The Fast Lane
Saturday. Ishmael Reed at the Oakland Art and Soul festival. He is not altogether happy with Jerry Brown, the outgoing mayor of Oakland. I waited while he finished a conversation with another member of the audience after his panel participation to thank him for some really wonderful writing. With the cameras and the shooting jacket he probably assumed I was a member of the press, more often than not a problematic person to an old rebel and writer like Reed. Thus is life. I discharged my responsibility to thank him for the impression he'd made when I first discovered his writing so many years ago.
Monday. Time does fly. I futzed around the apartment Saturday, setting up the new CD printer, installing more computer cables and burning most of the pictures currently clogging my hard drive to DVD. I need to get better and faster at this. I need more hard drive space. Some may say I need a life as well, but some people will say most anything, particularly after they've had a couple of drinks.
I photographed the wedding Sunday in the late morning, early afternoon, at the Oakland Museum. I hadn't realized how much space they have up there on their roof. Photographed the wedding dinner later that evening in San Francisco (the Four Seas on Grant) and had a pretty good time. The pictures seem to have turned out - not to my satisfaction, they never turn out to my satisfaction - but to the satisfaction of the bride and groom. I shot candids while the professional wedding photographers, three of them, took care of the heavy lifting. They shot six hundred pictures (part of the contract), I shot eight hundred, which is why I've spent so much time downloading pictures and burning them to disk.
The full color labels that incorporate a photograph from the wedding and are printed directly onto the “printable” DVD's are nice, something a little different. The bride and groom should like them. Their families should like them. Hell, I like them. Be nice if they didn't have that big damned hole right in the middle, but I'll think about that the next time I do this: shoot a couple of photographs specifically for the DVD labels, something with a potted plant or the head of a blotto wedding guest right in the middle. Strange, making these calculations.
Tuesday. This has been a good day for reasons I'm not really able to articulate. Maybe it's the air. Maybe it's the drugs. Life in the fast lane, though, here in Oakland.
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