I haven’t had a good place to stretch out and work in a while, but just got a 1 bedroom with a garage. And the garage is super legit. New headquarters in Castle Heights. I’m gonna try to blog everyday. Let’s ride.
Category: RESEARCH
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REPORTING
It’s here. Stoked. These will go on the Hamburger Eyes site on Thursday. 800 pages, 3+ lbs. !
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RAMPAGE
I live in Los Angeles again. I think I’m ready this time.
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TERRIES
Did it. Book is done and at the printers. After 2 more days of computer crashing, I finally figured it out. I had to compress the shit out of the photos but at this point I don’t care. I am guesstimating the book will weigh about 3 lbs so already I am tripping on shipping costs. But first things first, it is turned in.
Now on to another book in the works and a new issue of Hamburger Eyes. Also, camera straps.
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COMPUTER BLUE
Ok so I was gonna turn in my book last week Thursday, it is over a week later and it is still not turned in. I had everything done. I am not one to shy away from problems or issues that arise, I have seen almost everything go wrong with all kinds of projects since I have been doing this a while. But I found out the upload file size limit is 2 gbs. I have talked to multiple tech guys over there and there is nothing they can change about it. My file is 3.4 gbs. That’s ok. I will just compress my files down and I spent a week doing that. And then they tell me they were wrong, it is 1.6 gbs max file size upload. Ok. I will fix it. So I’m working on it and now my computer hangs on exporting the pdf. It is an 800 page document, so I know it was going to be tough on my computer. But it has been 2 straight days of crashes. I have deleted tons of stuff, I have cleared all the ram issues, I compressed files even further and no pdf. Also, it takes almost 2 hrs to export this pdf before it tells me it didn’t work. I have been at this all week. Taking a break tonight. But it will be turned in sooner or later.
Also, I was just reading what I wrote last week and wanted to add something. This 800 page book sums up the last 3 years of moving city to city, it sums up my excessive use of my phone as my main camera during that time, but wanted to add that it also sums up my use of social media. I deleted all my accounts like a month or so ago, which kinda makes sense why I feel like I’m ready to go back to a regular camera. I wasn’t mister post every 5 mins, but I would post regularly. And I really got into story mode on ig and snapchat and often found myself in time loops that kind of led to “projects”. For example the squirrels, on snapchat I would try to get a snap of a squirrel everyday. It was easy because there was like 100 of them living on my block at the time. That turned into a 12 page feature along with the cover of an issue of Hamburger Eyes. Anyways, I’m rambling. I’m excited to turn in this book and move on to the next thing.
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PREVIEW
So I been thinking about doing a big fat book. I saw Kris Kirk do a fatty one and it came out cool. In fact, when I saw his I asked him to publish mine. He was down. We were thinking it would be around 250 pages and be released by last November. But it was killing me thinking about what the book is about or if it is about anything. We made some loose deadlines that kept getting pushed back but I couldn’t pull it together.
I cancelled it. I told him I can’t do it because I don’t know what to do. And if I did do it, it would need to be a lot more pages because I like to hide my weird photos by drowning them in a ton of pages. And it would be mostly cell phone photos. Which is totally fine with me but I didn’t want him to put his money and hard work into it if he wanted to make a super nice thing with a big box and screen printed covers etc like the way he did his. He didn’t care, he still would do it. But also I was thinking it would be stressful for someone else to edit these photos. The formalities were messing with me. I had to abort.
But a couple weeks ago I got the download from deep space. I’ll make the book about leaving SF and moving around a bunch and ending up in SD. It’ll be about being lost and wandering and found again. And I will edit it and publish it myself, since uhhh that’s what I do for a living. I am actually moving back to LA in about 2 weeks, so this book would kind of sum up this random 3 year journey I been on. I am also about to get a new camera and thinking about going back to a flip phone or some other lesser connected phone. So it will sum up that journey as well. I had been mostly using just my phone for photos and haven’t shot or processed any film since I left my darkroom in SF.
I started working on the book this past week and boom it’s done. It is photos from Dec 2014 – Dec 2017. In that time I did 7 issues of a zine series called “Koinstars”, 5 issues of another one called “EZ Beach”, and 13 issues of “Ray’s Reports”. If you have seen any of those zines or keep up with this blog then you probs have seen at least half the photos. This book highlights some of that stuff plus all the in between stuff and left overs.
This book is titled “Chrysalis” and is 800 pages and being turned in to the printers tomorrow. It will be out hopefully next week. Here are some previews and more on hamburgereyes.com
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DESTINY INN
I been watching a bunch of movies lately, yet for some reason I don’t feel like reviewing them like I did with Black Panther. I have to rethink my reviews section. More to come.
