my little rebellion

Beer, cigarettes, and Tri-X 400.

2009-02-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

A Sunday afternoon in a new town. No friends, no internet, no money - what's a girl to do?

I found an old roll of film in some luggage, did a little dance, and then ran off into the desert for the day.

colors.

2009-02-18T10:16:00.000-08:00

These are from my Holga. The lens is plastic. Everything good about these is Kodak.

A day in the park.

2008-03-22T09:21:00.001-07:00

Late March. The cherry blossoms are blooming, the sun is shining, and I've got a bottle of wine and roll of film to get rid of. What a perfect day for a picnic.

And then it was time to go home.

I had one exposure left the next afternoon on the way to Card Photo:

I should do this every weekend.

Life is short, when you're film.

2008-03-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

I took these with my boyfriend's Canon one night while he was sleeping. (Shhh! Don't tell him!)

The film was in our fridge for 6 years. At least. That's one thing digital will never do as gracefully: expire.

120 milimeters of fun.

2008-03-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

When I decided to really take on this expensive, masochistic, and probably-not-very-rewarding hobby, I almost went out and bought a $300 brand new Nikon 35mm SLR, which is basically the last film SLR not made by Canon. (The Canon ones are ugly.) But then I thought to myself, "You know, I guess I should shop around a little before dropping 300 bucks." My art-school-photo-major boyfriend suggested I get a Holga.

Holgas are an interesting camera. They're a PRC invention from the late sixties, made out of plastic, with a crappy lens and notorious light leak problem. Framing your image is approximate - the tiny viewfinder is a couple inches over from the lens, so your actual composition is always a little bit of a surprise. What's great about them is that they're the only medium-format camera you can buy anywhere for under several thousand dollars. That's right - the Holga takes 120mm film, as opposed to the standard 35mm canister we're all familiar with. Well, those of us who ever owned a film camera, at least. 120mm negatives are about four times larger than 35mm, so the photos can be printed four times bigger, or with four times the detail. Very cool.

Another downside to the Holga - and this is the reason I almost didn't get one - is that they've become extremely trendy. Bummer. But I thought, "What the heck, its fifty bucks. If I actually keep up this absurd hobby, then I'll eventually get myself a real camera - and if I don't, I've only wasted fifty bucks."

Here are my favorites from my first roll. Some are double exposures, which I did on purpose because it was so easy with my cheap-ass Holga. (Simply refrain from winding and you can shoot another picture right over your last one!) This will inevitably happen to me by accident - but hopefully not too often. While some digital cameras will let you take a double exposure, the Holga method is a lot more fun, and it just has it's own... thing goin on.

My little rebellion.

2008-03-11T20:01:00.000-07:00

I am not a photographer. I know a lot of photographers, I've worked with a lot of photographers, I'm even related to a couple of photographers - but I'm definitely not a photographer.
So this blog isn't about photography, because that would be kind of silly. This is a blog celebrating film.

I love shooting film. I have very little idea what I'm doing with it, but I love it. It's special. Light goes into the box, and a picture comes out. No batteries required. Amazing.

Film is a dying medium. It's expensive, it's unforgiving, it's technical, it's chemical - and it's simple.

And when done right, it's beautiful.

So this is my little rebellion against an age where catalogs are full of low-quality jpegs, and magazine covers are more clone stamp than skin, and people everywhere look at me funny when I open the back of my camera and pull film out, instead of staring at it, flipping through menus.

This is for the adorable couple at Card Photo down on O'Farrell who've been developing my (mostly wasted) film for six years, and every other mom-n-pop one hour photo place that's had to sacrifice since the Digital Revolution.

And mostly it's dedicated to my dad, who is a real photographer.

(Of course the irony is that in order to put my film photos on this blog, I have to scan them and edit them in Photoshop. You can trust that cropping and rotating will be the extent of my editing though - part of my goal is to re-learn the art of planning a photograph without thinking, "I'll just shop it later.")