ManicAmerican.com has launched

This blog has been a long and rambling prelude.

The real story has finally begun.

Please change your bookmarks to www.ManicAmerican.com

-Dan

The Bad Big New Flickr

Flickr is about to undergo a massive redesign, to make the photos bigger, the site faster, and everything more social and linkable. And I hate it.


Currently, images display at 500px. Soon, 640px will be the new standard size, with larger versions mere clicks away. Will the photos look bigger, brighter and better? Yes. Will they be easier to be ripped off flickr and stolen? Yes.

You can guess which aspect of the redesign is resonating more with me.

So without further ado, as we're about to leave on a massive photo-journey, I've turned to watermarks to help allay my neuroses. Why? There is no way to "opt-out" of the new features, especially the new "All Sizes" button, where the images getter bigger than you intended them to be seen. You can't change your settings and you can't have your account kept in the current mode. So it's either upload to only the minimums and watermark or abandon Flickr altogether.

Flickr, I kinda hate you right now, and I really don't appreciate the lack of communication and help with all this. Thanks.

DIGITAL

(click)

TXQ09: The Old School BBQ Bus of Austin, TX [photo gallery]

More art / less sleep:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/manicamerican/galleries/72157624248831383/

Love/Hate Film

I should be planning the fast-approaching Asia trip.
I should be researching new cameras and lenses.
I should be coding.

Instead I’m fighting with my scanner to load photos from TXQ09… low light frames don’t load easy. And it takes a lot of trying time to get the photos scanned correctly.

Yet, when I get shots like these, I love it more than just about anything….

Shooting `SRUCTURE

Whether it’s more of a learning style or closer to imitation, I’ve always been influenced by the writer or director whose work I last ingested. This has been going on for years now. It’s nothing new and I know to look out for it so as to keep it in check if need be.

This has now been spreading to the INFRASTRUCTURE videos and films that I shoot and edit. Case in point: The Rox Box show last night and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon.

Watching the Criterion Collection's commentary by critic/historian Donald Richie, what stood out most was Richie’s notes of Kurosawa and Kazuo Miyagawa's use of shapes and composition to tell the story: how when the characters on screen form squares or circles, the viewer intuitively knows that everything is good, but triangles, especially broken triangles, imply that something is askew in the relationships between those on stage.

Back to the Rox Box, with the band near the end of their set. The sound is great and everyone is clicking. I’m positioned in front of the stage, low to the ground to force more of a “hero angle” in the four-shot I’m shooting. I normally move around a lot to change up the shots, but I was holding this position, because what I saw was a diamond (or inverted square if you would): Rob at the North point, Micah South, Chris West and Erich East. For much of Tear Down Kings and Old World, that was the primary shot that I used, and it looks damn good. Without even listening, you see the presence and performance of the band simply by the shape they are framed in.

So when we release video from the show, keep all this mind… it’ll make watching it all the more interesting.

TXQ09: The Best Brisket in the World

DS09 Phase V: Texas BBQ Tour 2009

In 2008, Texas Monthly named Texas' Best BBQ joints, shacks and restaurants. Since then, The Manic American has been on a quest to visit them all.

Open for only a few hours each Saturday, Snow's BBQ in Lexington serves the best brisket on the planet.

See the photo gallery on flickr.

See the Texas BBQ Tour 2009 video on YouTube.