first day of work

...Officially.

I worked a 3 hour beginning/introduction session with the director Saturday afternoon, which went very well. But today was my first day in front of all 14 of the students.

I'm going to be working with these students for 3 months. All of them paid thousands of dollars for this intensive program. It was important that I make a good impression.

For those of you who know me personally, it is fair to say that I am a bit of a perfectionist at my job, yes? Like everyone else in the world, I have my off-days but I was not going to let today be one of them. For 6 hours, I pulled out all the stops. I did some of the craziest, dynamic, hardest poses I've ever done for a life drawing session. I feel like I've ran a marathon - I have that feeling of extremely productive exhaustion. But did I set the bar too high for myself? I don't think I can physically top what I did today. It's close to impossible - something in me would snap or break.

But maybe not. I felt good enough to go for an hour and a half hike around the river, and it is not a flat hike. But I took it fairly easy, and snapped some lovely photos with my digicam. Kind of a test shoot for what I will shoot with my precious borrowed (from awesome friend, Dave Levingston) Mamiya C330 and only 12 rolls of black and white film.

So enjoy the photos.









Tomorrow or Tuesday I will go around town and shoot various notable buildings and establishments. Still trying to get a feel for the town, and not be so afraid while walking down the road. There are very few sidewalks, and the sidewalks they have are very narrow. And the roads are barely bigger than a one-lane road we see in the states. And they aren't one-way streets. ...You have to be very careful going around corners.

To be fair, european cars are significantly smaller... but not proportional to the size of the residential streets.

Anyway, I'm going to finish my green tea and pass out. Have to be up in 10 hours to do it all over again! :)

35mm

I branched away from my medium format fixation for once, and shot some 35mm.

I like.

This is off my bulk roll of TMax 400, and developed myself. I need to fashion a more effective way to hang-dry the negatives. It's never been a problem with the 120 since the negatives are only about 3 feet long, as compared to a 36 exposure roll of 35, which is more like 5 feet long.

These also need to be scanned better.

Details, details.

And one of my developing reels broke. That will make developing much less efficient, since I have 4 more rolls to develop.



Ah, well.


No nudes this post, but I hope you enjoy these nonetheless.

Superior Hiking Trail

Cascade Shore

Cascade Shore

Off the Superior Hiking Trail

Water Study

Leaf

Lilies and Ant

edit: some more...

Split Rock

Water Study 2

Flowers

Water Study 3

Hope everyone has a great holiday weekend!

Developing! Part II

So...the scanner works... sort of.

I spent over 3 hours figuring out all the bullshit (pardon my french... but, well, I am french. Anyway, I digress) including finding the semi-secret covering over the top light source (hopefully you know what I'm talking about. It's he light source that allows for transparent negatives to be scanned correctly, instead of the light source from the bottom that scans reflective surfaces).

So I get that figured out, but now I need to find the film holder that comes with the scanner. Okay... so I spend 10 minutes looking for that - found it - and guess what? The two squares reserved for, what I can only imagine to be, 120 film is about 2 cm short on all sides. And of course, this is a huge deal - I dont want a third of my film not recorded... not funny. So I end up having to place in manually... not a big deal... except for when I scan it, the width in which it scans is also 2 cm short and, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to change the settings so that it will scan more area.

So I improvise. But the only solution I can come up with is very time consuming. Oh well, it's a little more invested effort. Not a biggie. It just requires scanning each negative twice and then combining the two in photoshop to include both ends.

There are three computers in this house that I use. The main one is this laptop on which I'm writing. It is a great companion, even after 5 years with a bum fan. Then there's my grandma's desktop that's mind-numbingly slow, but the only computer that has the drivers and software installed for the scanner. And then there's my desktop Mac in my room where I have a copy of photoshop, but no access to internet.

It's been a bit of a run-around today, but man... I'm only slightly (very, very slightly) annoyed compared to the joy of being able to see my film bigger than 6X6 cm and, of course, in negative form.

There will maybe be a couple more to come in the next couple of days.

15 seconds at f4.5

And one of my double exposure experiments:

_____________

Camera: Lubitel 166 Universal
Film: TMax 100.
Developer: TMax

TMax was my choice of developer this first go-around because it was in a convenient size, inexpensive, and frankly the NatCam store I went to didn't have many other options that were in my price range (at the moment).

Willow River

On the last day on our trip, Dave and I woke up at 5am to go shoot at Willow River State Park. I was really looking forward to shooting there, as the waterfalls and cascades are absolutely huge and gorgeous. Keep in mind that when we shot this image, there was a fisherman about 100 yard from us, no doubt more distracted by the fact that we were disrupting the fish then there's a young nude woman posing upstream. He didn't even look at us when we passed behind him on the way out.

An important note to mention: The hike in is pretty easy, but the hike out will definitely take your breath away, even if you crawl back.

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I love being in nature, especially near water and in these wonderful settings. They are so peaceful and awe-inspiring. The roaring white noise of the water almost forces you to concentrate on your surroundings and to be in the moment.

I think I'll be taking Erin here. There definitely wont be enough hours in the day when she's here.

_________________

Dave Swanson.