ever-fixed mark

I’m going to have to start a separate category for “Pictures Taken with My Mobile Phone during My Commute,” if I actually survive long enough to implement it. Unfortunately most of the amazing shots I take while I should be driving turn out like this:

This van is transporting the Christian Electrician, complete with a little golden cross logo in the center. I had to click through two Google pages to locate that link because, believe it or not, there are quite a few Christian electricians in New England who explicitly bill themselves as such.

My book club just read Zeitoun (a fast, gripping read), and it made me think about the title character, a Muslim, who selected a rainbow as his company logo without realizing it was a gay symbol. He thought about changing it because he didn’t want to alienate potential clients, but he discovered that there was enough gay custom that he had more work than he could handle just marketing to that niche.

Good Lord, that was an exhausting vacation. What with the dinners and the parties and CHRISTMAS! and New York during the Blizzard of the Century and ice skating and skiing and snowboarding I can’t wait to go back to work for some peace and quiet.

On a day when both children were unexpectedly at home (you’re open during the blizzard, Day Care, but not on New Year’s Eve?), I decided to take them on a little photo safari. I gave each of them a loaded Holga (wonderful thing about a plastic camera; your child can drop it in a snowbank with impunity), and we went out to the mall to see what we could shoot. I showed the boys how to advance the film, set the depth of field, and trip the shutter. (There are only two aperture settings on a Holga - “sunny day” and “cloudy day” - so they’re hardly worth changing.) I tried to give some pointers on composition, but they were having so much fun I didn’t want to restrict them too much. The kids were very excited, and it was all I could do to stop them from shooting a whole roll in the first five minutes.

When we got home, I showed them how to load the rolls into the developing tank, an admittedly unexciting demonstration given that it all takes place inside the changing bag. Then I asked them to suit up to help me develop them. Here’s Minor all suited up in his paint smock and rubber gloves:

After I had developed three rolls - two from Aitch, one from Minor - I realized that Minor hadn’t really gotten the hang of advancing the film. His style tended heavily toward the impressionistic, the result of multiple exposures:

Aitch’s style was more documentary. Here’s the coffee shop. It has a nice industrial feel:

Here’s a street scene. Aitch’s height gives him a good perspective here:

I encouraged him to try to fill the frame with an image, and he produced this shot of the courthouse:

And we got the ghost bus! Ghostly, no?

Finally, here’s a portrait of me trying to discern the number of exposures left in the film in my camera. This is one of my favorite pictures of myself, and it’s not just because my face is obscured. I think he really got something of me here.

Husband and I bought a digital camera right before Aitch arrived. It was state-of-the-art at the time, but now it’s not, and the battery doesn’t hold a charge. We rarely use it, nor do we have plans to replace it. Husband doesn’t see the point of lugging around an extra device for pictures and prefers to use his iPhone when the mood strikes. I’ve switched to film, largely black-and-white film that I can process myself at low cost.

A few weeks ago, Husband and I split up the boys for the day. Husband and Minor took the dog on a walk around the pond; Aitch and I went to the beach. We each took our cameras. Husband was able to e-mail me the following happy snap before either of us had returned home.

Several weeks later, when I finally got around to developing my film, I was able to produce this record of my day with Aitch:

It’s a good thing we have the iPhone, because if it were solely up to me, the pictorial record of our lives would look like the Addams Family Photo Album.

I know that this isn’t a great shot, but I wanted to post it as a record of my first experiment with infrared film. Underwhelmed? Yeah, me too. Infrared typically produces dramatic effects, turning foliage white and skies dark blue. Sometimes this looks kind of gimmicky, but I’ve seen some infrared beach photographs that had dramatic dark skies and otherworldly lighting on the subject, and I wanted to give that a try. Googling around just now, I discovered that I should have been using a filter along with the infrared film. Next time, I will take care to read the WHOLE internet before venturing out with my camera.

Another fun fact I learned from Wikipedia: Paul Simon changed the words to “Kodachrome” from “Everything looks worse in black and white” to “Everything looks better in black and white” for his Central Park concert. That was bugging me, because I knew I had heard both versions, but couldn’t figure out why there would be a “better” lyric, because it doesn’t make sense within the context of the song.

After five long days at my new job, I was awarded a well-deserved holiday, and not a moment too soon. And if we can only persuade the Kenyans to run the Boston Marathon on a regular basis, then I’ll be able to maintain this delightful schedule of five days on, three days off.

What to do with my day off? Well, now that I have developed a number of rolls of 120 film, I have been thinking about branching out to 35mm. I decided to take advantage of the fine weather to shoot a roll with Husband’s pinhole camera, which I haven’t used for over two years, according to the post. So I dragged out the tripod and headed out to the salt marsh.

Pinhole cameras are the lowest of the low tech. There is only one aperture setting; shutter speed is controlled by your steady hand and “one Mississippi, two Mississippi”; and there is no viewfinder for framing the shot, so you just point the box at your (preferably still) subject and hope for the best.

Landscape photography is not really my thing, but it was fun to try something different. Voilà:

These steps lead down from an observation post at the wildlife sanctuary. We’re still waiting for leaves here in New England. The film was overexposed, so I did a bit of adjusting on the computer. This shot looks completely different on three different computer monitors, so I’m not sure what it looks like for you.

Et voici:

See what I mean about being unable to frame the shot? This condemned shack sits alongside the only route to the island. “No evacuation possible” refers to the fact that if the road washes out in an emergency, the islanders will be swimming for it. “Got KI?” is a reminder to keep a supply of potassium iodide on hand, in case there is a nuclear accident severe enough to pose a threat of thyroid cancer, but not so severe that you’d be instant toast, in which case the KI wouldn’t do much good. Potassium iodide is something of a local obsession — the emergency response calendars they hand out every year remind you to get some, and if you send your kids to public school you have to sign a permission slip authorizing the school nurse to administer it. I think the pinhole effect adds a nice apocalyptic aura to the picture.

The pinhole experiment was so much fun, I find myself thinking, “How low can I go?” How can I push the boundaries of photographic technology even further…back? Then I saw this article in the New York Times and immediately though, “That’s going to be my next camera.”