a few more black and white photos

This is the last of the black and white work that I have scanned at the moment; I have a bunch more in various stages of getting into the computer. Three rolls unprocessed, three that need to be scanned, and one half roll in the camera that I’m exctied about.

Anyway, these are sort of random. Yesterday, I was going to talk about the mood in the city, but it doesn’t quite feel right with these photos. maybe later, after the new film is scanned.

Fletcher in his natural habitat, playing a tabletop game. Gym? I’ll show you a gym. Saibh, with her hat. I’m not sure it wasn’t a doll’s hat before this photo. SF. No idea what I was doing there. Maybe this was from the passenger’s seat in the car?

sf not street photos (totally street photos)

This is where i find myself; on the street, in SF, taking pictures of things, not people. it’s not really street photography so much as a sort of urban landscape. There’s this idea of the street photograph as a well-dressed pretty lady in a perfect shaft of sunlight; this is not that. Neither is it getting right in the face of the subject. I’m terribly shy out in the real world, even among people I know sometimes.

But there is still a lot going on, even within those bounds, with the attempt to have respect for the people and things you photograph. Not to say that other people’s approaches don’t do that, I’m only going by feeling here. It’s hard to get involved with people enough to know them well enough to make good pictures of them. You can meet someone and take their picture, have a conversation, and sometimes you get lucky and it’s a real moment, and other times you’re left with a bunch of wrong impressions. The clarity and quality of the images has no bearing on the truth that theymight portray. of course, truth is old fashioned. now it’s all about narrative. what’s the story?

san pablo and nearby

The san pablo project is weird in that it has physical boundaries; all the pictures taken on the street or sidewalk or in businesses that are on it. These rules are somewhat arbitrary, but they keep me from tossing in every good picture that somehow tenuously relates to the road or the history. If I gave myself a 50-yard margin around the road, the last picture would count, too, but that feels like cheating. I still like it, and it was scanned and probably shot within a couple days of these other ones.

That’s another thing about shooting film. Unless the photos were all shot on the same day, and I have something to remind me of when they happened, there’s no way to know when a given photo was taken. So we’re not super chronological here, is what I’m trying to tell you.

dinner club april-ish

I think this was April? Might have been early May. Wasn’t June, that just started. Hella grainy; this is P3200 exposed at 3200, and then scanned with a little too much sharpening in the scanner software. I can’t really be bothered to re-scan (if you knew what a headache scanning is, you’d agree).

I’ve built up a pretty good backlog again, mostly of film work, but some with the fuji too, so I’m going to try posting at least once a day until the backlog is back down to manageable size. Don’t know if I’ll have a ton to say, but we’ll see.

Here’s today.