Stupid

May 23rd, 2021

This album represents a fairly unthematic, miscellaneous collection of photographs. At this point, I was feeling fatigued by how much theory I was putting into each subsequent photo project, and I began lugging my camera around more out of habit than an actual desire to photograph. In this particular setting, I was rewarded for that habit. As you'll see, this post runs the gamut of my usual subjects: flowers, birds, textures, Sam, etc.

My interest in time-consuming photo projects fluctuates, and during the lulls I convince myself that if I spend time taking pictures then I'm not actually present to enjoy the world. It was the striking texture in "Foliostratus" that compelled me to start photographing at all, but I restricted myself to only shoot when necessary and not "hunt" for images so to speak.

This limited interest would extend throughout the rest of 2021, although I would muster up enough ambition to photograph an album every few months. I was realizing that living on my own with no family trips to incentivize me and no school projects to prompt ideas forced me to rediscover how to create photo opportunities on my own.

A light in the distance

My brother-in-law was gracious enough to lend me his old Minolta camera around the same time I was studying film photography at San Jose State. I was fortunate enough with the limited lab hours to get most of my best shots developed and printed, but once the semester ended I had very limited access to the darkrooms. I had put off developing the remainder of my rolls until some point in the future, but once COVID hit and I graduated, I lost that access for good.

I made a half-hearted attempt to locate other darkrooms, but as fellow students had mentioned before, darkroom labs are a dying business and the few that still exist were too remote for me to reach. I resorted to developing at Foto Express in downtown San Jose. I also made some small 5x7 prints, but I knew that if I wanted to have a permanent digital record, I needed something more sophisticated than scanning photo prints on a standard printer.

I saved up some money and purchased an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner, which was designed specifically to produce high-quality scans. My main interest in this model was a film tray that could hold 35mm negatives and a software that could automatically target the negatives and invert them to positives.

Tech jargon aside, it was a much more efficient tool that produced higher-quality scans of my film. I went through the arduous process of scanning all my work, which took several weeks.

A light in the distance was part of a project in my film photography class, although I can't remember the specific requirements. For whatever reason, I dropped the concept in favor of photographing Sam. Looking back, I don't regret the switch considering some of my favorite photos of Sam were from that shoot, but I had a much better concept that I dropped as an excuse to get some pretty shots of my girlfriend.

My original idea was to photograph business after closing hours. I wanted to examine spaces meant to be populated but now in isolation, and there was a thrill photographing in a manner that was suspicious, particularly at banks. I was interested in liminal spaces even before the aesthetic was trending online, as I'm sure many who pioneered the genre were. Liminal spaces is a completely separate tangent, but if you're interested, I'd recommend this video by Solar Sands explaining its origin and aesthetic.

It was once here

My brother-in-law was gracious enough to lend me his old Minolta camera around the same time I was studying film photography at San Jose State. I was fortunate enough with the limited lab hours to get most of my best shots developed and printed, but once the semester ended I had very limited access to the darkrooms. I had put off developing the remainder of my rolls until some point in the future, but once COVID hit and I graduated, I lost that access for good.

I made a half-hearted attempt to locate other darkrooms, but as fellow students had mentioned before, darkroom labs are a dying business and the few that still exist were too remote for me to reach. I resorted to developing at Foto Express in downtown San Jose. I also made some small 5x7 prints, but I knew that if I wanted to have a permanent digital record, I needed something more sophisticated than scanning photo prints on a standard printer.

I saved up some money and purchased an Epson Perfection V600 Photo Scanner, which was designed specifically to produce high-quality scans. My main interest in this model was a film tray that could hold 35mm negatives and a software that could automatically target the negatives and invert them to positives.

Tech jargon aside, it was a much more efficient tool that produced higher-quality scans of my film. I went through the arduous process of scanning all my work, which took several weeks.

Separate to my class project, I later visited Portland during the holidays. You might recognize the photographs in this collection because it was at the same time I shot An Eagle In Your Mind and Misery Trail, and I wanted to shoot both digitally and on film. Of course, given the nature of film, it isn't surprising that you guys aren't seeing these until almost 4 years later.

What I love specifically about this series is how the format in conjunction with the landscape makes the photographs feel much older, particularly with the barren landscapes of Smith Rock. Not having seen these photographs in ages, I viewed my own photos almost as 19th century colonial survey shots of the untamed west.