Obsessive Documentation

We have a friend in NYC who used to work as a videographer for a production house there. I was telling him about this Canon digital video camera that we were fooling around with. It had a great mike and a built-in stabilizer so you could zoom and pan and not look like you were tripping over something. And our friend began lamenting the fact that anyone could take professional looking footage these days. "It used to take a skilled technician to make those shots look good", he said.

I love the fact that all these tools are so available. But I have to admit that obsessive documentation may be getting in the way of real experiences. Another friend, who just bought a digital camera, sent us a photo he took of Pharaoh Sanders playing in a park in San Francisco. The only people visible in this photo all seem to be busy documenting the event that my friend was documenting so now I have this document of them documenting the music and, well, you get the picture.

Digital cameras allow you to take photos wildly in unusual places and sort them out later without any expense other than time (which I enjoy frittering away). I was the only one taking photos in the Little Theater during the Blair Witch Project (top). I've started taking my digital camera everywhere (in an effort to abide by our motto.)

Duane snuck the photo at right of Don Van (formerly Captain Beefheart) Vliet's paintings in a New York gallery. He uses a Russian Lomo camera. The walls were white but you can't use a flash while sneaking photos. Van Vliet's paintings are as wild as his music.