Konica half frame cameras...

Konica eye half frame camera. (mine's the original 1, though it's been abused and is a bit dysfunctional) I've run exactly two rolls of film through it. It's amazing. And I've never uploaded and entire roll of film before but here it is. There's a poetry to the pairings of images that is purely coincidental. It could be extrapolated to the manner in which I acquired this camera, it was given to me at a garage sale where the owner couldn't be bothered to carry it back inside at the end of the day.

Film

Film cameras.

It's a romantic notion. And there's no denying that the photographs that come out of a film camera have a feeling to them that can't be simulated, no mater what Instagram suggests.

Does that mean they are better? More soulful? Maybe.

There's no denying that a digital camera takes a "better" picture. At least by many standards that would be true. It wasn't always that way. Early digital had resolution and noise issues, and medium format cameras are magic, but it took a long time for people to accept that a digital camera could produce a good photograph.

The truth is, film is old, temperamental, difficult to work with, and in reality, produces inferior images.

But there's something magical about it.

I think I'll be shooting more film.

Home, part 8.

Robert Adams suggests, "The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace." But more so it was William Eggleston that identified the beautiful in the ordinary. And Jeff Wall has an exacting ability to make you look at very ordinary things for a long time until you find narratives, histories, treasures in what appears a very banal image. This is home, in all of it's glory. Pure. I could live there. I have lived there. I don't want to live there. But there it is. Amazingly, beautifully honest. 

Objects in the hills.

Subject matter and metaphors. I've long been distracted by landscapes. The monsters we plant in them are intriguing. Bridges to traverse the landscapes. Bins to hold the products of the landscapes, though I'm not sure how one would consume the other save for the presence of slowly deteriorating metal bins nestled into a hillside. 

Road trip

And then I was in Portland. And then I left. I took the long way home, heading more directly east than north, finding winding roads and distractions not related to an Interstate Highway. I flexed the muscles of my SVT Cobra Mustang, getting a better understanding of what it could do on a country road. I eventually ended up on a bazillion lanes of highway towards the end of the trip, mostly stuck in traffic despite the extra real estate afforded to automobiles, but before getting stuck there I got three photos. I think that might be a record for a day. And I'm understanding more a camera like this one. And I should pull over more often.

The Ridge

Bike rides at dusk with a camera and an iPod full of podcasts. My 35mm prime lives almost permanently on my camera and has gone a long way towards curing me of my desires to own a Leica M9 one day.

It's sad to note that the Ridge will be demolished within the year. Too many old movie theaters are disappearing. There's nothing to be done about this one, it's not an attendance problem, it's the unquenchable desire for more and more condos this city has. Real estate speculators will be the end of this theater. Too bad.