Merry Christmas!

To all who celebrate!  And happy holidays to others whose observations are different than mine.  May it be a happy time of year for everyone.

Three in a Row

I currently have some photos in a small group show at Lightbox Gallery, which is located in Astoria, Oregon.  I've never exhibited on the west coast, so it makes me happy.  Check them out if you are in the area.

Two Cameras, One Scene

On the left, my Holga with Polaroid back and homemade filter.  Held together with a bunch of rubber bands and electrical tape.  On the right, my Arunas cam: a cigar box pinhole with Polaroid back.  Both sitting on a seawall, ocean in the background, my mini-recorder weighing down an unpeeled Polaroid in the foreground.  Taken with an sx-70 camera 2 months ago.

Taken with the camera on the right.

Taken with the camera on the left.

Yeller

From acid, to butter, to mild vanilla....

Tourists checking out fake goods on Canal Street, NYC

Weeds growing out of a sidewalk against a cement building.

Apparently a crash test dummy has made off with the cab.

A member of my toy collection.  Hitting the sauce again.

Art gallery on the Lower East side of Manhattan.

Beach Pavillion on the New England coast.

Paste up on the old Tennessee Mountain restaurant in Soho.  

It's sadly since become a Crocs store.  :(

Foggy dirt road captured on Redscale film.

Why Scanning Film Is An Endless Task

There's a reason my film scanning is a never-ending process. First, I am always taking pictures, so the rolls of film and stacks of polaroids continue to grow. Second, since the majority of my cameras are low end and quirky, they can cause double exposures, uneven spacing between frames, and, due to unsophisticated or absent focus/aperture controls, too dark/light and/or blurred images. All these lend to far more time necessary in the scanner with each of these types of images as I attempt to find and make a picture.

Generally, if I take a photo with a sophisticated camera (ahem, I have only one, the Pentax 67) then scanning is a breeze. I can do an entire roll of film in a couple of hours; one evening. With the lo-fi cameras, I spend more time first making a 'reality' scan of the image "as is", and then doing multiple variations of the same image through adjustments to each of the color channels in attempts to 'find' a better photo, more detail, or more character and soul. I may also increase or decrease the saturation, or convert it to black and white, and save all these versions for later comparison.

Pictured above is one of my recent scans. It was an image taken last month in a plastic camera with an attached polaroid back. The film was a black and white Polaroid type which expired 9 years ago, and while I should have shot this as a long exposure, because it was very early morning, very cloudy, and I had a dark filter over the lens, I forgot. All this resulted in an underexposed photo with barely any image, as you can see.

It doesn't end there, however.  All's not lost.  There's nothing to lose in trying to pull something out of these types of images when scanning. Sometimes I find my best images this way. Lightening it, manipulating the color channels (I always scan as 24bit color, even if it's black and white) and other adjustments will cause distortions, and exaggeration of the film emulsion's aberrations, and the dust particles, but all that adds to the character.  The following are three of the 5 or so variations I made of the above photo:

The Blues

Not the sad kind.  Just some instances of this wonderful color in my life....

Some street art.....

A hot summer night rooftop cocktail...

An old building in lower Manhattan shot with a plastic Diana camera...

Other people's art I've collected....

New England tufts captured on expired Polaroid film....

Brownie Holiday

This camera is one of the easiest to shoot.  It uses size 127 film, which is less common, but not difficult to find.  There are zero settings, no "cloudy" vs. "sunny", no "near" vs. "far".  Just point at the subject and click.  And every time I use it I make a notation in my mini recorder (which later gets transcribed in my film logs) that it might be broken, because the 'clicker' feels so slow and like it's not 'catching' on anything.  I note this in case after development I can't understand why the film came out blank or blurry.  But each time, I get some decent shots on the roll.  Here are some recent scans.

Scanning Film

When I scan my film, I usually scan several versions of a single frame.  This, for example: original on the left, more neutral in the middle, and b/w on the right.  Taken with a toy plastic Holga TLR camera, using Lomography's RedScale film.

Holga Magic

Captured on a grassy hill with sea views, somewhere in a very remote part of New England. I credit the medium film format as well as the plastic Holga camera used for the resulting magic.  This surely doesn't occur with digital, unless an 'app' is applied to the photo.  Happy Weekend to all!

The Summer Of Double (and Triple) Exposures

This year more than any other year I made so many mistaken double, even triple exposures with all of my cameras.  To clarify, in the past, it has always been bound to happen with my roll film cameras; you take a picture, then forget to wind.  The plastic toys don't have much protection or warning to prevent a shutter button from being depressed if the film has not been advanced one frame after taking a photo.  Certainly, this could be a good thing, allowing for artistic license with intentional double exposures, or advancing as little or as much as one wants between frames in order to make the photos spaced well-apart vs. overlapping.  A mistaken double exposure, however, is upsetting mainly because it tends to ruin two potentially good photos, and I am baffled as to how many times I actually did it with Polaroid film this year (like the one above)!  Over and over.  I'm getting forgetful in my old age if I can't even remember to pull the photo out once I've snapped it.  gah!

Shooting Film Expired in 1983

Kodak VR 1000 film.  Came out reminding me of a Seurat painting, pointillism and all!

As The World Flickrs: Snailbooty!!

There is no other doll photographer out there which can send my nerve endings into a delighted tizzy like a person who goes by the moniker 'snailbooty' on Flickr. Scenes from elaborate to simple are the settings for Snailbooty's fantabulous collection of bizarre doll-creatures. It's quite clear to me that much time is taken to set up scenes and lighting, and hours upon hours of shooting takes place. My favorites are the black and white 'film noir-esque' ones, which are at once jolting and comical (in fact, you'll find a lot of humor as you browse through the pages of Snailbooty's Flickr stream!) And the talent doesn't just end with the camera, no, Snailbooty is an artist as well. I invite you all to check out this wonderful body of work.

[**OFF-TOPIC NOTE ..... I am still without access to most of my files from the old pc. Two of my seven external hard drives died on the same day, and my images now only remain on the pc's internal drives (I had 3). It is seeming like an eternity for which I wait while external enclosures for those 3 drives arrive in the mail. Until then, I am unable to do much of my work, and going absolutely bonkers in the process!!]

Iron Lady

Iron Lady, originally uploaded by sMacshot.

Oh gosh, I need to be strong. My digital camera is broken; I need to get a new one, and I am sort of devastated by the loss. I wasn't looking for a change, but I've discovered that Canon has a loyalty program so I can trade it in and get a better deal on an upgrade to the one I've been using for the past 4 years, and maybe it is time for me to move on, learn more technically (the camera I had was not very advanced, but not too amateurish, either) perhaps it's time for me to expand my knowledge and have equipment which would allow me to do more than I could before.

Until it broke, I'd take that camera with me any time I went out at night, walking around the neighborhood... got some great shots that way. Now I feel lost without it, but until I figure out my next options, it's forcing me to do other things.


The photo here is not a digital camera product. It was taken at the family beach house with a toy plastic Diana camera....the old kind; it takes medium format film which I get developed into negatives, so I can scan them myself. This is one such negative scan. Love the look that lo-fi cameras + film gives!

Time To Pack it In...

Linens, originally uploaded by sMacshot.

...get ready to start anew. Happy New Year to all who celebrate it!

Better Days Ahead

Better Days Ahead, originally uploaded by sMacshot.

Click the photo to read my caption. Hope all are well!

Whoosh

Whoosh, originally uploaded by sMacshot.

That darned (and wonderful) light-leaking plastic camera business again. It's perfect, I think, for presenting summertime memories the way they are in my mind. I was following my sister one evening after dinner down a seagrass path leading to the ocean. The sun was shining, the wind rippling across the tall grass, and butterflies....thousands of them, everywhere.

Crop Top

Crop Top, originally uploaded by sMacshot.

I am finally getting a start on the summer photos... scanning and potential post-processing takes so long, it's the part I dread. I shoot with so many lo-fi cameras that the majority of what I shoot never get seen by others, (still, I feel compelled to go through the steps to process and store them) and of the rest I actually do show, a certain kind of appreciation will be necessary if one is to see the beauty. They aren't everybody's cup of tea. You can click on the photo to read the humorous caption which explains this self portrait.

Want a Free Bikini?

So I've taken the 8:30ish train out to Long Island where I can lay on the beach all day and jump in the waves; pretend the city doesn't exist for a bit, and that summer is not really 'done'. I'm minding my own business when a nice-looking beachy sort of guy comes up and says those very words to me. I sat up and responded with a "yes" spoken almost as one would a question, like when someone rings your doorbell, ala 'who is it?' You know. He plopped down and removed his backpack, fished around for my size, and voila! New black bikini. Mine now. Even better he asks if I'd like one for a friend as well! So Ann, (my twin sister) it's waiting for you when you visit me next!

Note: the above photo is one I'd taken a few summers ago while at the beach house with one of my Holga (plastic toy) cameras. It's in my Flickr stream.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

As I've mentioned, I am at the family beach house in New England, and I've brought a big collection of cameras to play with. My twin sister, who I feel is an incredibly amazing photographer, (though she thinks I'm looney in the nut about that) does the same but with better equipment suitable to her style. She develops her own black and white film and brought all the chemicals and equipment for us both to do that here while on vacation. After shooting medium format (120mm) Kodak TMax 100 film, (she with a Hasselblad, and I with a Holga) my sister walked me through every step until we ended up with wonderful long ribbons of developed negatives. We hung these with special hangers and weighted clips to make them dry straight and uncurled, and once dry, cut them into scan-able strips and used masking tape to adhere one of our cut strips to a window to take a photo of with our digital cameras. In Photoshop we inverted the digital shots so we could get an idea of what we had come up with. (The dark blue areas are from something outside the window, not the photo itself. Also note that once home, we will use our scanners to do this correctly...this window/inversion is called the 'poor man's scanner'.) Here's mine taken looking out of a room into a hallway of the beach house. Pretty neat.