Shadow

Had a beautiful Saturday with lots of surfing, thanks to Steffi, Daniel, Dan, Franz, and Jill. I'm not sure if one can call that stuff surfing at all, though. It feels a bit like the ocean doesn't like me much and prefers to constantly spit me out. The thing I was doing reminded me a lot of Rodeo.

It's four in the morning now. Working at night is what I really enjoy. Nighttime is the time when my productivity, creativity and inspiration (if any) is on its very peak. At least that's how it feels to me. During sunny weekend days however, I sometimes feel like a shadow of myself.


Location: Mission Beach, San Diego.
Gear: Cheap plastic and a black and white film.

Holgarama

In times where cameras are so perfect and post-processing possibilities unlimited, it is somewhat relieving to use a crappy $15 toy camera. It feels so light in your hands, and pressing the shutter feels so incredible cheap and rogue, it's a big pleasure to use it. Imperfections are considered interesting in the toy-camera world. In fact, they are so poorly built that each camera has its own unique errors, producing unique looking images. Here are my first results from my Holga. I modified my camera a little to prevent light from leaking into the camera body. The scanned images however I just shrank a little and added my web address, other than that, they are completely untouched. That's part of my Holga deal: don't touch.

I used a 400 ISO black and white medium format film. This was the first time I used film at all, and must admit that I was a bit shocked when I learned that getting roll of 12 exposures developed costs me as much as the whole camera did. Plus $5 for purchasing the film. No wonder film died so quickly. However, I strongly believe that some sort of analog photography will have a big revival at some point in the future.

Anza Borrego Wildflower


Another flower. Well, why not, call it an experimental phase. These wildflowers are actually pretty insane looking. If you would take those home and do some serious macro photography, you would probably get images that look like from another world. However, I don't have a macro lens, and instead tried my best using an extender tube I borrowed from Steffi. The depth of field with such an extender is so little, it's not even funny anymore. It's a question of millimeters. Tiny moves in the light wind make the sweetspot wander significantly from frame to frame, even with fast bursts.

And speaking of experiments, I finally started to use the toy camera that I bought almost four years ago. I cannot show any results yet, the film first needs to be developed :-D