The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Second Wind

There’s a weird phenomenon, when you fast from eating. When you fast, whether it be for religious reasons, or oh-god-let-this-colonoscopy-get-here-already-eque health reasons, at the end of that 24 hours, you think “I’m going to eat ALL THE FOOD,” you sit down at the dinner table, and your belly fills up after a forkful of lettuce.  You just can’t eat any more; you don’t remember what it feels like.

Sleep deprivation is kind of the same way.  Sleep starts to become this thing you desperately want and cannot process.  It’s the agony and the ecstasy of the second wind.

The second wind has got to be the most dangerous part about the night shift.  Usually, I start my “day job” at 11pm or 1am when I head to the lab.  This part of my day I’m usually very alert for, as there tend to be a lot of nutty drivers on the road during the night.  I expect it and I’m extra cautious. I pause extra long at intersections and look for night time joggers.

When I start to scare myself?  Driving home at 10am the next morning, with all the normal people.  Those people are driving on a (full or not) night of sleep and I’m the anomaly.

All the social cues are there: the sun has risen, the morning radio is on, I might have a cup of coffee.  I feel normal, or even more than normal.  I feel like a superhero that’s gone beyond needing sleep.  And that’s a big fat lie.

You aren’t normal after a night awake- or at least I wasn’t one day last week.  My eyes were heavy, my stomach was growling, my head was pounding… but my routine was telling me I was awake.  ”It’s day time.  Come on body, everybody else can do it.  Are you a weenie? You have work to do when you get home.”

This is what I was thinking as I cascaded through a red light.  Completely, totally, out of body.  I immediately pulled over.  No one was around, I didn’t hurt anybody.  But I could have. I could have. And I have been hurting myself - I’m not getting enough sleep and it’s something I have to change right now.  

I got home fine and went to sleep, and three hours later my phone starting going off.  Emails arriving, things to follow up on, people asking simple questions who have no idea I’m trying to reset a horribly off internal clock.  And I am such a nut, when my phone automatically turns on and the floodgate of emails arrives, I start responding.  In bed.  Maybe naked, and definitely way too tired.

The truth is, this is nobody’s responsibility but my own.  I’m the only person capable of making my personal well-being and safety a priority.

I was going to end this post on a lighter note.  I was thinking something along the lines of, “When you let yourself get so tired you literally fall asleep on your keyboard, you don’t do your clients any favors either.”

You know what? Fuck that - I never deserve to be that tired.  My well-being does not come with the caveat of “…and also it’s good for my client.” Life is short, and quantifying how valuable it is based on how well I’m serving the people I work for is a disservice to my human nature itself. Eat. Sleep. Breath.  That has to happen every day regardless of whether or not I’ve got clients.

I’m still trying to figure all this out, and I guess I don’t really know why I’m posting this on the internet for everybody to see. But I do think it’s good to lift up the hood from time to time, let everybody see what’s rumbling, and figure out how to make things better.  After I take a nap. 

A Hardcore Square

I often find myself thinking something around these lines, “Man!  I wish I was one of those hardcore sports photographers or something! One that skydives and shoots surfing and rides along in humvees!”  The truth is, I’m a square that wears kneepads to shoot just about anything because my stupid joints are already putting up a fight and I’m eighty. I am always happy to have editing to do because it means I also have snacks and sweatpants and a comfy chair with my name on it. Not exactly an innate badass, right?

Anyway, I have this mental image of myself that is all, flingin’ memory cards around like amo, rolling around on the ground with a fish-eye lens, when in reality?  I look this this…

…All the time when I’ve got a reason to shoot and/or process images. A slap-happy dork. With tiny forced-perspective dinosaur hands.

So one night last week I woke up from my pre-shift post-dinner nap, I felt a little off, but I was in a hurry to get to my shift early so I could sneak in a little extra color practice.

By the way, I have this theory that sleeping after a meal is really bad for my belly.  I think this is proof.

To get to my office I drive through, how shall I say, the hood.  Which is just fine in the day time, but suddenly considerably more scary when you have to speed off the highway in a hurry to an unfamiliar exit and before you can think, are projectile upchucking out your passenger door window onto a random sidewalk.

I have no idea what I ate, but it was ugly.

So I’m straddling my front seats - still with my seatbelt on - leaning out the window and thinking, “I’ve made a huge mistake.  But I’ve got to get to work.”

Lo, the bright lights of Jack in the Box suddenly clear into focus in my peripherals.  I have found salvation and it is a plastic bucket of Sprite.

I pull into the parking lot, still so queazy I have to run to a trashcan before I can even get inside.  In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Oh these poor cashiers, I am going to scare the shit out of them,” but I think what came out of my mouth was “GIVE ME THE BIGGEST SODA YOU HAVE RIGHT NOW.”  I’m sorry, whoever you are.

I sit there with my soda, and twenty minutes later, I keep going to work.

And I couldn’t help but smile a little bit when I finally got back into the car and headed down to the office, because going to work after some ridonkculous episode like this must mean I really love what I do.  So much that I am a little hardcore afterall.

The end.  I need a nap.

Life in the Mid(night)s, Part 2

Stopped on Highland and Wilshire on my way home from work, at 5am.

I threw out some thoughts Monday about venturing into the wonderful world of color correction.  It’s a thrilling opportunity that comes with a small caveat - I work nights. And I don’t mean evenings.  I mean, leave-when-the-moon-is-out-and-get-home-as-the-sun-is-coming-up nights.

This gig also involves working as a dailies operator, a very unglamorous job but one I really love so far.  I get to see boatloads of footage and work with some really cutting edge technology.  And I can go to work in PJ’s.

People ask me all the time if working nights is hard.  And it can be, especially when I wake up at noon without a full night’s sleep, lots of photos to edit and a burning need to find more shoots (yeah, you should hire me.  I’m kind of hot shit).  And man, I haven’t put away my laundry from last week. Talk about a domestic disaster.

Hello sleeping husband.  Thanks for doing the laundry I have now inadvertently turned into a cat bed.

But I’m on my way.  I am a part of the process.  I may not be able to control how many people are hiring me to shoot my own images, but I can control what I find sacred - which is every, single, image I get to be involved with.

Seriously, what is it about the middle of the night that makes people do things like back into a stop sign and leave the friggin’ bumper there?   But thanks for the still life yo.

As I write this, I’m sitting in Starbucks around 7pm, enjoying a high-calorie processed frozen thing to zap myself back into the realm of consciousness —I’m sure I’ve completely fucked up my eating habits at this point— but I want this fantastic struggle.

And I want this too.  Nom nom nom.

So I’ll gladly have coffee at 7pm.  It’s because of this odd-hour night job I get to quit my third job. And I just realized that means I’m making my living from making images.

The weird schedule, the long to-do list, is infinitely easier now that I know I’ve got a light at the end of the tunnel. The light I assist with capturing in an image, even if it’s in a very small capacity, is something I can look back on and take pride in.  And hopefully as time goes on, more and more of those images will come from me. I’ll take sharing light for now.

But I won’t share this.

For “dinner” after a shift last week, I grabbed a husband-made cinnamon roll and some meatloaf (made with Oklahoma raised beef brought back in a cooler across three states).  It was 6 or 7 in the morning, so effectively, breakfast-for-dinner-for-breakfast.

Come on, what a great story is that.  Totally worth the Vampire sleep cycle.

Life in the Mids

That, my friends, is a level of subtlety you have to have a little magic in your veins to see.  

For me, it’s after I master the basics, these two colors that include every wavelength in the visible spectrum (or rather scatter and absorb*), that I’ll move on to adding the subtle touches that differentiate that particular look from a plain ol’ properly exposed shot.

Believe it or not, most movies you watch have neutral whites and blacks.  Which means that the majority of the look actually occurs in the midtoness.  It is often not in fact a huge shift or extremes that create a beautiful color grade: but rather a thoroughly balanced and deliberate use of the mids.

Which is a wonderful metaphor for the type of career I aspire to have: great basics, a deep understanding of black and white principles, but innovation in the mids.

A life of subtlety; a life of grace; a life in the mids.

*I can’t help it.  I’m a huge dork and this kind of talk totally grinds my gears.  What can I say?  I have a hard on for color science.**
**I was so close to ending this on an artsy fartsy note.  And then I had to go and use a boner joke.  I guess make that two boner jokes.