you he finds it funny and all you can do is call him a “sellout”?

You negate his feelings because they don’t jive (racist?) with your own? You deny him unique feelings, his own personality, but I’m the racist one? Okay then. How totally compassionate and not racist of you. I'm sorry he didn't live up to your stereotype. Sometimes those spics get uppity and don't behave the way you'd like.

Here’s a couple of the nice things the kind, not-racist people wrote about me in the comments on Street Carnage:

“I hope I never meet you”;
“I hope everyone who jokes about calling their friends racial slurs gets cancer”;
 “Congratulations on having a Spanish boyfriend. How exotic!”; and,
“I’m gonna assume this fat cunt’s as dense as she is fat.”

Yet, you claim you are worried about hurting other people’s feelings.

 I'm sorry, but I don’t buy that you actually care that much about racism. You care more about your ego and the pretense of being a good person. You care about the APPEARANCE of being good, and Lindy’s article (which, yes, goddamnit, was funny and well-written) was SAFE. It was the easy way out. No one is going to send you hate mail and yell at you for taking the stance that racism is bad.

 Personally, I thought it would be a little more interesting to try to see some grey area in that. I thought that was a worthy idea.

And this is what bothers me the most about this idiotic "racism" witch hunt. People claim they are so concerned about not hurting anyone, then they turn around and call me all kinds of shitty names. They can't wait to misunderstand what I wrote, twist it, and put their own words over it. Guess what, liberal hipsters? I have feelings, too. Just like black people. In fact, why don't you just pretend I'm a black person? Then you can be nice to me, too.

 I’m going to make one thing clear, because I thought this was glaringly obvious, but I guess I need to spell it out:

If you are making racist jokes to your friend, and they don’t find it funny, you should FUCKING STOP MAKING THAT JOKE. Because you’re an asshole and a bad friend.

 My only — ONLY — point was that racism is defined by intent. As it should be. If I don’t mean something to be racist, then it isn’t. And if I say something to my friend that hurts their feelings and they say “Hey, that hurt my feelings” guess what I say? I say, “Hey, I’m sorry, I won’t say that again.”

 What do you think I do? Just run around in the streets yelling nigger and demanding that people find it funny?

 I wrote a book about growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness. Do you think I haven’t had people accuse me of being a horrible, evil person before? The difference is, they called me a sinner and you call me a racist.  Both of them are blanket terms meant to slander a person, take away their power, and insinuate that nothing they think or feel is valid.

 You can misunderstand this article all you want. I am aware that you have completely misinterpreted it. I will not be guilted into a false admittance of racism by angry assholes. Because you are wrong about me, so fuck off.

I should also note that I said nothing about Lindy as a person, I said nothing about the quality of her writing or her humor, I made no comment about her weight. Other people made this personal, which makes me think that not only did you not read my article, you didn’t even read HERS.

Apparently, you all have some issues you need to work out. But they’re not present in my article. In my world, being cruel and obnoxious and self-righteous is far worse than being ironically racist. But I guess you have different moral standards.

p.s. Are you aware, non-racists, that Marcus is the one who started us joking in this manner? I make ironic racist jokes because he did it first. I think that bears mention.

Captain Puerto Rico

My super boyfriend, who is, and always will be, my own personal hero.

(In addition to being one of the kindest and most hilarious comic book nerds on the planet, he's very supportive of my photography hobby. Add "patient" to his long list of good qualities.)

Awkward, rapey Flickr photography

What is Flickr for, if not awkwardly posed photos of slightly chubby girls floating uncomfortably on either black or white backgrounds?

All of these photos are the product of the same artist, who I stumbled upon entirely by accident tonight. One of them was titled -- shockingly -- "Shot in my Garage". I think he means photographed, but from the way these women are standing, he may actually just be shooting at them.

I'm sure he's a lovely person and not at all as rapey as the contorted women in the photos insinuate.

Oddly, these are all generally well lit.





I'm looking for something like Maggie Gyllenhall in Secretary with kidney stones.





I want you to sensually touch your thigh, then give yourself a breast exam, because early detection is key to prevention.




Your invisible chair just broke. Show me how much you miss your only friend, the invisible chair.

You're trapped on a desert island and you're hailing a plane full of thongs.

Give me something gay. Okay, not that gay.

Has anyone seen my arm hat? I could have sworn I left it... oh, how embarrassing. I was wearing my arm hat the whole time!





This damsel in distress seems to have stepped in something... sexy.




You two look so relaxed and natural here in this all white room. Do you come to this all white room often, together? Mind if I take a candid?





STOP! RAPE!




Just naturally stretching my right arm while I kneel and arch my back and lay my left hand across my stomach. Hear that crack? That was my spine exploding.




Mom says I'm special and beautiful and Jesus loves me extra, that's why he put my head on backwards.

Just waiting for the bus!

Street Carnage

My blog entry on Kreayshawn and V-Nasty has been republished over at Street Carnage. Check it:

http://www.streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/kreayshawn-and-v-nasty-giving-wiggers-a-bad-name/

Also, this exists: