film fridays - please respect

if a sign requesting respect is, er, respected, it gives me hope that perhaps we can do the same in general within the population. unless we need to wear signs on our persons at all times asking for respect. what if respect doesn't match my shoes today? dammit.

maybe we need to make respect the new black. that way it will match everything, including my black, black heart.

anyway, happy new year (almost), and see you on the flip side!

the specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

holga walls

because we had unseasonably warm weather toward the end of this year (up until december!), andy and i had been trying to take our days off together to take trips to outlying towns and locations in order to take photos there. this holga image was made during a day trip to annapolis.  i was drawn to all the various wall textures, both natural and man made, and liked how this combination came out.

film fridays - grand central station (another take)

wherever you happen to be headed during whatever holidays you celebrate, have a safe trip, be thankful for what you have, and strive to make things better for yourself as well as those around you!

the specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

holga patterns

this is an extremely close up detail of a tile mural in adams morgan, washington dc.  we were heading home from crafty bastards in october and stopped to take a few photos (when i say "we," my husband is a photographer too).  using the manual holga film advance, i overlapped the frames to combine the tiles to enhance the mosaic feel.

film fridays - free

i made this image in new york city during my last trip there. i just loved that there was nothing in the "free" box. :)

the specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

dupont circle fountain holga

dupont circle fountain, taken at the end of our last sketchcrawl in october. i wasn't feeling my sketches that day (and was reluctant to post very much as a result), but i did get a few holga shots that i liked. this is a rare single frame, since i usually overlap exposures for a layered effect.

anyway, despite my seemingly impaired sketching ability, it was a beautiful day, i got to spend a lot of time outdoors with some talented DC artists, and made some nice photos. i call that a win!

steel + glass

modern plan of survival, steel and glass, 2010

i've been up to some very different (for me) work over the last couple of months, and the culmination of that experiment is just about done - i am delving into sculpture, specifically with steel and glass!  the pic above is my first piece in what i hope will be a series. 

if you are in the dc metro area, you can come see this piece, along with tons of other really awesome work by the glass school artists, at their open studio and sculpture market TOMORROW (saturday), december 11, from 2-6 PM.

the washington glass school

3700 otis street

mt rainier, md  20712

from the glass school's blog post:

"See some of the new directions the artists of the Washington Glass School are moving the traditional craft with integration of modern process, mixed media, and narrative.  Some of the artists showing include: Erwin Timmers, Tim Tate, Elizabeth Mears, Chris Shea, Allegra Marquart, Michael Janis, Nancy Donnelly, Robert Kincheloe, Sean Hennessey and Rania Hassan.  Music, Demos, Class Specials and more are on the agenda for the day!

The recent Glass & Steel Sculptural Development class will present their final projects in one of the galleries at the school - this semester's class has created some of the most impressive works yet! See what happens when you have set loose a class at DC Glass Works and Washington Glass School and toss in some aluminum pour castings & metal welding - you will be impressed and wanting to know when the next class occurs!"

film fridays - 5 pointz tracks

i made this image in new york city in the 5 pointz, a graffiti covered block of buildings. this shot didn't showcase the graffiti so much as it did the subway tracks and the barbed wire fence keeping the back lot private. i liked the way the lines came together, and was happy we had some clouds in the sky that day for texture.

the specs: hasselblad xpan II camera and kodak tmax 400 film.

finnish embassy holga

it is a little known fact that while in high school, i co-founded the finnish resistance movement in chemistry class with my good friend who now also lives in the dc area. it's a long story of how that came about, but can be summed up with us playing off of a spelling error on the part of our teacher. fast forward 20 years (yikes!) when we passed by the finnish embassy during our october sketchcrawl. needless to say i got very excited. it wasn't open, but the architecture was so cool looking, so i swung into the courtyard to make some exposures.

viva finland!

film fridays - the watcher

i made this photo in the 5 pointz in new york city. you can see a little more of the buildings a few posts down in the levitation photo, but the place is literally covered in graffiti. i liked this particular piece of graffiti because it just seemed to watch over you... or glare at you. depends on how you look at it i guess. :)

the specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

NYC apple store holga

i don't have many holga images from my nyc trip this past october as a opted to shoot with the xpan most of the time i was there, but i did make this shot at the apple store in manhattan. i was visiting with my friend rob (the one pictured a few posts back who is levitating!), who is a long time employee of that store. i had never been to that particular apple store before, and it was pretty neat to see how very different it is from the apple stores around dc. i was standing underneath their glass stairs looking up at all the people coming and going... while rob was answering customers' questions about iphones even though he was not technically working that day. :)

film fridays - grand central station

this film friday image is dedicated to all the travelers out there this holiday weekend. i shot this in grand central station up in nyc in october during my visit for the toying with creativity book launch party.

specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

dead end - annapolis holga

this is one of quite a few new holga images i have to share. it's easier to save film and develop it all at once rather than a roll at a time as i take them, but the downside is that i have a ton of images in one swoop. so, i'm going to spread out my sharing a bit so that it's not so overwhelming for you or for me. :)

this one was taken during a day trip to annapolis. andy and i have been trying to get out on our rare days off together to roam and take photos, and this came from one of those trips. fun fact: we were officially engaged in annapolis a decade ago!

toying with creativity

i have a holga image featured in this book: toying with creativity. check it out if you are able. i haven't been able to read the entire thing yet, but it's a pretty good resource for anyone interested in lo-fi cameras and image making.

by the way, most of the recent nyc images i've been posting (and will continue to post) were taken the day of the launch party for this book. i took the train up to the city and roamed with camera in hand until it was time to hit the party. :)

also, another bit of publicity i received a while back was a profile on holgajen's blog. you can read that HERE. lots of my images are featured, and the commentary is quite good, i think. check it out!

film fridays - follow the white rabbit head

the rally for sanity / keep fear alive march on the mall in washington dc last month was a bit of a challenge to photograph. for starters, i'm shorter than just about everyone else on the planet, so trying to get a decent vantage point above the crowds was pretty futile. in addition to that, i had my parents in tow from pennsylvania, so i didn't want to wander too far away from them or they'd be lost in the wilds of dc. i contemplated strapping a day's worth of food and supplies to them just in case, but decided i should be a good child and guide them myself. :)

in any case, i decided to wander a bit on the outskirts of the rally so that i could move around and get some photos that way. for the most part i was not terribly happy with any of my images, but i did come away with this amusing one of a guy parading around the head to his rabbit costume. i saw that and got in as close as i could to get a few frames. the feet from above were from people perched on a moving truck they had rented for the occasion - if only i had thought of that!

the specs: hasselblad xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

film... tuesdays? - xpan levitation

i realized that i missed last friday's "film fridays" post. but, i have a good excuse - i was busy developing and printing 5 rolls of xpan II film and 5 rolls of holga film! and what's more, here's one of those images - it's my friend paco (the rest of the world knows him as rob) levitating in the 5 pointz - i took this photo during a visit to new york city last month. i took a similar photo of paco back in the late 90's in front of some graffiti in our college town of kent, ohio, and we thought it would be funny to make another for the new millennium.

the specs: hasselblad xpan II camera and kodak tmax 400 film.

and i'll try to get back to posting these on friday now that i have a lot of new material to share. :)

film fridays - street performers, nyc

this is sort of a fun random image from nyc a while back. friends and i were wandering around and ended up watching these street performers work the crowd while we waited to rendezvous with the rest of our party. two of my friends can be seen just under the jumping performer / over the line of jumpees in the background. :)

the specs: nikon fm3a and kodak tmax 400 film.

old town alexandria holga - eel

i made this holga image back in july during a stroll around old town alexandria, though am just now getting around to posting it. it was very hot that day, so we only stayed out for about two hours, and all i can say is the lack of ice cream shops on the main drag is a deal breaker for future summer visits to that area!

film fridays - the guggenheim

this is an image taken at the guggenheim museum in new york city. the lines and architecture are incredible, but i was happy to catch those two people peeking over the edge of the top floor.

specs: nikon fm3a + kodak tmax 400 35mm film.

film fridays - harpers ferry

this panoramic photo was taken a while back during a day trip to harpers ferry in west virginia. specs: made with an xpan II and kodak tmax 400 film.

film fridays - times square

i was in nyc visiting friends a few years back and we were on our way through the city when i made this image. i've seen a lot of photos of times square, but i wanted to take back something that seemed less commercial and more gritty than the current touristy vibe that the area has. the black and white film helped with that, i think.

specs: taken with a nikon fm3a and kodak tmax 400 film.

film fridays - the grand canyon

the grand canyon in black and white. i have a bunch of photos of it, but i like this one because of the shadow from the tree on the cliff where i was perched.

specs: shot on kodak tmax 400 film with a nikon fm3a camera (i think).

trust me

this is another holga photo i made during the july 31 sketchcrawl through washington dc. this was taken near the mall, where i saw this strange banner of the colonial drummer. while i wish i could take complete credit for the words overlapping like they did, i discovered the amusing juxtaposition after i developed the film. sometimes even i am a little surprised by what comes out of my holga. :)

film fridays - platinum print

i know this image looks a bit different than some of the other film images i've posted, with a strange color cast and all. that is not a mistake - it's a platinum - palladium print! i've made silver print versions of this image as well, but the ghostly quality that i like so much about this image shines through with the platinum technique, so this is the version i prefer and show.

the specs: original negative was made with a hasselblad 501CM camera, and then the negative was enlarged to roughly 5x7. i think this particular image was enlarged digitally (cheating!), but there are plenty others that i enlarged by hand using an enlarger and reversal film, so i don't feel too bad about this - besides, we had to do one digital enlargement for our class. :)

the final negative was then contact printed to a piece of paper that i hand coated in the platinum - palladium solution and exposed under light in a contact print frame. this particular print is on archival hot press watercolor paper (arches was my paper of choice back in the day).

museum of the americas holga

this holga photo was taken on the very last stop of our july 31 sketchcrawl through dc at the museum of the americas. i had never been there before, and that's one thing i love about sketchcrawls - we make pit stops in lots of places around the city, ranging from heavily traveled to more obscure and everything in between. anyhow, i was drawn to the minimal nature of some of the elements i was finding in and around the building, and thought it would be fun to combine them. the hunch paid off, and this is the resulting image.

film fridays - multiple exposure

i made the portrait part of this week's film fridays image while still an undergrad in college. i was taking my very first studio photography class, and recruited just about everyone i knew to come and sit for me to let me take their photos. this guy was in my creative writing class, and it was a really fun session. fast forward about 7 years, and i took another photo of the crystal pool doors at glen echo park here in maryland (these are the old, decaying, beat up doors i was talking about in an earlier post!). i was teaching my photo class at the time about creating double exposure prints in the darkroom and how they could take two separate negatives and combine them into one image, and made this print as a demo. i really liked it, so i kept it on file.

both images were shot with 35mm film cameras, and i believe both were nikon N90s bodies. the film for both would have been kodak black and white (either tmax or tri-x, not sure which).

and yes, i know you could do something similar to this with digital, and what's more, i know how to do this sort of effect digitally... but that takes all the fun out of it. :)

DCCAH - permanent collection

a while back i entered some of my original toned silver gelatin holga prints to be considered for purchase by the dc commission on the arts and humanities art bank.  the work in this collection is purchased from local DC area artists and is displayed in a variety of government buildings throughout the the district. anyway, they accepted two of my images into the permanent collection, which is pretty awesome!  the images they chose are incidentally one of my oldest and one of my newest holga images: "chinatown" and "the mall."

so, if you are in any government buildings keep your eyes peeled for my contact prints, matted to 11x14 inches! if i ever find out where they are displayed i'll be sure to announce it.
:)

film fridays - matt

i've always liked this photo i made of my friend matt several years back. it's not exactly a portrait, not fashion either. but the minimal aspects of it, the focus on tiny details of his jacket, and the implied body language are all kind of cool to me. it's just a little tiny sliver of time that is very dear to me, and this photo serves as a reminder.

like most of my "film fridays" choices, this image never fit with any exhibits so has not seen the light of day until now.  that is one of the driving forces behind this weekly feature, since everyone tends to see and know my holga work.  not that i don't plan to share my holga images more, but other work deserves attention on this blog too.

the specs: made with a nikon fm3a camera, and kodak tmax 400 film.

glen echo - crystal pool holga

a few weeks ago i went to glen echo to make a few prints in the photoworks darkroom, and after i was finished there i took a stroll around the park with my holga. this is one of the images that resulted: the crystal pool. the front doors have been fixed up a bit since i first started photographing there several years back. the pool has long been filled in, but the front door is now new and painted. i actually sort of preferred the decaying version, but i can see as how it might appear unattractive to visitors!

film fridays - winged woman

look! it's another color film image! but, like the last one i posted, this was captured on medium format chrome film, and NOT negative. these rich blues and contrast just wouldn't have happened by using film - at least not without the help of photoshop. if you're gonna shoot color film, then SHOOT COLOR and go straight to the chrome. :)

the specs: photographed outside an art gallery in sedona, arizona, with a hasselblad 501CM camera and fuju velvia 120 chrome film.

film fridays - san francisco

this is the famous golden gate bridge in san francisco - i visited there in 2004.  this image was made with a hasselblad xpan II camera and kodak t-max 400 film.  i love the xpan because it's such a wildly different crop than anything else i use, and it forces me to think about my compositions in a different way. i think this photo is a good example of that, utilizing the negative space throughout most of the frame!

film fridays - new york city

i made this image in new york city in 2003 or 2004 (i'd have to look it up) during a visit there. i was standing inside the guggenheim museum, watching people come in the revolving door.  don't worry, i actually looked at the inside of the museum too. :)

the specs: nikon FM3A camera body, and kodak t-max 400 film.

film fridays - arizona

i know you are all confused now.  am i not the one who said i do not shoot color?  yes, i did say that. but, this is different because the image above was made on medium format chrome film and not negative film. slide film is much, MUCH more awesome than negative for a lot of reasons, but mostly because the colors are so much more vibrant and rich. if you're gonna shoot color, i say, SHOOT color, and don't mute it down. but, maybe that's just me.

anyway, the specs: this is my husband andy, during a trip to arizona in the spring of 2002.  the image was made with a hasselblad 501CM and 80mm lens, and i think the film is fuji velvia 100F chrome.

that's all for this week's film friday, so see you next week!

film fridays

yeah, i know what you're thinking... isn't like, every day a film day for you? well, i do shoot digitally on occasion, but yes, the majority of my personal work is indeed captured on film. however, the majority of my film work is shot with a holga camera, and i specifically wanted to showcase some images that i've taken over the years that were NOT made with a holga. i'll note the camera used and if i can remember, the type of film i used as well.

so first up, an image i made in 2004 in san francisco, california. it is photographed using a nikon FM3A camera, and kodak tmax (i think) 400 speed film.

i love the geometry of this photo, and love the FM3A. i lament that i don't get to spend as much time using this camera as i did in the past. i have too many cameras and not enough time! but one of my goals is to shoot more film and get back to the fun-ness of making photos that are single exposure (read: not made with the holga). i don't plan to give up on the holga any time soon, but a little diversity is a good thing, and it keeps the creative juices flowing.

so that's it, and expect another non-holga film image every friday from now until... whenever i feel like doing something else. :)

absence makes the heart grow something something...

i haven't posted here in a while. that's partly because i have film that has yet to be developed / scanned, and partly because i've been focusing on drawing a bit more recently. also, i got a bike for my birthday last month and have been working up to running errands with it (i procured energy bars and chick peas from whole foods today using said bike!).

last weekend i participated in sketchcrawl #28 around washington dc. basically, a group of local artists walks around the city, spending about a half hour at each location, and we all sketch.  it's cool because i get to meet new people, but also because it's neat to see how each person interprets a scene since we are all together for the duration of the crawl. this is also a worldwide phenomenon, and you can check out results from all over the globe on the sketchcrawl site.

here are a few sketches from that day (and hopefully soon i'll be back to posting some holga work or mordançage prints... i'm itching to get back in the darkroom!). click on the image to see in more detail.

(view from the salon on the second floor at the renwick museum)


(figure drawing at the corcoran museum)

(drawing myself drawing on the metro on the way home from the sketchcrawl)

check out all of my sketches from the day on flickr!

LottoHEART mordançage

i've been sitting on this image for a while because it was created as a donation to LottoHEART and was just auctioned off along with 199 other works of art for their annual artwork lottery. every piece of work, donated by hundreds of artists ranging from beginner to established, is exactly 5x7 in size, and is presented anonymously so that no one knows who created each piece (hence the reason i had to wait to post mine publicly). see all the artwork that was auctioned HERE at this link, and you can also see more about the organization and get a list of the participating artists there as well.  i had fun trying to match the works donated to the artists on the list, but am not sure anyone would be able to do that for mine... this piece is a little different than my more widely known artwork. but, hopefully it will end up in a good home and help raise money for a good cause!

oh, and happy 4th of july, everyone!

Brookland Holga

this is the last holga image from the brookland sketchcrawl in may. technically this is the first holga i took that day, and this is the corner of 12th and newton NE streets, underneath the CVS overhang. the sketchers all went their separate ways to sketch and arranged to meet at the CVS, and i was there earlier than most... so i whipped out the holga for the remainder of my time there. 12th street is the main drag in brookland, and there were a lot of signs, letters, numbers, and various other things we're probably supposed to be paying attention to. i like jumbling them all up together in my images. ;-)

Franciscan Monastery, Brookland DC Holga #2

this is the second holga image from my latest dc sketchcrawl outing, again taken in the franciscan monastery gardens in brookland, dc. i tried to showcase the architecture a bit more in this one, and i was immediately drawn to the door labeled "private". i find myself photographing doors and fences a lot with my holga work, and while part of the appeal is the aesthetics of these details, there is a psychological intrigue as well. i don't know what it is, but i always want to open doors that tell me i am not welcome there. ;-)

Franciscan Monastery, Brookland DC Holga

this is one of several holga images i made during the latest sketchcrawl on may 15 (#27, for those in the know) where we walked around the brookland neighborhood of dc. one of our stops included time in the franciscan monastery gardens, which are huge and gorgeous - definitely worth a visit whether you are religious or not, as it is a very peaceful and pretty place to chill out and enjoy being outdoors. the mosaic of mary in the center of this image was one of many pieces of art i found throughout the gardens, and you can also see the architecture to some degree in the photo.

it is official: i love brookland, and want to live there someday!

Zeek Magazine

I recently received a copy of the Spring 2010 issue of Zeek Magazine in the mail, where I am a featured photographer! I'm not sure if the magazine is out on the racks for individual purchase, or if you need a subscription, but the cover looks like this:

And the image that is featured is this one, from my Route 66 trip back in July of 2008, which was taken at the very start of the excursion in Chicago's Millennium Park:

overlooked holga image

i shot this image a while back during a session in washington dc, but overlooked it because it did not fit with the theme of the shoot i was going for at the time. often times, when i have one goal in mind, i only collect / process / print the images that allow me to accomplish that preset goal and skip over the rest. fortunately, i kept this frame in my holga folder and came across it today while searching for holga images for another purpose. so yay for new found old images!

everything old is new again

here are two new 16x20 mordançage prints that i made from old (previously 8x10) negatives of cherry blossoms. the finished product is always a one of a kind image, so it's cool to rework images at different scales and fun for me to see how many different looks i can achieve with the same image as a base.

washington dc holga

another holga image taken in washington dc... i think this was around the portrait gallery.

bethesda holgas

i recently photographed these images on the way back to my car after dropping off artwork at the recent fraser gallery photography exhibit in bethesda. i had not been using the holga as much lately in favor of mordançage work, but since i have a feature exhibit coming up next year, i want to try to get some more new material to work with and possibly display. therefore, i bring the holga with me everywhere and see if i happen upon anything interesting...