There are a few reasons for that, mainly having to do with time — as in, not enough of it. Time to think about topics I think you’d like to read about; time to develop those topics into well-written blog posts of a length adequate to do justice to the subject. I am by nature a long-form writer and thinker; I tend to want to wrap my head around a topic, ponder it, and explore it thoroughly in words. Lots of words.

But this kind of thinking and writing takes time and energy, both of which I’m finding increasingly in short supply around my many other commitments. This crunch only got worse when I started writing for Fraction Magazine. I practically stopped writing here at all. It was tough enough to maintain a flow of high-quality written output for one or the other blogs, let alone both.

Moreover, my penchant for bulkier prose seems to run counter to the prevailing blogosphere zeitgeist, which wants more-frequent and shorter posts that emphasize images and video over text alone. That is fine with me; I’d like to do more posts based on images —mine or others’— to prompt sharing and discussion. So I’m trying to re-train myself to think in shorter chunks of prose, with more emphasis on images, which I can post more frequently, yet still meet my own expectations for the quality of the output. Though WordPress has steadily improved in this regard, images and video still seem a bit like grafted-on appendages here, rather than organic parts of an integrated whole.

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot more with my Tumblr account. For those of you who don’t know it, Tumblr is a very simple and attractive micro-blogging platform that makes it easy and nearly brainless to post text, images, video, audio, or what have you. Whereas WordPress is on its surface a blogging platform, underneath it’s a high-powered Content Management System for websites. Tumblr, on the other hand, is much more lightweight and simple. Tumblr can’t do everything WordPress can do; but much of the time, it does what I need.

I’ll keep this blog active, and I’ll use it when it seems appropriate. I’ll also try to cross post from Tumblr to here, and vice versa, at least for a while. And I intend to send out a notice to Facebook and Twitter whenever something gets posted anywhere. Keeping all of this straight is exhausting, and I’m investigating the tools necessary to make everything automatic. Bear with me as I get it all sorted.

So thank you for your attention and support here. Keep this blog in your feed readers, and in your hearts and minds; but make room for (yet) another one, my Tumblr feed.

It will live at http://blog.michaelsebastian.com.

The flight was a surreal experience. The Ambien I took to try to reorient myself through sleep to a twelve-hour time differential only gave me about
4 hours’ restless sleep, and produced a strange sense of time compression. There are large chunks of the flight I simply can’t account for. Perhaps it’s just as well.

I’m now holed up in the airport bar waiting for the rest of my travel companions to arrive. Got about 2 hours to wait.

Immigration and customs was efficient, quick, and friendly — more so than my recollection of US customs when returning home. Not exactly warm, mind you, but pleasant and businesslike,  and not off-putting.

The weather is appalling right now — overcast and rainy, as it’s forecast to be for much of the next week. And the humidity, and general unaggressiveness of the air conditioning, conspire to produce an overall sogginess that, atop 24 hours of travel grunge, has me longing for hotel and shower.

For now,  this half-pint will have to do, as I hurry up and wait.

I downed an Ambien and tried to sleep. I got maybe 4 fitful hours, but even in the relatively plush confines of “economy comfort”, I could find no position in which something didn’t cry “uncle” to an armrest or seat edge or passing drink cart.

I can further testify that awakening before the recommended 8 post-Ambien hours have elapsed is not a state for decision-making.

Our collapsed-passenger distress call earlier turned out to be a dehydrated, sleepless Chinese passenger (US resident) who self medicated with OTC cold remedies and red wine, got to feeling dizzy, and fell out en route from lav to seat.

Nothing serious, but the Delta people were all over me and the pulmonary / critical care doc from Seattle who’d gotten there first. They had reams of forms and reports for him to sign, and were pressing us for status updates for the pilot. I guess it’s a costly pain to have to divert an aircraft to an unscheduled landing in God knows where to get some poor bugger to hospital.

Anyway, Delta gave us both travel vouchers and drinks as a token of appreciation; an offer of a biz-class upgrade was not forthcoming.

For that perk, and the sleep it would facilitate, I’d do CPR from here to Manchuria.

2100Z, 33,000 ft, somewhere over the Canadian North.

A short hop to Atlanta, a quick stop at Customs for one more Form 4457, and yet another Starbucks; now I’ve boarded a Boeing 777 for what I hope will be the longest flight I ever have to take.

I expect to arrive in Shanghai at around 2:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday, 16 hours and a day after takeoff. I fully expect also to learn what hammered sh*t looks like with my first glance in a Chinese-restroom mirror.

Our flight path takes us north-northwest from Atlanta back over Louisville, then onward to skirt Chicago to the west. From there we overfly Ontario and the western edge of Hudson Bay, going feet-dry again over the Northwest Territories. From there it looks like a whole lot of nothing below us as we cross the Far North of Canada and the roof of the planet over Siberia on our way to Chinese airspace.

I really wish either my seat-back moving-map display were better, or I’d paid more attention in geography class. But what I’d thought of as a trans-Pacific flight is really a trans-Arctic, if not polar, route. Makes sense, because the shortest distance between two points on a globe is a segment of a great circle. What’s that, you ask? Mark the route on the globe’s surface and start sawing along the line. If you cut through the globe’s center, then the route is a great circle.

Deploying my smart phone to write this provided a “duh” moment, as I pondered the absence of wi-fi on this flight.  Well, Marconi, that’s because the wi-fi in the cabin can only distribute an internet feed from somewhere else, and a glance at my map display shows nothing but Arctic waste below. Evidently there’s no satellite feed, either, our I’m confidently Delta would have figured out how to monetize that, too.

So by the time you read this I’ll already be on the ground in Shanghai, no doubt wondering where the hotel van is; our what I did to deserve the customs cavity search. Wish me luck.

Sleep? Noise and movement hath murdered sleep. I very much want to move my bio-clock toward Shanghai time, where it’s currently around 4 a.m., but I’ll have to somehow convince my pineal gland it isn’t really 4 p.m. in Louisville. I have Ambien, but I’m not sure I want to take that until the rest of the passengers have settled down a bit.

I’ve already watched “The Guard”, and I have the first season of “Breaking Bad”, three Kindle books, and “Bridesmaids” teed up on the wife’s iPad (thank you, dear). I’ve even found time to aid a stricken passenger when the call came for “a doctor onboard”. But sleep is what I really want.

Stay tuned; I’ll let you know how it worked out.

I am honored and way-beyond-pleased to represent Fraction Magazine at the Lishui Photo Festival in Lishui, China, from November 4 – 10. I’ll be displaying a selection of images from my series 52 Miles.

Also representing Fraction will be photographer and educator extraordinaire Jim Stone. We two and Fraction editor / curator David Bram will be accompanied by two others whose names I’ll not mention lest we sully their reputations by association!

We are also spending a few days in Shanghai at both ends of the trip, where we will be mere specks among some twenty-three million people in the world’s most populous megalopolis. I’m getting agoraphobic just thinking about it.

My goals are modest: to avoid foodborne illness and North Korean prison camps, have a great time, and return with a lot of interesting photographs.

I expect to be blogging this adventure in real time to some extent during this trip, venue TBD. Google Plus has become the center of my much-reduced social-networking activity, so my Google Plus profile would be a great place to start.

Well, one big reason is that David Bram, editor of Fraction Magazine, has asked me to write a monthly column for the Fraction blog. So I’m pretty darn excited abou this opportunity to spew forth my wisdom upon an even larger audience.

As things stand now, the column will appear on the Fraction blog mid-month, around the 15th; and that same column will also be linked and archived with each issue of Fraction the magazine, which appears the first of every month.

The column debuted April 15th; you can read it here on the blog, or here in the magazine.

You do read Fraction, don’t you? It’s a must for anyone who loves contemporary photography. One visit will explain why.

I’ll still be blogging here periodically, but in a fairly crowded work, family, and artistic life, I’m hard pressed to put out a thoughtful, well-done blog post more than once a month. But keep this blog in your feed reader anyway; but be sure to do the same over at Fraction.

First, the good folks at One One Thousand, who were kind enough to feature my work in their December 2010 issue, repeated their mistake a few weeks ago on their blog. There, they foolishly invited me to hold forth as part of their “Visual Influences” series, wherein photographers discuss, ahem, their visual influences. Hold forth, I did.

Second, I was delighted recently to have licensed one of my favorite images, “Big Wheel“, to a textbook publisher as an illustration to accompany a poem within a college-textbook poetry anthology, estimated circulation 50,000. I’m pumped about this. The textbook’s editors saw the image in The New York Times Magazine back in November of last year, and got in touch with me. (That, in turn, was a direct result of my having participated in Critical Mass last summer.) Not sure when the book is coming out; I’ll let you know of course.

Third, I’m going to be involved in a new online collaboration which will debut soon. Like, tomorrow. That, too, I’ll post.

So don’t touch that dial.

My first task was to reorganize the storage cabinets where office supplies (shared by my wife in this joint-use space) and photographic gear reside. There are four of these 6-foot steel cabinets lining the back wall of our basement-office. I put my hand on just about every item in each cabinet, deciding its fate. I threw away quite a bit of stuff, and consolidated, reorganized, and relabeled the rest so I can actually find things. I still have the rest of the office to tackle—chiefly, the embarrassing crap-midden that is my desk—but at least now I’ll have the cabinet space in which to store other things I decide to keep. So far so good.

The third cabinet from the left contains, among other things, unused “legacy” cameras. Among these I found my venerable Nikon F3, given to me by my parents as I completed my internal-medicine residency training 21 years ago this summer. It was my first “real”, professional-level camera, and I made a lot of pictures with it during that phase of my photographic life. I haven’t shot with it in nearly 5 years; it still had a roll of original T-Max 400 in it. Feeling nostalgic, I decided to take it out for a spin. While it shows some use, it’s in good working condition, and all I had to do was replace its batteries to get going. I found myself wondering why I had put it away, largely untouched, for so long. It is, after all, a fine camera, used heavily by pros back in its day. After shooting a few rolls, I had my answer: 35mm, if it was ever the right tool for my eye and work, isn’t the right tool now.

Allow me a moment’s digression. Like other people for whom photography is a passion rather than a job, my photographic career has proceeded in fits and starts over the years, with periods of intense interest and activity interrupted by prolonged fallow times, as life’s other obligations took precedence. I started making pictures at around age 8, using beater cameras gifted by family members. My first one was a brown-Bakelite Kodak Brownie that used 620 film; I also briefly owned a Zeiss Ikon Contina 35mm with no rangefinder and a broken light meter. It had a sweet lens, and was a beautiful machine to look at. Alas, not even Carl Zeiss could gainsay Newton’s laws of motion, as they apply to cameras and pavement.

But my early pride and joy was my Hanimex Praktika 35mm, with its undistinguished 50mm no-name screw-mount lens. I remember my excitement—I was about ten years old—when I marched down to the camera counter at the Farmers Branch, Texas Montgomery Ward to buy the Praktika. I confidently plunked down the fifty-odd dollars for this marvel of East German engineering, money I’d earned helping my father conduct a big family garage sale that summer. The Praktika was the first single-lens reflex camera I ever owned. And, having purchased it with the proceeds of my own toil, I was proud of it. I shot with it throughout middle- and high school, as my interest in photography waxed and waned, and finally withered to almost nothing during college—I studied, and played, hard, in those days.

But sure enough, in my last year of college, my lifelong recurrent itch flared once again. I scratched it with yet another beater camera—but a better class of beater, a very used Nikon F2 with a balky metering prism and a 50mm lens with a bent filter ring. This $200 investment carried me for a couple of years, until it, the Praktika, and much of what little else of value I owned were taken by the burglar who visited my New Orleans med-school apartment one night. That, plus school pressures, put paid to my photographic activities for about the next five years.

Enter the F3, which showed up in my last year of internal-medicine residency in Birmingham, Alabama. Another photographic resurgence ensued as I graduated and entered private practice there, and had a bit of time on my hands. It was a time of transition into the “real world”; frankly, I was bored, a lot, and not at all sure I’d made the right career choice. I shot a lot with the F3 over the next two years (I even had a motor drive!); but these were also the years of my Ansel Adams phase, so the Nikon shared time and mind-space with the Sinar F I bought from a local studio photographer who had thrown in the towel. I also picked up a fairly complete medium/large-format darkroom kit that I installed in my rented house’s spare bathroom. I produced a lot of work, but very little that would make it into my posthumous retrospective.

Enter real life, once again. Bored and frustrated with medical practice, I quit after those two years, and moved to North Carolina with my new wife to do residency number two, in anesthesiology. The camera and my darkroom stuff got packed away (except for my Beseler 45MXT, which sat in the empty dining room of our next rented house for 3 years!) and largely forgotten, again until just as I was about to graduate and begin my anesthesiology practice in Memphis, Tennessee. Once there, I made a few fits and starts photographically, but the demands of work, home, and soon, children, didn’t allow for much beyond snapshots with the F3. The Sinar went into deep storage, while the Beseler was again relegated to a patch of unused floor. We stayed in Memphis for 5 years, until my practice imploded (long story.)

Looking for a place to land, I followed my wife to her native Kentucky in late 1998. We’ve been here ever since. (By the way, though it may seem like I was in the Witness Protection Program, all this relocation is not unusual for a physician just starting out in practice, especially one who switches specialties.) I didn’t do much photography beyond family snaps for the first few years here. I shot the F3 some, and snapped away with one of those Minolta clamshell APS cameras, bought in Tennessee when child number one was en route. I also dabbled a little with a Kowa Super 66 that had belonged to my wife’s grandfather, but did nothing serious with it, or with the F3.

But once again, life intervened, and with it came a reawakening, yet again, of my passion for making pictures. I left my practice here for a different one, and started shooting more. I finally bought a used Contax 645 system in late 2004, an acquisition that marked the start of my latest phase of photographic effort, which has continued unabated ever since. During this time, I’ve bought and sold a few cameras, but I’ve stuck with medium-format (and the occational 4×5) for the vast majority of my work throughout this latest period—which I expect will end when I do.

[Writing this, I'm impressed at how my photographic resurgences seem always to have come at a time of other life change. I had never noticed this association until just now, writing this story. This probably indicates how deeply the desire to make images is woven into the fabric of Mike---I reach for it especially when other things seem uncertain or in-transition. I leave it for the shrinks to determine what that means.]

Back to the present. What does any of this have to do with my recent reunion with the F3? Getting it out of the cabinet had me thinking back to my transition from 35mm to medium format six years ago. What had prompted my seemingly definitive move away from 35mm film to medium format (excepting a lamentable side trip through cropped-sensor DSLR)? After all, the Nikon is a featherweight even compared to the Contax 645. It’s fun to shoot, easy to carry, and is made for mobile, run-and-gun photography. I had traded in this ease and convenience for the weight and sloth of medium format, but why?

I got my answer after I processed and scanned my 35mm-Reunion-Tour rolls last weekend. From a technical standpoint, compared even to my more pedestrian medium-format efforts—and to anything I produced with my D300—the 35mm pictures suck. Really they do, even taking into account that I was mainly shooting to verify that the camera was still working, and that I could focus the thing and remember how to use its center-weighted averaging (what, no matrix?) metering capability properly. It was a technical exercise, not an artistic one. I finished the legacy roll of TMax I’d found in the camera, and shot a roll each of Ektar 100 and BW400CN. The images are across-the-board technically inferior, and aesthetically disappointing.

In retrospect, then, it’s no wonder that I had stopped shooting 35mm film. I had stumbled upon medium format using a no-frills hand-me-down camera; and found that it was then, as now, the obvious tool for me. Beyond medium format’s superior image quality, I like the deliberative shooting pace and mindset its bulky, manual-everything cameras force upon the user. I like the square or near-square images made by medium-format cameras; 645 is about as rectangular as I want, and even then I often find myself cropping off a sliver of image along the long edge. (6×7 is Close To Heaven.) 35mm image proportions just seem too wide; I waste a third of that frame.

I am slowly transitioning to digital now—expect a future post on that—but I still love film, and will likely continue to shoot it for some time.  But whither the F3? With additional practice and improved technique I feel certain I could make technically better images with it than this recent batch. There’s a good bit of sentiment attached to that old Nikon, and I’d love to love it again. But I just don’t think that the (relatively) tiny, crowded, grainy, tonally-squeezed 35mm negative is a fit for the kind of work I’ve been doing since I discovered medium format. I think I am by nature not a small-format photographer, and it’s only in the last few years shooting larger formats that I’ve really made work I’d consider of first caliber. There’s really no going back for me.

Anyone want a used F3?

Zane had found me, in turn, via Emily Shur’s recent roundup of gallery openings, among which she mentioned New Directions 2011 Moments of Being. This exhibition of contemporary portraiture is on display through this month at wall space gallery in Santa Barbara, and moves north to their Seattle gallery for a February run.

I’m happy to have this occasion, therefore, to again thank curator David Bram of Fraction for including my work in this show; and wall space owner Crista Dix and her staff for making it happen (Patricia, this means YOU!)

Looking at this post as I write it, studded with hyperlinks to virtual places hither and yon, I’m amazed all over again at the power of all this interconnected-ness, even as I’m at times bewildered by it all.

K, West Virginia, June 2010

I am delighted to be part of the New Directions 2011 show, Moments of Being, in January at wall space gallery in Santa Barbara, California.

My thanks to juror David Bram for including my work, and to Crista Dix and her staff at wall space for making the whole thing possible. It was my pleasure to have met Crista as one of my reviewers this past June at Review Santa Fe (Crista, if you’re reading this—FILM!)

The show opens January 4th, and runs through the month. An opening reception is planned for January 12, at the gallery.