This website, and all pages within this website, and all videos, tape recordings, podcasts, and other materials including photographic images and captions, offer, disseminate, convey and represent my opinions, hunches, suspicions, best recollections and editorial views.
You can no longer tolerate the crime, the crazy government, the police, the taxes, your neighbors, your in laws, your outlaws, your wife, your dog, your boss, your landlord, your city council, your school administrators, your kids, your kids' friends, your daughter's boyfriend, the nightly news, the people defecating in your driveway, the rock band next door, the dogs, the parties, the drunks, the dopers, the rotting bodies on the sidewalk (San Francisco), the zombies down the block, the litter, the filth, the smell, your President, Congress...
Been there.
Where on this earth can you escape to, that has 80% fewer problems, nearly no crime, no drugs, no homeless, a more common-sense government, far lower prices, a better climate, and police that probably won't SHOOT YOU over a parking ticket?
Am there.
Bonifacio Global City, aka BGC, Taguig, Manila, Philippines.
I mostly shoot animate objects -- people, critters, things that move and will never, ever look the same way twice. Sure, it's sometimes fun to go snap a building or a park and play around with different angles and looks and colors and filters. But honestly, you can go there anytime -- anyone can -- and shoot the same damned scene a million times, whether tomorrow or next year or next century. But people shots -- no one will ever look the same as they do at THAT INSTANT in time. They are creating Art without even knowing it, every second of their existence, and I am stealing it gladly.
People ask me all the time if the child is dead. The notion is so odd. It comes from people who have grown up in an uptight world. Thailand isn't (yet) uptight (though silly Westerners are trying as hard as they can to make it so). The motorbike taxi riders often take kids to school and pick them up and take them home. Buses are rare. This is a common sight in the afternoons; the kids are tired and just fall asleep on the way home. No one thinks a thing about it -- except those having never been around, out in the real world. It's annoying in a way. And sad. Sad that so many have such a skewed vision of the world. America, heck, The Western Nations et al are anything but the centers of the Universe, like they think they are. Out and around, in the real world, real life is playing out every minute of every day. Our advice: Go experience it, and your world view will be changed forever. Your blood pressure will go down, your diabetes will perhaps even vanish, you won't need pills to go to sleep and Red Bull to wake up. You'll become.....worldly. Then go back to your western nanny-state after a decade.....and throw up.
I've been creating websites for nearly 30 years. I used to create the coolest, most cutting-edge sites on the web. But this is an ugly, dog-simple website with no apologies because I've watched the cool ones crash and become obsolete, one after another, again and again and again, due to the never-ending de-volution of HTML and a relentless barrage of new and "better" website-building languages and a whole world full of browsers that can't -- or won't -- keep up. I learned over decades that you can design the coolest, cleverest (no, it's not a word, suck it up) website on earth -- which WILL FAIL because some lazy and/or incompetent/misguided coder somewhere (commonly fired Microsoft employees) updates, changes or ruins some obscure snippet of code which then conflicts with some older or newer piece of code and the whole site goes down, which then requires hours or days to repair or rebuild. You create a gorgeous website and proof it in every possible manner and way with every browser and it's running like a Swiss watch -- then you move on to other projects and four or eight months later you go back to check the site and it's a mess of mis-formatted nonsense because some "professional coder" somewhere managed to get some core coding defaults changed industry-wide and now your website is junk that must be fixed and/or completely rebuilt. Homey say No Mo'. The strategy now is to use only code that is so simplistic it's never likely to be changed (i.e. "upgraded" and ruined).
This site is MUCH better when viewed on a real computer screen. Seriously. Phones are good for many things, but web browsing, especially photo/video sites, is NOT their strong suit and never will be.
These images below have been put through the proverbial wringer. It's a wonder they're still alive.
Sometimes grain is the fault of a sloppy and/or lazy photographer. Sometimes grain or noise is added either manually or by a filter, for effect. Sometimes grain just "is" as a result of supreme amounts of downsizing and compression due to internet bandwidth constraints. Sometimes grain is the result of how your device (mis)treats an image. Below, grain was added by a filter in some cases. Above, no grain was added. Sometimes the photographer chooses to allow some degree of grain to remain, because to remove it would leave an image shot in less than desirable environments, too soft. Grain is often added to give an image a bit of a "gritty" look. I like a bit of grit sometimes. I hate baby photography. It's just too mushy.
Above is an image pushed to the point of Cartoonish -- which I like for this particular shot. A filter added a lot of grain to the two shots below.
Extreme grain, below. Even though this was added intentionally because it enhanced the mood of image greatly (this is sort of how it "feels" when you stroll around this teak boat bone yard), both this version and the original version with zero grain, shot in good light with a 51mp Canon, were rejected by all stock agencies. Homey took da hint, but I'm guessing that someone, somewhere, could have used the above image. I came to the conclusion that stock agencies don't want to do any work. At all. They want to create a fully automated assembly line which requires absolutely zero real-world or human thinking or input. They want to create a completely self-driving industry in which they merely sit in the Bahamas and sip sweet drinks and cash the checks from YOUR hard work and creativity. They don't want to even THINK ABOUT their business, if possible, and when they do have to intercede in some small hands-on way, it annoys the heck out of them. That's why you won't find a lot of creativity in the stock images markets. Yes some slips through -- but that isn't the focus.
Image below would never (ever) be accepted by a stock agency due to "grain", even though it was purposely inserted by the filter.
These started out as originals mostly at either 27mp or 51mp, depending on the camera used. Your monitor or phone may not display the colors even close to how they were shot. It could be that your monitor needs calibration, or it could be you just have a crappy Chinese monitor, or it could be that I CHOSE to tweak certain colors for effect.
They've been down-sampled to a tiny fraction of their original size to fit and work on the WWW, then the quality setting was reduced from 100% to around 60-70% due to bandwidth. Then the obnoxious Copyrights were slapped on. It's a wonder they're even still viewable, and compared to the originals, they ARE barely viewable.
Driver is a delivery guy -- is he delivering the kid? That's pretty common when you need to send your kid somewhere
It happens that many of these were shot from about 50-70 meters away, often when approaching sunset, because that's when the strange and wonderful subjects tend to come out. That means the camera was struggling on targets doing 50 kilometers per hour.
I retired as a photographer around 2010-2016 (it was a gradual process). After that I traveled around the world with not much to do except to work with SE Asian orphans. My real intention was to dismantle any of the 80 million (with an M) unexploded land-mines in Laos. I thought that would be a positive thing I could do for the world (undoing the BS the US did to so many countries and then walked away with a shrug and a flick of the hair). Everywhere you go you'll see people, kids and adults (and dogs), hobbling around missing limbs, eyes, sections of their torsos or parts of their skulls (count 5 images down from the page top); that's all almost exclusively from US land-mines. I got to the point where I wouldn't even step into the jungle to urinate; it's just too dangerous unless you're on an established trail or path. Even then, maybe I'm heavier than the 20kg Asian kids or the 35kg adults who've been softly padding through there for years. Go out some evening for a neighborhood game of baseball in a vacant lot? Forget it. Thanks, USA, for all that you do for TO the world.
Drunk, drunk, drunk again. What can I say
I applied everywhere for this work. But I learned that almost exclusively it's done by females and trained rats. Pity the rats, which are truly exceptional little friends. I was denied in every instance by every organization because, they said, I didn't have the temperament for it. No male does. --Interesting and depressing insight into our gender. So much for gender equality in the "spiritually enlightened" corner of the world.
I ended up just working with the homeless, usually the jungle families living under tarps. I have a million pictures of that. I don't like to share them.
SE Asia is an easy place to live for the homeless
I had sold off most cameras and studio equipment after retiring and I just fiddled around here and there taking street snapshots, usually with a Canon 5Dsr or others, and a 70-200 telephoto, like the images shown below. Eventually I wore out a few more Canons and amassed another 108,000 "keeper" casual snapshots (like the ones below) out of a few dozen million shutter actuations, and I started wondering what I could ever do with all these street-shots.
I'd worked in a dedicated niche market through my career, for only one company, and never shot "stock" and was never inclined to. I know a bit about that industry and, truthfully, I want nothing to do with it unless it is completely on my terms.
Stock image agencies are now owned and run by Precious Millennials and Sillycon Snowflakes and they aren't known for having the common sense God gave a crowbar. They are unspeakably miserable to do business with and I will not do it. BTW, the image below is grainy because the shot was stretching the capabilities of the equipment and because even though it's ugly, I wanted to keep as much detail as possible. It's a trade off and is up to the photographer.
When your submitted and accepted "stock" images are incompetently, "accidentally" presented (leaked) to the public, often without copyright markings at all(!), and are subsequently STOLEN and used around the world for the profit of everyone but you, you may find that it's very difficult or even impossible to get the ongoing theft stopped and more difficult still to extract back-payment -- I have some such images and pieces of literature right now in that category. In the past I've luckily collected handsomely on every single theft and infringement, eventually, but honestly I have better things to do with my time and my blood pressure is happier if I just say no to putting my work in positions where it WILL get stolen. It's like leaving your lawnmower out on the sidewalk all night in South Chicago. Sure, it'll be there in the morning.
Land mine, Laos
Many long-time photogs are reporting that they have given up on photography itself and stock agencies altogether and spend all their working hours now, just chasing and collecting on IP infringements that the stock agencies have let slip through. That's their occupation now --- copyright theft detectives, and then, subsequently, collection agencies, and ultimately lawyers when they sue (because you CAN'T FIND a good lawyer and you couldn't afford them if you did). Yes, yes, when you nail a copyright thief and they refuse to pay (most will refuse until physically forced) and you go get a judgment from a court that judgment is supposed to compensate you for attorneys' fees and other expenses. Try it and see what happens. In the one in twenty cases where the judge even awards it, s/he'll award an amount about 1/20th of what you paid out, and you'll probably never collect even that because the miscreants won't pay willingly and you'll have to go back to court AGAIN and attach some property they own, and then go through the motions of selling THAT. You could invest YEARS in recovering five or ten thousand dollars.
Helium. You suck in enough, you can do this
My work was almost always stolen by national magazines, luckily, and that meant there was a better chance of recourse against those thieving turkeys. Even then, some of them forced me to take it all the way to a courtroom before they stopped the proceeding and begged my attorney, "Oh, uh, gee, please sir, maybe we made a mistake here; can't we all just -- sniffle-snuffle -- GET ALONG?" And my attorney would say no.
Quite the stylish pair. I could do a whole shoot around them if I ever saw them again
Some would swear on a stack of bibles that they had my written permission to use the material. They continued to adamantly and loudly swear it even as they waltzed right into the courtroom. They swore it under oath! But when the judge finally demanded that they produce evidence of that permission, they couldn't, because, of course, they had no permission at all and never had it -- they had merely stolen the images and used them for profit. Once finally CAUGHT and backed into a rat's corner with no place to run, they'd pay on the spot and we'd drop the suit. The stock agencies probably won't help you at all to any appreciable to degree. Their sloppy contracts, capricious and riddled with nebulous loopholes, all in the agency's favor of course, like a ridiculous Farcebook TOS, are responsible for your losses, but try, I dare you, to get compensated by the lackadaisical agencies who caused you these problems and losses. That's the Millennial's Creed -- to TAKE.
Little flower thingy. Poisonous to eat. No, heck -- why do you believe me?
Back when I was writing for a living, I had a friend, mentor and agent in New York named Richard Curtis. He wrote a book called, "How to be your own literary agent (sometimes)". You can read it and glean a weak and watered down education of what the image market has become also, because literary theft and imagery theft are the same. At least with text, it's easy to string-search for thefts. Images, not so much. Read the book and you'll become so disheartened that you'll decide not to write except for fun and family and you'll decide not to take pictures except for fun and family unless you're doing it under a direct contract where your benefactor is paying you for flat-out "all rights", and paying handsomely. Then, when that NEW OWNER of your images lets someone steal them, YOU DON'T CARE AT ALL. It's a rotten place that we have devolved to in society and business but that's the reality.
I like that song from US TV -- Bad girl Bad girl, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
This is now the state of stock photography. Thanks Snowflakes. I, personally, elect not to become involved in it ever again in the traditional sense. Thank God, I don't have to.
I'm not sure what I'll do with this batch of 108,000 (and growing by a few hundred a day). I'll think about it.
This girl works out a lot. A LOT. Really, a LOT
To kick it off, the links below will open MP4 video files, which are simple, inelegant Lightroom slide-shows (complete with bugs and errors so typical of any Adobe product) of only a couple hundred pictures. Just sit back and relax; you don't have to do a thing except turn off the sound if you wish. In the worst case scenario you'll hopefully glean a tiny bit of understanding of SE Asian daily life.
Just wait -- ALL things will come to you from street vendors. ALL thing
Some of these images are old, shot with decrepit cameras in bad conditions. Normally I'm a "function before form" guy. That means, simply, that before my aircraft is allowed to look pretty, it first must FLY WELL, and before my rifle needs to "look cool" in combat, it first must SHOOT STRAIGHT in combat, and before my wife needs to be gorgeous, she first must have a GOOD HEART.
99f., and 88% humidity. No AC
In photography, however, I'm "form before function". If I had a choice to place a pristine 1975 Ford Pinto or a rusted-out Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic in my living room, which would I choose? Which would would fuel the romantic fires of my soul? If I had a dark, grainy, blurry shot of Boothe pulling the trigger with the resultant black-powder muzzle flash and smoke right behind Lincoln's head that night in the theatre, I'd put that right here on this website and to Hell with the technical errors in the image. The mainstream stock agencies, however, would reject that image because Boothe's hand jerks as the gun is fired and that hand was blurred. I'm not joking. Every stock agency would reject that (ok, ok, one or two would accept it as a "flawed historical document", but you get the point). A photograph must capture the moment FIRST, and be "technically correct" second. In a perfect world, you'd have equal helpings of both qualities. Last time I checked, this world ain't perfect, dern the luck anyhow.
Great commercial for Coke. I tried and tried and TRIED to get them to look at it. They obnoxiously refused
Some of these images are pretty dirty, technically speaking. Nothing in this post-retirement batch was ever intended for any purpose except to gaze upon once in awhile with family and friends -- they were merely recorded memories. I've cleaned and corrected many, and have not bothered with many. The compression and the slide-show creation has also introduced many nasty artifacts and problems.
Add some flour, milk, and a CRASH--
The video slide-show is a largish file, not particularly suited for phones with cracked screens running on rickety roaming cellular plans. Even if you can spare the gigs on your aging Android, the images will look, well, like images on a cell phone. They look bad enough just getting them onto the WWW at all. Please don't defile these steaks in a frying pan in Wesson oil; they've been through enough already. Barbecue them properly, instead, on a nice computer screen. No, they're not 4K. That file size would have been of Biblical proportions. If your connection isn't up to snuff, there will be hesitations (if you can watch Netflix you're probably ok). But if you have bandwidth issues and you still REALLY want to watch it, let it run all the way through, jerkity-jerkity, while you go take a bath, and once it has finally loaded itself into the cache on your browser, it "should" play through smoothly the second time because it will draw locally from that cache file. If you're outside the continental US then fire up your VPN (we like NordVPN) and set it to a fast US connection.
Prettiest girl on Earth
If I ever do put any of these for sale, I'll sell "all rights worldwide" only. I will NOT make myself crazy chasing various licenses around the world because nearly every single buyer abuses those licenses. I really hate going to court.
The buyer will receive the jpg, of course, sans copyright (the new owner must put their own on at that point because THEY will be the full and legal owner) plus a copy of the original RAW file from the camera. Edit and tweak to your heart's content with the RAW. Remember that the jpg versions are crops from the RAWs, and usually represent only a small corner of the overall original image. Also, the RAW files have no editing at all -- they will look flat and dull. Only the jpg images (what you see here) have been tweaked and corrected FROM THE CAMERA RAWs (in Canon's case the RAW files have a CR2 extension but they're still RAW files).
How to get your friend to the nearest petrol station when he runs out
The prices will be high. Yes, some stock contributors/agencies may sell an image for $19.95, but they might sell it 500 times.
In my business model, you will own ALL RIGHTS to the image, even for resale in any way you desire as many times as you wish, except what rights I retain for personal use and for website displays to represent my work in a portfolio. In this way, not having your image stolen and copied is YOUR problem, because it will no longer BE my image. I'm tired of that game and homey don do dat no mo'.
Is the American system better? Should this dog be simply killed? No safety net here
Believe it or not, there's a small handful of images in this batch of 108,000 that I will never sell. Some are unique personal moments.
Re the issue of so-called "model releases", here's how it works in real life: No one needs a model release to sell an image that was taken in any public place.
She taunts the street dogs until they bite her. Too many have tried to break the cycle with zero success
The seller cannot control what is done with said image. The photographer has broken no law by TAKING the picture and s/he breaks no law by SELLING the picture.
But you may wish to have a model release depending on your intended use.
In the monsoon seasons this is almost every day. Four lane boulevard under there somewhere
If your image is going to represent a product, a company, a political party or some other cause, the subject of that image might (MIGHT) come back at you someday and say they never wanted their amazing likeness to be associated with that product or that cause, and now they want money from you; lots of it.
A friend who languished for a year from a totally curable affliction then died. Thank you, socialized medicine -- it's coming to America too
On the other hand, if you have an amazing image of a mother and daughter walking hand in hand, and you're advertising a trip to the local petting zoo or a beautiful vacation destination, it would be quite difficult for the subject(s) to make a case in court that you were ruining their reputations. The case in court will be based on "how a reasonable human being would see things". That's literally the test the judge would use to decide the case.
Central Laos, still sometimes occupied
Also, if you "disparage" the person, they can come at you for that. Think about that innocent mother and daughter walking hand in hand, with their likeness being used to represent legal prostitution in some Third World country -- yep: you gonna get nailed and you should. Did you buy an image of, say, a slender-breasted woman on a sidewalk, but you wanted to add more "punch" to it and you gave her virtual breast implants and then have her representing battery operated sexual aids? Some subjects might come back and say, Wow! Thanks! May I have a copy? Or, others might say you have embarrassed them mortally and ruined their life and they want a hundred Godzillian pesos from you.
Maybe they can sue and win. Common sense here is your friend and savior. Don't have any of that? Then may God and Buddha and that other guy, help you.
He once was white and had money and a home. SE Asian girl took it all. Now he lives on the beach and eats from dumpsters
The thing most people don't realize is that having a standard model release doesn't protect you in these cases anyway, though many silly stock agencies THINK they do. You must have a specific release that explicitly allows for ANY AND ALL USES, even if they're disgusting, immoral, disparaging (seriously, you need that word and many just like it in your contract) and otherwise even a philosophically unflattering treatment of their likeness. Most image buyers think that if the model release includes the words "any use", they've covered. What can happen is that the featured subject who signed the release can come back and STILL challenge it, saying yes, they saw and read that phrase and agreed to it by signature, but never in their wildest dreams did they think those words (any and all) meant THAT (whatever THAT is). You need a model release that's a vague, nebulous release like a Twitter TOS, written BY attorneys to outsmart, who else, ATTORNEYS, which is ALSO mind-numbingly specific and embarrassingly graphic. Go to a commercial porn photographer/videographer and get THEIR release and use THAT as a STARTING POINT, and then add to it. Almost no photographer today can give the buyer a release like that, except the ones who've been around the block 16 times already.
Got an image you TRULY LOVE and want to DISPARAGE THE DAYLIGHTS OUT OF? Pay a graphics artist to slap a big old Covid mask on that face and you're usually golden (unless they're identifiable in some other way). If you think you might want the person in your newly-purchased image to represent bubble-gum scented hemorrhoid cream with glowing neon sparkles, the contract must cover anything and everything imaginable and it must state that about nine times in twelve different ways in 16 different languages and should show a copy of their ID and their head-on likeness holding it up, be witnessed copiously with TRACEABLE witnesses who provided REAL addresses and identification, and really, really ought to be notarized. 99.999993% of model releases in use today do NOT have that kind of coverage and the USER (not the photographer) of that image is living under Damocles Sword and they might have been there for decades and decades and not even known it.
I do have model releases for paid photo shoot work but there's precious little of that in this collection -- it was all sold decades ago. Street photography very, very seldom (say virtually never, and never with a comprehensive release) comes with a model release. In some cases I could POSSIBLY obtain one by tracking down the subject(s). It would take time and money and YOU would pay for it. Ask me about any particular shot and I'll give you the percentage odds of obtaining a release for it and what I would charge, win or lose. Some would be a few hours, easy detective work, and some would be nearly a global manhunt with rewards being offered on telephone pole fliers and a payment being made ultimately to the subject AND finder's fees to others. Many or most street shots would be impossible.
We never figured out what she was trying to protect
If you aren't going to "disparage" or otherwise insult the subject in a street-shot, you should be just fine with it with no release. "Should be". There are some crazy, crazy people out there who go funny when they smell munny, even if you have a comprehensive release. The commercial use of photographs always has been, and always will be, a gray area. You pays your money and you takes your chances -- just like when you drive your car to the supermarket.
It's in the eyes. The meanness is in the eyes
Do I sound like an attorney? I loathe those turkeys. But they have created a world in which you almost need to be one to just get through daily life. Who does that benefit? ATTORNEYS and almost no one else.
This is a rough video of a walk-through in a Filipino Barangay in Manila, Philippines.
This area is situated more or less inside of the BGC, Taguig area, and serves as the workforce supply for the high end businesses, shops, malls, restaurants in BGC. This area houses the people who earn maybe $8 a day so the business owners a hundred meters away can make $800 per day. This is (the area depicted in this video is) considered a mostly upper-middle class neighborhood compared to most of Manila. The camera angle and lack of stabilization has a reason. Actually, it is stabilized by a Samsung S23 Ultra phone, but Filipinos are a bit (or more) wary of people taking pictures and even the Samsung couldn't remove all my walking and arm-swinging to keep the phone from being spotted too easily. I once saw an expat walking through an area like this, making a video travel blog, and he was assaulted pretty soundly by residents. I walked through here with the phone at my side, not pointing ahead, but off to the side, so as to appear that I was just walking along carrying a phone. No eye contact. Even to do this would be considered stupid -- you can be killed for a $100 phone here (a friend was robbed twice just in one crossing of the city on the same bus), and this was an $1800 phone, so a bit risky if anyone figured out what it was. Knowing its value would have meant that at the very least I would have been followed and possibly intersected up ahead. I could go through with a Filipino and be in less danger, but alone, as I was, was sketchy. Anyway, it is what it is. Remember, this is upper middle class for the working class. It gets much, much, much and vastly worse. I'll try to cover some of that in another vid or ten. No attempt was made to stabilize this further.
This area is kept strictly separate from the super-slick area that is BGC; in fact, it is walled and gated off except for fire access, and a couple of open streets at the extreme far end. Note in the beginning and end of the vid that access to this area from BGC is only via a long narrow sort of pedestrian semi-tunnel (for the workers). At the end of the vid, maybe around minute 20 or so, you can begin to see just how delineated this area is from BGC. Walls make it clear that no one in BGC should be insulted by having to look at this area, and the people in this area shouldn't be insulted by having to constantly look at the shining example greed can build, only meters from their hood. The vid was slowed slightly just to give better looks at things that were flitting by too quickly. No audio. Requires strong connection.
BELOW:
Video Slideshow #3 (most images from
pages 7-28),
Medium/high resolution
and bandwidth, not for slow
connections and crappy phones.
About 5.4 Gigs. This requires HIGH
Bandwidth! Not for the faint of heart.
Duration about 1.5 hours
If you experience slow streaming just
switch your VPN to a US server.
BELOW:
Video Slideshow #3 (most images
from
pages 7-28),
Low resolution
and bandwidth, OK for slow(er)
connections and crappy phones.
About 3 Gigs. This requires GOOD
Bandwidth but not "excellent".
Duration about 1.5 hours
If you experience slow streaming just
switch your VPN to a US server.
You've got to have fun in this life! You work
and struggle and toil for decades for what?
So you can have fun! But really, all it
takes is this... If you experience slow streaming just
switch your VPN to a US server.
 Copy.jpg "This girl taunts the street dogs until they bite her, (pokin' da bear, pokin' da bear) then screams bloody murder. I've had a few adult girlfriends like that.")
