68 Society

another from the Wizard's Council of 2012. Bohemia River life. One half of a half-frame photo taken with the Pen-FT.

wizard's council

At the mouth of the Bohemia River. Taken with the Pen-FT.

long overdue update. lots of work going on, but here's one in the spirit of fourth of july. everyone was mad at me by the time these fireworks were gone. summer in nyc.

kite

jacob riis

july 2011, taken with the Olympus Pen-FT

whiskey shot

this is one-half of a half frame shot from the same roll as the previous post with the Pen-FT. we were at this place called Fatty Crab that had this whiskey shot and this incredible pickle juice back deal. It's a trendy thing now, but the first I'd heard of it was at this place a couple years ago and I still think it's the best pickle back. I've seen some places serve straight green water from a pickle jar, but this place made its own every day. It got to the point where Gary and I were ordering whiskey shots just so we could have the pickle juice with it. We both got pretty drunk.

the highline

These are among the first photos I ever took with the Pen-FT. They're wildly inconsistent and still are at this point. Some basic problems with the film not advancing correctly to the still present metering problem—I'm beginning to think the lens itself is shooting a half-stop too slow because the meter looks fine compared with my handheld Minolta Auto V. You can almost see the schizophrenic nature of the camera at this point, although admittedly I was, and still am, still learning how to use it (see all those damn photos from my last SF trip I lost, or rather, don't see them). These photos are of Susan and my friend Kevin while we were waiting in line to get up to the Highline, and then finally up top. Around this time there were rumors the hotel directors were paying people to have sex in the windows where everyone could see, so the walkway was often crowded with paparazzi photographers with $10,000 setups. Some of these are actually quite good. Others I almost have to ask what decade they were taken in: the 70s?

goodwill 2008

this is a photo i took of some guy's portrait that's hanging in the downtown Brooklyn Goodwill. i remember it was crazy cold this day and we ducked inside the store to take a break from the ridiculous wind while we were on our way to the Transit Museum. The picture of the guy with the coke bottle glasses flashing the goat horns was so hilarious to me, juxtaposed with those nasty platform sneakers on the shelf. They had like 10 pairs of them.

my apologies to the one of you who check this blog every few months. i have a post coming up with some pics from Montauk in August taken with the Yashica t5. i've also been pretty busy helping organize this year's Brooklyn Fishing Derby. if you're in NYC and want to get in on some fishing fun check out the derby site. if you don't live in nyc and want to see where i'm posting all my fishing pics this fall, check it out too.

this photo was taken with the pen-ee.

this one time

summers in san francisco

these are a couple of old photos from SF when i was living there, probably around 2002 or 2003. the top one i took with the Olympus Pen-EE. the film got heat damaged at some point, which you can see pretty well in the left photo. i'm not sure why i didn't put this one in with the other Mission Records posts i did a few months ago. i've been digging through a bunch of film and scattered prints in an attempt to get organ-izized and i've found a lot of stuff that i missed because i'm so dis-organ-izized. but i'm getting there...

the second photo is a cross-process pic of sara sandberg at a cafe near the Bay Bridge, right by the bay in fact. i can't remember what it is called. we went on a walk around SF after i moved there. i remember we went back to this apartment she was subletting in the Tenderloin, bought a bunch of 40s, met up with Cinque who cooked this amazing and incredibly spicy thai curry, then we all got super drunk and passed out for a couple hours, and woke up and it was just light out in the evening. i remember summers in San Francisco as cold and foggy; every late afternoon i could see the fog rolling in thick over Twin Peaks from my window, whenever i happened to look out that window. i've been feeling pretty nostalgic for SF lately, maybe because the weather's been so ugly here in New York, but i'm beginning to wonder if i could ever live there again.

the price I pay

More photos from that one trip I took back in 2003. These are a continuation of the film I shot with the Pen-EE. I'm starting to get the hang of color correcting in Photoshop, but nonetheless most of the photos I've taken with the tiny Pen-EE are better than the ones I've shot with the more elaborate Pen FT, which is a bit of a shame since the latter cost about 10 times as much. I'm still working on getting to know that one (the FT) as well, and one of the things I'm learning is that even when the handheld light meter and the camera's internal meter match up, the pictures will still be overexposed. I figure I'm going to scrap the attempts to use E6 with the FT for now since it seems to be too precise for the camera and I'll stick to shooting color negative with it, which seems pretty much fine. It doesn't make sense, but it's going to take some time for me to figure out what's the problem. On a slightly side-note, at least all the photos I took when I was in SF last weren't all f'd up by my own hand or by airplane x-rays, though the true cause is still a mystery to me and doesn't really ease the disappointment in losing all those scenes.

Anyhow, these move in somewhat chronological order: Topanga Canyon road just outside Santa Monica on the way to Malibu, to a ways up north. Check out those crazy green sneakers I had on and the motor-ing fuel (Mountain Dew—every road trip in those days was all about junk food. The first drive back from LA to Delaware consisted of 4 packs of peanut butter crackers and about 8 liters of Mountain Dew.) For a while I also added chain smoking to the mix of candy, soda, and punching the roof in time with the music, but in later years the smoking habit had gotten pretty foul. I still like to do it occasionally. There's also a photo of the Road Warrior Integra (the car I bought for $300 while living in Sacramento—even though it looked totally beat up, I totally loved that car) and the good luck charm I hung off the rear view mirror to keep me safe.

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.

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.

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...

Auburn

Auburn is a small mining town 30 miles east of Sacramento. It had a really fun small concrete skatepark, which became a lot less fun after some kid fell off his bike there and then the town made everyone wear full pads, which I hated to do. Pat Ewok and I used to go to this skatepark at least once a week. Auburn was a town on a hill; overlooking evergreen-wooded canyons and snowy mountains in the faraway distance. They had rodeos there every weekend. I shot these photos of an abandoned house with the Olympus Pen-EE when I was living in Sacramento, sometime in 2002.