Andy Gapin

When I first got my DSLR, I didn’t really know what kind of photography I wanted to do. I hadn’t thought about it at all really. I just knew that I liked taking pictures all the time and always wanted a nicer camera to do so with. A lot of my photos were nothing more than a barrage of shots from various trips I’ve taken and candid shots from parties and such. Nothing really that spectacular, but with the latter, I liked the idea of catching a moment. I was intrigued by this. And for the former, I just liked to document what I was seeing. For the most part though, there was no “art” with any of it. I’m not a super artsy person. I “get it,” but that’s really about where it ends.

Now that I’ve been taking photos with a DSLR, getting very into it, and constantly reading everything I can find about it, I’m starting to change a little. But up until today, I still didn’t know what I was really intrigued by. Mostly, I’ve taken photos of what’s been available to me. I try to keep my camera with me as much as I can and try to find things to take pictures of, but mostly, I wait for it to come to me. With just a couple of exceptions, I haven’t been seeking the photos out and trying to create the situations myself.

If I want to get better, I need to change that, but in order to change it, I need to have that intriguing idea that I can run with. I’ve yet to find that. I have things I want to take photos of and I look at other people’s photos and I think to myself that I would love to take those kinds of shots, but I never really come up with my own ideas or think about it much after that. I don’t find anything to add to these already existing ideas. So for eight months, I’ve just been putting along taking as many pictures as I can trying to find that one subject that really sticks with me and inspires me.

I feel like I may have found it yesterday while exploring Wolf189′s Tumblr page. As far as I can tell neither his Tumblr nor any of his other websites actually have his name, but he’s a film photographer who takes a lot of erotic shots. Erotic photography wasn’t particularly what I was looking for, I was just exploring Tumblr since I made a page there recently. I clicked on the photography section in the directory and his page was one of the recommended ones. Over the course of the day, I clicked through all 50 pages of photos he has posted there and looked at some of the stuff on his other sites. He posts a lot of pictures multiple times, but there’s a lot of stuff all with a similar theme.

Of all the photography I’ve ever looked at, this is some of the most interesting. It really sucked me in. I found it stimulating and intriguing. Not because of the nudity and sexuality, but the style and what he does with the subject. I really liked it. I found myself studying some of the images really closely and putting thought into the composition and the color choices and everything.

I was seriously sucked into it. As I looked at some of the photos, I thought about how I would recreate them and do them differently. I found them extremely inspiring. I started a list of all of the shots that I wanted to do. Ideas started coming freely to me. The positioning, the props, how the subject would be dressed, different variations to try out, the composition and angles. It all just started flowing to me. None of it was really sexual. I mean, there was sexuality in these ideas I had and the photos I was looking at, but it wasn’t pornographic at all.

Right now, I have a long list of things to try out. I’m sort of short a model though. My fiancée doesn’t really like being in front of the camera, but has learned to deal with it pretty well. However, she doesn’t feel comfortable actually modeling or anything of the sort. As many couples have done, we’ve taken a few pictures and I’ve got a few of them that I like a lot, but she doesn’t really want to be the subject much. I don’t really know how to go about finding a model. I posted on Craigslist earlier today, but I don’t really expect much. I’m not a professional, I don’t aim to be. Photography is a hobby to me and this would be a new thing for me to try out. I don’t think my first few batches will have many keepers and I can’t afford to pay someone for this. So I need to find a model that doesn’t mind being the subject of erotic photos (not necessarily nude at first, but I would like to try that as well) and doing it for free. I don’t want to come off as a creep that is just trying to take naked pictures of girls for…personal needs. I don’t know how not to though.

That’s one issue, but my bigger issue with it is that I like to be able to post my photos on this site and Flickr and what have you. I don’t want to just take photos and not do anything with them. I don’t think I would ever call myself a photographer and my skills are down right beginner still, but I like putting my stuff out there and getting some feedback. I think it gives a little bit of meaning to it. And it’s that not being a photographer part that’s the problem. I’m a software developer by career and I like that. I enjoy my work a lot.

My fear is that if I start posting these types of photos it will come back to bite me in the ass later. While I am not looking for a new job now, I will be at some point in the future, many times, I’m sure. And with most employers looking people up online before hiring them these days, these photos will be found. My name is far too unique–there is just one other with it–for anything I put online to not be found. This is something I always consider before posting anything anywhere on the internet. Once it’s online, it’s there forever.

If I were a photographer, erotic photography wouldn’t really be an issue, it would just be work and it would actually be what was bringing in the paychecks. But I am not a photographer and it is likely that future employers will find my website instantly and view these photos as being pornography. Now, I don’t have any desire to make porn, but as is the point of this post, I am very intrigued by eroticism in photography as art. I’m not an artsy person and will never be an artist in any sense of the word, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t wish to create something as art and can’t enjoy it.

So what do I do? While I can easily admit that this is something that has just come up in the last day, I am very intrigued by it. I may try it and find that, like just about everything else I try to photograph, I suck at it. But I may also find that I like it a lot. The ideas are flowing in my head already. Do I not post these photos on my website and Flickr? Do I create another site that is not attached to my name for them? Post them under a different Flickr account? I would prefer not to do that, but I guess it’s an option. If I post a photo, it generally means that I’m happy with it and proud of it. Sure, I may not like it later on, but at the time, I find it to be an accomplishment for myself and where I’m at with my skill level. So, because of that, I want to put that photo out there as myself and I want my name attached to it.

I’m going to find a way to try this and I don’t want to keep the photos to myself. Like I said, I don’t think there’s much of a point if you’re not going to share what you’re doing. Signs are pointing towards me liking this subject a lot. Tonight, my fiancée was cooking dinner in just her underwear and tanktop, it wasn’t erotic, but it wasn’t safe for work either. I found a way to take a hundred quick photos of her doing it. All of the angles and composition came naturally. I knew each shot I wanted to take and what I wanted from it. I didn’t even think about it, it just flowed. The results were incredible. They were easily among the best shots I’ve ever taken and I didn’t have to try. The exposures and lighting were nearly perfect. It was fun. It was a lot of fun. I want to do it more.

I won’t post these pictures of my fiancée because I think it’d be a little weird to post such pictures of the woman I’m going to marry, but I think I’ve got a lot of good shots here. The photos I take of her are much more personal than anything else for obvious reasons, but the same kind of creativity flows behind them.

At this point, I don’t really need to decide anything and I’m making a huge deal of pretty much nothing, but it brings up the question that is often asked, what’s the difference between art and pornography? If I find that I’m actually into this, do I post the photos and have them speak for themselves without worry of others being offended? Could I find a happy medium and just post them and galleries in the photography section of this site and not as part of the main blog? Is these even something to be concerned about? Would a future employer not hire me because of it? What will family members think of it?

I’m curious as to what people’s thoughts are on this. Personally, I’ll actually worry about it for real if this is something that sticks. For now, I’m just going to give it a shot and see how it turns out.

I took a little weekend camping trip with my friends over the weekend in Worthington State Forest. I’d like to do some real camping that requires a little hiking before getting to the campsite, but even camping out of the trunk of your car is a lot of fun. There was a little hiking involved with a trail that seemed a bit more intense than expected. Very rocky and a bit steep at points. Everyone made it just fine though.

One of the highlights had to be just plopping our chairs down in the river though. Our campsite was alongside the Delaware River and it was very shallow where we were. A few of us spent a large portion of Saturday with our chairs in the river just sitting there with a few drinks watching people canoe and raft by. The river was only about a foot and a half deep there so it was perfect. We were like the kings of the river, everyone floating by took pictures and watched with jealousy at our geniusness.

Anyway, I’ve got a few pictures here…

It’s been a week since we last ran thanks to a busy week last week and camping over the weekend. This is something we’re not going to be able to do much longer with the half marathon training starting up again. We have a while before the race, but we need to really extend the training this time around so it’s not as much of a shock for our bodies as the last one was. Running is going to have to take precedence over everything else again.

So anyway, with the week off, we decided we’d just do a 4 mile run tonight and 6 tomorrow. I started off with a little bit of a side cramp, but it went away inside the first half mile. Overall, the run was pretty easy and we kept our normal pace. I was feeling great at the end and felt like I could have run all night.

I signed up for Tumblr last week. I never used it before because I didn’t really see the point of having something that feel between this site and Twitter, but we’ll see. I don’t know that I’ll use it too much…or maybe I’ll use it a lot. Maybe I’ll use it instead of Twitter more. I don’t know!

At any rate, I set it up so that my Tumblr posts should cross post here. I haven’t entirely tested it though so I’m hoping it works.

Last night’s show ended up coming together surprisingly well. I had to reach back a littler further than normal for newer music so it wasn’t the absolute latest crop that The Playlist is normally comprised of, but I think the overall product of the show was pretty decent. I actually ended up playing a couple older tracks, Streetlight Manifesto to satisfy a request and Rilo Kiley for my fiancée since I got the song stuck in her head earlier in the day. Fitting these two in wasn’t too hard as it seems the Music Department has been a little behind throughout the Summer while everyone is away from school. This has resulted in the overall flow of albums getting reviewed and into the studio being almost non-existent. I expect that things will start to pick up next week as kids come back to school.

Other than that, there isn’t really a lot to say about the show.

• Maps And Atlases – Israeli Caves – Perch Patchwork
• Wolf Parade – Cloud Shadow On The Mountain – Expo 86
• Upstairs Downstairs – Stationary’s Helping – Inland And Out
• Streets On Fire, The – Chadwick Shut Up! – This Is Fancy
• Elsinore – Chemicals – Yes Yes Yes
• Menomena – Queen Black Acid – Mines
• Streetlight Manifesto – Would You Be Impressed’ – Somewhere In The Between
• White Fence – Destroy Everything – White Fence
• Steel Train – Behavior – Steel Train
• These United States – Nobody Can Tell – What Lasts
• Social Studies – We Choose Our Own Adventures – Wind Up Wooden Heart
• The Orbans – New Dress – When We Were Wild
• Best Coast – Bratty B – Crazy For You
• Wavves – Post Acid – King Of The Beach
• A Great Big Pile Of Leaves – Race Car Driving – Have You Seen My Prefrontal Cortex?
• Rilo Kiley – Silver Lining – Under The Blacklight

90.3 The Core

Because of the rain, we had to run at the gym tonight. Man, I hate running on treadmills. It just feels like so much extra work. I sweat more and can’t keep as fast of a pace as I can outside. It’s just miserable, but despite my fiancée’s attempts to bribe me into agreeing to just go straight home from work instead, we had to do it.

Overall, it was an average treadmill run.

Thanks to having some extra Summer hours lingering around, the lady and I were able to take a full day off from work on Friday to take it easy and have some fun. We decided to take a trip down to the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know anything about it before a couple of days earlier when my fiancée suggested it, but it’s a 35-acre public park that serves as a permanent exhibit of hundreds of pieces of contemporary sculpture. It’s pretty neat actually. You pay as you drive into the park and from there, you can just wander around and enjoy the art at your liesure. Some of the sculptures can actually be touched and have signs saying so.

They don’t give out free maps so you’re left to kind of figure out where you’re going on you’re own if you don’t want to buy one–we didn’t. I have a feeling that we missed some stuff as there are a few forks in the paths that I feel like we never re-visited. It’s a fun place to go and if you’re the kind of person that can stare at art for hours, it can be a nice little outing to get lost in.

I took a bunch of pictures there to start off a big picture taking weekend. These will probably be the only ones that I will post, but we’ll see as I go through the rest. Saturday’s pictures are just some family photos and Sunday’s are of my soon to be sister-in-law with her dog that she asked me to take for her so she can print them out and frame them for her college dorm room.

Today’s run was a little shorter than the last two since we have some stuff to do during the day. The pace was a little slower than the past few runs, but it felt good and energetic.

This is the first new t-shirt that I’ve gotten in quite some time. I really have slowed down on the shirt buying. Part of it has been that I just don’t have anywhere to keep them all, it’s a mess, I need to get some better storage/organization going for my shirt collection. The other thing is that we’ve been trying to save as much money as possible for the wedding so we’ve been cutting back on unnecessary purchases. $10-15 here and there doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can add up.

Anyway, I saw this shirt and had to have it, I don’t really like dark blue shirts much, but I like the graphic. As a big Star Wars nerd, I love the Wizard Of Oz take on it. Being that it’s not a straight up Star Wars shirt, I think I can get away with wearing it without entirely looking like a loser who lives in his mother’s basement and has never seen a real boob before.

This shirt came from RIPT Apparel which I like a lot, but takes fooooorever to send orders. It took over three weeks to receive this shirt. I believe it’s because they don’t print the shirts until after they’ve been ordered which makes sense and I can live with that, but I don’t like it. The other thing about RIPT is that they don’t use American Apparel shirts and what they do use tends to run a bit big. This is a size small, but it’s roughly the same size as most of my medium sized shirts which generally are a little big on me.

I had a lot of energy with tonight’s run, breathing was good and I enjoyed the entire thing. I forgot to throw a pair of shorts into my gym bag so we ended up running at the park near our house instead of the one near where we work and normally run at during the week. It was a nice change of pace for a weeknight and running a little later resulted in ever so slightly cooler temperatures. It’s also a less humid park, but the loops are shorter.

We did just over 6 miles at an 8:49/mile pace. I had it in me to keep going for a few more miles and go quite a bit faster, but I like to stick with the fiancée, it’s nice to have her next to me.

I think 6 miles is going to be our standard for the next month or so. I’m hoping that by then we’re doing an 8:15 or better pace.

Lastly, this was my first run using RunKeeper on my iPhone. I’ve always used IMapMyFitness, but I’ve kind of had it with that app. A few months ago, they made a change to the voice feedback so that it no longer paused your music while it was giving you an update. The problem is that the speech isn’t loud enough to make anything out. It’s borderline useless. The app also doesn’t provide splits for your run. I would really like to be able to see the difference in my speed from one mile to the next. On Tuesday, I tried using Strands which wasn’t too bad, but the voice feedback was very basic and robotic sounding. It also didn’t pause the music so it was difficult to hear. RunKeeper seems a lot better so far. The feedback was crisp and clear and the music volume was lowered. Their website seems to be pretty solid too even if almost all of the reports require an elite account. I’ve got a couple other apps to try out, but I like this one a lot.