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. |
Thanksgiving Leftovers
| Since I'm not taking a lot of pictures during the week right now I've picked out a few more photos from last weekend in LA. |
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| Shopping carts at the Farmers Market |
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| Thanksgiving decorations |
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| This marks the start of the Farmers Market property. I suppose I should go on some Mike Davis inspired rant about the privitization of public space and the concomitant loss of civil liberties but, eh, I like the Farmers Market. |
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| An alley near Fairfax & 3rd Street. I remember when I was living in New York I knew this Argentine guy who was riding out the crisis by working for a few years in the US. He had a son back in Buenos Aires who demanded that his father send him a picture of a sinister alley of the kind he'd seen in countless in Hollywood films. My friend walked all over the grid part of Manhattan looking for and failing to find an alley way. He should've gone to Hollywood [or south of 14th].
Doritos Spill in the Outer Banks. A container washes ashore. The images accompanying this article are strangely beautiful and also remind me of a lot of contemporary fine-art photographs. |
Fun with the flash
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| I rarely use the flash on my camera but there's a lot of cool tricks you can do with it. Strobist is a blog just about lighting with flashes or strobes as they're called. It's a whole other universe of equipment and toys. |
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| Santa & Reindeer at The Grove in LA
Figure and Ground by Richard Renaldi is an amazing photo book [and only $30 on Amazon]. A lot of the photos are on Renaldi's website, but they look much better in the book. Renaldi uses an 8x10 inch camera. In digital terms that would be, like, 500 megapixels. In person, the blown-up prints are astounding. Yossi Milo in NYC is exhibiting Renaldi's portraits from Jan 25th to March 3rd next year. Alec Soth on blogging & artistic reputation: Blogging is probably bad for one’s reputation in the art world. The art world is built on exclusivity. Blogs are built on availability. Most art stars don’t even have websites for fear of appearing pedestrian. But photography, for me, is a pedestrian art. It is democratic and accessible. So I participate in the blogosphere knowing full well that it probably hurts my art-world reputation. [link] Turistas Brazilians don't like foreigners criticizing their country [like Americans but not nearly as bad]. I can imagine the shit storm that's gonna brew over the movie Turistas, a soon to be released horror flick that follows a group of sexy Americans who travel to Brazil only to get robbed, beaten, drugged and wind up in some crazy doctor's lair who then harvests the organs of the hott tourist chicks. I'm shocked (!) that anyone would be offended to have their homeland thusly portrayed. Folks aren't too pleased about the stealth promo site paradisebrazil.com which purports to be a backpacker guide to Brazil. The "webcam" shows a dead body on the beach while the words "invasive surgery" "bloody harvest" flash in the background. Interestingly, organ theft is a persistent urban legend in Latin America. Such is the problem that the US State Department even has a page debunking the Baby Parts Myth. The rumor is especially persistent in Guatemala which has a large number of foreign adoptions. Tragically, in 2000 a group of Japanese tourists were attacked in the picturesque mountain village of Todos Santos Cuchumatan [a place I visited in 1995 and fell in love with]. One tourist and the group's bus driver were killed. |
Thanksgiving
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| Mom and I drove down to my brother and sister-in-law's place in LA. They put on a knock-out dinner for twelve people whose center piece was this big-ass 26 lb. turkey. |
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| Let's see, a shave and a haircut are needed, I think. Sometimes I like the light so much [late afternoon, filtered through light clouds] but I don't have anyone but myself to take a picture of. I suppose I can get away with some ego-blogging on my vanity site.
The Ongoing Drama of GOL Flight 1907 On Sept. 29 two planes collided over the Brazilian Amazon. One of them, a one month old 737 with 154 people on board, crashed, killing everyone on board. The other, an even newer corporate jet somehow survived and landed at a nearby airforce base. One of the passengers on the jet was Joe Sharkey, the New York Times Business Travel columnist. Not a week after the incident he wrote a column about his brush with death. How to do planes collide in the middle of the Amazon? Philip Greenspun, blogger and amateur pilot, suggested that GPS may have played a role. Planes flown manually will tend to have some random variance in their elevation. Auto-pilot is more precise and when both of these planes were given instructions to fly at 37,000 feet, disaster was set in motion. The crash has had a lot of repercussions in Brazil. Since early investigations suggested air traffic control was at fault by directing both flights to fly at the same altitue, the controllers have been staging a work-to-rule slow-down, protesting their work conditions and out-of-date equipment. This has lead to horrific delays across Brazil of 12 hours or more. Recently a crowd of 40 angry passengers stuck overnight in Curitiba stormed a runway in protest. Absurdly, the authorities suggested the jet pilots were pulling aerial stunts in the empty skies over the Amazon. The pilots have denied this, of course, as has Mr. Sharkey and the other passengers aboard the jet. Ironically, had they been pulling such stunts, they'd probably have deviated off course and avoided the GOL flight. The two American pilots of the corporate jet have had their passports seized by a Brazilian judge pending the conclusion of the investigation and been all but crucified in the Brazilian press. The Air Force, which oversees air traffic control is also running the investigation. They have been dragging their feet since they realize its their fault. The pilots have been stuck at a hotel in Copacabana. One can imagine worse fates than spending a couple of months on the beach in Rio but clearly their quasi-incarceration is unfair. To put an American perspective on this, imagine a plane carrying young families home from Disney World crashes after colliding with a private jet piloted by two Saudi Arabians. Imagine all the outrage and ugly xenophobia that would bring out. Joe Sharkey has since started a blog where he's been writing detailed but very readable updates of the unfolding drama/farce. This whole sad story calls out for an article by William Langewiesche who practically made is career at The Atlantic writing about airplane crashes. Unfortunately his articles aren't online but several of them have been collected in his excellent book, Inside the Sky. |
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| When people ask me for blogging advice, I say the most important thing is to make it sustainable. When i'm totally lacking in inspiration, I open up the fridge and snap a photo. In 30 years the consumer product design and implicit diet selection will be fascinating. Maybe.
Camera Talk The new Nikon D40 looks small, cute and well-designed. It's 6 megapixels and only $600. I'd still have to recommend the Canon Rebel XTi which is 10 megapixels, has dust removal and is nearly as small. It's $815 right now on Amazon. [I own the first generation Canon Digital Rebel. I'll probably wait another product release cycle before upgrading.] If you're looking for a small point and shoot, get the Canon SD800 IS. This camera has two features I really like. The first is image stabilization which is just all-around useful. The other is a wide angle lens. People have this phallic fascination with how long their zoom lens is but, umm, wider is better. It's easer to take group shots or interiors. The SD800 is currently $361. A cheaper option is the Canon SD600. It doesn't have the wide zoom or the image stabilization but it takes very good photos, it's a tad smaller and a lot cheaper--only $217. Flickr Camers is a page on what cameras their users use. This is a very cool page if you like data and excel. One thing that jumps out at me is that Flickr is really a digital SLR community. The top five are all Canon or Nikon dSLRs. Here's my flickr profile. I don't use Flickr so much since they annoyingly limit the number of slideshows non-paying users can create. They already limit the upload amounts for free users so restricting slide shows is just petty. Cute Photo: a Xolo dog wearing a lucha libre mask. |
Pots & Succulents in the Garden
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| Some unrelated stuff...
Paraisopolis is the biggest favela in Sao Paulo. It's smack in the middle of Morumbi, one of the city's richest areas. It's surrounded on all sides by mansions and luxury highrises. I found this knock-out photo of the favela taken from one of said high rises. On Google Earth the favela appears as an intense cluster of urban density with the high rises indicated by their cast shadows in the satellite photo. That link is actually to Wikimapia which is a neat mash-up of Google Earth with a wiki and allows people to comment on places. The commenter, likely a non-native English speaker, awkwardly but perspicaciously describes the area as "a conglomerate of unwealthy people". ¡Atrévete Te, Te! [YouTube] is this catchy reggaeton song by the Puerto Rican group Calle 13. The song has a big gay following because of the first two lines, Atrévete, te, te, te. Salte del closet [translation: D-d-d-dare yourself to come out of the closet, full lyrics]. The rest of the song is not actually gay. The singer's trying to convince a good girl to go bad. Gays aren't the only ones trapped in repressive closets. Anyway, check out the video. The lead singer is really cute. $2 bills for strippers and Nixon on a $1 coin. There's some funky mojo going on at the US Treasury.
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| Trail sign at Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve. Most of the trail signage at these preserves have been replaced with smaller, metal signs that I would assume are more durable. Seeing the rare, old sign makes me a little nostalgic for hiking when I was younger. |
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| A couple of photos from my hike on Saturday. An inversion layer kept the smog below 2000 feet. Above that you could see over 100 miles, from the mountains above Salinas all the way to Mt. Tam. |
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| I feel a little guilty and uncreative for posting something as obviously post card-y as downtown San Francisco as seen from Twin Peaks but last Sunday, in the late afternoon, the light was just so perfect as a ray of sun shot through the clouds and cast its warming glow upon SOMA's overpriced lofts. |
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| My friend Andrew thought the ascending and descending rows of houses in Daly City in the background on the right looked cool. They do. [Hey there, big yellow bus] |
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| The once rich ecology of shopping malls in the South Bay has consolidated to a few mega-malls, owned by the Australian company Westfield. Renovated, they have densified, upscaled and added hulking, multi-level parking structures to their peripheries. It's not Black Friday yet, but on a rainy day in November it seems like the whole world is headed to the mall. I try to slip in the back way and go straight for the top level of the garage. Up there are plenty of spaces, light and a view of the heavens. [Oakridge, South San Jose, Nov. 11, 2006] |
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| My car. I liked the cloud reflections. I should probably blur out my license plate or something. Some stalker's gonna come after me. |
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| Cleaning off the windshield while gassing up. Photo by Luc [from a couple weeks ago, he's back in France now]. |
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| Long Ridge Open Space Preserve, along Skyline Blvd between Saratoga Gap and Page Mill Rd. [I go hiking a lot]
Alec Soth: Art installations are like haunted houses. Modern Monk: Corporate Suicide The Happiness Project: Daylight Savings Time & Happiness |
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| Returning to suburban banality: my street. Luc said he felt as if he was on the set of Desperate Housewives. Do you see any white picket fences? Still, if you're from another country I suppose all American suburbs look kinda the same.
My friend Jesse is now blogging! His site, Jesse on the Brink, is filled with his hilarious anecdotes and fantastic writing. |
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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. |