ready for the weekend

husband comes home today! we're ready to see him and hang out with him again, for sure! i've volunteered to pick him up at the airport (and no, it's not ONLY because i want a starbucks grande venti latte).  i really can't wait to hear his stories of places with names like belo horizonte. doesn't a place with a name like that sound just wonderful? (more wonderful than clayton, NC, in any case, which is also where he was.)

i'm also looking forward to seeing the D60 and what pictures he managed to take with it. i don't really know what it thought of being sent out into the world without me and i'm a little sad that it's been to brazil and i have not, but i know it was safe in husband's capable hands. i told him he had to take a few hotel mirror self-portraits, but i'm not sure he did that (for some strange reason, he doesn't always do what i say). it's just that the D60 will expect it.

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husband said the other day that we should go to the states sometime this year. 

my response, "oh yeah, i just got a sale email from KLM and there are super cheap tix to joburg, like under 4000DKK or something like that." 

husband said, "that's not the states."

oops.

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watching all of the leaders arrive at the G20 summit in london it struck me that they're there to talk stimulating the world economy and about the environment and such, but they all pulled up in giant, bulky, beefed up armored gas guzzling big-ass cars and vans and SUVs.  is that really any better than the message sent by those assholes from the carmakers who showed up for their first meetings in their private jets? i also thought that instead of "growth" in the subtitle of the G20 conference, it maybe should have said "sustainability." because we can't sustain the kind of growth we saw. we've only got the one planet, you see.

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this is a screenshot of my flicker view stats. check out the spike when my kitchen was on apartment therapy! i normally have a rather steady amount of  views (between 200-400), but that day it shot clear up to 1854. it helped that the moo people tweeted another of my photos that day. i guess i don't really care about any of this one way or another, but i thought it was pretty funny visually.

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this is the weekend where we attend the wedding party for husband's sister. i'm so excited to see what they thinks of their atelierBB goodies. the party will be at the wonderful gamla kassen in landskrona.  these shots are from another party we attended there early last summer.

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note, i've been on a roll of late and put up a bunch of single entries over on balderdash, be sure to go check them out. they're autobiographical, but there's a couple of pretty funny ones.

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they promise sunshine and up to 15 degrees this weekend, so you won't see much of me here. i hope the weather is fine where you are and your weekend is filled with laughter!

scenes from a day

what follows are scenes from my day. i got up at 5:45 a.m. and headed for oslo. see if you can tell when i started using the new nikon D300 that came with my new job. i'll admit, it's pretty good work if you can get it...

shots on the metro

love the double-exposure feel caused by lights in the tunnel and the reflection

you KNOW i had to go there

venti latte

i want!

love!

glossy magazines

norli bookstore

i leave you with the shocking fact that 530 container vessels are laid up around the world. that means taken out of use and "parked" in a fjord or bay or anchorage somewhere. that's a serious lotta vessels and even more containers!  this GEC is scary stuff.

more tomorrow evening when i get home.

ASIDE:  to be honest, i'm not sure you can tell from these particular pictures when i switched cameras...but the location should give it away. i was sneaking a lot of the D300 pix, so i wasn't always looking through the viewfinder or holding still. the proof will show eventually tho'. and the camera feels AMAZING in my hands.

photo obsessions

i'm a sucker for a new photographic obsession. last may, on a trip to singapore i bought my nikon D60 and when i got to manila and found my friends were all into lomo, i bought a couple of analog lomography cameras--a diana+ and a fisheye. soon after that, in munich, i stumbled onto a store with the lomo stuff and bought an octomat as well. that meant that i was schlepping a bag around with no less than four cameras in it at any given moment. that was madness. and it tapered off a bit (i don't carry the lomo cameras around anymore as much as i probably should). but it was mostly because i discovered through the viewfinder photography or TtV, as it's usually called around the internet. and that called for, yes, you guessed it, another camera. one which has a viewfinder large enough to use your DSLR to take a picture of that viewfinder. it helps if you mask it off somehow to make it dark enough for your DSLR to autofocus (you'd need extra arms to hold it all if you didn't use autofocus).

but, in case this is all gobbledy-gook, allow me to back up and explain.

my diana+ (and my rockin' pilgrim sunglasses)

first the lomography thing. lomography is a photo trend wherein people take old cameras made by the "lomo" people or holga or other old russian (read: soviet) cameras in general (why oh why didn't i buy some of those when i was in russia in '94?). these were cheap plastic cameras made and sold in the 50s and onward. they are extremely simple and have all sorts of light leaks and quirks which make for some really interesting and unpredictable photos. you can add to the effect by loading them with slide film (preferably expired) and then "cross-processing" it in the chemicals for regular film. you might have seen "cross-process" effects in Photoshop or Lightroom presets that are called this. they often given a bluish or reddish cast to the photos. but you can get it naturally by using an old fashioned film camera and cross-processing.

what got me intrigued about the lomo thing was an exhibition i saw in manila with displays of photos that a whole army of lomo fanatics took during one day at the wonderful serendra shopping centre at manila's fort bonifacio. the way of displaying multiples of the photos in big expanses was just so cool, as were the colors that you get using cross-processed expired slide film:

photo exhibit in manila

who wouldn't fall in love with this?

now the diana+ and the real holgas all use 120 film, but the fisheye and my octomat use ordinary 35mm film. here are some of the pictures i've taken with my lomo cameras, as well as a cheap penguin-shaped camera that came with some candy (those are funnily enough, some of the best ones).

fisheye sabin

diana+ - double exposure and film not advanced

expired slide film - cross-processed

penguin candy camera

expired slide film - cross-processed

octomat

from one shutter depression, this takes 8 photos over 2 seconds

expired 35mm slide film - cross processed

diana + - shot of cameras on the table

including the cyber-shot that's in the sony-ericsson phone

and our old SLR Canon AE-1 program (a classic)

if you want to see some really awesome lomography, check out my friend liane's photostream on flickr. she really knows what she's doing. me, i'm just playing around. some of her photos were part of that exhibit in manila that got it all started for me. 

for lomo enthusiasts, the beauty is in the unpredictability. film that doesn't advance, light leaks, double exposures. all of the "mistakes" are what makes it fabulous. and there's something really appealing in that. a chaos that i'm drawn to. plus, it's like the old days where you actually take your pictures in to be developed and have to wait for them. awesome. there's something that just feels good about waiting (however impatiently one might do that). we don't wait often enough for gratification these days.

which brings me to TtV photography. in a way, you get some of the appeal of the lomography thing...unpredictable, grainy, out-of-focus shots, but with instant gratification, since you actually take them with your DSLR.

the first camera i tried out the TtV thing with was this beauty:

and after reading a few tutorials online, i fashioned this contraption and took some pictures:

and took this:

the only editing i tend to do with TtVis cropping, because when you download your pictures, they look like this:

but otherwise, i leave them alone because what you want is the blurriness, the dirt that's on the viewfinder on the old camera and the generally speaking, the quirks. with this really old camera (it's from 1901), i love the shape of the viewfinder, but most of the "right" cameras for TtV photography are square, like it comes out with my rolleicord, which was the next acquisition. since i wanted to do "real" TtV photography. the problem is that i haven't really been able to try it out properly until yesterday because it's been so cloudy and you need good light for TtV.

for my rolleicord, i made a contraption out of a box that a bottle of calvados came in. i painted the inside of the box with matte black paint, then secured it at the right size around the camera with a couple of pieces of duct tape:

my rolleicord and my contraption

rolleicord with contraption in place

picture by sabin of me taking a TtV picture with my Nikon D60

with the rolleicord, my pictures look like this before i crop/straighten them:

and like this after:

it looks like i've applied all sorts of processing, but i haven't done any at all, aside from the crop & straighten. that's what's cool to me about TtV--getting the processing effects naturally. i've been a little fed up lately with some of the over-processed photography i see out there. some part of me feels it's dishonest, at the same time as i am strangely drawn to it, because it's FUN to process your photos. this way, with TtV, i can satisfy both parts of my divided personality--the naturalist and the geek who loves software and gadgetry.

the beauty is that you don't HAVE to pay $300 for a used rolleicord TLR to do TtV photography, you can pick up an argus 75 or a kodak duaflex, which is what most people out there are using. you should be able to find one at a flea market for $10-25 (they made tons of them). i have yet to try my $10 brownie 620 , but there will be other days of sunshine and i expect it will work just fine too. you also don't have to have a macro lens for your DSLR, you just have to experiment and get your contraption the right length so your kit lens will do the autofocus thing.

so, what are you waiting for?