a day of playing 'what's next?'

This was one of those days where the fun just doesn’t want to stop. Everybody just kept deciding to keep going, order another round, get another bite to eat, move on together to the next location. There may have been a split to nap in the mid-afternoon, but we all rallied at Temescal Brewing after. There may have been some cycling after beers, who can say. By the end, by the last picture, it was dark and time to go home and chill. Luckily, it’s downhill from there to the house.

inbetween things

Did a bunch of film scans this evening, and I have to say I’m not super happy with what I’m getting from the 35mm work. I’m going to go through the motions of developing what I’ve already shot and looking at it honestly, but I’m not super positive about it. A lot of the things I like from the work coming out of the 6x9 camera just aren’t there in the smaller format. Maybe the 40mm 1.4 will be the silver bullet to make it all magical again, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, here are three images off the queue. I don’t think they’re related at all, or even shot within a month of each other.

game night at fletch's

These were from the first batch I did here at home, and they have a ton of dust and water spots (partially because my basement is dusty, and partially because I don’t have anything to clean them with prior to scanning). A little cleanup and they’re presentable. The last image in particular, was pretty hard to work on; I thought for a minute there might be starts in the background, but no, it was just dust that happened to look like a familiar constellation.

Need to scan more… I’ve got four pages of 35mm work ready to be scanned. Maybe tomorrow night? Friday night? One of them is the first roll through the new camera, shooting with the 50mm Canon lens I’ve had for better than a decade (and is itself a decade older than me, at least). Looking forward to seeing how those look.

This particular night we were mostly playing games, but I had the film camera and found a few moments, between things and on a pizza pickup run, to get a few photos in. That seems to be the way I work now; photos when I’m not doing anything else that requires my attention. It’s the background process that’s always running. Still, always looking.

Still trying to do a post a day; at the end of the month, we’ll see how I did without a backlog. Here’s today.

you can’t see it, but fletch is showing off a twiddler, an absurd input device that I’m super tempted to get. Beers that don’t like being poured. The fog all rolled in.

damaris' birthday in film

So these are the film photos from the same time we were there as this post, but this time with the texas leica (as opposed to the almost leica I just got in the mail, which, more on that later). There’s definitely something to the film work that I didn’t even realize I was missing in the digital versions.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to be said for a fast camera with the option to be color or black and white at will. but there’s also something to be said for the tonality I’m getting from these negatives, which is nothing like what I get from any of my digital cameras, even after pretty extensive processing.

So yeah, I bought another film camera, to complement the ones I already have. Shot my first roll of film this afternoon with a super old lens that may or may not be worth anything. I have another lens bought, that hasn’t shipped, that should be a little better suited to this camera (I bought the camera and lens the same day last week; the camera arrived from japan faster than the lens from new jersey). It’s everything my other film cameras aren’t; small and light and really fun to shoot with. The first roll is drying now, I’ll probably scan some tomorrow.