i went out with this bigass 400mm fixed-distance lens i got many months ago. it felt like i was hauling a machine gun around. it is just the right size where a tripod is not needed, but such a support would not be a bad thing. and the lens only works with the Minolta film SLR. it does not work with the Sony DSLR. that was pretty annoying to discover, but i could have done better research, i guess. actually i don’t know if i could have realistically learned that the lens was incompatible with the Sony without finding out the hard way. bah… who cares. but i thought i got a pretty ugly shot of a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk. the dude was totally knocked out, sprawled like a dead bird on the sidewalk. i do not like those type of pictures but i thought i’d try it anyway, since the distance between me and the individual was great enough that it suited the purpose of the lens, and the purpose of my outing with said lens, which was to get pictures of shit that was far, far away.
i spent a few minutes setting up the shot, nervous about the possibility that the man was not sleeping at all, but lying in wait. i have seen him around this area for years. he is pretty clearly disturbed, and others have described to me their odd and/or unnerving encounters with the guy. i see people like this and i imagine that they arrre smarter than they appear, and that their public façade is part of an elaborate game to shame others. i imagined that if i took his picture and he saw me do it, then he would stake me out, or shame me somehow, and to be honest, if he did do that, i feel like i would deserve it. pictures of people in these states — which some would consider humiliated dishevelment — is an exploitative genre. i felet awful after taking the picture. i really did. i briskly walked away from the scene, feeling like i was escaping.
alas, i got to the park, which was my original destination, and after trying a few shots there i made the irritating discovery that i had failed to properly thread the film. no pictures had been taken. nothing recorded. i’m a dumbass, but i felt that i didn’t deserve the picture of the homeless guy anyway.
before getting the failed shot that was not, i noticed a more interesting image that was impossible to get with a still camera, but that could have worked as a video. the dude was asleep on the sidewalk outside of a bank, about 10 feet from the ATM and the front door to the place. inside the bank, at the atm, was a woman laughing and yelling into her cell phone. she looked like petit poor, as my aunt would have said. the woman was not from Bloomberg country, but she dressed well and looked sharp, like she took care of herself.
her animated conversation, muted to me because of the windows, looked interestingly juxtaposed against the immage of the nearby vagrant slumbering on the hard sidewalk. she had no apparent knowledge of the sleeping man, nor he of her.
it looked interesting, but maybe only in my mental space.
i wrote a story last week, and today i added another flourish to it. about someone who loses something, a purse, and she experiences that sudden flood of panic, which i today decided was an evacuation.
i gotta go. so much to talk about, time evaporates when i sleep till 12:30 every fucking day.