She's in Bloom

Hello!

I haven’t blogged in a couple weeks—I’ve been mostly posting one-offs to Instagram and sitting on a few rolls a film that have actual blog-worthy collections on them, one series in particular that I have been very much looking forward to seeing.

A few weeks ago, I took a walk through my city and shot an entire roll of closeup flowers. I rewound that roll, reloaded it (trying my best to wind to to the same start point without any markers), and then shot a roll of self-portraits in the park. The portraits themselves were a bit of an ordeal; my air cable release wasn’t firing reliably, and the needle inside it that pushes the shutter button wasn’t retracting after being fired, so when I advanced the film, it would immediately fire again. After each shot, I had to disconnect the cable release, manually push the needle back in, and reattach to my camera. When I first I arrived at the park, the cable release wasn’t firing at all, and I almost packed up and went home.

Glad I didn’t.

The below images are my first attempt at intentional double exposures (we’ve had a few happy accidents like the ones posted here). My friend Steven, the unofficial King of Double Exposures, gave me a few tips, the most important being to push your film a stop or two. He does it using aperture, but I did it by setting my camera ISO to 800 for 400 speed film. It took my brain a minute to understand why this is important, but the way it makes sense to me is to remember your film is a negative. When you take a picture, the light exposure is “taking away” material from the film strip that results in your image. If you push your film, it will underexpose it, leaving it a bit dark. Your second shot then “takes away” more of the film material, creating a more ideally exposed image.

Here is the full set of my floral self-portraits, including a few screw-ups that I just like aesthetically.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Más Moss

One of the things I love about photography is that I’m never done learning. It’s not even halfway through the year, and already I’ve experimented with a bevy of new elements: double exposures (more to come on that), printing at home for the first time, video, using more expired film, and macro photography.

This set is a combined experiment on those last two bits. I’ve been doing some nature walks with plant-minded friends to capture closeup shots of moss, lichen, and mushrooms (see here and here for more), and recently brought along a roll of expired Kodak Max 400 (expired 2008) to see what would happen.

Expired color film tends to run a bit dark, and macro photography needs a lot of light. It was also an overcast day, under the cover of tree canopies and brush. It could have gone either way. But the result was a series of warm, reddish-toned images that rendered our backyard flora and fauna otherworldly.

Thank you for reading, you’re beautiful.

Bulls on the Beach Pt. 2

I’m going to keep the text portion of this post pretty short—you can find part one of this set here for my thoughts on being called a sports photographer and more photos from this event (True Grit Bulls & Barrels Beach Rodeo). I have more to say about photographing rodeos in general but will save it for a later post, so stayed tuned! Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.