vintage photography – feather2pixels

Tagged: vintage photography

March 19, 2013

Punched its ticket to the NCAA tournament with a 68-65 win against Wichita State.

8:55 am

I am starting a project that involves making and projecting 35mm slides from scratch.

I figured my first step should be to test my found projector with some found slides. To my delight, it worked great.

[iframe src=”http://player.vimeo.com/video/62141608″ width=”500″ height=”281″ frameborder=”0″ webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen]

Soundtrack thanks: Ben, Joe, Nowell, Shal

Post Categories: gratuitous videoquestionable experiments

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June 24, 2012

A picture could help here to render a diagnose.

9:03 pm

The art of instant gratification has come a long way since 1977, but this peel-apart Polaroid of my parents and I taken this weekend is pretty much perfect.

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June 4, 2012

After 12 months, or if any service is cancelled or downgraded, regular charges apply.

11:42 am

My just-completed voyage to the US easternlands resulted in some interesting artifact finds at home, as well as the creation of some new ones. Now I am back.

Some pictures of note:

And finally, a video of me and Danny dominating The Looper at Knoebels in Elysburg:

[flv:knoebels.flv 600 400]

Post Categories: familyfood pornfriendsgratuitous videopennsylvaniaphotoboothsphotojournaling of debatable qualitypostcards & letterstravels

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May 14, 2012

An outside substance the body would normally would ignore.

1:29 pm

There were eight people at my house not too long ago and we all fit around the kitchen table for breakfast.   That day a reoccurring thought was there have never been eight people in this apartment before.  And there have definitely never been eight people around this particular kitchen table.  I have had the apartment for three years and the table for ten.   So it was with no shred of hesitation that I blew half the strategic reserves of Polaroid peel-apart film (now made by Fuji).  These three snaps seemed compelling enough to archive via scanning machine.  EB took the best one, I thought, on top here.  It’s from the autoimmune death trail that is north Bernal Hill.

Post Categories: favorite spotsfriendsphotojournaling of debatable quality

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July 18, 2008

No AA tonight.

6:26 pm

On Friday, C.W. and I caught a photography show at RayCo Photo Center featuring the collodion process, which is such an antiquated technique that it was already obsolete by the twentieth century. The process required slathering a salt-coated glass plate with silver nitrate and taking a picture, all while everything was still wet, all in the field, all within about ten minutes. Aside from serving as a thoughtful fuck you to digital photography, the show was teeming with some of the most striking portraits I’ve ever seen.

Collodion

Even better, though, was the vintage photobooth next to the broccoli table. At $2.75 a print, it’s by far the best one I’ve found in the city so far.

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August 3, 2007

I go crawling over me.

8:05 pm

I have been experimenting with a bastardized CMYK printing process. It interests my inner scientist: how do three essentially florescent colors manage to fool the eye into experiencing the entire spectrum, and how far can one take that illusion with screen printing?

I took three full days to conduct an initial study at the Cellspace silkscreen loft (It’s great: there are no workshops going on and so, with the exception of the vaguely territorial tabby cat, I have the whole place to myself). I took six different 669 peel-apart Polaroids from the first half of 2007 and reproduced them on a series of two hundred postcards.

The original photograph was scanned:

original image

and digitally separated into it’s four base channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I forced each channel to exaggerated halftones and exposed each one on a separate screen.

I mixed my own batch of transparent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and printed the four screens on the same postcard in that order. This example of Bartlett Street was probably the most successful of the six, though they all looked interesting. Here is the progression from one to four colors:

composite

I can definitely move forward from here. I like the exaggerated halftones because the image and the colors only resolve themselves from a distance. On a more cerebral level, I like how it draws attention to the optical illusion of the printing process: at one glance its a cluster of dots and at another glance it is a photographic image. I want to experiment with making the halftone dots even bigger.

Post Categories: CELLspacequestionable experimentsscreenprinting

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July 5, 2007

A throwback to a character created 15 years ago.

9:50 pm

Homecoming 1 Hour Photos:

corinne

corinne

nowell and jill

jill and nowell @ the dumpling king

to-shi-o

to-shi-o

me and bulldogger

bulldogger and me

my room

my room

a church

in front of the church of light

.

Post Categories: friendsphotojournaling of debatable quality

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April 22, 2007

An obligation to mitigate changes

6:22 pm

I ended up accepting Indy Sarah’s press pass to the Shins show and so on a cold Wednesday night I found myself eastward bound in a taxi down Market Street with her. I was excited; the Shins are good and the Shins are popular, but I had never seen them play and thus couldn’t fully commit to liking them.

We arrived in the middle of the first song, which according to band policy, meant that I had two and a half songs left during which to take pictures via my photo badge. They passed in approximately twenty seconds.

It was about then that I realized I have no idea who these musicians are, much less what they look like. It was a truly disappointing moment. Not that the performance was bad in any way, but it made me realize that all that I know about this music, which I supposedly like, is recordings–just another way to suck the experience out of life. Lots of people before me have expressed that sentiment at concerts but it’s my big thing now and maybe the experience of being behind the cameras cast it in full relief. Anyways, in addition to the digital, I also managed to lug the Polaroid along and by luck snapped this remarkable shot of James Mercer in what looks to be the bowels of hell.

james mercer

So the verdict: The Shins’ are good performers and their music is intelligent and well-balanced, the logical result of a natural selection process operating on a sea of shitty indie bands, weeding out the undesirable characteristics in a lucky few. The problem is the Shins don’t move me. Until the encore, that is, when they came onstage, harmonicas in hand, and played old shit lithe way Neil Young would have. And sometimes two songs can make a show.

Then I accidentally let Indy Sarah use my chapstick and she gave me a virus.

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March 18, 2007

Protected: We just look at each other and we know.

7:43 pm

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March 5, 2007

Protected: Pretty much the same.

11:41 pm

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February 25, 2007

WHS reunion info.

11:56 pm

How do I want you to feel about my life today?

Well, I finally started cranking out some silkscreened postcards. I am still cutting most of them out, but a limited run (of postcard no. 9, out of sequence only because they were the most plentiful) was dropped in the Mission and 24th mailbox on Friday. Prepare yourself.

psotcards

There are more on the way. I seriously underestimated the issues involved in screening 220 postcards (matching fronts and backs, successfully printing little letters, finding a good halftone but that’s vague but not too vague) but that’s what workshops are for. Joanna continued to crank out some pretty cool stuff too. I grabbed one of her test strips.

On Wednesday, Phanna and I won trivia night with an unprecedented two man team! It came down to a rare tiebreaker question: “what was the average weight, in lbs, of a knight’s armor in the middle ages?” We said forty-five. It’s fifty. Add one Pig Buck to the bank.

Work is so silly. I read about valves and programmable logic controllers and things like that, and the next day I show thirty-five college kids what I learned. Part of their training is licensing as a third engineer (on a ship) and this week Baby Bluehawk and her friend passed the exam requirement. She stopped by my office beaming to deliver the news and it was charming. So that’s a good part of my job, right?

The second Critical Mass of 2007 was much more successful than the first. This time I coralled the Bulldogger and Marella to join me, but we cut it too close and, again, I missed the beginning (do they really start at 6:30?). Luckily, we intercepted a fellow straggler who came prepared with a walkie-talkie and he led us to Fisherman’s Wharf, where somehow the mass had extended itself. After that (and besides a rare Pac Heights excursion) it was a pretty standard ride. The guy with the ridiculously loud speaker cart was there this time, which makes a big difference.

This week, after nine and a half years of post secondary education, Jill started her first job since the ol’ sandwich shop in high school. That’s the kind of irony grad school gets you. But suddenly she’s a development engineer at a fancy biotech company on the Peninsula and I am very proud of her. I still remember first meeting her in Dr. Stewart’s Physiscs class on virtually our first day at Pitt. We ended up choosing the same major (bioengineering) and working together on just about every group project, sometimes against our will. I caught up with her for a rushed Guinness (which she claims to only drink with me) on Wednesday night and asked her how it was going. “Lonely,” she said. She will be fine. Jill is always fine.

Oh Morgan Jameson, what the fuck are we doing? I wrote her a really heartfelt email a little while ago but it was utterly unsendable. So I didn’t send it, we didn’t speak for a while, and now, somehow, I am doing this thing where I write her about every little detail of my madness. And make no mistake, it is madness: we wrote 5,548 words to each other this weekend. It’s helped bring things to a conclusion but now she just thinks I am insane and self absorbed, which of course is kind of true, but I think I regret it. As it stands now, the plan is to not write each other for a month.
I went to an Oscar party at Louise’s tonight. I will say several things about Louise: (a) she throws a damn good Oscar party. Just like last year, it featured her baked potato bar, which is executed with such authority that it transcends the irony that would surely destroy any lesser baked potato bar. This brings up another good thing about Louise: (b) she’s groomed her irony into sincerity, which seems to me like your only viable option if you are going to stick with this type of disposition(At least without becoming an insufferable Mission jerkoff). Louise does karaoke and Stevie Nicks parties and sundae bars because she loves them. We also made buttons, which I realized is an awesome thing to do.

buttons

After another Sparky’s breakfast this week, Sadie took Nowell and I to the giant camera obscura at the Cliff House. It was closed (apparently because the day wasn’t “beautiful enough”) but at least it made for a good Polaroid.

camera obscura

Post Categories: beerfriendsmediocre artPacific OceanPittpostcards & lettersthe Mission

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February 4, 2007

BED’s patrons can sip cocktails and don the club’s complimentary socks

8:41 pm

I tried to start this blog post a bunch of times but it hasn’t worked. I guess that means I can’t figure myself out. I can’t. The imaginary is a drug and I am addicted to it. And that inevitably means pushing away the real and the people who actually have something positive to offer me. I am powerless. I live to torment myself. But hey, it was another wholesome weekend. I went surfing for the first time. I got a plant. I went to a Berkeley party where people had names like Pepper and Io. I ate Taco Bell. Check out these Polaroids!dog

ocean beach

surfing

potties

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January 31, 2007

There’s a disease going around.

8:14 pm

God dammit, I totally lost a blog post. The gist of it was that I had the most action-packed weekend in recent memory.

Critical Mass wasn’t quite rained out on Friday, but I would say that the mass wasn’t quite critical enough. I got there (The Ferry Building at 18:30 on the final Friday of each month) late and joined a group of maybe twenty other stragglers for a subcritical mass. Subcritical Mass was in some ways more fun but noteably more dangerous than real Critical Mass–there aren’t enough bodies to stop traffic and at one point a Honda Prelude came within a foot of hitting me head on at forty-five miles per hour as we biked the wrong way down Folsom Street. We finally found the main group, but it didn’t really have enough people to form a collective conscious. Instead we were a bunch of indecisive assholes, tentative at every intersection, and I biked home to work on feather2pixels.com.

So: feather2pixels.com: check it out. I guess this is my best stab at a first draft. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Not that anyone needs any of this crap. I feel good about the modest format, though even this laughably little took me months to program. I can’t escape computers.

So after blowing $10 on a misloaded film cartridge, the old Polish dude at Action Camera in West Portal showed me how to properly load my new Polaroid on Saturday morning. After producing a few successful shots, I say “I can’t believe I waited till I was twenty-seven to pick one of these up.” Every frame looks like it was taken in in 1976!

bartlett street

west portal

That night, after finding my favorite Dylan album on vinyl, I made it back to the Exploratorium for a sound festival, which was a little disappointing by Exploratorium standards, but I saw some old friends and I felt very cool to be known at the greatest science museum in the world. A pepperoni and mushroom pizza with a pitcher of Bud was enjoyed afterwards at Vincent’s.

Sunday started with a surprisingly solid breakfast in North Beach followed by a hike in the Marin Headlands. I’ve never actually hiked there, but the hills smelled strongly of Calfornia and the Pacific was sparkly from the summit. There are endless clusters of abandoned forts up there, decaying in the caustic fog sixty years after the Japanese didn’t invade. A murder of crows kept their eyes on us as we climbed through the ruins and wished that I had bothered to bring along my new camera.

This is Sarah:

sarah

After three unsuccessful attempts to find Rocky II at area video stores, I met Krisitin at the Sunset Baskin Robbins. We settled for the original, which wasn’t really a bad thing. And there you go: an exhausting, exhilarating, perfect week. A model for what I want out of life.

Post Categories: friendsthe Missionvarious excuses

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