new orleans photo alliance members only exhibit
08 May 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: New Orleans Photo Alliance
NOPA is having a members only photo exhibit, and I decided to submit 5 photos for consideration. I spent 2 days going through my entire flickr photostream, and these are what I came up with:
This is a good example of the kinds of photos I like to take. It’s not focused or brightly lit, but would a clear photo of a stingray be more interesting? Chances are you already know what they look like.
For the most part I tried to pick more dynamic–as opposed to static–photos. Shots in motion that are unlikely to be repeated. This is one is static, but I’ve always really like the composition and the colors.
I like the sky and the sun on the water and that weird light leak.
I love this shot, I even had it made into postcards. It says so much about Louisiana to me, some good, some bad. I like how you can’t see the man’s head or anything of the kid handing the ticket except the hands, so you focus on the alligator.
I took this back in California, during my macro period.
further adventures in flipped lenses
30 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: 120 film, 620 cameras, flipped lens, Kodak Brownie Hawkeye
This is my second roll with a flipped lens, and I think it works better on close subjects. You get a spot of focus surrounded by blur when you’re close up, but with distant subjects it tends to be a uniform fuzziness.
this is my superbowl
15 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: instant film, Polaroids, Schoolhouse Antique Mall, SX-70, The Impossible Project
I took Friday off work to go to the semi-annual sale at the Schoolhouse Antique Mall in Washington. It’s the second week of April and October, and I haven’t missed one since I moved to Louisiana in March of 2010. Seems like there weren’t as many extra vendors this year, though. And a lot of the rooms in the schoolhouse were empty. When the economy sucks, antiques are one of those total non-essentials that are one of the first to fall by the wayside.
Anyway, I kept the damage minimal: some vintage postcards from Opelousas, a couple of silver-plated teaspoons for Mom (she didn’t feel well and couldn’t make it), and a Polaroid “The Button”. (Get a load of the balls on that seller: $300? I paid $18.) It’s the same camera as the Polaroid “rainbow” One Step, just with a different body. They were the last generation SX-70s, a bridge between the old folding SX-70s and the 600 series, the model that Polaroid more or less stuck with until their demise.
Yesterday I decided to poke into a few of the good antique stores in Lafayette. I thought it might be fun to have one of the rainbows as well; I could get one on eBay, but it’s more fun to find one in a store. (One good thing about these cameras is that the batteries were in the film pack, so corroded batteries in the camera is never a problem.) And whattaya know, I found one for $22 in the very first store I walked into.
I found an eBay seller that sells the flashbulb bars for $7 and bought one for each camera. I thought it would be fun to have them, even if I never use them (like the flash holder and bulbs for my Kodak Brownie Hawkeye).
I don’t know when I’ll actually use them. You can’t get new film for them anymore, of course. Unlike with the older bellows-style Land Cameras, there isn’t any Fuji film that’s compatible with it. You can either buy really expired film, or that Impossible Project stuff. It’s pricey–$23.95 for 8 exposures. I would happily pay it if the film were more stable, though. But it tends to fade or speckle or crystallize. The first year or so it seemed like they were trying to improve it, but all the stupid hipsters are willing to plunk down money for crappy film. So they’re like “Develop it in the dark between 72-75 degrees and store it upright in an airtight container!”, and they sell a bunch of accessories to try to keep the photos from looking like crap. So it’s not really in their best interest to make the film better. It’s a pity, I had really high hopes for IP when they launched.
my penpal of the week interview was posted yesterday
03 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Life, Photography Tags: Canton, Dirt Cheap, McComb, Mississippi, Penpal of the Week, road trip, The Dinner Bell
Read it and bask in my awesomeness.
Last weekend was the first of what I hope will be an annual road trip for my meetup group, to Mississippi. (It won’t always be in MS, though. The plan is for north Louisiana, the Galveston/Beaumont area of Texas, and possibly Arkansas.) We spent Saturday in Canton and Sunday in McComb. I don’t have any photos developed yet; I’m going to use the rest of the rolls at Laos New Year in Lanexang Village this weekend.
Canton is really beautiful. The downtown is arranged around a square containing the Madison County Courthouse, a very Classical white-columned building with a distinctive dome. Quite a few movies have been filmed in Canton, mostly because of the courthouse. It’s like the go-to town in Mississippi for whenever producers want a really southern old-timey looking courthouse. It was the courthouse in A Time to Kill–or, as I think of it: You can Be a Racist or a Vigilante, Take Your Pick.
The buildings in the streets around the square are really old (at least to my California frame of reference), a lot of them painted bright colors and with original details like stamped ceilings or little petal-shaped windows. Canton has a ginormous antiques festival twice a year, so there are a lot of year-round antique stores. I bought a pair of opera glasses at one, which should look nifty next to my absinthe spoons. BELL EPOQUE YO.
We also went to the cemetery that was the original cemetery of the town, and it’s next to the old Madison County Jail, which was being fixed up by the local historical society.
On the way to McComb, we stopped at a charming store called Dirt Cheap in Brookhaven. Hope goes there whenever she goes to The Dinner Bell (of which more later). It’s like a Dollar General, but not QUITE as clean or charming. However, they did have Kodak film and disposable cameras for $3. Which for some reason rang up as “health & beauty items”. I haven’t done any disposable distortion in a while, so I stocked up. (In the same section we also found dirt cheap condoms, next to dirt cheap pregnancy tests. Probably if you use the former, you find yourself in need of the latter.)
McComb is near the Louisiana border, on the Bogue Chitto River. It’s actually where my father was born, but his family moved to North Platte, Nebraska when he was very young and he and his siblings thought of themselves as midwesterners, not southerners. I’d never been to the town. We didn’t get any photos of the town, but we drove through a fair bit of it. There’s a lot of suburban sprawl around the edges–the town isn’t big, but it’s the only town of ANY size in Pike County (weird to be dealing with counties again, rather than parishes), so they have a lot of the businesses that serve the whole county. But looking at the old center of the town, I could imagine how it must have looked when my father was a child. It was pretty hilly, which I wasn’t expecting. I guess whenever I think of MS, I think of the delta, which is as low and flat as south Louisiana. It was nice, I miss hills.
We spent the morning trying to find the damn river (Hope’s GPS is easily confused), also stopping to photograph another cemetery we came across. But we mostly stopped in the town in the first place to eat lunch at The Dinner Bell. It’s a round table restaurant in a converted private house: you sit at a table topped with a giant lazy susan with a dozen other people, the servers bring out dish after dish of southern home cooking, and everyone helps themselves. Fried chicken, ham, potato salad, turnip greens, butter beans, sweet potatoes, macaroni cheese, and the best fried eggplant I’ve had IN MY LIFE. Hope sometimes drives all the way from Baton Rouge just to eat lunch there.
This trip made me realize how truly awful Louisiana drivers are. I drove hundreds of miles in MS, and not once did I see someone hanging out in the passing lane mile after mile, going half the posted speed limit. I see that literally every day in LA.
Naploeonville, LA: Lomo LC-A+, Fuji Velvia
20 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: Assumption Parish, Fuji Velvia, Lomo LC-A+, Lomographers of Acadiana, louisiana, Napoleonville, slide film
Pink Slim Dress: Napoleonville, LA
05 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: 35mm, Assumption Parish, Lomographers of Acadiana, louisiana, Meetup, Napoleonville, Pink Slim Dress
February’s meetup was actually yesterday. We met in Napoleonville, the seat of Assumption parish. It’s a cute little town of less than 700, and apparently so boring that teenagers can’t think of anything better to do on their weekends than wander around town beating stop signs with sticks.
This little Episcopal church was built in the 1850s, and Union soldiers stabled their horses in it during the Civil War.
There’s always a cemetery on the agenda.
The doors were tiny. They just barely cleared my head, and I’m only 5’4″.
We found this ornamental concrete place that was like someone on a giant meth bender with an unlimited supply of concrete made an acre of statues and fountains all at once.
This was where we were going to eat lunch, but it turned out to be closed on Sundays, so we found the local Dairy Queen rip-off.
The last weekend of this month is our first annual road trip, to Mississippi. I’m very excited!
Mardi Gras: Lomo LC-A+, Fuji Natura 1600
20 Feb 2012 1 Comment
in Life Tags: 35mm, Fuji Natura 1600, Krewe of Muses, Lomo LC-A+, Mardi Gras, new orleans
Thursday I only worked until noon, then I drove to New Orleans, checked into my hotel, and walked down St. Charles Street until I found a good spot. I had originally planned to be at St. Charles and Louisiana, but the fact that the streetcar route was closed for the parade put the kibosh on that. Which worked out to my advantage, because I learned that away from major intersections, the crowds are a lot thinner and the NOPD doesn’t bother to put up crowd barriers. You can walk right up the floats and Muses will drop the beads and other goodies right into your hands. As I was walking home, a very drunk, very gay man demanded to know what the FUCK I did to get all those beads. I started to explain, then just shrugged and said “I just kept shoving people out of my way” instead. This earned me a “YYYEEEEEAAAAAHHH!!!” and a high five.
Please do not ask me if I flashed. No one does that at the St. Charles street parades, which are family events that people bring their kids to. For fuck’s sake, there are high school marching bands in those parades. It’s not Bourbon Street, okay?
morgan city: holga 135BC
19 Jan 2012 1 Comment
in Photography Tags: 35mm, Holga 135BC, louisiana, Meetup, Morgan City
faubourg marigny: brownie hawkeye with a flipped lens
05 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
in Photography Tags: Faubourg Marigny, flipped lens, Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, louisiana, new orleans
I got these back from Dwayne’s Photos a couple of days before Christmas and kept forgetting to post them. I took the lens out of the camera and turned it around, a modification known as a “flipped lens”.
obligatory new year’s post
01 Jan 2012 1 Comment
in Life, Photography, Shopping Tags: Krewe of Muses, Mardi Gras, new orleans, Nook Tablet
I feel like 2011–my first complete year in Louisiana–was a pretty good year for me. I still feel positive about my decision to move down here, and the Lomography meetup group has been going well. We picked up another member–our first male member–last month. He’s been living and working in South Korea for the past few years, and he made a Shaun of the Dead reference like 10 minutes after we met, so I think we’re going to get along.
I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I got a Christmas bonus (a week’s wages–gross, not net) and told that I’m getting a raise. I bought myself a Nook Tablet today, as a post-holiday reward to myself. I’m still going to get most of my reading material from the library, but I can see buying new releases that have waiting lists, or obscure titles that can’t be obtained through interlibrary loan. Plus there’s magazines, music, games, movies, TV, web browsing.
Jamie and Greg went back to Los Angeles today, and Rian returned to Chicago on Tuesday. I have tomorrow off, then it’s back to the grind. But I have the next meetup–in Morgan City this time–next weekend, and Hope and I have discussed doing a Lomography road trip in March. I was thinking either north Louisiana, the Galveston/Beaumont area of Texas, or Mississippi. And by a weird coincidence, she mentioned a restaurant in McComb, MS. That’s the town that my father’s family was originally from, although he mostly grew up in North Platte, NE. So it’s probably going to be Mississippi this time, although I’d like to do more in the future.
One thing I’d like to do different in 2012 is that I’d like to do something for Mardi Gras. I didn’t last year, and I kind of felt like I wasted being in south Louisiana. I think I’ll probably go see the Krewe of Muses parade in New Orleans. That’s an all-female krewe that rolls through uptown the Thursday before Fat Tuesday. Since it’s all women, and not in the French Quarter, and not on Mardi Gras the actual day, there’s a minimum of the obnoxious shenanigans I associate with Mardi Gras in New Orleans going on: namely, drunk college girls flashing their tits and drunker frat rats trying to date rape anything with boobs.
