unexpected romance

Posted on September 28, 2026 by greg

I live in Iowa, a farm state, but I don’t know dick about farms. Or farming or farm life or farm culture or farm technology. Crops—I can distinguish corn from soybeans. Livestock? I’m sort of familiar with basic farm animals—I’m okay with generic pigs and cows, but I couldn’t tell you about different breeds. I can identify some farm equipment, like a combine, though I don’t really understand what it does. I’m basically ignorant about almost everything farm-related.

That said, I’m sort of intrigued by farming in a sociological way. Periodically, I’ll make my way out into the countryside or I’ll visit a small town to shoot some photographs and maybe try to get a sense of what life is like for rural folks. In keeping with that, last week I went on a brief tour sponsored by the Iowa Barn Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving old barns. I expected to learn something about the history of barn architecture.

I did not expect romance.

Two sheds, a wheelbarrow of bricks, and a very red truck.

I’ll come back to the romance in a bit. First, the reason I wanted to take that tour and visit the Mitchell farm was to see their barn. Not the barn you see in the photograph below. Their other barn. The barn they bought in 2019, the barn a neighbor was about to demolish, the barn (built in 1915) they decided to jack up and move to their property. That’s right, the young couple you see in the photo bought a used barn for US$2000. Then they found some folks who’d put it on a massive trailer, and they had it hauled a couple of miles to their farm.

I was eager to see that barn. I figured any barn that could elicit that sort of response from folks must be one hell of a barn. But when we arrived at the Mitchell farm, I didn’t even notice the barn. In fact, I spent the entire morning on the farm and failed to shoot a single photograph of the exterior of that vagabond barn, that vaga-barn. Why? Because I was immediately distracted by…well, by everything else on the farm. Beginning with Matt and Libby Mitchell.

I noticed them even before I left the tour bus. They were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, casually talking to each other. What struck me was how obviously comfortable they were with each other. Kicked back, patiently waiting for a bus to disgorge a small group of strangers who were there to nose around on their property. There was no sense of discomfort or unease or anxiety; there was, instead, a very palpable aura of quiet contentment. You could see that these two people liked and cared for each other, that they shared a casual, companionable intimacy. They were so obviously affectionate, so relaxed and comfortable, so contented. I wanted to photograph them…forget the barn.

Then, of course, there were all those tractors.

Some of the approximately 35 old tractors.

So many tractors. At one point I asked Matt how many he had. “Oh, about thirty-five or so.” Thirty-five or so. Like the actual number didn’t matter. What makes this even more weird is that the man doesn’t seem like a collector. At least not in the traditional sense. Not like people who collect coins or thimbles or comics. He doesn’t seem to be deliberately putting together a collection, he’s not out tractor-hunting. He just hears about old tractors nobody wants…and brings them home.

Those tractors? They’re all operational. They work. He hasn’t restored them; he apparently doesn’t care that they look like old tractors. He just wants them to work. To be working tractors. I don’t know, maybe he wants them to fulfill their tractor destiny or something, and tractors are supposed to work. That’s the purpose of their existence.

It was the same with almost everything on the farm. Matt Mitchell is something of an agri-tech otaku. He has a deep, obsessive passion for old farm equipment. He finds it, buys it, or barters for it, or just agrees to take it off somebody’s hands so they can get rid of it. Then he brings it home, gets it in working order, and…and that’s it. Then he’s happy.

Scattered throughout the farm are projects—some finished, some in progress, some only a vague promise in the future. It’s a working farm, of course, so there’s a haymow in the vaga-barn’s hayloft (a brief tangent; I learned that a haymow is a pile of hay, loose or baled, stored in a hayloft). The vaga-barn is also a place to store future projects. An old Suzuki motorcycle, a pair of ceramic farm sinks, a rocking chair, an old desk—all of it dusty and distressed but potentially functional.

Potentially functional, that seems to be the key. Functional and practical. Not necessarily practical in the present day, but practical for its time. For example, the vaga-barn has an operational Louden Hay Carrier. “What in the hell is a Louden Hay Carrier?” you ask. It was a revolutionary pulley and track system developed by William Louden in 1867. It allowed farmers to easily transfer hay (either loose or in bales) into a hayloft, which made it possible to build bigger barns with larger lofts to store more hay. Here’s a video showing how it worked:

Unfortunately, I didn’t learn about the Louden Hay Carrier until after I’d spent time in the loft, so my photographs don’t show the tracking system. But in the photo below you can see the loft’s drop door and the ropes that accompany the system.

The loft of the vaga-barn, with the ropes of the Louden Hay Carrier

Following Matt and Libby Mitchell around their farm, listening to them talk about the things they’ve acquired, the projects they’ve completed (or started), I came to understand their interest isn’t grounded in nostalgia. Nostalgia is a sentimental longing for a golden past that’s very likely imaginary. This isn’t about a desire to capture the past.

This is romance. Not the sort of soppy, sentimental romance we see in movies (and, okay, I confess to enjoying rom-coms, but this isn’t that). This is romance in an older sense. I’m talking about an active, emotional connection with, and affection for, old technology. It’s passionate, to be sure, but not the burning, all-consuming sort of passion that torches everything and eventually extinguishes itself. This is a quiet, relaxed, enduring sort of passion. It escapes the boundaries of logic and convention, yes, but it never strays very far from reality. This is romance grounded in the appreciation of the beauty, purity, and out-dated practicality of agri-tech that can still work.

Matt Mitchell praising mortise and tenon joinery.

The Mitchells don’t need a thing to be shiny or pretty; it just has to have a history, it has to have had a life, it has to have mattered once to somebody, and it needs to have the potential to perform its function. If that potential is there, the Mitchells would like to see it fulfilled.

That’s romance, right there.

storms and bicycles

Posted on August 10, 2026 by greg

Six years ago today I had two ‘first ever’ experiences at the same time. I’d bought my first ebike—a massive 70 pound fat tire Rad Rover—a month or so earlier. As I’ve said many times, at that point I’d never even seen an ebike. I bought it online, purely out of hope that I might be able to ride again with minimal knee pain. It was a life-changing purchase. I rode that burly bastard everywhere for that month and I’d never taken it out of the lowest level of pedal assist. I’d never needed to.

Until that day six years ago.

That day started out beautifully. Bright, sunny, a bit humid but with a light breeze, a few fluffy decorative clouds. Classic Midwest August weather. I was still enamored with my new bike, so I stopped periodically and photographed it. After I’d ridden about ten miles, the weather began to change. The sky got a wee bit darker; it looked like we might get a rain shower. I don’t mind riding in a light rain, but I wasn’t sure how an ebike would fare in a shower. So I headed home.

Ebikes were still really uncommon in 2020. Almost every time I went out for a ride, somebody would stop me and quiz me about it. How far could it go, how fast was it, was it expensive, where did I get it, was it different from a regular bike, why were the tires so fat, was it cheating? On this day six years ago, as I was riding down a street that would some day become a new housing development, a city worker flagged me down to ask questions.

We chatted about the bike and about the housing development, and as we talked a tornado siren began to blare. That’s not an unusual occurrence in August, but it’s normally in conjunction with a thunderstorm. It still looked like we might get a bit of rain, but clearly there was no thunderstorm. So we ignored the siren. After a couple of minutes, it went silent.

Before the second tornado siren sounded.

A few minutes later, it sounded again. It still didn’t look like we were facing any sort of seriously bad weather, but a second tornado siren suggests we should pay more attention. The city worker and I both checked our phones. As we did, the wind began to pick up. This is what I saw on my phone.

The city worker climbed back into his truck; I got back on the bike. I was only about four miles from home, so I wasn’t particularly concerned. Then a third tornado siren went off. And the sky got really dark and the wind became pretty insistent. There was still no rain, but there was a radical drop in temperature. I could see bad weather behind me, so for the first time ever, I put the bike in a higher level of pedal assist. There were five levels of pedal assist; I went to level four. With the wind behind me, I was easily cruising just over 20 mph on a 70 pound bicycle.

Let me say this. There’s a weird sort of joy in riding a bike as a bad storm chases after you. Part of it is the drama, of course. The sky getting dark, the wind picking up, the sirens blaring. I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but there’s something perversely thrilling about being in a situation that’s out of your control, and dealing with it, and getting away with it. That was one of the things I liked most about being a PI. This situation was definitely out of my control and I was dealing with it, but I had yet to get away with it.

Ginger, my partner, had obviously heard the sirens; she had the garage door open for me. I rode directly into the garage, got off the bike, and closed the door just as the rain began. I was laughing at having escaped the storm, still unaware of what had actually been chasing me. I went to a window and looked out. This is what I saw.

This was the second ‘first ever’ event. I’d never heard the term derecho before. A derecho is a widespread weather system of straight wind reaching at least 60 mph along a front of at least 240 miles lasting at least six hours. This derecho had winds of 120-140 mph (in Iowa); it lasted about eight hours, causing astonishing amount of damage across several states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

There was no prior warning of this storm in Iowa. Weather forecasts didn’t show the possibility of a derecho occurring until it was already happening. The system developed rapidly and arrived unexpectedly. As the storm traveled east, of course, more communities were warned, but locally it was an absolute surprise.

I got back on my bike the next day to survey the damage. It was easier to travel by bike than by car; fallen trees, downed power lines, and debris blocked several city streets and the city’s network of multi-use paths, as well as most of the bike trails.

The storm caused over $11 billion in damages. It’s taken years to rebuild. Although most of the communities have recovered physically from that derecho, trees are slower to replace. You can still see the damage along some of the more rural bike trails. This section of the Heart of Iowa trail is still littered with fallen and partially denuded trees.

The Heart of Iowa trail hasn’t fully recovered.

It was a hell of a storm. Six years ago today. I’m still cycling, although I’ve bought a newer, lighter, more maneuverable ebike. But as I ride along the more rural bike trails, I still see evidence of the derecho. And every time I do, I remember that thrilling, harrowing, frenzied race to get home, and I’m grateful for the invention of pedal assist.

You can read more about that derecho at this site by the National Weather Service.

against my better judgment

Posted on July 23, 2026 by greg

Sometimes the forces of popular culture ensnare you. Most of the time you can ignore them, but every so often some slippery bastard finds its way past your guard. Then one day, against your better judgment, you too put your baseball cap on backwards. One day, you too join Instagram. One day, you too watch KPop Demon Hunters or Severance. One day, you too drink kombucha. One day, against your better judgment, you too play pickleball. It’s not so much that you want to do these things; it’s just that you find yourself thinking, “I dunno, maybe I’m missing out on something? Maybe? What the hell, I’ll try it.”

One day, against my better judgment, I bought the book Dungeon Crawler Carl and turned to page one.

For the last year or so I’ve seen Dungeon Crawler Carl (let’s just agree to call it DCC) mentioned on various social media. I thought it was possibly the stupidest book title I’d ever encountered, but beyond that I gave DCC no real thought. Then, about a month ago, my niece mentioned it. We often discuss books and though she’s more sober-minded than I am, I’ve learned to trust her taste. The last time we spoke, she confessed she’d picked up DCC, started to skim it, and couldn’t put it down. She said she was reading the third book in the series. Her husband was on the sixth book.

A few days ago I finished reading a novel and began to cast around for something else to read. Here’s the problem with ebooks; they’re almost designed for impulse buying. I don’t recall what DCC cost, but it was fairly inexpensive. so against my better judgment, I bought it. And started reading it.

Folks, it really is as stupid as it sounds. Possibly even more stupid.

Also? My niece was right; it’s completely engaging. I just bought the second book in the series.

For those of you who are completely and happily unfamiliar with Dungeon Crawler Carl, here’s a brief summary. At 2:23 AM on January 3rd, every structure on Earth that had a roof completely pancaked. Totally flat, smooshing everybody inside (or partially inside).

If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes.

What happens next is…okay, wait, a tangent. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, right? Poet, literary critic, philosopher, theologian in the late 18th and early 19th century. You know, In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree, that Coleridge. One of the things our boy Sam came up with was the concept of poetic faith, which he described as the “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment.” Basically, he was saying readers need to relax into a story and not get fussy about its ‘realism.’ This poetic faith is what allows readers (and movie-goers and television watchers) to set aside their logic and accept a world in which librarians solve murders and sword-wielding women in lingerie-armor fight dragons.

Sam Coleridge would applaud Matt Dinniman, the guy who wrote DCC. Right from page one, the reader has to willingly suspend disbelief like a motherfucker. By the end of Chapter One, you not only have to accept that every structure with a roof gets massively smooshed, you have to accept that what’s left of the Earth gets turned into a subterranean reality game show sponsored by some sort of galactic corporation. A game show that echoes every roleplaying video game ever made, in which the survivors of the Great Smooshing become characters fighting monsters (and sometimes each other) as they move through the various levels of the game, while an intergalactic audience watches.

There is absolutely no way this premise should work. I mean, the first five or six chapters are basically a game tutorial. Carl, of course, was NOT inside at 2:23 AM when the Great Smooshing took place. He was outside his Seattle apartment, wearing only a leather jacket, boxer shorts, and a pair of pink Crocs, trying to coax Donut, his ex-girfriend’s prize Persian cat, back inside. Carl and Donut become unwilling contestants in the game.

I am NOT making this up. That’s the story, these two (it’s not a spoiler to tell you Donut becomes sentient and able to speak) fight their way through various levels of the game dungeon. An inordinate amount of time is spent on Carl and Donut setting up their display menus, killing monsters, adding loot to their inventories, gaining game experience, leveling up, assigning skill points.

This should NOT WORK AS A NOVEL. But it does.

Why? For several reasons. First, obviously, is the developing relationship between Carl and Donut. Anybody who has ever shared space with a different species (cat, dog, ferret, snake, doesn’t matter) will identify with this. Like any relationship, it evolves as the characters experience the world and change. The relationship shifts through various stages from ‘Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s annoying cat’ to ‘Carl and Donut.’ And you sense the relationship will continue to evolve in future books.

Second, periodically we’re reminded that the Great Smooshing was an incredibly traumatic event. Not only that, but the injustice of forcing the few survivors to fight for their survival—sometimes against each other—as a form of entertainment is a recurring emotional trauma. And even though the reader knows Carl and Donut will survive their adventures (at least for now), other characters don’t. Carl often has to decide how far he’ll go to survive and/or keep Donut alive. There’s real emotion here.

Third, the story addresses issues involving the entertainment industry in general and game shows in specific, as well as aspects of corporate greed. To improve their slim odds of survival, Carl and Donut need to be popular, to attract fans of the show. That can mean killing in spectacularly gory ways. This is made more problematic when they discover the ‘monsters’ they fight are essentially replaceable slave labor, whose suffering is real.

I used to teach fiction writing. I always told my students that a writer has one overarching job: to get the reader to keep turning the page. Yes, there are hundreds of other things writers need to do, but if you want people to read your work, you have to find ways to make the reader want to turn the page—to need to turn the page, to find out what happens next.

Matt Dinniman does his job well. He’s got me turning pages. Is this art? Nope. Is it literature? Nope. But it’s solid, clever, thoughtful workmanship. I don’t know how many books are in this series. I don’t know if I’ll read them all.

But I know I’ll read the next one.

may in monochrome

Posted on June 14, 2026 by greg

A few days ago I posted some photographs I shot during a rainstorm, which disrupted a planned photowalk. I casually mentioned it was difficult to think in terms of color having just spent “a month of shooting mostly monochrome.” And I realized, I’d failed to write about my May in Monochrome project. So…here.

May is the month when Spring really takes hold. April gets credit for getting it started, but May is when everything seems to change overnight. That whole April-showers-May-flowers business is pretty accurate. May is a colorful month.

So what in the hell was I thinking when I decided to do a month-long monochrome project in May?

I suspect it had something to do with the release of the Ricoh GR IV Monochrome camera back in February. Even though I’m not considering buying one (at least not until they come out with a 40mm equivalent model), I checked out a lot of reviews of the camera. That means I saw a LOT of amazing black-and-white photographs. (Okay, I suppose we have to address the “Is there a difference between ‘monochome’ and ‘black-and-white’?” question. Technically, the answer is yes; monochrome means ‘one color’; we’re talking a single base color along with its different shades and tones. You could, for example, do a monochromatic photo in shade of red. But for most photographers, we use the terms interchangeably. Sometimes because ‘monochrome’ sounds more cool, sometimes (as in my case) it’s because we’re lazy and it takes fewer characters to type than ‘black-and-white. It takes even fewer characters to type ‘BW’ so guess what I’ll be doing for the rest of this post.)

I grew up shooting BW. That was mainly because BW film was less expensive than color film and much easier to process in the darkroom. But shooting BW taught me a lot about line and form and tonality. The release of the new Ricoh camera got me jonesing for BW again, so I decided to devote a month to shooting mostly monochrome. It was just my luck that the new Ricoh happened just before May.

Just to be clear, when I say I shoot BW, I mean exactly that. I never (well, almost never) shoot in color then shift to BW in post-processing. When I shoot BW, I set my camera to BW; everything I see in the viewfinder (or on the display, with the Ricoh) is in BW. I do that to remove the distraction of color. I want to see the world in shades of tone rather than hues of color. When you strip away color, then texture, contrast, light, shadow, and specularity become more critical.

There’s a better than even chance you’re not familiar with the term specularity. It refers to they way light reflects off various surfaces. When light hits a flat surface (like the side of the buildings in the first photo or the surface of the pond in the second) it reflects differently than when it reflects off the rough, bristly side of a longhorn steer. That specularity becomes significantly more important in BW. Specularity makes you decide whether you want hard, sharp, contrasty images or soft diffuse ones. I say ‘you’ have to decide, but in truth the subject matter is often the deciding factor.

If I’m shooting in the city, I tend to go more contrasty (I’m pretty sure that’s actually a word) than when I’m shooting in the countryside.

Removing color from a photograph removes any number of visual distractions. Oddly enough, that makes it more difficult to shoot good images. An ‘okay’ color photo can, to some extent, be rescued by the introduction of interesting colors. They draw the eye; color can be visually satisfying in itself. With BW obviously, there’s no ‘interesting color’ rescue. The image succeeds or fails entirely on its composition and tonality. BW photography is more unforgiving.

Earlier, I noted that when I shoot BW, I set the camera to BW. A lot of photographers choose to shoot in what’s called RAW format. This captures ALL of the physical information about the intensity and color of the light, which necessarily means it produces an image of unprocessed color. RAW files are meant to be processed later on the computer; they allow you the most control over the final image. In truth, RAW files will produce ‘better’ monochrome photographs.

So why don’t I do that? I’m not entirely sure. I tell myself it’s because when I shoot BW, I want to commit to the image. I don’t want to turn a color image into a BW image. But, again, it might be because I’m lazy and don’t want to spend the time fussing with a lot of post-processing.

The thing about BW photography is that it feels timeless. I admit, that sentence reads like the sort of bullshit photography purists say when they want you to take them seriously. But there’s some Truth to it. The photograph above, shot in May of 2026, could just as easily have been shot in May of 1986 (the apartment building in the center of the frame was built in 1985). The longhorn cow and calf could have been shot in the 1930s. That’s part of the appeal, isn’t it.

It was fun and challenging to spend a month shooting mostly monochrome. But I’m not likely to do this again, at least not in the foreseeable future. I’ll still shoot BW photos when I see something that feels like it should be shot in BW, just like I always do. But after a while I deeply missed color. Some images are just better in color. In the selfie above, that ceramic cat is orange; the roof of that building in the background is bright blue; the wallpaper was a soft sort of lavender; the sewing machine was hot pink. There’s nothing wrong with the selfie in monochrome; it’s just incomplete.

Maybe that’s the thing. Maybe that’s the challenge. Some images can feel complete (or more complete) in monochrome. And some just can’t. The photographer has to be able to know the difference.

in which i look at an old photo (part 9)

Posted on May 24, 2026 by greg

Back in May of 2024 I read an article that suggested photographers could benefit from looking at their old photos as if they were made by a different person. At the time, I was skeptical about the idea, but what the hell…I did it anyway. And here’s me doing it again, for the 9th time.

What’s weird is the fact that I’ve never been at all interested in looking at my old photos. I understand a lot of photographers do that, but it never made much sense to me. I mean, I shot those photos; I know what they look like. I’ve already seen them; I want to see something new.

Without rereading the original post (or the original article), I can’t quite recall the actual point of this exercise. I think the idea was that by looking at one of your old photos as if some other photographer had shot it, you can learn more about yourself as a photographer. That doesn’t sound quite right, but I’m pretty sure it had something to do with dissociating yourself from your work and evaluating it. Whatever the point was, it was apparently enough for me to go rummaging through my digital archives.

Which brings me to this:

I shot this about two months after buying my first digital camera–an Olympus C770UZ. We’re talking four megapixels. I’d put away my Canon A1 a couple years earlier, bored with photography (most of the photos I’d shot in the preceding years were job-related: forensic photos of crime scenes or surveillance photos). A friend had bought one of those Olympus cameras and it looked like fun. So I bought one and started playing with it.

This photo was shot at night, a 15 second exposure, illuminated with a flashlight. It’s just one of my old arson boots, jammed full of dead grass I’d gathered during the day, and set on top of a clay flowerpot. No idea why; I must have been in a Dadaist mood. I even gave the photo a title: Vase.

You know, I’m starting to understand some of the value of looking at old photos. I was a lot more playful with photography back then. I think having a digital camera–being liberated from the expense and constraints of film–gave me more freedom to just try weird shit and immediately get a sense of whether that weird shit worked. I recall getting several friends to simultaneously throw objects into the air, which I’d then photograph. Things like footwear or toys or pieces of fruit, hovering in the air.

Now I think of it, my first foray into Instagram was a project I called Things on a Table, which had a somewhat Dadaist anti-art nonsensical vibe, and was also sparked by the purchase of new tech; in this case, a cellphone with a decent camera. Since it wasn’t a ‘real’ camera and Instagram wasn’t a ‘serious’ photo app, I could just fiddle around with them. The project involved finding a thing, putting that thing on a glass-topped patio table, then photographing the thing. I wrote about Things on a Table back in 2014.

I may have to consider doing some sort of Dadaist project. Preferably one that doesn’t require buying new tech.

thisness and whatness and something more

Posted on April 21, 2026 by greg

I find I’m less and less interested in photographing stuff. By stuff, I mean things. Objects. Including people. Back in the late 1980s, William Eggleston declared, “I am at war with the obvious.” I’m not at war with it; I’m just no longer interested in it.

When you photograph things…and it doesn’t really matter what that thing is… you’re basically saying THIS is important. This thing, this object, this building, this person, this whatever. It’s an acknowledgment that THIS very specific, individual thing is worth your attention. Almost all photography is about THIS. I’ve spent most of my life photographing THIS. Look at THIS. This is how I see THIS.

There’s a term for that–the ‘thisness’ of things. Haecceity. Yeah, it looks like I just chucked a bunch of vowels and consonants into a jar and shook them up, but it’s an actual word (by the way, it’s pronounced hek-SEE-ity; I know you’re wondering about that). It refers to the unique, irreducible, often undefinable properties and aspects of a thing that distinguishes it from all other similar things. It’s what makes each identical twin an individual. It’s what makes your dog special. It’s what makes that elm tree distinct from all other elm trees. It’s the dings and dents and scars of life that makes this different from all of that. It’s the thisness of a thing.

If you’re interested in learning more about the concept of haecceity, do a search on John Duns Scotus, the 13th century Franciscan friar who put it together. I considered adding some of that in his post, but decided I’d rather pound a nail through my foot. My specific individual foot.

Much (maybe most) photography is an attempt to capture the haecceity of a thing. Every photograph of, say, a flower is an attempt to reveal the beauty of that specific individual flower. Every photograph of a water tower or a puppy or a pickup truck or a pair of old boots is an attempt to say THIS puppy or THIS boot is unique and special and is worthy of my attention. And let’s face it, most of those attempts fail.

Instead of capturing the haecceity of the thing, we more often capture the quiddity of the thing. Yes, quiddity is also a real word. It refers to the qualities and properties a thing shares with others of its kind. That photograph of the puppy or the boot is more likely to reveal a sense of puppyness or bootness. It’s the whatness of the thing…the thing that makes it a puppy or a boot.

That’s not a criticism. Depicting the essence of puppyness or bootness can be captivating. People familiar with that specific puppy or that particular boot may recognize it as an individual, but a lot of folks will look at your photograph of a puppy or an old boot and think, “Yeah, now THAT is what I call a boot, right there.” Which is another way of saying they appreciate its bootness.

I began this by saying I’m less and less interested in photographing stuff. These days I’m less interested in the thisness or the whatness of things. I still shoot those photos, of course. It’s most of what I shoot. But for the last few years I find myself trying to photograph something less tangible, and I’m not even sure I know how to describe it. I want to photograph…I don’t know, moods? States of mind? An ambiance maybe. A feeling.

I want to shoot photos that can express a sense of what it’s like to be there.

Yesterday on Bluesky I posted this photograph. It’s not about the haecceity of the dog (who was a wonderfully irreducible and highly individual dog named Luka) or his quiddity (although there was a lot of dogness going on with Luka) or the guy or the street or the city. It’s not about any THING.

I want it to be about being up early on a wet, chilly morning, bringing take-home breakfast back to your apartment while gainfully employed people pass by, isolated in their cars, trying to get to work on time. I want it to be about the dampness of the air and the noise and smell of traffic and the softer sound of a dog’s feet on cement. I want it to be about two beings who care for each other and are comfortable in their companionship, even though they’re of different species.

I want it to be about all of those things. But that’s a lot to cram into a photograph, and I don’t feel like I succeeded. It’s not quite there–not quite what I want it to be–but I like to think I’m getting closer.

in which i fuck up (but still have fun)

Posted on March 1, 2026 by greg

Let me first say this: I enjoy the hell out of my wee Ricoh GR3X camera. I’ve owned and used lots of cameras over the years, but I’ve never had one that suits my approach to photography so perfectly. I love that I can quickly shift between full manual control (which is a slower process but gives me control over every aspect of the exposure) and a setting that allows me choose the aperture I want and let the camera handle the rest (which is quicker and far more useful for street photography).

Last Friday I took a walk and decided to try something new. For the first hour or so, I’d shoot entirely in monochrome using the street settings AND I wouldn’t chimp the results. (For non-photographers, ‘chimping’ is reviewing the photos you just shot, which can inspire you to go “Ooh ooh” like a chimpanzee.) The second half of the walk, I’d shoot normally.

This where I fucked up. I somehow managed to change the street settings so the camera’s ISO was set to a minimum of 6400. What does that mean? ISO refers to the standardized scale that measures the sensitivity of a digital camera’s sensor to light. All you really need to know is this: the higher the ISO, the more ‘noise’ you see in the final image. In daytime, standard ISO settings are usually between 100 to 400. I was noodling around with an ISO that was at least sixteen times higher than normal. The result? Images like this:

As you can see, noisy. But because I was refusing to chimp, I was unaware of the problem. So for an hour or so, I kept wandering, kept looking at stuff, kept shooting at the wrong ISO. When I saw a pair of workmen–one prone on the sidewalk with his head inside a manhole, the other feeding some sort of conduit tubing into the hole–laboring with the golden dome of the State Capitol Building behind them, I paused long enough to shoot a photo. I was confident I composed a decent shot, and the camera did its best to find a correct exposure based on the settings…but yeah, noise.

The thing is, I’ve learned to trust the camera. I’ve learned it’s incredibly responsive, that (assuming I’ve set it up properly) it allows me to shoot quickly, reflexively, on impulse. For example, I saw this tattooed guy in a tee shirt, toting bags of groceries, and wearing a ski mask. He was at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic light to turn (or for the traffic to ease up enough for him to jaywalk). There was no time to properly compose a shot, but with the Ricoh all I had to do was react. I simply raised the camera in his direction and pressed the shutter button. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Except, of course, for that ISO of 6400.

Noisy. Harsh. But I can’t blame the camera. I’m the one who fucked up. I’m not saying these photograph would have been great if I hadn’t fucked up, but they’d have been…well, better.

And that’s okay. Making mistakes is human, right? And I’m an avid believer in what Alfred Stieglitz called ‘practicing in public.’ He wrote,

“Some people go on the assumption that if a thing is not a hundred percent perfect it should not be given to the world… Either you feel that a thing must be perfect before you present it to the public, or you are willing to let it go out even knowing that it is not perfect, because you are striving for something even beyond what you have achieved.

I wouldn’t claim these photographs are ‘given to the world.’ More like inflicted on the world. But yeah, I’m surely ‘striving for something beyond what I’ve achieved.’ Because what I’ve achieved here is that I fucked up. I suspect I’ll continue to fuck up on (I hope) an irregular basis.

Despite fucking up, I still had a good time. I not only believe in practicing in public, I also believe any walk on a sunny day is a good walk. And I believe in the reality of the Happy Accident, of which I have some evidence: I actually rather like the final ISO-fucked photo, which happens to be a selfie.

things i’d like to see in 2026

Posted on January 2, 2026 by greg

2025 sucked, don’t even try to tell me otherwise. 2026 has the potential to be better, though it could implode at any moment. Nothing is certain. However, in a feeble attempt to be optimistic, I’ve make a list of things I’d like to see in 2026. I don’t expect to see any of them, but hey, there’s no harm in hoping.

Anyway, in no particular order, I’d like to see:

local municipal police officers arresting ICE agents for violating the law. These assholes are running wild in the street and ain’t nobody holding them to account. Arrest them, cuff them, give them a fair trial.
sensible legislation limiting e-motos. I’m talking about these stubby bastards. They’re sold as ebikes, but they’re not intended to be ridden like bikes. I don’t have anything against them as a mode of transportation, but the sad reality is a LOT of these e-motos are ridden by assholes. Assholes ruin everything.
speaking of bikes, I’d like to see more people dressed in normal clothes on bikes. This isn’t a dunk on folks who wear lycra and ride road bikes. I’d just like to normalize cycling as transportation, not just as a form of exercise.
women in US films & television shows that look like actual women wearing actual women’s clothing with sensible shoes instead of models in high heels. Give me more Sarah Lancashires, more Olivia Colmans, more Susan Wokomas, more Lesley Manvilles. Give me women who can act, not just look good. (Okay, we have Merritt Wever in the US, who is fucking amazing; give me more Merritt Wevers too.)
Donald J. Trump in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit…in a coffin.

quiet spaces. Deliberately quiet spaces, both indoors and outdoors, both public and commercial. Not silent spaces; just quiet. Spaces where you can have a conversation. Coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, and other businesses that commit to quietness should be given tax breaks.
Brett Kavanaugh busted for DWI.
a mini-series based on Ellen Kushner’s novel Swordspoint. Or any of her novels, really.
billionaires taxed out of existence. There’s no reason for billionaires to exist. Nobody has any real use for that much money. Every dollar somebody ‘earns’ over a billion dollars should be taxed at 100%. I mean, c’mon, if you spent US$100 thousand every single day, it would take you more than 27 years to spend a billion dollars. That’s just nuts.
more dedicated infrastructure for bicycles and other forms of mobility. I’m talking about bike lanes and secure bicycle parking. We should really make it safe and easy for not just cyclists to get around, but also folks in wheelchairs (and we should subsidize motorized wheelchairs to a much greater extent). We should drastically decrease car dependency (and the operative term there is ‘dependency’).
much much much more funding for the Arts. All sorts of arts, and especially weird esoteric arts, even if we don’t like them. Hell, we should encourage people–ordinary people–to take up any form of expression. I’d go so far as to support accordion players and mimes. It would make people happier, and lawdy, we need happier people.
also, Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Cen…well, from everything.
capes for mail carriers. These people are fucking heroes; they deserve capes.

Okay, that’s enough. None of these things will happen (although I think there’s a decent chance Comrade Trump will go toes up in the next 12 months), but they’re still it’s nice to think about. Oh, wait. I forgot one.

I’d like to see the patriarchy smashed into tiny shards, those shards ground into the finest dust, that dust buried deep in the earth, and the earth above it salted so that nothing will grow there for a thousand years. Or so.

There. Done.

Editorial Note: By the way, the illustration is a wood engraving by Frederick Sandys from the early 1860s. It’s called ‘The Old Chartist.’ Chartism was a British working class movement that called for 1) the vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above (women, of course, were totally fucked), 2) secret ballots, 3) no property qualification to be a Member of Parliament, 4) payment for Members (so working men could temporarily leave their regular employment to work in the public interest), 5) annual elections. These were radical wishes unlikely to occur, much like my wishlist above.

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