i’m very pleased to be a part of collect.give, a wonderful site launched by the incomparable kevin miyazaki. collect.give is a place where photographers offer small editions of small prints (letter size or less) for a low price and donate the proceeds to a charity of their choice. as of the first of march the site has raised over $5000 for various non-profit organizations. i’m offering a print from my series of burned book pages, with the money going to support camp del corazon. prints could be yours for the low, low price of just $40.

thanks for including me, kevin!

you can see others from the series here.

in other news it almost rained here today. but then didn’t quite. rain would’ve been nice. one thing about los angeles, too much damn sunshine. it’s everywhere. gets on your nerves after a while.

here’s a pic of the last time it rained.

still, part of the point of this blog (for me, not necessarily for you) is to inspire myself towards taking more pictures of things. that is, inanimate objects. from the first moment i started taking pictures there was never really any thought to what i would point the camera at. it was always people. or sometimes animals. things with eyes. i was only ever really interested in photographing things that could talk back to me. or get impatient, or vain, or shy, or angry, or say witty things, or could share some experience. and still, the best part of my job is being able to get small slices of the lives and experiences of a great many different kinds of people. i don’t think still-life shooters get that so much. but i could be wrong.

anyway. . . here are a couple shots from some of the miles traveled.

and while we’re on the subject of it. . i have one big gripe with las vegas. on my first trip to las vegas last month i specifically brought one quarter that i intended to use in a slot machine. i’m not much of a gambler, you can tell. i like the games, but not particularly the losing money part. slot machines were appealing only insofar as there was a tactile sort of quality to it – it’s satisfying to feed coins into a machine and to see moving parts whir around and hear the clink of the reward, should you actually win. also, winning at a slot machine has weight – coins are supposed to spill out, and you fill up a cheesy plastic cup with them, and it’s heavy and it’s noisy and you feel like you’ve done something.

imagine my surprise now, when i find that, carrying my quarter around the new york, new york casino, none of the machines actually accept coins anymore. it’s all paper money or special cards. there’s no more tactile feeling of dropping coins into a machine. there’s hardly any machine feeling at all – just electronic buttons and displays. i left without losing my quarter.

on my second trip to las vegas that week i spent exactly $2 on gambling. i put one dollar into a slot machine, and one dollar into a video poker machine, only to have my suspicions confirmed. this isn’t fun. now, i don’t have any problem with gambling. i have self-control, and i don’t have an addictive personality of any sort. so gambling isn’t ever going to get me in trouble. my gripe is this: these are supposed to be games and the truth is that they aren’t actually the least bit entertaining. i don’t mind losing my $2, but i’d like some entertainment value for that money. however, there wasn’t any.

still. . . i think i like this format, so i’m not so distraught that i’ll avoid starting over. my first dip of a toe into the public blogosphere, influenced by many factors. first, there’s the influence of friends – tim archibald for having a good idea, and bill smith for always perfectly executing a good idea. and mostly there’s the desire to just have a place to put all those pictures that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

for example: i must’ve driven past this sign hundreds of times in the past three years. i’ve always thought it’d make a great location, but never found the appropriate subject to put there. the other day, though, i figured maybe it didn’t need anyone else. there’s something about a “you are here” sign that’s kind of comforting. grounding, maybe. even if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s nice to know where you are, right? even if it’s a crappy, handpainted sign indicating where you are, and where you are is a parking lot of an abandoned building. there might be a metaphor in this, but still. . . comforting.