Portland

I went to Portland a while back, and I shot this roll of film right after it rained. I realized later that I had gone to a city and didn't photograph a single person. Weird, huh?

Fontification!

I know it has been a while, so I thought I'd better come up with something neat to end the dry spell. I have been pretty fascinated by typography these days, and I have been sketching a lot of letters just to see what I can come up with from my head. That gave me the idea to see what I could find in my house that would make up an alphabet. Some of them are really obvious, and some are kind of a stretch of the imagination, but it was a fun and challenging little project. Not a bad way to waste a Sunday afternoon, I must admit.

Help!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how come I have to title them? Titles suck. They are hard to come up with and if you choose the wrong one your art becomes totally and irredeemably lame. Seriously. And the worst part about titles is that I am horrible at coming up with them. The only thing I have ever titled well is my grocery list. Guess what the title is. "Groceries," that's it. My lack of imagination in this area has usually resulted in me just choosing one title for a whole group of images/sculptures, and it is usually only one word. This has become a pretty reliable way of getting over this hurdle. That is, until tonight. I put all these photos up and looked at them and looked at them again, and I was at a total loss. It was going to be "Dog Days of May," but then I added cows. How the hell do cows fit in? And then it was going to be something clever about animals but then I added hands. Hands? Animals don't have hands! So this is where you come in. Please title this post for me. Please...

April Flowers

Flowers, 'nuff said. Oh, except that the third picture is of maple leaves, so I guess it doesn't count. I'm gonna leave it in because I think it it pretty though. Also, I want you to know how hard it was to stop myself from saying "I'm gonna LEAF it in. (get it?)"

Plants

It's spring, from Oregon to Texas, and plants everywhere are kicking it up a notch. This will be the first of several plant-themed posts, so get ready fo vegetation overload!

It's just like cheating!

So, I assume that everyone has used a polaroid camera before. I used my first one when I was twelve; we had a Japanese exchange student who owned a camera and she let us try it out. (The pictures from that day are hysterical, I still have them and if you are lucky, I may show them to you). Polaroid photos had a pretty distinctive look that involved weird colours and slight vignetting on the corners. And, if you were bold, you could draw on them while they developed and get even cooler results. The whole idea of Polaroids was centered around fun instant gratification.
Fast forward to now, when Polaroid cameras can be found in the free box at any yard sale and Polaroid film is practically extinct. Hardcore fans have stored boxes of film in their freezers and sell it on E-bay for a fortune. One Polaroid film factory has been restarted by a new company and two new types of instant film are available to the public at twenty dollars for eight sheets of film. Basically, if one really wants to use a Polaroid camera, one can. Or, you can just take a digital image and drop it into a downloaded program. Wham! Polaroids!
So, this is what I did. And I have to admit, it is kind of addictive. In my head, I refer to it as "roiding," which might be part of why I like it so much. Also, I am a total sucker for photo gimmicks, like filed out negative carriers and over-saturated colour photos. I really tried to resist this, especially because of the plethora of Facebook profile pictures that have been "roided." But seriously! Look at those cows! Don't they look so much more meaningful now?

Abandoned Factories

These photographs were taken with a Minolta SLR and a wide-angle lens. So it is much fancier than the other cameras I have been showing pictures from. It takes nice pictures, I will give it that. This was the first camera I used in photography class and I liked it then. However, I stopped using it for about four years, and my brother sold the lens that was on it and bought a wide-angle to replace it. Which is fun, don't get me wrong. But the fun wears off after the twentieth shot or so, and you start to run out of ideas for cool shots. Wide-angle can be really interesting, but it can also start to feel like a gimmick. (Kinda like filed-out negative carriers, which I totally love and have to consciously avoid doing too often). That said, I really like these pics, although I had to choose only a few to avoid redundancy. Oh well, enjoy! These were taken in White City, Oregon, and Central Point, Oregon.

Winter Blues

So, these are from the same little blue plastic camera that I took the last set of pictures with. It was sold as a sort of disposable but re-fillable supercheap toy, but it has lasted me for years. I LOVE this camera. It feels like cheating a little, because for some reason it takes pretty good pictures. And I don't have to do anything! No light metering, no focusing, no settings. Just click, and it's done. Granted, it doesn't do well at night, or in weird lighting situations, but at midday, outside, it is totally reliable. Usually I use expired film in it, but this time I decided to try my "nice" film, Arista 100. I know, I know, that is not super awesome film either, but it is a heck of a lot nicer than expired colour film that costs 25 cents a roll. And I am very happy about the results, except that somewhere along the line I let my camera get very dirty and didn't catch that before I shot this roll of film. So, ignore all the UFO's and just enjoy the bleakness of the Southern Oregon winter, all right?

Why I Use Disposable Cameras

Again, these are from college, I am sorting through the archives to find stuff I like while I work on printing new stuff for you all to look at. I shot these with a camera that costs $1.50 and expired color film that cost $0.50. The combination of expired cheap film and plastic lens resulted in these bizarrely colored images. I also printed these, and the color processor I was using at the time (with the always optimistic name HOPE) was having a little trouble that week. For some reason, stuff (I really have no idea what) kept getting stuck on the rollers and making these very strange white marks on the images. But I really really like these pictures. I think that the weird marks and the colors complement each other. Basically, I made a few mistakes, used really inferior materials, and totally lucked out. I think they are beautiful, and I hope you do too.

Drive-By Shooting

These images are from a project I did while I was in College. It started as an attempt to capture the awkwardness between people sitting at a bus-stop, but I quickly found out that people don't want to be photographed by complete strangers while they are waiting for a bus. It is a long story, and maybe I will tell it someday, but for now let's just say it didn't work out like I had thought it would. I ended up having my mom drive me around so that I could take pictures out of a car, safely out of the reach of angry bus-stop denizens. These are some of the results, and if you see yourself in these pictures, well you finally know what that was all about. Sorry.