Tag: photography

tales of a creepy doll carriage

91k0heExW0LI have a photo on another French book cover! This time a reprint of Un soupçon légitime by Stefan Zweig.

I took this photo in 2003 with a Pentax K1000 camera and slide film, then had the film cross-processed–probably at my local Target, since they never knew what to charge for processing film without prints, so they’d just do it for free!

This old-school doll carriage was my mother’s as a little girl, and it featured in a number of other photo shoots over the years. Now it sits in my office and occasionally amuses my kids when I let them play with it.

 

Reliving my 20’s

A while ago I went back through some old photos from my "artsy photographer" days, and was kind of stunned at how much I loved their intimacy and raw, unfinished-ness.

This was before I got into more staged work with volunteer models, during my "cross-process all the films" phase. At the time, I didn't think much beyond random experimentation, and regarded most of my work as amateur-ish (it was) and therefore unremarkable.

But something about this unpolished, rougher version of myself speaks to me now; time and distance has made her a stranger. It's a bit like peeking into the window of a friend's house. I know her, but I don't *know* her, so I'm not inclined to judge.

La Femme Comestible

41gWPKrWBlLI woke up to some cool news this morning, and I have to share!

“Back in the day” (ie. before kids), I was an aspiring fine art photographer. Most of my photographs from those days are listed with a stock agency, Arcangel Photos, that specializes in offbeat, artsy photography.

It’s been years since I’d sold anything, which isn’t surprising; my portfolio is old and very small compared to the professionals. I figured they’d retired my images, or shoved them to the back of a virtual drawer of search results somewhere, never to be seen again. But today, I got an email from royalties management, noting I’d sold an image.

That was a pleasant surprise in and of itself, but then I saw the publication and did a double take – it’s the cover of a French reprint of a Margaret Atwood novel!

I’m having a fangirl moment! Margaret Atwood has been one of my favorite authors since I was in college; heck, when I first read The Handmaid’s Tale, I was that young, aspiring photographer, living out of a one-bedroom apartment with my then-fiancé and two cats instead of two kids. What a rush!

And that’s the story of how I checked an item off my life list that I didn’t even know I had. 😀

Fifteen

I was going through old photographs after Dad passed with the intention of putting together a photo book, and came across some of my really old stuff.

It reminded me that Tim and I started dating 15 years ago. He was obviously my favorite subject, with a few dramatic selfies (which were not called selfies back then) thrown in for good measure. Man, we were young.

Happy 15 years, love. Let’s make the most of all the years yet to come.

Then and now

Shortly after we moved here, my parents bought the property next to ours and gave it to my brother, so today we decided to take a look around. At the back of the property are three junked cars that have been there for decades – an Oldsmobile, a Buick, and a Hudson. All of them have been stripped for parts, had their windshields shattered, are overgrown with trees and weeds, and are full of bullet holes from bored and/or disappointed hunters.

The last time I explored the land, I was a senior in college. I made these cars the subject of a photojournalism assignment. I think I got an A for conveying a sense of emotion and humanity without directly photographing a person.

I visited on three separate occasions in 2003 and 2004 as well. The cars lend themselves to high-contrast, black-and-white photos. Each time I go, I see some new detail I’d overlooked before.

This afternoon, I went back with my iPhone. The cars themselves haven’t changed much, but the photographs have. My eye probably has, too, thanks to the rebirth of square photography. Welcome to the age of Instagram.

I wonder what these cars will look like ten years from now. I wonder if I’ll still be drawn to them, and if so, I wonder what those photos will look like.

London in photos

This post is only two months late in coming, but I had the good fortune to spend a week in London for work back in November. Here are some highlights, including yummy food, sights, and pics from a street art tour:

Could be a while…
Street art tour
Street art tour
London!
Locks
Brew Dog
Pink
Flats
Sage advice
Brick lane
Leicester Sq.
Beef Bourginoun
Kathryn with tea
Chinatown
Mozilla offices
Cute coffee
Chinatown
World’s End
cappucino
Yum!
“Juicy bits”
Limoncello
Big Ben
Westminster
The Eye
Carousel
Big Ben
London at night
Mind the Gap
English breakfast
Underground
Telephone booth
Pastries
Boys!

Printing in the age of Instagram

Initially I was kind of an anti-iPhone-photographer snob… but I’ve found I’m way more likely to document the moment with my phone than dig out my hulking digital SLR with its inconvenient manual-focus portrait lens, not to mention the time it takes to transfer the resulting photos to my computer (provided I can find the camera cable, which is a challenge in and of itself) and process them in Photoshop, then wait for them to upload to the printing company. In the face of all that hassle, the simplicity and ease of use of the iPhone camera cannot be denied. It may not be fine art, but my family memories aren’t fine art, and truth be told, I love some of the photos I’ve taken with that camera.

All but three months of Gwen’s first year were stored not in an album or keepsake box, but on Flickr and Instagram. I thought about this a few weeks ago — I haven’t printed a single snapshot since Gwen was three months old. And I thought about how strange and uncomfortable that felt. Ellie has a thick baby album full of 4×6’s, Gwen has… an Instagram account.

I love digital photography, but there’s something satisfying about holding a photograph in my hands, the tactile richness of a stack of freshly-printed images, the thrill of receiving a new packet of photos in the mail. So I decided to do something about it! I went back through my archives, beginning with this photo, taken last Christmas when I first got my iPhone:

Baby Gwen

And the latest photo of my little mischief-maker:

*melt*

 

… and everything in between, which, when I sorted through it all, came out to about 300 photos.

That was almost enough to make me throw up my hands and add a few dollars to Gwen’s therapy jar (I have a few years to come up with an excuse as to why her sister has an album and she doesn’t, anyway) but after some research, I settled on PostalPix, which lets you order prints (and other products) directly from your iPhone. A few weeks later, I have a handful of envelopes full of beautiful prints, and I’ve assuaged my guilt (at least temporarily — I still haven’t worked up the ambition to put them in an album). Plus, new photos never have to touch my computer — I take them on the phone and have prints in my cart with just a few clicks. So easy.

My only complaint is you can only print in batches of 40 (when I started this process it was 60) so having a large backlog of photos meant I had to be methodical about what I’d already printed and what I hadn’t. Now that I’m caught up it’s better, but it would be much easier to purchase unlimited prints in one go. All the more reason to keep my standard printing company (iPrintFromHome — have to plug them because I love them) for large orders, and use PostalPix for snapshots.

Another iPhoneography-related service I tried recently was StickyGram, which turns your Instagram photos into magnets (I’m kind of a magnet addict). Sure, I could just use an ordinary magnet to stick my kid’s photo to the fridge, but what would be the fun in that? Photo magnets up the cute-factor. While I won’t be using StickyGram as often, it has nothing to do with their quality or service — it’s just my bank account might get mad at me, and my fridge can only hold so many magnets.