i spent the afternoon shooting film, finshing off an older roll of Kodak Portra 400, and shooting all the way through a second new roll. i have a bunch of black and white film i should get through, too. i might use that for portraits of a friend/lover. i find black and white doesn’t suit me for everyday shooting, except once in a while. and you can’t swap out film once it’s in the camera. i mean, not reasonably, i don’t think.
i think i’ll take this batch of film to B&H for developing. most places don’t develop the Professional grade film any more.
i think i got some really good stuff today. some shots over on the BQE could come out really great, if they look like i think they did. it reminded me of a comment made by the photographer who caught the famous portrait of Che Guevara. i can’t think of that photog’s name offhand, but after he took the shot (and before he saw it) he told friends how excited he was about seeing that shot, because he just knew it was awesome. at the time i remember wondering how he could know. by no means am i comparing anything i got today to that famous portrait, but i just connected with his his sense of anticipation that bordered on satisfaction, and i imagine he had to have had misgivings about his confidence in the quality of that photo before actually seeing it.
sometimes i feel like a photographer is a ghost. someone whose presence escapes unnoticed, or who is barely remembered later, but who sees unnoticed things and has access to the vagaries of reality’s machinations.
other times i feel like it’s just luck, and blunt force that eventually arrives at clarity. this version of the photographer is a thief,stealing reality from its occupants and objectifying it. it’s appropriate that this photographer is said to “capture” photographs, since the elements within the frame can be described as caged, or imprisoned.
christ, i htink i sound like susan fucking sontag, if i remember her photography essay with even a glimmer of clarity.
i am thinking of upping the ante on my camera closet by adding another sony dslr. the top of the line sony alphas fit all my minolta and sony lenses, but they lack the fold-out lcd screen i so depend upon in the sony alpha 550. i, of course, had no such screen today, with the film SLR, and i work with it just fine, so maybe i shouldn’t care. still, it’s a killer feature that i’ve used to get pictures of things that people throw on top of payphones.
…..
much of the last week has amounted to an object lesson in how to waste time. i unwittingly re-scanned about 300 photos i bought a year ago from an estate sale on Ebay. i scanned the photos with the ScanSnap, which is an ADF (document feed) scanner into which i fed the pictures and they were scanned and saved without me actually looking at them. i looked at all of them eventually, and a few of them were standouts, but a year later i evidently had little memory of the collection as a whole, because I scanned away on the flatbed, thinking to myself that it was good that i was finally scanning these images once and for all. toward the end of the scanning, though, i started noticing some very familiar images, though i could not find them anywhere else. they would, of course, have been obliterated from the web site with November’s blowout, but the blowout would not have affected offline scans. in the end i found the scans from last year, found that i had just re-scanned all 300+ of them, and it was very very annoying.
the other complete waste of time from this week involved trying to find a set of pictures that i know i took, but which i hadn’t catalogued or indexed yet. i finally resorted to copying them down from the camera again, which is time-consuming because i could not remember which camera i used for these pictures, so i had to shuffle through 3 cameras before finding what i was looking for. only when i commenced copying them down did i notice that they were already there, and tha ti was pretty well just staring right at them for the previous 2 hours. oh, that was annoying.
just thought i’d share.
in corporate wasting time is, of course, part of the culture. it’s fun! not so much when it’s all on me. i can’t fire myself, although in november and December i contemplated getting a job, as i felt i had built my little business up to a point where i could not safely maintain it on my own. ironically, getting a job would be the same as getting fired, or firing myself.
…..
something funny happened as i dicked around with the new keychain camera. i was on s crowded subway, feeling like james bond, pointing the camera lens right at the faces of strangers unawares, savoring the anonymous collection of unpretentiousnesses, when i discovered that i was actually recording the movements of an acquaintance named Jimmy, someone I talk to 2 or 3 times a year. sitting next to Jimmy was Dave, who is a true friend, and sitting next to Dave was his friend and co-worker, whose name I forget. Dave and Jimmy know each other not at all, but there they were, sitting on a crowded subway, spoiling my ersatz attempt at surveillance and reality video grabbage buy rising up as recognizable faces and known quantities. it was funny to me, trying to be all stealthy and anonymous, to discover that i seemed to know half the people on the subway car.