Woo, photos from Japan came back! Give me some time to pick through them all and then I'll lay them out for your greedy little eyes to see.



This photo is so worthy of posting just for how madly I had to scramble across everything in the room to make it to the windowsill in the 10-seconds given by the camera timer.

I bought this T-shirt at an Animal Collective concert a few years back because I liked the print on it. It was a pretty oddly-fitting shirt so I made it into a tank top that is also pretty oddly fitting. But I have a dilemma that I will now pose to my fashion-forward reader/s: darts or no darts?

I.e. do I don the tiniest shorts I can find on my floor and wear the thing in its odd-sack-shaped form, as below...

Or do I toss a few darts in the back and make it a little more form fitting?

What say you?

Recently I fell in love with film again. Digital had been looking so appealing... 'It's just so EASY,' I had been thinking. On-the-fly ISO adjustment; no trade off between light sensitivity and graininess; a huge initial cost, yes, but no constant drain of funds for film and develop/print costs--$10 here, $15 there... again and again and again. That and, while the digital photos from my friends looked consistently great, my own seemed to be deteriorating.

What is with these colors?
What the hell happened there?! Oh, I guess that film was expired...
Overexposed... underexposed... overexposed again...
Well would you look at that, my SLR's got light leaks!

Two weeks ago I was back at my favorite camera/film processing store. The older gentleman who's always dressy in a shirt and tie and who has the nice but somewhat intense gaze was answering my question about the price differences between getting my images back as prints or on a CD. At the end of his spiel he added, "But if you're making the effort to shoot film you should go for prints."

The comment didn't sink in immediately and I opted for the CD, though continuing to lazily think over it while we discussed other things. I ended up changing my mind at the last minute and asking for prints.

Last weekend* I came back in and got the prints back. And there was something wonderfully nice, and missed, about holding prints in my hands and being able to flip through them. And on top of that the looked GOOD; they looked good despite the light leaks and the graininess and the slight over- and under-exposures. Film has this ability to freeze a moment in time that I don't experience with digital photographs. Go look at some old prints from the 70s and 80s and you'll see what I mean (maybe). Anyway, here are some of the photos from those rolls. Unfortunately I'm not too familiar with the print scanners at the university so I ended up settling for what they gave me, but I wish I could show you the prints themselves because they are beautiful.



















*This post was actually from the summer of 2011 but I didn't have the photos all scanned in and done until now. I've since calmed down in regards to the dilemma I was having then; I've come to terms with my my simultaneous love of film and recognition of the various perks of digital. I will continue to shoot film. I may get a DSLR sometime in the future (the distant future, when I am rolling in riches enough that I have worked my way through the higher-priority items on my want list and finally make it down to a DSLR), but most of the areas I want to expand into as a photographer are still in the analog realm.

I'm in Fukuoka, Japan. Things noticed/occured: It hasn't rained yet. Evenings are the perfect temperature to wear short skirts with tights and a jacket. I was told I ate beautifully with chopsticks. When driving down the windy and relatively dark back streets, the bright white glow of the vending machines that are everywhere makes them hover like technicolor ghosts around every other curve.