New office!

I took an office in the Highland Park area with Rob (top left) in an old school (actual school) building owned by David (top center). In the basement there is a darkroom where Rob and Bob (top right) throw down ye olde chemicals for developing and printing. I'll join them down there at some point I'm sure.

Now and then, Kevin drops in to read Walker Percy* books and write some words himself.

Not that it matters too terribly much, but I shot these with the ole Leica on bulk rolled film, rolled by Rob, developed by Rob, scanned by me. Totally dirty scans...some scratches too. Oh well. Tomorrow, another 8x10 shot....maybe two?

*our building was in some way used by Walker Percy WAY back in the day.

Day 271

Day 221

Kevin Wilder taking a gander at an advance reader of Dr. Frank's new novel Andromeda Klein.

Day 150

And that concludes Kevin and Juanita week. We here at Cary Mills appreciate your support.


If all is going as planned, I should be on my way to Japan now. This will be the last electric lion until I find a way to make it happen, which, in theory, could be when I get back.

Camera / Nerd info about my trip--I am taking the following cameras and stuff:

5D (and some sort of lens)
Lomo
8mm camera (Nicole is picking up a couple more cartridges at B&H)
Crappy digital camera
various readers and hard drives and stuff
lil superstar (thats the name of my tiny, tiny hackintosh)



I really debated bring my 4x5 but I just can't seem to do it.

Day 149

So this is one of my favorites. I decided to leave it for Friday to end the week on a positive note.

Tomorrow is the end of this glorious week. Stay tuned for the final photo of Juanita tomorrow.

Day 148

This is about the only serious photo i took the whole day with Kevin and his dog. The rest were intentionally awful in some way.

Day 147

This is just painful.

Day 145

This sweet, glorious week of Kevin Wilder awesomeness continues with this beast of a photo. Come on, let him in...he wants to talk to you about cookies, magazine subscriptions, and/or possibly a cult. Are you telling me you can't trust that smile?

















[give him your money. go on, do it.]

Day 135

So, today I ate lunch with Caleb and we chatted about a portrait idea I have for the authors of Some New Trend that in some way involves either borrowing Alan's 4x5 (which has a PC Sync built into the shutter) OR figuring out a way to make my old Speed Graphic sync with...well..anything. I have an old Pacemaker Speed Graphic which is only equipped with a Bipost sync for old school flash bulbs and such. See below:



So, if you are even vaguely familiar with flashes or strobes and how to hook them up you'll realize this is a connector you may never have seen. This is even older than the household plug style (I think?). Anyway...the bottom line is I have connector that could realistically connect to the Bipost. I did some digging online (shocker) and found some info (a while back) and (just now today) decided to try to cobble together my old cord (instead of buying a custom cord). I had an extra, short PC Sync > 3.5mm cord hanging around so I clipped and stripped it to see if i could manually wrap the wires around the posts and get the shutter trip to close the circuit. Well...straight away that worked. I hooked the wires to the posts and plugged in the 3.5mm jack thing into the Pocket Wizard which trigged my flash perfectly.

The next step is to find a better way to make the cords stay on the Bipost so I rummaged through my box of cords and found an old hard drive closure power supply that had a cord (it was one of those cords that are in two pieces. One piece from wall to transformer, another fixed cord that goes from transformer to the device) looked like the cord you'd plug into your old school electric razor...the two little hole things. Perfect. Only, it was larger than the electric razor ones (which people had said work) so I had to hack the shit out of it do some surgery on it so I could make it pinch together and cram on the posts.

IT FREAKING WORKED.





So now I have a custom cord made from crap I had lying around anyway. I set up the camera, ghetto-cord, pocket wizard, and then a flash with umbrella and another PW. Busted out the 4x5 polaroid (gotta have instant gratification on this one) and made Kevin stand in, as he was in the studio writing (see Some New Trend link above) for a test shot. (Anyone sick of my parentheses yet?)

Focus. Close shutter. Pull polaroid thingy. Click. Close and remove polaroid. Wait. Pull polaroid.

Well, shit. It didn't look like it fired.

The tests looked fine. I.e. it seemed the flash was firing during the exposure. It apparently wasn't.

I have read about a small capacitor that may need to be shorted out in the bipost BUT the F-X setting for the bipost (as seen above) is SUPPOSED to be 0ms and thus should fire the flash when I ask it to. For now it doesn't. Or it may have. The above photo of Kevin is the second shot I took of him and I had the umbrella on the other side and it LOOKS like it filled his right side even with the ambient. But then, I can't really tell. There seems to be a small catch in his eye (our right, his left) but who knows.

So my next test will be to create ANOTHER cord to serve as the sync cord and go straight from the Bipost to a strobe pack. Too lazy to bust them out tonight. If that doesn't work...I'll have to dig more. And if I can't make it work I'll just borrow a more modern 4x5 to shoot SNT stuff. I'd hate to just shoot it digital. Gross.

Okay thats the end of the nerd out.


And just a note of goodness. I've been listening to Damien Jurado a ton today. I suggest him for what ails you. He posted a couple of new random tracks on his space. Solid, of course.

Day 131

So, today I managed to grab Caleb to go on a tiny pointless road trip. We ended up in Good Hope, which is about 45 minutes north of Birmingham and not an area I know well, or really at all. It was mostly driving around with the windows down looking at nice green land and ended with Caleb playing ukulele in Smith Lake and me taking a couple of 4x5s of it.

Later this evening I took a couple of frames of Kevin Wilder of Some New Trend fame. Here is one of those....Caleb to come tomorrow.

Day 129

Day 065

Kevin + Grilled Cheese

I forget what I shot today. Steph is in town.

Day 039

Kevin from a while back.

Man I can't wait for Africa film.

Day 358

a make shift thingy while im gone. kevin. being awesome.

Day 352

kevin as the CEO of this blue wall. or maybe the koufax bohemian club.

Day 343

more testing of the thing. i hate lighting.

Day 306

so today's post is of Kevin Wilder. Kevin is a writer who works out of my studio and is, as of this day, starting National Novel Writing Month yet again. he and a good chunk of my friends have done it for a few years and i even tried it one year to no real avail. the goal is 50,000 words over the span of a month. i got 1000 words in, drew a picture and counted that picture as 1000 words and "finished" 48k short. im decidedly not a writer.

i need to photographer all my nanowrimo friends.

but also speaking of kevin...he and i are in a pretty bad ass band called Cat Steve Evans. Cat Steve Evans is a sister band to the great ukulele tour de force called Ukesex, which is produced in association with the lovely stephanie's personal Uke project called Uke A Million.

and speaking of uke a million, be sure to check out a brand new song on the ukeamill blog. its steph and myself doing a damien jurado song (matinee).

>THIS WAY TO THE UKE BLOG


****As of right now, the compture got weird and the song may not be posted. its not great anyway but i played uke. whatever.

Day 257

i love how awkward this turned out.

Day 253

so glad he's back in my life. too bad its just in time for me to leave for 3 weeks.




[ed]



so we leave today! we head to the airport in like 5.5 hours and then there is no looking back. im very excited.

if you need anything photographed in eastern europe, let me know.

i had grand plans to have a good update here before we left but i dont really know what to say.

Day 247