Category Archives: Photography

Midsummer

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I’ve been working on a long post covering our East Coast vacation last year for some time now. But a disastrous combination of overwork and writer’s block has made it a struggle to get the piece out the door. In its place is this short update, along with an accompanying photo gallery.

Since Will’s promotion at the end of May, the summer has flown by. We’re past the midpoint now: this time next month, he’ll be in middle school. His time has been taken up by a series of different camps. He started the summer with a couple volleyball camps, as he was thinking about trying out for the school team next year. He followed that with a few weeks at KCAT, which has been a favorite of his for several years now, and next week, he’s attending a camp where he’ll learn to make Minecraft mods. Suffice it to say, he’s been busy.

Nestled in there was a two-week trip to Camp Campbell. He had a blast at his one-week mini-camp last summer, and was eager to stay longer this year. We drove up with his friend, Henry, and dropped the pair of them off on Sunday. After that, Julie and I were more or less on own for thirteen days—Julia more or less takes care of herself most of the time.

We even made plans to see the latest Mission Impossible movie, just because we could. It was a treat to go out without worrying about getting home for bedtime, but the evening was slightly marred by an incident on the drive up to the theater. We were cruising along U.S. 101 at highway speeds when something—we’re still not sure what, as it was dark and moving quickly—came out from under the car in front of us. I couldn’t swerve into an adjacent lane to avoid it, and I was hesitant to slam on the brakes and potentially cause a pileup, so I attempted to maneuver around it while staying in my lane. It didn’t work. Part of the object went under the front right wheel of my car, and after we passed it by, we could hear something scraping and dragging in that area.

We pulled off the freeway as soon as we could and pulled into a nearby parking lot. A cursory inspection revealed that the fender liner over the wheel had been torn off and was hanging on by one or two attachment points; hence, the dragging sound we heard. We tried to remove the liner completely, but lacking proper—or any, really—tools, we couldn’t get it off. That left us with a dilemma: should we continue on to the theater, scraping the damaged liner on the pavement the whole way, or should we skip the movie and drive home? We were around the halfway point, so we decided to press on and catch the film, at the risk of making a bit of a spectacle of ourselves all the way from Santa Clara to Mountain View.

The movie was a pleasant diversion, and when we emerged a few hours later, we steeled ourselves for the drive home, knowing that it would be accompanied by the sound of the dragging liner for a solid twenty-five minutes. But a minor miracle occurred: when I put the car into reverse and backed out of the spot, the liner tore off the rest of the way. We hopped out of the car, threw it in the trunk, and made our way home in blissful silence.

It turns out that we had lost our under-carriage cover in addition to the fender liner. This was an expensive part to replace, and the repair ended up costing us over $1,000. Maybe I should have slammed on the brakes after all.

But at least it was fixed, and I wouldn’t have to worry about that part ever again, right? More on that in a future post, perhaps.

That long preamble aside, the photo gallery accompanying this post includes further exploration of film photography. For this round, I switched to Ilford HP5 Plus film in place of the Kodak Tri-X I used for previous efforts. I like the results, though I’d be hard-pressed to say that they’re dramatically different from what I achieved before; maybe the contrast is a little less striking (or overstated, depending on your perspective), but the difference is subtle.

The majority of the photos cover drop-off day at Camp Campbell; I took an evening trip to Vasona Lake County Park a couple weeks later to finish off the roll. I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to play around more.

Gallery: Midsummer

Springtime Experiments with Expired Film

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As I mentioned in our last post, Julie and I purchased an Advanced Photo System (APS) point-and-shoot camera before we got married because we wanted to be able to take nice pictures on our honeymoon. We also thought that it would set us up well for the future, since APS was the hot new(-ish) thing in consumer photography, and it had a bunch of amazing new capabilities, such as automatic recording of time and date information as metadata and mid-roll film changes. Compared to the drug store 110 cameras I’d played around with on family vacations as a teenager, the camera we bought seemed like the pinnacle of high technology.

Of course, this was the fall of the year 2000. By 2003, digital cameras were outselling film cameras, and when our daughter was born in 2004, we bought a brand-new digital point-and-shoot so we could take pictures to our hearts’ content (and we did). In all, I think we used our APS film camera a grand total of three times: on our honeymoon, as planned; on a trip to Point Reyes for our first anniversary; and when we bought our house in 2002. Our investment in the future of photography didn’t work out very well for us.

I was surprised, then, to come across a completely unexposed roll of APS film as I was digging through our bin of photography gear last month. It had to have been sitting in our closet for at least twenty years, and had probably been expired for fifteen. I could have just thrown it out—that would have been the most sensible thing to do—but I’ve been deep into oddball photography–adjacent projects for the last couple years, and that led me to an inescapable conclusion: I was going to shoot this film.

That decision led to a conundrum: I have no idea where our original APS camera is. I’m sure it’s around somewhere—knowing myself, there’s no way I would have thrown it out—but there was no way I could put my hands on it. So, I did the obvious thing: I bought an APS SLR, the Canon EOS IX, on eBay. And, unwilling to stop there, I bought a lens, as well: the generally well-regarded (but inexpensive) Canon EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5. Did I have other EF-mount zoom lenses I could have used with this camera, as well as the 50mm prime I used just a couple months ago to shoot a roll of black and white film? Of course. But based my research, the consensus seems to be that they produce significantly worse images than the EF 24-85mm model, and that clearly wouldn’t do for a project as important as this one.

So, with the equipment sorted out, I was ready to shoot my single roll of expired APS film. The conventional wisdom on the Internet seems to be that you should overexpose expired film by a stop for every 10 years since its expiration, so I set the exposure compensation control on the camera to +2 stops and went to work finding things to photograph around the house and in the yard. It’s mid-February here in California, which means that, for all intents and purposes, it’s spring. As such, there was plenty to focus on. You can see the results here; I’ve also included a picture of the camera in all its late 90s glory.

All things considered, the photographs turned out surprisingly well. I had no idea whether the camera and lens would even work, since I had bought them sight unseen from anonymous sellers. And the film was a complete wild card: though, as far as I knew, it hadn’t been exposed to temperature extremes, it had been stored around the house for twenty-plus years with no particular effort put into preserving it. Taking those factors into account, I was very pleased with the images I got. Neither the camera nor the lens has image stabilization, so camera shake was a problem for indoor shots, but brightly lit outdoor scenes came out better than I had any right to expect, and the color wasn’t too far off.

In all likelihood, I’ll never use this camera, or shoot another roll of APS film, again. But the equipment was dirt cheap compared to modern photography gear, and I had a great time putting it all together and using it to take some pictures.

Gallery: Springtime Experiments with Expired Film

November in Black and White

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I already have more hobbies than I have time for—the majority of them get exactly zero attention, most of the time—so this fall, I thought to myself, “Why not add another?” With that mantra in mind, I decided to explore film photography. You can see the results here.

I’ve always been a little bit interested in photography, long before I had the slightest understanding how it worked. Some of my oldest memories are of my dad rearranging the lamps in our living room and fiddling with a light meter to set up for Christmas portraits. On early family vacations, I toted around an old Kodak Instamatic that took 126 film. And on later trips, I took a drugstore pocket camera that shot 110 film—I probably still have that camera in a box somewhere.

But that was pretty much it until Julie and I got married: my college and grad school years are almost completely undocumented photographically, except for visits to my parents. Before our wedding in the year 2000, I bought an Advanced Photo System (APS) camera to take on our honeymoon, thinking that would set us up for the long haul. Smart, prescient move.

That was the end of my film photography journey until this November when, on a whim, I bought a roll of Tri-X, put it into an old Canon SLR I bought on eBay a few years back (the last time this impulse hit me), and just started taking pictures. I’m not an especially skilled photographer—these shots were taken using automatic focus in aperture priority mode—but I was pleased with the results nonetheless. They’re mostly candid shots of my family and the neighborhood, subject matter that’s inherently appealing to me, and the experience left me eager to find opportunities to explore further.

Gallery: November in Black and White

Cold Weather, Ch-Ch-Changes, and Fall 2013

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It’s finally starting to cool off in our part of California—a part which, fortunately for us, is not currently on fire; there are many who are not so lucky. It’s going to get down to 42° Fahrenheit tonight, a temperature that isn’t that cold by Chicago or Nebraska standards, but still feels pretty chilly when you’re shivering outside the school waiting for the bell to ring.

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that we don’t currently have a functioning furnace. Ours stopped working sometime last winter, and we decided against an expensive repair because we thought that we would surely be out of the house and ensconced in a rental by the time the next winter rolled around. That assumption has worked out really well for us.

For now, the first thing I do in the morning is step into a pair of cozy slippers and pull on a heavy sweatshirt before I head up to the kitchen to make the kids’ lunches. And, after they’ve gone and it’s time for me to get ready for work, I think long and hard before I turn off the water and step out of the warm confines of the shower onto the icy tiles of our bathroom floor.

Of course, the chill in the air means that Halloween is just around the corner. William carved a pumpkin (with Julie’s help) at school today, and had decided, the last time I asked him, that he wanted to dress up as Darth Vader this year. Fortunately, that’s one of the many costumes we already have in his vast collection, so as long as he doesn’t change his mind, we won’t have to buy a new one this year.

This Halloween, for the first time, neither Julia nor Joe seems to be interested in trick-or-treating. Instead, they’re planning to stay home to hand out candy or, just as likely, hide out in their rooms. Although this was an inevitable transition, it’s still bittersweet: they have so much going on in their lives, and so many stressors coming at them from so many different angles, I wish they could hang on to their sense of wonder and fun for one more Halloween and have a night of carefree jollity.

Speaking of fun, frivolity, and bittersweet transitions, we received an email from UPA this week letting us know that the registration deadline for students taking AP tests this year is coming up in a couple weeks. And, in a real first, Julia will be eligible to take the AP World History exam in the spring. I’m gobsmacked that our daughter is taking concrete steps toward (hopefully) receiving college credits, while the memory of her clinging to me every morning as I tried to drop her off for kindergarten is still painfully fresh in my mind.

In other fun news, Julia is set to have her wisdom teeth removed over the holiday break after we return home from Nebraska. This step is a prelude to a series of other procedures on tap for the next couple years that won’t be fun—for us or for her—in the moment, but will pay off down the road if all goes according to plan.

We don’t have any new pictures ready to post at the moment, though I do hope to publish a set this weekend covering Halloween and some other fall adventures. In the meantime, here’s a set of previously unpublished photos from fall 2013 that I’ve finally gotten around to processing. The album contains lots of soccer pictures, any number of cute shots of baby William, and a few snapshots from my very first visit to the Airtime offices in New York City.

Gallery: Fall 2013

Airtime Point Lobos Hike

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Nothing family related here: just some photos I took on the early–morning hike at Point Lobos that a few intrepid souls went on during our company offsite last fall. We had been there before as a family, so I was mostly interesting in trying out the new wide–angle lens I picked up before the trip as a completely unjustified treat for myself.