LA 2000

my friend christine at the GR house where i lived back in 2000. that was a long time ago eh.

kids of the black hole

santa monica beach 2001

get lost

Getting lost on the 1 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I'd never driven it before, but decided kind of on a whim to do the drive after visiting a friend in LA and being beguiled by the sights on a short drive past Malibu. I've walked along the 1 before; I forget what it's called once it's past Sunset, but once I had this crappy bike and I was foolishly riding it in the pitch blackness of Sunset Drive from Gayley and Veteran toward the ocean, determined to make this fatalistic and ill-advised journey. I got a flat tire about halfway to the beach, and ended up half-walking, half-dragging the bike behind me. I don't know why I didn't just abandon the thing, but I eventually got to the 1 and saw the lights at Santa Monica Pier. I didn't know where else to go, so I started walking to the Pier, figuring at least there I would know where I was. All in all, I ended up walking about 12 miles along Sunset, the 1 and Santa Monica Boulevard back home.

I took these photos on my first trip up the 1. I'm pretty sure if I had the opportunity again I'd probably take just as long (9 hours) to do the drive as I did this time, since I was constantly stopping, taking pics, having a smoke, standing over the edges of cliffs overlooking the ocean, staring out into the sea, trying somehow to take all of this vastness in. There's a couple specific places I want to go back and shoot, but I don't know if that will ever happen. I took these photos with my Pen-EE and used a Minolta Autometer V to get the exposures. I had about three cameras on this trip and have a lot of photos to dig through. These were some that came first to mind. I wish I could go back...

Also, if anyone actually reads this, I've been a little absent lately in updating the pages. I've been increasingly overwhelmed by work, surrounded by books, magazines, articles and other stuff I need to read and not getting anywhere, watching hockey, working on Fanzine, working on a new fishing/cooking site with Ben, etc. Trying to pull it all together and hope to update a little more frequently than just once a week...

cars

a couple of weird cars i saw in LA and happened to have my camera on me. i'm pretty sure i planned at one point to have this as a series of photos, but it still hasn't happened. i could resurrect it, but is it really worth it? i took these with the yashica t5, which, around the time they were still made, was one of the best and most affordable point-and-shoot cameras around. i can't remember where i got mine from, but it was in LA and i bought it for around $125. zeiss lens! waist-level view finder!

blow out!

This is the big issue with the little Pen-EE camera: although it's incredibly easy to use, its fixed shutter speed will turn against you in really bright or low light situations, especially when you have film loaded that just won't work with a 1/60 exposure in a given situation. Take the first three photos, which I shot at mid-day on a beach. Even at f22, the 1/60 exposure with TMax400 gave me a negative back about as translucent as a piece of cardboard. I did some pretty extensive Photoshop work on those shots to salvage them from the land of massive overexposure, and what you see is what i got. Maybe I could have done a little better in the darkroom, seeing as how I'm still getting the grasp of burning and dodging digitally, but I think it's alright for what it is. 400 speed film is just too fast for a situation such as this, but when I have the camera in hand, i'd have to take what i could get and hope for the best. I usually try to keep 100 or 200ISO loaded in it now.

the last photo was taken under similar circumstances, probably TMax 400 as well, but I somehow managed to burn this one in better, so the image looks somewhat respectable. some of the open shade probably helped. this one was taken in 2001 at Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. When i went to LA for the first time in 1999 I stayed at the Youth Hostel there. I met this Navy guy who turned out to be a complete racist asshole who fetishised silly Japanese girls. I tried to crash his car a couple times by running a bunch of red lights. I also met some cool dudes at the hostel from Brazil and Japan. That was a long time ago. This shot is just an old couple and some drunk on a bench.

The first three photos are from 2003 i think and are of some good old friends of mine who I never get to see anymore. Sometimes i wonder if i'll ever see them again. One lives in LA still (I think) while the other lives in Beijing. We drove up north past Malibu on the 1 to this beach with tide pools. I remember it was very beautiful, but we didn't get in the water. We just hung out on the beach and smoked cigarettes and laid around in the sun slowly soaking in life before we went back to Silverlake or wherever it was i was staying. I wish i had taken better pictures.

xprocess

sam in LA


broken lock in Berkeley


wires in LA


cash money LA


venice beach


chasing birds in LA

No real backstory here; just a few cross-processed shots from LA and Berkeley. I shot these between 2001 (the LA shots) and 2003 (the Berkeley one) on a Yashica T4, the best point and shoot camera ever made. even though cross processing can be a little too easy of a cheap trick, some of these are among my favorite photos i've ever shot.

mojave desert 2003

someone correct the date if i am incorrect. this is film that i obviously really screwed up. either i did something when i loaded it, or something is wrong with my 12-frame film back and it doesn't advance right because you can see how all the frames double-exposed on each other in those crappy triptychs at the top and the bottom. which is kind of a shame because i think some of them might have turned out quite well if i hadn't fucked it up, especially the ones of krishna sitting on the hill like a Buddha. even still, it's probably the closest thing i'll ever do to art.

i went to the Mojave Desert with my friends Krishna, who is from LA, and Emily, who is from Delaware like me. it's kind of a weird story here because i feel like i hooked them up via myspace or something... i somehow introduced them through the Internet and at that time in my life i had factions of friends on both coasts, and i thought with my best efforts, never the twain shall meet. but one night i got drunk and introduced these two; he liked the Fucking Champs and was moving to nyc, she liked the Fucking Champs and lived in nyc. suddenly they were hanging out, going out, she was bringing him to Delaware and meeting other friends from there and the East Coast. people from Newark were meeting people from LA and vice versa. the gates had been breached. my world, i thought, was collapsing in on me. part of my mission, going there with those two, was to break them up.

instead we all got super wasted on a bottle of absinthe kris's ex-girlfriend had brought back for him from Europe. we split a case of Budweiser and spent the night passed out in a shitty motel room in the desert. then we woke up the next day to a blinding sun, horribly hung over, ate greasy breakfast at a greasy diner, and drove out to some place off the highway and took these photos.

i took a few rolls of b/w film too, which i didn't screw up, but i haven't scanned them yet. eventually i will. kris and emily also shot photos that day; maybe if they see this they will show me some.

It's a sad and beautiful world

these are just a few of the many photos i shot on US1 (but i think the only ones with the Hassleblad) on the way back to San Francisco from LA for the first time. i think it was 2003. it took about nine hours total, with all the stopping on the sides of roads and navigating the winding, serpentine turns alongside cliffs that drop hundreds of feet. i remember distinctly slamming on the brakes and skidding off toward those cliffs when i saw something amazing, which was pretty much everywhere. when i got back to SF i started to make a habit of driving north or south on the 1 for hours whenever i needed to get out of the city or was having some kind of mental breakdown and just hang out on a cliff and watch the ocean or read a book or whatever. smoke cigarettes. it all seemed to do me a lot of good since i never took any medication for my mental problems, which were probably just as bad as anyone else's.

i remember doing a lot of driving those days, listening to tapes and smoking parliaments. it was a good car i had: 1988 acura integra special edition, with the ridiculous rear spoiler made of solid rubber which made the trunk hatch weigh like 50 pounds. black faded by the sactown sun. bought the car while i was living in sacramento for $300 off a japanese kid who was moving back to japan. it had 3 different size tires when i bought it.

this whole driving/motorist theme will come up a lot in future posts. this is just a start. also, burning and dodging is a lot easier in the darkroom than in photoshop. still trying to get the hang of it.