I used to be a photographer
Yeah one of my 90 million jobs I was good enough at to just barely get paid.
I don’t know how to do any thing RIGHT.
I can tell a joke well enough to make you chuckle but I can’t do stand up.
I can write well enough that you read this shit. And I thank you for reading this.
I can do radio well enough that I programmed multiple stations and did all kinds of cool shit. I’m not good enough at kissing ass though and so I don’t do that anymore.
I can book you the fanciest hotel room you’ve ever seen for basically nothing. I can do that in my sleep. I don’t do it anymore.
I am an idiot savant at cooking. You want a chicken? Fucker, you are getting a chicken. And its going to be the best chicken you ever ate. I still do not cook anymore.
I took to cashiering like I’d been born there. It’s easy for the most part and I get to help people. It’s physically hard but I love my customers and I will continue to lift their 40 pack of water or their cat food up if they don’t trust our hand scanner. I’m still not great enough at that job.
Back in the day one of the stupid assed things I did was think I could be a photographer. No one has to tell me I wasn’t good at it. My journalism teacher shit all over any picture I took. And I was taking pictures on actual physical film, developing my shots myself on a camera that I had to actually focus MANUALLY.
When I was running my photog game, no one had smartphones. They barely had auto focus.
Other than writing, taking pictures and then producing them by hand made me so happy. Everyone is a fucking photographer now though so I don’t want to get back into it. I am not and never will be one of those smartphone or digital only photogs because it’s sterile. It’s also idiot proof. I want to smell chemicals, I want my hands to chap, I want to push myself and the equipment to get what I want to see in print.
It’s almost a lost art.
My art is lost.
But these are my favorite photos. I took them all with a film camera, developed all of them myself, sometimes in the dark room at my college, sometimes in a hotel room where we put the chemicals in the bath tub and shoved a towel under the door so I could open and develop the film. Sometimes I did this in my bathroom at my Grandma’s house.
I was good, but not good enough.
(This is my friend Ruth, she sang for a band called Misbliss. I literally photographed every show they did.)
(The first time I shot color was shooting a Tori Amos show. I won an award for picture number two. I doubt she’s ever seen it. Some girl from my class stole my negatives and tried to sell them on EBAY)
(You’ll see more of this guy in a minute. This is Ty Elam in Bakersfield at the college I was going to. We were stuck with color film. If Ty had his arm a few inches lower, this would have been a front page picture. This film sucked shit and I had to push it but color and black and white do not speak the same language. Good news is I’d seen Videodrone enough by then to time this and a series of photographs from this show to shoot it sans flash.)
(Took this one of John Doe from X with his permission. My journalism teacher told me it sucked. I took this without a flash doing all kinds of gymnastics to get a good shot.)
(Remember this guy and Videodrone, these are photos from them opening for Korn. I take terrible pictures but this one ended up on the front page of the newspaper.)
(this one is my favorite. I am the only person who likes it.)
(This is the one my journalism teacher liked. I’m okay with it but seriously the image quality because of how hard I had to ride the film, makes it not great.)
(This is one of my top 10 photos I’ve taken. Justin Cronk didn’t really like me but I was good with that. He was in this band in Bakersfield called Farewell Space Cadet and they played a show at my college. It was hot af and Justin always played his heart out to an almost disturbing degree. When he ran off to Seattle to do this big assed band Vendetta Red with some of my other friends, the fans of Vendetta Red also started trying to claim they took this picture. I think Justin cussed at me after this but this is him, tired and hot after playing his ass off. I was very fucking wrecked when he passed.)
(This is the only picture I took on my phone and loved it. This is Ryan Shuck from Julien-K and Adema on stage in Las Vegas. The owner of the venue asked me if they could use the picture.)
Like most things, I was good but not good enough to make a job out of it.
I could not roll film in a black room to save my life. That was the only part of developing my own prints I didn’t like.