Calcutta. Paan stains on the wall.

Ok, These are photos of India. I haven't been there in a while but I'm just getting around to "printing" these. Which means, scanning and photo-correcting and jpeging them into web files. In that sense, they're no different from the Cuba and England and SF photos I've been posting here. It's just that they're over a year old. This is the only place they exist however, since they're not included with my writings about India.

Like you care.

I barely pulled this one. It's all grainy because the slide was dark. Too dark to be saved, really, but I was stubborn. The scan had tons of noise so I converted it to greyscale and thus, we get grain, which is really noise. See? Couldn't let this one get away though. Scared the shit outta me when I took it.

Ok, I usually try not to over do it on the photos. As I was discussing with Jim, the other day, I think that editorial restraint is the hallmark of great photography. But this one's getting some good feedback on photograhica.org so I'm gonna throw it up. Same woman, can't remember her name. She was crazy. working the whole street, playing with me, drinkin coffee, hittin stickball, touslin schoolkid's hair. I took 3 photos of her as she stood there and the one I'm not posting is her doing a shimmy-shimmy shakey dance with her hips which of course couldn't be captured by my single shot twin lens reflex Rolleiflex.

A saucy old woman gives me some attitude. Manrique Street, Havana.

Playing stickball on Manrique Street, Havana.

I can't take it any more. Please click on the slideshow to the left. It's the best I can do. For 2 days I've worked on a version of it that never came to be. You see, I just wanted to do something simple like put a counter and maybe the title up there but the way the damn thing's implemented it's fucking impossible. It uses a function to flip the images and I can't get other details on the page to update as the image loads. I've tried document.write from within the function but that erases the page and all the objects it had initialized. FUCK.

All day I work on stupid ass shit like this. It's not like I have to. There are plenty of other things a guy could do. Nobody even uses the slideshow that I have now and it works ok for everything except Nutscrape 4.x.

Part of this fix was to get it to work in netscape by writing the img tag every time with h and w variables. Problem is I need to use PHP or something to do that. I keep thinking as I write this that I just write a function that runs in the onload event of the image that goes and gets another set of image attributes from an array I initialize at the page load. Yeah. Fuck. I know that won't work. I'm so sick of this.

Shit I gotta try something else. I'm blowing off scanning images and returning that Mr. Rogers t-shirt I ordered.

Treat Street. Cristina's fire escape.

Whoops! I stayed up all night reading about Garry Winogrand. Once again getting sucked into Masters of Photography and making it impossible for me to have a normal day tomorrow. Shit.

I also started learning about SmartTags on scobleizer.com and I'm gonna block that shit on primco.org as soon as possible. Get out of my code. Tha shit sux.

<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="trUE">

I've got to get some sleep.

The taxi stand in front of the Capitolio Nacional, Havana. I shot this photo and had a nice conversation with a guy during the half an hour I spent waiting for Squash to get out of the museum. They get a lot of tourists there and I meet a lot of people who talk to tourists all day. (It's common to meet an 8 year old who speaks 6 languages) This guy was different. This guy was pretty fearless, or else he had paid off the cops because when they came near he continued talking to me. I asked him why he didn't fear them and he said, "They know me, I am here every day. They've checked my papers and things many times but never put me in jail. Sometimes interrogation takes a long time but it's worth it." Talking to a tourist is against the law and aside from it being a horrible law, I actually appreciated how a tout would suddenly stop bugging me peel off and start walking the other direction. Policia. Mira. Vale, policia muy fuerte. I had conversation with about 20 people in the street that day. I can't express how weird that is. 20 people. Not just "Hello, where from?" but actual meaningful conversations where I learned something. It's really cool to walk about with a camera in a place like that.

Gosh dern it. I witnessed the 'goats last night and David gave me a call and told me to come down to 17th and Capp. I stayed underground until about 4:30. Damn. Vatapartay! I hurt my hand but I'm not sure how. I hadn't even recovered from the cuts on my feet from the beach bonfire and now I got a broken hand.

I've started to post my photographs on other websites and see if I can't drum up some interest in what I've been doing. I've been doing a lot of work lately so I figured I should show it off. That's partly why I do it. I've started posting on photographica.org and photo.net. Very different worlds. I'm not sure how I fit in at photographica -- a lot of garbage collecting going on there. But on the other hand, photo.net is very geeky and overly technical. If you want to see good pictures definitely go to photo.net however.

Dragones Street. Havana. This is some of that "stand on the corner and shoot" stuff. I was trying to take a picture of the sign and this woman crossed the street into my depth of field.