A Few Friends and a Time-Traveling Moose

So that moose was hiding in a mysterious undeveloped roll film I found the other day, from my trip to Alaska in 2006, yeesh.

Walk Walk Snap

I recently took a couple walks with my film cameras, a pentaxk1000 I've had for prolly a decade, and a canonet ql17 g3 that I recently got off ebay. The canonet is known as the poor man's Leica, it's the first rangefinder I've ever had, I haven't shot enough with it to really determine how I feel about it, only a couple of the photos below were taken with it.

On these walks I just gave myself the focus "whatever is visually interesting/appealling", nothing complicated, and then walked around downtown for hours. These images weren't scanned in, I don't have a film scanner at the moment. I used a little portable light table I have, and my 20d to get them on the computer, taking a photo of the frames, then inverting them, so the quality of the "scans" isn't great, but it's functional for sharing on the internet.

I developed the negatives myself, which was something I hadn't done in years. It is a bit of a pain to work with chemicals and definately no where near as efficient as the streamlined digital process of today. But the suspense of having to wait to see the actual images, the care necessary in order to properly use the 36 frames (which you paid for), and the finality of your decision when you snap the shutter, are useful limits which would probably help any digital photographer to remember exactly what they are doing as opposed to snapping the shutter and checking the back screen until you get it right. So, here are some photos

A Few of Friends

Below are some photos from a full moon camping shindig hosted by my friend Dustin out at the Klickitat Canyon Winery in the Columbia river Gorge, from early October.

Burnside

I stopped by Burnside Skatepark yesterday. I had never been there before. The place was actually built "guerilla-style", I think 18 years ago or something along those lines. By "guerilla-style" I mean these skaters just took this empty trashed lot under the burnside bridge, where a lot of junkies and prostitutes would hang out, and with what concrete they had, started forming ramps and whatnot, now it's one of the most challenging skateparks around. Built by skaters, D-I-Y, with a spirit of lawlessness. Their project eventually gained approval by the neighboring businesses apparently. It makes the skatepark back in Louisville look like Chuck-e-Cheese. It was wierd because I had visited this place via video games in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater when I was younger and it was actually pretty similar.

Back from Burning Man

My neighbor had just got back from Burning Man. He plays in a group called March Fourth Marching Band. I haven't seen them yet. They drove the fire truck and apparently a school bus too, to get down there. I think they said there were around 15 people at their camp. The name of their camp was The Dump. They also called it The Shark Camp, because they had shark costumes and fake blood and whatnot. They strapped an upright piano to the back of the fire truck, it was the one we had kept in the basement here that they had taken to BM the previous year. Everything was covered in desert dust. The piano is looking a pretty fatigued, I might see about finding a different one. People are giving away pianos for free on craigslist all the time out here.






Time to fire up the old blog.
Some photos from the other day.