Making Music


A Venice Beach portrait.

I got lots of good Holga shots back from the store, basically one roll of black and white, and one roll of color film. This is one is the first color picture. There are also more Lensbaby results on my hard disk from last Sunday. I'm not sure what it is, the imperfect optics of these toys that make photographing so easy going, or simply the fun of using something new..I might keep posting daily now for a while.

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.