Breakfast In America

We went to a restaurant called Breakfast In America.  It was started by an American student who missed American diners while abroad.  As someone who has been missing fluffy Coney Island caliber pancakes, I thank this man from the bottom of my American heart.  I've never been more excited to eat pancakes.

As far as I know, this is one of the very few places in the city where I can get coffee that will be refilled as many times as I want and comes in a cup larger than a thimble.

This looks really repulsive. It wasn't

I was outraged that these people ate their pancakes without syrup. So I continually made them uncomfortable by photographing them.

Film from Metro

I've been shooting with my rangefinder primarily on the Metro because a. it works quite well for the concept I'm going for and b. it is far smaller and quieter than my digital.  I need to begin shooting away from the metro though as the project is more about people in public spaces, not people in the Metro.  I'm pretty happy with the results so far.  Sadly the color on blogspot is really funky so you can't see the nice saturation of the film or all of the time I spent adjusting the color in curves.

We had to copy the lighting of some random picture we found in a magazine.  Turned out a bit Valérie Belin ish.  Anna did a better job than I did on the lighting.  She seemed to be wearing a little raccoon mask in all of my shots of her...

Louvre

We went to the Louvre last Sunday when it was free and packed with people. We looked at some art. I think in 3-4 hours we saw about an 10th of the entire museum. It's gargantuan.

Guard man.

Vase detail of an elderly bearded man suckling at the teet of a younger lady. She seems to be into it.

Crotches on suits of armor. Why would the leave such a gap in the junk region? Questionable design.

I have no idea what draws so many people to this little and unfinished painting. Where did all of the hype come from? Why this and not the bearded guy nursing? I didn't really bother getting up close to it because I would have had to fight through this swarm of people and I probably would have come out sweating. Not worth it. I don't get it. But then again I'm the kind of person who enjoys this sort of thing.
Yep.

Galway

In order to get to the airport in Shannon I had to take a bus to Galway. I spent about an hour and a half there. It sort of reminded me of Ann Arbor if Ann Arbor was put into some sort of Irish blender. I ate a panini and browsed wool sweaters before getting on the bus to Shannon.

Bishop's Quarter Beach

Katies's friend, Brittany, went on a walk with us to Bishop's Quarter Beach. We walked on some seaweed and met some dogs.

Edward Hopperish House

They have palm trees...

Not what I expected to find here.

Chickens

The chickens were really into those shoes.

Waiting for Tom Connelly

The way I got to Ballyvaughan was by taking a bus from Shannon Airport, getting off at Kilcolgan, and taking a cab from Tom Connelly. Tom, like most people in Ballyvaughan it seems, has many jobs. He is the town's sole cab driver, the town welder, an owner of a tire business, and I'm sure like ten other things. He was a nice guy. I felt like kind of an asshole when I spilled Pringles on myself and his seat right before I exited the cab. I attempted to try to make things better by opening the door and removing the crumbs with a sweeping motion off of the seat but the just sort of spread the mess out within the car. Realizing there was no good way to make this okay I just apologized and left the car.

Anyway, these are two images I made while waiting for Tom to pick me up.

Sexy Shoes

A couple of weeks ago Katie hurt both of her feet from a combination of dancing and sillyness. We drove with a lady named Deborah (who works at Katie's school with a plethora of jobs I'm guessing) to go buy her some shoes that will help support her ankles. The selection was fairly sparse so Katie grabbed this hot brown pair.

The last image shows Deb demonstrating how to properly tie shoes of this kind for Katie. Deborah it sassy.

Some Irish Things

Ireland is completely amazing. It was a very nice change from Paris as I could actually experience silence there. On top of that I could look at stars and the beer was inexpensive and delicous.

These are from when I walked around Ballyvaughan for a bit on my first day while Katie went to go work on a project. Besides this one guy that was walking down the same road as me to go to his accordion lesson I didn't see any people.

Lately, I've been working primarily on this kind of work. Because I'm photographing mundane scenes, it is difficult to decipher what is too mundane versus the right amount of mundanity. I'm constantly questioning whether or not I'll find these interesting once I'm finished shooting them. I have no idea what my point is with these; I think it an intuition based thing. It is probably more due to my current obsession with color photographers from the 1970s. Oh well. I'm going to leave for Ireland now. Maybe I'll come back with a new obsession of creating kitschy landscapes.