Week -1 – First 2 Test Rolls – Fuji Superia X-TRA 400

Hello everyone, so for this week I cheated a little bit. I didn't process these myself because the chemicals haven't been delivered yet. However I was able to pull a few of my favorite images from the last couple of days. 

It occurred to me as I was leaving my family's place and hit home after I got the scans back from the lab but South Georgia just looks very de-saturated this time of year. I did not change any of that in post. 

That also brings up a good point, I will be doing minor edits to the final files that you see. Nothing too wild, but just minor corrections here and there.

I will also include a gallery at the end of each post of the "raw" files for anyone that wants to see both how the negatives look out of camera, as well for anyone that wants to see any outtakes or files that didn't make the cut.

Tumblr users may need to visit the direct blog at UNEXPhotography/52rolls to see the gallery. 

2014: a year in review

Well its about that time again. In 4 more days it'll be 2015 and another year will begin. As always its a good time to look back over the last 365 days and reflect on what this last year has brought. 

All things considered I really didn't get a lot accomplished over the last year. I shot less than in most years previous. But I can say there were more than a few extenuating circumstances. All of that aside here are my top 5 images from the last year. 

 

Shortly after starting my new job I was invited to photograph one of the owners at a show he was performing at. This image was taken as part of a "contest" with him, and even though it didn't win overall he said it was his favorite of the bunch.

It wasn't until 4 months later that I picked up my camera, but when I did it was one of my regular models Nicolette that was the subject. I say it every year but I love shooting with this woman. She always has great ideas and is game for any position that I choose to put her in. 

As a quick aside I should mention that this is actually version 2 of this image. I saw that because until this last year I would have told you that I despised Photoshop. I hated everything about it. But since I have been using it every day for work purposes, I can say that it is a very useful tool that I am eager to learn more about.

My second time working with Hada Pixie came next. Another set for Zivity.com. Pixie is another great model that always comes up with interesting options to work with. This set was ranked "noteworthy" by Zivity staff members, and is another example of an image that I re-worked post photoshop hatred. 

Jason AKA Davinci Black, was a previous co-worker of mine a few years back. He wanted some new photos for an album he was working on. And I was very happy to hear from him and to get the chance to help him out. Keep an ear out for what is coming from this guy. 

Finally one of the many photos of The Imperial Opa that I took at their burlesque show earlier this year. I loved shooting all of the various acts, but I thought this photo of the whole troupe summed up things much better. 

So that's it. That was 2014. Onward to new projects and new photos. If you haven't read recently I have started my 2015 project blog over at UNEXPhotography.com/52rolls where I will be shooting a roll of film a week for the next year. What would you like to see? Let me know below!

Until next time, thanks as always for taking some time to see what I have been up to.

-B

A Year of Film

So I guess now is as good of a time as ever to announce (officially) my first project for 2015. I have been hinting at it for a while, but now I am ready to talk about it.

We live in a very digital world, this is pretty clear to anyone who hasn't been living under a rock. The invention of digital photography has been a great one. It is easier than ever for anyone with access to anything from a consumer smartphone to a high end DSLR to take and share photographs with the world. When I got my first digital DSLR in college, it opened my eyes to a new world (or at least one that was cheaper and didn't require spending hours a week in a darkroom). I became comfortable. In a way I became complacent with my skills because I knew that I could shoot faster, trim down accidents, and still have deliverable photographs. It was too easy to just "spray and pray".

A few years ago I found and blogged pretty extensively about my experience with Caffenol developing. It was an experiment that resulted in some fun time figuring out how I could take film and produce images in my own bathroom. Some with great success, others not so much.

Good or bad, I had fun.

If you have been following some of my other blogs you may have noticed a lack of content and updates. I wrote an update earlier this year talking about how I feel, and how I have not had much drive to create. I hope to change that, and learn something in the process over the next year. 

A Year of Film:
 

The Challenge: Shoot and develop 52 rolls of film (or packs...I'll count instant film as well).
The Tools (and a not so brief history): I have a few options at my disposal.

(Not mine)

The first is a Minolta Maxxum 5000, my first 35mm camera I ever used. It was (if I remember right) originally my grandmother's, which became my mother's, and when I started college and needed one for class it became mine. This has been my workhorse 35mm for many years. Its not particularly a hard camera to use, and it has a manual mode, so naturally it served my needs. However I still find this camera a little "too easy" for all of what I want to accomplish (and I'm a little ashamed to say that I have never really experienced using a full manual camera before). However I have another option–

Until a few hours ago this bad boy belonged to my dad. Who knows when he bought it, when I asked about it all he could tell me was "I haven't used this since the late 90's, if you want it, Merry Christmas".

It came with just a few more pieces than what you see above

After I dusted it off I threw a new set of batteries into the meter, I loaded a fresh roll of generic drug store 400 ISO film into this beast and have shot a few frames over the last day.

I may or may not use those photos as a first entry into the project.

Finally we have a set of 2 Polaroid SX-70 instant cameras. With a little help from The Impossible Project I will count at least two of my "rolls" of film to be coming from one or both of these cameras. Although I'll try not to make it my primary option.

The Stock(s): 

Until this project I really have only had experience with a limited number of black and white stocks (Ilford 100 Delta for life!). But I hope to change this. As you can see above I just placed my first orders for some various film stocks. Hopefully it won't be too long into the new year before I am able to crack everything open and make something happen. I still need to order a Color C41 developing kit. But those still seem to be pretty easy to come by, so I'm not too worried. 

The Process: It's pretty obvious that I like to explain things in more detail than needed sometimes. But I will be sure to keep that up. I keep pretty copious lab notes on my process and hope that I can maybe pass some of that along. I will be posting those notes along with the results for the week. 

I haven't quite decided how this blog is going to work yet, but I have a feeling it'll go something like this: A brief (yeah right) paragraph about the week including any issues that may have come up. Images from the roll of film processed (probably both working and failed...or some anyway). And finally any "lab notes" that I have taken.

I have also created a gallery which I may or may not use to post my favorite images as they happen as well. But one step at a time, no need to put the cart before the horse.

The Goals (aka TL;DR):
1) Shoot more (Period. End of story).
2) Experiment with various film types by shooting 1 roll of various film each week.
3) Slow down and re-learn the basics of shooting photographs, and hope to learn something new.
4) Profit? Take over the world? Make a book? Who knows?

So without further ado, I welcome all of you into my journey. Hopefully you can be inspired and learn something too. See you all in 2015!

 

[Insert clever title here] - October 6th 2014

This is probably going to be a longer post than I really wanted it to be, but hear me out. Please. I just need to rant for a little bit.

If you have been following me lately you may have noticed a lack of distinct “photographic” content coming the last few months (if not longer). Simply put, I am just not feeling very inspired lately. 

For the last almost a year I have been working at a new job. I’ll spare you all of the details, but lets just say that I thought that this was going to be an opportunity for myself to grow creatively and get new work done. I was even encouraged in the interview to do so. However day by day the longer I am here the more I realize I am just spending too much time looking at other people’s work, and not nearly enough time creating more of my own.


I haven’t even had the drive to pick up or even look at my camera gear since July…or whenever it was that I last posted anything.

Most of the time I just feel like I have lost the “spark”, while simultaneously feeling burnt out with just about everything. On the one hand I can’t really complain. I have a roof over my head, food in my stomach, and my bills are getting paid (barely in some cases but thats a whole other story all together). But on the other hand I notice myself getting more and more frustrated as the days go by. 

I am tired. Not really in the physical sense (although that also is a subject pretty close to my heart). But more often than not I am looking at things and saying “why even bother?”. I’m told this is a normal part of human existence…but I don’t like this. “Well Blake–“ you might say, “keep pushing through, the only way to get through this is to keep working”. And you would be right. However I am just not sure how to do that most of the time.  On a daily basis I get home from work too tired to do much of anything that doesn’t involve Netflix or my cat. And on my one real day off from work a week, I am more likely to spend it with people that I like to spend time with because it gets me out of my apartment.

It even seems like many of the regular models I work with have become tired of what I do. And to be completely transparent and honest, I’m more than a little jealous when I see them working with other Photographers. But at the same time I at least feel a little happiness to see that they aren’t depending on me and not doing what they do.

Wrap all of that around a nice big bow of “For a photographer that uses the tag line ‘I shoot people’ you sure don’t know where to find people to shoot’” and things start spiraling into a circle of self loathing. (Hell most of the time I don’t even carry business cards around with me anymore which is terribly stupid. I mean, how else will anyone in the rare chance that I meet anyone even get a chance to see what I do?

Facebook once was a great source and place to post new work, meet new people, and attempt to develop a “community” of sorts that can see what I was doing and provide feedback. Even if that community was made of mostly of my friends, at least my work was getting seen. Recently however, Facebook has made it very clear that unless I am willing to pay…nothing I say or do will show up in your timeline. I’m willing to be that this won’t even get seen by half of you unless I repost it to my personal page. 

I have started spending more of my time on Twitter lately. At least I am able to occasionally share something that could be considered interesting and have slowly been gathering “followers”. Whether or not they actually see any of my work is another story as well. Mostly because if they are anything like I was when I started…I am just following people that follow other things that I like. 

The sad fact is that in the grand sense of the world, I am invisible. Most of anyone that follows me are people that I already know in person and associate with at least mildly regularly. Just to be clear I’m not asking all of you to whore me out to your friends list. I may be shameless when trying to plug myself, but I’m not going to resort to becoming some internet chain letter (although I do know someone who can make you a millionaire if you Western Union him $100 US Dollars). 

I crave conversation and interaction. Plain and simple. There is an old saying that I am sure you have heard that goes “it does’t matter if people are saying good things about you, or bad things, as long as they are saying something”

And to be blunt, nobody is fucking talking about me. 

I’m not ready for my Warhol 15 minutes to be up yet. 

So what does all of this really mean. Well for one I want to make it clear that I am not giving up (which very well may be the first or a very important series of steps). I still have a few projects I would like to complete sooner than later. Many of which I have been alluding to over the last few years. Two of which I won’t go into too much detail about right now, because they are going to require a lot of leg work…and financial backing of some sort (and in the case of one at least a lot of cross country and maybe even global travel). 

The other two are still possible but are going to require a lot of discipline (which I have, or I’d like to think so anyway).

Starting soon (realistically after the first of the year) I am going to take a step back from photography as I have “known” it so to speak. I am making a goal to shoot 52 rolls of film (one per week), and post images regularly. I’m still trying to decide if these will follow any sort of theme. I haven’t really worked that out yet. I feel that digital photography in my case has become more of a crutch than anything in my last few times I have done anything. Its so easy to just “spray and pray” and hope to cull things down. I’m not hoping to give up digital entirely, but I do want to remind myself what started this whole adventure in the first place.

I would also like to put more effort into shooting the “self censorship” project I have been talking about for a while now. I’m sure if you have talked to me in person I have probably mentioned it to you, and I believe I even have mentioned it in my various communications with all of you friends and followers. I am in the “casting” process for this one and hopefully will have the seeds planted very soon

Well thats about it, thanks for hanging in there. I don’t say it near enough but if you are keeping up with what I do I sincerely thank you. Without people like you and your encouragement I would have given up long ago.


-Blake




© 2006 – 2023 UNEXPhotography and Blake Griffin.

Privacy Policy