a story about nothing
...I've been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing.
"I've been outdoors, nowhere, in nothing."[april/may 2012 | vivitar ultra wide & slim | fuji superia 400]
a football & barbeque story
...football, burgers and beers.
preface
a football & barbeque night is not something special, and I don't tend to carry a camera with me all the time, really. this time, however, I threw the fuji x-pro1 in my bag, expecting to find an interesting lighting situation, what with a barbeque night held at a dimly-lit porch and a big glowing television screen tuned in to the euro 2012 football matches.
I waited for the night to fall properly, set the iso to 3200, the aperture at f2.2 (small nitpick of the fuji, you turn the aperture dial to f2 but it keeps selecting f2.2 - not much of a difference) and the shutter speed at 1/60. I could immediately see the images came out underexposed, so I turned to 1/30 after a while, keeping in mind I would have to seriously push them on post-processing. all of the following images were shot with the fuji x-pro1 and the fujinon 18mm/f2, in raw format. I converted the raw files to dng through the latest adobe dng converter, then I processed the dng files, pushing the outdoor photos (all apart from the first one, that is) at least one stop, effectively going straight into iso 6400-12800 territory. the close-up portraits are all pushed at least two stops. I am really impressed with the high iso images this (aps-c, let's not forget) camera produces.
...now, on to food, football and beers.
burger time
the guy you always want in your company
cats enjoy a nap after eating
relaxation time
going really close-up
nightcap
a life story
a camera. one roll of film. one month. one place. one km radius. a life story.
a camera. one roll of film. one month. one place. one km radius. a life story.[minolta dynax 7 | minolta 28mm/f2.8 | fuji reala 100]
a beginning
a promise
a setback
a life
an end
a day in the life
...I saw a film today, oh boy.
march/april 2012, olympus xa2, kodak ektachrome & fuji astia (both expired 1999) cross-processed…
another winter story
...from rain to sun to rain again.
following the whims of the weather... building on the first winter story... discovering new places, challenging old places... nothing like an hour of walking in the rain, avoiding human presence - nothing like the big old sun in the sky, wondrously saturating the world, a walk on the seaside - doctor jekyll and mister hyde. ... recording with the cheapest, widest film camera ever, the vivitar ultra wide & slim, on the cheapest 400 iso film ever, the rossmann 400.
a winter story
...from sun to rain.
february/march 2012, olympus xa2, kodak ektachrome (expired 1999) cross-processed...
night roaming
...the beginning of a night urban landscape series.
what do you do when it's a rainy night and you want to make some images? grab the fuji gw690, load it up with some kodak portra 400 and try to combine two of todd hido's masterpieces: roaming
the resulting images were inevitably underexposed and I had to push the film a bit during scanning...
...the amazing thing with the 6x9 negative you get out of the fuji gw690 is that you can discover things you didn't see when shooting a scene - for example, here's a 100% crop of the fast 2000-dpi 28-megapixel scan I did of this image... somebody had spotted the erratic behaviour of my car and was watching/photographing me at the same time I was photographing this particular scene...
...on the move again, with white balance getting more difficult because I went up to 1/8 from 1/4 for fear of getting blurry images, thus underexposing the film even more...
...a frame that the lab guy chopped off on the left side...
...and here is the last frame, which left me wondering who to blame for the extra light leaks, the lab guy or my handling of the film - sadly for the lab guy, I will have to blame him, different lab than the one I usually trust my films to and first time I get frames chopped off and light leaks ruining my last frame (which becomes the first frame when unloading the film for developing)...
...and after shooting this handful of frames in the space of half an hour during a rainy night, I am officially hooked on night-time urban landscapes. coming soon near your suburb, on a tripod.
the last good day of the year
...walking by the sea and trying to take photographs.
actually, these photos were taken on the last day of 2011 and the first day of 2012, since I couldn't finish the 35mm roll on new year's eve. this post should have a different title - it should be called something like "the last/first weekend of 2011/2012", or maybe "one weekend, two years", or "next time the weather's rainy, remember to load your camera with colour film instead of black & white" but the song by cousteau kept spinning in my head and I went for it. so there I was, new year's eve, just another saturday for some people (just me, I guess), clouds, rain, cold - a perfect day to visit the seaside. I loaded the minolta with some really old kodak panatomic-x film, decided to also take out the kiev 88 with the flektogon 50mm/f4 (I don't get a lot of time with wide-angle lenses), threw some medium format films in the bag and jumped in the car.
rafina is a nice place for winter seaside walks, the clouds were lining the sky and the colours were perfect for photographs... at that point, I realized that I hadn't brought any colour films with me apart from a slide film meant to be used with tungsten lighting... I wasted a minute in cursing and pitying myself and then decided to try my best... in the end you could say that my best wasn't good enough - lesson to self: buy a big stash of kodak portra and always carry some of them. you just can't beat colour film for anything remotely resembling a landscape.
anyway, photos. an attempt on a simple I-can-focus-really-close view of the beach...
...then this crazy guy came crashing through the sand...
...it's always nice to find interesting bits and pieces that people throw away, although it'd be nicer if you never found any kind of litter on a beach (and that proves that I can be politically correct if I want to)...
...then a typical I-have-shot-this-too-but-it-looks-better-in-colour frame taken during my superhuman attempt to finish the roll, which didn't happen anyway, since I was still in the middle of it...
...and this is the only shot from the kiev 88 roll that has some interest, although most of its interest lies in imagining how different it would be if it was a colour shot...
...that was the end of new year's eve photo walk, a searing, majestic session of uninspired photos that had the bad luck of being a black & white peg in a colour hole. thirty frames were shot on new year's eve, most of them died because of lack of any kind of photographic interest.
but you always have to try some things twice, so on new year's day I returned to the same beach to finish the 35mm roll. this time it was a little better, and I tried to get some movement in my frames...
...and you gotta love people walking their dogs on the beach - when combined with a super-slow 25 ASA film, you get the chance to imitate michael ackerman, or that other what's-his-name-guy who first shot a moving dog...
so that's it, a weekend of enjoyable walking by the sea and not so enjoyable photographs. hell, at least I cay say that 2011 left, 2012 came and I was still trying to finish one roll of film - one more story to tell my children (or somebody else's children, anyway). I have to point out that I learn from my mistakes, though - my next trips to the seaside were shot exclusively in colour.
