A wooden Japanese mask of “a jealous woman.” On Halloween, Erin wore this with a kimono. She spooked all the neighborhood kids.

I either turned the wheel in a strange way here, or they cut the negatives badly.

I’m into health and safety, but here’s evidence that I’ll play with a camera while driving. Unwise.

I’ve worked in Palo Alto for two weeks. I’m familiarizing myself with one neighborhood. It oozes plainness and strangeness.

My co-engineer at a soon-to-be-renamed startup is Jon. We’ve worked together at two jobs in the past. Working with him again feels triumphant. When our last job ended, I told myself I would take the opportunity to work with Jon if it ever came along. Opportunity knocks.

In Palo Alto I played with double exposures. This portrait of Jon provides me with a good lesson: the light of one exposure can wash out the other. Obvious in retrospect, the lesson is learned.

Trivia night frustrates me because I don’t care to know the answers to most of the questions. But I love spending time with my roommates drinking and chatting. When tonight is trivia night at Cato’s Alehouse, the two come hand in hand.

I bow out before the end to walk up Piedmont Avenue home.

The most well lit signs indicate businesses that have the most to lose.

The moon-sign indicates nothing to lose.

Inspired by Casey’s Framed Fractions, I purchased a Holga 135 from the FourCornerStore.

In past photo experiments I used SLR and digital cameras. They easily answered my biggest questions:

• Where is the edge of the frame?
• What object is in focus?

The Holga is a simpler camera. So simple that it unasks my primary questions. The camera provides neither precise framing nor accurate focus. The viewfinder, wholly independent of the lens, provides only a good estimate of the films edge. The lens offers only a primitive guide for the focus. The Holga’s lack of immediate feedback has led me to an easy-going “best guess” philosophy when pressing the shutter release.

Free of my usual questions, my brain has discovered some obvious new ones. I now question the most obvious subject for this artform: light! The camera is a light-capturing device. I now have all new questions when walking with the camera:

• How much light is there here?
• What speed is the film?
• How much contrast is there in foreground and background light?

As a musician, I’ve felt sensitive to sound for years. I’m excited to be more aware of another wave (and particle) in my environment. And I’m excited to share some of the artifacts of this awareness.

The Lead Ball

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The Zero Gravity Chamber

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