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- “Rock n’ roll! It’s the music of puberty.” — Suzi Quatro
- 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Twelfth Night: or, What You Will
- “Literature is the written expression of revolt against expected things.” Happy Birthday to the least happy man ever, Thomas Hardy
- “I’m not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.” – Marilyn Monroe
- “[My ambition is to] give something to our literature which will be our own.” — Walt Whitman
- “I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.” — Agnès Varda
- “I never made a message picture, and I hope I never do.” — Howard Hawks
- “If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.” — poet Countee Cullen
- Reviews: Currents (2026)
- Reviews: Forge (2026)
Recent Comments
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- sheila on “Rock n’ roll! It’s the music of puberty.” — Suzi Quatro
- Lyrie on “Rock n’ roll! It’s the music of puberty.” — Suzi Quatro
- Maddy on “I’m not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.” – Marilyn Monroe
- Mike Molloy on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Much Ado About Nothing
- sheila on “I never made a message picture, and I hope I never do.” — Howard Hawks
- Bryan Summers on “I never made a message picture, and I hope I never do.” — Howard Hawks
- Lyrie on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
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- sheila on The Books: “Awake and Sing” (Clifford Odets)
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- sheila on “Listen, I never meant to make money. I never wanted it. I’m a singer, man.” — Gene Vincent
- Pat on “Listen, I never meant to make money. I never wanted it. I’m a singer, man.” — Gene Vincent
- sheila on “There’s nobody as good as the Ramones, never will be.” — Joey Ramone
- Jincy Willett on “There’s nobody as good as the Ramones, never will be.” — Joey Ramone
- sheila on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Hamlet
- Biff Dorsey on 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Hamlet
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I love your photos. You could just fall into them. Nice eye. On that last one, I keep shifting back and forth on whether something is about to begin or something has just ended. I suppose it depends on one’s frame of mind.
Thanks for your comment!
The funny thing about the second one is that over to the right is an enormous raucous group of drunken people – Patrick, all his friends, just a HUGE crowd – but right there in front of me was this pristine red-leather emptiness. You’d never know from the photo that a huge group clustered on the edges of it!
I’m so jealous that you got to hang out with Patrick. No one has ever made me cry with laughter more than him when I read his blog.
Sheila, I love the lighting in the second one. What settings did you have the camera on? Was it auto w/ the flash off, or did you have the settings manually adjusted? Effin great picture.
Noonz – yeah, the flash was NOT on … I like to use the setting ISO on my camera – that seems to capture what I actually SEE in dim-lit atmospheres- as opposed to over-lighting something. Basically – it “reduces blur” in low-lit scenes.
Cool. Yeah, I detest using the flash, because it ruins indoor pics. Your camera handles the ISO setting really well. On mine, when I manually set it to say, ISO 800, I usually get grain-o-vision. It’s usually when i’m trying to shoot something not easy like a car interior (a nightmare I have not fully overcome). I love your shot because it doesn’t look grainy at all. The light playing off the seats in the foreground is nice, too.
Noonz- I tried to take pictures of my car’s interior and they came out crapola!!
I like natural light … and if it’s a dusky twilit scene, then I want that feel in my photo – without having to sacrifice clarity. It’s hard.
I also have a setting that I experiment with – the “night scene without flash” – which is somehow different from ISO … not sure how … I’ve had okay results with that (but just okay) … ISO is my standby … my twilit or dawn pictures of the skyline where the light is low and I want the contrast – are pretty much all ISO.
What I’ve figured out (with my camera, at least), is that to get a good shot of the car interior, I have to go into the manual mode and play with the ISO, aperture, and exposure settings until i get something with minimal grain. I can also dial back the flash intensity in that same menu, which helps a lot because you can minimize its effect and keep that natural light look you want. (The day this all became clear to me, it was like having an epiphany).
Of course, the problem is that sometimes I HAVE to kill the flash to get the right lighting, and the taking of the photograph without blur, etc requires the steady hands of a bomb squad technician. I don’t have those, most of the time. So to get a dumb shot of a speedometer, for example, I’ll often have to sift through 13 blur-o-vision pics to find The One.
Some of the other guys at AB are like, “Dude, you need to buy a DSLR.” Those do offer a ridiculous amount of flexibility, but they’re $$$$. Plus, I now have a chip on my shoulder re: my instamatic-type digicam. If I can take good enough pics with a $200-some-odd camera, why splurge for a $1K plus rig?
FYI: Let me know when you get bored with this conversation, as I can BS about this stuff all day.