3 posts tagged “minolta”

On Easter weekend I took a whirlwind trip to Chicago. Only staying one night, I didn't have a lot of time to venture out into the parts of the city with the grandest gothic architecture and some of my favourite haunts, but I did manage to take along the Minolta that B gave me, and I had an absolute riot shooting up the city in black and white.

I took many of my shots at night, and didn't expect them to turn out at all. Having seen the first set that's come back I've been pleasantly surprised at how hard it is to screw anything up with this particular point-and-shoot baby. I love the Minolta. B got some extraordinary shots on it when he was doing the steam engine graveyard on one of his own treks, and while I've yet to capture anything that dramatic yet, I've had a hell of a lot of fun running around learning to be unapologetically brash with a lens.

When I went to pick the pictures up, I was disappointed to see that only one of the three sets that I had shot was back, and that they had messed it up processing true black and white film to a colour format, and that they had also seemed to lose the other two sets. I was relieved to find that the first set turned out rather cool inspite of the processing mixup, and that the missing film showed up and I was able to pick the negatives up today. I've not had a chance to look at them yet, but I wanted to share some of my favourite shots from the first batch.

 

By rights this shot should never have turned out.  It was taken in a glass elevator that was descending rapidly, so I expected some level of motion blur, but there was none.  Chicago is magic for me, and the architecture of this building is one of the reasons why.  A combination art deco and Middle Eastern gothic.  Your head is constant whirling around and looking up to take in the forest of extraordinary builds all around you.  How could it not be a grand city with the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright?  In this particular shot (unretouched) I love the way the modern skyscraper in the background pales in comparison to the sturdy old deco build in the forefront.  Kind of a cool metaphor for what makes this city so spectacular.

 

This was also shot in the same glass elevator, now almost at the bottom.  I was again surprised by the absence of motion blur on the taxi that was racing by.  Not a spectacular shot by any means, but I love the architecture of the builds.

 

 

Every single time I visit Chicago this bloke is out on one of the main street corners in the Magnificent Mile.  I've never heard him utter a word.  He covers himself head to toe in thick metallic paint, and does the robot dance next to a massive boombox.  There are always huge crowds around him, and I find myself just mesmerized watching him.  This was at the end of a very long night, when he was just packing up.  I asked if I could snap his pic, and caught my breath as he leaned so far over I thought he would fall.  He has amazing control of his limbs beyond the dancing, locking himself as rigid as a statue.  Was just thrilled to find him once again on the visit when I was photojournaling a city I'm so in love with.  He's one of my favourite memories every time.

 

This was just a delicious little piece of serendipity, since I'd just finished making a set of Victrolas for my studio in Second Life.  I was walking along the street at night and stopped dead in front of this window.  The Victrola was gorgeous, and sat beside a handful of other antiquities that made this shop window absolutely stunning at night.

Atlas ...

Poor guy's shoulders must get tired.

Cannot remember what building this clock is atop, but it looked terminally cool at night.

 

 

 

Almost seems wrong to be whoring pics of shop windows when there is so much more to Chicago, but of all the cities I've been in, the shop fronts in this one are so much more like art.  I was amazed that these pics turned out at all given so many of them were taking whilst walking, and without a flash.  It's the first time I've used true black and white film in about 25 years, and it was the perfect city to shoot in that format.  An odd little accident that the photoshop accidentally processed the film to colour instead, which uses a very different set of chemicals in the development.  I groaned when they handed me the negatives and told me about the mistake, but actually kind of intrigued by the result.

 

 

 

You know how during a shoot there is that -one- shot that you desperately want to turn out?  This is that shot.  I was walking across the road and found this gentleman standing on the corner playing the sax.  I'd caught him earlier and just loved listening.  There was a crowd around him, and I was sure that given the absence of the flash, the fact that it was very dark at night, and the movement of my walking while snapping would have made this a write-off.  This Minolta Roan sent me is my favourite camera to shoot with.  I get the coolest vignetting around the edges of some shots, interesting light leaks and scratches, and a rock-steady picture in spite of whatever jostling I may be giving it in the process.  This bloke is part of the flavour of Chicago and one of the reasons I love wandering about at night so much.  There is always something going on.  It feels like the city never sleeps.

I'd spent hours writing a posting and laying out my shots from my first photo shoot in March with the junk store film cameras, but lost it.  Rather than trying to recreate the monster (perhaps it was a sign), I'll simply tuck them in unceremoniously here, and let the comments I tucked into each speak for themselves.

I've since received the shots I took in Chicago, and love them, but will post those separately.  I've written a bit more below these shots about some of the filters I used, and why I love B's so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I took this on. I was thrilled when I unearthed the film scanner that I forgot I even had, and was able to load my negatives straight into it. Still, I had no idea exactly what B. was going through each time he told me he was scanning a batch of 5 more pictures. I'm thinking "scan ... slap it down, press the button, it's done". Em ... no. The film scanner is meant to process the negatives properly, doing a high resolution pass and enlarging the capture to the size of a proper print. Each strip of negatives took a very long time, and inspite of lining them up perfectly (so I thought) they seemed to come out askew in the final file.

With a little prodding from B., I brought a handful of my first pictures inworld and showed him the results. As I said in my previous posting, I was really rather disappointed with what I managed to capture on film. They were rather unremarkable, and I had a bit of an aha moment when I realized that I was holding things at arm's length and really not entering the space of what I was trying to capture. Still, when B. looked at them, he saw something quite different, and in a matter of moments he was applying his Holga filter and a few others, to dramatic effect. I couldn't believe how much more alive and vital the pics looked with even the tiniest bit of tweaking, and I got excited about looking at them again with new eyes.

The next morning I reloaded my filters into Paint Shop Pro (a package that I've comfortably used for years) and reacquainted myself with the hundreds of possible effects I had at my fingertips again. I didn't want to get into heavy retouching, but rather looked to see if I could get a bit of vignetting and soften things up, make them grainer and a bit more retro, as B. had with his filters. I spent hours just playing, and I loved it. It felt like poetry touching each picture and finding it's soul, and I couldn't wait to get back the set I shot in Chicago Easter weekend.

I've gone ahead and uploaded just a handful of the original batch I took, along with some of the mods that B. did on them, and that I then did myself. This is a learning experience, and a really fun one, and I can't wait to get out and shoot again.

I know to some people it may seem terribly morbid to have spent so much time shooting in a graveyard, but it was a fascinating place to be still and simply look around and take things in. There's great drama, lots of stories, rich history and a sense of heightened presence as you wander along the winding paths through plots that are sometimes hundreds of years old.

Some of these pictures are B's mods of my originals. Very ethereal and almost romantic with the way they are dilated and softened. He gets some brilliant effects with the filters he applies. They have the capacity to turn an ordinary piece into something quite moody and immersive, and this is definitely the case with this picture.

I tend to be drawn to very old, retro photography, and like to experiment with a combination of sepia, noise and shadow filters. I love playing with light, and I am always seduced by a waterstained photo pulling me back into some lost time.

One of the sites that I've found to be invaluable the past few year's is Harald Heim's "The Plugin Site". There are literally hundreds of free filters and effects that you can download for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other standard graphics editors. Take a peek here at some of the ones you can pic up to try yourself:

http://thepluginsite.com/resources/freeff.htm

There are a handful that I draw on consistently, including Toadie's, Greg's Output Factory, the Ornamente filters, Harry's filters, and the VM toolkits. At the moment, it's a case of overkill. I'm in the honeymoon phase again, the way a kindergarten kid is when he's given his first box of crayons, but that's the point of an experimental project, right? To play and push the envelop and just have fun is an intrinsically cool way to learn.

B, you'll never know how grateful I am for the fact that you put these back in my hands again and have opened a door into something I have both missed very much, and love reclaiming again.

 

~mwah~

Me.

Back, exhausted and happy.  Two of my kids came along with me as I went out on the little quest that Baron challenged us all with today: to go out and shoot our cities with cameras that used film.  There's far too many things to even know where to start to tell the story of your city through your own eyes, so we consider today just the first installment of what we all agree will be many more adventures to come.

I took along the Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim, the Vivitar Focus Free PN2001 and the Minolta AF101R cameras that Baron was so kind to send along to me a few weeks ago.  I wasn't brave enough to try out the one that's really making me crazy: the old Kodak Tourist with bellows.  That requires a bit of thought on my part, or the arrival of some special film I've ordered to shoot with it.  I've been itching to get out and shoot, and it was the perfect sunny day.  I also took along the Canon Sureshot to see how much of a difference it makes in comparing the film results to a digital.  I have to say it felt like cheating to have it in my hands, but it allowed me to bring in a few early shots to share from my trek.

This was just a really fun outing.  My daughter and one of my sons came along, both with cameras of their own.  My son had a Viv that my dad gave him, and my daughter's seemed borked so we went and grabbed a handful of the junkiest dollar store cameras we could find in the spirit of the junk camera challenge B posed earlier.  We decided we weren't going to plan this out, but rather just start driving down toward the river front, and that if any of us noticed something that caught our fancy, we would simply get out and shoot.

 

We spent over an hour in a graveyard, getting down and laying in the dirt to get shots, and finding the most ironic things (for instance, a modern children's playground right in front of a very old mausoleum).  The thing that I found most fun was watching my kids find their own voices and express themselves in insanely creative ways.  My daughter picked up a Tim Horton's "roll up the rim to win" coffee cup someone had tossed on a grave, and when she threw it into the garbage can she cracked up saying "I wonder if they won" and then got even more curious about what was to be found in a graveyard garbage can.  So there we stood taking pics of it, with deadflowers and stray pieces of bricbrac and the losing cup, probably looking like complete dorks and loving every minute of it.

 

I'm sure people thought we were absolutely mad at what we did at times, but not one of us felt a pang of embarrassment and simply egged each other on.  At one point my son noticed another of these cups, alongside a Dr. Pepper can and a cigarette package, and decided to pierce them each on a spire of the old graveyard wrought iron fence with the mausoleum behind, taking a pic he's calling "Caffeine, Nicotine, Dead."  It was just a cool little family outing to get out and crawl around in the mud and go nuts for hours together, and we can't wait to do it again.

We ended up heading down the water front to shoot some of the sculptures in front of All Saints cathedral, and then the old rum runners grave -- the Detroit River.  It doesn't exactly sound romantic, but we're blessed with what I believe is now the longest natural (undeveloped) city waterfront in North America.  There's a beautiful sculpture garden, the Peace Fountain, and old Steam Engine called "The Spirit of Windsor" and an old Louisiana Riverboat across the way.  So many things down there that we want to go back and shoot another time.

We headed home around 6pm for some supper.  I cannot wait to process the film from the Viv and the Minolta to negatives so that I can scan them in and go wild.  At the moment, I pulled some of the pics from the digital.  We didn't haul it out and use it until the very end, so some of the best shots just aren't there, but at least it gives a tiny taste of some of the fun we had today, and a peek at my city, Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

So, thanks, B, for a wonderful, wonderful day, and for spoiling me in a way that has opened the door to some really tantalizing new adventures!  This was an awesome way to get me back out again.

(And baby, I found a damned squirrel ... ~laughs~  He obviously knew how important it was for me to capture him, because he walked right up to me and sat on his hind legs and posed.  Got the token pigeon right behind him ~grins~)

Sue.