There Is No Cat

52@52 Week 39

Well, I really screwed this one up.

I shot this last weekend with the Intrepid and some of the New55 from the automated coater. I developed for three minutes instead of the two that they recommend, which is what I started doing with the hand-coated stuff. This came out overexposed, so I think I’ll try two minutes for the next attempt. The print looked a lot worse than this, very blown out.

But worse, the angle looks awful. I leveled the tripod, thought I levelled the camera, but I must have bumped the rotator on the back of the camera slightly when I was putting the Polaroid film holder in place. Crap. Oh well, it’s not like Sandy Hook, where I shot this, is a million miles away.

This is week 39, which means I’m three-quarters done with this project. It’s good to have this to spur me to shoot, but some weeks the results are less than inspiring. I guess that’s okay; the idea is the keep shooting and get better.

I did go out last Sunday with my Supersense 66/6 pinhole camera (built on top of the Impossible Project’s film processor unit, 500 of them in the world) for World Pinhole Photography Day. But the film I used, Impossible Project Color 600 Beta from December, didn’t work very well. I got lots of weird orange spots on my shots. I suppose there’s a certain charm to them, but I didn’t feel like using one of them for this project.

Posted at 3:26 PM
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52@52 Week 38

It’s “Roid Week” on Flickr this week, where people make a special effort to post Polaroid-style instant film photos (no fakes, thank you, only real pictures). So I’ve been shooting a lot this week. I decided to return to my experiments with New55 4×5 film.

I shot this last weekend with the Intrepid and some New55 from the last batch that had hand-coated paper. They’ve automated the coating process to try to make the product less painful to make and more economically feasible. So this is the last of a breed. And as I’ve seen before, there’s a big difference between the negative and the print.

The prints aren’t without their charm, but they’re not high fidelity. I recently got my two packs for backing them on Kickstarter. I look forward to seeing if the automation makes a difference on that count. They announced the other day that they’ve completed fulfilling the Kickstarter backing orders. Congratulations to them! I hope this means that the production is financially viable and continues.

One of the pictures I posted on the first day of Roid Week got picked up for Flickr Explore, their page where they post photos they think are worthy of more attention. It was shot outside the parameters of this project, so I didn’t make it my photo here, but I’ll include it as a bonus shot here.

I shot this with my Polaroid 250 on well-expired Polaroid Chocolate pack film. I was very happy with how this turned out. Looks like other people were, too. I had to turn Flickr app notifications off on my phone the morning this was posted to Explore because my wrist kept buzzing every 30 seconds. I wound up with 16,998 views of this shot on Flickr and 232 people favorited it. Feel kind of weird.

Posted at 7:33 AM
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52@52 Week 37

I went out at lunch time yesterday with the Travelwide and went to the Leonardo marina. I noticed this house at the time. But the light was wrong, so I went back after work, around 5:30.

I’ll probably have to go back to do this subject justice. When I saw it at lunch, the flags were unfurled in the wind, and you could see what made them distinctive; the US flag was upside down, and there is a Confederate flag at porch level. I don’t think you can see that clearly in this shot. You also can’t read the No Trespassing sign, and don’ get the sense of chaos from the yard. Maybe I didn’t get close enough. The wind being wrong kind of made that moot. I’ll go back to try to get this right. Maybe. It’s kind of a scary place. The marina wasn’t very picturesque otherwise at this time of year. Very few boats in the water right now, unlike Belford, which is for working boats instead of pleasure boats.

Just like last week, self-developed Velvia 100. Last week, I rated it at ISO 50 and it still came out underexposed. This week I rated it at 100 and it was worse. My spot meter is still broken, so I’m using my iPhone as a meter. It hasn’t been a problem on other shots, which give me histograms of perfect exposures when I scan, but for Velvia, it doesn’t work so well. Next time I’ll bracket the other way. Took me a while to get the hang of Kodachrome, too, when I was shooting it.

Posted at 2:12 AM
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52@52 Week 36

I went out at lunch time yesterday and shot two frames of Velvia 100 with the Travelwide in Keansburg. I developed them both this morning. They both sucked. This one sucked less.

I like the colors, but the framing leaves a lot to be desired. Feeling better, but still not 100%, so this was as much as I felt capable of shooting this week. Hopefully next week I’ll be back in the office and shooting in the city.

Posted at 2:10 PM
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