I finally had time to scan in the first roll of film I shot with my Holga camera. I love how the images turned out! The colors, blurry edges, and grain is so good, and no photoshop was used. Unfortunately, I didn’t tape the back of my camera onto the rest of the body, and a major light leak ruined most of the photos.

When I was scanning in the negatives, I realized just how much detail medium-format film can capture. My digital photography instructor, Coriana Close, always complained about the limitations of using even a high-end digital slr camera in comparison to 35mm (or better yet, medium-format). I didn’t understand until I zoomed in forever on one of these photos and the image still didn’t pixelate. It’s like the time that I started shooting in RAW with my digital camera and found out that the reason people sing its praises is because it’s wonderful.

One of my favorite bloggers, Fraeulein Zucker, uses 35mm film and posts new photos every day. She was an inspiration to me today when I went on a hunt to find cheap film (CVS carries a store-brand package of four rolls for $8). I want to start making more photos the old-fashioned way. It’s nice.

I am convinced that everything you need to make pop art can be found at the dollar store.

Good people, all.

Good food can be found at Bobo’s Restaurant.

Pentax ME Super, cross-processed slide film
Naco, Mexico
This is the one good photo out of a whole roll of film—I think I need to over-expose my photos next time.

I started making collages out of my old issues of Time. Each collage is made from one issue, on 8×10″ Arches rag paper, in 3 hours or less. Each title is a quote from that issue. Feeling the immediacy of each composition is important—news is always coming, always in your face, and always changing. In spite of the rushing and the pushing, making the collages has allowed me to step away from and reflect on what is current in our culture, looking at what our ephemera says about us.

See also:
Time Collages set on Flickr.

See also:
Holga Blog: Holga at the Movies

The final project for my typography class is to make three-dimensional experimental type that interacts with space. I’m playing around with ice letterforms. I like how time is such a big player in the shape and existence of the letters. Time’s role isn’t very apparent with the written word. While it’s true that context does change over time, and physical decay occurs, imagine if everything ever written disappeared 15 minutes after its composition.

There’s a Part B to this exercise: application (isn’t that always the case with design?). We need to make a poster that advertises an event, using our photographic documentation of our experiments. For me, possible events include a lecture on climate change, the Harbin Ice Lantern Festival, or a Vanilla Ice concert. Other suggestions are welcomed.

If you would like to make letter-shaped things (crayons, cakes, candles, popsicles…), here is where I got my mold.

I’ve been so interested in cameras lately.