I had always thought that the curbside recycling programs paid for themselves by selling the recyclable materials. But it turns out that they’re not free, and never have been. We pay for the recycling pickup along with the garbage bill, but the bill isn’t itemized, so nobody knows how much it costs.

To some extent, I can sympathize with residents who don’t want to pay more for curbside recycling when the bins are just getting raided by scavengers. But I have a lot more sympathy for the guy who has to go out and collect cans and bottles in order to feed his family.

I can’t help thinking how great it would be if there were some way to turn this situation into a real jobs program. If we could actually employ people to walk around with carts and collect the bins instead of driving around in big diesel powered trucks, that would be a much greener way of collecting the trash and recyclables, right?

Anyway, I took a lot of photos for this assignment. Here are some of my favorite shots and some outtakes that didn’t make it into the article:

For some reason, probably because it’s so weathered and decayed, this building reminded me of ghost-towns I’ve seen in Nevada. It seemed to me like it belonged in the middle of a desert or wasteland.

This is the first in a series of images that I’m creating for a new portfolio.

The idea for this one came to me when I took a different photo of this same tunnel a while ago. The long exposure made the headlights of the cars stretch out into streams and it reminded me of a river.

The river idea made me think of all the commercial/lifestyle/stock photos I’ve seen of fishermen standing next to streams and rivers. Most of those types of commercial photos are composites; they shoot the landscape, and then they shoot the model in the studio, and then they put the whole thing together in Photoshop. So it’s kind of poking fun at those images by putting the fisherman into a completely absurd environment instead of a mountain stream at sunset.

This is a lot different than anything else I’ve done. I usually tend toward more “straight” photography, and I actually had to get some help with the post production on this because I’m not much of a Photoshop wiz.

The images in the new series are all loosely joined in the sense that they all include some sort of visual joke. Some of them (like this one) reference commercial photography clichés, others are just funny on their own, but I hope to keep the style consistent throughout. Stay tuned for more.

Big thanks to Jamie for helping me with the post-production on this shot, and also to Richard Orlando, fly-fisherman (and model)  extraordinaire.

One article was about summer drinks from around the world. I ended up taking pictures at Saul’s restaurant in Berkeley, where they make chocolate egg creams, celery soda, and about a dozen other soda drinks. It was a lot of fun to shoot, but I ended up drinking about half of each soda they made (wouldn’t want to waste it) and ended up not feeling so hot after I left.

The other story was about seed swaps. I took pictures of Mat Rogers, the director of UC Berkeley’s Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology, in the garden behind his apartment building. Mat was a great sport about lying down in the dirt for a shot that didn’t even end up getting used in the article.

Here are some of my favorite shots and outtakes:

In other news, my camera bag still smells like a chimney.