Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Hi! Thanks for visiting. I'm an American photographer living in Buenos Aires. These are photos from the blog I kept on my site from 2003 to 2009. I now have redesigned the home page to just show a portfolio of my current work. I also blog at BuenosAiresPhotographer.com where I post my baires snapshots. |
Salem, Indiana
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| El Maguey. USA Today: New Arrivals Fan Out. 30% gain in immigrants in Indiana in 5 years. You can now get decent Mexican food in Southern Indiana. Thank god for that. |
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| Coit Tower Mural. A 1930s thing. Diego Rivera-lite.
LA Street Food [flickr]. DFW on a saturday night [me, flickr]. DFW: aerial shot Raven Maps SoCal [big .jpg, via bldgblog]. I love this map. $50 for the printed one. |
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| The tallest building in the universe. It rises to infinity.
Actually, no... |
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| The Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco.
Cool: Dubai in a Dust Storm. New Canon Digital SLR. The 3rd generation [I have the first]. It's 10 megapixels but the biggest improvement is the self-cleaning sensor to get rid of dust. This is a big problem with Digital SLRs if you change lenses a lot. Dust gets on the sensor and can be very hard to remove. The best review I've ever read on Amazon is the first one for the Canon 50mm f1.4. There's no way to link to the review directly so scroll down to the one by "Careful Critic". It's the first one. 400 out of 403 people found it useful [make that 401!] so I suppose it's pole-position will remain. In the review he lucidly explains why you'd want to spend $320 for the lens as opposed to a mere $70 for the "nearly identical" 50mm f1.8 lens [it has something to do with "buttery smooth" bokeh]. It's a bit technical but still a gem of clarity. FYI, bokeh is the a Japanese word for "blurry background" [I guess if they make the cameras they can invent the words]. I use the cheaper lens. I suppose this makes my portraits' "bokeh" have more of a "margarine" smooth quality. |
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| Photo of a California AAA map showing the roads I took in the Tehachapi Mountains (Lockwood, Cuddy Valley, etc.) during a back-roads drive to Northern California described in the post below. There's probably some way to trace this route in Google Maps. I'm a AAA member, however. I get the maps for free. This low-tech/high-tech approach seemed appropriate given that this is a fotoblog. |
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| Route 33 north of Ojai, one of my favorite roads in California. I drove up to the Bay Area on Saturday following backroads. Rt. 33 was closed at a certain point and I was forced on a 70 mile detour thru the Tejachapi Mountains--Lockwood Valley Road to Cuddy Valley Road to Mil Potrero Road which turns into Cerro Noroeste Road which finally meets up again with Rt. 33 (in case you, or I, want to retrace my steps). It was a corner of Southern California I've always meant to explore. There were lots of stubby pines, burn patches, white pick-ups, American flags, Bush stickers and cutesy log cabin-style mountain homes. It's defininately not Mazda Miata country altho I love the mountain roads. Zoom zoom! I continued north on the 33 thru the oil-patch apocalpsis of Taft and back over the coastal range on the 58, zig-zagging thru Paso Robles wine country onto the 46 and over the last set of coastal hills to the ocean, fog, cool air and Route 1--all the way up to Santa Cruz (see also Feb 06).
São Paulo Graffiti. For months I've been annoyed at Flickr's 3-set restriction for el cheapo users like me. Yahoo Photo has now grafted on Flickr's DNA allowing for tags, comments, contacts and the above set is a sort of experiment. The photos are of graffiti murals and pichações that I took in SP during my two visits this year and last. Also check out the Brasil Graffit Flickr pool |
Los Feliz - Vermont Ave.
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| Each morning I've been walking down Vermont Ave. to take the subway into downtown. It's downhill and pleasant with the morning fog still above.
Post-Castro Cuba [John Lee Anderson interviewed on New Yorker's website, better and shorter than his article] Metro Logos [subte!] |
Laguna Beach
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| I'd never been to Laguna Beach before Sunday. The beach is small and very popular. The crush of people, density of beach front development and houses climbing the hills reminded me of the Costa del Sol in Spain. There was a theatrical element to so many people out on the beach that wasn't unpleasant. |
| Take me out
Friday night I went to go see the Dodgers beat the Giants, 3-2. This was my first pro baseball game in, I don't know, 20 years, maybe. Dodger Stadium dates from 1962 and has only been lightly renovated since then. It retains this sort of Astro-Age design that reminds me of the Jetsons and the old Tomorrowland at Disneyland. Being a native Northern Californian I was vaguely in favor of the losing team. My friend was as well, even going so far as to wear a Giants sweatshirt. This subjected us to some heckling from the drunk, upper-deck fans who went so far as to call us 'fucking faggots' (If only they knew...). My next time in Northern California, I may have to go see the Giants play at the newly rebranded AT&T Park. Originally opened in 2000 as Pac Bell Park, the stadium has now changed its name twice to reflect M&A activity regarding their corporate sponsor. Some have suggested it be renamed 'Telephone Park'. May I suggest Corporate Action Park, or perhaps, Branding Consultants Field. |
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| Here's an overly constrasty image of Malibu taken from Rambla Pacifico up near Saddle Peak. It's amazing there's homes up in these rugged mountains. I can see why they burn down or slide down every five years. |
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| I decided I should embrace living in California, so I bought a 2000 Miata. It's completely impractical and fun. Driving up the PCH last weekend it occurred to me that I have become Malibu Stacy.
Good article: NYOB on Boliva & Evo Morales. The writer, Alma Guillermoprieto has some good books of her collected New Yorker articles on Latin America. |
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| I'm now staying at a friend's apartment in Los Feliz. It has this very LA, very David Hockney pool in the courtyard that I never see used but looks cool anyway. |
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| The other night I drove the length of Mulholland Drive and stopped at all the vista points to take pictures. This one is from the Hollywood Bowl overlook. The highrises are downtown LA and in the foreground is the Hollywood Freeway [the 101] and the buildings around Hollywood & Vine. |
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| Shabby old houses in Venice, in contrast and often directly across the street from the fab lofts pictured below. No doubt Prop 13 slows the total obliteration of the past, altho this last one doesn't look like it has long. Cool analogy: the Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons. |
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| Venice is this once funky now thoroughly gentrified neighborhood just north of where I'm staying. It's become filled with these aggressively contemporary designs for houses, lofts and small office spaces. |
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 | Hi. I'm a 33 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. Currently I'm posting most of my pictures on BuenosAiresPhotographer.com. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |