first piece of 2012! (finally)

I've had a very hectic last few weeks but it's so good to get back in the studio again! Nothing like multiple out-of-state trips, crazy snowstorms (with power outage), and piles of house guests to throw off your schedule. Anyway.

This is my mom's little Brownie camera again posing for a drawing. Can I just say again how much I love it? It's so adorable.

I wanted to get a little different effect than the last drawing so I tried a more subtle monochromatic wash-y thing with the watercolors and the gouache. I thought I would see how the image transfers worked over the top and I think I like what happened. There's nothing like being able to take the things I use in Photoshop and plop them straight onto a painting. Incidentally, the "Drug Store" stamp is from the back of a photo that my grandpa took and that was where he and my mom got their film developed when she was a kid.

film: roll 2!

I had family visiting so the scanning project got slowed down a bit but here's some more film. This is the roll out of the Yashica (44A if you're interested) and I really like it! The fourth photo is a double exposure but it's hard to tell that it is. So here's a few shots and the rest are here.

Oh, and this is from the negatives...finally worked out the problems I was having with the scanner.

film: roll 1!

I got my rolls of film back today...woo!

I'm still scanning everything but here's the first roll. Yes, I scanned the prints but I don't want to hear about it. My scanner which came with a negative and slide scanning accessory is apparently terrible at scanning negatives. They looked awful. I suppose I might be doing something wrong but I got impatient so I scanned the prints.

For some reason the prints were sort of sepia toned so I killed that off in photoshop so you can see how they are supposed to look. I think, anyway...the box said black and white so I don't know why they were so brown.

I tried to get a variety of light conditions but I'm not sure I can even tell so I think at least for this black and white film I'll just go for it if I see something I like. Everything came out pretty darn good and this is the camera with no focusing, no shutter speed adjustment, just a button and a winder. I think I'm in love! :)

Sadly the roll of film that was sitting for decades in the Pentax was completely blank. Not vague or hard to see, just blank as far as I can tell. I was really hoping there would be something interesting on it.

things I've learned in the past week or so: a list.

(Cat included not to show scale but because you can't take a photo in this house without a cat stepping into the shot)

While talking to my mom about my pinhole lens for my digital camera she mentioned she still had some of her old cameras. So when I was home visiting this month I had a look around the basement to see what I could find and possibly use for my own purposes.

The little Brownie Holiday at the top is the camera is the one she used when she was a kid and it appears to be still in working order as far as I can tell. The other two look like they still work too...the Pentax takes 35mm film so it will be easy to find out if it's still working but the other two take 127 film. I assumed that anything I found that took an odd film size would only be useful for looking at or doing through-the-viewfinder images but apparently you can still get film for them online and even still get it developed, although not surprisingly you have to send it out. I think I'll get some film just to see what they can do. This may be a short-lived project since I don't really miss having to deal with developing film now that I have a digital camera but the temptation to try Mom's little Brownie is too strong to ignore :)

So to sum up some things I've learned:

I want to buy film for a camera which hasn't happened in forever

You can buy some really weird film formats online

Film people (as in, people who scorn digital cameras) are kind of scary

My mom keeps a lot of random stuff in the basement

And some things I've learned recently that do not involve photography:

If you think that you can go riding even when you have a miserable cold because once you've gotten the saddle on the horse, the rest should be easy, think again! Once you're away from your handy step to get up on the horse, you have to get on from the ground! And in my case this meant that even while standing on the uphill side to get a better start I still almost didn't make it. Which would have meant walking back to the house.

Double check that your new mp3s actually are on your mp3 player before driving back to your hometown (5 hours there and 5 hours back, for me).

30% chance of rain might mean anything from "a 30% chance it will rain at all" to "it will rain 30% of the time today" to " the air is made up of 30% rain." I had one very exciting ride this week :P

pinhole Hawaii

Cathy mentioned pinhole photography a few months ago and I thought it sounded interesting but I can't really see myself taking photos with film. So as I was poking around looking at pinhole photos I saw something about digital pinhole photography which seems much more like my kind of thing - instant gratification. :) I tried making my own pinhole but it was not working that well so I gave up and bought a commercial version.

I hadn't had time to play with it before we went on vacation so I tried it out on waves and palm trees and such. I kind of love it and I'm going to see what else it can do now that we're back home.

little vacation!

We went to Hawaii with my sweetie's family last week. We got some good family time in - they all live two states away so we don't see them nearly often enough. I played with my new camera and lenses (although I must always add the disclaimer that I'm not a proper photographer). So I took pictures of fishes in tide pools (above)...

...little bitty crabs on the beach...

...and as required by law, I took many pictures of the sunset from the beach.

Of course, now I'm feeling all jet-laggy and weird so I should probably have another vacation to recover from this one, right? :)

tiny birds

It's that time of year again...the garden is growing out of control (including the weeds, unfortunately), there's a horse who needs exercising, and I have several sewing projects to put together for summer.

So there's no art in this post but am I apologizing? I am not. Things happen. It's ok. The only problem is that I tend to post here when I have art to show you so when I haven't been in the studio much I sort of feel like I have nothing to post. But today I am sharing with you some tiny little hummingbirds so I hope that will be ok :) I got a zoomier lens for my camera and I've been practicing on these little guys. Hummingbirds are so tiny I've never gotten a good picture of one before. They're all buzzing around looking for a fight so if you go out in my yard right now you're likely to be divebombed and chirped at within an inch of your life.

whales

My mom was over visiting last week so I don't have any art-y things to show you but I do have whales! We went out on a boat and saw gray whales migrating past the Washington coast. I've never been out on the water whale watching before - my only other whale sightings were from land so they were not exactly very close.

I love having house guests because that seems like the only time I do things like this. Even though it's not very far away I never take the time to do some of the tourist-y things.

spring at last!

Happy Spring to my northern hemispherical friends! Not much has come up in the garden as of yet but my hellebores are going strong despite getting buried in snow a few weeks ago :) And whatever flowering tree I have there is juuuust about ready to flower. Oh, and the spotty green leaves are my pulmonaria popping up.

I feel like I'm coming out of hibernation, too...do you get that feeling in spring? One day of sunshine and I'm whizzing around doing things in the house and weeding in the garden and kind of all over the place.

I took these pics with my new camera which does not have a handy little screen that I can tilt up towards me when I'm trying to photograph something down at ground level. My old camera was great for this sort of thing (although not the greatest camera). So I tried to point the camera up under the hellebores and click and then look what I got. Not the most efficient method but I got some interesting compositions that way :)

more layers

Digital collages, 5x7".

Making these is a good excuse to try taking more random pictures and I'm liking my new camera. I haven't had a camera that had a manual focus option in several years so I'm taking a bunch of odd blurry and light-spot-y pictures to use as textures for these collages.

The auto-focus setting is great, too, though. It focuses so much faster than the old camera. I'm taking lots of cute kitty pictures because it will actually focus while the cat is still doing the cute thing! With my old camera, I got lots of pictures 3 seconds after the cat did something cute :P I don't think I (or anyone else) wants this to turn into a cat blog, so I'll try to restrain myself from posting all cat photos.

In believe-it-or-not news, the sun actually was out today.