I'm turning 42 in less than 24 hours time. I cant believe that my 20s and 30s have passed by me in literaly the blink of an eye. At 42, I cant say that I feel any differently than when I was 18.....except that maybe I've got to lug around 10 extra kilos of body mass these days. I still admire a pretty girl no differently from 20 years ago....Although now they call me 'uncle' or 'sir'.

The bones are starting to creak a little more these days. Getting up at 4am in the morning to shoot at daybreak is no longer an automatic jump out of bed but rather a process of jump-starting the engine and getting it to warm up before hauling myself out from between the sheets. I no longer sprint but 'quickly amble'.

Whatever physical limits age imposes on me, I know one thing.....I'm still an 18 year old in my mind. Just ask my wife...."Pick up your dirty underwear!", "That's enough (3 pitchers) beer for one night young man!" and my favorite nag "I want you home before 11pm!"

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Raymond my brother just returned home for a 2 week vacation from Portland. His wife and 2 kids did not come this time and it was a real bummer I could not catch hold of his 2 darling children....Catherine and Christopher. Next time.

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I was in Jakarta on business on Thursday and Friday and tried to squeeze in Saturday morning 17 April for a quick shoot with some friends.

I went out shooting in the morning with Ferry Indrawang and 3 other photographers from fotografer.net. It was torture and hell.... I had just gotten back to my hotel at 4am after a hard night of partying with my clients. The vodka, Dom Perignon and the Johnnie Walker Blue Label threatened to keep me in bed and total hangover misery when the phone rang at 6.45am....sharp.

"HEY! You ready? We're at the lobby!" Ferry and his gang had arrived on time to my dismay.

I invited them up to my room on the 52nd floor of the Aston. While they packed the open balcony and blasted away at a glorious sunrise, I stumbled into the toilet and took a quick cold shower to kick start the cylinders and popped some pills for my gout and sugar levels.

Without a coffee, I was barely ready at 7.15am and we left the hotel for the shoot.

That morning we were shooting around the Ben-Hilir market area, about a 15 minute easy walk from the hotel. My stomach was empty and we stopped outside the market and had 'bubur kerupuk' a congee topped with 4 kinds of fish crackers. Washed down with a Tebotol drink, I felt life returning to my body and the world looked a much better place.

A couple of the guys were new to shooting on the streets armed with 28-300 Tamrons and other assorted lenses that allowed them to shoot from distant comfort zones. I passed a little advise and forced them to move in close to work with their subjects (from 20 feet away, I had them move to within 10 feet or less of their subject matters). I hope it helped.

So from 10 feet or so away from their subject, one of them was plainly getting an originally patient subject impatient by taking 1 to 2 minutes composing in-camera. "Hey man, err....why dont you try composing in your head first what you want to shoot and once you've figured it out, then get in and execute it within 3 seconds?" The curse of using the zoom lens to compose had to be exorcised....

This market area is fascinating, stinks like hell in the meat sections and filthy.....I loved it. They had bootleg DVDs selling for $1 a piece.....I picked up Hellboy and a couple of other movies (by the way, they worked fine at home)

By 10.30am we wrapped up and stopped by the college canteen at the nearby Atma Jaya A Catholic University for re-fuelling and a debrief.

The canteen was an outdoor type set up with long wooden benches and tables and shacks that sold different types of food and drinks......and it had a Bohemian reggae air about it. We stayed for an hour shooting the student faculty. Girls outnumbered us guys by 15 to 1. I felt old among so many 19 year olds.

Left the college at around 11am and rushed back to check out. Caught my flight back to Singapore at 1.30pm.

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Polar Bear found an interesting article by Bruce Wilson titled "Loss of Craft in Photography". It's long so I've cut out a nice portion of it to share with you guys.

...."Where old timers used to spend hours just to create a single image in the 1800s, a digital photographer, with literally zero variable costs in film and processing, creates huge numbers of images but the bulk of them without any elements worth redeeming.

I've extracted excerpts of this article which I found helpful in refocusing my own personal image-creating efforts.

The entire article can be found here http://wilson.dynu.net/dilution.asp titled "The Modern Camera, And the Dilution of Effort

Quote..."WE HAVE SOMETHING TO GAIN by taking our time. Instead of shooting three rolls an hour, spend three hours on one photograph. Think about the scene. Is it really worth shooting? Will your cousin want to see it? [I don't mean will he comment appreciatively when you show it to him, I mean will he pay you to put it on his wall?] Is the light the best it could be? ....... If you don't know, how can you expect your photograph to successfully convey it?

There are literally dozens of similar questions that should be asked by the photographer for every scene before the camera is even out of the bag. Will someone with a digital or automatic camera ask them? Not likely. Instead they'll bang off a few shots and see what it looks like then they get the prints back.

And the shame of it is that we are seeing these 'photographs' all over the net.. I have no hard evidence, but I'd hazard a guess that at least half of the images we see on "photo" websites are posted by photographers who have never in their lives intentionally composed an image. Sure, they've framed a lot of them, thousands perhaps (some seem to wear this like a badge of honor), but the composition was just what happened to be in front of the lens then the shutter was pressed. And after a few repairs in Photoshop, up the Internet they come.

AND SO WE COME TO IT: the DILUTION OF EFFORT. Photographers have only so much time to take pictures. Jackson would spend days getting one negative. That's a great deal of effort packed into one image, but what extraordinary images he made! We spend fifteen seconds or less and what do we create? Cascades of snapshots! Piles of photographs that even our mothers won't hang on the wall. Yep, we are creating nothing more nor less than snapshots, created in an instant, and just as interesting as those Aunt Josephine shot when the family went to that Jersey beach last summer. Shooting fast is diluting our efforts, spreading one hour of our talent into dozens of worthless shots.

There is only one cure: Go out with only one frame left, and try not to waste it. Spend half a day finding the one subject or scene with enough emotion, feeling, interest, or beauty to justify using all the film you have to shoot it. It isn't easy. The temptation to move on because something out there might be better is strong. But it must be ignored until you are certain that where you are has no possibilities. If you stopped, something there must have attracted you. Stay there until you know what it is. And when you know, start thinking like a photographer and figure out how best to capture that something on film. It isn't easy, and there will be many false starts. The images you get from this process are the ones you should be letting us see.

And how do you tell the difference between a snapshot and an intentional photograph? That too is hard to do, and it's likely we'll all make some miscalls. Generally the intentional photographs will convey in some way the intent of the photographer. We'll have an idea what he was after, what he saw, or what meant something to him. And to us. Snapshots are usually nothing more than disconnected scenes from the life of the photographer, with no meaning to the viewer at all.

WE PHOTOGRAPHERS, especially those amongst us who have some inkling what a good photograph is, must find the intentional images amongst our own portfolios and more importantly in the portfolios of young photographers. Look at them for a time, think about them, sort out our feelings about them, and then tell the young photographer as best we can what we really think of their work, and how we think it might be improved. It's okay to say what we think of the color, and it's okay to say what we think of the framing, or equipment and film choice. But what we really need to tell the photographer is what we felt about his or her image, what did it do for us, and what didn't it do. Viewing an image is a very personal thing. There isn't a standard to which all photographs are compared more reliable than your own meandering experience. Use it to tell the photographer how you felt about his work, or how you expected to feel but didn't. Then he can compare how he felt to how his photograph made you feel and decide what to do next.

Bruce Wilson, Provo Utah, July 4, 2002. (edited slightly 14 August, 2002) " End Quote

To create one image only a day......that would be like telling a drug addict that he's going to get a hit once every 3 days.

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Another interesting photography related article found from the Houston Chronicle....I'd cut and paste the article because of fears of it getting archived and lost .

"Afghan photographers using Victorian-era technology. Wooden box cameras still getting job done fast and cheap"
By MATTHEW PENNINGTON (Associated Press)

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The photographer poses his subject in a high-backed chair, peers into a bulky, wooden box camera balanced on a rickety tripod, then whips off the lens cap and silently counts a seven-second exposure.

It could be a snapshot from a bygone age, when negatives were made of glass, long-suffering portraitists lugged around portable darkrooms and getting one's picture taken was something really special.

But in much of modern Afghanistan, this is still what passes for a snapshot booth.

A dozen or more photographers using Victorian-era technology set up shop at Kabul's busy Sadorat intersection each morning, competing for trade with more upmarket photo shops that boast newfangled digital cameras.

With most Kabulis struggling to get by on less than a dollar a day, the black and white prints from the street photographers -- processed by hand inside the box cameras -- suffice for slapping on official forms and identity cards. The fee is 30 afghanis, or 60 cents, for a set of four, a quarter the price charged by shops.

It's also quick.

"If you go to the photo shops, it takes a long time -- three or four hours -- to get your picture," says Najibullah, 27, who has been pitching his homemade camera on the same street for 13 years. "I can do it in 10 minutes."

His alfresco studio is a steel chair with a brown blanket draped over the high back for a backdrop. Discarded bits of white photo paper litter the dusty ground like hair clippings at a barber shop.

The Taliban religious army, which ruled for five years until its ouster by U.S.-led forces in late 2001, frowned on photography. But Najibullah kept working, although he wasn't allowed to take pictures of women.

The camera is wooden, covered in red linoleum to make it water and light proof. The only imported component is a Russian lens.

The back opens to reveal a screen attached to a retractable lever that is maneuvered until the upside-down image is in focus. Najibullah then closes the back, and sticks one arm into a lightproof opening in the camera's side to insert a small piece of photographic paper that will record the image.

He then gets his subject to sit still and takes the photo by removing the lens cap. He exposes the film for about one second on a sunny day, about seven seconds with a wide aperture if it's dull and cloudy.

That done, his right arm again burrows into the camera like a ventriloquist wielding a dummy, and with one eye pinned to a tiny peephole, processes the photo paper in two mini trays of chemicals inside to get a negative.

To get a positive image, he then repeats the process, only this time taking a picture of the negative using an easel he attaches to the front of the camera.

The final print -- rinsed off in a bucket of murky water -- is adequate, but won't win any technical awards. It can be used on most Afghan documents, but not passports, which require color.

"It's cheap, it's fast," says Abdul Mohim, 25, who has stopped by to get reprints for his father to put on an application for retirement. "If I go to the photo shop they'll probably tell me, `Come back tomorrow.' "

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From forum buddy Nightbreed who is embarking on a daunting personal crusade....."I am embarking on a Crusade. A Crusade to rid badly written and punctuated English in any forum that I am registered in. By no means am I the most qualified person to do this. I am not even an authority on the Language. But I know bad English when I come across it. And this is the main reason for my Crusade.

I will continue to do so in the light of any criticism, ostracism and threats of physical violence. I will endeavour to bring light to this Dark Age of English Language Usage, where English is so badly mangled by careless, indifferent use of grammar, spelling and punctuation. I will persist until the day you pry my cold, dead fingers from the computer keyboard.

How will I do this? I will re-write any examples of bad English I come across and re-post it again in its corrected form. I may not be able to do so for each and every post, but I will try. I am neither omnipresent nor omniscient.

I am doing this because of the blatant abuse of the Language in its everyday form, especially in local forums. This has spread its insidious influence into everyday writing practices.

So take this how you will. Here I make my stand. And I urge the like-minded to take up arms and join me!"

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