"What needs to be photographed will be photographed"

From The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon:

The driver's head was cubical, vines of hair creeping up his neck; there was a gray swirl around his bald spot, not unile a satellite picture of a hurricane. I wished Rora would photograph it, but there was not enough light. He had decided, without consulting me, not to bring a flash on this trip. The flash is for weddings and funerals, he said. What needs to be photographed will be photographed.

I hate flash for the most part, except for when I'm out with the Golden Half.

"Good things happen when you put the ball in play"

My dad always used to say this about hitting. This was most true when I was in Little League: the 11-year-old fielders were unreliable, so if you could avoid striking out there was always a realistic chance that a "good thing" would happen.

(I apologize if this is not obvious to some of my audience. I'm talking about baseball! I'd also like to make it clear that my dad was not an 'overbearing American sports father,' I'm grateful for the fact that he never yelled at me from the stands like other parents did.)

Maybe the same is true of photography. Instead of 'put the ball in play,' it's 'click the shutter.' I went through almost a whole roll of Golden Half pictures at the recent King Khan show here in San Francisco, and I was surprised to find a couple of pictures that I thought were not "half" bad, if nowhere near great.

In baseball, having a good eye means being able to lay off pitches out of the strike zone. In photography, is it just knowing how to throw out all your crap?

Estadio Jalisco, Guadalajara

An evening at a Chivas game.

I don't really like using flash in very public places, as it draws attention, but I think being so easily spotted as a foreigner actually made it easier for me to be somewhat brazen with my camera this night. (Of course he would take pictures!) For purposes of discreteness, it helped that I was using the Golden Half, which is small enough to be slipped into a pocket, and also that my companions for the night had given me a Chivas jersey to throw on.

Estadio Jalisco is fairly old, but as Miguel, one of my hosts, told me, "es un templo de futbol" - it's a temple of football. Pele and Maradona both played there in their prime. I like the old-fashioned feel of these luxury boxes. This guy craning his neck to watch a replay on a TV above was the rowdiest fan in our area, at one point he was banging on the ledge with a metallic object of some sort.