REAWAKENING TO LIFE

Holga and HP5.

I strangely like this image - aside from it being very dark, it encapsulates the feeling of walking in the woods and coming upon a clearing.

Purposing a time to be purposeless, to wander, to seek out what you don’t know, yes, this is a valuable and necessary time. To eat the locusts and the wild honey, to be tested and to force yourself to become hungry, to admit to faults and imperfections covered over by the business of computers and money and speed - this is the desert, the wilderness. 40 days or 40 years, whatever it may be will be.

Holga. Hp5. Waterfall. Red filter. Lots of contrast.

Personally, life has taken a bit of a turn lately. I know I am in the midst of a change of path, as I have left a church I have been a part of for the last seven years. I know its a drop in the bucket versus someone who has been in a church for their lifetime, but their influence on me has left an indelible impression on my spiritual genes. My only regret is… well… I really don’t have any that I can think of at the moment. I will let you know if any come out.

However, I am looking forward to this time without bonds or responsibilities in that sense, and to really see what I am spiritually without all the swirling politics of a church. Back to basics. Please. Panera on Sunday mornings sounds great to me.

Ilford HP5 with the Ansco Speedex R - a great pair of horses across the street from my work. Somehow they figured out how to jump the electric fence and run around our property. I figured it was only fair that I get some frames of them. She only charged at me once.

I finally figured out how to scan in the edges of the frame. I usually do not crop my images, so I like to print all the way out to the border, showing the frame and make of the film. Mmmm….

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.

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.

An image fresh out of my new/old camera - a Yashica GSN. My grandfather graciously gave it to me after finding it in his basement. I had previously lusted after one that I saw at a flea market for $40 (and I don’t think it even fired…).

There are rumors and claims that it is as sharp a lens as a Leica (ahem… I make no claim such as this), but it has a f/1.7 killer fast lens, and I’d say it is pretty freakin sharp. I burned through a roll and processed it with sweaty palms. Can’t wait to shoot more. Thanks Pop.