Some of you may know how I feel about Cincinnati. Some of you may not. I could write a thesis on where my love for this city stems from. To keep it short, I really hated the suburbs while I was growing up. I begrudge people for wanting to live in the suburbs, it’s just not for me.

There’s also one more element to this obsession. There are people who work their whole lives to retire to Palm Beach. Well, I just want to live in a city, an urban, real city. In reality, I’d probably love any city, but I fell in love with Cincinnati when I was a teenager. And you know how hard it is to shake those high school crushes.

I haven’t traveled much, but I’ll stick up for Cincinnati until I die. People get pissed when I defend Cincinnati against New York, L.A., and Chicago, especially since I’ve never been there. What they don’t understand, is that I know those cities are great, I just think Cincinnati is great, too. It gets a bad rap.

Anyway, here’s a shot of my beloved city. I don’t live there yet, but I will soon.

If you’ve been in Cincinnati for the past month or so, you’re probably done with snow. This was shot when things were just getting started, so I was glamoured by it. Photographers love snow like people in the 70’s loved blow. You’ll hear us go on and on about contrast and fill light and negative space. But at the end of the day, it sucks. It’s just really cold rain. It sticks to your shoes and messes up your carpets. It forces us to put salt down on the roads, which eats through the metal on our cars. Screw seasons.

Sorry for the rant, but this was shot at the University of Cincinnati campus. I was on my way to speak at some photojournalism classes. It amazes me how much of an adult I am. I drive to speak at UC where I’m supposed to inspire young journalists, but I sing in my car the whole way there and I have to move my yo-yo out of the way to get spare change out of my glovebox.

To quote the quirkiest and most awesome alt-folk/bluegrass band Wonky Tonk: “To young for the old and to grown for the youth, I’m stuck in the middle and no substance will soothe, my life’s all scattered, got no time for rest.”

Inspired by my failed cookie photo a few days ago, I was on the lookout for a good metallic subject for a photo. This was shot in Garfield Park near my work. It’s a water fountain (if you couldn’t tell). I liked the muted colors, and the juxtaposition of the circle on the squares. The composition, I just noticed, is VERY similar to the cookie photo. But I think this works much better.

I’m not sure I’d drink outta that thing, though. In recent news, Hamilton (my home and subject of many posts) made headlines this week for having the best tasting tap water in the country. One more thing that makes Hamabama awesome. I hate the idea of bottled water, and I’ve listened to hundreds of reports telling us that most of our country has really high quality tap water. Following this line of logic, you would think that I would like public water fountains. But they sort of scare me. Germs, birds… yuck. I’m a total hypocrite, I know.

It only takes about 2.5 months for a single person to produce 333 lbs of trash. That seems like a lot. This photo was shot a few yards away from where I park my car each night. It seems that most of the people on my block labeled their trash can to stop them from getting mixed up with other ones. We have not done this because our trash can is easily identifiable because it is not labeled. I’ve probably walked past those three trash cans lined up hundreds of times. I like this one a lot because it’s a scene that you might not notice at all just walking by, but it’s graphic and repetition sort of pulls you in. Well, that’s my opinion of it. Let me know what you think.

This image, I have to admit, is not my favorite. When doing this project, I find myself getting fixated on finding a shot that fits an idea. This day I was bound and determined to find something that emphasized shape. For whatever reason, I liked the half circle and against the straight lines. I think this shot would have worked with better lighting and a wide angle lens, but the Rollei 35 I used for this first month has a fixed 43mm lens. Not very wide. It’s widest aperture is also f/3.5 and I was using 100 ISO film, so indoor lighting was terrible to work in. This shot was probably made using a shutter speed of 1/2 a second. Anyway, no excuses, this is supposed to be a learning process. And what I learned here is that the metal in this photo looks awesome. I love the texture of it. Digital cameras couldn’t pull this off with their narrow latitude.

So yeah, this photo has a copy of CityBeat in it. And yeah, I work for Citybeat. So freakin’ what! I shoot what I see. With this “Ultra Color” film, I really concentrated on finding great colors. This wasn’t easy because for the first two weeks of the project, the sun just hid from me like I was dating its mom and it didn’t want a new daddy. It sucked, and frankly, it’s been pretty grey lately as well. I’m getting a little tired of winter. I’m either moving to the desert or I’m going to start hibernating. Anyway, the lips and words and bright orange color all came together to make this shot.

Later in the day (I think it was this day), I saw a cool frame with a police horse, but you’ll never see it, because I can only shoot one frame a day with my film camera. When I walk outside to lunch or to my car, I carry it on my shoulder. So the horse came up and I was rocking the film body still instead of my digital. You live and learn.

The guy on the cover this the CityBeat in this photo is a guy named C. Spencer Yeh. He’s a crazy avant garde sound and multimedia artist. Read about his work here.