Cascade Falls on Large Format
Cascade Falls is certainly one of my favorite newly discovered locations nearby. Fun hiking with gorgeous views. The splotches of light hitting the forest floor in the early morning is just heavenly. I will be returning many more times but I am happy with the results of this early autumn morning.
Cascade Falls
This is a location I could keep returning to. While the frames I took last weekend did not come out as great as I expected, I know the views are ripe with potential. I could do a photo book of this location entirely. Just need to keep photographing it.
All frames shot with a Mamiya RB67 Pro S. 65mm Lens.
Film: Ilford HP5+ Pushed to 1600.
My D&D Sleeve Tattoo
So this year I have been working with a tattoo artist named Jeffy at Brightside tattoo in Baltimore to create what I think is just the absolute coolest sleeve tattoo ever. He did such a great job making so many different textures and his line work is so clean! Check him out if you like monochrome tattoos in an illustrative style. I am so happy with how it came out and have been waiting for it to be fully healed to take some photos! How many of these monsters can you name? It is so hard for me to pick a favorite individual monster
Photos from Renfaire
Some photos from Ren Faire, may have forgotten to pull the dark slide on a couple exposures so this roll is a couple frames short.
Also, I think it is cleaner to put the negatives into their own gallery. Rather than everything side by side? Not sure, I will keep fiddling with it.
Sept 17, 2024; Nature Walks and Spartan Races
Recent roll of film I shot
Among the roll here are some macro shots, (poison Ivy, cigarettes, flowers) testing out the focal distance on the Mamiya RB67 (65mm lens) As well as a couple scenes from a walk I took. I am upset that the focus missed on the runner with the gasmask, but its such a strange moment I still love the image. The way the light hit all the weird surfaces of the big rock was too wonderful not to shoot. Finally we have some group photos from our Spartan race on Sunday.
This roll was certainly a learning experience, but I am loving shooting with this Mamiya. It feels like the camera equivalent to driving a stick shift. Even the act of removing the dark slide before you can hit the shutter. It feels like the best parts of experiencing shooting a large format camera and medium format all in one.
A lesson in developing
Film photography can be unforgiving at times. Something as simple as putting the reel in upside down when you load up the tank, can have catastrophic results. I lost 4 sheets of 4x5 film for this reason alone. However not all the shots were destroyed. Some were effected by the ensuing light leak less and others were untouched.
These 3 frames are what survived and have become ultimately, significantly more precious for it. That's sort of the beauty of film though. It feels like both a gift and a huge accomplishment for just getting the photos to exist in the world. It has a real dollar value cost for every shot you take. Not to mention the time and energy put into every shot to make sure you get the most out of every exposure. When it fails, it hurts, but when it succeeds, you are walking on clouds. Film is more satisfying to me because of these extra high highs and those highs exists because of the extra low lows. There is a risk to shooting film.
It feels a lot like playing a game on “hardcore difficulty” were you only have one life and if you die, you have to restart the game.
All this to say, I was very excited for these frames. And there was another portrait I really wanted to come out but unfortunately they did not. Maybe I'll get another chance, but unlikely. I can at least learn from my mistakes.
These portraits were taken of the artists in the tattoo shop I have been visiting frequently this year. Jeffy, with the big glasses and beard) is the incredible artist who did my DND sleeve (photos coming once it's healed).
I also had some images that didn't really survive, but look heckin' cool nonetheless.
First roll on Mamiya RB67 Pro S
I am overall very happy with how this roll turned out. There were a few exposures I took an educated guess on because I shot without a light meter. There are others I didn’t expect to turn out well and actually became one of my favorite from the roll. An Accidental double exposure that is just so dang crispy it makes me want to shoot an entire roll of double exposures. But mostly, because its made up of a bunch of people I see on the daily at work. None of them are engineers or scientists, but they all make NASA happen every day. I am excited to share their portraits with them.
Re-Scanning some old negatives
I think this was a fruitful practice, it showed me very candidly how far my development and scan technique has come in the last year or two. The older the negatives the more work in post I had to do getting rid of dust spots or weird unevenness in the development. I also very much love seeing the side by side. remembering to export a version of the negatives before I start inverting and processing is going to be something I need to make muscle memory in my workflow.
