Hello again Flickr. A month later and it is good to be home. Three weeks of world travel sounds great on paper and in reality it is great, but it is also exhausting. It is safe to say that my travel bug is scratched for at least a few months. That is a good thing as I have more than 70 rolls of exposed film between the trips to Maui and France to work through. It is going to take several months to plow my way through all that work. But that is a task I am looking forward to. I am looking forward to the delayed gratification that makes film so thoroughly enjoyable to use. I am looking forward to sharing those images with family and friends for the first time and I am looking forward to curating, writing and sharing it all with you through Flickr.
I am in my element when I am out in the world (exotic or not) with a camera in hand. And while this past month of whipping around the globe has left me worn out - almost in need of a vacation from my vacation - it has also been an incredibly fulfilling month. Give me a windswept Hawaiian beach with a wooden pinhole camera and a single roll of film and I am a satisfied individual... on several different levels.
I have given more than a little thought too on my on-going use of Flickr and on-line presentation in general. But those are thoughts I will share with you on a subsequent post. I am not completely out of vacation mode just yet and mentally it is still difficult to spend too much time in front of the computer. I'm sure you understand. But I had to get a new image up at some point and figured this was as good a place to begin again as any.
Secret Beach on Maui by the way. Not a terribly well kept secret mind you, but a beautiful one to be sure.
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I really don't intend to get back into the France images just yet, but today I couldn't resist - it's the Eiffel Tower's birthday after all.
So, bon anniversaire, Eiffel!
Tags: Paris France Eiffel Tower la Tour Eiffel Europe travel sunset pinhole Innova 6x9 lo-fi photography city urban film analog 6x9 medium format wooden camera Trocadero
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It is hard to do much better than Cape Kiwanda at sunset, except maybe Cape Kiwanda at sunset with a pinhole camera. ;-) I posted this image yesterday over to my Tumblr blog but figured I had better share it over here too.
Speaking of Tumblr, Blue Moon Camera has implemented their own Tumblr blog too. For those of you familiar with our customer show, this is more or less the same thing, except digital. For those not familiar with our customer show, here's the scoop. Our lab sees thousands of photos a day. Multiply that by weeks and months. Amidst all those photos are some real gems, pictures that make us pause, laugh, wonder, exclaim... you get the idea. So we started curating and voting on selected images, making copies of the prints, getting the customer's permission then collecting them into a big show we have at the end of every year. The show has multiple motivations, one of the largest being to celebrate the wonderful work that our customers - many of them not professional photographers- do on a daily basis. It also is a chance of course to celebrate the beauty of a good optical print from a piece of film and the joy of printing in general.
With me so far? Historically speaking, the work that goes through our scan lab largely gets overlooked. Every once in a while we would see an image and like it so much we would make a print of it for our customer of our own volition just so it could be included in the show, but by and large, scanned film got passed over for customer show nominations. But lots of awesome work goes through our scanning lab as well as our print lab and we wanted to be able to share it too. So Anne (with some help from Katt, Sarah and myself) slowly built a Tumblr blog and started curating work to feed it. The idea is the same: to celebrate the amazing work that our customers do and share it with everyone else. The Tumblr blog has other motivations too. It also serves to show how nice the marriage between analog and digital can look - just how nice a product can come from scanning a piece of film. We also started collecting "EXIF" data of sorts, in this case film type and camera type. So hopefully the blog becomes a running example of book of what different cameras and films can do. So if you have the time, inclination and/or desire, stop over at it and check it out. It has been running for a couple of weeks now with new posts coming at a twice weekly rate.
As far as this image, I figured I had better post something good as I will only be making one post today. The family and I are heading back to the coast for the night staying over in Seaside but with planned jaunts further south to these parts. Wendi tracked down a new, off-the-beaten path beach near Cape Kiwanda that is supposed to have some cool basalt formations that rise up out of the surf at low tide. So we're going to go check those out and otherwise get sandy and wind-scoured. :-)
Tags: Innova 6x9 film analog pinhole coast ocean Cape Kiwanda Three Capes Scenic Route Oregon Oregon Coast Pacific Northwest landscape sunset cliffs Haystack Rock Pacific Ocean lo-fi 6x9 Kodak Ektar 100
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I love AirBnB. I do. It's spoiled me. Hotels are now a thing of last resort. You know why I love it so much? Because of serendipity.
Even a great system isn't without its hiccups now and again. For example, our plan in France was to stay four nights in Paris in a swanky hotel that Wendi had got quite a deal on, then to train up to Mont St. Michel for several nights and then down to Avignon for a bit over a week before returning to Paris to stay one last night before flying home. We don't travel with technology that keeps us plugged in. This is partially out of necessity but mostly out of choice. Even if we did own iPhones or laptops I still wouldn't want to bring them. Who goes to Paris to spend the whole time browsing the internet on their phone?! Nonetheless, we didn't go completely unplugged opting to take along our iPod Touch with its wifi connection. A good thing too for four days into our Paris stay, the day before we would be leaving for parts north and unknown wifi accessibility we got an e-mail from the fellow who was renting us the apartment we planned on staying in our last night in Paris letting us know that due to a scheduling glitch, AirBnB had double booked his apartment for that night and he had to cancel one of the reservations. To make a long story shorter, our reservation got cancelled and we were left without a place to stay for that last night, which was only about ten days and much busy and hard traveling away. Wendi, who is a pro at finding great places to stay and getting superb deals on them... ahead of time but who doesn't deal with last minute stress very well (plus the stress that always comes with traveling in a foreign country) crumpled just a bit leaving it to me to solve our little dilemma. And it was little. I mean, worst case we just pitch a tent under the Eiffel Tower, right? Anyway, I got back onto AirBnB and browsed for a bit and found a nice little apartment for a nice rate not far from the cemetery where Jim Morrison is buried. That last detail is completely extraneous but true. We made our reservation, got confirmation from the apartment owner, took a short recuperatory nap and then went out and wandered the streets of Paris and made photos.
Fast forward a week and a half and we arrived back in Paris from Avignon, road weary and simultaneously sad and glad to be finally heading home. We found the apartment building and punched in our key code. The inside of the building was quite old and weathered, but in that really neat way not in the unsettling way. Our apartment was at the top of five flights of stairs up the twirling spiral of wooden steps that had seen so many feet the middle of each runner was worn and bowed in.
I took one look at these stairs and fell in love. I knew a pinhole image was going to be in the making before we left. We climbed up, knocked and were greeted by Evy, the fellow who owned the apartment. My first thought was that he looked kind of like a very tan Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, but this was due entirely to his frizzy, exploding hair style and not because he had yellow skin or an evil disposition. He was actually a very cool guy. We got settled in with our gear, got some rough directions from him on places to eat and how to leave the key when we left in the morning and prepared to head back out, not wanting to waste any moments of our last hours in Paris. I stepped into his studio to tell him bye (he was leaving for his home near Versailles and we wouldn't see him again) and he caught sight of my Hasselblad on its strap on my shoulder. You should have seen his eyes light up. It was like a kid seeing his presents under the tree come Christmas morning. He wanted to know all sorts of things about it, having only heard of them and never seen one. So naturally I unslung it off my shoulder and offered to let him hold it, even popping up the waist level finder for him. Whenever I show people my Hasselblad, the moment they look into that waist level finder for the first time is my favorite moment of the whole interaction. You can watch people become 20 years younger with amazement and glee the first time they see the reflected image in their hands. They love it and I love it that they love it. Evy loved it. He even grabbed his phone and asked me if I would make some photos of him with my Hasselblad, which I did so gladly. How can you refuse a man with frizzy hair who is that obviously happy? In short, you cannot. It was an awesome encounter. The kind you don't get staying at hotels. Well, I mean, they could still happen but the odds are so much lower. Plus you don't have to walk up cool, old, wooden stairs like this. Oh sorry, I meant get to walk up stairs like this.
On our last morning, all packed and ready to go, I grabbed my pinhole and gorillapod and afixed it to the railing at the top looking straight down and let a 20 minute exposure slide on by. This may have been the last photo I made in Paris, by the way.
At least on this trip.
Tags: pinhole film analog stairs vanishing point 6x9 Innova 6x9 Paris France Europe looking down last night interior old wooden
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It had been several years since I had last been out to Abiqua Falls. In fact, on that first trip Owen wasn't even quite two years old and him and Wendi waited in the car while I navigated the slippery, mud slope down to this relatively remote waterfall. So during the recent cold snap, we figured it was time for a return visit. Personally, I was hoping for a bit of ice, and though the puddles of water on the road down to Abiqua were crusted with ice, the falls were sadly lacking any of the frozen stuff.
That didn't slow down me or my pinhole very much though.
Tags: Innova 6x9 Innova wooden cameras pinhole pinscape waterfall Abiqua Falls Oregon Pacific Northwest landscape film analog lo-fi long exposure adventures Blue Moon Camera
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