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October 2011 One of my short stories was a finalist in the Cincinnati Review's 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Prose Prize.
September 2011 Photographs from my Tokyo Crossing Series will appear in the fall issue of The Adirondack Review. I was also named a finalist in their 2010 photography contest.
August 2011 My novel, The Hashimoto Complex, received an honorable mention in Starcherone Books' 2011-12 Innovative Fiction Contest..
July 2011 One of my short stories was short-listed in the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Contest.
June 2011The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer, one of my long stories, was named a finalist in the 2010 Long Story Contest.
April 2011The Hashimoto Complex is a finalist for Black Lawrence Press's Big Moose Prize. • One of my stories was a finalist in Third Coast Magazine's 2011 Fiction Contest. Writer Brad Watson judged.
March 2011 One of my short-short stories will appear in SpringGun Journal this spring.
January 2011 One of my short stories is a finalist in Third Coast's 2011 Fiction Contest. Novelist Brad Watson will pick the winner next month.
August 2010 On August 15th, my novel The Hashimoto Complex was named a finalist in the Santa Fe Writers Project 2010 Literary Awards. • Pocket Smut has just published my twisted, perverse short short story called Please Don't Eat the Sausage.
July 2010 One of my long short stories, The Heart Is A Lonely Drummer is a finalist for Ropewalk Press's Thomas A. Wilhelmus Fiction Chapbook Prize. The press is a University of Southern Indiana imprint. Its website is here.
May 2010 One of my recent short stories, Protection has been "honorably mentioned" for the 2010 E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award.
March 2010 A selection from my Suburban Geometries series is entered in Leica's Oskar Barnack Prize competition
February 2010 I've donated a triptych to art auction benefit for the victims of Haiti's devasting earthquake which takes place on Wednesday, 2/10 at 7pm.
December 2009 At 7pm on Sunday, December 13th, I will give a reading at one of NYC's only leather biker cafes, Motorcycle Federation. Organized by Madeleine Beckman, the reading will also feature Roberta Bernstein, Jean Monahan, and Nicole Sprinkle. More details later.
November 2009 I will have a couple of stories published in the Brooklyn Writers Space first anthology, The Reader. The launch party is on Thursday, November 5th at 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street, in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.
October 2009The Hashimoto Complex won 2nd Runner-Up in the 2009 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Novel Competition. • I will be attending an artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Antonya Nelson.• Photos of my friend LuLu LoLo's 14th Street Newspaper Boy performance appeared in Domus Web. • My short-short South of the Border is favorably noted in The Review Review.
July 2009 A photograph from my collaboration with LuLu LoLo, Pierrot 2.0, was included in an Italian mail art exposition here.
May 2009 My short story Back Trouble is a semi-finalist (top 27 out of 654) in Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. • Photos from my Suburban Geometries series are published on Polar Inertia's Spring 2009 (#34) issue at the end of May.
April 2009 4/8: Max's cousin Elena Takeuchi was born at 5:24pm Tokyo Time! • My long story The Heart Is a Lonely Drummer is a finalist (top 30 out of 900) in Summer Literary Seminars-2009 Unified Fiction and Poetry Contest judged by Lynne Tillman. • A photo from my Visual Haiku series was published in Shots's Spring 2009 issue (#103).
February 2009 My short short story South of the Border was awarded 3rd Place in the Sonora Review's Third Annual Short Short Contest. The judge was Aimee Bender.
January 2009 My short story Second Actis a finalist won Honorable Mention in Cutthroat Journal's 2008 Rick DeMarinis Short Story Competition. The story will be published in February.
November 2008 Brooklyn Writers Space Reading at Union Hall, Sunday, 11/9, 5-7pm. BWS.
September 2008 Final LMCC Reading at U.S. Custom House, Thursday, 9/18, 6-8pm. RSVP is mandatory because of security. RSVP at LMCC's site here. Map of Bowling Green here.
August 2008 Our Baby Boy Is Due! 8/15 is the due date of our unnamed boy. HE'S HERE! Max Miles Takeuchi was born on Friday, 8-22-8 at 3:33pm! See tons of pix here.
April 2008 Excerpt from Tokyo Crossing appears in Redivider. Readings at LMCC Open Studios 4/26 at 92Y Tribeca, 4/27 at 200 Hudson St. Studios.
March 2008 Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage appears in WordRiot. Awarded a 2008 Fellowship from the Urban Artist Initiative/New York City. March 28 & 29: LMCC Workspace Open Hours.
February 2008—2/11 Reading at the Telephone Bar. 2/25 Reading at Union Hall with Brooklyn Writers Space writers Amy Sohn and Alex Tilney.
October 2007—Awarded 1st Place Lucie Award (Abstract Nature Fine Art Category) from the International Photography Awards 2007.
August 2007—Awarded 9-month residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
July 10, 2007—Short story Please Don't Eat the Sausage read by British actor Alex Woodhall at the Liar's LeagueSex & Death reading series, London.
October 2006—Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL.
Tripod Setup
I recently upgraded (reverted?) from a ballhead to 3-way pan-tilt head. Above is the hardware I use to photograph artwork. Manfrotto’s 410 head with micro-adjustable 3-axis adjustment. On top of the head is Chris Hejnar’s elegant, custom arca-swiss adapter with clamp for the 410/405. And on top of that are some Really Right Stuff rails, clamps, and their pano adapter mounted vertically. All this hardware allows me to reposition the camera in small increments without having to touch the tripod’s legs--very convenient if you’re shooting a lot of work of similar sizes and you want to maximize the usable pixels of your capture.
Magnolias (Union Square)
Rented two 100mm macro lenses during Adorama’s Passover break: the Nikkor 105mm F2.8 VR and Zeiss’s 100mm f2. Both are great, both are expensive. Will have to run some more tests in the studio to see whether either beats my 85mm tilt shift for sharpness. These were taken with a lowly D40 body.
New Lens (Prospect Heights)
Just got a stunning new lens: Nikkor 60mm f2.8 AFS. Very sharp and contrasty and not bad at all with flare.
Kodachrome R.I.P. 1935-2010
Kodachrome was my first color film love. Great name, great colors, great longevity. 2009 was the year Kodak ceased manufacturing it and yesterday the last Kodachrome lab in the world--in Kansas--processed its last roll. Before Ektachrome and high-resolution color negative emulsions became the preferred choice of photographers, Kodachrome was the king of color. Much of the groundbreaking images in the history of color photography were shot on Kodachrome, but none are perhaps as well known as Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl, seen above. NYT has 2 stories on this here and here.
The Death of Professional Photography
The New York Times has an article about how amateurs have been flooding the professional photography market. This isn’t news for somebody like me. This is what I’ve been calling the Craigslist phenomenon. The shitty economy has forced everybody to get more creative about how they earn money. And many photo hobbyists are discovering that they’d happily take photos for next to nothing, thus the undercutting of prices and the devaluing of pro quality. Wedding photography for $3-500 is now commonplace. Headshots for $75. When you’re an amateur, time is not money. The complication of course is that there’s often little that distinguishes amateur from pro work. This is often the case in the arts. But technology-based jobs have been getting outsourced to cheaper competition—India, China, etc.—for years. Professional photographers now either have to pursue the high-end or compete against the lowest-common denominator. Of course journalism and photojournalism are dying professions anyway. Twitter and blogs now deliver the news and flickr allows anyone to enter the stock photo business. Competition is healthy of course and as Cocteau said, a medium only really becomes an art form when it is affordable by the masses. So, while I love the increasingly visually saturated world, I’m preparing for my full retreat into another non-lucrative passion, fiction writing.
