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.
:)