Richard X Raymond's Blog
This has been my progression over the past few weeks of sketching. 🙂
I’m still puzzled by Jiren’s power levels and what I still don’t know the hell Ultra Instinct is. Also… 17 was the MVP.
Oh…am I talking Dragonball Super Again?
Modern dance is something I could not tolerate when I was younger. I didn’t get it. I think wisdom comes with age as they say.
I still rock my Canon 5d Mark III for pro work. Hopefully the Canon Full Frame mirrorless will have a native EF mount.
The Dance Concert was at Patapsco High School in Dundalk, Maryland….
Not bad at all….
Exit….
I haven’t been “gunning” much street photography as of late….
Reason being: I love shooting models AND, to be honest, I don’t vibe with the respected professionals out there who call themselves street photographers.
Being a geek is fine. I’m not a geek however. I’m from the ghetto. I ride a black Harley-Davidson. I have a criminal record. I’ve shot guns at people in the streets and have sold my fair share of narcotics.
I know I’ve said before that being a street guy makes me a better street photographer. This is probably true. I’m a good street photographer. Turns out I’m a better glamour/fashion photographer though….
I also LOVE shooting females. Love it. There is little more I’d rather do on a Sunday besides shooting with a pretty lady and then editing the photos later on my iMac.
Will I shoot more street shots? Of course I will sooner or later. I AM the streets. Right now though I’m doing other shit and having fun doing it. It’s not like anybody was paying much attention to my street stuff anyhow. I’m invisible. We all are, most of us at least. The internet is oversaturated with street photos. There can never be enough photos of pretty women though…Ever.
Exit.
Having a model girlfriend would be nice…
I know…we all want a model girlfriend. Still, I’m a photographer and having a live-in model would make things a lot easier for me moving forward. I’m not being selfish here am I?
I could rehearse lighting setups with her. I could shoot her wearing different colors and in different locations. It would be fun. Experimentation is my mindset here. None of that gutter stuff YOU’RE thinking about…. witcho’ nasty self…
She needs to be close to my age though…
🙂
My new lighting setup is working great. No complaints here. It took a few months to work all the kinks out and buy my strobes but now I’m all set to continue my street portrait career and kill shit…
My new site is R X R Photo
Check it out!
I miss bus trips to amusement parks. My favorite part of the trip used to be sitting beside a girl I liked and hoping our arms or legs touched…
Life isn’t fair but I suppose we all have our micro-struggles to deal with huh?
Exit.
I have never looked better.
I have never felt better physically, besides maybe when I was in boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois or training at the RTC in San Diego, California…
I have never been more at peace. It’s a hard-fought, uneasy peace at times, but it is peace nonetheless.
I’ve never been more single though. I’m single as shit. It’s crazy really…
My retreat from the grips of “all-social-media-all-the-time” has been documented, (and needed) but I have also retreated from dating sites. They suck these days, dating sites…
Dating sites worked well maybe 10 years ago for guys like me perhaps, but not now. They don’t work as well today for me because my expectations have changed a bit. Also, I see the same people on all the sites I have tried in the area. Just recycled profile pictures all over the place.
I suppose I have resigned myself to the reality of living and dying alone. This arrangement isn’t all bad at the moment, but it could suck pretty badly if I reach old age and still haven’t found a nice pretty lady.
Pretty is a thing too for me. I’m dead ass sick of being rejected by mediocre looking women. If she isn’t truly exceptional looking then I’ll take my chances elsewhere. She also needs to be fit. I spend hours in the gym each week. She at least needs to be in shape.
The older I get though, the more I realize that the entire “mating and dating” phase of my life isn’t exactly in its beginning stages. I’m far closer to the end of the era where my reproductive drive dictates the majority of my decisions. Nowadays, I just want to plan and make art when I’m not working. I don’t want any stress related to pleasing another fussy human. I don’t want to be responsible for the emotional well being of another adult. Not yet. Soon maybe…
Like any good Samurai, I long to do things the old way…
Do I like microwaves? Nah. I heat my food up in the oven. TV dinners too.
Do I like TV? Of course I like TV. Um….at least I used to. I guess TV has lost its appeal to me as the centerpiece of human entertainment…
What has replaced TV?
Facebook.
Instagram.
Snapchat.
YouTube (which I like)
Netflix.
Every video game ever made in last 17 years…
…the distracting temptation of each mindless app on your phone.
At some point you look at all these cable stations and social media platforms and you feel as though you are spending your waking hours in a place that isn’t real.
I mean, lets say you are at work, (which is most likely a real place) but when you get bored or frustrated or happy or whatever at work you go to this virtual place on your phone to share random thoughts or to gain some sort of misplaced perspective by driving yourself to irrational jealousy as you follow other peoples lives…
I don’t want to be too harsh here. Even a Samurai must adapt to change. When the Shogun dies we become Ronin. When the Katana is outlawed we buy guns. When guns are outlawed we buy wine.
Still… I think back to my youth, when we had 3 TV’s (which each had 5 available channels to watch) and a chorded phone and a radio. Nowadays I have all that in my iPhone. All of it. I long for the days when the world was smaller and I couldn’t interact with so many people virtually.
For instance, I have several Facebook “friends” in Indonesia. I will never see them in person within this lifetime most likely, and even if they really aren’t so special that I’d go to the other side of the planet to holla at them, part of me wishes I could see them. Why? Because I see them on my phone and maybe we traded some adult photos back when Facebook was newer and people did that shit. That makes me want to see them. That makes me subconsciously compare American woman I meet to these world-apart Indonesian gals. Life was a lot simpler when Indonesian girls were a “theory” or a curiosity and nothing more. In short: the internet has made the world smaller but it has also made me feel smaller too, while making my expectation of the world bigger.
I deleted my Instagram account today. Why? First because I was shadowbanned and secondly because it was useless to me. I have never made a single meaningful contact through IG. R X R Photo has never booked a photoshoot or made a dime from it. I have felt bad when a photo didn’t get as many “likes” as I felt it deserved though…
Will I delete Facebook next? That’s possible, but I’ll give that another year or two. I have a feeling I’ll just end up using Facebook messenger only…which I really don’t understand how it’s superior to regular old texting, but whatever. I would like to be like the old photographers who booked clients through word of mouth and their own websites and not through becoming a bitch for social media. I’m starting to hate what I see everyday. Nothing is separate any longer. There are no sub-genres. Every little interest you may have on social media moves along the rivers and dumps into the big social media oceans of presidential politics, social causes, and blindly fighting with strangers. It sucks. I suppose this social media thing as isn’t social anymore…
Exit.
I have never been comfortable with the concept of being a follower.
This attitude and subsequent behavior pattern for me dates back to my days as a toddler, according to my mother. I’ve always been a bit of a rebel she says, or more precisely, a little badass free agent.
Not to say I haven’t followed behind friends and done dumb shit. Of course I have. Those experiences just made me more adamant about not being a follower.
So along comes Twitter and then Instagram and these apps ask me to follow people and try to attract followers by any means…. and ya boy Ric Ray is immediately offended. Followers huh?
I mean, Tom of Myspace didn’t ask me to follow him. Tom wanted to be my friend. I sort of liked that about Tom. Even Facebook went the “friend” route and did so more intimately by limiting the number of friends I could have to 5 thousand. As far as reductionism is concerned Facebook is an outlier. IG and Twitter put no limits on the number of followers you can amass. Myspace had no limit to the number of friends you could add.
IG doesn’t limit you. Nope. Your pathetic, uninteresting, pedestrian life limits you. Ive never had more than a few hundred followers on any platform….
I’m too humble to think myself so fabulous that I’d have actual followers. To be fair though, I know “follower” in the social media sense means that this or that person is following my feed, not the creepy “Jim Jones in Guyana with a few cups of cyanide and a cult” type of followers…..but it still seems contrived and unseemly. Of course someone like Taylor Swift has millions of true followers and deservedly so. She’s a megastar. Perhaps a person who amasses say… 25 thousand followers on Twitter can have a slice of that megastar feeling. Maybe for a price…
You of course can buy followers. You can also “follow for follow” with people and then get sneaky and unfollow them so you can have that golden ratio of 1000 to 1 followers.
Like when you look at some pop star’s follow/follower count and she has 1.2 million followers but only follows 1200 people….Nice.
I just don’t like the concept of following anyone. No one is worth following to me really. I don’t care what my favorite rapper is doing this evening or when my favorite pornstars’ next live cam show is happening. Who gives a fuck?
The reasons I’m done with IG and Twitter sort of mirror my hesitancy to buy into bitcoin at the current time… Allow me to explain….
Bitcoin was good to get into early. You could mine bitcoin without using a completely prohibitive amount of power (electricity) to do so. Nowadays mining bitcoin can only be undertaken by people (or sovereign nations) with a lot of money and resources already at their disposal, like North Korea for instance. Otherwise your ROI will be negative in all but the most ideal circumstances. Similarly Twitter was hot to get into early when people were following like crazy, but a few million spam bots and Nigerian email scams later and people are a bit more conservative with their follows, UNLESS you are a person with a lot of fame, money, and resources…..
I hate following people and honestly I don’t like being followed. Facebook even tries the follower thing but it’s not well defined and it comes off as sketchy. They can keep it. They all can just keep it…..
Exit.
I haven’t been watching football on Sundays this year.
Why?
Who knows?
I have been shooting aspiring models and friends though.
There were no 100 degree days this summer.
I’m not saying global warming is wrong, but back in the 90’s I recall consecutive summers in Baltimore and Georgia where the thermometer read 100 degrees or above.
The current/past summer was muggy yes. Hot? Not really to me.
I switched companies that I shoot sports for. (If you want to know to whom I switched check my Facebook page or something) Shooting sports is fun but the money is drying up pretty quickly. Fewer and fewer parents are willing to buy prints of their kid once he or she (the parent) leaves an event, and those photo tents you see at tournaments aren’t as lucrative as they once may have been. Couple that with newspapers and magazines dying slowly, and there really isn’t a major demand for sports photos. I see parents and high school students with semi-pro gear on the sidelines now all the time. They may not have the passion and skill to produce high level sports compositions, but that camera and lens they now hold represents the money they would have spent on professional photos perhaps…..
Sports are in full swing though. I’m booked to shoot every weekday afternoon (after my main job) up till probably the first week of November. I’m also shooting models now until kingdom come, and will probably miss many Sundays in front of the tube watching the Redzone channel because of it. Sundays are great to shoot models for that reason however. It’s a dead day in the city for foot traffic and that’s a perfect environment to shoot in….
MICROSTRUGGLER is nearly a year old. I mainly like to shoot women and that’s what this blog will be about moving forward: photos and women…..
Exit.
Model on Instagram is @myrlanis_
She only accepts followers who follow me first….
My IG is @rickyray73
Tee shirt available here.
microstruggler.wordpress.com