slide-a-palooza

I got a package in the mail Saturday from one of my snail mail pals. It was pretty large and felt like a magazine; it actually turned out to contain over 100 old Kodak slides! She’s a public/found artist and is always picking up goofy stuff from thrift stores and garage sales.

Most of them appear to have been shot in the San Diego area in the early ’80s-early ’90s, judging from notes that were written on the frames and the archival sleeves they were stored in.

When I showed them to my brother, he said “I bet you see a murder being committed!” (I think we watched too many Brian De Palma movies as children.) It took me about an hour and a half to sort through them all; no murders, but when I picked up the pile one slide fell out at random, and I held it up to the light:

I haven’t been 23 in a while, but I can still recognize a marijuana plant.

Hilarity aside, whoever took these photos was actually a really good photographer. They took a lot of macros, photos of the ocean, food photographs that could be in a magazine.

They took a lot of photos of this cat; this one is my favorite. (There’s also a lot of photos of a dog.)

It’s a cherry in an ice cube. I don’t know, I like it.

It is HARD to take close-ups of insects, they tend not to stay still.

I eventually sorted them all into the following categories: animals, mountains/hills, interiors/still lifes, sunsets, light blurs (you know, like when you take a photo from a moving car at night), trees, plants (including about a dozen pot plants and one slide of a huge, hairy bud), food, landscapes w/ buildings, and beaches/ocean (which composed about 1/3 of the slides).

I’d like to make something like this with them, although probably on a smaller scale. Or maybe I could do like a lampshade, somehow? That would look cool, too. I probably have enough slides for both ideas, actually.

I lined a few up along my windowsill, just to get an idea of what they look like. (There’s a strip of metal behind them, they’ll look better without that.) I have a northeast-facing window and I only get a few fleeting moments of direct sunlight early in the morning, so I don’t think fading would be much of a problem. I’d like to eventually scan them all, so the images themselves won’t be destroyed even if they do fade (or I inadvertently destroy them playing Martha Stewart).

Like me on Facebook!

Blackbird Fly: Our Lady of Lavang & Holt Cemetery

The film camera I took on my most recent NOLA outing was the Blackbird Fly, a plastic 35mm TLR  rangefinder made by Superheadz (they also made my Golden Half). I haven’t used it in a while and I was considering selling it, but thought I should use it one more time before I made up my mind. I remembered it as difficult to use, but I think that’s because when I last used it I didn’t yet have much experience with rangefinders. Since then I’ve used several (and I collect Arguses, which are all rangefinders); my Yashica MG1 is my go-to camera for B&W, and even my Smena 8M is a rangefinder.

The only drawbacks to the Blackbird Fly is that a) it’s difficult to take horizontal photos, instead of using the viewfinder you have to compose your photo through a cut-out in the viewfinder hood, and that’s never a 100% accurate way to frame; and b) you have to really concentrate on getting your subjects level. I remember the first roll I shot looked like I had done it in a rowboat. And unless it’s really overcast or you’re shooting indoors, you need to stick to low-speed film (this is Kodak Ektar 100), because there are only 2 aperture settings to the camera–sunny and cloudy/flash–and both of them are fairly wide, I think F11 and F8. With higher speed film, 400 or even 200, in a camera with a normal range of aperture settings, I usually stop it all the way down to F16 when it’s a sunny day.

Anyway, I think I’ll keep it for now. It’s a little unusual to find a TLR that’s also a rangefinder, and the camera itself is fun to use and even rather cute. And like most rangefinders (except my Yashica, which has an in-viewfinder focus aid that allows you to be really accurate), the fact that you’re never 100% right about the distance from your subjects results in an appealingly soft focus.

Like me on Facebook!

Holt Cemetery, New Orleans

My quest to photograph every cemetery in NOLA continues. Holt is the city’s cemetery for indigent people; as such it’s the only one to still practice in-ground burial, and many of the markers are hand-made by family members. It’s out on City Park Avenue, which I sometimes refer to as “the nexus of the universe”, because there are over a half dozen large cemeteries within a few square miles–I’ve photographed Greenwood and Cypress Grove already. I almost didn’t find this one, it’s behind the campus of Delgado Community College. The third time I drove past, I noticed a little side road leading onto the campus called “Buddy Bolden Road”, and I remembered that he’s buried in Holt, so I turned onto it and it led me right to the cemetery.

Weird thing abut Bolden, I keep stumbling across him. I read Coming Through Slaughter a couple of months ago, which is a fictionalized version of his life. (EJ Bellocq is also a character in it, and just before I read it I visited the cemetery he’s buried in and saw his mausoleum.) Not long after, we had the meetup in Jackson, which I planned before I read the book. Jackson is where the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System is, where Bolden spent years (he was schizophrenic). And then I found out that a relative of mine–by marriage only–was also incarcerated there (although after Bolden had died there), after he tried to kill his wife, my great-grandmother’s sister. I’d always known about that, but not where he was sent.

Holt is a far cry from most NOLA cemeteries, with their grand mausoleums and towering marble monuments. The plots are inches from each other; the grass is shaggy and dotted with clover like an improbable May snowdrift. Graveyards almost never feel sad to me, merely peaceful, but this one has a melancholy that’s almost enjoyable–like when you press on a bruise. It hurts, but there’s something compelling about it, too. I don’t know, maybe it’s only because it’s the first cemetery I’ve been to since my grandmother died, but the people buried here seem more real to me than the occupants of those fancy above-ground tombs. People loved them enough to build a monument with their bare hands and whatever tools and material they could afford.

PICT1074, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1105, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1075, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1095, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1092, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1102, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1098, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1107, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Like me on Facebook!

Our Lady of Lavang, New Orleans

Our Lady of Lavang is a Catholic church in Gentilly (the most racially diverse neighborhood in NOLA) with a 100% Vietnamese congregation. The mass is conducted in Vietnamese, and the shrine is an interesting mix of traditional Vietnamese architecture and Catholic iconography. Our Lady of Lavang was a Marian apparition that occurred in Vietnam in the 19th century, at a time when Catholics in that country were being persecuted. The Vatican has never authenticated it, but JP2 allowed as it was “important”. To keeping the coffers full among the Vietnamese diaspora, no doubt. HEY-O.

PICT1048, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1069, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1073, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1057, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1045, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1052, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1062, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1056, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Like me on Facebook!

Lomographers of Acadiana: Fort Jackson

April’s meetup had to be re-scheduled because of Granny’s funeral, so it was last Saturday. I chose Fort Jackson in Plaquemines Parish, a decommissioned masonry fort from the 1820s. There are a lot of those south of New Orleans, but most of them are closed right now because of Hurricane Isaac. I didn’t find anything online that said Fort Jackson was closed, and in fact there was a Civil War re-enactment there just a couple of weeks ago, so that must mean it’s open, right?

PICT0996, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

*bangs head repeatedly on nearest hard horizontal surface*

FUCKING LOUISIANA, I SWEAR. Of the many, many things that are annoying about this state, top of my list right now is that our parks and historic sites are constantly getting shut down due to hurricanes. And since fixing them up isn’t a budget priority, they stay shut for months or sometimes even years–and then by the time they get them open again, oh hey look out, here comes ANOTHER FUCKING HURRICANE. Katrina shut all the forts down for so long that they were only open for about 18 months before Isaac came along and shut them all down again.

What’s frustrating is there were still lots of people there; even just the outside is pretty interesting, and it’s right on the river. If they opened it and charged a small fee, they would probably have enough money to fix it up by the end of the summer. Maybe I’ll write a letter to whoever is in charge of parks and rec for the state. I’m not going to bother with Jindal, because he’s a Rethug douchebag who doesn’t give a shit about this state outside of how he can use it as a springboard to higher office. Good luck with that, brah.

However, driving through Plaquemines Parish gave me an idea for another shoot. I kept seeing signs for a town called Pointe a la Hache, which I thought sounded interesting, so I Googled it when I got home. It’s the parish seat, but it’s very near where Katrina made landfall, so it got pretty wrecked and only about 200 residents have returned since the storm. So it’s got kind of a ghost town vibe, and there are a lot of ruined buildings. The courthouse was damaged by arson over a decade ago and has been left as is, there’s been a “temporary” courthouse in nearby Belle Chasse since. The parish council has tried 3 times to move the seat to Belle Chasse, but it always gets rejected. Louisianans: we love to pay lip service about how much we cherish our history, but we don’t want to actually spend any money on preserving it. *sigh*

PICT1003, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1011, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1008, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1010, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1002, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT0999, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1020, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT1023, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Granny, Mother’s Day 2010, taken with the Blackbird Fly

Granny, Mother’s Day: Blackbird Fly, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

My maternal grandmother died last week. She was 93 and my sole remaining grandparent. She hadn’t been well in a few months; she had oral surgery last summer to remove the few teeth she still had because they were becoming impacted, and she never quite recovered from that. She still had good days, but all her little ongoing health problems seemed to get worse, and mentally she started slipping. She had a heart attack last month, and although it wasn’t major, her doctor said she had to go into a nursing home and undergo physical therapy before she could go back to her apartment in assisted living. She was miserable there–it was a perfectly nice place, but she hated what it represented–and although we tried to make her believe it wasn’t permanent (we kept her apartment at Eastridge for her), we think she just lost the will to live. She developed congestive heart failure and was re-admitted to the ER on Monday evening; she died peacefully in her sleep on Thursday morning while my mother and aunt were talking to each other in her room. It was so quiet that at first they didn’t even realize she was gone–she was DNR, so she wasn’t hooked up to a crash cart alarm or anything.

My grandmother was Catholic and she wanted the whole nine yards when she died: vigil, rosary, mass of Christian burial, and internment in the vault with my grandfather (who died in 2006 at the age of 98, after 68 years (!) of marriage). I’m an atheist, but I had no conflict about doing any of these things, even saying the rosary, which yes, I know how to do. (And I collect rosaries, so I had plenty to choose from.) It’s not about me and what I do or don’t believe, it’s about respect for my grandmother’s beliefs and wishes. Not even an argument.

It took up pretty much the whole weekend, and of course it was rife with bizarre family drama–although nothing like my grandfather’s funeral, which included, among other events, a cousin’s husband who wandered into the wrong funeral and kissed the wrong body. Let’s see, my mother asked her cousin’s ex-husband to say the rosary, and the cousin tried to murder him with her eyes during it. Oh, and during the rosary he said the first 3 Hail Marys were to stop “the sin of abortion, especially partial-birth abortion” (which is not a thing that actually exists). Not only is it tacky in the extreme to drag your politics into a funeral rosary, MY GRANDMOTHER WAS PRO-CHOICE. The same ex-cousin was also a pallbearer, and in the limo he used the phrase “colored boys”, which my aunt’s fiancé said was like “laying a giant turd” in front of everyone else present. So I pretty much never want to see him again, but my mother loves him for some incomprehensible reason. (Also she doesn’t like the cousin he was married to, and it drives her crazy that she’s still friends with him.)

Let’s see, what else… the priest saying the mass was Filipino and frankly had an accent that you could have hacked with a machete; my aunt, sister, and myself also nearly got a fatal case of giggles whenever he said “Jesus Cwist”. And of course there was the presence of my mother’s older sister and her husband, who no one can stand. No one in my immediate family has spoken to them since my grandfather’s funeral. Mom, Aunt Lori and I immediately started joking that Granny didn’t like her enough to wait for her to get there before she died, or she just didn’t remember that she had another daughter (she was supposed to get there on Saturday; she hadn’t visited in over 3 years, even though she just lives in Florida), because we are terrible people.

Mom took my sister and brother-in-law and my aunt and her fiancé to the airport on Tuesday afternoon, and just when I thought all the family drama was over (not there was any from any of those particular family members), one of my cousins’ girlfriends left a comment on my oldest brother’s Facebook, berating him for not coming, saying he didn’t “have enough respect” to “share her last day with us”. HOLD THE FUCKING PHONE. My brother lives in Chicago and has only worked a few weeks in the past year and a half–he’s a legal proof-reader/editor and the job market SUCKS out there right now. More importantly, the house he shares with his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s parents just suffered catastrophic damage when the Des Plaines River flooded. He felt like they needed him more, and everyone completely understood. Pam (the cousin’s girlfriend), is a complete fucking moron. No, I mean seriously–if her IQ cracks 90, I’ll eat a dictionary. She has NO situational awareness or tact and is completely blind to social cues. I replied to her comment that I know she isn’t “the shiniest coin in the fountain”, but I thought even she could understand why Rian didn’t come to Granny’s funeral. Then all of Rian’s friends started landing on her with both feet, she and my cousin unfriended everyone, and I guess we’ll never see either one of them ever again. Big fat bummer.

So now we’re trying to get back to normal, and of course that’s when you really start to deal with loss, once all the funeral/family obligations are finished. I feel okay. I’m sad and I miss her–I had an especially close relationship to both of my mother’s parents–but she had been telling my mother that she was “tired” and she was “ready”, and I take comfort in that. I’m grateful more than ever that I moved here when I did, I saw more of her in the past 3 years than I had in the previous 20. My only regret is that I didn’t move here sooner, so I could have spent time with my grandfather as well. But I just wasn’t ready to leave California then, although I had started to accept that I probably would one day.

I’m a little worried about my mother, so much of her life since she moved back to Louisiana has revolved around her parents. She saw on the cable guide last night that Dancing With The Stars (Granny’s favorite show) was coming on, started to say that she had to call her mother to remind her, and got very quiet for a while. I’m hoping she will now get the knee replacement surgery she’s needed for a few years, she always said she couldn’t because it would lay her up for too long. I want her and I to do more while she’s able, but her knees always hurt.

Here is my grandmother’s obituary, which my aunt, mother, and I wrote together. And we picked out the photos for the video tribute together as well–some of them were photos I own, and a couple of them are photos I took: this one, and the photo of her with her 90th birthday cake.

Camera stash!

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, get all of my vintage cameras together and take some photos. (I took 3 photos from 3 positions: standing, sitting, kneeling.) I don’t keep them all in one place–I group all the rangefinders together in one place, my Kodaks in another, my Polaroids in another, some that are for sale I keep in the closet, and miscellaneous ones are on the top shelf of my desk–so it’s hard to get a sense of how many I actually have. This isn’t even all the vintage cameras I’ve EVER owned, since I started my Etsy shop last year, I’ve sold a few. A lot of these are for sale, too–in fact, most of them would be for sale at the right price. Although there are a few I wouldn’t sell at ANY price: my Arguses, my Land Camera, the WWI-era Zeiss-Ikon that Phil bought in Germany when he was in the Army. He gave it to me a few years ago.

PICT0988, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT0987, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

PICT0990, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

A lot of people do film stash photos, but I don’t have tons of film on hand at any given time. Frankly I think it’s dumb to hoard more film than you can shoot in, say, a year. Refrigerated or no, unexposed film is a slowly degrading medium. I’m currently stockpiling about 20 rolls of Fuji Neopan 400, which I recently learned is being discontinued, but I won’t try to amass more than that. I’ll just have to switch to Ilford when it runs out. Sigh. Although at the moment I do have quite a bit of Fuji color 35mm, since my friend Trish sold me her stash!

Like me on Facebook!

Pink Slim Dress: LeBeau Plantation, Arabi, LA

(The Pink Slim Dress is the SuperHeadz knock-off of the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim; it has the camera’s exact body and 22mm lens, but not its annoying habit of an extremely easily broken film advance. It comes in a variety of colors.)

I take my color 35mm to… Walgreen’s. I know, I know. Their ignorance of photography actually works to the Lomographer’s advantage, because they don’t try to “correct” screwy film. They just develop it and slap it on a CD. But lately I’ve been having trouble with them. One roll came back with the colors all muddy, which almost certainly means they were using old chemicals. And 2 of them had weird spots, like water spots, all over the prints. They tried to tell me the film was damaged. 2 rolls seems doubtful, but they were from the same package, so… not impossible?

I decided the problem wasn’t so much with “Walgreen’s” as it was with “the Abbeville Walgreen’s”. This isn’t a very big town, and there isn’t a deep talent pool to draw from, which is probably why our local Chili’s can’t get a simple hamburger right. (Seriously, every 6 months there’s an “under new management” banner out front, every time my parents try it out, and every time they come home and are like “Yeah, no, it’s still terrible”.) I mean, the woman whose name tag says she is the “photography dept manager” once told me they couldn’t cross-process my slide film (which I had had done there like, 20 times at that point) because their machines couldn’t handle E-6 “size” film, only C-41. I patiently explained to her that E-6 and C-41 aren’t sizes, they’re chemical processes. The size of both films is 35mm.

So I took this roll (and the roll I shot in the Smena 8M) to the Walgreen’s in Lafayette. And even though this roll was from the same batch of film as the 2 that had spots on them, it’s spotless. So I think I’m going to take it there from now on.

487650-R1-24-1, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487650-R1-18-7, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487650-R1-19-6, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487650-R1-15-10, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487650-R1-13-12, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Like me on Facebook!

First roll from the Smena 8M: slightly expired Fuji Superia 400

Saturday was my Lomographers meetup, in Jackson. It was kind of blah, the town looked more interesting on paper. Like, every other building was on the National Historic Register, even if it was built yesterday. And we couldn’t even find the abandoned building that (allegedly) used to be part of the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System. I think it’s on the grounds and whoever took the photo that I saw just didn’t want to admit they were visiting someone there.

But it’s still fun to get out of the house and see other people and take photos. Lunch was good, too–we went to a BBQ place and I had a bacon blue cheese hamburger. And afterward we stopped off at the Port Hudson National Cemetery, which is on the way back to Baton Rouge. It’s kind of humbling, all those thousands of identical tiny white headstones. But next month (or rather, later this month) I’m going to have it at Fort Jackson, a decommissioned early 19th century masonry fort in Plaquemines Parish. That can’t help but be interesting!

However, the main objective of the day, for me, was to test out the Smena 8M, and mission accomplished. It took me like a half hour to figure out how to load it; eventually I realized that the original take-up spool had gone missing and the seller had included the guts of a 35mm film canister to make up for it. Which means the film lead has to be trimmed on both sides, instead of the one side, as it comes. The ends of 35mm rolls–the end that fits into the canister, not the end that sticks out–are very narrow. I’m also pretty sure that the lens cap is not original to the camera, it has threads on it, like the seller pulled it off a bottle. It was very thoughtful of them to include it, and to stick a little hammer and sickle pin through it–that’s just fun!

I like the camera a lot, it reminds me of the LC-A+ in that when it’s focused on infinity, you get perfectly clear photos; but when focused closer, things can get interestingly fuzzy, because there’s no focus aid and you’re always just guestimating. (With the LC-A+ it’s because there are only 4 focus settings, so you’re never really perfectly focused.) I didn’t notice any camera shake blur, either that trait has been exaggerated or I just have uncommonly steady hands. Maybe all those years of needlework!

487649-R1-20-4A, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

See what I mean about “interesting fuzziness”?

487649-R1-23-1A, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Nice saturation of color, too. It really is a good lens for a cheap camera. I believe the Soviets always had good optics factories, so even their “proletariat” cameras had quality lenses.

487649-R1-09-15A, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487649-R1-07-17A, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

487649-R1-00-24A, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

I finished up the roll around the house when I got home in the evening. This shot really captures that lovely, golden late afternoon light. (It’s slightly double-exposed because it was the last frame. I could crop it out, but I don’t really mind it.)

Like me on Facebook!

Jefferson Island, LA

I’ve lived 20 minutes down LA-14 from Jefferson Island for 3 years, but never made it out there until now. We’re having some warm spring weather after an exceptionally cold March, and the island contains a beautiful public gardens (same as Avery Island). Like most of the “islands” around here, it’s actually a giant salt dome that rises above the flat landscape, although this one actually does have water partially surrounding it, a saltwater lake called Lake Peigneur. It used to be a much smaller freshwater lake, but in 1980 Texaco drilled too far down and punched through to the salt mine under the lake. The suction as the mine filled with water from the lake reversed the flow of the Delcambre Canal and started pulling in saltwater from Vermilion Bay. When you stand on the dock, you can see a chimney from a house that used to be on dry land sticking out of the water, and old telephone poles.

Joseph Jefferson House, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Joseph Jefferson was a 19th century stage actor, he bought the entire island and built a vacation home there.

Japanese teahouse, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

There are lots of Asian elements to the gardens. This Japanese teahouse is apparently just for show, as there was no way, that I could see, to get inside. The porch is several feet off the ground and there’s no staircase! That’s dumb.

Buddha, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Lily pond, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Lion fountain, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

peacock, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

The peacocks in the garden are pretty tame. I swear this one was posing. WERK IT.

Buddha & kitty, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

Kitty is seeking enlightenment!

Like me on Facebook!