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.)

The Poconos and MaxFunCon East

Over this past Labor Day weekend, my husband and I attended MaxFunCon East in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. We have been to plenty of conventions before - horror conventions, sci-fi and comic conventions, classic film conventions - but we had no idea what to expect about this one. All we knew is that we were fans of a number of MaxFun's podcasts and the other fans we had "met" online all seemed to have the same creative and open spirit. It was an amazing weekend, and I almost feel like apologizing for wandering around with my Pentax K1000 and trying to make it look as creepy as possible. Almost.

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:

Mystery film!

It's the first day of spring, but it's a miserable and cold one here in the Washington DC suburbs. The Cherry Blossom festival just started, but there's no way I'm going outside today. Instead, I reached into my (extensive) backlog of processed but unscanned film. Today's random roll is some Lomochrome purple I shot last summer in Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland. On the one hand, I want to get better about scanning and sharing photos in a timely manner. On the other hand, it's a perfect day to re-visit a great Scottish vacation. The photos below were taken ( as I recall) at the Calton Burial grounds in Edinburgh.

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.