REAWAKENING TO LIFE

Shot on HP5 with a Holga, left the roll out in the sun in my car, and kept it loaded in a developing tank for a month… I do bad things to film.

Purposed wanderings yield better prints and expanded minds. If I don’t find what I am supposedly looking for, I am confident that it will find me.

Two posts today - lucky you.

Taken in Rothrock with an Ansco Speedex R on HP5 - a $5 buy at a fleamarket. I am a fan of the out-of-focus spins you get in the background and foreground of the image, which a lot of the old lenses have at their full aperture.

A reinterpretation of a natural scene - I feel that photography and camera/lens design has always tried to capture *exactly* what the scene is, and the image quality was limited by the technology of that day when the camera was produced. I think very few cameras are designed to give the images it captures a special look, like designing a lens that purposely creates a spinning blur. I think about my Canon SLR which is designed for very little image distortion and accurate color reproduction, and I feel that most of the images that are produced striaght from that camera are stale/sterile in comparison to a camera that uses inferior lenses that were made several decades ago.

I feel that photography will never be able to faithfully reproduce what we see in real life, so why try so hard to? Take images that reinterpret the scene and choose a camera/lens in the same way you would choose a paintbrush for a particular texture.

Yashica GSN with crossprocessed 100VS Ektachrome.

I had something to say, but I think that I just better listen right now. I have always talked about my plans and goals (going back to Rwanda, moving to NYC, grad school, family, house, etc, etc), and never just only listened to God about them.

In a reflective time a week ago, he specifically said to not be afraid to set my heart on something/someone/somewhere… I am just not sure what those things are. The overtly Christian response is to set my mind on the things above, to seek the Kingdom first and these things will be added to you. I just know he has brought me this far, and in no way am I out of his arm’s reach.

One of the many images from the recent trip to DC. Yashica crossprocessed 100VS Ektachrome. Played with the color balance and kept the grain.

I knew the change would not come without consequence - to move ahead, I must leave things behind.

Giacometti is one of my favorite sculptors. Later in his career, he freaked out when his figures became smaller and smaller until his drawings contained no figure forms at all. He shreiked in terror when he realized that he had finally completed his work as an artist. A little too dramatic for my taste, but he hovered on the ledge of insanity for quite a while and to cross over was to place the capstone on his career.

Me? I just took a picture, wanting to blur the foreground and background, giving a sense of depth to the crude miniatures he created.

Nikon 5400, color capture to BW. It does a great job with the ‘bokeh’ - which is the blur quality of out-of-focus portions of the image.

I walked past these arms of dead wildflowers everyday when I come into work. Traveling to get unique images would be great, but great possibilities for photographs are usually in sight, as long as you are willing to look at the mundane with freshness.

A simple quote from my bosses on their secret to photography (who are in Antarctica photographing the endangered icebergs and who were both BBC Photographers of the Year):

“All it takes is vision.”

Maybe influenced by the trip to DC and referencing the nation’s obelisk? A boundary marker around the house where I work. The wonders of shooting in digital color and converting them to BW.

I shot 6 rolls of film this past weekend with the Yashica, and they are sitting in my bag unable to be processed until Wednesday…ugh. I shot a ton of statues and art work in the museums, trying out lighting schemes and dissecting the way the figures approach the viewer (or vice-versa). It reminded me of my time in Italy, and analyzing how heavenly and spiritual subjects are represented in an earthen visual language of statues and paintings.

How and why does gold represent holiness?

Okay okay, this is not from DC. Agh - I forgot a card reader, so no up-to-the-minute updates…

BUT I have a few that I will be posting anyway. This is using my LCA with a cheap-o wide angle filter on it backwards. I don’t know how the scientifics of it, but it has a similar effect as a tilt-shift lens or like a peephole. This was the only good one that came out on the whole role.

Still one of my favorites to shoot with is a $20 cheapie called a Holga. There’s no way in Photoshop to create the organic-ness of a purely crappy camera. Shot through a red filter, Ilford HP5, and scanned in.

I still love film, no question about it, and the way it works in toy cameras. There are ways to take the lens out of a Holga and strap it onto a digital SLR, but I haven’t been impressed enough with the results to want to do this.

This is a gravel pit in the middle of Quebec’s fishing country. When we passed by it on the way in, I knew I had to make some time get back there to shoot around because the landscape was so surreal. Representing and conveying this weirdness is attempted by shooting a high-resolution film in a low-resolution camera.

It was great being alone up there with just a camera to defend myself from Canadian gypsies or brown bears if they decided to make their presence known. Canada is still one of my favorite places to shoot.

Drab color and contrast in the original, so I upped the saturation, used a raw converter to go black and white, and gave it another shot.

I am trying to figure out what form this blog will morph into, so bear with me in these early days. Should I post more images or keep it to once a day? Post image data? Keep my thoughtful and inspiring insights about daily life to myself? Explain theological mysteries or my contempt with modern economic superstructures?

I guess when I have it, I will post it. Right now I have a ton of images that have remained hidden on my computer for wayyy too long, all of which need an audience.

Looking for things to shoot with my Nikon 5400. This camera sat in my drawer rarely used for about 2 years. I have a new found love for the swing-out LCD screen as I can set it on the ground or hold it up above me, get real close, and have a wide-angle option.

A fair amount of tweaking went into building up the oranges and blues, bringing out contrast, and making an image out of some mud and leaves. I find that I either want oversaturation or BW, but rarely do I want to try to emulate the real colors a scene actually portrays.