First day of the year.

 Another year over, a new one just begun....

So says Mr Lennon with a little help from Miss Ono.

It was dark and grey this first day of the year, and foggy. Vancouver gets misty but not foggy. Not often anyway. I grabbed my camera before the birds were there and as I opened the deck to catch morning mist a murder flew by. It was quite ominous. No time to think, just take photographs.

Very dark and brooding but I like them.

A Bar Named Sue

I took this photograph years ago. I used a big clunky DSLR and at the time it felt like I was trying to not so secretly place a monster white elephant on my lap without anyone noticing. I wonder if a more inconspicuous camera might afford more photographs like this. There are a few I covet, rangefinder type cameras with stealth shutters and smaller lenses. There was music playing in the bar when this photograph was taken, it was loud enough to mask the loud clunking of a mirror shifting up and down inside the body of a camera. That made it easier to hide the elephant for sure. If I could only shrink the elephant down to the size of a charming pig I might get more photos like this. Maybe it's time to adopt a pig.

Bicycle Parts

 I was playing around with work lights as studio lights. It seemed to work out alright.

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.