Rock and Roll and Film and Iron

A few months ago, my husband and I found out that one of our favorite bands was playing with another one of our favorite bands along with another one of our favorite bands who I’d never gotten to see live before…in Birmingham, Alabama. So what would a normal, responsible adult couple do? Yes, fly from Washington DC to Birmingham for about 48 hours.

While there, we met up with some friends who took us for a walk around the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. Once a pig iron blast furnace, after closing it was preserved and restored and is now a museum, center for metal arts, and concert venue. It’s a beautiful site to wander around on a grey, drizzly day.

I’m sure we’ll be back at some point to actually explore more of what the city has to offer, eat more biscuits, and take more photos. (Oh, and the show was amazing.)

Mardi Gras 2018

Although I've been visiting New Orleans since "before the storm," I'd never been to Mardi Gras before. I decided this was the year to do it, since it's also the 300th anniversary of the founding of New Orleans. Thanks to some friends who are Mardi Gras veterans (and now, locals) I was even given a chance to march in one of the oldest parades on Mardi Gras day itself with bagpipers Kilts of Many Colors. Since I was going to be spending my time either trying to catch (and dodge!) beads or marching, I decided to bring only my smallest camera - a 110 from Lomography called the "Baby Diana." Everyone seemed amused at the tiny camera, but the tiny negatives are extremely lo-fi...and a pain to scan!

National Cathedral: Space, Light & Sound event

Artomatic was amazing, as always. Met some great artists, saw some really original pieces, and learned a lot about presenting my work and even (yikes!) networking and talking to people about photography. Now that I'm back to real life, I'm going to get back to the scanning mines. These are from the Washington National Cathedral's February program called "Seeing Deeper." For one night they removed all the chairs and lit up the Gothic interior with colored, changing lights. I read up on low-light photography before I went, but I was mostly just winging it. The only shots that came out were from my Diana+, which I used with a long exposure trigger and a light tripod. I tried metering with an iPhone app, but with the lights changing and the stark contrasts I was mostly left to guessing. Even with high-speed film and shooting on the longest exposure, nothing came out from my Pentax; I'm guessing I should have used the "bulb" exposure and held it open as long as I did for these - about 5 to 7 seconds.

Montreal and San Fransisco on Film

It's been an oddly busy summer here. We recently made two quick trips - first to Montreal, a lovely city with amazing food that I very much want to go to again when they aren't experiencing record heat. So hot, in fact, my plans to take photos at the Mount Royal Cemetery were thwarted. (We did at least stop at the scenic overlook though.) Then just two weeks later we went to a beautiful family wedding in Marin, California. Since we were flying in and out of San Francisco anyway, I insisted we tack on an extra day to see the city. More great food and drinks and the weather was much more to my liking!

Still working on my backlog of negatives to scan, but here are a few of my favorite from the first batch. First, Montreal:

And San Francisco:

FotoWalk Underground

I'm very honored to have my photo "Capitol" displayed for the summer in the Crystal City FotoWalk Underground as part of Exposed DC's 10 year anniversary celebration. Exposed DC is a great resource for local Washington DC area photographers, and they hold an annual show that I always look forward to. "Capitol" was originally selected to be part of the 2013 Exposed DC show at the LongView Gallery. It was taken with a medium-format Lomography Diana+ camera, then scanned and printed digitally. (Original negative scan is below.)

In the back of the drawer...

I'm not sure if this is the oldest roll I have lying around that's been processed but not scanned, but it's got to be close. (We went to London in June, 2009.) I had just a few usable images; it's nice to feel like I've learned something even if it makes for a frustrating scanning session.

New Orleans - Revolog Lazer film

We visit New Orleans once or twice a year, and for January's visit I took the Revolog Lazer film I received for Winter Gift Giving Holiday. The "lazer" effect goes continuously throughout the roll; now that I know what it looks like I wish I had gone with standard 35mm frames instead of Diana Baby square and half-frames, since some of the shots showed minimal effects. These are a few I think worked out well, though.