C. Hannibal visually speaking

Lisa Breaks Down My Photo Skills

One of the things I’m most grateful to my sister for is the fact I got to see Gordon Parks deliver the commencement at her graduation from F.I.T. He died a couple of years later. Besides being an author, composer and movie director, he was a badass shooter. And the man was self taught.
I’m working on getting my Gordon Parks on, but we’re a long way off. Grainy ISO settings be damned! Plus, I’m still kind of scary when it comes to sticking cameras in people’s grills.

Lisa, the digital associate angel on my shoulder gave me a fair, honest assessment of my first 3 homework assignments. Practice is definitely needed, but I think she would agree I have a little G. Parks in me, however tiny. Below are the photos with her comments. Live and learn, my folks.

“#23 is beautifully exposed….”

That’s right. Shorties at the Fairy Convention didn’t even flinch when I put the lens all up in their public space. Good feeling.

Continue reading “Lisa Breaks Down My Photo Skills” →

C. Hannibal visually speaking

Flexing the eye muscle

Any of my regular readers know that I generally don’t skip this many posts, this frequently. Between Strunk&White sessions, staying up till dawn, and taking hundreds upon hundreds of photos for a guy named Duy, it’s hard to find time to dedicate to anything resembling what I used to do. Just know that I’ll return with the same reporting on marginal cultures in distant lands once this work ebbs. For now, check out my pics.

And don’t forget, in the words of the great poet Edward Vedder, above, “I’m still alive.”








C. Hannibal concerts, music, visually speaking

Busting Flicks in D.F.

Toy Selectah
I first started hearing photos referred to as “flicks” sometime in the mid 1990s. Up to that point, a flick to me was a movie. One of the things a lot of guys and girls in my neighborhood would do is take a flick outside of a club against a spray-painted backdrop, usually a huge dollar sign or something else that signified urban cool. If it was a group of ladies, you would get the sexy pose; a group of guys and you would get the hard-rock pose with one guy kneeling in the front somewhere. Someone probably had a gold grille in the pic, too. The photographer was probably using a Polaroid camera and sold the picture for around $10 bucks. I know my boy Marcus has a ton stashed in a box somewhere.

Coming to the digital camera game late, I decided to bust more flicks myself. In the past year, I’ve upgraded to a Canon G10 and focused my eye on hundreds of things. If anyone peeps my Facebook albums, they know.
Buraka Som Sistema Nov. 2009 Mexico City

I just entered my first photo contest, and didn’t win, but one of my photos beat out a couple dozen others to get printed and displayed in the exhibit for The Space Farm, a media collective based in Mexico City, check them out, here. Then, if you’re in Jersey, go to Space Farms, just for the kitsch-y flavor.

All flicks taken in Mexico City in 2009. They represent the four out of five I submitted that didn’t make the cut (from the top): Toy Selectah, Andrea Echeverri of Aterciopelados and Buraka Som Sistema.