Robert M. Culp Aug. 16, 1930 - Mar. 24, 2010

Farewell, friend.

A short tribute on Fanzine.

motor away pt. 1

The first photos are from an unknown (meaning I can't remember which) beach while driving up the 1 back whenever I first did it. It must have been 2003. I posted some other photos from this same trip here and there and I'm starting to archive the rest of the photos but it's taking forever to scan and work on the images since my computer takes about 30 seconds to 2 minutes to complete any action these days, especially when I'm working with big files such as these. The later ones were the middle hours of driving up the 1, when I was beginning to realize I couldn't stop every time I saw something I thought was completely life changing, but was still trying not to crash my car. I was torn between hauling ass on those lonely stretches of pavement and stopping every third of a mile. I guess I tried to compromise with both until it got too dark to shoot any more. It's kind of strange, looking at these photos because it causes a sort of reverse nostalgia for the photos I lost (or more accurately, fucked up) of Susan and I driving along the 1 last month. It's not quite "reverse nostalgia"; it's more that the order of my emotions toward these photos and the ones I screwed up are reversed—the older ones are making me miss and regret the would-be newer ones more. I guess it's probably for the best anyhow.

just a thought

i've never been one for poetry but i've been really into this billy bragg song of late.

an excerpt:

in public he's such a man
he's punching at the walls with his bare and bloody hands
and he screaming and shouting and acting crazy
but at home he sits alone and he cries like a baby
and he holds your letters but he can't read them
as he fights this loneliness that you call freedom
you said this would happen and you were not wrong
i've fallen in love with a little time bomb


more pictures next update...

the march girl

to borrow a chorus from the great band Dead Moon:

it's ok.
we've all seen better days.
it's ok.
we love you anyway.

happy birthday.

return to the high seas

par avion

A couple photos I probably took either flying to or from LA. I always wondered why I didn't shoot more slides with the Yashica, but then again, I mostly cross-processed them, probably for the worse. I dig the ghostly atmosphere these shots have, though it was mostly by luck than by virtue of skill.

Speaking of which, I got back the slides I shot with the Pen-FT while I was in San Francisco in February, and almost all of them to a one are completely washed out to the point where the transparencies are pretty much totally transparent. I shot a couple test rolls of color negative up in Maine with the FT and found the camera's internal light meter (the whole reason I bought the FT instead of the Pen-F) was pretty close to accurate for being 30 or 40 years old. I know slide film needs to be close to spot on or better, but the degree to which this roll was washed out was something I've never seen before. Kind of a shame because it was basically mine and Susan's whole vacation, including a pretty amazing drive up the 1 to Point Reyes, and none of the photos survived. A big bummer, actually.

I've since been trying to figure out what happened. Below are a couple shots that squeaked by, but are still overexposed. At first I wondered if the airport x-rays had damaged the film or washed it out somehow, but I haven't read anything about this particular damage happening to anyone else. I went out this weekend to test the FT's internal meter versus my handheld Minolta Auto V (which I use for the Hasselblad) and still found the camera's accuracy to be pretty close, sometimes differing by a stop to a half-stop. I don't know if that's enough to give me the results I got. Then I was thinking something ridiculous because I was wearing sunglasses at the time I was shooting maybe I was setting the camera wrong because the scene looked darker with the glasses on? Yeah, it didn't make sense to me a minute later either. Guess I have to keep testing it, or maybe just scrap the idea of using slides with this camera since the meter is pretty accurate and previous rolls of color-negative film came out mostly fine. Also, the photos I took with the Seagull (also using the Minolta meter) came out very nice. Weird.

kids of the black hole

santa monica beach 2001

retrospect

Older, drunken times in "Bernal Flats," just across Cesar Chavez from my old apartment. Photo taken by my friend Ravi. It was his birthday.