Jorge Quinteros

Lowdtown’s Ray Masaki

Kickstarter has the clever option for you to narrow the search of projects based on your city and sometimes without any intentions of foraging for anything specific, I like to see what I can find. On one of these casual searches, I came across Ray Masaki, a designer based in Harlem who’s project centered around amassing funds to relaunch a t-shirt line under his fashion company Lowdtown.

I can’t recall the exact amount of days he gave himself to raised the money but I would think it’s irrelevant at this moment since he’s already surpassed the $2,500 he was hoping to garner. He current stands at $3,547 and has 11 days to go.

This belief that photography is an excellent excuse to tour unfamiliar places and meet people who you would have never met otherwise has bee stronger for me now then ever. There are a lot of talented artists out there, especially in New York and any chance I can get to meet up with a few of them, I’ll take the opportunity. After a few back and forth replies on Twitter with Ray, we chose a quaint coffee shop in Soho to meet.

The central topics of conversation with people that I’ve reached out to and met has mostly always revolved around life, their artistic talent and most importantly the realization that even doing what you love can be hard and discouraging, specifically when you’re attempting to make a career out of it. Being an artist in general is difficult because you have to sell yourself and even thought Ray had mentioned he was content with his current job and career as a designer, he’s always had the impulse to extend and apply his talent onto ventures such as his own clothing line.

You can tell a lot about an artist based on what occupies the pages of their notebooks and Ray was kind enough to bring along a few of the many sketchbooks he’s already gone through, so I could get a glimpse of the type of obsessive material he thinks about. As a photographer, there was one particular piece that I instantly connected with which he had still been working on. My immediate reaction to the piece was that it “would make for an awesome t-shirt.” It’s the pen sketch you see above that reads Film Cam.

Ray was very candid in talking about his vision for Lowdtown, about a few bumps he had to overcome which made him go back to the drawing boards several times, until he was truly confident that what he was creating was something special. Having been able to raise enough funds on Kickstarter to further elevate his vision is pretty amazing, so I’m curious to see the final products of the sketches he showed me and the plans he has for them.

After we left the coffee shop, we walked around Soho to get a few shots. I think creative people are some the most valuable assets in business today. They are the ones responsible for driving main projects and conjuring up million-dollar ideas. I love how small talk online has the potential to turn into something else; you never know the positive that could come from it and on top of that, there’s nothing wrong with making an acquaintance out of a complete stranger.

On The Things I Carry

Much like John Carey, I’ve also always had curiosity for the things certain people carry with them on a daily basis regardless of how simple they may be because these items have the potential to illustrate a person’s character, personality and what they may intend to represent.

My need for any of the following items doesn’t really vary regardless of whether I’m photographing or at work. I would say that 99% of the time these items are always with me.

1. Pocket-size Ruled Moleskine Notebook - First of all, you could just about walk into any local office supply store or bookstore and find dozens of different brands of notepads for jotting notes but what makes these well-liked black notebooks popular is their quality, their design and the history behind them.

The Moleskines truly do fit everyone’s needs and purposes. I’ve own a couple large softcover ones but when it comes to having just one to use and abuse, I’ve opted for the traditional black cover, ruled sheets in pocket-size format. The paper in them is thick enough that it doesn’t bleed through and just the idea of having random writings in one single place far exceeds having to dig for miscellaneous pieces of paper in your pocket that might have contained information of value and that’s easy to lose.

Here’s something to remember about notebooks. You’re unlikely to use them if they’re not portable, easy to use and if the don’t cater to your workflow. As far as notebooks, the idea of going paperless is overrated for me. As much writing as I may do by means of a keyboard, nothing beats traditional pen and paper every now and then.

Something I’ve noticed about people who use Moleskines is that once they embraced them, they generally become very devoted to them and often find themselves buying more and more regardless of whether they may need a new one or not.

2. Moo Cards - Other than being unique and aesthetically pleasing to look at, the huge advantage for a mind changing person like myself in using Moo Cards is their Printfinity feature - the option of printing a different image on every card in the pack. As a photographer, it’s a very creative way for me to showcase a variety of my work as oppose to opting for the traditional one-image only design.

On top of all that, most people don’t expect to be asked to choose which business card design they would like, so there’s always a wow-factor when I’ve given them out to people who have interest to follow up more on my work. At the moment I’m in dire need of more business cards and despite the inclination to experiment with something different, it’s unlikely I’ll deviate from what I’ve been accustom to carrying with me for the past 3 years.

3. Jetstream Pen - I have to admit that office supplies fascinate me, particularly pens. When ever I see them aligned neatly in their corresponding aisle in a store, I fantasize about how much more writing I could produce on paper if I simply had the perfect pen.

Ballpoints pens are the workhorses of the writing world. They’re the most common in the market due to their low price and durability but I prefer Roller Ball Pens. I find writing with them tends to be more both elegant and effortless. When I find a pen I enjoy, I do everything I can not to lose it because there’s something satisfying about using a pen all the way until it can no longer pinch another speck of ink. The converse is also frustrating. When you’ve found a pen you love and it stops working despite having a lot more ink to offer.

4. Louis Vuitton Card Holder - I’m just as obsessive about leather wallets as I am about my pens. I seek to find one that’s minimalistic, appealing, slips easily into a pocket and can withstand consistent usage. At the moment, I’m using this Louis Vuitton Card Holder that was given to me at work. This handcrafted wallet is mainly intended to hold a few credit and business cards and leaving very little room for any cash unless you fold it it neatly several times into 1 of its 3 inserts but even that is a stretch.

My wife finds my penchant for rarely carrying cash intolerable, so this card holder doesn’t do much to assist me in advancing myself in that department. I’ll be upgrading very soon to something as simple but with more compartments but if you were to pick my pocket in the street at this very moment, this card holder is what you’ll find.

5. iPhone 4 - I never upgraded to the iPhone 4s in spite of the acclaimed enhancements such as a 5MP camera or voice-command software Siri. To me, those two features were never enough to convince me to modernize what I have now. With the amount of “iPhone 5” unconfirmed rumors, I’m willing to just wait it out and see how much of the growing speculation materializes into an actual product.

Much like every iPhone owner, perhaps it’s superfluous to say the device is with me 24/7 as well and since day one, I’ve always been the type to sport a case with it and at the moment I’m using an PhoneSuit Elite Battery Case. I read countless reviews and received several suggestions about which battery case were the most proficient and practical to handle and I eventually settle with the one you see now. I’ve owned it for about 3 weeks and eventually I’ll get around to writing about my experience with it thus far. What I can say about it so far is that it carries out everything you’re told it would do.

6. Stainless Steel and Silicone Fossil Watch - People often assume that in view of everyone practically carrying a cell phone now a days, there’s really no need to sport a watch anymore. According to this article from back in 2006, there is a correlation between increased cell phone usage and decreased interest in people purchasing watches, and that the cell phone is partially responsible for the reduction. I’ve always worn a watch. I feel absolutely lost without it and there’s been times when I’ve risked being late for work because of the rash decision I’ve made to turnaround on instances when I’ve accidentally left the house without it.

I own 3 variations in color of the Fossil watch you see in the photograph. This particular style retails for about $125 but I snagged this one for $75 tax-free while vacationing in Grand Cayman Island 2 years ago.

7. Tungsten Carbide Wedding Band - With the exemption of this ring, I don’t own anything that you would classify as jewelry and that includes any fancy gold piece that some men can’t seem live without. I never cared for it which is probably a good thing because I can’t imagine how much money I would have spent buying gold if I were the flashy type.

I chose an extremely minimalistic Tungsten ring as my wedding band. The strength of tungsten carbide has made it widely used for decades in industrial applications - it is four times harder than titanium, twice as hard as steel and are 100% scratch-proof. I love the ring and I very often get compliments on it. The one characteristic to know about Tungsten is that because the material is extremely hard, wedding bands made from metal cannot be sized like gold, silver or platinum rings. When you are ready to purchase, make sure that you take extra care in determining the proper size.

That’s it. This is pretty much the things I carry. Nothing ostentatious but simple things that define in a way how simplistic I guess you can say I am. If you’re curious as to the things I carry when I’m out photographing, there should be no surprise in stating that it’s just as minimal as what I’ve shared today but that’s for another article.

On Evaluating Time

I’ve been thinking a lot about this sought after commodity we call “time”. Time in reference to the ability to step back and really analyze how I currently spend every minute of it outside of work and determine ways I can make better use of it.

This is probably something most people have heard from friends and family before, but it bears repeating that the moment you become a parent, the one aspect of your life which you’re instantly deprived of is time.

I don’t mean losing something in a bad way. Your priorities just happen to change, so it’s natural to realize that some activities you once engaged in are no longer worthy of the time you’ve been devoting to them. For example, I don’t watch much television anymore and when I do, I enjoy having control of how long it would take me to watch a show by having recorded it. As far as sports, I only pay close attention to boxing and soccer both of which have minimal commercial interruptions in comparison to any other sport you can think of so I don’t object to watching live games.

I see my time as being comprised of a series of precious moments, namely connections with myself, with my family and friends which leaves minimal room for me to waste it on stuff that longer interest me. I can’t recall the last time I was remotely excited for the launch of a game for any of the consoles I own. Because being a parents takes a lot of your time, especially when your child is still young, you often have no choice but to dedicate your time only to activities that are truly worthy of you and starring at a TV set for countless hours is not one of them anymore. I’ve thought about selling the Xbox and the PS3 since they hardly see any use.

I’m not saying you have to completely abandon any experience you once valued but I like to think I’ve upgrade to something that ultimately improves me as a person. Once you start seeing how small daily time expenditures add up to years out of your life, you can’t help resist the impulse to trim some of the most obvious time wasters that clearly aren’t worth a big investment anymore. Everyone has their own definition for what time-wasters are but for me, it’s any activity you dedicate time to without really any specific reason to do so. Once you assign this definition to certain activities, you’ll start thinking about how you have been spending your time.

I love reading, I love writing, I love photography, I love exploring the city I live in to discover places and meet people and when I’m not on baby duty, at work, at the gym or socializing with friends, any of the referred activities encompass my spare time.

In spite of my wife’s suggestion, I don’t indulge in naps during the day and I don’t sleep late on my days off largely because I think of these 2 suggestions as time which could be allocated towards something productive. Time is one of the most valuable resources we have as individuals and it took the act of becoming a parent to realize this. Think of it this way - if you only had $100 to spend in a month, would you spend it frivolously items like gum and chips or would you spend it diligently on food that actually has and adds nutritional value to your health?

Films and books have been produced around the concept so there’s obviously a strong emphasis on the value of time. They say it’s a bitch when there’s insufficient amount of it and yet when we have an abundance at our disposal, we squandered it like quarters at a slot machine thinking there’s not much loss that’s occurred perhaps because we fail to consider that a lot of what we do in life is cumulative.

Those who are unaware of its importance waste it and spend their time doing nothing. My grandfather despised the popular saying of “killing time” because to him, wasting it was more like a suicide in that we’re not harming anyone but ourselves.

What got me thinking about all this was a film my wife and I watched the other night after finally attending to the identifiable red envelope that was laying on our coffee table long enough. The film was called In Time starring Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.

In it, time is literally considered money. It’s a currency. You work to earn it. You pay your bills with it, you buy gifts for your family with it, you could have it stolen and you can even waste it all at a bar which would not only leave you flat broke but also dead because you weren’t careful in conserving it.

Everyone in this futuristic world has a luminous bio-timer embedded on their left forearm that counts down how long the person has to live. Everyone is born normally but once they reach the age of 25, the timer on their arm begins to countdown to zero. Everyone starts with a year. Life is bought one day, one hour, even one second at a time. It’s a scary feeling.

What I essentially took away from the film was that we shouldn’t waste the time we’ve got and we should allocated towards activities that truly matter to us. We all effectively have to work to sustain ourselves so there’s no question that dedicating time towards what we do for a living is a must but it’s what we choose to do with our time when we’re free of obligations that I’ve been evaluating in my life.

I can’t fathom the idea of both living and surviving like the characters in this film but if you knew that time spent on activities that add no value to your life are being discounted from the time you could be doing something valuable, you would probably quickly stop doing the former.

My time after work pretty much revolves around caring for my son. We’re lucky for him to have adopted the routine time we established for him to go to sleep every night. After his last bottle at 8:30pm, he’s tucked in his crib, the humidifier is running, his night rockship night-light is connected and I’m absolved from daddy duty all the way until 10:15pm which is when I typically go to bed. If my wife is not working late, I obviously spend time with her but if she is, this is the time I spend either reading or writing for the site. The thought of watching tv doesn’t cross my mind because I have a very small window of time to do anything and so I don’t care to spend it on tv shows.

Do you often think about how you spend your free time? If not, you’d be surprise to discover how often we tend to splurge it on nonsensical stuff.

Street Artist Lawrence Hosannah with Paper App

What’s attracting about Paper app by FiftyThree is that the creators developed it around the concept of keeping things extremely simple so one could easily begin creating. There is no presence of an overwhelming amount of tools that you need to make sense of before you can even start doodling. In fact, there’s barely a choice of tools which I believe is a good thing.

Rather than Papers being an app stocked with features, instead you get this gorgeous looking app that resembles having an endless amount of fancy digital Moleskine notebooks at your disposal. I’m personally well aware of my inability to draw anything worthy of being shared but I’ve already seen a good amount of amazing stuff being produced with this app. So much that I was really eager to find someone talented who I could hand over my brother’s retina display iPad and Rockfish Stylus to see what they could create using the app while I documented the process.

I reached out to street artist/entrepreneur Eli who I’ve kept in contact with ever since photographing at 5Pointz in Long Island City and described to him what I had in mind accomplishing. Within a span of a couple of days, he set me up to meet fellow artist Lawrence who I had coincidently photographed painting a mural during my visit to 5Pointz.

Someone was told me that skills has this distinct ability to make it seem as if you’re talented but in reality, you never really were because you just happen to have worked your ass off refining whatever it is that you willingly do over and over again. As I had mentioned before, I was never any good at drawing. I was one of those people with no talent who took a glimpse at their work and instantly gave up. Then there’s those people who stare at the same work and find ways to improve it. At age 41, Lawrence is the latter.

When I asked him how long he had been drawing, the hesitance to respond quickly while he effortlessly maneuver the stylus to produce lines, shades and shapes that connected and actually made sense conveyed to me he had been at it for a long time with no intentions to stop.

In between him drawing, me documenting his digital strokes from various angles and some good old conversation about life and art, 45-minutes elapsed and he presented me with a final piece which demonstrated to me that a true artist has the natural ability to create a compelling piece of work regardless of the medium. This wasn’t Lawrence’s first time working with a stylus but it certainly was having an iPad as a canvas which towards the end had him strongly considering investing in one based solely on his experience with Paper app.

I’m more than grateful for Lawrence taking some time out of his busy schedule, for allowing me to pick his brain regarding his art and for the opportunity to see a white digital canvas go from bland to what you see above.