Secret Still

As someone who has been a lover of amphibians and reptiles since literally before I can actually remember anything, I’m not hard to convince that snakes are beautiful. From their fluid movement and delicate texture, to their bright color and silent nature, there’s a lot to be loved about the real inspiration for the word sibilant. So I practically giggled with glee when I found Mark Laita’s collection of photographs titled “Serpentine.” Laita takes amazingly brilliant photos of these incredible animals, capturing their beauty and their character. The execution is simple and elegant and supremely successful. I’d like a giant, full-color print of one of these to put on my wall and stare at, but I will just have to settle for the book that’s coming out in Fall of 2012 like all the other poor schlubs. Fine, that’s fine, I’m gonna turn those pages back and forth until the whole thing falls apart in my hands.

Mark Laita: Serpentine

And now I give you pictures of people with catfish. You’re welcome.

Catfish

Well I thought I had already mentioned Jonathan Levitt here, but looking back through old posts I have proven that idea wrong. Once step closer to absolute truth. Allow me to put things to right by saying that I spent about half an hour today looking at Levitt’s personal photo blog rather than doing all the things I get paid to do. TIME THEFT! Most of what I learned from my time wasting is that Mr. Levitt leads a more entertaining and certainly more photogenic life than I do, or at least is better at seeing things that way. But I think I can get to that level, I’ll just need a better career, a better camera, and better friends. How hard do you think it would be to fake my own death and start over?

Jonathan Levitt

LA photographer Lou Mora seems like a genuinely happy, really nice guy; the kind of guy you always want to succeed no matter how you feel about the rest of the world. That in itself would be enough for me to support him, but luckily he’s also an incredibly talented photographer. He manages to capture that beautifully crafted, seemingly effortless moment that comes off as something personal and natural. Notice I said “seemingly effortless,” because he is damn sure working his ass off for those shots. I’ve said it before, but photography is an art that anyone can practice, but that very few are any good at. There are a million variables that go into a good shot, and not enough control over all of them to be certain each time that everything won’t be ruined. For Lou Mora all those variables line right up and pause for that one brief click of the shutter.

Lou Mora

As more and more people are starting to Tumbl, there’s actually some variation in the content away from animated dancing gifs and pictures of Suicide Girls. People are starting to use it in newer, more interesting ways. William Matthew Valle is a 19-year old culinary school grad, and he takes pictures of food. Great, so does almost every bubbly, hungry chick in a big city who refers to herself as a “foodie.”

Tangent: I was once in a class where the instructor was making small talk with us before we got started. She was from Minneapolis, and flew out California a few times a year for this class. The conversation turned to food. When asked where she liked to eat here in the Bay Area, she responded, “Nowhere really. I’m kind of a foodie, so I have really high standards when it comes to food. The Bay Area doesn’t really have that much to offer.” I’m not a foodie. I love good food, and I celebrate both eating and making it, and all the aspects of that artform, however, I eat taco bell and frozen pizzas and whatever the hell else I can get my hands on when I’m hungry. I also like the Bay Area, plenty of good things here, but it’s not really my ideal for a place to live. I don’t celebrate its majesty or anything. All that being said, if you genuinely enjoy food as an art and derive enjoyment from it tasting delicious, there are not a lot of places that beat the Bay Area. The point being, that woman is a moron. I saw her eat two bags of sun chips and a drumstick ice cream cone for breakfast. This illustrates why I hate people who call themselves foodies.

Back to my main point: William Matthew Valle has a Tumblr called French Cuisse in which he exhibits photos of dishes he’s made next to photos of the ingredients organized neatly. It’s simple, colorful and beautiful, just like his dishes, and it makes my hands and mind want to be cooking. Since what I’m concerned with most is beauty and inspiration, I’d say Valle’s site is a winner. And what’s more, I would enjoy eating his food, which is a damn good compliment from anyone to a chef.

French Cuisse

Wrap your lips around a nice, tall glass of Eliot Lee Hazel’s photography, then lay back, turn on some Acid Mother’s Temple, and prepare for things to get weird.

Eliot Lee Hazel

As the Winter here dies off slowly, the rain lessens, the clouds dissipate, and slowly all the gray is replaced with unending, eye-shattering blue from edge to edge. I come from a place where the rain happens in the Summer, and the weight of all that water in the hot air just pins you down. It’s the sweaty, heavy, mouth-breathing  cousin in everyone’s life. And I dig that. But Northern California offers a Summer as mild as its residents, a Summer made to go adventuring, to sit in parks, to ride off into. And that’s reason number one for California having the gigantic population of motorcycles that it does. 10 uninterrupted months of pure gold are available for the outdoor pleasures of everyone here. How can you not want to be pouring yourself through the raw air at top speed with a sleeping bag and a skateboard lashed behind you, ready for all the causalities that lie ahead, pointed toward some great cosmic singularity of all the Summer sunsets waiting for you out there, melding with the 4th dimensionality of yourself into one, long, many-legged beast of past and future and swaying with your impending entropy to the rhythm of piston cycles. Now put that into the cracked and faded memories of some long forgotten album of photos, dusted off in time of quiet to remember when your blood boiled and your heart sang and dust filled the cracks of your fingers. That’s where Eric Loundy’s work lives, in that eternal, golden present, in that endless Summer of dreams, in the hot blacktop and chill ocean winds of exploration, in the fading roar of a machine as it disappears around a bend and out of sight.

Eric Loundy

Max Wanger: photographer, liver of life. Simple, well composed, heartfelt photography that seems to love everything about life, painted in those faded, golden tones of memory and dream. It’s not quite perfection, but if you squint a little you can see it from here.

Max Wanger

I’ve got a big dinner to cook this weekend, so I’ve been looking at thousands of pictures of food recently. This is not a complaint. If someone would pay me to do this, I would say yes and never look back. Hint. What I like to do is this: 1) Brew beer with my friends; 2) Create an elaborate, multi-course meal based around that one type of beer; 3) Design a menu for the meal; 4) Cook and serve. One of the steps that is missing from that list is taking photographs of the cooking, presentation, and enjoyment of the meal. I’m too busy cooking it, and everyone else is too busy drinking beer and having a good time. Aside from having the best name on the internet, Squire Fox is a photographer whose food shots are inspiring enough to make me put down the knife for a minute and get a couple of good shots of the plating. But on top of that his lifestyle shots make me miss the South. Not that that’s a hard thing to do really; I hear a Randy Travis song and I start get misty over the land I left. It’s very emasculating. So thank you, Squire Fox, for making me feel inadequate on two fronts.

Squire Fox

Dear Laura Taylor,

Why does your name sound so damn familiar? I was thinking that before I even found out that you were from Georgia originally, but that little tidbit just makes it more likely that we’ve met. Have we met? I doubt it. I tend not to forget things. Maybe you knew some friends of my friends or something. I mean, Athens was its own little insular community, but when you combine that with the people we all knew in Atlanta, shit, that’s pretty much everyone in North Georgia. Exponential relationships just work that way. Well look, we might have never met, but I like your photography anyway, and we’re living some parallels in that we both came to California from Georgia. And we both clearly love our friends. You show it by photographing them, and I show it by telling them that I had sex with their mothers. I think it’s a gender thing. Your photos are rich and well composed and certainly engaging, but really what I noticed most was that you love the things you’re seeing. Passion for something is rare, and the drive to pursue it above all else even more so, but you seem to have found that the trick is to run right at it with your arms open, laughing. Works for me.

p.s. Please stop shooting your friend Amanda as she is very attractive and I have a girlfriend that I love very much. Life is hard enough as it is.

Regards,
Brad

Laura Taylor