My Relationship With Photography

     Apparently there is something in my family's blood that makes us all interested in photography.  I remember as a small boy that my father would constantly take pictures and he would even develop some of them in our apartment in Brooklyn.  Even as a young boy, I remember asking my dad to teach me about photography but I was always quickly intimidated with all of the information he would throw at me and my pictures were always awful.  They looked as if a chimpanzee had tried to eat the camera and accidentally hit the shutter button.  In all of my pictures, the lens was covered in fingerprints, saliva and hair.

     I never lost the interest in visual arts though.  I just had to change what my preferred method of expression was.  I was more adept with the brush and canvas than I was with a Minolta and film.  Someone once described painting as being all about what you include, while photography was all about what you exclude.  (BTW, I know I butchered that quote, so if you know who said it and what the original quote is, please let me know.)

     In my late 20's I had the great fortune of befriending one of the World's most gifted photographers, Yousef Khanfar.  It was in Yousef's first book "Voices of Light" that I rediscovered my want to capture a frame in time.  I didn't want to just get the moment, but be able to share a certain perspective as well.  Yousef's advice even before I picked up a camera allowed me to study photography and appreciate everything the art was capable of.

     Fast forward 10 years and someone's financial misfortune allowed me to acquire a very good camera at an unbelievably affordable price.  Suddenly, my photography was limited by my own inexperience or inability to get on film what I wanted and not by my camera.  Armed with my Nikon D700, I was ready to take on the world.  Then I started to see other people's photography and what they were doing and I felt like the fat guy that just joined the gym.

     I have recently reconnected with a few distant cousins and they are also into photography.  As I mentioned in my opening statement, it seems that a passion for photography runs in the blood.  Looking at their photography has left me thinking that although I am in the beginning of my journey, that through practice maybe my work can stand up to theirs.  After all, we all came from some common ancestor and there has to be something in our DNA that drew us all to a shared hobby (or profession).

     I share with you all their work.  Please feel free to compliment it (if you have Flickr accounts) or add them to your contact list.  If you live in Sweden and you are looking for a wedding photographer, I recommend Erik Candray.  Just let him know that you were led to him through me.

Thanks all and I will C U @ a show,

AC3

References - 

• Yousef Khanfar Homepage & Portfolio

• Erik Candray Homepage
• Erik Candray Flickr Photostream

• Oscar Candray Flickr Photostream

• Adolfo M. Candray III Flickr Photostream

 

I Gotta Lose Weight Faster Than I'm Losing My Hair....

I always said that if I lose too much hair that I would just shave my head.  I would never want to be one of those guys that refuses to admit they are bald and they do a crazy comb over.  You know the kind, the ones that grow their sideburns really long and stretch it over their barren heads as if they are the grounds crew at Yankee stadium pulling a tarp on a rainy day.

Even worse would be a toupee.  Those bad boys are making a major comeback in the new decade.  Maybe it's just that the people that got them last decade are getting older and there are a bunch of vain baldies that need to go in for a touch-up.  I constantly see these geezers out there that have rugs that have hair like a horse's mane and underneath they get their haircut Jason Statham short.  In the end, they look like they have a sickly rat riding on the top of their head like Michael J. Fox rode that van in Teen Wolf.

So here I sit with a body like "Precious" and hair that is starting to look like Danny DeVito.  In fact, Danny DeVito has a body kind of like Precious', just a lot smaller.  So in the end, I am becoming Danny DeVito, just much much larger.  Great.  I just realized that.  Now I am really depressed!

So my original plan was to shave my head if I lost too much hair.  I wasn't going to try and pretend like I was Donald Trump, I would go down with some dignitiy.  My plan was to find a hot wife before I lost it all and then she would be stuck with me for the rest of my life (I always assumed I would die before any wife I could find, mostly because she would probably kill me -I am that much of a pain to live with).

Now that I have the hot wife, I realized that I need to lose weight before I shave my head.  You see there are no fat, bald guys out there that are stylish in any sort of way.  If you are fat and bald, you just end up looking like a testicle.  And God fobid if you ever stand next to another fat, bald guy, then people will REALLY start to notice!  Even children would point at that and say, "Look Mommy, they look like my hacky-sack after I get out of the shower!"

Who needs that.  Even Michael Chiklis looked in the mirror one day and decided fat and bald or "fald" is no way to go through life.  So now my body is in a race.  My hair and my ass are competing to see who could lose more first.  Don't even get me started on my breasts...


C U @ a show!

AC3

Pleased To Meet You...

So I used to blog pretty regularly back in the day (and the fact that I used the phrase "back in the day means that I am over 35).  I enjoyed blogging because it gave me an avenue to express my thoughts whenever I wasn't up on stage.  As you can guess by my alias, I am a stand up comedian, or at least I was, back when I chose that as the name I would use on everything from XBOX Live to Facebook to my web site.

Fast forward 5 years and now I live in the 9-5 world where your company throws you a biscuit every Friday and you should be grateful for it.  I had to put comedy aside because I am Latino (again, I am sure you figured that out from the name).   As a Latino, I am divorced with kids.  That means that I need to pay child support and alimoney and doing standup does not pay enough for me to follow my dream.  I've always intended on returning to doing standup, but time really does fly.

I guess the hardest part is that I was really good at comedy.  Not to sound too full of myself but I was proud of the fact that I could hold my own next to any comedian, no matter how well they did, or how well they were known.  I've had producers tel me that I was "Old Reliable" and they could give me a tough spot after a comic that did really well, or worse, a comic that did really poorly and just sucked the life out of a room.  I understood the psychology of the room and I had enough jokes in my bag that I could get the crowd back into the show.

In the end, I had done shows with comics like Dave Attell and Jerry Seinfeld.  Even Louis C.K. pulled me aside one night to compliment me.  I really felt like I was doing what I was meant to do. It just felt right.  Unfortunately, comedy is a young person's game and (just like with great power) with age comes great responsibility.  The only thing that keeps me going is thinking about Rodney Dangerfield.  Rodney was a guy that did standup, but had to go back to work.  When Rodney was around 40, he returned to comedy and was a huge success.  Who knows, maybe I can follow in his footsteps.  After all, no one gives me any respect either...

C U @ a show (someday),

AC3